Unable to simply air the reality of George W. Bush's immense unpopularity manifesting in a chorus of boos for his last public appearance as U.S. "president," MSBNC newscasters (YouTube.com, 1/20/08) chide inauguration attendees for "bad form"--before eventually finding a camera shot to cut to instead showing the crowd cheering... for Obama.

Hardly a new phenomenon; read about corporate media censorship at the 2000 Bush inauguration in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Protesters Rain on ABC's Parade" (3-4/01) by Jim Naureckas

Just when even the ultimately acerbic political critic Matt Taibbi began (New York Press, 1/14/09) "to lose faith in America's ability to fall for absolutely anything," he notes New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman, "resident of a positively obscene 11,400-square-foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism":

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a Green Revolution? Well, he'll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95.

While this hypocrisy is galling, Taibbi admits to finding Friedman's writing hilariously bad: "When you tried to actually picture the 'illustrative' figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school." But the wholly unfunny part is "whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors"; see the recent FAIR Action Alert: "Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page: Friedman Supports Civilian Suffering as 'Education'" (1/14/09)

Wolf Blitzer and David Gergen, watching Obama sign official papers yesterday in the Oval Office:

BLITZER: And if you've ever seen Barack Obama's signature, he is very precise when he writes, and it's -- and if he writes, he scribbles some words before he signs an autograph, for example. His penmanship, I must say -- and I've seen it -- is really excellent.

GERGEN: He's got a little flourish to that signature.

BLITZER: He has a great flourish. And it's very impressive.

On Monday (1/19/09), Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz took a look at the health of Time and Newsweek, and almost immediately rendered a political judgment:

The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more elite audience, in print and on the Web, abandoning the old Henry Luce notion of catering to the masses. It is nothing less than a survival strategy.

Hmm. Maybe those magazine editors are "loath to admit" they publish liberal magazines because, well, they don't? Kurtz sure doesn't offer much evidence to that effect. Here is how he makes his case:

One answer is to jettison the old straddle-the-center formula in which the newsweeklies spoke with an institutional voice rather than publish bylines. Each magazine's lead columnist -- Time's Joe Klein, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter -- is liberal. Newsweek has been running columns by Jacob Weisberg, the liberal editor of Slate, another Post Co. property. Newsweek also ran a controversial cover last month headlined "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage" -- "one of the last great civil rights issues," Meacham says. And its top writers appear regularly on liberal talkshows on MSNBC, with which it has a news partnership.

Time's Joe Klein is not what one would consider a liberal. Alter might be, though he's clearly of the torture-approving, bash-the-teachers-unions, move-the-Democrats-to-the-right model. Newsweek also publishes regular pieces from the likes of Fareed Zakaria, George Will and Robert Samuelson--none of whom could be called liberal.

Kurtz played up the recent pro-gay marriage cover story, but later recalled that the magazine also turned in cover stories about Obama's supposed elitism and the (misguided) notion that the United States remained a center-right nation even after Obama's victory. Kurtz could have also mentioned the magazine's recent attempt to rehabilitate Dick Cheney and torture.

About Time, Kurtz wrote:

Time ran a column last week by liberal academic Jeffrey Sachs titled "The Case for Bigger Government." This week's issue features Obama, Time's Person of the Year, yet again, and the cover headline "Great Expectations," plus a piece on his wife as "America's Next Top Model."

Wait--Time put Obama on its cover? This week? Well, that is curious news judgment.

Kurtz adds:

Stengel's ideal staffer is Mark Halperin, whom he hired from ABC. Halperin created the political tip sheet the Page for Time.com and the magazine, and often appears on television. Both newsweeklies now realize they are competing on the Web as much as on the newsstand.

Halperin is well-known for attacking supposed liberal bias in the media, denounced the supposed pro-Obama media bias as "disgusting,"  and even advocated getting liberals out of newsrooms. This guy is the "ideal staffer" at a magazine Kurtz sees as moving left? Please explain.

The Pentagon inspector general's report on the Pentagon Pundits scandal was released (to no one's surprise) late on Friday. Also unsurprising were its contents--the report basically concluded that there was no serious wrongdoing, not to mention no clear idea of what constitutes "propaganda" in the first place.

The report was summarized in the New York Times (1/17/09) by David Barstow, the reporter who broke the story that led to the Pentagon whitewash. Barstow seems unimpressed with the Pentagon's work, noting that investigators couldn't manage to interview some key Pentagon staffers, couldn't find evidence that any of the pundits used their Pentagon access to enrich private companies and didn't even seem to know how to corroborate the simplest facts:

The report asserts that 43 military analysts had no affiliations with defense contractors. But its listing of analysts without ties to contractors included many with easily documented connections to them, including Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and NBC military analyst.

In fact, as the Times reported in November, General McCaffrey is a paid consultant to several military contractors and sits on the boards of several others, including DynCorp, one of the nation's largest recipients of contracts connected to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Asked why General McCaffrey was listed as having no ties to contractors, officials at the inspector general’s office said their "search parameters" might not have uncovered all relevant business relationships.

Those "search parameters" must have been carefully selected.

Finding it "more than ironic" and even "disturbing and more than a little sad," Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 1/17/09) points out that "at the same time that the United States is inaugurating a new presidency that marks the crashing of a racial barrier at the White House," the African-American-centric News & Notes--a show "actually staffed by African-Americans"--is being canned by National Public Radio:

One of the ironies is that NPR, an outfit which many people regard as a bastion of wide-ranging discourse, has an internal atmosphere so corporate that many journalists there are afraid to talk publicly--to journalists!

Check this out from the Current article [on the cancellation] : "Several employees did not return phone calls requesting interviews or declined to discuss their situations out of fear that they would be fired or lose their severance packages."

While admitting that News & Notes "wasn't the most adventurous program on the airwaves," Solomon explains that "it did meaningfully expand the diversity of NPR programming on a daily basis"--and "now these attempts to diversify have been given pink slips." To Solomon's ears, "rhetoric aside, the priorities for programming can be heard loud and clear."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "How Public Is Public Radio?: A Study of NPR's Guest List" (5-6/04) by Steve Rendall & Daniel Butterworth

Asking the deceptively simple question, "More Bank Bailouts: Who Gets the Money?", Beat the Press blogger Dean Baker has another telling example (1/18/09) of biases in media corporations' reportage on corporate economics:

The Washington Post made reducing the pay of autoworkers by $4.00 an hour a central theme of its coverage (both news and editorial) of the auto industry bailout. For this reason, it is especially noteworthy that its discussion of new plans for bailing out banks has no mention whatsoever of executive compensation at the banks.

In good years, the highest-paid bank executives could make more money in an hour than a UAW autoworker earns in a year. For this reason, readers may find restrictions on the compensation of bank executives to be an important part of what could be another trillion dollar bailout package for Wall Street.

Ever a master of understatement, Baker thinks "the omission of any discussion of executive compensation is quite striking."

In distinct contradiction to corporate media's see-no-evil focus on the next presidency, media activist Veterans for Peace continue driving for Bush administration accountability with a new mock newspaper bluntly titled War Crime Times. The publication--featuring such uncorporate headlines as "Obama Should Prosecute Bush Officials Who Designed Torture Policy" and "Media Complicit: U.S. Journalists and War-Crime Guilt" (1/16/09)--recently was handed out, appropriately enough, to visitors at the Fox-friendly Newseum in Washington, D.C.

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Media and Impeachment: Not for Discussion, Only for Derision" (7-8/07) by Cynthia Cooper

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman relates how (1/13/09), at George W. Bush's last press conference, he was "professing what he called his 'respect' for journalists" by asserting that "always the relationship I have felt has been professional." Yet, Goodman tells us, "despite his avowed respect for the media, Bush refused to call on the journalist Helen Thomas"--perhaps because of hard-driving queries like this, from "one of the last times" he let Thomas speak, "in July of 2007":

Mr. President, you started this war, a war of your choosing, and you can end it alone, today, at this point, bring in peacekeepers, U.N. peacekeepers. Two million Iraqis have fled their country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don’t you understand? You have brought the al-Qaeda into Iraq.

Having been silenced at the White House, the "first female member and president of the White House Correspondents' Association" and current "senior member of the White House press corps" gives Goodman's audience her views on the last news conference: "I thought it was nostalgic. I understood the reporters' soft questions," but "I think they gave him a platform of self-defense and self-delusion. The whole idea that it was a disappointment not to have weapons of mass destruction? A disappointment?" And what would Thomas have asked, given the opportunity?: "I would have asked a news question. I would not have gone into the nostalgia."

Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Phyllis Bennis on George W. Bush & Helen Thomas" (3/24/06)

Comparing Tribune Co. raider Sam Zell to sea pirates of yore, longtime radio progressive Jim Hightower thinks (JimHightower.com, 1/18/09) Zell doesn't come out too well--"the difference between pirate captains of old and modern-day corporate bosses is that pirates had ethics":

They fairly shared their loot, for example, with the entire crew. Contrast that with the rip-off of employees by the bosses and bankers involved in the recent tribulations of the Tribune Company. This media conglomerate, which owns some of America's top newspapers and television stations, was bought a year ago by a Chicago real estate baron named Sam Zell.

This fellow didn't have anywhere near enough money to pay the $8.2 billion purchase price, but, hey, that's no problem for a striver. Zell simply got the company's CEO to let him use the employees pension fund as collateral for bank loans to buy the Tribune. Even though their money was put at risk, the employees had no say in the deal, nor in how the company was run. It was run badly. Less than a year after Zell's takeover, the Tribune has had to declare bankruptcy, and employees are likely to lose jobs, severance payments and pensions.

Hightower details how the company's "former CEO was given more than $40 million when Zell took charge," involved parties like "Citigroup and Merrill Lynch were paid about $36 million each" and Zell himself "had put up less than 4 percent of the purchase price to get control of the company, and...if the Tribune's assets have to be distributed to creditors as a result of the bankruptcy, Zell will be first in line to get his--standing in front of the employees whose company and pensions he wrecked."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Bob McChesney on Tribune Bankruptcy" (12/12/08)

Recalling how "too often, government has tried to expand Internet access by giving public money to massive phone and cable companies" and only gotten "tax dollars squandered," to the point that "Americans now face few market choices, and pay high prices for speeds that are far too slow," the folks at Free Press are now asking Congress to:

not write another blank check to these same corporations. Please make sure my tax dollars are used only to support broadband build out that is:

1. Universal: focused on connecting the nearly half of the country stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
2. Open: committed to free speech and without corporate gatekeepers, filters or discrimination.
3. Affordable: providing faster speeds at lower prices.
4. Innovative: dedicated to new projects only and available to new competitors, including municipalities and nonprofits.
5. Accountable: open to public scrutiny so we can ensure that our money isn't being spent to prop up stock prices and support market monopolies.

Use their handy form to contact your representatives and urge "No Bailout for Phone and Cable Giants."

Writing for a collective media criticism blog in Michigan (MediaMouse.org, 1/15/09), Jeff Smith states that, "if the U.S. public is ever going to hold the U.S. government accountable for its policy in Afghanistan, then we need to challenge how the U.S. news media reports on that policy." But he also knows that "for many Americans most of their news media comes from local TV news or the monopoly daily newspaper in their community." With this in mind his group has "monitored three local TV stations and the Grand Rapids Press" for various periods:

Our first study of the local news coverage of the U.S. policy in Afghanistan began the day U.S. warplanes started dropping bombs in October 2001. We conducted a 75-day study of the three Grand Rapids based TV stations' coverage of what was then exclusively referred to as "The War on Terror." All three of the TV stations used slick graphics and ominous music to intro their stories. In addition, each station came up with its own titles related to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, such as "America Strikes Back," "America at War" and "The War on Terrorism."

The type of stories that were presented on the local TV stations either focused on what the U.S. military was doing, the response from the Taliban or the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Much of the footage that was used was provided by the Department of Defense.... This type of coverage framed the war from the U.S. perspective with limited information on what was happening to the Afghan people. Even more absent than stories on civilian casualties was the lack of any reporting that provided historical context to U.S. policy in that region of the world in recent decades.

Smith and co. conclude that "if the public relies on the local news media for understanding U.S. policy in Afghanistan, that people will have limited knowledge of that policy and a perspective that is primarily through the eyes of U.S. officials," and, looking forward, "if an effort to challenge the incoming administration's position on Afghanistan is to be successful, it must include as part of its strategy both an understanding of how public perception of Afghanistan has been created and a plan to challenge how Afghanistan is being framed in the news."

For a national perspective, see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Propaganda of Silence: Losing Interest in Afghanistan's Plight" (11-12/06) by James Ingalls & Sonali Kolhatkar

Excerpting a David Ignatius column (Washington Post, 1/15/09) that characterizes a strict Obama administration "focus on... getting things right in the future" as "the kind of realism that will disappoint liberal score-settlers," Glenn Greenwald's Salon commentary (1/15/09, ad-viewing required) describes how "the word 'liberal' has undergone a remarkable transformation over the last eight years"--at least among corporate pundits:

All that has been necessary to qualify is a belief in such radical, exotic and fringe-leftist concepts as search warrants before the government can eavesdrop on our communications; due process before the state can encage people for life; adherence to decades-old Geneva Conventions restrictions which post-World War II America led the way in implementing; and the need for an actual, imminent threat from another country before we bomb, invade, occupy and destroy it. Now added to the pantheon of "liberal" dogma is the shrill, ideological belief that high government officials must abide by our laws and should be treated like any other citizen when they break them.

Part of the reason Greenwald thinks that what Ignatius "does best" is "serve as the spokesman for the Washington establishment's most conventional wisdom" is the columnist's implication that "high political officials (and our most powerful industries, such as the telecoms) should be able to break numerous laws (i.e.: commit felonies), openly admit that they've done so, and then be immunized from all consequences."

See Ignatius' starring role in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Old Media's Election Centrism: It's Not Their Party and They'll Cry if They Want To" (12/06) by Jim Naureckas

I don't know whether George W. Bush will issue a slew of pardons in his last weekend in the White House, but I would expect such pardons to receive less scrutiny than those issued by his predecessor.  And if he attempts to pardon those who committed crimes on his behalf, you can count on large sectors of the media to welcome that self-exculpating behavior as a way of letting bygones be bygones.

Two newspaper stories today provide a false account of the context of the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The Washington Post:

Hamas and its allies have fired thousands of rockets into Israel in the past eight years. The pace accelerated after the Islamist movement, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, routed forces loyal to the rival Fatah party in June 2007 and seized control of the narrow coastal strip. Since then, Israel has implemented a crushing economic blockade and carried out regular military raids that it has said were a response to rocket fire.

This is an extremely selective history. The Post's claim that Hamas "accelerated" its rocket attacks after 2007 ignores the fact that a cease-fire agreement for much of the second half of 2008 drastically curtailed rocket fire into Israel (an agreement that largely fell apart after an Israeli attack in November).

Meanwhile, in USA Today:

Israel wants to ensure that Hamas cannot rearm itself. Before the offensive, Hamas militants fired up to 80 mortar shells and rockets a day at Israel. The number of attacks has declined to less than 20 a day, the Israeli army says.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "before the offensive." During the cease-fire period last year, rocket fire into Israel was well below the 80 a day figure the paper cites. In fact, it was much lower than the 20 a day figure too; it was around a dozen a month. USA Today wants to advance the argument that Israel's violence has 'worked'-- but to do so you must erase certain inconvenient facts.