More bad news for right-wingers longing to peddle the myth of liberal bias in the corporate media. Indiana University released a comprehensive study of the visuals used in presidential campaign coverage from 1992-2004, finding that the three major broadcast networks--NBC, CBS and ABC--all favored Republicans in each election. 

The study focused on the visual production of news: where each story was placed in the newscast, editing techniques and manipulations related to camera angles, shot lengths, eyewitness perspectives and zoom movement.  Among the most negative visual representations or "image bytes" is the "lip-flap shot," where a reporter's narration is placed over a candidate talking, which the report calls a "violation of professional television news production standards."

"Not only is lip-flap unflattering for the candidate who appears," the report notes, "but it also distracts from the reporter's narration because viewers focus attention on making sense of what the lip flapper appears to be saying." The technique was found to be used more often with Democratic candidates than with Republicans. A similar partisan bias was found in which candidates were given the last word, which were videotaped in flattering low-angle shots and which were given unflattering extreme close-ups and high angles.

In attempting to account for the pattern of favoring Republicans in four consecutive election cycles (during both Democratic and Republican administrations), Maria Elizabeth Gabe, one of the study's authors explained, "We don't think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they're just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage."  In other words, "working the refs" works.

News that an arrest may be in the offing in the Chandra Levy murder case--no, it’s not Gary Condit, but a man currently incarcerated for a similar crime--inspires many unpleasant strolls down media's memory lane. But the most unpleasant might be Jonah Goldberg's ode to pack journalism and rushing to judgment (Jewish World Review, 7/11/01; Townhall, 7/16/01 ), where the conservative columnist all but declared Democratic Congressman Gary Condit guilty of murder. Wrote Goldberg:

Technically, it's bad form for journalists to "rush to judgment." We're supposed to carefully weigh and measure every confirmed fact as it comes in. Speculation, gossip and prurient chatter shouldn't play a role in our thoughtful deliberations on the important topics of the day.... Let's give all that rest for a minute.

Having dispatched with concerns over professional ethics, Goldberg graduated to several paragraphs of wild speculation, among them:

I think California Representative Gary Condit had something to do with the disappearance and therefore possibly even the murder of 24-year-old intern Chandra Levy. (Corpses from suicides tend to turn up.) I don't know if Condit said to a shady friend, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome intern?" Or if he forcefully declared, "Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia, er, I mean Chandra Levy" to his Hell's Angels buddies. But one thing is clear: Condit has not behaved like an innocent man.

Then, after stating that the story would "probably turn out to be a murder investigation--with Condit as a prime suspect," Goldberg reached his crescendo, endorsing pack journalism’s righteous supposition that Condit was the killer:

Normally, I am loath to endorse pack journalism and feeding frenzies, but this time the media is 100 percent right. First of all, this is news. The only reason Condit isn't a suspect in a murder investigation is that this isn't an official murder investigation yet. If or when it does become one, Condit will undoubtedly be a--if not the--suspect. But more importantly, if it weren't for the media pressure, it's unlikely that Condit would have cooperated as much as he has.

Besides, there's foul play afoot, and methinks Condit is wearing some dirty shoes.

As it turned out, of course, there's no reason to think Condit had any involvement in Levy's murder. Meanwhile, Goldberg's sullied journalistic principles (here are some more recent examples) did not hinder the Los Angeles Times columnist and TV pundit from steadily rising in the corporate media. Indeed, they may even have helped.

Industry news outlet TV Predictions has a commentary from Phillip Swann (2/22/09) telling us that when "roughly 36 percent" of local television stations recently stopped broadcasting ahead of the digital conversion deadline ("stations save money by switching early because they would no longer have to transmit both analog and digital signals"), "the FCC received more than 70,000 complaints in the first two days." "Based on these developments," Swann writes, "you would think that the early DTV switch was a major disaster":

But good luck in finding that story in many of your nation's top trade and consumer publications, particularly if they are owned by companies that also own local TV stations which desperately want the switch to occur now.

For instance, the Los Angeles Times, which is owned by the Tribune Company, which also owns roughly 20 local TV stations, ran a headline last week that said: "Digital TV Switch Goes Smoothly in San Diego."...

The Columbus Dispatch, whose ownership also owns a local TV station in Columbus, ran a headline that said: "Switch to Digital TV Met With Little Fanfare." The Tampa Tribune, owned by Media General, which owns TV stations in 18 markets, published a headline stating, "Digital TV Switch Doesn't Faze Viewers."

Citing media news publications' "historic closeness to the National Association of Broadcasters and other industry heavyweights," Swann tells why "so many publications seemingly so eager to portray the early Digital TV switch as a huge success": "In the case of newspapers with ownership connections to local TV stations....their corporate parents have a vested interest in creating the perception that the switch is a success, so by God, their newspapers will toe the line or else." In other words, "Don't kid yourselves, folks. Newsrooms do not make decisions based solely on journalistic reasons."

Listen to the current FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Brandon Lacy Campos on Digital TV Conversion" (2/20/09)

Ryan Chittum of CJR.org holds up (2/19/09) Rick Santelli's recent CNBC tantrum as "an example of what's wrong with a certain kind of financial journalism, the kind where people of like backgrounds spend all day staring at tickers and interviewing each other. As such, Chittum says, "the segment couldn't more clearly illustrate the disconnect between the financial-services sector, certain financial journalists and, you know, 'reality'":

What sent Santelli, CNBC's hot-air, oops, "On-Air Editor," over the edge? The homeowner bailout. Of course, he didn't get himself into nearly this much of a lather over the trillions of dollars we’ve given to Wall Street welfare cases and the busted banks. Oh no. He's mad that non-financial-service-professionals, otherwise known as homeowners, or, according to Santelli "losers," are up now for help--to the tune of $275 billion, much of which would go to the banks anyway....

But then, this may be a symptom of a wider disease. We at [CJR's] the Audit have written repeatedly about the blame-the-homeowners meme that's been so popular in misdirecting people away from the real culprits in the crisis: the financial-services boiler rooms that created all those junk mortgages and bundled them into crap securities for sale to all-too-trusting rubes (aka "clients") around the world.

Looking at the "powerful undercurrent of outrage from some people who are paying their mortgages (or renting) who disdain those who aren't or can't," Chittum is compelled to explain exactly "what's going on here": "This homeowner bailout isn't really even aimed at easing people's suffering. It's aimed at the banks, whose downward spiral will not stop until the housing market stabilizes."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Scapegoating Minorities for Failures of Banking: Blaming CRA Makes Little Sense, but Gets Finance Industry Off the Hook" (1/09) by Mary Kane

Media Matters (2/24/09) catches AP reporter Liz Sidoti garbling Barack Obama's position on entitlements:

He called the long-term solvency of Social Security "the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far" and said reforming healthcare, including burgeoning entitlement programs, was a huge priority.

What Obama actually said was:

In the coming years, we'll be forced to make more tough choices and do much more to address our long-term challenges, from the rising cost of healthcare that Peter [Orszag, Office of Management and Budget director] described, which is the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far, to the long-term solvency of Social Security.

In other words, healthcare is by far the single most pressing fiscal challenge--not Social Security.

What's surprising is not that a reporter would misunderstand a speech--Obama's phrasing could be a little bit confusing, I guess--but that anyone who follows politics for a living wouldn't know that healthcare is a bigger problem than Social Security. Maybe they should pay less attention to corporate media.

Apparently the New York Times has moved Elisabeth Bumiller over to the Pentagon beat. Her record as Bush White House correspondent produced some memorable missteps ("You can’t just say the president is lying," for example), so it wasn't a surprise to see her byline under the story, "From a Carrier, Another View of America's Air War in Afghanistan" (2/24/09). The piece was little more than pro-military propaganda (is that "another" view?) with lines like "pilots circle Taliban strongholds like an airborne 911 service and zoom in," and:

From 15,000 feet up, the pilots protect supply lines under increasing attack, fly reconnaissance missions to find what they call "bad guys" over the next hill, and go "kinetic" with bombs that kill three, four or five Taliban fighters at a time.

Of course, a piece about airstrikes in Afghanistan can't completely avoid mentioning civilian casualties; but the point of Bumiller's piece is that these things aren't supposed to happen. Just ask the U.S. military: "As Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, the commander of United States naval forces in the region, put it: 'We don’t drop when we’re unsure.'"

Is there any reason to put any stock in such reassurances? Not if you think way back to, say, Saturday's New York Times:

KABUL, Afghanistan — An airstrike by the United States-led military coalition killed 13 civilians and 3 militants last Tuesday in western Afghanistan, not “up to 15 militants” as was initially claimed by American forces, military officials here said Saturday.

Bumiller's piece would seem to be an attempt to make up for that bit of bad press.

Howard Kurtz had Bernard Goldberg on his Reliable Sources show (CNN, 2/22/09), weeks after the erratic right-wing media critic blew off his show.  You could have had a better conversation about pro-Obama media bias with the drunk on the next barstool.

For example, when Kurtz says:

I think sometimes you're selective in your evidence. For example, you write about Deborah Howell; she's the former ombudsman at my newspaper, the Washington Post. You say, "She waited until after the election to write about the tilt on the Post op-ed page toward Barack Obama." But--and she did, but on August 3, Deborah Howell wrote about the huge imbalance in photos favoring Obama at the Washington Post. On August 17, she wrote that Obama had a 3-1 advantage over McCain in front page stories. So she didn't entirely wait until after the election.

...it's really not much of a response for Goldberg to say:

No. But this was the--this was the information that would have done us a --it didn't do us any good after the election, Howie. I mean, it was nice that she wrote it. It was nice that she acknowledged what just about everybody out in America already understood, that the media did side with one candidate over another.

And when Kurtz tells Goldberg:

You say that the media during the campaign didn't show enough interest in Obama's longtime relationship with the "unhinged," as you put it, Jeremiah Wright, but as you acknowledge in the book, the tapes of those "God damn America" sermons were first aired by ABC's Brian Ross, who is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media establishment. And that that story, it seemed to me, kind of dominated the campaign news for several weeks.

...Goldberg's response is: "It only dominated the campaign after the tapes came out. And the tapes came out way, way late in the campaign."  The story of Wright's sermons should have dominated the campaign before the tapes of the sermons came out?  Not to mention that nine months before the election is not exactly "way, way late in the campaign."

Jackie Calmes reports in the New York Times (2/23/09):

The president signaled in his campaign that he would support addressing the retirement system’s looming financing shortfall, in part by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000. But that would ignite intense opposition from Republicans, especially with the economy deep in recession.

Liberal Democrats are already serving notice that they will be equally vehement in opposing any reductions in scheduled benefits for future retirees. But any solution, budget analysts said, must include a mix of both approaches, though current beneficiaries would see no change.

Really?  Budget analysts said it was impossible to balance Social Security's books without tax increases and benefit cuts?  That's odd, considering that Social Security's 75-year shortfall amounts to about 1/300th of projected GDP.  Were these the same budget analysts who described a system that is projected to need help paying its obligations starting in 2041 as having a "looming financing shortfall"?

David Gregory sticking up for bank stockholders on Meet the Press (2/22/09):

There's a larger point here, which is, first of all, the more...the shares of...these banks gets talked down...the closer you get to wiping out the shareholder completely. And it's, it's not clear to me that everybody understands that the investor in this country, who is not just a fat cat, the investor is us.... It is the taxpayer, it's the teacher, it's someone who's invested in a 401(k). The investors on the sidelines, scared to death about taking any risk. And unless that changes, this economy really can't turn around.

Matthew Yglesias writes today (2/23/09) on the oddity of Gregory making a distinction between fat cats and people like himself. I can't find a published estimate of Gregory's salary, but his NBC colleague Chris Matthews reportedly makes $5 million a year (Washington Post, 1/8/09), as did his Meet the Press predecessor Tim Russert (Washington Post, 5/23/04), so Gregory's salary is probably in that neighborhood, give or take a few million. This is a hundred times the median family income in the U.S.--not counting Gregory's spouse's income; she used to be a vice president at Fannie Mae, making an estimated $3 million a year.

On Gregory's actual point: Only about a third of stocks are owned in the U.S. by the wealthiest 1 percent, so it's true that not all stockholders are actually "fat cats."  But almost 90 percent of stocks are owned by the top 20 percent of households, so when you're talking about policies that benefit stockholders, you're talking about benefiting a distinct minority.

Raw Story (2/22/09) has a report that illustrates, in passing, the ridiculousness of how copyright law is applied on the Internet.

The story concerns a McDonald's employee in Arkansas who threw an abusive customer out of the restaurant and got shot, and the hamburger company's refusal to pay the injured employer workers compensation because the worker's "injuries did not arise out of or within the course and scope of his employment."

Surely there's a legitimate public interest in the question of whether corporations pay compensation in such cases.  And if you want to have an informed opinion on this particular case, it would help to be able to see what actually happened.  The good news is that there is a videotape of the incident.  The bad news, as Raw Story reported:

A surveillance video of the incident, which had been posted to YouTube, was taken down after McDonald's charged copyright infringement.

It's unfortunately common for media companies to squelch criticism of themselves by claiming that their critics are violating their copyright.  But here you have a corporation that is not in the media business using copyright law to try to prevent people from seeing a video that they have no discernible commercial interest in, simply because people seeing the video might think less of the company. This is a perversion of copyright law, which is supposed to "promote the progress of science and useful arts," not assist in damage control operations for big businesses with PR problems.

Raw Story updated their story by noting that the video is once again available on YouTube, via a local news report from station KARK. Whether McDonald's will try to get that taken down as well, or whether the company has decided that such censorship efforts are actually counterproductive, remains to be seen.  But the public's access to information about public questions should not be held hostage to corporate PR strategies.

Economics blogger Dean Baker asserts that "about the only thing that readers can learn from an article on Japan in the business section today" is that "The New York Times Doesn't Like Japan" (Beat the Press, 2/22/09). Among the piece's "variety of complaints about Japan's economy, many of which are contradictory," is "the standard line about people not spending because deflation means that goods will be cheaper in the future if they wait"--which Baker debunks by noting that, with "deflation...generally less than 1.0 percent," a Japanese shopper "considering buying a $600 television would save approximately 50 cents by delaying the purchase a month." Finding this motivation "unlikely" to make many "delay purchases of big-ticket items," Baker also examines a "chart accompanying the article [that] complains that consumers are 'neither spending nor saving'":

This is bizarre, because saving simply means not spending, so, if consumers are not spending, then by definition they are saving. In fact, this chart shows a big increase in consumption over the last 20 years, with the saving rate having fallen from more than 15 percent in 1985 to about 4 percent in 2005. The article later complains that consumers are not spending because they don't have confidence in the country's pension system (which it tells us is a warning to the United States), but it is not clear how much lower they would want the saving rate to go.

That "the chart shows that nominal consumption has fallen by more than household income" has Baker explaining that this "implies that either taxes have increased or the data in the chart is inaccurate."

Huffington Post journalist Sam Stein thinks (2/19/09) that "coming off of a tone-deaf cartoon that compared the author of the stimulus bill with a crazed, shot-dead chimpanzee, it seemed likely that, for the time being, provocative political metaphors would be put on hold"--but that would be discounting the offensive superpowers of hate radio staple Rush Limbaugh, whom Stein quotes (via Media Matters) having "pushed the envelope once more":

Within the confines of our Constitution, and the political arena of ideas, they [Democrats] must be stopped. I don't care why they see this country the way they see it. I don't care why a murderer does it. I don't care why a rapist does it. I don't care why this Muslim guy offed his wife's head. The NOW gang is out there saying 'oh, that's not domestic violence, that's just, uh, that's just....' What do they call it? 'Culturally honor killing'.... I don't care, I don't care why anymore.

But what's a little comparison to simple rapists and spouse-murderers for a media figure who's used Nazi references for his foes for years? Read the FAIR Action Alert: "When Are Nazi Comparisons Deplorable?: For Fox News, Only When Republicans Are the Target" (1/16/04)

The February 18 Democracy Now! segment on Fox reality TV star Sheriff Joe Arpaio features Arizona's East Valley Tribune reporter Ryan Gabrielson telling Amy Goodman exactly how Arpaio's officers

went to the homes of the two publishers for Phoenix New Times, which--there was an investigation being conducted into a case where New Times published Joe Arpaio's home address in its paper and online. And Arizona has a kind of interesting law where you're not allowed to publish online the address of law enforcement. And so the sheriff had been pushing our county attorney to do an investigation and prosecute the case.

Over the course of that, it sort of snowballed to the point where they--New Times--received these hugely broad subpoenas for basically every bit of information about readers, reporter notes etc., just breathtaking subpoenas, grand jury subpoenas. And they were supposed to remain sort of--you know, they weren't supposed to publish anything about it, and they felt that they had a need, that people needed to know what was going on with this investigation, so they published all the details about these subpoenas.

Proving that Arpaio's abuse of power extends beyond his inmates to local media as well, "that night, after the newspaper came out, sheriff’s deputies in plain clothes showed up at the homes of these two publishers and arrested them."  Arresting journalists for reporting on government attempts to prosecute them for publishing information--interesting interpretation of the First Amendment they've got going there in Arizona.

The Sacramento Unit of the California Media Workers Guild has published (BeeGuildNow.org, 2/16/09) an open letter to McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt describing how,

in quick succession, our salaries and our pensions have been frozen. The company match has been eliminated from our 401K plans. We’ve gone through two rounds of buyouts. Our ranks are thinner. But that is only the beginning. An unknown number of us will be sent out the door in the coming weeks, laid off during the worst economic climate in 80 years.

Those of us who remain will work harder, but we will work for less. The company has told the Guild we all will be furloughed this year, and beyond that, we will be asked to take additional voluntary pay cuts. If not, more of us may be terminated.

As the workers are "just gutting it out, hoping to survive," they ask one thing of Pruitt: "Work harder for less." Their request of the big boss to "reduce your full compensation this year to $500,000" sounds quite reasonable, considering that his "most recent publicly released annual compensation package is $4.6 million, of which $1.1 million is listed as base salary." Will Pruitt honor their logical assertion that "a voluntary reduction on your part would save jobs. Simple as that"? A look at Pruitt's CEO peers' behavior gives little hope; listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Bob McChesney on Tribune Bankruptcy" (12/12/08).

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred disparagingly this week to the praise that terrorism allegedly receives in "mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera." In his February 18 column, Friedman wrote:

To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets--from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan--but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and websites, as "martyrs" whose actions deserve praise.

Actually, Al Jazeera refers to such attacks as "suicide attacks"--as a quick search of the Al Jazeera website, where one can view programs online, can attest.

But if Friedman were really concerned about media praise of terrorism, he might start by raising alarms about a certain New York Times columnist by the name of Thomas Friedman.

In a January 14 column defending Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip,  Friedman praised the 2006 Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which killed about 1,000 Lebanese civilians, as the "education" of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah:

Israel's counterstrategy was to use its air force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians--the families and employers of the militants--to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

See FAIR's Action Alert: "Terrorism on the NY Times Op-Ed Page (1/14/09).

Update: To be fair to Friedman, he was presumably talking about Al Jazeera's Arab-language service, not Al Jazeera English, when he wrote that "mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera," refer to suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Pakistan as "martyrs." So what do bloggers fluent in Arabic have to say about the columnist's assertion?  One blogger who teaches Arabic and is the former editor of the journal Arab Media and Society wrote  (Semi-Expert, 2/18/09): "Arab mainstream media, and certainly not Al Jazeera, the most mainstream of them all, in fact, don't refer to suicide bombers as martyrs." Friedman’s claim was also challenged  more harshly at the Angry Arab blog (2/18/09): "Can somebody tell this liar who does not understand Arabic, and who relies on MEMRI for his misconceptions about the Arab media that Al Jazeera does NOT refer to terrorists in Iraq as "martyrs" and does not offer them praise?”