Continuing the media trend of cheering Obama's center-right cabinet nominees, the Los Angeles Times' editorial page weighs in today (12/28/08): 

The best measure by which to evaluate any president's administration is the quality of the appointees. In recent times, however, a president's inner circle also has been viewed through the prism of identity politics. Obama has succeeded on both levels, assembling an impressive roster that includes men and women, blacks, whites, Latinos and Asian-Americans. Only once did he seem willing to allow diversity to trump policy. He offered the Cabinet-level position of trade representative to the protectionist Rep. Xavier Becerra, but after Becerra withdrew -- and after Obama had named another Latino, [Ken] Salazar, as secretary of the Interior -- the Rubik's Cube was twisted again and the trade portfolio went to former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, an African-American supporter of NAFTA.

In other words, the corporate media's preference is for ethnically diverse cabinet officials who demonstrate little to no ideological diversity. Knowing that this will please the corporate press is a lot easier than solving a Rubik's Cube.

The editorial would also seem not to have noticed that it has contrasted "quality" with "identity politics"--in this context meaning the hiring of anyone who is not a white man.

The New York Times' Charles Blow writes on the op-ed page ("Heaven for the Godless?," 12/27/08): "The Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: 'I am the way, the truth and the life: No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.'”

He then expresses puzzlement that many Christians nevertheless avow that Jews, Muslims, Hindus and even atheists can get into heaven.

Maybe these Christians know their Bibles better than Blow does: In his most explicit discussion of Judgment Day (Matthew 25:31-46), the Jesus of the Gospels describes the Son of Man saying on his return:

Come, you who are blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me.

...Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.

Note the lack of any reference to believing in Jesus. Blow suggests that "many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible." If by "flexible" he means open to varying interpretations, that's obviously true.  But Blow seems to think that a "literal" interpretation of the Bible requires one to believe that Jesus was not speaking literally when he said that helping other people alone could get you into heaven.

The Washington Post recently published an editorial praising the city's charter schools, claiming that those schools' students outperform their public school counterparts "not because they come from more privileged backgrounds but because the charters are free to innovate and implement practices that work." The editorial pointed to an analysis the paper did that found the city's charter school students doing better on tests, attendance and graduation.

"Clearly," the editorial argues, "the 'no-excuses' innovations of the best charters make a difference: longer school days, summer classes, an inclusive culture of parental involvement, and the power to hire teachers who are committed to a school's philosophy and dismiss teachers who aren't up to the job."

When it comes to schools, the private-is-better mantra is a popular one in corporate media. But is the Post editorial's conclusion really so "clear" from the paper's news analysis? That article pointed to a big factor unmentioned by the editorial board: money.

The charters get about $3000 more per pupil per year than the public schools, which "can provide a crucial advantage over traditional public schools." The schools also have access to loans and grants that the public schools don't. The article described some of the larger charter schools' multi-million dollar surpluses that have gone to hiring additional staff and high-tech equipment.

And guess what? "The extra funding, it turns out, coincides with improved academic performance. The schools with the largest surpluses have ranked at the top on test scores."

It's hard to get much clearer than that--but it seems putting more funding towards public schools is not nearly as appealing to the Post editorial board as allowing more schools to lay off teachers at will.

For a change of pace from his incessant immigrant bashing, CNN's Lou Dobbs recently exclaimed over "unusual storms" and snow in Las Vegas, Southern California and Arizona's mountains. This "unbelievable" evidence has Dobbs wondering: "So what are those folks talking about global warming?"

Posting at Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog (12/19/08), Steve Benen describes how, "to 'discuss' the subject, Dobbs invited CNN meteorologist Chad Myers and Heartland Institute science director Jay Lehr onto the show":

Not surprisingly, Lehr told Dobbs what he wanted to hear, starting with an anecdote about Lehr's sky diving hobby.

LEHR: I have jumped out of a plane in Ohio every month for 31 years, and I track the weather constantly to find out if I can make it out of a plane. And I can tell you, the weather the last ten years hasn't been significantly different than the ten years before that or the ten years before that. It has been -- it is always changes what the weather is about. And to say that it has to do with global warming is really more of a joke than anything else. Why people are so alarmed about it, I have no clue.

DOBBS: You know, that's fascinating.

Before ending the segment, Lehr added that the sun, "not man," warms the planet, and that "right now," we're "going in to cooling rather than warming."

Let's quickly highlight reality here. First, it's not the sun. Second, snowfall on one day in one part of the country does not reflect "climate." Third, an anecdote about sky-diving experimentation is not indicative of climate science. Fourth, though Dobbs apparently forgot to mention it, the Heartland Institute is a conservative think tank subsidized by ExxonMobil, not an independent scientific organization, and Jay Lehr's background is in "groundwater hydrology," not climate science.

Oh, and fifth, this is not "fascinating."

Benen notes that "the bizarre commentary from CNN's Chad Myers wasn't much better. He argued that it's 'arrogant' to think that humans can affect the climate ('Mother nature is so big,' he said) and that people who accept global warming are only looking at 'a hundred years worth of data, not millions of years that the world has been around.'"

Benen wonders, "Why is this man a CNN meteorologist?"  But the sad fact is that a lot of TV weather people think their experience predicting local snowfalls makes them more expert on climate change than actual climate scientists, and often peddle similar nonsense on the air.

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "In Denial on Climate Change: Leading Pundits Reject Science on Global Warming" (5-6/07) by Peter Hart

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon have compiled their 17th annual list of "P.U.-litzer Prizes" (OpEd News, 12/18/08). Among this year's "stinkiest media performances":

HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE -- MSNBC's Chris Matthews

This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac Primary in February--when Chris Matthews spoke of "the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

BEYOND PARODY PRIZE--Fox News

In August, a FoxNews.com teaser for the O'Reilly Factor program said: "Obama bombarded by personal attacks. Are they legit? Ann Coulter comments."...

GUTTER BALL PUNDITRY AWARD -- Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball

In program after program during the spring, Matthews repeatedly questioned whether Obama could connect with "regular" voters--"regular" meaning voters who are white or "who actually do know how to bowl." He once said of Obama: "This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody. But the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder."

And there's plenty more malodorous journalism to be found in FAIR's extensive archive on corporate news coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

With the recent release of a tape recorded President Lyndon Johnson concerned that Richard Nixon's people had avoided Vietnam peace negotiations for domestic political purposes, Paul Jay (Real News, 12/20/08) interviews Consortium News's Robert Parry on "evidence of Nixon's treasonous legacy and the media's choice to ignore it":

PJ: So you would think this should be a... real confirmation--the story's kind of been out there, in some articles and some books--but to have this kind of confirmation that we didn't have before, one would think should have been a screaming headline all over the newspapers and all over television. But there's one AP report and not much else....

RP: This has never been focused on with the degree of attention it deserves. And the last chapter on this was when the Associated Press does report what Johnson said in these newly released tapes, but the story is treated as not much news.... And none of the background is put into this AP story. It simply states "Johnson made this claim" and there's some suggestion that maybe Nixon didn't know about it--which is, I guess, based on the AP's own impression--without going back and saying, "Hold it, there's a lot of evidence about this and it shows, and it should be something that Americans now accept as real history."

Read Bob Parry's article in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Journalists 'Humbled' but Unrepentant: Despite Iraq Disaster, Questioning Authority Still Taboo" (11-12/07) by Robert Parry, Sam Parry & Nat Parry

This week, the FAIR radio show CounterSpin (12/19/08) has constitutional rights advocate Michael Ratner countering the fact that,

when the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report finding former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high officials responsible for abusive treatment of detainees in Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, with few exceptions, the media played the story down, preferring, for instance, righteous anger over embroiled Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.

Then, education writer Alfie Kohn discusses Obama cabinet pick Arne Duncan:

Obama's pick for education secretary drew more attention than you might have expected--in large part because the press corps was lobbying Obama to make a more conservative choice. What do the media mean when they talk about things like education "reform"?

See the related FAIR Media Advisory: "Media's Failing Grade on Education 'Debate'" (12/16/08)

Veteran publisher Tom Engelhardt's rundown on the decimation of book publishers' staff (TomDispatch, 12/17/08) compares "collapsing worlds" with newspapers--"a disaster area long before the greatest downturn 'since the Great Depression' hit":

The bad news about the news has been flooding in for years, even if it's worsened under the weight of more general economic tough times. If, for instance, you were even reading a newspaper in print on Tuesday, December 9 (and, if you're under 25, odds are you weren't), then you undoubtedly caught the story about the debt-ridden Tribune Company, a news monster which owns, among other properties, the Los Angeles Times (almost half its staff lost since 2001), the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune (almost a third of its staff lost since 2005) and even the Chicago Cubs, filing for "bankruptcy."...

Only the week before the Tribune filed, America's largest newspaper company Gannett announced a 10 percent cut in its workforce due to "declining revenue," on top of a 3 percent cut last August (neither evidently being part of the 5 percent "trim" at its flagship paper USA Today in late November). And don't get me started on the rest of America's newspapers. At least 30 of them are for sale right now, including the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News, which lost $11 million in the first nine months of this year, with few buyers in sight.

Writing that the Tribune Co. "even had the nerve to claim that bankruptcy meant it could 'cease all severance payments and deferred compensation to employees who have been laid off.' (Pity the poor reporters who took those buyouts)," Engelhardt notes that, ironically, "it also hired the investment bank Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin as consultants. In case you're worried, they surely will get paid."

Listen to FAIR's recent radio program CounterSpin: "Bob McChesney on Tribune Bankruptcy" (12/12/08)

I was intrigued to see this in a New York Times editorial yesterday (12/18/08):

The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the "war on terror"--the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.

I doesn't seem like the paper generally puts the concept of the "war on terror" at arm's length. Looking at the last few months, the most popular editorial construction seems to be something like this (11/16/08):

Troops and equipment are so overtaxed by President Bush's disastrous Iraq War that the Pentagon does not have enough of either for the fight in Afghanistan, the war on terror's front line, let alone to confront the next threats.

The description of Afghanistan as "the front line of the war on terror" (sans scare quotes) comes up a lot. There was also this codswallop from an op-ed by Philip Bobbitt (12/13/08), from the National Security Council:

The ''war on terror'' is not a nonsensical public relations slogan, however unwelcome this conclusion may be to Pentagon planners or civil-liberties advocates. The notion of such a war puzzles us--after all, who would sign the peace treaty? -- because we are so trapped in 20th-century expectations about warfare. But success in war does not always mean the capitulation of an enemy government (as we have seen in Iraq); rather, it varies with the war aim.

In a war against terror, the aim is not the conquest of territory or the advancement of ideology, but the protection of civilians. We are fighting a war on terror, not just terrorists.

Man, we must suck at it, then! Bobbitt went on to claim that "Mexico is potentially our Pakistan...."

Then there's book critic Michiko Kakutani (10/6/08), terkeling John le Carre:

Although the story is enlivened by Mr. le Carre's intimate knowledge of tradecraft and his psychological insights into the reasons people become spies, informers and believers in a cause, the novel is flawed, like his 2004 book, Absolute Friends, by an overly schematic narrative devised to drive home the author's contempt for the take-no-prisoners methods employed by the United States in the war on terror.

Seems like the folks at the New York Times are pretty comfortable bandying the term about--unless it's time to look thoughtful on torture.

Useless caveat of the day, courtesy of the New York Times (12/19/08):

Mr. Bush, one of the least popular presidents in recent history, if public opinion polls are accurate…

Yes, perhaps it's all a mirage.

The corporate media template for explaining Mideast violence can be summed up like this: Palestinians attack, Israel retaliates.

It wasn't surprising, then, to read this lead in today's New York Times (12/19/08):

JERUSALEM — Rockets are flying from Gaza into southern Israeli communities again. Israeli warplanes are firing missiles back, and Israel is closing the crossings through which food and fuel are supplied.

Same old, same old--the Palestinians started it. Interestingly, though, the piece doesn't really provide evidence of that; in fact, readers are more likely to conclude that the lead is just wrong:

It took some days, but they were largely successful. Hamas imposed its will and even imprisoned some of those who were firing rockets. Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

But the goods shipments, while up some 25 to 30 percent and including a mix of more items, never began to approach what Hamas thought it was going to get: a return to the 500 to 600 truckloads delivered daily before the closing, including appliances, construction materials and other goods essential for life beyond mere survival. Instead, the number of trucks increased to around 90 from around 70.

And:

In addition, Israeli forces continued to attack Hamas and other militants in the West Bank, prompting Palestinian militants in Gaza to fire rockets. The Israeli military also found several dozen improvised explosive devices used against its vehicles on the Gaza border and about a dozen cases of sniper fire from Gaza directed at its forces.
While this back-and-forth did not topple the agreement, Israel’s decision in early November to destroy a tunnel Hamas had been digging near the border drove the cycle of violence to a much higher level. Israel says the tunnel could have been dug only for the purpose of trying to seize a soldier, like Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli held by Hamas for the past two and a half years. Israel’s attack on the tunnel killed six Hamas militants, and each side has stepped up attacks since.

A major--and majorly disturbing--story of post-Katrina New Orleans is broken (12/17/08) by an independent reporter at the Nation who finds evidence of up to 11 black people shot by white vigilantes in one New Orleans neighborhood immediately after the hurricane. A.C. Thompson writes that

over the course of an 18-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed....

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting [the black flood survivors]--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

What exactly does it tell us that corporate outlets looking at the same region and time period dedicated their enormous news budgets to sensationalistic--and largely apocryphal--reports of black people looting and shooting one another, but never even gave a hint of race-based violence by whites?

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Demonizing the Victims of Katrina: Coverage Painted Hurricane Survivors as Looters, Snipers and Rapists" (11-12/05) by Jaime Omar Yassin

Associated Press TV writer Lynn Elber reports (12/18/08) the bad news that, "nearly a decade after the NAACP condemned a 'virtual whiteout' in broadcast TV, the civil rights group said major networks have stalled in their efforts to further ethnic diversity on-screen and off." Even worse,

television shows of the future could be even less inclusive because of a failure to cultivate young minority stars and to bring minorities into decision-making positions.... A "critical lack of programming by, for or about people of color" can be traced in part to the lack of minorities who have the power to approve new series or make final creative decisions, said Vicangelo Bulluck, executive director of NAACP's Hollywood bureau.

As remedy, Elber tells us that the report "calls on networks to revisit a 2000 agreement to diversify the ranks of actors, writers, directors and executives" and "also seeks to establish a task force with network executives, the NAACP and other civil rights groups."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Eric Boehlert on TV Diversity Study" (8/8/08)

Crooks and Liars blogger Cernig posts (12/15/08) the video of George W. Bush responding to an ABC interviewer's point that Al-Qaeda did not actually "take their stand" in Iraq "until after the U.S. invaded": "Yeah, that's right. So what?" The sad part is that Martha Raddatz's correction of the inverted justification timeline shows what can be considered an extraordinary amount of spine by corporate news standards. Cernig thinks "Raddatz should have thrown out her script at that point and eaten him alive, but she didn't. Yet another failure of the tame media, who are too afraid of losing their precious access to ask the obvious questions even now." Cernig further quotes the London Guardian's Ian Williams finding it

surprising that so many reporters can be polite and deferential with someone who has turned the U.S. Federal Reserve into a giant Ponzi scheme and broken the world's strongest economy. They defer humbly to someone who has contrived the deaths of 4,200 U.S. servicemen and -women in Iraq. It even failed to follow through on questions about the president's murky military record with the Texas Air National Guard while his peers were dying in Vietnam. This intrepid press corps showed no compunction in following in minute detail Clinton's screwing around, but kept silent as Bush screwed entire nations.

Williams reminds us that just "last week, a Senate report pointed the finger directly at Bush and his senior officials for authorizing--indeed, ordering--torture and abuse of detainees. But no one threw any shoes."

A Free Press open letter continues the push (12/18/08) for Barack Obama "to appoint leaders who will reform the media and protect the open Internet." The letter's diverse signatories include FAIR, along with the Center for American Progress, Service Employees International Union, National Organization for Women, American Library Association, UNITY: Journalists of Color, the Hip Hop Caucus, bloggers from DailyKos and members of Pearl Jam. Specifically,

public-interest groups, bloggers and the creative community strongly support Obama's pledges to diversify media ownership, renew public media and promote fast, affordable, open Internet access. The letter's signers now call on Mr. Obama to appoint public officials who will carry out our shared goals.

Read the full text and entire list of signatories here.