Noting that "news organizations often encourage their journalists to appear on other platforms for promotional purposes," former TVNewser Brian Stelter reports (New York Times, 2/15/09) that, "when the National Public Radio analyst Juan Williams speaks on the Fox News Channel's highest-rated program, the radio network doesn't want any attention":

Mr. Williams, a longtime political analyst and author, is a paid contributor to both NPR and Fox News. His voice is a prominent one at Fox; he was a panelist for the network's coverage of election night and Inauguration Day. When he appears on the cable channel, he is regularly described as a "senior correspondent for NPR." While that title is accurate, NPR has asked Mr. Williams to ask Fox not to identify him that way when he appears on the O'Reilly Factor, the network's 8 p.m. opinion program.

The request was made after Mr. Williams said on the Factor that Michelle Obama has "got this Stokely-Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going." The allusion to Mr. Carmichael, a leader of the black power movement of the 1960s, spurred dozens of angry e-mail messages to Alicia C. Shepard, the NPR ombudswoman, and resulted in conversations between Mr. Williams and the radio network's editors.

Shepard's response was one of concern that Williams "tends to speak one way on NPR and another on Fox"--while Fox itself took a condescending shot at NPR when announcing it would happily deceive its own viewers: "Fox swiftly said that it would drop the radio references--not only on the Factor, but on all the network's hours of programming. 'We were doing NPR a favor by even plugging them.'"

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Field Guide to TV's Lukewarm Liberals: How to Spot Centrist Pundits Served Up As the 'Left'" (7-8/98)

Regular Huffington Post media critic Marty Kaplan finds something especially "discomfiting" (Jewish Journal, 2/16/09) about recent stimulus bill coverage and "what it says about the role that the media have carved out for themselves in American public life":

If the job of the press were to help the public understand what's really important, and to distinguish propaganda from facts, then Republican attempts to sink the bill by defining it as liberal pork would have gone nowhere. The endangered mouse that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was allegedly earmarking billions to protect; the Las Vegas supertrain that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was claimed to have snuck in; the rationing of health care that former New York Lieut. Gov. Betsy McCaughey accused Tom Daschle of hiding in the bill: None of these and other colorful lies would have gained any traction if truth value were a prerequisite for airtime. Instead, unfortunately, the more outrageous the allegation, the more irresistible it was to the media.

When reporting is reconceived as stenography, there's no place in news for news judgment. The Republicans know this. If we trash it, they will come--that's the GOP's formula for gaming the Beltway press corps. With a handful of honorable exceptions, television journalists are particularly helpless in the face of phony charges. Instead of sorting things through, they just serve them up, to be repeated in the right-wing echo chamber on cable, talk radio and the internet. The closest the mainstream media come to helping citizens distinguish what's believable from what's baloney is the weaselly formulation, "Some say... but others say...." If citizens want to separate what's true from what's spin, well, you're on your own, pal.

Writing that "of course that didn't happen just yesterday," Kaplan traces this attitude to back when "news became a profit center within entertainment conglomerates": "To aggregate audiences and to sell their eyeballs to advertisers, it's not necessary, and it's awfully expensive, to take pains to figure out what's accurate. It's much better television, and it costs nothing at all, to hand a bullhorn to a propagandist. Nothing, that is, to the networks--just not nothing to democracy."

Listen to the recent FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Lori Wallach on Buy America Brouhaha" (2/13/09)

FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 2/14/09) tells why he's concerned the potential lifting of the government ban on press photography of war casualties' coffins isn't "particularly good news":

I wrote in my book War Made Easy that ambiguity is part of the process that we bring to the media-consuming table: "Visual images may be among the most powerful messages we receive about war, but those graphic messages still leave it to us to assign them meaning. And we, in turn, assess meaning not so much because of what's in front of our eyes as because of what's behind them--our assumptions and attitudes--influenced and shaped, probably much more than we would prefer to admit, by cues from political leaders, pundits and reporters who function as role models with their reactions, including what they say and don't say."

Solomon's fear is that, minus any crucial reportorial context about the brutal reality of war, the photos might "mostly excite the nationalistic pride that exalts the fallen as the bravest of the brave and heighten the fervor of the facile notion that others must die to affirm that the earlier dead did not die in vain"--in the larger picture, "unless the mindset and context of how the public sees that photography undergo a major shift, war will go on."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Self-Censorship to Official Censorship: Ban on Images of Wounded GIs Raises No Media Objections" (March/April 2007) by Pat Arnow

"Pointing out how often pundits' predictions are not only wrong but egregiously wrong" is, in Newsweek science columnist Sharon Begley's view (2/14/09), "like shooting fish in a barrel, except in this case the fish refuse to die. No matter how often they miss the mark, pundits just won't shut up." Citing "the fact that being chronically, 180-degrees wrong does not disqualify pundits is in large part the media's fault: Cable news, talk radio and the blogosphere need all the punditry they can rustle up, track records be damned," Begley looks at Stanford psychologist Philip Tetlock's methodical attempt to "identify those more likely to have an accurate crystal ball" using "something psychologists call cognitive style":

At first, Tetlock's ongoing study of 82,361 predictions by 284 pundits (most but not all of them American) came up empty. He initially looked at whether accuracy was related to having a Ph.D., being an economist or political scientist rather than a blowhard journalist, having policy experience or access to classified information, or being a realist or neocon, liberal or conservative. The answers were no on all counts. The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit's accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock's first clue. The media's preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced.

Begley explains how the dominant news media format reinforces this harmful predilection: "Bold, decisive assertions make better sound bites; bombast, swagger and certainty make for better TV. As a result, the marketplace of ideas does not punish poor punditry."

Survey some recent disastrous results in the FAIR magazine cover story Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

In the same column (2/16/09) that he cites Sam Donaldson's reputation as a "blowhard liberal," the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has an item in which he complains that "the Vogue cover story on Michelle Obama, by editor at large André Leon Talley, is nothing if not laudatory." Kurtz writes:

The Talley article mentions briefly that Obama showed up "at a fundraiser I co-hosted last year." That would be a $1,000-a-head fundraiser--"An Evening With Michelle Obama"--also hosted by Vogue editor Anna Wintour and designer Calvin Klein.

Wouldn't the story have had more credibility if written by someone who hadn't helped the Obama campaign raise money?

Wouldn't Kurtz's criticism have more credibility if he acknowledged that fashion magazines are not exactly known for their hard-hitting attacks on the celebrities they profile?

Kurtz's subhead for the item--"Coziness in Vogue"--suggests that the article is a sign of the times, part of his ongoing "Obama Adulation Watch"...which he continues under that heading in the same column, with an item about a New York Times blogger who reports that women often dream about having sex with Barack Obama.

This kind of media criticism is barely above the level of Jonah Goldberg. If Kurtz is trying to evaluate what kind of honeymoon the press is giving Obama, shouldn't the fact that cable news allowed Republican lawmakers to dominate the debate over his stimulus plan carry more weight than the ethical lapses of Vogue?

Discussing the retirement of ABC's Sam Donaldson, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz writes (2/16/09):

Donaldson's detractors viewed him as a liberal blowhard, and there were certainly times when his mouth outran his brain.

I would certainly count FAIR as being among Donaldson's detractors, and we viewed him as someone who was frequently mistaken for being liberal because he shouted questions at Ronald Reagan. And the examples Kurtz gives of Donaldson's reporting--promoting a Colin Powell presidential bid, suggesting that Bill Clinton should resign over the Lewinsky scandal--do not exactly illustrate a progressive crusader.  Though Kurtz does report that Donaldson was proud of a report that tracked down a Nazi war criminal; maybe that makes him a liberal in Kurtz's book.

The author of an upcoming "people's history of the Bolivarian Revolution entitled We Created Him," George Ciccariello-Maher tells (CounterPunch, 2/15/09) an eerily "familiar" tale of one unnamed political leader who, after being "in power for nearly eight years,"

no longer feels the need to comfort his opponents, and his discourse radicalizes as his view of term limits shifts. Dismissing his opposition as rigid "dogmatists," the leader now insists on the need to change course flexibly to meet circumstances. True and sustained change, he argues, requires the continuity of his successful leadership....

Not without controversy, then, was the decision of the region's largest newspaper--aligned politically with the leader--to wade into these conflictive waters with the following declaration: ..."The bedrock of… democracy is the voters' right to choose. Though well intentioned… the term limits law severely limits that right, which is why this page has opposed term limits from the outset… Term limits are...profoundly undemocratic, arbitrarily denying voters the ability to choose between good politicians and bad."

While the paper had previously insisted that any change to term limits come through popular referendum, it now reverses this view, taking the position that for reasons of political expediency, a simple vote in the small executive council will do.

While consumers of corporate U.S. media may recognize this as the common narrative against current official U.S. enemy Hugo Chávez, Ciccariello-Maher lets us know that this land where "weak-kneed apologists parade about under the banner of free press" really "is none other than New York City, the leader none other than Michael Bloomberg, and the newspaper none other than the New York Times." Cautioning "patience: we haven't even gotten to the hypocrisy part yet," Ciccariello-Maher then goes on to note how

the New York Times has never been bashful about the crush it has on this tale of hypocrisy’s third character: the narco-terrorist president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. Uribe is currently engaged in an effort to change the Colombian constitution for a second time to allow his own re-election, doing so not through popular plebiscite, but rather indirect legislative vote. But not that you would know this from reading the press.

Read the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall

Consortium News has an informative list (2/15/09) of "some special stories from the previous month" that were neglected by corporate media obsessively "focusing on the end of the Bush era and the start of the Obama era"--here's a sampling:

"WPost Columnist Excuses Torture," by David Swanson, cataloging the excuses for torture. (January 4, 2009)...

"WPost Finds Second Side to Gaza War" by Robert Parry, observing some journalistic one-sidedness. (January 8, 2009)...

"How the CIA Handles the WPost" by Melvin A. Goodman, describing high-level media manipulation. (January 9, 2009)

"WPost Flacks Again for Bush's Crimes" by Robert Parry, recounting another example of media bias. (January 10, 2009)

Check out lots more of Consortium News editor Robert Parry's relentless effort to hold the national capital's main daily paper accountable here, here, here and here.

Salon critic Glenn Greenwald's look (2/14/09, ad-viewing required) at the journalistic powerhouse that was a recent New York Times David Brooks-Gail Collins Internet "conversation" yields the Greenwald observation that "Brooks did an excellent job of explicitly demonstrating most everything that is relevant--and destructive--about the mentality of the standard Beltway journalist." Greenwald quotes Brooks being "really annoyed by... the withdrawal of Tom Daschle" and providing an alternate "word for lobbyists: experts. Some are sleazy and many are quite admirable, but the idea of trying to run Washington without them is absurd." Greenwald's response:

To David Brooks, lobbyists are nothing more than "experts" who provide important and helpful insight to legislators as they earnestly try to craft laws in the public interest. Not only are lobbyists a positive influence, but they're actually indispensable. The fact that these so-called "experts" are paid by the wealthiest corporate factions to ensure that the laws Congress passes are designed to serve their narrow, insular interests--and that this is accomplished by pouring money into the coffers of the very people who write the laws so that they're writing the laws that serve these interests--never makes it into Brooks' understanding of this process. Thus, he is baffled that anyone would find lobbyist-domination of our political process to be at all objectionable.

In Brooks' position Greenwald sees "the full expression of one of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist"--which spells bad news for any reader tempted to take such creatures seriously: "Because they are integral members of the Washington establishment, rather than watchdogs over it, they are incapable of finding fault with political power and they thus reflexively defend it and want it to remain unchanged."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "David Brooks vs. the Real World: Columnist Dreams Up His Own Reality" (9-10/08) by Steve Rendall

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok (HateWatch, 2/13/09) gives a review of Ann Coulter's lengthy history of "sliming everyone and everything she disagrees with" before disclosing that, "despite denouncing school desegregation as a 'spectacular' failure, Coulter has generally avoided bolstering white supremacist hate groups. Until now, that is":

In her latest foaming-mouth tome--Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America, released on January 6--Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which the New York Times had described as a "thinly veiled white supremacist organization." Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is "a conservative group" that has unfairly been branded as racist "because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group."...

Coulter could hardly be more wrong.... The CCC's columnists have written that black people are "a retrograde species of humanity," and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a "slimy brown mass of glop." Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes "forced integration" and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as "genetically inferior," complained about "Jewish power brokers," called gay people "perverted sodomites," and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, "Patriot of the Century."

Potok explains that Coulter "really ought to know" this, since "the organization where she frequently speaks, the Conservative Political Action Committee, has publicly banned the CCC from its annual gathering because it is racist."

Read how, crank though she may be, Ann Coulter is one of a class of media figures that facilitates the spread of such hate into much larger venues--see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads: From National Review to the New York Times" (3-4/05) by Steve Rendall.

For more on the Council of Conservative Citizens, see FAIR Press Release: "National Media Should Cover Racist Links of Prominent Elected Officials Like Rep. Bob Barr and Sen. Trent Lott" (12/11/98)

The New York Times' Travel section featured a February 8 piece by Ned Martel headlined, "In Grenada, Leaving the Past Behind," where the reporter refers to the 1983 U.S. invasion of the tiny Caribbean nation. A more accurate headline might have read, "Leaving the Facts Behind." Here's how Martel summed up the invasion story:

In 1983, American satellites peered down on Point Salines, the southwest corner of Grenada, and detected a newly paved lane toward the sea, plus some nearby armaments and fuel tanks. Cubans had arrived on the island, abetting some coup plotters who captured and then executed the prime minister, and the Reagan administration realized they were watching a hostile military base under construction, some 1,500 miles southeast of Miami.

That's a garbled version of the case for the invasion made by Ronald Reagan, who claimed that he was forced to invade because Grenada was building a military airport at Point Salines as a way station for Soviet planes, and because the coup was endangering U.S. citizens there.

The reality? Reagan loathed Grenada’s popular and Cuba-friendly prime minister, Maurice Bishop, and had been planning an invasion of the island for some time. When Bishop was deposed in an internal coup, Reagan used the event, the airport story and the danger to Americans on the island as pretexts for invading (and imposing a "friendly" government).

Of course, Reagan was lying: The airport was Grenada’s new international airport, designed by a Canadian firm, financed by the British government and Grenada's neighbors, and no secret to anyone. As far as the danger posed to Americans, the chancellor of the medical school that many of the Americans on the island attended charged that the greatest danger his students faced was from the the U.S. invasion.

And what of the Cubans Martel said were there to help topple Bishop? They were almost all workers, there at Bishop's invitation, sponsored by Cuba's pro-Bishop government.

Instead of referring to its own archives, where some of Reagan's Grenada deceptions were debunked years ago, the "paper of record" is adding new misinformation to its Grenada file.

You see it all the time: You need 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.

Not exactly.  Under Senate rules--which can be changed by a majority vote--you need the consent of 3/5ths of the Senate to close debate on an issue; that's 60 votes. To pass a bill, you need a majority of those present. Since Ted Kennedy is sick and Al Franken has not yet been seated, that's 49 votes.

Is that an academic distinction?  No, not really.  Politically, voting against an emergency stimulus bill is very different from voting to block a vote on an emergency stimulus bill.  Particularly if Majority Leader Harry Reid required filibusterers to actually hold the floor, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style, Republicans might find it a great deal harder to keep a 41-vote bloc together.

In any case, Americans are generally under-informed about the way their complex system works. Spelling out what's going on, even if it takes an extra sentence, is preferable to a misleading and sometimes inaccurate shorthand.

Update: jhm in comments is correct in saying that it is not the debate cloture rule, but rather a Senate rule against deficit spending, that required a 3/5ths majority vote to pass the stimulus bill.  Both are self-imposed requirements, adopted through majority vote, but the politics of standing up against deficit spending are different from standing up against the Senate voting.

There's been a corporate media trope lately that the stimulus bill, despite Barack Obama's assurances, contains "pork." It's not always clear what "pork" means, but the Washington Post today (2/13/09) had an example of the genre--headlined "Despite Pledges, Stimulus Has Some Pork"--that opens with a definition of what it means by the term.  Unfortunately, it's a definition that would seem to turn virtually any government spending into an instance of "pork."

Reporters Dan Eggen and Ellen Nakashima lead off:

The compromise stimulus bill adopted by House and Senate negotiators this week is not free of spending that benefits specific communities, industries or groups, despite vows by President Obama that the legislation would be kept clear of pet projects, according to lawmakers, legislative aides and anti-tax groups.

And here's exhibit A:

The deal provides $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, for example, including money that could benefit a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers.

Note the language there: "could benefit."  A few paragraphs down the piece clarifies:

Reid spokesman Jon Summers said in a statement that the transportation secretary "will have complete flexibility as to which program he uses to allocate the funds," but he acknowledged that "the proposed Los Angeles-Las Vegas rail project would be eligible."

So the Las Vegas-to-L.A. rail link (huh, that sounds less silly than "Disneyland," doesn't it?) "would be eligible" for the high-speed rail money--as would proposals to speed travel between L.A. and San Francisco, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the major Ohio cities, etc.  The list of high-speed rail projects on the drawing board would certainly take a lot more than $8 billion to fund.

If being one of several "eligible" projects that could potentially benefit from a program makes you a "specific" beneficiary of that program--and therefore a recipient of "pork"--what government program would not have such beneficiaries?  What kind of stimulus spending would not meet the Washington Post's definition of pork?

Brad Jacobson comments (Media Bloodhound, 2/12/09) on the fact that amid all the dubious stimulus bill coverage, the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright appeared on NPR to discuss the fact that he "reported last year that he knew the Bush administration had been spying on him." Noting that "the statements of NSA whistleblower Russell Tice and New York Times reporter James Risen" back up Wright's contention, Jacobson quotes the NPR host saying she's "a little surprised that there was so little coverage and less outrage over Tice's allegation"--at least outside non-corporate media. Jacobson says that

you might think Tice's bombshell appearance would precede a flurry of news coverage, of Tice popping up across the airwaves, from morning news shows to nightly news lead stories to the front pages of our most respected newspapers.

Yet according to a LexisNexis search performed by MediaBloodhound, no broadcast network nightly news programs reported Tice's allegations (including, oddly enough, NBC Nightly News) in the following days after Tice's appearance or in the three weeks since. CNN and PBS NewsHour also failed to find his revelations newsworthy. The New York Times, Risen's own paper, the one that broke the NSA's illegal wiretapping story? Nothing. Not a single story reporting Tice's allegations.

While Risen could still have a report in the works, Jacobson asserts that "Tice's statements demanded to be reported in our nation's paper of record just as a vital wire news story, not reported by Times journalists, makes its way into Times' pages."

Media Matters writer Eric H. Hananok notices (2/10/09) something fishy about an airing of the Fox News show Happening Now in which host Jon Scott introduced an overview of the government stimulus bill's development thus: "We thought we'd take a look back at the bill, how it was born, and how it grew, and grew, and grew." As Scott "referenced seven dates, as on-screen graphics cited various news sources," Hananok astutely recognized the fact that they "were also contained in a February 10 press release issued by the Senate Republican Communications Center." The clincher:

One on-screen graphic during the segment even repeated a typo from the GOP document, further confirming that Scott was simply reading from a Republican press release. The Fox News graphic and the GOP press release both claimed that a Wall Street Journal report that the stimulus package could reach "$775 billion over two years" was published on December 19, 2009.

But it's already well-established that chronological time is but a minor obstacle in the path of corporate reporters bent on predetermining reality.