Quoting Washington Post/CNN media "critic" Howard Kurtz slamming Headline News for "talking about this constantly on cable for more than a week" and "feasting on this terrible situation," Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 3/30/09) also cites Kurtz railing against media obsession with octuplet mother Nadya Suleman on CNN: "The media were demonizing her....all the while capitalizing on America's latest soap opera."

But, lo and behold, a "Crossfire-like vapid shouting match" couldn't be resisted:

Kurtz dedicated an entire segment of this past Sunday's Reliable Sources to a gratuitous pie fight between two players involved in Nadya "Octomom" Suleman's never-ending nationally televised freak show. But a little over a month ago, Kurtz decried the media's exploitation of the octuplet mother for ratings and for doing so under the false pretense that concern for her babies' well-being drove their 24/7 coverage.

While seeing evidence that "Kurtz seems to signal that he's in on the joke," as Jacobson sees it, "the problem is, he's not just in on the joke, he's part of the joke of which he's supposed to be critiquing." Picking from among "scores of worthy topics [that] were open for a substantive media discussion," Jacobson writes that Kurtz instead

might have covered the fact that, according to LexisNexis, not one broadcast or cable network news program--including CNN--reported last week's revelations that Bush administration prosecutors tried to pressure former Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, after years of being brutally tortured and having never been charged with a crime, to sign a statement saying he was never tortured and that he committed terrorist acts he didn't commit in return for his release.

Even though "it's no Octomom," Jacobson says this is "merely the kind of story that, consciously or not, affects every single American when millions of them are deprived of its coverage."

The Maynard Institute's Richard Prince (Journal-isms, 3/30/09) has a look at "a two-day conference in Washington called '1968 and Beyond: A Symposium on the Impact of the Black Power Movement on America,'" with "hardly anyone from the mainstream media...there to cover it."

Urging his readers to "think beyond the news media script that often pits a noble civil rights movement against a 'destructive' one preaching black power," Prince quotes some symposium participants:

"The white media just basically attacked us," Askia Muhammad Toure, activist, educator and poet and one of Monday's panelists, told Journal-isms. "Very few black people were writing in the white media at the time, and those who did attacked us, too." He attributed the attacks to fear of black self-assertion....

The activists didn't always feel so alienated, according to playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones. The media "were a little naive earlier," he told Journal-isms. "But they got wise. You used to be able to hear Dr. King, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael," he said, referring to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But those voices soon disappeared. Today, "they only put fools" on the air. (And too many, Toure added, are happy to go on.)

Poet Sonia Sanchez assessed the "very important role" of media in the black power movement as "positive and negative, but mostly negative," and "said most reporters were more interested in creating an uproar than providing context and getting facts right." In fact, "she said she doesn't see much difference today, citing recent coverage of Obama's grappling with the economy." Prince backs up the idea of an essentially unchanged corporate press with depressingly familiar statistics from StopBigMedia.com: "Racial and ethnic minorities make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, yet own just 7.7 percent of full-power radio stations and 3.15 percent of television stations."

News reports on a March 25 F-22 crash in Mojave, Calif., that "contained some strange assertions about the cost of the F-22" have budget myth-buster Winslow Wheeler (Military.com, 3/28/09) decrying the "utter hogwash" that reporters printed "possibly based on the price asserted in the Air Force's 'fact' sheet on the F-22 that was linked to a Pentagon 'news' story on the crash." Wheeler demonstrates how the uncritical dissemination of the assertion therein--that "the cost per aircraft was typically described in many media articles as about $140 million"--means that "the tragic event was apparently used to disseminate some booster-baloney":

The latest "Selected Acquisition Report" from the Defense Department is the most definitive data available on the costs for the F-22. The SAR shows a "Current Estimate" for the F-22 program in "Then-Year" dollars of $64.540 billion, which includes both R&D and procurement. That $64.5 billion has bought a grand total of 184 aircraft.

Do the arithmetic: $64.540/184 = $350.1. Total program unit price for one F-22, what approximates the "sticker price," is $350 million per copy.

So, where does the bogus $143 million per copy come from? Most will recognize that as the "flyaway" cost: the amount we pay today, just for the current production costs of an F-22. (Note, however, the "flyaway" cost does not include the gas, pilot etc. needed to fly the aircraft away.)

Striking at the heart of such military budget propaganda, Wheeler responds to credulous reporters: "OK, so the F-22 is really pricey and the Air Force and its boosters are full of baloney on the cost, but it's a great airplane, a real war winner, right? Oh, please. Consider the source."

Writing under the pen name Jami Tarn (CounterPunch, 3/27/09), one San Francisco lawyer is rallying against "a hate-filled column in the San Francisco Chronicle." Chronicle commentator Debra J. Saunders "insinuated that Tristan Anderson, still lingering in a coma in Tel Aviv after taking an Israeli tear gas canister to the face, costing him part of his frontal lobe and possibly his right eye, deserves this comeuppance for daring to join Palestinians in protest against Israel’s illegal Apartheid wall." Saunders, Tarn wrote, reduced such suffering to the snarky "love-it-or-leave-it Amer'kuh" line that Anderson now has "found out in the worst way that political protest outside the Bay Area isn't all energy bars and catch-and-release."

Tarn notes that, to Saunders, even "a temporary traffic-snarling protest is 'menacing and violence-tinged'; everything the police say is credible":

Saunders lamented, "The problem is…when an officer's skull is fractured--as happened to SFPD's Peter Shields during an anti-World Trade Organization protest in 2005--there are no angry marches closing down Market Street." As one of the lawyers who represented independent journalist Josh Wolf, jailed for eight months for contempt for refusing on principle to turn over his video from that incident to the FBI (which did not show the attack on Shields, but did show Shields' partner, Officer Michael Wolf, choking a completely non-threatening protester half to death), I know something about the events--a protest against the G8 Summit, not the WTO. It began when Officer Shields sped down a dark street in his patrol car, dangerously scattering protesters like chickens, then jumped out wildly swinging his baton. According to his own account, he was in the midst of striking a protester in the arms and legs when someone hit him over the head.

With the discussion of Afghanistan sounding more and more like the debate over Iraq these days, we thought it would be worthwhile to point out how similar the media rhetoric around all of the U.S.'s recent wars has been. To that end, we've put up some classic FAIR articles from the January/February 1990 issue of Extra!--which happens to be the first issue that I edited--critiquing corporate media coverage of the Panama invasion.

There's the main piece, "How Television Sold the Panama Invasion" by Mark Cook and Jeff Cohen, documenting how U.S. journalists viewed the brief war through the eyes of the U.S. military and Panama's tiny elite; "Censored News: Drug Links of Panama's New Rulers," which exposed the hypocrisy of the main rationale offered for the invasion; "'Noriega Offered His Usual Damp, Limp Handshake to Bush's Firm Grip,'" dissecting the propaganda offered in a Newsweek cover story; and "Reporters Rallying Round the Flag," which offered this classic quote from a CBS producer:

When American troops are involved and taking losses, this is not the time to be running critical commentary. The American public will be rallying around the flag.

For more evidence that coverage of U.S. warfare hasn't changed all that much in the past three decades, see FAIR's work on Kosovo, Somalia, the Gulf War and Grenada.

Author and journalist Sheila Gibbons has some regrettably foreseeable news (Womens eNews, 3/30/09) on how female reporters who "worked hard to establish themselves in what had long been a male-dominated field" are faring in a time of massive media cutbacks and layoffs:

By the end of 2009, a quarter of all the newsroom jobs that existed in 2001 will be gone, says the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

This outgoing tide is taking away the reporting, editing and producing jobs of seasoned journalists, many of them women.

I'm thinking of investigative reporting ace Roberta Baskin of WJLA-TV in Washington, who in January picked up a prestigious duPont-Columbia University Award for her work at the station and lost her job the next day.

Another casualty: Glenda Holste, former associate editor of the editorial page at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who left the paper when her values and those of her corporate bosses "no longer matched," as she put it, and staffing levels began to shrink.

Margie Freivogel, for 34 years a reporter and editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, took a buyout in 2006 when the paper was sold.

They, and many like them, lost or left jobs for which they were superbly qualified. What a loss for them, for their viewers and readers, and for younger people to whom they could have been marvelous mentors.

"It sometimes takes so long for women to get to those spots, it is worrisome," says Dawn Garcia...president of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

Holste's and Freivogel's silver-lining optimism--"the new platforms make the traditional media gatekeeper less relevant than it's ever been," since "the Internet may be friendlier to women" than traditional media--takes on added importance in light of the other veteran reporter's history:

In 1996, Baskin managed to break the story on Nike's Vietnam sweatshops on CBS's 48 Hours, which received enormous attention. The program was updated for re-airing in 1997 but was pulled after CBS and Nike inked a deal for coverage of the upcoming Winter Olympics that put CBS's correspondents in clothing displaying the Nike "swoosh," Baskin says.

NPR watchdog Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/28/09) would just "love to know what it costs NPR to station Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Afghanistan," from where she dispatches to U.S. public radio such "news" as U.S.-installed Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai telling reporters "that he welcomes the increased American focus on Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan,"  that "the plan will help restore Afghans' faith in western efforts in their country" and--in an actual soundbite from Karzai--"It's exactly what Afghan people were hoping for and seeking, therefore it has our full support."

Nelson also reported, "Meanwhile in the southern province of Helmand, Afghan and coalition forces killed 12 militants Friday night."

Nelson's report has Mytwords thinking it's a

good thing she's actually there and can verify what Karzai said, including that awesome, exclusive voice recording of Karzai himself speaking--wow! And it's amazing that she was able to scoot down to Helmand province to confirm that those 12 Friday night "kills" were actually "militants." I mean, seriously, if she weren't actually there, I might think that she was just reading this crap on Voice of America and Stars and Stripes.

Looking back over how corporate "media abandoned any pretense of objectivity in pushing the original TARP back in the fall," when "they eagerly pushed the story that the economy would collapse if the TARP did not pass," Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/28/09) recalls how "media never told the public that the Fed had the ability to takeover the banks in the event of a national emergency and it had plans to do exactly this back in the early '80s debt crisis." Which makes it somewhat unsurprising that "the new line that being pushed to argue that there is no alternative to the Geithner plan is the claim that Obama would need congressional authorization to have the FDIC take over bankrupt banks":

Is that so? It's not clear why. The law authorizes the FDIC to take over bankrupt banks. Under the law passed by Congress, the FDIC is supposed to take over Citigroup, Bank of America and other zombie banks.

It's likely that the FDIC would not have enough money to pay for cleaning up these zombies, especially if it pays off the banks' bondholders. (It has no legal or moral obligation to pay these bondholders, unlike FDIC-insured deposits.)

The Fed could almost certainly lend the FDIC the necessary money, as it is doing under the Geithner plan. The Fed can pretty much do whatever it wants, so it is not clear why anyone would think it could give money to subsidize banks through the Geithner plan, but not to clean up the banks' mess.

Of course, the other story is interesting also. Suppose that the FDIC seized the bankrupt banks and lacked the funds to clean up the mess. Would the Republicans allow the banks' bondholders to get cleaned out? That doesn't seem likely, but it might be fun to watch.

The underreported "fact is that the banks and their political allies have lied to the public continuously throughout this crisis to get more taxpayer money for their pockets. It is irresponsible to take anything these people say at face value at this point." See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Going All Out for Bank Bailout: Media Paint Crisis as Too 'Urgent' for Skepticism" (1/09) by Dean Baker & Kris Warner

Jonathan Schwarz has a quick post (3/27/09) over on his A Tiny Revolution blog asking readers, "Have I Lost My Mind?" or "is it really true that the New Republic published a 6,000-word profile of Larry Summers" that wondered if "Summers might appear to have less to contribute on the bank and credit-market front" since "his exposure to Wall Street over the years has been limited."

Schwarz has to ask how it was possible to print that passage

without mentioning Summers spent several years as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the world's largest hedge funds?... That's such an incredible dereliction of basic journalism that I wouldn't think even the New Republic would be capable of it.

The New York Times reported today (3/30/09) that New York State government had reached an agreement on a $131.8 billion budget. The third paragraph of the front-page story by Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim reads:

And despite the enormous fiscal pressure the state faces, the budget contains $170 million in financing for pet projects--an amount unchanged from last year--suggesting that Albany’s appetite for what critics call pork-barrel spending appeared to be undiminished. Listed in the budget were grants to gun clubs, an upstate museum dedicated to bricks and brick-making, the Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta and an organization known as the Urban Yoga Foundation.

Note that $170 million is 0.13 percent of $131.8 billion--roughly 1/1000th of New York's total budget. So maybe "Albany's appetite for what critics call pork-barrel spending" isn't so large after all, even if it is "undiminished." Why, then, is this trivial aspect of the budget in the third paragraph, while the reader doesn't learn about healthcare cuts until the 11th paragraph, and doesn't find out they amount to $2.3 billion until the 20th paragraph?

Sure, yoga is funny, brick-making museums are funny, and when you combine "Soccer Hall of Fame" and "Oneonta" you've got comedy gold. But the emphasis should be on the aspects of the budget that have widespread impact on readers' lives, rather than on a minuscule fraction of the budget that the Times finds easy to mock.

It's to self-described "establishment" journalist Evan Thomas' credit that he calls attention (Newsweek, 4/6/09) to economist Paul Krugman's progressive criticism of the Obama administration's financial bailout plan; corporate media generally pay much more attention to critics from the right.

But the same shallowness that renders most media policy discussions virtually useless infects Thomas' article, which seems more interested in analyzing Krugman's personality than his economics. "A lot of what he says is wrong and not considered," asserts George Mason economist Daniel Klein. Such as? Thomas doesn't say (nor does he allude to Klein's right-wing politics). "In areas outside his expertise he sometimes gets his facts wrong," Thomas asserts--without offering examples.

In a rare glimpse of substance, Thomas cites some unnamed administration officials' specific criticisms of Krugman's bank-nationalization proposals. Thomas' summary of the economist's counter-argument: "Krugman swats away these arguments, though he acknowledges he's not a 'detail' man."

One suspects that Krugman had more to say than that, and including his response might have helped readers determine whose policies might better address the economic crisis. But Thomas needed to save room to describe his subject's "lovely custom-built wood, stone and glass house by a brook in bucolic Princeton."

Free Press' Craig Aaron and Joseph Torres (Guardian.co.uk, 3/26/09) promptly knock down the scary development in which Nancy Pelosi recently "asked attorney general Eric Holder to consider loosening antitrust laws to help out struggling newspapers by allowing more media mergers. Holder responded by saying he is open to revisiting the rules":

Pelosi's request sounds innocuous at first--after all, struggling newspapers seem to need all the help they can get. But opening the door to more media consolidation is not the cure for the crisis in journalism. More of this bad medicine will only weaken reporting and worsen the health of our democracy.

As a few big companies swallowed up more local media outlets, they gutted newsrooms. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the industry lost 5,000 journalists last year and has slashed 16 percent of its news staff since 2001. Is it any surprise that fewer people are buying newspapers when reporters are being taken off their beats and bureaus are being shuttered?

But media consolidation hasn't been a disaster only for dedicated journalists or the public who rely on reporters to keep an eye on their leaders. It's also been bad for business.

Just a few years ago, the average profit margin for newspapers was over 20 percent--with some bringing in twice as much or more. But that did not satisfy the newspaper executives or Wall Street. Instead of investing in the quality of their products and innovating for the future, the big media companies have been obsessed with short-term gains. Instead of bolstering their news-gathering or adjusting to the new media landscape, companies like McClatchy, Tribune and Lee Enterprises used these astronomical profits to buy up other properties.

And of course, throughout this process, "federal regulators rubber-stamped these mega-mergers," even though "the media giants took on massive amounts of debt."

David Sirota has a new column (Creators Syndicate, 3/27/09) chronicling the nature of "newspapers' self-inflicted blows":

First, financially strapped newspapers undermined their comparative advantage by replacing audience-attracting local exclusives with cheaper national content. Then the providers of that national content diverted resources from tough-to-report investigative journalism that builds loyal readership and into paparazzi-like birdcage liner that unconvincingly portrays politicians, CEOs and their minions as celebrities.

Former journalist David Simon, "whose HBO series The Wire examined this trend," gives Sirota the awful truth: "In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation."

Want to know if "the media did a great job" covering Barack Obama's second major presidential press conference? Jason Linkins says (Huffington Post, 3/25/09) you can "just ask the media! Because they'll tell you!"

But "at the same time, the media is also quick to point out that the press conference was 'totally boring!'" Among those bemoaning what Linkins deems "certainly a strange coincidence" is NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd, who thought that "more than anything else, Obama's news conference last night resembled a campaign TV ad," and asked, "how many times did we hear Obama mention his budget's top priorities: education, energy, healthcare, reducing the deficit?" Linkins' reply:

Indeed, HOW MANY TIMES DID OBAMA TALK ABOUT THE BUDGET? Jesus, it was almost as if he kept getting questions about the budget. In fact, it was ALMOST AS IF Jennifer Loven, Jake Tapper, Ed Henry, Chip Reid and Chuck Todd himself asked a bunch of questions about spending and budgets! Was it like a "campaign TV ad"? Hmmm. I wonder if that's because Obama spent a lot of time, on the campaign trail, patiently explaining his budget priorities, amid approximately a million billion questions about "HOW WILL YOU PAY FOR THESE THINGS?"

Yes. It's the repetition of perennial questions--questions whose answers, offered long ago, were so satisfying to voters that they voted in accordance with their satisfaction--that BORED, thunderously.

Linkins' "look at the breakdown" of questions put to Obama yields "a pattern" in which "'traditional' media outlets brought the repetitive, dull, blunt force trauma, and the smaller, less-called-upon outfits provided the evening's flavor," with questions on such interesting and important topics as violence in Mexico, homelessness and stem cell research.

The New York Times editorial page's lending of space to former AIG financial vice president Jake DeSantis' plea for "us all to reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit" has incurred some of Matt Taibbi's trademark wrath (Alternet, 3/26/09):

He acts like he's a victim because he didn't get to keep his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 in the middle of a global depression. And he really loses his fucking mind when he writes:

None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber's salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you're inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down--well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn't get paid for that job.

Schooling DeSantis on life "in the real world," Taibbi tells him that "when your company burns a house down, you're not getting paid by that client": "It's only on Wall Street, where the every-man-for-himself ethos is built into an insanely selfish and greed-addled compensation system, that people like you expect to get paid in a bubble--only there do people expect their performance bonuses no matter how much money the shareholders lose overall, no matter how many people get laid off."