FAIR friend Tom Tomorrow notifies his readers (ThisModernWorld.com, 1/26/09) that his long-running editorial comic is being cut from possibly the entire Village Voice Media chain:

The papers I was running in are: Dallas Observer, New Times Ft. Lauderdale, Houston Press, LA Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, Nashville Scene, OC Weekly, Pitch Weekly, Denver Westword and the Village Voice (though there is a small possibility of a reprieve for the latter).... Oops, forgot one: Seattle Weekly.

This still leaves me with 80-odd papers, as well as Salon and Credo, so it's not a fatal blow. And believe me, I wasn’t so naive as to imagine I was going to get through this economic mess without taking some hits. Nonetheless, it's a serious chunk of major cities to lose in one fell swoop. (Don't get me started on the joys of consolidation this morning.)

Tom humbly suggests that "if you live in one of those cities and think this is a bad decision, you might want to share those feelings with the local editor"--particularly when you consider that This Modern World often is the most critical (and frequently the most informational) content in any given issue of some of these "alternative" weekly papers.

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Yesterday’s Tomorrows: A Cartoon History of Two Decades of Media Criticism" (1-2/07) by Tom Tomorrow

"Liberal media" basher Bernie Goldberg is back with a new book, and Media Matters' Dianna Parker (1/25/09) finds him as error-ridden as ever:

In yet another instance of mangling the facts to show purported media favoritism toward then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, Bernard Goldberg writes in his new book: "Finally, in the last month of the campaign, the [New York] Times returned to the Obama-Ayers story, but only after McCain and (mostly) Palin began making it an issue on the campaign trail."

A Media Matters Nexis search confirms that, "In fact, in what ABC News' Imtiyaz Delawala reported was the "first time" Gov. Sarah Palin raised Obama's connection to former Weather Underground member William Ayers, Palin actually cited the October 4, 2008, New York Times story to which Goldberg refers."

Read FAIR's take on an earlier Goldberg book in our magazine Extra!: "Bias Short on Substance: Former CBS Reporter Claims TV Has 'Leftward' Slant" (3-4/02) by Peter Hart & Steve Rendall

Reading this at the bottom of neo-con William Kristol's column in the New York Times (1/26/09):

This is William Kristol's last column.

Homer says, "Woohoo!"

Then reading this at the Politico:

EXCLUSIVE: Progressives will delight when they get to the italic note at the end of Bill Kristol's column in the Times today say, "This is William Kristol’s last column." His one-year contract was up. Sources tell Playbook that he’s now beginning a monthly column in the Washington Post.

Homer says, "D'oh!"

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helpfully debunks (1/26/09) some of the more tendentious and misleading criticisms of the White House's economic stimulus package. Here's one such trope:

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000--and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Well, that's refreshing; one only wishes that news articles in the same paper would challenge such spin instead of merely passing it along, as they did yesterday (courtesy of GOP Congressmember John Boehner):

Mr. Boehner cited numbers to counter Mr. Obama's, saying the House Democratic plan included $600 million for the federal government to buy new cars, $650 million for digital television coupons and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. "All told," he said, "the plan would spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create."

A January 23 New York Times column by Bob Herbert distilled the message of Barack Obama's nascent administration as "No more crazy wars." FAIR associate Norman Solomon's reaction (AfterDowningStreet.org, 1/26/09): "I wish." Lamenting the current "narrowness of political vision--while news outlets are reporting that the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is expected to 'as much as double this year to 60,000 troops'"--Solomon recalls the Lyndon Baines Johnson inaugural speech that "foreshadowed the massive slaughtering of people in Vietnam":

Pundits and congressional leadership nodded sagely as the president cited the threat of Communism and proceeded to boost U.S. troop levels in Vietnam. Similar nodding--and nodding off--is now underway as the president cites the threat of terrorism and prepares to boost U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan....

Lyndon Johnson's capacity to deliver on hopes for a Great Society shattered on the jagged steel of a war that, year after year, few pundits were willing to acknowledge was crazy....

Several weeks ago, a Bob Herbert column made a practical moral argument: "Sending thousands of additional men and women (some to die, some to be horribly wounded) on a fool's errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness."

Days after the inauguration, the news has included a fresh spate of stories about Afghan civilians killed by U.S. missiles. Hamid Karzai, in effect the president of Kabul, declared that the Pentagon’s frequent killing of civilians in Afghanistan "is strengthening the terrorists." And so it goes.

Solomon's reminder to today's journalists: "Escalation of a crazy war will make it crazier. Pretending otherwise will not make it any less insane--or any less destructive." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Norman Solomon on Obama's Inauguration" (1/23/09)

Raw Story highlights a Daily Show clip (1/22/09) in which Jon Stewart plays an astounding array of "soft-on-terror" clips from Fox coverage of Barack Obama's first day as U.S. president. Stewart then reminds us how "criticism and dissent of the president's policies, especially Iraq, used to be viewed" by playing a March 30, 2007, "Talking Points" segment in which Bill O'Reilly says "this hate stuff, this rooting for the administration to fail in Iraq and other areas is un-American, unbecoming and unacceptable. Like him or not, Mr. Bush is the elected leader of this country." Raw Story's David Edwards and Ron Brynaert transcribe the subsequent Daily Show pay-off as follows:

Stewart showed conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh talking about how he wants Obama to "fail," during an appearance on Fox News' Hannity on Wednesday.

"I am hearing many Republicans say that--well, we want him to succeed and prominent Republicans," Limbaugh had said. "Yes, we wanted--they have laid down. They have totally--they're drinking the Kool-Aid, too."

"So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail," Limbaugh said later in the interview with Hannity.

For some background on corporate media's ideas about acceptable and unacceptable criticism, see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Dissent, Disloyalty & Double Standards: Kosovo doves denounced Iraq War protest as 'anti-American'" (5-6/03) by Steve Rendall

Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 1/20/09) is linking to Glenn Greenwald's Salon catch of John Barry telling Newsweek readers to not sweat "the core charge that the [Bush] administration 'misled' the legislature and the American public by faking evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction." Barry asserts any such accountability would be "vengeance, pure and simple," because "there is ample evidence that Saddam was genuinely believed to have an arsenal by those with access to the intelligence."

Schwarz thinks "it would be incredible for any reporter to write this," considering that "the U.S. was told by the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service Tahir Jalil Habbush, Iraq's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, and dozens of relatives of Iraqi WMD scientists that the administration's claims were completely wrong":

But it's truly mind-boggling to hear it from John Barry.... It's much worse: Barry personally broke a giant story immediately before the invasion of Iraq about the U.S. government faking WMD evidence.

In the March 3, 2003 issue of Newsweek, Barry revealed that Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, after defecting to Jordan in 1995, told the U.S. and UN that Iraq had no remaining WMD. This was the opposite of what Bush, Cheney, Blair and Powell were claiming Kamel had said. According to Barry, Kamel's statements had been "hushed up."...

Of course, Barry's story was completely accurate. And it was about something the CIA in 2003 knew with 100 percent certainty--i.e., what Hussein Kamel had said in 1995. (This is opposed to, say, whether what Kamel had said was true. It was later learned he'd been completely honest.)

So to sum up: Even after having the CIA blatantly lie about his own work, John Barry will angrily defend the government's veracity.

While hopeful that "Barack Obama is about to create some glasnost within the U.S. government," Schwarz writes that "even if he does, America's news outlets will retain an alarmingly Soviet tinge." See the FAIR Action Alert: "Missing From ABC's WMD 'Scoop': Star Defector Hussein Kamel Said Weapons Were Destroyed" (2/17/06)

In discussion with Foreign Policy in Focus' Sameer Dossani (1/16/09), Noam Chomsky states "the fact of the matter" that "the press won't talk about": "that there has been a political settlement on the table, on the agenda for 30 years" in the Middle East. And that would be "a two-state settlement on the international borders." Unfortunately, as Chomsky often points out, "the United States vetoed it so it's therefore out of history":

Sameer Dossani: Yes, the Taba negotiations. The two sides came very close to agreement.

Noam Chomsky: They were called off by Israel. But that was the one week in over 30 years when the United States and Israel abandoned their rejectionist position. It's a real tribute to the media and other commentators that they can keep this quiet. The U.S. and Israel are alone in this. The international consensus includes virtually everyone. It includes the Arab League, which has gone beyond that position and called for the normalization of relations; it includes Hamas. Every time you see Hamas in the newspapers, it says "Iranian-backed Hamas which wants to destroy Israel." Try to find a phrase that says "democratically elected Hamas which is calling for a two-state settlement" and has been for years.

Putting it simply, Chomsky says that, "Well, yeah, that's a good propaganda system." See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Nixed Signals: When Hamas Hinted at Peace, U.S. Media Wouldn’t Take the Message" (9-10/06) by Seth Ackerman

Leave it to Forbes to get someone from the Hoover Institution to do an "in-depth" feature on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media" (1/22/09).

The results are about as bogus as you might imagine, including a number of people who are not only not liberals, but who are actively loathed by the actual left end of the media spectrum--and the feeling is generally mutual: folks like Fred Hiatt, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens (did their Nation sub lapse in 1998?), Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan.

Then there are some corporate journalists whose "liberalism" seems entirely resume-based: Kurt Andersen founded Spy and does a culture show on NPR! David Shipley wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and works at the New York Times! Gerald Seib works at the Wall Street Journal but doesn't write for the editorial page! Andersen is the kind of "liberal" who writes about "the Democrats' 'mommy party' M.O. of naivete, mollycoddling, and profligacy," Seib does pieces like "Bipartisanship Could Help Victorious Democrats," while Shipley's Times op-ed page has been the object of repeated complaints from FAIR for its right-slanted choices.

There's a couple of people on the list--Jon Stewart and Oprah Winfrey--who are indeed influential liberals who are "in U.S. media"...but if by "media" they don't mean journalism, why not include Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen?  They're "in U.S. media" too.

Then there's the bloggers, who largely define themselves as not being part of the "MSM": Arianna Huffington, Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

That leaves six people on the list of 25 who actually are liberal journalists with a regular platform in traditional U.S. media: the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg; the Atlantic's James Fallows; Michael Pollan, a freelance writer for the New York Times; Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; and PBS's Bill Moyers. What does this say about the myth of the liberal media? Maybe the Hoover Institution can study that.

What would a real list of the most important progressive media figures look like? Feel free to leave suggestions in comments.

Sometimes you don't need to read more than a headline. Take today's Washington Post:

Senate Gets Reacquainted With McCain the Maverick

OK, let's read just a bit:

Two and a half months removed from his defeat in the race for the presidency, colleagues say, McCain bears more resemblance to the unpredictable and frequently bipartisan lawmaker they have served with for decades than the man who ran an often scathing campaign against Barack Obama.

The "unpredictable and frequently bipartisan" John McCain doesn't really exist--McCain has for some time boasted a reliably conservative Senate voting record. (His "maverick" years of 2001 and 2002 were an exception to the rule.) It's good to know that this media-manufactured myth is back--before we had time to miss it.

Raw Story's David Edwards and Muriel Kane (1/21/09) report on ex-NSA agent Russell Tice's appearance on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, where the man "who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005" further revealed "that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists":

When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists."

"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"

Tice did not answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything."

Though unable to say to what use all this illegally obtained data was put, Tice did know one thing: "He was sure it 'was digitized and put on databases somewhere.'"

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Terror Talk Crowds Out Thoughtful Discussion: Wiretapping Americans for Foreign Intelligence" (11-12/07) by Cynthia Cooper

Media critic Brad Friedman explains (BradBlog.com, 1/21/09) exactly why he considers media reform "the most important...reform of all at this particular point in the 21st century":

While the Supreme Court has declared many times that the right to vote is protective of all other rights, I'd suggest that the right to be informed, accurately, via our nation's publicly owned airwaves, is the right that ensures our right to vote is ultimately protective of anything.

With our current hard-right-leaning corporate media landscape, every attempted reform, including Election Reform, by any Democratic administration, must overcome a nearly impossible crucible of right-wing opposition--and more disturbingly, propaganda--across the nation's public airwaves.

Friedman asserts that the removal of this "built-in impediment" is crucial for the U.S. to "restore itself from the 20-year imbalance that has quietly decayed the nation's sense of Reality-based policy since Ronald Reagan dismantled the Fairness Doctrine in 1987."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Steve Rendall on the Fairness Doctrine" (11/28/08)

Your daily dose of radio bigotry is brought to you by the super-hater team of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Rush recently hosted Coulter on his radio show (RushLimbaugh.com, 1/16/09), where they got down to some of the racist banter they're so famous for:

Rush: Arianna [Huffington], you need a translator.

Coulter: And George Soros!

Rush: Yeah, him, too. I've never heard the Daily Kos guy speak.

Coulter: Yeah, he was brought up in someplace in Latin America. You can't understand them. They speak in foreign accents. They represent the Democratic Party.

Maybe this is just an example of their particularly xenophobic brand of "humor," but really, how witty is it to ridicule people who may, or may not, speak English with an accent?

Writing on Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog (1/21/09), Steve Benen quotes Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris of Politico rueing the lack of "evidence that [Barack Obama] is willing to challenge Democratic special interest groups": "There are few examples of him making decisions during the campaign or the transition that offended his own party's constituencies.... Has Obama ever...stood up to organized labor in the way that Clinton did in passing North American Free Trade Agreement?" Saying that "it was never altogether clear to me why this was supposed to be persuasive," Benen sums up the reasoning as "the Democratic nominee agrees with the Democratic Party! Eek!":

I realize this is a common argument, I just don't understand why. For one thing, Obama has "offended his own party's constituencies" more than a few times, both during and after the campaign. Before the election, Obama was at odds with Democrats over FISA and the financial industry bailout, and after the election, he frustrated party constituencies on everything from cabinet selections to Lieberman to Rick Warren to tax cuts in the stimulus bill.

Benen's obvious question: "Why on earth would Obama's chances of success as president be dependent on his willingness to disagree frequently with his own party?" His own equally obvious answer: "That's nonsense." See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Media Tell Obama--Don't Be a Lefty Like Clinton" (11/7/08)

Scott Horton of Harper's (1/21/09) tells us of some big news on "the German television program Frontal 21, on channel ZDF": In an interview there, "internationally renowned law professor" and "independent expert for the United Nations" Manfred Nowak, "the United Nations Rapporteur responsible for torture, stated that with George W. Bush's head of state immunity now terminated, the new government of Barack Obama was obligated by international law to commence a criminal investigation into Bush's torture practices." But, outside of one widely picked-up AP piece in which the professor is vaguely quoted stating that "justice also means to look into the past," Google News shows not a single U.S. outlet mention of Nowak on the matter.

Horton has more news on high-level accountability you won't get in the U.S.:

The ZDF piece also includes an interview with attorney Wolfgang Kaleck, who brought charges against Rumsfeld before German prosecutors. He states that the Obama administration is "off to a good beginning" with its explicit renunciation of torture, but it still has not shown how it will hold Bush, Rumsfeld and others to account for their crimes, nor has it demonstrated its legally obligated duty to provide compensation to torture victims.

But that subject has also been proven entirely verboten among corporate U.S. media. Listen to the FAIR radio program Counterspin: "Michael Ratner on Detainee Abuse Report" (12/19/08)