A four-sentence squib in the New York Post announcing the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation's new National Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury Plan to raise awareness of such dangers as Shaken Baby Syndrome suffers from the Post's well-documented predilection for less-than-tasteful headlines--in this case: "Kids Get a Fair Shake". The foundation's communications director, Jennipher Dickens, has responded (1/12/09) with an open letter asking what's so funny about the "No. 1 cause of death and disability for children in the U.S.":

the very idea that a newspaper editor would think it was clever to refer to the most devastating form of child abuse in such an offhand, callous way is beyond hurtful and unacceptable. There is no other way to define their actions other than it being an intentional mockery of the trauma children and their families suffer.

As a former newspaper reporter myself, I know the reporter who wrote the story was not responsible for the offensive headline. However, also as a former reporter, I know the mentality of the people who do come up with newspaper headlines--to capture the audience and sensationalize the piece in order to sell newspapers. While this is of course standard practice, it is not at all acceptable when it comes to child abuse resulting in brain injury!

Looking for a positive outcome from the situation, Dickens thinks the paper "should not only print an apology... but they should also devote an entire section of their Sunday edition to the first-ever National Pediatric Acquired Brain Injury Plan." She ends with a suggestion: "If you feel the same way, please be sure to call, email or send a letter to: Mr. Col Allan, Editor-in-Chief... 212-930-8000... colallan@nypost.com... letters@nypost.com."

Media blogger and satirist Brad Jacobson presents his "2008 Fact or Fiction Challenge" (MediaBloodhound, 1/13/09), in which outrageous quotes both real and made up are listed for the reader to "see if you can distinguish between the two." A sampling:

4) "Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal."--Frank Baker, Associated Press Los Angeles Assistant Bureau Chief, in a memo to staff....

31) "The Tiger Woods injury story was of major importance and we felt we needed to devote time to it as the lead. "--Rick Kaplan, Executive Producer of CBS Evening News....

34) "During 'blackout week,' the AP didn't mention [Paris] Hilton's second birthday party at a Beverly Hills restaurant, at which a drunken friend reportedly was ejected by security after insulting Paula Abdul and Courtney Love. And editors asked our Puerto Rico bureau not to write about her visit there to hawk her fragrance."--Frank Baker, Associated Press Los Angeles assistant bureau chief, on AP's journalistic restraint in covering fluff

HINT: They're all true.

It is a hallmark of a sane and moderate society that when it changes leaders and regimes, those left behind should be abandoned to the judgment of history. It is in savage societies that the defeat of a ruling faction entails its humiliation, exile and murder.

--Charles Fried, New York Times op-ed page (10/11/09)

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Russia is so feudal in its system of patronage and reward that it is virtually impossible for a leader to hand over power without controlling his successor or at least receiving an exemption from prosecution--something Mr. Putin granted his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in 1999.

--Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times op-ed (1/12/09)

Newsweek's cover story (1/19/09) is a look at the Cheney/Bush national security policies that will Barack Obama will soon inherit. In his editor's note, Jon Meacham advises that the piece is definitely NOT a look backwards:

.. to rehash the case against Cheney at this late hour in the life of the Bush administration would be the rough equivalent of pornography--briefly engaging, perhaps, but utterly predictable and finally repetitive. As Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas explore in this week's cover, the urgent question now is whether President Obama will hew to that dogma or whether, confronted with the realities of office, he will begin to see virtue in the antiterror apparatus Cheney helped Bush create.

Well, that's a relief--one thing people probably don't want is accountability. And what an idea to get Stuart Taylor to co-write it. He recently wrote that Bush's civil libertarian critics are more worried about surveillance "than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists." Taylor went on to argue that Obama "kick the hard Left gently in the teeth." (Read Matthew Yglesias on Taylor here.)

The actual cover story is about what you'd expect; it cheers Obama's FISA flip-flop and claims it "is a liberal shibboleth that torture doesn't work." I guess that isn't "utterly predictable."

As for that torture shibboleth, see Extra!, (1-2/02):

This evident confidence in the efficacy of torture seems to be shared by many pro-torture pundits, though as Human Rights Watch points out, "the unreliability of forced confessions was one of the principal reasons that U.S. courts originally prohibited their use." As early as the 18th Century, political philosopher Cesare Beccaria warned that the victim of torture "will accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent" (and will falsely implicate others "yet more readily").

Former FBI official Oliver Revell concurs: "People will even admit they killed their grandmother, just to stop the beatings" ("The Legal Prohibition Against Torture," www.hrw.org).

Those who might expect the Paper of Record to ignore or bury stories about Israel using the incendiary white phosphorous in its attack on Gaza can point to yesterday's paper (1/11/09), where the following sentence appears at the very bottom of one piece:

Human rights groups are also concerned about the Israeli use of white phosphorous, which creates smoke on a battlefield, at low altitudes or crowded areas, because it can burn like a kind of napalm.

U.S. corporate media have shown some difficulty in grappling with the issue of incendiary weapons; see Extra!: "Now It's a Chemical Weapon, Now It's Not" (3-4/06) by Seth Ackerman.

Today's Washington Post (1/12/09) brings news that will probably surprise very few readers:

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges.

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.

Huh. So why did the New York Times tell readers last year that Bush's economic record was strong? As a FAIR alert summarized:

The New York Times (1/28/08) claimed in a front-page story that George W. Bush's economic growth record "would be the envy of most presidents." This claim has no basis in fact and should be corrected by the newspaper.

The paper never responded to FAIR activists on that one.

MediaBloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson has a disturbing story (1/7/09) of one reporter's diligent efforts being excised from articles that eventually then appeared under distorting headlines. Jacobson provides transcripts of the Associated Press' Matthew Lee doggedly trying to pin down the Bush administration reasoning for refusing to support a temporary cease-fire in Gaza "that doesn’t have to be sustainable and durable if, during the pause that you get from an immediate cease-fire, something longer-term can be negotiated."

Jacobson writes that, "according to a LexisNexis and Google News search, Lee didn't publish a report after this briefing on Monday" and after another day of similarly "pointed" questioning, "Lee wrote up and filed his story. With the misleadingly hopeful headline 'Rice Traveling to U.N. to Push Gaza Cease-Fire.'"

The article opens: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to New York and the United Nations on Tuesday in a bid to broker a sustainable cease-fire as soon as possible to end the crisis in Gaza." Lee knows there's a stark difference between a "cease-fire" and the administration's "sustainable" or "durable" cease-fire. Most of his back and forth with [Deputy Secretary of State Sean] McCormack for two days pivoted on these semantic but very consequential points of distinction. AP editors surely know this as well.

Yet the AP--America's leading newswire service--either carelessly or willfully misled its readers and all the news providers it supplied with this headline, many of which, as is often the case, then use it to frame this unfolding story. A headline much closer to the truth would've read "Rice Traveling to U.N. to Push Conditional Gaza Cease-Fire." Omit "conditional" or some such synonym and the headline gives the false impression that Rice is coming to the Palestinians' rescue. Lee and his editors at the AP realize as well that Rice is coming to the Palestinians' rescue like she came to the Lebanese civilians' rescue in 2006.

On that peculiar form of "rescue," listen to the Deadline Pundit condemn Rice's "immortal statement that 'it would be premature to call for a cease-fire'" on FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: "Ian Williams on U.S. Diplomacy" (8/18/06)

Veteran media analyst Robert Parry takes apart (Consortium News, 1/10/09) "the Washington establishment--and its chief mouthpiece, the Washington Post"--for "trying to stymie any meaningful accountability for the outgoing administration and thus cover up for their own complicity in Bush’s crimes and incompetence":

The latest example is the Post's front-page article on January 10 which offers a one-sided defense of torture in the guise of discussing how President-elect Barack Obama is under pressure over his expressed goal of prohibiting abusive interrogation of detainees in the "war on terror."

The Post article presents those interrogation policies as an undisputed success, even quoting Vice President Dick Cheney as something of an unbiased expert in declaring that the harsh tactics "have been absolutely essential to maintaining our capacity to interfere with and defeat all further attacks against the United States."

Throughout the article, Obama's opposition to torture is portrayed as simply campaign rhetoric meant to appease the left-wing Democratic base and some human rights activists. Meanwhile the pro-torture position is described as realistic, hard-headed and patriotic.

Even though the offending piece "appeared in the news columns--not in its reliably neoconservative editorial section"--to Parry "the article read more like a pro-torture opinion piece masquerading as news." To this end, "the Post included no counter-arguments against the alleged value of waterboarding and other tactics which have been widely condemned around the world as torture."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to 'Waterboarding': Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5-6/08) by Isabel Macdonald

Writing for the Nation (1/7/09), Alexander Cockburn finds that in "the major media, aside from some passable stuff on the cable news shows, the flow of ignorant drivel seems as toxic as ever,"

maybe worse, since Israel has tried to empty Gaza of all reporters. The Israelis wipe out whole families, phone apartment blocks to terrify the occupants with boasts that their homes will shortly be blown up, and the Israel claque here stresses the consummate humanity of the attackers. Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post celebrates the birth of the new year by extolling Israel for being "so scrupulous about civilian life." Professor Alan Dershowitz dishes out congratulation for Israel's "perfectly proportionate" onslaught.

Cockburn's memory even "goes back to Martin Peretz in 1982 inscribing in the New Republic glowing sermons on the doctrines of humanity instilled in the Israeli Defense Force." Cockburn notes that these were "words written not long before Israeli generals gave the green light for the killers of the Phalange to go to work, disemboweling women in the camps under the indifferent or admiring gaze of IDF personnel" in Beirut's Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila.

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Ali Abunimah on Gaza" (1/9/09)

Noting that the project of "'solidifying' the finances of Social Security" is properly characterized as "an obsession of the [Washington] Post," and not the "Fundamental Fiscal Issue" corporate media generally report it as, Beat the Press blogger Dean Baker explains (1/12/09) yet again that "the program can pay all benefits through the year 2049 with no changes whatsoever. Even after that date, it would always be able to pay beneficiaries a far higher benefit than what current retirees receive." Nonetheless, "the misidentification of Social Security's financial state appears in a front-page article today":

The article later describes President Bush's effort to privatize Social Security as an effort to "tweak" the system. Under President Bush's proposal, a worker who earned roughly $100,000 a year during her working lifetime (adjusted for inflation and income growth) and retired in 2040 would see a reduction in benefits of almost 30 percent against current law. The fall in benefits would increase over time until even the highest-paid workers would receive only slightly more in benefits than workers who had modest wages throughout their working years. It is misleading to describe such large-scale cuts as a "tweak" to the system.

The article also includes an assertion that President Bush proposed a healthcare plan that "many independent experts thought could make care more affordable for poor and middle-income families." It does not identify any experts who held this view. The plan, which would break up employer pools and encourage people to get insurance as individuals, would lower the cost for healthy individuals (who have little need for healthcare), but would raise the cost of insurance for those with serious health problems.

A hint as to how the Post managed to justify these misstatements is seen in Baker's observation that the "article relies exclusively on economists who missed the housing bubble and were surprised by the current crisis. It would be helpful if the Post could find a broader range of economists for its sources."

After taking pictures at a New York demonstration in which, as the Indypendent summarized, "thousands of people rallied at Times Square Sunday afternoon, calling for an immediate end to the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip," I was rather taken aback by AP's account of the same event, which put the number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators at a mere 150. AP's report stated:

Across town at Times Square, about 150 pro-Palestinian demonstrators waved signs with pictures of dead and wounded children and chanted, "No justice, no peace! Israel out of the Middle East."

As would have been evident to any journalist who witnessed the rally at Times Square, there were far more than 150 people--the crowd spanned several blocks from 39th street to 42nd, and when the protesters proceeded on a march up to CNN's headquarters to protest media coverage of the war, half of 8th Avenue was shut down for several blocks.

Yet AP's inaccurate figure has already been republished in the Washington Post.

Readers of the French wire agency Agence France Presse learned yesterday about a demonstration on Saturday in which "several thousand protesters descended on the White House Saturday in support of Palestinians in war-ravaged Gaza" before marching to "the headquarters of the Washington Post newspaper to protest" what one of the demonstration organizers identified as "its hard pro-Israeli line."

Strangely, readers of the Washington Post would have been hard-pressed to find anything about the demonstration targeting their newspaper. There was no mention of the rally and march in the paper's A section, and the event wasn't even mentioned in the metro section. Presumably, the paper felt it had news of far more pressing importance to Post readers--like, for instance, the Post's metro-section story yesterday, "Skunk Stuck in Slurpee Cup."

Inter Press Service reporters Jim Lobe and Ali Gharib point out (1/8/09) another Mideast timeline being mangled in favor of the Israeli version of events:

Consumed by coverage of the 4 November presidential election, U.S. mainstream media ignored a key Israeli military attack on a Hamas target that some Palestinians claim marked the effective end of the ceasefire between the two sides and set the stage for the current round of bloodletting.

While the major U.S. news wire Associated Press reported that the attack, in which six members of Hamas' military wing were killed by Israeli ground forces, threatened the ceasefire, its report was carried by only a handful of small newspapers around the country.

The 4 November raid--and the escalation that followed--also went unreported by the major U.S. network and cable television news programs, according to a search of the Nexis database for all English-language news coverage between 4 to 7 November.

In fact, Lobe and Gharib tell us, "the military action, which was followed up by an aerial attack that killed at least one other Palestinian, appears to have dealt a fatal blow to the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire that had taken effect." In a reversal of mandatory corporate media terminology, we even read that "in retaliation for the attack, Hamas launched some 35 Qassam rockets into Israeli territory 5 November which, in turn, provoked Israel."

The whole thing is in some ways strikingly similar to U.S. media mistreatment of the genesis of another recent major Israeli invasion, that of Lebanon; read the FAIR Media Advisory: "Down the Memory Hole: Israeli Contribution to Conflict Is Forgotten by Leading Papers" (7/28/06).

An L.A. Times brief proudly announces (1/8/09) that the paper's former managing editor, Douglas Frantz, "has been chosen to be chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as it reorganizes under its new chairman, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.)." Douglas Frantz.... Does that ring any bells? You won't find any hint of it in the Times, but Frantz also happened to be the managing editor who cited a seasoned reporter's "conflict of interest" when spiking his article on the Armenian genocide. The substance of that "conflict"? Co-signing a letter with other journalists who dared point out that the Times' own style guide says "the Armenian genocide is a historical fact and we should use the word 'genocide' without qualification in referring to it." The controversy this ignited was credited with ending Frantz's career at the Times, but the paper's staff found this of no relevance to Frantz' qualifications in the realm of foreign relations.

Listen to FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: "Harut Sassounian on LAT and Armenian Genocide" (5/4/07)

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel's assault on Gaza in today's paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale:

The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not stopped Hezbollah's massive rearmament, their very presence makes it impossible for Israel to take any preventive military action, lest it accidentally hit a blue-helmeted Belgian crossing guard.

In other words, the Lebanese cease-fire is problematic because it is currently preventing an outbreak of violence.