In today's Times (1/9/09), reporter Steven Greenhouse has a piece headlined "Bill Easing Unionizing Is Under Heavy Attack" about the array of corporate opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (a bill that would expand unions' power to conduct "card check" organizing drives).

But the piece seems to be more of an illustration of the lopsided media debate over the issue. Here's who Greenhouse quoted from the "anti" side:

-Sen. John Ensign, Republican of Nevada
-Mark McKinnon, a media adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and George W. Bush, is a spokesman for the Workforce Fairness Institute
-John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers
-Wal-Mart spokesman David Tovar

Those four are balanced by:

-Tom Woodruff, director of strategic organizing for Change to Win

This is similar to the way the Washington Post covered the issue a month ago. The premise of Greenhouse's piece is that anti-card check forces are gearing up to spend millions of dollars to defeat the bill. They probably don't need to spend much of that money on media outreach, though.

Editor & Publisher reports that the musings of Bono will begin appearing on the New York Times opinion pages this Sunday--the latest episode in a long media tradition of choosing Western celebrities to address issues concerning Africa, one of Bono's pet projects. Given Bono's record of cozying up to Western leaders on issues like debt relief and trade rather than confronting and challenging them, the Times will not just get Bono's star power, it'll also get to increased the real estate given to highlighting the downtrodden of the world without actually rocking the boat too much.

Another problem with getting your surgeon general pick from corporate media is that they're likely to have corporate media's typical biases against marijuana.

Peter Hart asked the New York Times:

What should TV reporting of a civilian massacre look like, exactly?

Well, I guess the Times thinks they should be covered this way:

Extra!: How America's Leading Paper Covered a Massacre

...which is to say, they should be covered almost exclusively from the point of view of the community that the perpetrators of the massacres come from, with virtually no perspective from the people who are being massacred. Of course, this may depend upon the identity of the massacre victims.

When you routinely report about Israel and Gaza through the eyes of Israelis, the results can be awkward, like today's New York Times front-pager that frames what was a human catastrophe for many Palestinians--the killing by Israel of some 40 Gazans at a U.N. school--into a mere military and PR "pitfall" for Israelis. As the headline read, "For Israel, Lessons from 2006, but Old Pitfalls."

In the third paragraph of the story, reporter Steven Erlanger mentions the killings along with other earlier "pitfalls":

And then there are the sudden events that can throw off so many careful calculations and come to symbolize the horrors of war--like the deaths of civilians from Israeli munitions in Qana, Lebanon, both in 1996 and 2006, and the reports on Tuesday evening of as many as 40 people, including children, killed as they sought shelter in a United Nations school in northern Gaza.

In fact, neither of Israel's Qana attacks--the attack on a building near Qana in 2006 that killed 28 civilians, nor the 1996 attacks on the Qana U.N. refugee camp that took 106 lives--resulted from from "careful calculations" being "thrown off." As the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported (8/1/06), the 2006 attack purposely targeted a three-story building near Qana because it was near the site of a previous Hezbollah rocket launch, even though the IDF, in Ha'aretz's words, "had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time."

In the case of the 1996 massacre, a U.N. investigation found that Israel Defense Forces had misrepresented key facts of the assault and had likely intentionally targeted the Qana refugee camp: "While the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors."

The Associated Press reported on December 27 that "thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons."

In his latest column (1/2/09), Charles Krauthammer pointed to that report to prove just how obvious it is that Israel is the moral actor in this battle of good and evil:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel/Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger.

Here's what Amnesty International (12/29/08) has to say about it:

Compounding the atmosphere of fear resulting from the Israeli bombardments, Israeli forces have been sending seemingly random telephone messages to many inhabitants of Gaza telling them to leave their homes because of imminent air strikes against their houses. Such messages have been received by residents of multi-storey apartment building, causing panic not only for those who received the calls but for all their neighbours. Such practice was widely used by Israeli forces both in Gaza and in Lebanon in 2006, but has not been reported since. The threatening calls seem to aim to spread fear among the civilian population, as in most cases no air strikes were carried out against the buildings. If this is the purpose, rather than to give effective warning, this practice violates international law and must end immediately.

Writing today on the choice of CNN health correspondent Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general for the Obama administration, the Washington Post reported that

if he is confirmed by the Senate, Gupta would provide the administration with a skilled television personality to help market what is planned to be a massive reorganization of the U.S. health system.

Yet judging from Gupta's evidence-free attack on Michael Moore's documentary Sicko last year (see FAIR's Action Alert, 7/11/07), it would seem that surgeon general nominee's most relevant experience in communicating about healthcare reform is arguing dishonestly against proposals for a single-payer healthcare system.

For more on Gupta's TV personality skills, see CJR: "Paging Dr. Gupta" (10/27/08) by Trudy Lieberman, and Schwitzer Health News Blog: "CNN's House Call Makes Some Bad Calls" (2/4/07) by Gary Schwitzer.

The New York Times today, reporting the shelling of a U.N. school that killed dozens of civilians, offered a typical formulation:

With another day of gory news reports inflaming the Arab world....

What should TV reporting of a civlian massacre look like, exactly? And are other news reports ever held to this standard? Was U.S. media reporting on the aftermath of the September 11 attacks ever referred to as an attempt to "inflame" the U.S. public?

Read today's Gaza stories in the New York Times carefully, and you might actually learn something about the propaganda tactics Israel is using. In one piece about the lessons learned from the 2006 Lebanon war, we learn that the aim is to fool Hamas, according to an Israeli military official who cites as a key strategic change Israel's "methods to keep Hamas in the fog of war, which includes disinformation and impediments to real-time press coverage on the ground." "The less Hamas understands, the better," he is quoted by the Times.

Of course, disinformation doesn't just keep Hamas in a "fog"-- it prevents everyone from understanding what's happening. Another Times article sheds more light:

And so for an 11th day of Israel's war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

That doesn't sound like fooling Hamas is the point, does it?

The author of that piece--Ethan Bronner--nonetheless seems to rationalize Israeli censorship:

Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world to a simplistic story: an American-backed country with awesome military machine fighting a third-world guerrilla force leading to a handful of Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.

Israelis and their supporters think that such quick descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening--years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered, and a message had to be sent to Israel’s enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.

There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict, of course. But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the news media far away from the death.

So there are "other ways to construe the context"--but Bronner doesn't bother telling readers what they are. Maybe he thinks we're better off in the "fog"?

There was a whole lot of chatter a couple of days ago (thanks to the Drudge Report) about NBC's Today show canceling an appearance by far-right bomb thrower Ann Coulter. Should the network be applauded for deciding that they had better things to do than grant Coulter's falsehoods and hate-mongering network airtime? Turns out not:

Coulter's segment was dropped from the schedule because of news that the show was expecting to cover in the Gaza Strip with the Israeli military action there and in Washington with the Obama transition. Today had booked former British prime minister Tony Blair. Coulter was to promote her new book, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America.

"We've had Ann Coulter on Today many times, but because of the news in Washington and the Middle East, we decided to cancel her appearance tomorrow," NBC News said in a statement Monday. "Understanding the media as well as she does, we are sure she knows this happens from time to time. We look forward to welcoming her back in the future."

Coulter, for the record, appeared on the CBS morning show instead. For someone who crusades against the liberal media, she sure spends a lot of time in network TV studios.

William Hartung writes:

By and large, it is a good thing that John Bolton is no longer in government, where he worked overtime to undermine any number of worthwhile agreements, such as the effort to cap and roll back North Korea's nuclear program. But his fall from power has come at a price. He is now the mainstream media's neocon of choice, widely quoted in news articles and placed prominently on op-ed pages as if he were just another pundit, not the co-author of some of the most disastrous policies in our nation's history. The last straw may have come today, when Bolton simultaneously had articles on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times (an impressive "daily double").

See also Think Progress: "Bolton in Fantasyland" (6/5/09) by Matthew Yglesias

One might not expect much from a USA Today editorial headlined "How to Turn Obama's Success Into Gains for Black Boys," but it's hard to get past the first two graphs without feeling ill:

You can see the message on brick wall murals in inner cities: Yes we can. You can hear it in the music of Black Eyed Peas' frontman will.i.am: Yes we can.

You can imagine hearing it pass the lips of thousands of black mothers, perhaps after awakening their sons early to complete homework before they head off to school, just as President-elect Barack Obama's mother did: Yes you can.

Huh.  I guess if one tries REALLY, REALLY hard, you can almost imagine a black mother encouraging her son, just like Obama's white mother did. Unsurprisingly, the paper manages to turn the piece into an endorsement of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law:

Most important, Obama has resisted calls from the teachers' unions to dismantle President Bush's No Child Left Behind school-reform law. Whatever the law's shortcomings, No Child's relentless emphasis on data forces school districts to come clean about the poor job they have done with black boys.

Two things strike me about this appearance by Alan Colmes on the Colbert Report: One, the fact that he would take part with good humor in a humiliating joke that's on him illustrates why he was the perfect person to play the role of the Liberal To Be Named Later. Second, it's remarkable that even in the parts where he's presumably expressing his own opinions--rather than the pre-scripted expressions of adulation handed to him by Colbert--he's still manages, reflexively, to come up with the perfect Fox News Democrat position: He agrees with Colbert on the issue at hand, but produces a different, more innocuous reason for his stance.

Watch the whole thing--but the best part is the opening credits.

One of the facets of the Gaza crisis not getting enough media attention is the fact that Israel has barred reporters from entering the Gaza Strip to report on the war--despite an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that stated that foreign journalists should be allowed into the territory.

It was good, then, to see the issue raised on CNN's media program Reliable Sources on January 5. Not so good, though, were host Howard Kurtz's comments:

And when we do see video of the attacks in Gaza or the aftereffects, much of that video, as my understanding, is supplied by Arab media outlets, so it may be very selective.

Yes, the Arab channels tend to not show the buildings that haven't been destroyed in airstrikes--a clever propaganda trick indeed. Kurtz followed up on that by saying to his guest:

Your point about civilian casualties, Paula Hancocks--I heard interviews yesterday with Palestinian officials on CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere; they were using words like "massacre" and "bloodbath." Obviously, it's in their interest to portray the Israeli incursion in the harshest light. And as you just noted, you have no independent way to check that, or do you have at least limited ways to try to check that?

It's hard to miss the point that Kurtz is trying to make about how media should cover the Gaza conflict: Journalists should be allowed into Gaza to show that Palestinians (and Arab TV stations) are exaggerating the level of suffering.