Expressing "concern that these deals could break FCC rules about commercial clients within news programs," the New York Daily News' Richard Huff reports (2/10/09) a local scandal related to the WPIX/Channel 11 Pix Morning News program that "features a local restaurant chef whipping up a meal and often an anchor talking about a chance for viewers to purchase discounted coupons to the restaurant":

What's not said, however, is that some of those appearances are part of a marketing agreement in which the restaurant gives the station 100 $100 gift certificates and gets a guarantee of on-air time during the Pix Morning News.

The coupons, worth $10,000 altogether, are sold on WPIX/Channel 11's Web site for half their face value, with the revenue going to Channel 11 and a corporation that handles the coupon distribution.

One marketing plan obtained by the Daily News clearly stated to the restaurant being pitched that in exchange for the coupons, the customer got on-air time--not a commercial--during the weekly "Dining Pix" segment.

The crucial--and potentially illegal--part is that "the on-air segments are not labeled commercials, but rather pitched as something the restaurants are doing to give diners a discount on food in hard times." But Huff is not fooled: "since Channel 11 keeps some of the money from the coupon sales, in a way, the ad-sales department is selling part of the program to a client."

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (2/8/09) quotes from yet another "Time magazine article about Larry Summers and how incredibly brilliant he is":

Perhaps as early as March, they'll launch their biggest lift with the beginnings of a plan to reform Social Security and Medicare, the two entitlement programs that, even before the economy collapsed, were threatening the Treasury with bankruptcy.... When Obama unveils his annual budget in late February or March, Summers promises that the president "is going to describe the kinds of approaches he wants to take to the entitlement problems that have been ignored for a long time." Some options might include delaying retirement, stretching benefits and lifting the cap on taxable earnings....

On that front, Republicans could come to Obama's rescue. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has told Obama in person that his party favors entitlement reform and would work for passage if both parties shared the risk.

That's right, one of the geniuses largely responsible for the formation of our current economic crisis is being lauded by Time--and so many other corporate outlets--for alarmist Social Security misinformation thoroughly debunked for years now. Or, as Schwarz notes in his usual pithy way: "It really required a Democratic president full of hope and change to cut Social Security."

New York Times columnist Gail Collins is really kind of a tragic figure. She used to write for the Long Island paper Newsday, finding a way to cover New York State politics from Albany in a way that was both informative and funny--no mean feat. Then she went to work for the Times and has never been the same since. Today she's got a piece about how an old dog won a dog show and how a number of people in public life are old.

She used to be a writer whose work could be compared to that of Molly Ivins. Now she seems like she's trying to understudy for Maureen Dowd.  It's a warning to us all.

According to a report in the New York Times (2/11/09), NBC is launching a new series to track down and expose war criminals. The network's plan has attracted some criticism from U.S. officials and human rights experts, who are concerned that the network's journalists might be publicizing false accusations against the suspects they're "confronting" on the air. (The show sounds eerily similar to the network's To Catch a Predator series, which purported to bust sexual predators.)

The first suspect is apparently Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting professor at a Maryland college who has been accused by Rwandan authorities of participating in the 1994 genocide in that country; a Human Rights Watch official is quoted in the article saying that the case against Munyakazi is actually somewhat murky.

If NBC is actually interesting in exposing war crimes, though, there might be an easier way to do this. Couldn't they just invite Henry Kissinger to appear on Meet the Press, and then "surprise" him?

Writing that Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein's tough questioning of President Obama was a healthy "confrontational question," Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog thinks that (2/10/09) "more importantly, as Ezra [Klein at the American Prospect] noted, it was 'confrontational from the left rather than from the center.'" Benen then looks at stimulus bill broker Senator Ben Nelson's recent press experiences:

Last week, during the Senate debate, Nelson made four appearances in four days on Fox News and Fox Business. The questions were predictable, and presupposed that Republican talking points were right. Nelson clearly struggled in the [MSNBC Rachel] Maddow interview, though, in part because he faced substantive questions from a progressive perspective, and in part because he's not used to substantive questions from a progressive perspective.

Consider the kind of questions Maddow threw his way: Wouldn't the legislation be more effective with a higher ratio of spending to tax cuts? Why cut $15 billion in school construction money? (When Nelson emphasized the importance of local control of education, Maddow reminded him that school construction crews wouldn't affect the curriculum.) Why take out $40 billion in aid to states? Why is there less money going to food stamps, when food stamps offer the best stimulative bang for the buck of anything in the economic arsenal? (That last point has been lost on almost everyone else in broadcast media.)

Nelson being reduced to admitting that such concessions were more in consideration of appeasing Republicans than in actually helping the U.S. economy is "one of the reasons" Benen finds "shows like Maddow's (and press conference questions like Sam Stein's) so important. The political discourse is dominated by a certain conventional wisdom, which looks at the news through a prism of Republican creation."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (2/10/09, ad-viewing required) gets worked up over one entry in the National Review's "25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years":

One of its writers, S.T. Karnick--who... considers Rambo to be a sterling theatrical achievement that celebrates authentic Christian values--named the genuinely superb 1985 Terry Gilliam film, Brazil, as #22 on the list. When doing so, Karnick wrote...

"Terry Gilliam's Brazil portrays a darkly comic dystopia of malfunctioning high-tech equipment and the dreary living conditions common to all totalitarian regimes.... Terrorist bombings, national-security scares, universal police surveillance, bureaucratic arrogance, a callous elite, perversion of science and government use of torture evoke the worst aspects of the modern megastate."

Is it even theoretically possible for someone's brain to allow them to write that last sentence in National Review as listing the hallmarks of "a totalitarian regime" and "the worst aspects of the modern megastate" without simultaneously realizing that this is everything that same magazine has cheered on for the last eight years at least?

Greenwald further drives the point home in a subsequent update that quotes Terry Gilliam himself saying "he recognizes what is glaringly obvious to everyone but National Review: that the very authoritarian horrors depicted by the film are the exact ones ushered in by the U.S. government over the last eight years."

Courtesy of Ben Armbruster (Think Progress, 2/9/09), generally right-leaning media "critic" Howard Kurtz displays a total lack of self-reflection when, after discussing the sexism Katie Couric faced "as the first woman to anchor a network news program,"

Kurtz then asked Couric if her new hairstyle has something to do with her most recent successes:

KURTZ: We're going to put up some pictures of you over the years, and I'm going to ask you whether you think at all a factor in your recent success could be this new hairstyle.

Couric's response was sharp: "You know, you should ask Charlie Gibson about how he’s changed his part a little bit, or how Brian looks more tan on the air"--but who can tell if that jibe managed to pierce Kurtz's sometimes unreliable mind.

Jon Stewart has a Daily Show bit (2/9/09) replaying Bill O'Reilly's staunch declarations that "we hate those paparazzi, we think they're the scum of the earth" because "the right to privacy is a basic constitutional tenet." That sounds like quite a principled stand; the only trouble comes when Stewart then shows O'Reilly Factor clips of its own camera crews ambushing journalists out with their families, in front of their own homes and even commuting on a city bus to quiz them about why they said or wrote certain things.

Stewart then embarks on "a great experiment," showing O'Reilly listing "the people that [he] believes deserve protection"--"Cruise and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie"--and wondering what happens if "they were to offend O'Reilly in some way." The rich payoff is video of a Factor reporter who, in Stewart's words "must really want that story to sit around with all the 'scum'" paparazzi waiting to ask Jolie why she would allegedly "ban Fox News from your premiere last night?" Stewart names the real "governing principle" here as "ignore the privacy rights of anyone who disagrees with Bill O'Reilly."

Sometimes it's really baffling that Thomas Friedman is considered one of our nation's most important thinkers on political and economic matters. Here he is today (2/11/09) channeling what "non-Americans" have to say:

Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn't through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.

If you don't understand that the United States developed its economy behind high tariff walls, then you probably believe the Earth is flat.

Today's lead New York Times story (2/1/09)--subheaded in the print edition "Scant Details, and Wall Street Reacts With a 4.6 Percent Plunge"--is a classic example of the fallacy of treating stock market prices as a kind of opinion poll. Reporters Stephen Labaton and Edmund L. Andrews wrote: "The initial assessment of the plan from the markets, lawmakers and economists was brutally negative, in large part because they expected more details."

Presumably the reporters talked to lawmakers and economists and got their responses directly. But when one is talking about the reaction of the market, one can only look at the direction of prices, which are set by traders who are primarily interested not in assessing economic plans, presumably, but in valuing stocks at what they're actually worth.

There's a school of thought that holds that the best response to the banking crisis is to declare that troubled banks are insolvent, have the government take them over and run them until they have a positive value again, and then sell them off. Some economists suspect that this may actually be the administration's unspoken plan, with the thinking being that the government might be reluctant to publicly acknowledge that major parts of the financial system are worthless. If stock traders believe that this is in fact the plan, then they would rationally sell problematic bank stocks for whatever they can get, because those stocks would soon be worthless.

Conversely,  many economists believe that it would be a bad idea to give large sums of money to insolvent banks, because the banks' management and stockholders might just pocket the money without improving the health of the financial sector. Such a plan might boost bank stocks without actually helping the economy.

Yesterday, according to the New York Times business section ("Stocks Slide as New Bailout Disappoints," 2/10/09), the stock market decline was

led by steep declines in Bank of America, Citigroup and large banks already leaning on taxpayers for support. Regions Bank, SunTrust, KeyCorp and Fifth Third fell even more as investors worried that regional banks could be vulnerable to a new "stress test" aimed at revealing the weakest links in the industry.

In many ways, the financial crisis is about assets being misvalued and the system threatening to grind to a halt as institutions are reluctant to acknowledge more realistic valuations.  If the Treasury plan means that banks that are worth nothing will soon be treated as though they are worth nothing, that could be a big step in the right direction. In short, plunging bank stock prices could mean that Wall Street thinks the administration is on the right track.

FAIR has a new action alert out calling on New York public TV station WNET to reject a $1 million grant to report on Social Security and healthcare from a foundation that supports cuts in Social Security and opposes universal healthcare.  Please post letters that you send to WNET in the comments section of this post.

Newsweek's current cover declares, "We Are All Socialists Now." But it's actually another story from the magazine that pushes the notion that Obama is likely heading the country in a (gasp!) European direction.

Michael Freedman's piece certainly doesn't start off on the right foot:

Have you noticed that Barack Obama sounds more like the president of France every day?

Newsweek laments the "distinctly continental sniff" of Obama's economic rhetoric, which apparently evokes "business bashing and protectionism"  that was, until recently, "largely relegated to the far left." The real problem, though, is what it's going to do to us Americans:

Slow growth could kill rugged American individualism, too. Healthcare in the U.S. is for the most part tied to employment, so if job numbers continue to look dismal, or get even worse, an ever-greater number of people will start looking to the government for support.... It's very easy to imagine a chorus of former American individualists demanding cushy French-style pensions and free British-style healthcare if their private stock funds fail to recover and unemployment inches upward toward 10 percent and remains there.

Pensions and healthcare for all-- this is worse than we thought!

After President Obama's press conference last night, Fox host Bill O'Reilly saw one to score points against the White House--by mocking Obama for relying on a list of pre-approved journalists when he took questions.

Unfortunately for O'Reilly, his guest at the time was former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who had to point out that this was... well, exactly the way Bush did things.

O'REILLY: Look, he had those guys listed, written down, who he was going to call. Now, in other press conferences, they just look around, and they go, "Oh, right, right, right!" And they go, "This one, that one, this one." Correct?

FLEISCHER: Well, George Bush never did that. I don't know how Bill Clinton did it, but it's a bad idea to reward the guy with the loudest voice.

O'REILLY: OK. So....

FLEISCHER: Writing it down gives the president what to call (ph).

O'REILLY: George Bush came in with a list of guys he was going to call on?

FLEISCHER: Yes, I used to prepare it for him. I would give him a grid, show him where every reporter is seated. And there are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They're screened.

O'REILLY: Like the Huffington Post.

FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it Siberia. And I told the president, "Don't call on Siberia. Just stay right here and call on these people on the grid in front of you."

Like O'Reilly, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz also seemed to think the breakthrough question asked by Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein was a little weird. Where O'Reilly suggested Stein was an "oddball," Kurtz wrote that he asked a question about a "a cause popular on the left"--by which he means the same thing.

Also like O'Reilly, Kurtz got the history of press conference protocol wrong, writing:

Some journalists are miffed that Obama decides the day before news conferences whom he is going to call on -- the fortunate ones are notified in advance--reducing the other reporters to the role of mere extras. Past presidents have generally worked their way around the room, starting with the wire services, networks and major newspapers.

Too bad Kurtz didn't have Fleischer with him to let him know that such an open-ended press conference system would be a "bad idea."

Calling it "something of a breakthrough" that, at his most recent press conference, Barack Obama took a question from Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, Steve Benen (Political Animal, 1/10/09) explains that Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz isn't quite correct in saying "Obama made a bit of history by calling on the first blogger at such a session": "In January 2005, then-President Bush called on right-wing blogger Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, who asked for the president's thoughts on Democrats who are 'divorced from reality.'" So, more accurately, Stein is just "the first credible and legitimate blogger to be called on at a White House press conference."

Indeed, the differences are important. When the conservative Gannon/Guckert got to ask the president a question, he threw a rather pathetic softball, intended to help the president look good. When the Huffington Post's Stein stood up last night, he asked an excellent question that the president didn't want to answer, on an issue most news outlets prefer to ignore: "Today, Senator Patrick Leahy announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that before you turn the page, you have to read the page first. Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?"

See how truly pathetic traditional media looked by comparison when, given his own opportunity, "the Washington Post's reporter asked, 'What's your reaction to Alex Rodriguez's admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?'"

Mark Howard (News Corpse, 2/9/08) rebuts "complaints from Republicans, who accused the president of politicizing the Census" by announcing that the new Director of the Census--being a "far-right Republican running an agency for which he has shown contempt"--will have to "work closely with the White House": "The Census has always been political.... George Bush installed the manager of his presidential campaign, Don Evans, as his Commerce Secretary" (the position overseeing the Bureau of the Census). Wondering "would anyone be foolish enough to assert that that wasn't political?" Howard further notes that

Fox News, however, takes hypocrisy to new levels. Bill Sammon, deputy managing editor for Fox, reported today on the move to have the Census be overseen by the White House. Predictably, he demeaned the proposal as a Democratic power grab. Then he went on to brag that only Fox News was reporting this critical story. He specifically said that he had checked for other news reports and found none.

Well, apparently he didn't check ABC or MSNBC or CNN or the Washington Post or the New York Times.

Declaring it "bad enough that Fox is misreporting this story on a substantive basis" and "that they load up their broadcast with an ignorance-fueled outrage," Howard asks, "Do they also have to demonstrate such deliberately shoddy research skills so that they can pretend to be a lonely clarion for their pseudo-truths?"