Washington Post TV writer Lisa de Moraes' report (2/6/09) on a Barack Obama speech planned for networks' cherished prime-time hours gives plenty of room to TV executives' grievances--namely, Obama is going on national TV to talk about the economic crisis--during primetime, when some of their best shows are on! "His economic stimulus package apparently does not extend to the TV networks," she quotes one executive.

"Notice they're not going on Friday or Saturday," one network exec complained. "They're . . . preempting our better shows. You're not happy to lose a House if you are Fox, or two of the better comedies at CBS, or The Bachelor at ABC--we're all going to take a bath."

Absent from de Moraes' piece is any recollection of these same corporate broadcasters' recent glee over certain 2008 weeks in which Obama ad-spending exceeded the entire Bush ad budget for 2004--let alone any review of how TV abused the responsibility concomitant with this windfall; see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Top Troubling Tropes of Campaign '08: The Media-Created Narratives That Derail Election Coverage" (11-12/08) by Peter Hart

Media Matters' Jamison Foser (2/6/09) has "one fact that should be made clear in every news report about the stimulus package working its way through Congress, it is this: Government spending is stimulative"--and Foser provides evidence that, "unfortunately, many of the reporters who have shaped the stimulus debate don't seem to understand that." After quoting Charles Gibson of ABC telling President Obama that "a lot of people have said [his legislation is] a spending bill and not a stimulus," Foser writes that that is "like saying, 'This is a hot fudge sundae, not a dessert.'" Moving beyond these rudimentary economic facts, Foser looks at "another problem with Gibson's formulation":

in describing the stimulus as a "spending bill," he ignores the fact that the bill contains tax cuts, too. Lots and lots of tax cuts. And those tax cuts, by the way, provide less stimulus than government spending on things like food stamps and extending unemployment benefits....

MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, among others, has repeatedly suggested "welfare" provisions in the bill wouldn't stimulate the economy. This is the exact opposite of true; those provisions are among the most stimulative things the government can possibly do. There are some fairly obvious reasons why that is true, beginning with the fact that if you give a poor person $100 in food stamps, you can be pretty sure they're going to spend all $100 of it; but if you give a rich person $100 in tax cuts, they probably won't spend much of it at all.

Noting that these "old politics of demonizing 'welfare spending'" ignore "the simple truth that such spending not only helps those Americans who are struggling the most feed their families, it also does more to stimulate the economy," Foser knows why "you probably won't see is Mika Brzezinski or Charles Gibson or any other TV reporter suggesting that the tax cuts in the bill are not stimulative and should be stripped": "Anchors like Charles Gibson are not going to qualify for food stamps anytime soon. But they would certainly benefit greatly from some tax cut provisions that wouldn't do nearly as much to stimulate the economy."

Read more about Gibson's tenuous grasp on fiscal reality in the 'Tax cuts are good' section of this article from FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Dubious Debates: How Media Moderators Lowered the Level of Election '08" (7-8/08) by Jacqueline Bacon

NPR critic Mytwords was pleasantly surprised (NPR Check, 2/9/09) by Ari Shapiro's All Things Considered report "covering the ACLU case against Jeppesen--a subsidiary of Boeing--that has provided the torture flights for the CIA's extraordinary rendition program." That is, until "about three quarters of the way through," when "Shapiro closed the piece by featuring attorney David Laufman, identified only as having 'handled terrorism cases as a federal prosecutor'":

Shapiro says: "Attorney David Laufman believes tomorrow could be a rude awakening for some of Obama's more liberal supporters. [Laufman] 'There's that old joke that a conservative is a liberal who's gotten mugged and, thank God the new team hasn't gotten mugged yet.' But he says a daily threat briefing can be about as sobering as a mugging."

Oh we childish "more liberal" listeners who just don't understand the real Jack Bauer world of the threats facing our benevolent empire. If only we were privy to the super-secret briefings that the grown-ups get every day, then we too would be begging for more prison camps, more torture flights, more preventive wars, more spying on ourselves--in fact all kinds of "extraordinary" measures to protect the freedoms, liberties, rule of law and democracy that the "bad guys" want to take from us.

A cursory look at Laufman's "checkered past regarding this story" shows that "from 1980-84, Mr. Laufman served as an intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency," and "from 2001 to 2003, Mr. Laufman served as chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson at the Department of Justice, where he assisted in managing the day-to-day operations of DOJ and helped to coordinate the Department's responses to the September 11 terrorist attacks." Mytwords finds it awful "convenient that NPR failed to disclose the obvious conflicts of interest that Laufman has in this case."

Check out Ari Shapiro's own history as a world-class flack in this FAIR Action Alert: "Is Critical Journalism Incomprehensible to NPR? Correspondent Mocked Iraqi Colleague Who Asked About Immunity" (3/4/08)

"Though seemingly forgotten by most TV talking heads," it's still fresh in Robert Parry's mind (Consortium News, 2/9/09) how "it was only three years ago, when the Republicans had control of both the White House and Congress--and 'filibuster' was a dirty word":

It was usually coupled with "obstructionist" amid demands that any of George W. Bush’s proposals deserved "an up-or-down vote."

Yet now, with the Democrats holding the White House and Congress, the Republicans and the Washington press corps have come to view the filibuster fondly, as a valued American tradition, a time-honored part of a healthy legislative process.

Today, it's seen as a good thing that Democrats must muster 60 votes in the Senate to pass almost anything.

When the TV pundits talk about Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan squeaking through the Senate, they're actually referring to a vote that might fall in the range of 60 or more yes votes to perhaps 38 nos, a three-touchdown "squeaker."

The "anti-democratic" effects so "rarely mentioned in the news" are seen clearly when Parry describes what it took to "overcome a Republican filibuster" and get those 60 votes: "To reach this super-majority, Democrats have been forced to accept a higher percentage of tax cuts, even if leading economists consider tax cuts one of the least effective ways of stimulating the moribund economy."

Read more about Republican filibusters in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Turning 'Won't' Into 'Can't'" (11-12/07) by Jim Naureckas

Remembering how, "for days, the mainstream media talked endlessly about... Michael Vick. Dogfighting. Blood sport," OnlineJournal.com writer Missy Comley Beattie (2/9/09) recalls being "utterly dismayed that so many people who expressed outrage over Vick's crime, seemed to pay little or no attention to the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan." Which leads Beattie to an important question: "So, why, then, given our attraction to animal stories, were news anchors silent on the massacre at the Gaza Zoo by Israeli troops who shot and killed caged animals during Israel's recent assault on Gaza?"

An article by Ashraf Helmi and Megan Hirons provides the chilling details: ..."Inside one cage lie three dead monkeys and another two in the cage beside them. Two more escaped and have yet to return. [The zookeeper] points to a clay pot. 'They tried to hide,' he says of a mother and baby half-tucked inside."...

The gruesome attack must have posed a true dilemma when our mainstream media got wind of it: A tragic tale of dead animals vs. exposing the brutality of Israeli troops. Wolf, Anderson, Campbell, Suzanne, Chris, Norah, Contessa, Rachel, Joe, David, Sean, Bill, Megan and Shephard are probably working on a way to spin this to suit AIPAC. Perhaps, something like convincing us that a Gaza Zoo animal might be used as a shield by Hamas "terrorists."

Beattie's response to her own query about the reason for U.S. media silence: "The answer, of course, is that we're supposed to believe that Israeli troops are the good guys. Palestinians are 'militants.' Israeli soldiers are, well, soldiers." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Phyllis Bennis on Gaza & the Law" (1/16/09)

Chronicling how "media continue to do more to misinform the public than to inform them" about the current economic crisis, Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/8/09) spots "the absolute worst in journalistic practices" when "a front-page Washington Post article explains the Obama administration's policy by telling readers that the 'approach reflects Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner's philosophy of how governments should respond to financial crises'":

Trees had to die for this garbage? The reality is that the reporters have no clue as to what [is] Timothy F. Geithner's philosophy of how governments should respond to financial crises. The reporter knows what Timothy F. Geithner told them, so why don't they just stick to passing this information along to readers instead of speculating about his innermost thoughts?

The excursion into philosophy deflects readers from the real issue. Mr. Geithner wants to use taxpayer dollars to keep bankrupt banks in business. In effect, he wants to tax teachers, fire fighters and Joe the Plumber to protect the wealth of the banks' shareholders and to pay high salaries to their top executives.

Alas, Baker realizes that "no readers of this piece would understand that this is the process being described." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Dean Baker on Stimulus Package" (1/30/09)

La Frontera Times reporter Alfredo Gutierrez has the latest (2/6/09) from new Fox reality show star Joe Arpaio. The Arizona sheriff, under FBI investigation for violating civil rights in his crusade against immigration, recently marched all of the Maricopa County immigrant detainees--chained together in full prisoner uniforms--down the street "from the Durango Jail to the [new segregated] facility":

The parade was on a public road, Gibson Street in Phoenix, but the road was closed to all but the press. The press was notified of the public spectacle the day before and arrangements were made for all media to be present and photograph and film the prisoners. All the major television stations were present as were newspapers and radio and television helicopters hovered overhead. The forced march though short had one intended effect: it was a publicity orgy for the sheriff.

Remarking on "a particular sadness in witnessing this spectacle of human degradation," Gutierrez writes that "the symbolism was unmistakable, the men of color, the public humiliation, the forced march, the segregated camp"--but for the ever-sensationalistic U.S press, the only symbol that really matters is a dollar sign.

Protests of the corporate media embrace of bigotry and of Sheriff Arpaio directly are afoot across the U.S. and online.

The folks at Think Progress recently brought us "a report showing that, in the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1." Now that the legislation "passed the House last week with zero Republican votes, shifting the focus to the Senate," a subsequent survey (2/6/09) finds that "though the venue has changed, the debate on cable has not improved much":

In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that Republican lawmakers outnumbered Democratic lawmakers 75 to 41 on cable news interviews by members of Congress (from 6am on Monday 2/2 through 11pm on Thursday 2/5)....

Though the imbalance is already stark, the tilt of the coverage would have been even more lopsided if the analysis had been broken down into whether a lawmaker who appeared on TV was a supporter or a critic of the economic recovery plan. Some of the most frequent Democratic guests this week were outspoken critics of the proposed stimulus plans, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Found to be "particularly egregious" this week was CNBC, which "had more than twice as many conservatives, with 14 Republicans and six Democrats. Fox Business was even worse, hosting 20 Republicans for just four Democrats." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dean Baker on Stimulus Package" (1/30/09)

Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell gives another glimpse (Mother Jones, 2/5/09) at his Why Obama Won book, which found "reporters and pundits focused on flag pins, bowling and fairly trivial faux pas"--thus yielding "far more media lowlights than highlights." Resisting the urge to "do a full article just on William Kristol's errors and flubs at the New York Times," Mitchell instead lists "some defining media moments of the 2008 campaign," headed up by "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years":

On April 18... ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos focused mainly on small stuff when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the healthcare and mortgage crises, the state of the economy and other pressing issues had to wait until the midway point. Before then, Obama was pressed to explain (once again) his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his reason for not wearing a flag pin, while Clinton had to answer for her Bosnia trip exaggerations. Obama was also forced during this debate to defend his slim association with former 1960s radical Bill Ayers. This led to Obama's claim that Hillary's husband pardoned two other radicals. And so on.

Most damningly, Mitchell tells us that "Gibson only got excited when he complained about anyone daring to raise taxes on his capital gains"; read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Dubious Debates: How Media Moderators Lowered the Level of Election '08" (7-8/08) by Jacqueline Bacon

It's disturbing enough to read Chris Tomlinson's account (Huffington Post, 2/5/09) of the fact that "the Pentagon now spends more than $550 million a year--at least double the amount since 2003--on public affairs, and that doesn't including personnel costs" and how "over the past two years, the number of public affairs officers trained by the Defense Information School has grown by 24 percent to almost 3,500" but also consider that "along with putting out its own messages, the public affairs arm tries to regulate what other media put out." Some anecdotes from these efforts:

In mid-2008, Associated Press reporter Bradley Brooks was stepping off a cargo plane in Mosul en route to an embed when he saw pallbearers carry the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers from Humvee ambulances onto a plane. Brooks talked to soldiers, who mentioned their anger with political leaders, and wrote a story. Within 24 hours the military had expelled him from northern Iraq. He was told he had broken a new rule that embedded reporters could not write while in transit.

In 2008, eight journalists were detained for more than 48 hours, according to cases tracked by the AP, more than in any other year since the war began. Since 2003, the AP alone has had 11 journalists detained in Iraq for more than 24 hours. And a Reuters journalist has been detained by U.S. forces as "a security threat" since Sept. 2. "All of these journalists, with the exception of the one being held now, have been released without charge."

What really "troubles" the Committee to Protect Journalists about that last bit is that it "suggests that they are not able to successfully charge these journalists with anything." Meanwhile, on the other side of the same coin, Tomlinson tells us that "the public affairs department has even arranged to fly friendly bloggers to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act."

We noted recently Fox News' peculiar understanding of the Fair Use doctrine, which allows writers, artists and others to make reasonable use of copyrighted material so long as they don't infringe on the copyright owners' commercial rights; Fox interprets this to mean that critics should only be allowed to make use of Fox video if Fox is allowed to sell ads to run alongside the criticism.

Now another corporate media company is making strange claims against Fair Use.  The Associated Press is claiming that the well-known "HOPE" poster of Barack Obama violates its copyright, because artist Shepard Fairey used an AP photo as a model for the image.

Here's a question for AP: If a cartoonist wanted to make reference to the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" image--which is also a copyrighted AP photo--would they have to get your permission first? That's the implication of their claim about the Obama image. And the end result would be a world where artists can't talk about the images of our political leaders, because those images come to us via for-profit media--a strange position for a democracy to find itself in.

A new FAIR action alert is targeting CNN host Lou Dobbs for peddling anti-union propaganda about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), after Dobbs falsely suggested on his show (Lou Dobbs Tonight, 2/4/09) that the proposed new labor law would "end a secret ballot." In fact, the EFCA would not take away workers' rights to have a secret vote if they choose to; it would take away employers' ability to force workers to have such a vote.

(Click here to watch Dobbs' misleading report about EFCA.)

You can take action by emailing Dobbs at lou.dobbs@turner.com.

Please copy and paste your letter to the CNN host in the comments section below.

Walter Isaacson's Time cover story ("How to Save Your Newspaper") finds the magazine's former editor offering advice for the ailing corporate media. As he (and others in the business) see it, the problem is that news is now being consumed online for free, which of course makes it difficult to turn a profit (or, more to the point, the kind of profit expected by Wall Street investors).

And internet content is supported almost entirely by advertising revenue, which Isaacson sees a potentially dangerous path:

Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue.

Isaacson sees some papers experimenting with web-centric models, which is a problem:

These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers.

Huh. This is a little strange. Isaacson's point is that newspapers and magazines depend on a three-legged revenue stool--subscribers, newsstand sales and advertisers--and that relying too heavily on that third leg is a problem. But it's odd to treat this as a future or emerging problem for corporate media. Advertising revenue is traditionally much more important to a newspaper's bottom line than subscription revenue. Television and radio are almost entirely dependent on commercial money. And journalists have reported for years that pressure from advertisers threatens editorial independence (along with corporate ownership). One recent survey warned of “pressure from advertisers trying to shape coverage” and “outside control of editorial policy.” Another found that journalists “report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of the newsroom.” The dangers of relying on corporate advertisers should be well-known by now. And maybe--just maybe--such bottom-line pressures have helped create the problem facing Big Media today.

As for Time-- they've made their own curious deals with advertisers (this one, I believe, may have even happened on Isaacson's watch):

Time magazine's Spring 2000 issue was the culmination of the magazine's "Heroes for the Planet" series. Launched in 1998, the series "profiled individuals around the globe who are working to protect the natural world" (Time, Spring 2000). But Time made clear from the outset that not all environmental issues would get equal treatment. That's because the "Heroes for the Planet" series has an exclusive sponsor: Ford Motor Co. Asked about the conflict of interest presumed by having an automobile company sponsor an environmental series, Time's international editor admitted to the Wall Street Journal (9/21/98) that, no, the series wasn't likely to profile environmentalists battling the polluting auto industry. After all, Alexander explained, "we don't run airline ads next to stories about airline crashes."

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs' Michael Gillespie (1-2/09) saw Alison Weir of If Americans Knew speak about her group's "look at a category that would be universally accepted as significant and quantifiable" to examine U.S. media coverage of the Israel's occupation of Palestine: "We settled on coverage of deaths among both populations." Explaining that "first impressions are so powerful," If Americans Knew initially looked at the beginning year of the current Intifada. Starting with B'Tselem figures showing "165 Israelis were tragically killed by Palestinians, and 549 Palestinians tragically killed by Israelis," they then asked "Now how was this covered by our primetime network news broadcasts?":

Using Nexis-Lexis databases, Weir said she discovered that ABC reported Israeli deaths at a rate 3.1 times greater than Palestinian deaths, CBS reported Israeli deaths at a rate 3.8 times greater than Palestinians', and NBC reported Israeli deaths at a rate 4.0 times greater than Palestinians' during the first year (September 2000 to September 2001) of the second intifada.

Weir said she also performed original research on media coverage of the deaths of children on both sides, and in 2004, when eight Israeli children and 179 Palestinian children were killed, network news broadcasts reports were again markedly biased in favor of the deaths of Israeli children.

ABC reported on the eight Israeli children's deaths and on 20 Palestinian children's deaths, or 100 percent of Israeli children and 11 percent of Palestinian children, a ratio of 9.0 to 1. CBS reported on 4 Israeli children's deaths and 7 Palestinian children's deaths, or 50 percent of Israeli children's deaths and 4 percent of Palestinian, a ratio of 12.8 to 1. NBC reported on the 8 Israeli children's deaths and on 18 Palestinian children's deaths, or 100 percent of Israeli children and 10 percent of Palestinian children killed during 2004, a ratio of 9.9 to 1, at a time when Palestinian children were being killed at a rate 22 times greater than Israeli children, said Weir.

Exacerbating this proof of the fact that "media were using Israeli-centric perspectives to determine how they reported," is what Weir calls U.S. taxpayers' "direct connection to the anguish of Israelis and Palestinians: "We give Israel more than $7 million per day of our tax money... more than we give to all of sub-Saharan Africa." Taking the next step, If Americans Knew sought to determine why "most Americans don't know about that: Their 6-month survey of the San Francisco Chronicle "discovered that during that period there had been 251 stories about Israel-Palestine. And U.S. aid was mentioned in only three of those stories, usually in the last sentence." Weir even asks "how many times did they give the full amount" of the aid? The outrageous answer is "never once."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Illusion of Balance: NPR's Coverage of Mideast Deaths Doesn't Match Reality" (11-12/01) by Seth Ackerman

How distorted is the corporate media concept of critical journalism? Just look at Media Matters' write up (2/5/09) of a cable news show that named one commentator its "Muckraker of the Day" for presenting bogus evidence against global warming:

On the February 2 edition of MSBNC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, anchor David Shuster let syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock tout climate change skeptic Martin Hertzberg's assertion that global warming is not occurring because, in Murdock's words, "the Earth temperature has gone down 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1997." Murdock was referencing the following quote from Hertzberg that Murdock included in a February 1 column: "The average temperature of Earth's atmosphere has declined over the last 10 years. From the El Nino Year of 1998 until January 2007, it dropped a quarter of a degree Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit). From January 2007 to the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping three-quarters of a degree Celsius (1.35 degrees Fahrenheit)." Rather than challenge this use of data, Shuster named Murdock "our Muckraker of the Day" and "congratulat[ed]" Murdock for "stirring the pot."

"But climate scientists warn against cherry-picking yearly temperature averages as purported evidence that global warming is not occurring, especially" Media Matters notes, "from years in which El Niño and La Niña events occurred, as Murdock and Hertzberg did."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "In Denial on Climate Change: Leading Pundits Reject Science on Global Warming" (5-6/07) by Peter Hart