Jeff Cohen journalism student Christopher Lisee has a blog post (myxomatosis, 2/27/09) with video of an independent reporter's question to University of Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun. Asked to justify his being the "highest-paid state employee" during "a $2 billion budget deficit," the coach's belligerent response--"my best advice to you... shut up"--has the questioner responding that "if these [other journalists present] covered this stuff I wouldn't have to do it." Which in turn is met by audible jeers of "oh give us a break." But Lisee tells us questioner Ken Krayeske actually "prodded the mainstream media into action."

Lisee follows "the barrage of media coverage by the Hartford Courant" from "objective analysis" of Connecticut "Gov. M. Jodi Rell's request of a 5 percent across-the-board budget cut at state schools" and the fact that "no journalist... has asked Calhoun... about the merits of a pay cut" to reporting that "around the country, teachers, elected officials, casino employees, state employees, even newspaper reporters and a university president, are giving up some pay these days."

With Krayeske's bold question culminating in "calls for Calhoun to be disciplined in a letter from state legislators," Lisee says, "He's really started something":

Krayeske is the sort of go-get-'em guy so essential to independent media. He's not afraid to ask hard questions or get arrested for his views. He started a conversation that otherwise would not have begun....

It's funny, in a way, because what Krayeske has essentially done is opened the door for mainstream media to start covering an issue that before would have been much more difficult taking into account the nature of beat reporting and papers' bottom-line interests.

Calling a PBS NewsHour budget plan segment by Judy Woodruff "a primer on how to conduct an interview relying almost solely on Republican talking points," Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 2/27/09) says her "first question isn't necessarily a Republican talking point, but it might as well be": "$3.66 trillion, is that a number you can actually grasp?"

Seriously, members of the mainstream media need to stop acting like they suddenly have the vapors over big government spending. The Republicans weren't the only ones to preside over the most reckless spending in our government's history over the last eight years, on a war of choice and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in an environment of profligate deregulation and zero investment in infrastructure and our citizens' future. Mainstream news outlets and their anchors and talking heads watched it all unfold while expressing little or no concern at the time.

Woodruff's second question is like a GOP talking-point smorgasbord.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, just two of the terms I heard applied to it today were, No. 1, "radical," and the other one was "taking from the rich to give to the poor." Is this about redistributing wealth in this country?

I guess she couldn't fit "socialist" in there.

Relating how "Woodruff's line of questioning, one GOP economic meme after another, continues nearly unabated throughout the remainder of the interview," Jacobson thinks she's continuing the Jim Lehrer tradition of "giving the often false NewsHour impression that the quality of an interview is due to its length instead of its depth." Despite this unusual for big radio length, Jacobson dares you to "guess how many times she poses a question citing a criticism of an actual economist rather than a Republican?" His tally: "Zero."

No newcomer to the journalist-as-Republican-shill model, read of Woodruff's antics during the last presidential election cycle in this FAIR Press Release: "GOP Rhetoric on Kerry's Voting Record Goes Unchallenged" (3/8/04)

Immigrant rights advocate and independent journalist Roberto Lovato is worried (Huffington Post, 2/26/09) that Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Department Detective Aaron Douglas "deals with the world's media more than most" when flacking for Joe Arpaio--"America's Toughest Sheriff"--"Though he is a local official, his is often the first voice heard by many of the foreign correspondents covering immigration in the United States":

The proliferation of stories in international media and in global forums about the Guantánamo-like problems in the country's immigrant detention system--death, abuse and neglect at the hands of detention facility guards; prolonged and indefinite detention of immigrants (including children and families) denied habeas corpus and other fundamental rights; filthy, overcrowded and extremely unhealthy facilities; denial of basic health services--are again tarnishing the U.S. image abroad, according to several experts....

For her part, Alison Parker, deputy director of the U.S. program of Human Rights Watch, fears a global government "race to the bottom" around immigrant detention policies.

In Parker's view, Sheriff Arpaio's abuses "increase the risk that this will give the green light to other governments to be just as abusive or more abusive as the United States." But how do these fears translate in the United States' own media? Well, Fox for one appears unconcerned, or even thrilled, having made the racist sheriff a reality TV star with his own series: Smile ... You're Under Arrest!.

In his online column (2/26/09) for the Maynard Institute, Journal-isms, Richard Prince reports on those who see the New York Post's recent cartoon of a chimpanzee shot-dead--so that now "they'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill"--as "an opportunity to examine the factors that led to the cartoon's appearance in the paper." Specifically, "the NAACP plans to focus on diversity in newspaper newsrooms," calling the incident "a reminder that when we get through with Fox and the New York Post, we need to focus on the newsrooms in the country":

In December, an NAACP report pointed to "an ongoing trend where African-Americans and other minorities continue to be under-represented in nearly every aspect of television and film businesses, while largely being denied access to significant positions of power in Hollywood."

The NAACP has been issuing such reports at least since 1999.

Diversity efforts in newsrooms have stalled and many have given the issue lower priority as economic and survival issues consume the time of editors and publishers.

Citing a poll showing "a majority of voters... believed the Post's cartoon had racist undertones," "was directed toward Obama" and that the Post "should be responsible for dealing with the repercussions," Prince also notes that there has "not been an African-American editor on the local news desk since 2001, when the late Lisa G. Baird, who had cancer at the time, was fired."

Read about the Post's regrettably still relevant history of racism in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "New York Post: Militant White Daily" (1-2/93).

Ira Forman set off a furor in the blogosphere this week when he reported that CBS's pick for senior VP of communications, Jeff Ballabon, had once suggested "that Democrats are inherently bad people." (Forman--who is the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council--maintains that this is what Ballabon had stated during a debate between Republican and Democratic Jews in New York ten years ago, while Ballabon has denied the charge.)

Yet for the billionaire who owns the controlling shares of CBS, the question of whether or not the Democrats are "bad people" was ruled a moot point years ago. During the '04 election campaign, Sumner Redstone, who was at the time the CEO of CBS's then-parent company Viacom, expressly stated that while "the Democrats are not bad people," he backed the Republicans--simply because he perceived the G.O.P. to be good for business.

As FAIR has noted, Redstone stated at a gathering of corporate leaders in Hong Kong in 2004 (Asian Wall Street Journal, 9/24/04):

I don't want to denigrate Kerry... but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people.... But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company.

Redstone repeated these sentiments in an interview with Time (10/4/04):

There has been comment upon my contribution to Democrats like Senator Kerry. Senator Kerry is a good man. I've known him for many years. But it happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.

As it turned out, CBS's fortunes were not looking too hot by the end of eight years of G.O.P rule. Yet CBS's backing of Republicans carried on through the 2006 election, during which 57 percent of its political action committee financing went toward Republican federal candidates (43 percent went to Democrats), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In the last election, CBS appears to have anticipated the declining fortunes that Redstone's favorite party was to suffer at the polls; in a near reversal from the previous election, 58 percent of CBS's PAC funds went to Democratic federal candidates and 42 percent went to Republicans.

Sean Hannity is a great American. You can hear it every day on his national radio show, where the standard caller greeting to the host is, "Sean, you’re a great American!" The catchphrase is so well-known, it's been commercialized!

And who is more patriotic than Hannity, who uses his daily radio and Fox News Channel shows to maintain a vigilant watch over the slightest hint of anti-Americanism or subversion? Who warned you more often or at more earsplitting volume about how Barack Obama's life was littered with anti-American friends and associates advocating for the violent overthrow of the United States government? Who sounded the alarm (Hannity's America, 4/13/08) over Bill Ayers and his leadership role in the 1960s Weather Underground group, "whose mission was the overthrow of the United States government"? And who keeps you current on who’s who among the anti-Americans: the U.N. (Hannity & Colmes, 9/23/08), the Rev. Jeremiah (Hannity & Colmes, 8/5/08), the Air America radio network (Hannity & Colmes, 6/25/07), Michael Moore and his film Sicko (Hannity & Colmes, 6/17/07)?

That's why we were truly shocked to learn that Hannity's website is hosting a discussion where his fans can vote on the best way to violently overthrow the U.S. government:

"There's a lot of talk on this board about armed revolt," writes the Hannity.com regular centerscroll (who's posted more than 1,700 times on the site). So he started an online poll (2/23/09) to find out "what form of such a revolt the revolutionaries would prefer"--listing as choices a "military coup," in which "the military deposes the government and declares itself in charge"; an "armed rebellion," where "the fed-up civilian population attacks their enemies forcibly...to ultimately depose the government and install one that follows their own ideals"; or "war for secession," meaning "individual states try to secede and perhaps ultimately must arm to do it."

centerscroll did not provide any options for those who saw no need to overthrow the Obama administration, or who preferred to resist the government through nonviolent means.  As of 4 p.m. on February 27, 76 Hannity.com participants had voted, with 18 choosing the coup option, 31 picking armed rebellion and 27 opting for a war of secession.

Hannity better hope his Fox News colleague Bill O'Reilly doesn't see this poll. When some Huffington Post readers celebrated a report about Nancy Reagan having an injury--in an online thread that was deleted by the blog--O'Reilly likened the blog's founder Arianna Huffington to the Nazis and the KKK (Media Matters, 2/28/08):

Arianna Huffington is the editor of this. She knows it comes in, puts it up, along with a lot of other vile stuff. I mean, the whole thing is a sewer....  And don't you think Americans should start holding people like Arianna Huffington accountable for this?...  She's allowing that stuff to go on.

Do you suppose O'Reilly would hold his colleague Sean Hannity to the same standard?

Today's L.A. Times report (2/26/09) on the White House budget includes this curious warning:

The document--which included broad goals and few line items--laid down controversial markers on almost every major issue facing the country. Among the immediate budget winners are the middle class and the poor, whose taxes will be eased. Among the losers are the wealthy, whose taxes will increase, along with those of drug companies and oil and gas companies.

Lower taxes for everyone but the very wealthy, drug companies and the oil industry?! Why, the public outrage will be Santelliesque!

Lamenting the fact that "commercial radio stations everywhere have been swallowed up by a handful of giant corporations, playlists have shrunk and local and independent acts have been drowned out," Free Press activist Timothy Karr (MediaCitizen, 2/26/09) also lets us know that

the good news is that your rescue is at hand. On Tuesday, Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) introduced a bipartisan bill that would pry open our radio airwaves for thousands of new stations, bringing independent acts...to the audiences they deserve....

The Local Community Radio Act would unleash the potential of new music for millions of listeners across the country. The bill tasks Washington with licensing thousands of Low Power FM radio stations....

There are about 800 low-power stations already on the air. They're run out of college campuses, garages, backyard shacks and local churches, and aimed specifically at listeners in their surrounding neighborhood.

Beyond saving listeners from corporate stations' "mind-numbing concoction of saccharine and aspartame," some LPFM broadcasters "are providing local news and information that in more extreme cases has kept people alive." Use the Free Press action page to demand your congressmember "help restore much needed diversity to our airwaves, bringing forth new voices and viewpoints that are often overlooked by large commercial broadcasters."

Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for "standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is"--and then spreads some of the blame around:

Meanwhile, one of the Post's main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false-equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will's sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore's sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in the New York Times. Hm.

See Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff.

Media writer Nat Ives (AdvertisingAge.com, 2/23/09) throws some cold water on overheated reportage of "all the apocalyptic news about newspapers":

Even as they take blow after blow from recession and digital media, newspapers themselves still earn decent profits....

"Not a lot of papers are operating at a loss," said John Morton, the veteran industry analyst. "There are roughly 1,400 daily newspapers. We only hear about the top markets. That leaves at least 1,300 papers out there."

Publicly owned newspapers averaged an operating profit of 10.8 percent in the first three quarters of last year.

In fact, Ives tells us that, despite "rolling in layoffs," if you don't count "one-time charges such as severance and write-downs," the "country's biggest newspaper publisher, Gannett... produced an 18 percent operating profit margin last year"--proving that "there's no reason for newspapers themselves, whoever owns them, to stop the presses. Most operations are plenty profitable."

The problem with newspapers, as the late Molly Ivins noted, is not how much money they make--it's how much money Wall Street expects them to make.

You'd think that reporting on federal budget bills costing billions of dollars would be difficult.  But it's easy, really: All you have to do is remember that budget items involving animals or unusual foods are funny.

ABC's Jonathan Karl has mastered the genre.  Reporting on the ominous spending bill (World News, 2/24/09), he declared: "The bill is supposed to fund government operations, but it includes things like more than $1 million for so-called 'Mormon crickets' in Utah, $200,000 for tattoo removal in Los Angeles and $443,000 to control beavers in Mississippi." Hee hee! Bugs are funny, as are government efforts to control agricultural pests! And the bill also mentions "beavers"--if you're in junior high, you'll probably find that particularly amusing.

You know what else is funny? Pig poop! Karl transforms it into comedy gold:

Democrat Tom Harkin put in $1.8 million for "swine odor and manure management" in Ames, Iowa. "20 million pigs in Iowa," he explained in a statement, "make odor problems a very real issue." Chuck Schumer secured $2.2 million for the Grape Genetics Center in Geneva, New York. He told us the program helps farmers produce "better hybrid grapes."

Any more comical animals or agricultural products mentioned in the bill, Karl? "Nearly $3 million for poultry and blueberry research in Georgia, courtesy of Republican Saxby Chambliss and Jack Kingston. $127,000 for 'blackbird management' in Kansas. Senator Pat Roberts says the birds cost farmers millions."

In summary: "With the exception of the period right after September 11, this bill includes the biggest increase in federal spending since 1978.* Thanks in part to the millions earmarked for blueberries, blackbirds and crickets. And it's your money."

Thanks for the informative report, Karl.

* This does not seem to be true. The bill increases the funding for a group of agencies by $31 billion.  Military spending alone increased by $44 billion in 2002, $56 billion in 2003, $51 billion in 2004, $40 billion in 2005 and $55 billion in 2008.

Barack Obama unveiled plans to extend one lower- to middle-class tax credit, allow the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy to expire as scheduled, and raise revenue from a cap-and-trade emissions plan. Today's New York Times (2/26/09) described the proposals this way:

The combined effect of the two revenue-raising proposals, on top of Mr. Obama’s existing plan to roll back the Bush-era income tax reductions on households with income exceeding $250,000 a year, would be a pronounced move to redistribute wealth by reimposing a larger share of the tax burden on corporations and the most affluent taxpayers.

Huh. Were Bush's tax cuts, which were overwhelmingly tilted towards the wealthy, described as "a pronounced move to redistribute wealth" by the Times? My Nexis searches don't turn up anything like it.

I did, however, find a February 9, 2001 piece that began:

President Bush formally sent Congress his proposal today for the broadest and deepest tax cuts in two decades, touching off a debate that seemed sure to produce a major cut in personal income taxes this year.

But no sooner had Mr. Bush described his plan in the Rose Garden, declaring it a boon for the working poor, than Democrats began jockeying to limit its size while conservatives and business groups sought to expand it. The White House said it would try to head off corporate lobbyists--many representing major contributors to the Bush campaign--who seek to garnish it with huge cuts for their wealthy clients.

The Bush White House, according to the Times, was fighting to make sure his corporate backers didn't benefit from the cut. How did that work out?

The Times also mentioned that Obama's tax plan "introduces a politically volatile edge to the congressional debate over Mr. Obama’s domestic priorities." The L.A. Times (2/26/09) was sounding a similar alarm about Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to fund healthcare:

By relying heavily on new taxes, the president is also sending a potentially controversial signal that he is willing to ask wealthier Americans to help foot the bill for his healthcare agenda.

I suspect that if you asked the public if they supported raising taxes on the wealthy in order expand healthcare for those who need it, you'd find that it's not controversial at all.

While "TV news executives would like us to forget this whole bizarre episode," FAIR founder and former Fox News talking head Jeff Cohen looks back (Huffington Post, 2/22/09) at the shameful media circus that was Chandra Levy's disappearance. "As I witnessed the farce from inside cable news," Cohen writes, "I could see it was all about ratings and had nothing to do with journalism":

From May to September 11, cable news channels covered no story more than Condit/Levy. Not the economic slowdown, not California's energy crisis, not Ashcroft's or Rumsfeld's misguided priorities, and certainly not something or someone named Al-Qaeda. Al who?

For months until the morning the Twin Towers were hit, it was Condit--not bin Laden--who was the most despised man in America. Especially on cable news, where Condit was linked week after week to murder, with no end to speculation about how he'd caused the tragedy. Perhaps Levy died during rough sex with the congressman. Or her death was connected to Condit's ex-con brother. Or Condit's buddies in a motorcycle gang. Or because Levy was pregnant with Condit's baby. "TV's barking heads are drooling," wrote media critic Todd Gitlin.

Cohen sees "this week--with these same outlets reporting a 'break' in the 8-year-old murder case"--as "a good time for TV news executives to look back and give the public a big, fat apology," for "the story seemed propelled far more by salacious interest in Condit's sex life than concern for a missing woman."

See this column from another longtime FAIR associate Media Beat: "Media Mania: The Condit Scandal Goes Over the Top" (7/12/01) by Norman Solomon

After eight years of George W. Bush's rule, popular disapproval of policies that had come to be regarded as grave mistakes--from the invasion of Iraq to the response to the economic crisis--drove the Republicans from power.

Unfortunately, the media system has no such built-in check on powerful pundits, as the unchallenged reign of another George W. with a long record of mistakes can attest.

The ongoing controversy over a recent error-plagued climate change column penned by George Will--a Washington Post syndicated columnist whose record of error spans decades--offers a good case study in the impunity of the punditocracy.

As bloggers, media activists and environmentalists were quick to point out, Will made three significant errors in his climate change column, which was published in the Post (2/15/09) and scores of daily newspapers nationwide last week. First, he misrepresented scientific research from the 1970s, claiming that global cooling was then the prevailing concern. Second, he claimed the University of Illinois had found global sea ice was increasing, when in fact the school's researchers found the opposite. Finally, he claimed that U.N. climate researchers have found "no recorded global warming for more than a decade."

In the wake of widespread refutations on blogs, and action alerts by FAIR and Media Matters, the Washington Post received floods of emails complaining about the inaccuracies in Will's column, and the Post's ombud Andy Alexander soon issued a response to a blogger at Think Progress.

Claiming that Will's column had been subject to multiple fact-checks, Alexander addressed only critics' concern about Will's misrepresentation of the University of Illinois's sea ice research, defending Will by citing a University of Illinois statement that, in fact, actually refuted Will's claim.

Given that the position of ombud (a person responsible for responding to reader complaints and upholding accuracy at a media outlet) is the closest thing to a system of accountability that exists at newspapers, the Post ombud's response aptly illustrated the bankruptcy of what passes for accountability at a leading newspaper.

Unfortunately, the erroneous climate change column is not a blip on Will's record. On the issue of climate change alone, FAIR's magazine Extra! documents that Will's history of misquoting data to distort the debate goes back nearly two decades. As FAIR's senior analyst Steve Rendall recently noted on the FAIR Blog, in 1992, Will so grossly misrepresented a Gallup poll on scientists' views on climate change that Gallup took the rare step of issuing a written correction to Will's column.  A decade before that, Will made such a glaring factual error in a column published in Newsweek that the magazine took the unusual step of agreeing to publish a letter by Noam Chomsky (Will managed to block the letter's publication by throwing a temper tantrum.)

And yet this serial distorter of the facts continues to published by more newspapers than any other columnist. In addition to the Post, 367 newspapers publish his column. Why? This is a question newspaper editors should have to answer.

As blogger Jonathan Schwarz recently pointed out, the internet has profoundly changed the landscape of pundit impunity since Will's 1982 temper tantrum. The Washington Post ombud's role in protecting Will's work from the facts may be highly reminiscent of Newsweek's decision to spike Chomsky's letter. However, with the proliferation of blogs devoted to correcting the media record, and the advent of online media activism campaigns that can in a matter of hours generate thousands of reader complaints to editors, concerned members of the public have more tools than ever before to publicly debunk media errors and to push for greater accountability.

In this context, the Post ombud's inadequate response simply added fuel to the campaigns challenging the Post on Will's climate distortions. Yesterday, the presidents of leading environmental groups joined Media Matters in issuing a letter to the newspaper, and FAIR issued a new call for its supporters to contact the Post's ombud (ombudsman@washpost.com)

And given that it is not just the Post but some 368 newspapers nationwide that carry Will's column, the challenge of holding Will accountable is one in which people across the nation have to play a vital role in writing to any newspapers in their own local communities that published Will's error-plagued climate change column.

Given the abundance of online media activism resources, it is not hard to take action to push for greater accountability in one's local newspaper. (Media Matters has a useful application on its website that allows users to easily find out if George Will's column is carried in their local newspaper, and tips on writing letters to the editor can be found in FAIR's media activism kit.)

Given that the corporate media have granted Will impunity for decades now, this accountability is long overdue.

This AP "fact check" (2/24/09) of President Barack Obama's speech is, as usual, a sad effort. You really need to have some threshold for calling "gotcha," and some of these--maybe all of these--really don't measure up.

Obama says, "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market," and AP's Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn retort, "This may be so, but it isn't only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries."

But Obama didn't say--or suggest--that they were. Nor is he the sort of politician who routinely pretends that his party can do no wrong, and all problems are the other guys' fault. To falsely attribute a sentiment to someone so you can "debunk" is simply unethical journalism; it's much more misleading than anything AP found in Obama's speech.

Obama says, "It's a plan that won't help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values." And AP says: "If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money does not go to home buyers who used bad judgment, it hasn't announced it."

Well, actually, there will be requirements in the mortgage bailout plan that attempt to target it at more diligent borrowers. AP could have described how this would work, and people could have decided for themselves how effective those tests would be at screening out irresponsible borrowers. Or AP could have made an argument that the rules would be inadequate to achieve Obama's stated goals. Either of those would have been informative.

But instead the wire service rejects Obama's statement on almost philosophical grounds, since no public policy is ever going to make fine moral distinctions perfectly. That's not really a very helpful observation to make about a policy.

Obama says, "We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade." AP comes back with, "Obama only has a real say on spending during the four years of his term." Really? So the decisions made by George W. Bush in 2001 have no impact on the choices Obama will have in his first two years? And Clinton's 1993 actions didn't affect what Bush could do? That's not how the federal government works--in reality, budget and revenue choices have consequences for years to come.

Sometimes Woodward and Kuhnhenn seem to be calling for qualifications that would appear absurd in any politician's speech. For example, after Obama lists the goals he says his budget will achieve, AP all but snorts: "First, his budget does not accomplish any of that. It only proposes those steps." As if Obama should have followed with: "Of course, that may not happen. Congress may vote down my budget and reject my programs, and we may accomplish nothing." Does AP seriously expect any politician to talk like that?

I edit a magazine of media criticism for a living; it's pretty common for our articles to include examples of media figures saying something that we say isn't true. None of the examples from Obama's speech that AP cites would be strong enough to make it into Extra!--except maybe the catch about where the automobile was invented.