Guest blogging at Women In Media & News (3/25/09), professors Jamii Claiborne and Susanne Gubanc write that, while most "mass media voices had good intentions" and "seemed genuine in their desire to make the alleged February domestic violence incident between the seemingly perfect young celebrity couple, singers Rihanna and Chris Brown, into a 'teachable moment,'" for this "noble effort" they still "are not applauding."

By focusing the majority of attention on what Rihanna could have done differently before the alleged attack or should definitely do now after the violence has come to light, this loud, mass media echo chamber has engaged in classic victim-blaming. Coverage that emphasizes primarily the victim's role and responsibility--and takes the onus off the perpetrator--is likely do more harm than good to young women who live through dating violence outside the celebrity bubble. Violence against women is exacted by men with a bemused tolerance; it's time the media and men took on the responsibility to stop the violence.

In our personal lives, blaming the victim often comes from the need to deny that we ourselves could be next. In order to avoid confronting our own fear of powerlessness, we, with media reinforcement, assume the victim had the power to prevent what happened. Since Rihanna did not prevent it, we reason we are more intelligent, aware and stronger than she is, and so what happened to her could never happen to us. Media coverage thus allows viewers to indulge in the patronizing and arrogant assumption that we are immune to violence. Regardless of how subtle or unintentional, this sort of reporting and commentary reinforces the notion that "we"--those of us who are not currently in abusive relationships--are superior to the victim.

Thus, Claiborne and Gubanc say, "embedded in their good intentions are implications and oversights that do more to ignore at the least--and further at the most--the social problem of violence against women."

Responding to a Washington Post op-ed in which one Martin Feldstein "explains how Obama's proposed limitation on the deductibility of charitable contributions by upper-income taxpayers is a horrible idea," Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 3/25/09) asks

What does Feldstein have to say about the tax code change? Well:

In effect, the change would be a tax on the charities, reducing their receipts by a dollar for every dollar of extra revenue the government collects. It is hard to imagine a rationale for taxing schools, hospitals, medical research budgets and arts organizations in this way.... The proposed tax change would apply to married couples with incomes of more than $250,000....

I dunno. I think one rationale for taxing charities in this way is that the government somehow has to come up with the $180 billion it just handed over to AIG.

Seeking a reason for this logical disconnect, Schwarz looks to the Post's identification of Feldstein as simply "an economics professor at Harvard University [and] president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research" and notes "one affiliation the Post left out": "Martin Feldstein is a longtime member of AIG's board of directors. He's also a member of the board's finance committee."

Listening to "budget hawk" media figures who urge President Obama "to commit to spending cuts and/or tax increases" because they are "upset that the deficits projected for 2013 or 2019 are too large," Dean Baker (TPM Café, 3/25/09) finds it

especially annoying to hear the whining from this group of deficit hawks since their whining in prior years helped to drown out serious discussion of the dangers posed by an $8 trillion housing bubble. While some of us were yelling at the top of our lungs about the imminent disaster that would hit the economy when the housing bubble burst, the media chose to focus on these deficit hawks with their dire warnings about budget deficits 40 or 50 years in the future. Because the media and political elites chose to pay more attention to the deficit hawks than those warning about the housing bubble, we now get to enjoy the current economic crisis. And, one result of the economic crisis is (drum roll, please) . . . record deficits.

Compelled to "put the point so simply that even a Washington Post editor can understand it," Baker writes that, "because the media highlighted the views of the people who were ranting about the deficit rather than the views of people who understood the economy, we both got a wrecked economy and larger deficits."

For the New York Post (3/27/09), it's "Free Dumb Tower." For the same day's New York Daily News, it means "No More Freedom." They're talking about 1 World Trade Center, which is what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced it was calling the skyscraper it's building on the site of the old World Trade Center destroyed on September 11--rather than Freedom Tower, as it had been previously referred to.

And the tabloids, naturally, are outraged. "Freedom is out of fashion at Ground Zero," declared the Post. "Once hailed as a beacon of rebirth in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the Freedom Tower has been stripped of its patriotic name -- which has been swapped out for the more marketable 'One World Trade Center.'"

It's worth recalling that despite the popular media line at the time, there's little evidence that Al-Qaeda targeted the towers because they hated our freedom. The main association between "freedom" and the past or future buildings on the site is "free enterprise." Not only is that more clearly conveyed by the old World Trade Center name, but it's exemplified by the fact that the developers of the building are changing its name in apparent reaction to the preferences of the kinds of businesses that are likely to rent there.

But even commercial freedom looks too free for the Post and the Daily News--they seem to prefer the kind of "freedom" that can be used to shame people who are insufficiently patriotic.

Considering the fact that, "while the Obama administration says that the problems of the region cannot be solved by military means, the basic approach is reliance on heightened military means," FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Huffington Post, 3/24/09) thinks that "we desperately need a substantive national debate on U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Solomon notes that one attempt at such a debate, an open letter that "lays down a clear line of opposition to the rationales for stepping up the warfare," garnered signatures from only "14 members of the House (eight Democrats, six Republicans)." But the U.S. Congress looks positively enlightened when compared to its hometown paper:

One of several journalists in Afghanistan on a tour "organized by the staff of commanding Gen. David D. McKiernan," the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, wrote a March 23 op-ed in support of an invigorated "counterinsurgency strategy." With journalistic resolve, he explained: "Everyone expects a surge of violence and American casualties this year; no one expects a decisive improvement in the situation for at least several years beyond that."

The commanding general, Diehl added, does not anticipate that the Afghan army "can defend the country on its own" until 2016. In effect, the message is to stay the course for another seven years: "The thousands of American soldiers and civilians pouring into the country deserve that strategic patience; without it, the sacrifices we will soon hear of will be wasted."

Solomon hears "chillingly familiar echoes" in "the perverse logic of escalating the war in Afghanistan. 'Strategic patience'--more and more war--will be necessary so that those who must die will not have died in vain."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an explanation (3/23/09, ad-viewing required) for why he thinks that Howard Kurtz's belief that the image of corporate reporters as "just a bunch of cozy Washington insiders" is not "that big a deal"--because "there's such a built-in adversarial relationship between the press and the pols"--constitutes "an extremely funny joke today, showing why he is the 'media critic' for both the Washington Post and CNN":

That is some very penetrating media criticism there. The media and political leaders are at each other's throats so viciously, they have such sharply conflicting interests, that it's a wonder they can even be in the same room together without physical confrontation. For instance, it was the same Howie Kurtz who, in 2004, wrote this about what happened at his own newspaper:

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

Kurtz's own paper also reported Tim Russert's policy of refusing to report anything said by government officials unless explicitly authorized by them to do so.

Buttressing his condemnation with many more examples of such "adversarial" reportage, Greenwald also updates his post with grim video footage of "the ugly weekend riot that nearly erupted as a result of the intractable media/politician animosity" on display at presidential candidate John McCain's barbecue for his "base."

Read the recent FAIR Media Advisory: "The Short, Happy Iraq War of Howard Kurtz" (3/20/09).

Proving that the Washington Post is not the only purportedly "liberal" outlet interested in whitewashing the dark history of U.S. involvement in Latin America, Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/23/09) has blogged NPR's March 21 episode of Weekend Edition Saturday, in which the show

returned to the scene of the crimes of El Salvador's 1980s bloodbath--a U.S.-nurtured extreme-right orgy of torture and murder against organized labor, the poor, church leaders and leftists (and their families, friends, associates or potential associates).

There were a few problems with the report. Jason Beaubien's reporting isn't great; he does a little plastic surgery on history, claiming "the Reagan administration jumped into the Cold War conflict, spending billions of dollars to fight the Marxist guerrillas while Cuba and other communist states backed the FMLN." That's a rather tidy and truncated version of the long history of U.S. support for the murderous right in El Salvador--gathering steam and corpses especially in the 1960s.

Mytwords notes how Beaubien's segment conveniently "also ignores the historical record of who killed most of those 75,000-plus civilians in the 'Cold War conflict.'"

News Corpse blogger Mark Howard goes deep into the belly of the beast (3/21/09) with a look at some revealing comments from Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume upon receiving the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence: "Thanks to Brent [Bozell] and the team at the Media Research Center...for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years." Hume's subsequent admission that "it was a daily buffet of material to work from, and we certainly made tremendous use of it" makes Howard think

it sounds like the MRC was Fox News' wire service. They saved Fox the trouble of having to go out and make up the news by themselves.... But this isn't the first time a Foxian has revealed that they are in the employ of rightist ideologues:

• Fox anchor Jon Scott was caught reading directly from a Republican press release as though it were news.
• Rupert Murdoch admitted that he tried to shape public opinion on the war in Iraq.
• Murdoch also boasted that his Fox Business Network would be a more “business-friendly” network....
• In a revealing bit of staff development, George Bush hired Fox anchor Tony Snow to be his press secretary.

And, as a bonus bit "just added" by The Most Biased Name in News, Howard tells us that on March 23, "in an interview with NPR, Fox News VP Bill Shine blurted out that Fox is the 'voice of opposition.'"

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof issued a call in his column today for pundit accountability.

After making a problematic argument about knowledge and experience being overrated, Kristof correctly pointed out that in the media, “the marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability," and he concluded his article with a call for action: “Hold us accountable!”

Does this mean Kristof will now acknowledge the error of his prediction last month that the president of Sudan would not kick out aid groups in Darfur if the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest?

As Julie Hollar recently noted on the FAIR Blog, Kristof had encouraged the ICC warrant, writing (2/26/09) that fears of such retaliation were "overblown."

But Sudanese president Bashir has indeed followed through on his threat, lashing out in exactly the way many other experts--including Julie Flint and Alex de Waal (Guardian, 7/13/08)-- had predicted. Yet as Hollar noted on the FAIR Blog, Kristof didn’t “acknowledge his error and continue[d] to dispense advice” in his subsequent (3/4/09) column on Darfur.

Nor did he acknowledge the error in his latest (3/8/09) Darfur column.

Perhaps it's time to heed Kristof's call to action.

(Kristof's email address is, by the way, nkristof@nytimes.com, and the email for letters to the Times editor is letters@nytimes.com. Kristof also has a blog where concerned readers can post comments.)

A new FAIR action alert calls on the Fox News Channel to answer for host Bill O'Reilly's pattern of ambushing his critics.

O'Reilly (O'Reilly Factor, 3/23/08) recently targeted Think Progress blog editor Amanda Terkel while she was on vacation, sending his producer Jesse Watters to confront Terkel in one of the ambush-style interviews that he specializes in. Terkel had dared to point out that O'Reilly, who was invited to speak at a fundraiser for a foundation for rape survivors, had previously suggested that a "moronic" rape/murder victim had invited assault by her drinking and the way she was dressed.

FAIR's alert calls on Fox News Executive VP John Moody (john.moody@foxnews.com) to clarify whether the O'Reilly show's tactics meet Fox's ethical standards.

Please share any letters you send to Moody by pasting them in the comments section below.

An exchange from the Chris Matthews Show (3/22/09)--featuring the host, columnist Kathleen Parker, NBC's Mark Whitaker and Time columnist Joe Klein--about the threat to investigative reporting in the wake of corporate media's current financial woes:

MATTHEWS: The Washington Post did it with that...

WHITAKER: Right, the Washington Post.

MATTHEWS: You know when we found out about how they were treating our veterans coming back from Iraq over at Walter Reed?

PARKER: Right.

MATTHEWS: Because of Dana Priest.

PARKER: The--Priest.

KLEIN: Right.

WHITAKER: Right. (Unintelligible)

MATTHEWS: Because she had the backing to go do it.

Not to take anything away from Dana Priest at the Post--who won a Pulitzer, after all--but the first I'd heard about such issues was from the reporting of Mark Benjamin at Salon (and before that, UPI). Priest's stories got major attention in official Washington, and were picked up by the rest of the corporate media. But that's a sign that elites pay more attention to news in elite newspapers.

If big-time journalists paid more attention to their colleagues who are doing important work at less prestigious outlets, they'd feel better about the state of their profession.

Last night (3/23/08) Bill O'Reilly aired the results of his stalking expedition against Think Progress blogger Amanda Terkel, who had dared to question (3/1/09) the appropriateness of O'Reilly speaking at a fundraiser for a foundation for rape survivors in light of his suggestion (Radio Factor, 8/2/06) that a "moronic" rape/murder victim had invited assault by her drinking and the way she was dressed.

In the segment, O'Reilly presents the controversy sparked by his speaking a dinner for the Alexa Foundation as a conspiracy masterminded by "elements at NBC News" led by NBC president Jeff Zucker, whom O'Reilly refers to with more than a whiff of paranoia as "the man behind the curtain." But the person O'Reilly went after directly was Terkel, who the segment referred to as a "a villain" and "just dishonest" and accused of producing "perhaps the worst garbage" about O'Reilly's suitability as an anti-rape advocate.

O'Reilly's chief stalker, Jesse Watters, apparently followed a vacationing Terkel for two hours before badgering her to explain "the Mel Gibson component to Bill's analysis"--the context that O'Reilly's remarks about "moronic" murder victim Jennifer Moore had supposedly been yanked from. The blogger did not immediately recall this aspect of the three-year-old broadcast, but when she subsequently looked it up, she discovered the connection that O'Reilly drew between the actor's anti-Semitic tirade and the murder victim's death (Think Progress, 3/24/09):

I think it's safe to say that if Mel Gibson didn't get drunk, he wouldn't be in this terrible situation he finds himself in. And if a young woman, 18-year-old Jennifer Moore of Harrington Park, N.J., didn’t get drunk, she’d be alive today.

Hateful as O'Reilly's blame-the-victim rhetoric about Moore was, O'Reilly has stooped even lower, suggesting that an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped and molested over a four-year period didn't escape his abductor because he enjoyed his captivity (O'Reilly Factor, 1/15/07):

And the question is, why didn't [Shawn Hornbeck] escape when he could have?... The Stockholm syndrome thing, I don't buy it.... The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn't have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted...I think when it all comes down, what's going to happen is, there was an element here that this kid liked about his circumstances.

Women invite assault by the way they dress; kids like to be raped. To quote Bill O'Reilly out of context: "It doesn't get much more evil than that."

Media Bistro's Christine Delargy quotes (3/23/09) at length from a letter to the Washington Post questioning the "lack of diversity on WaPo's Sunday editorial pages":

Sunday's editorial pages are presumably the most-read of the week. They should represent the most critical and varied thinking of the week and set the standard for editorial pages. Help me understand the thinking behind the selection of the March 15 writers:

Eleven white guys, one white woman. At least six are more than 60 years old. Four are elected Republicans, but none are elected Democrats, even though the Senate, the House and the White House plus a majority of the governorships are controlled by Democrats. I do not remember Democrats being overrepresented on your pages during their "wilderness years." Quite the opposite.

Hopeful that such a persuasive letter might affect some change at the Post? First, consider Delargy's other note about the paper's responsiveness in general: "Also in this Sunday's Post, WaPo's ombudsman Andrew Alexander points out 'a corrections process in need of correcting,' reporting that the paper has a backlog of correction requests dating back to 2004." In other words, don't hold your breath.

Reporting that "L.A. Times blogger Andrew Malcolm started a web freakout" by suggesting "that the White House was blocking press access to a ceremony with the National Newspaper Publisher's Association," American Prospect blogger Adam Serwer (3/20/09) writes that, "in fact, part of the ceremony was an exclusive interview which naturally, the NNPA didn't want other reporters to have access to." But Serwer sees an entirely different, more substantive story here:

Lost in the hubbub is the fact that the NNPA is an association of a formerly thriving breed, the black community newspaper. Obviously the decline of the newspaper has hurt even very successful publications, but these newspapers, which report in great detail on issues and events that often get overlooked by larger publications, have been hurting for a long time. The black newspaper in America has a long, often heroic history: When white papers ignored crimes of lynching and brutality against black folks in the South, black newspapers published stories about them.

The NNPA itself has only been around for about 70 years, but it's the last of its kind. The fact that the president is giving the NNPA an exclusive interview is both a recognition of the perilous status of the black community newspaper and its illustrious history. Currently, the NNPA offices are located at Howard University, where in addition to publishing pieces from member papers, they train journalism students there in the craft of reporting.

"Given the state of the press these days," Serwer thought "this would be something worth writing about. But like the stories that the NNPA member papers themselves cover, this one isn't worth the big boys' time."
See Extra!: "A Different Race: The Black Press Reveals Gaps in Mainstream Election Coverage" (11-12/04) by Jacqueline Bacon.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok has the latest (HateWatch, 3/19/09) on CNN's "Lou Dobbs, the insult-spewing Latino-basher":

Dobbs, of course, is known for regularly pushing defamatory falsehoods about undocumented immigrants--they fill one third of American prison and jail cells, they're part of a secret Mexican plan to "reconquer" the American Southwest, they are largely responsible for a spate of 7,000 recent leprosy cases.... Even when Dobbs isn't hosting his own show, his fill-in hosts spew such racist propaganda as the lie about subprime housing loans going to 5 million "illegal aliens."

But Dobbs may have outdone himself on March 10, when he launched into a furious tirade against President Barack Obama, who earlier that day gave a major speech on education reform from the Hispanic Chamber's Washington, D.C., offices.

"I don't know what’s happened to this White House, but the wheels appear to have come completely off here over the last several days," Dobbs fulminated. "Making a decision to talk about a national initiative on education from the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which is effectively an organization that is interested in the export of American capital and production to Mexico and Mexico's export of drugs and illegal aliens to the United States. This is crazy stuff."

Potok agrees at least with the "crazy" part, considering that the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in fact "is well known as a relatively conservative, pro-business organization that represents the interests of more than 2.5 million Hispanic-owned businesses." Dobbs' smear was so egregious that "the man who has in the past utterly refused to retract false allegations, actually offered up a 'correction.'" But, while "it wasn't known if that was prompted by his CNN overlords, the angry demands for a retraction from the Hispanic Chamber, or his own guilty conscience," Potok is "betting it wasn't the latter."