One would think that Sheriff Joe Arpaio's record of taking his campaign against undocumented immigrants to what the New York Times has called "unconstitutional extremes" would make any prospective new employer hesitant about hiring him. Not so for Rupert Murdoch; starting December 27, Arpaio will star in a new law enforcement reality TV show on Murdoch's Fox reality channel.

Writing on Huffington Post, Immigration Policy Center director Angela Kelley goes through the soon-to-be Fox star's list of offenses during his tenure as Maricopa County (Ariz.) sheriff; citing a report by the conservative Goldwater Institute, Kelley notes that the sheriff "failed to serve" the community he was mandated to serve, and also withheld vital information and statistics from the public.

In other words, the new reality TV star has proven himself particularly committed to the essentials of the peculiar brand of "journalism" in vogue at Murdoch's Fox News Channel. Fox's failure to serve its audience by providing basic accurate information—on everything from election polling to the 9/11 commission report--has been well documented by FAIR. As the British equivalent of the FCC once noted about a characteristic misleading tirade featured on the network, Fox failed to show "respect for truth."

Arpaio's record of racial profiling and sweeps of Hispanic neighborhoods would also seem an easy fit for a network where one of the most popular hosts has advocated for airport profiling based on religion, and which has been criticized for providing an unopposed platform to the racist vigilante group known as the Minuteman project.

When the British police murdered an unarmed Brazilian immigrant in a subway, Fox host John Gibson expressed his open admiration for their approach, quipping, "Got to admire the cojones of those Brit cops to go after him like that."

No doubt Arpaio will feel right at home in his new gig.

Discussing the failed auto bailout on CBS Evening News (12/12/08):

KATIE COURIC: And it's almost, meanwhile, turning to Washington, Bob, impossible to figure out just what happened to this auto bailout in the Senate. There's all this finger pointing going on. What is your take? Can you explain it to us in simple terms?

BOB SCHIEFFER: I think frankly what happened, Katie, is that this is overwhelmingly unpopular, bailing out these auto companies with the public in general. And every poll suggests that. These leaders of the auto industry came to town first in their jet planes and now you find that the members of the union are not willing to consider a pay cut for the next two years. It was a very easy vote for Republicans to vote to block this thing. They were just doing what their constituents across the country kind of wanted them to do. That may not be the right thing, but I think in the end that's really what did them in.

Every poll suggests that bailing out the auto industry is overwhelmingly unpopular? Actually, no--really, the polls are all over the map on the auto bailout, ranging from a CNN/Opinion Research poll (12/1-2/08) where the public is opposed 61 percent to 36 percent to an L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll (12/6-8/08) finding 47 percent to 42 percent support for a bailout. One of the polls that did not find an auto rescue to be overwhelmingly unpopular was CBS's own--the network's December 4-7 poll found 45 percent approving of a bailout and 44 percent disapproving. Guess Schieffer doesn't read his network's own polls--or doesn't trust them.

By way of suggesting that corporate media should make even more aggressive efforts to tie President-elect Barack Obama to a politician who called him a "motherfucker" for refusing to try to bribe him, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer remarks:

I know that there are journalists who are taking a lot of heat for not being aggressive and tough with Obama.

Noting that she has heard similar claims several times from MSNBC's talking heads, digby (Hullabaloo, 12/17/08) asks the obvious question:

Taking heat from whom?

I expected that after the election the press would come under pressure exactly like this. It's a classic "work the refs" move. But the press is openly using it as an excuse for their own behavior, which is new and changed the rules, it seems to me. While they are haranguing Obama for failing to answer questions, they seem to think it's fine not to reveal who is pressuring reporters to harangue him. Maybe they need to take some questions themselves.

Commenting yesterday on the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly declared that "this horrendous story points out how difficult it is to deal with some Muslims":

Many Americans are simply fed up with these displays in the Arab world: unchecked violence, irrational thinking.

One could say that many people are fed up with displays of unchecked violence. Actually, as Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi was hurling his shoes at Bush, he explicitly cited the largest recent case of "unchecked violence in the Arab world"--the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

If Americans are fed up with violence and irrational thinking, that'll be bad news for O'Reilly's ratings. The Fox host, who was recently named as one of the nation's top purveyors of anti-Muslim smears in FAIR's report, Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation, responded to the attacks of September 11 by calling for the bombing of Iraq (among other countries):

Their infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain.

A just-released FAIR advisory documents the media’s lopsided debate in the lead-up to Obama’s Education secretary selection today. Across a wide range of national media outlets, FAIR provides evidence that only one side has for the most part been allowed to do the talking, marginalizing the most progressive candidate in the running for the post as an unacceptable pick.

Blogging at VillageVoice.com (12/11/08), regular FAIR contributor Neil deMause notices a report on criticism of the controversial Bronx borough president's reported Obama appointment: "At least, that's what you would have read on the New York Daily News website at 2:16 am, when it was posted. By this afternoon, the story, headlined 'Adolfo Carrion Under Fire,' had disappeared from the Daily News site." Wondering if maybe "the long arm of the borough president--or the Yankees--reached out and told the News to can it," DeMause quizzes the paper, which blames a technical glitch--but he has doubts:

This isn't the first article to mysteriously go missing at the News: In October, a story on parent outrage over high administrative salaries at the Department of Education similarly played now-you-see-it, now-you-don't, amid allegations of pressure from city officials.

While nobody's accusing the News staffers of knowing how to use those newfangled computer thingies, it's certainly convenient that this only seems to happen with stories critical of city officials, and not, say, Jennifer Connelly's figure.

Check out Neil deMause's decade-plus history of writing for the FAIR magazine Extra!.

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff (12/13/08) lays on the cloak-and-dagger prose when telling the tale of how, "in the spring of 2004," former Justice Department wiretapper Thomas M. Tamm "slipped through the parade of midday subway riders, his heart was pounding, his body trembling," to "call... the New York Times" and blow the whistle on "a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens."

After this dramatic lede, Isikoff mentions that "18 months after he first disclosed what he knew, the Times reported that President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to intercept phone calls and e-mails of individuals inside the United States without judicial warrants."

Hmmm, wasn't there some sort of important political event that occurred in the interim? Readers are left to wonder for themselves until--if they're still reading halfway through the 47-paragraph piece--they learn of how

Tamm grew frustrated when the story did not immediately appear.... It wasn't until more than a year later that the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, rejecting a personal appeal and warning by President Bush, gave the story a green light. (Bush had warned "there'll be blood on your hands" if another attack were to occur.) "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," read the headline in the paper's December 16, 2005, edition. The story--which the Times said relied on "nearly a dozen current and former officials"--had immediate repercussions.

That would be "immediate repercussions" as in "immediately after" the 2004 presidential election...

Read the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "A Scoop Delayed: Times Sat on Wiretap Story for a Year" (2/06) by Jim Naureckas

The New York Times' bizarre claim that the now infamous shoe-throwing is indicative of Iraqis' "conflicted views" on Bush should perhaps come as no surprise. As independent journalist Dahr Jamail reveals in the latest issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!, the paper of record is just as apt a dodger of the indisputable facts of Iraqi opinion as the president proved himself to be in yesterday's press conference.

Jamail's article, "As Usual, NYT Ignores Iraqi Opinion: Anecdotes trump polls on withdrawal," which is now available online, documents the Times' record of ignoring scientific evidence of overwhelming Iraqi support for ending the occupation.

Glenn Greenwald has a Salon update (12/15/08, ad-viewing required) on corporate media apathy toward the U.S. Senate report finding George W. Bush and his highest appointees responsible for U.S. detainee "deaths caused by abusive treatment"--many of which "have been formally characterized as 'homicides' by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan":

This report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not his job" to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes....

Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was voyeuristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits--many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals

Greenwald finds "the media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. war crimes," to be "perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks."

See items No. 17-20 in the retrospective published by FAIR's magazine Extra!: "20 Stories That Made a Difference: For Better or Worse" (1-2/06) by Steve Rendall, Peter Hart & Julie Hollar

In his introduction (12/12/08) to an Arundhati Roy analysis of how "our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching 'India's 9/11'" in the Mumbai attacks, Tom Engelhardt recalls that

the single omnipresent historical reference in the American media immediately in the wake of September 11, 2001, was, of course, "Pearl Harbor"--and those code words for it, "infamy" and "day of infamy," splashed in mile-high letters across the front pages of papers. What we had experienced, it was commonly said then, was "the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century."...

Now, "9/11" has become the "Pearl Harbor" of the 21st century, the antecedent and analogy of choice, and so, not surprisingly, it was on all but a few media lips, during the recent massacre and siege in Mumbai, India.

In the piece that follows, Roy "explains just why using 9/11 as the analogy of choice there, as we once used 'Pearl Harbor' here, will lead in no less terrible directions."

After comparing how "establishment news outlets... have praised the president-elect's cautious Cabinet choices" with the similar reaction after Bill Clinton's first election, Bob Parry writes (Consortium News, 12/15/08) that the reality for those "who resisted the corrupt Bush years--is that we cannot rest on our successes":

You might have thought there would have been a housecleaning at establishment news organizations where sycophantic journalists enabled George W. Bush and his disasters. But the roster of the mainstream/right-wing news media hasn’t changed much at all.

If anything, the neoconservatives have established an even stronger foothold in major news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post. In other words, to the extent that President Obama does try to take the country in a significantly new direction--especially if he goes after "the mindset" that led us into the Iraq War, as he promised--he can expect strong resistance.

Parry's lesson: "If this status quo is to change, all of us must keep the pressure on."

Washington Post columnist David Broder took up the issue of healthcare policy in his column yesterday ("Health Reform's Moment," 12/14/08). One of FAIR's chief criticisms of media over the past two decades has been the narrow range of sources the media rely on to shape the debate over a given issue. Healthcare is no different, so it was instructive to read the top of Broder's column, where you see who he considers important:

On the same morning that President-elect Barack Obama introduced Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, as his prospective secretary of health and human services and his point man on healthcare reform, a panel of key constituency group leaders met to assess the prospects for success.

Taking the microphone, in turn, at a Washington hotel were the head of Business Roundtable, speaking for leading corporations; the chief executive of Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company; the president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the trade association for that industry; and spokesmen for the National Federation of Independent Business, the small-business lobby, and AARP, the senior citizens organization.

All of them agreed that major health legislation has a much better chance of passage in the next Congress than when Bill and Hillary Clinton tried in 1993-94. And so did John Harwood of CNBC and myself, the two journalists invited to be on the panel.

Business groups, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies are the ones who really matter--and who will determine what "reform" ideas are possible, and which are not. It won't take Broder long to conclude--as others in the media have already-- that single-payer healthcare is off the table.

By now most people have seen the video footage of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. The New York Times helps you put it in perspective:

The shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad punctuated Mr. Bush's visit here--his fourth--in a deeply symbolic way, reflecting the conflicted views in Iraq of a man who toppled Saddam Hussein, ordered the occupation of the country and brought it freedoms unthinkable under Mr. Hussein’s rule but at enormous costs.

From the Times' account, al-Zaidi yelled at Bush, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!" This would not seem at all conflicted, would it?

Newsweek's Mark Hosenball writes (12/22/08):

The head of Obama's intel transition team, John Brennan, was the leading candidate for CIA chief until he was slammed by liberal bloggers for not doing enough while serving as a top CIA and anti-terror official to oppose Bush.

Actually, "liberal bloggers" hadn't "slammed" Brennan for "not doing enough...to oppose Bush"; they criticized him for being an ardent public defender of rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics," which is a euphemism for torture. Since Obama campaigned as an opponent of such policies, Brennan would have been a dubious choice to be his top CIA official.

One has to be a little skeptical of Hosenball's crediting "liberal bloggers" with the ability to determine who gets to be head of the CIA.

Sam Dillon's New York Times piece (12/14/08) is much better than most of the coverage of President-elect Barack Obama's search for an Education secretary nominee. It's even got some on-target media criticism:

Editorials and opinion articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have described the debate as pitting education reformers against those representing the educational establishment or the status quo. But who the reformers are depends on who is talking.