Personally inclined to think that "CNBC may be beyond repair," John Nichols (Nation, 3/17/09) still thinks a new Fix CNBC! campaign's "messaging is smart and instructive with regard to the broader media crisis in America," quoting their open letter to the financial network:

Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism--asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies and reporting the truth. Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You've been so obsessed with getting "access" to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today.

You screwed up badly. Don't apologize--fix it!

CNBC should publicly declare that its new overriding mission will be responsible journalism that holds Wall Street accountable. As a down payment, we ask you to hire some new economic voices--people who have a track record of being right about the economic crisis and holding Wall Street executives' feet to the fire.

Apparently lots of folks share Nichols' approval of the effort, since well "more than 10,000 people have signed the open letter" already, such as "Dean Baker... Free Press' Josh Silver, FAIR's Peter Hart and Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor, the co-founders of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is promoting the initiative."

Jon Stewart (3/17/09) has found Glenn Beck expressing his philosophy in what may be its purest form:

Believe in something!  Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!

The ABC network, in conjunction with the BBC and Japan's NHK, has repeatedly polled Iraqis about the state of their country and the U.S. occupation. On Monday night (3/16/09) they aired a report that featured findings from the latest poll. Anchor Charles Gibson reported:

Every year we have taken an extensive look at where things stand. Polling Iraqis and sending reporters across the country, both at times dangerous undertakings. But this year, extraordinary change, real optimism. 59 percent of Iraqis now say they feel very safe in their communities. And 65 percent say things are going well in their own lives. Both numbers up dramatically.

Reporter Terry McCarthy also cited the poll: "84 percent of Iraqis now say their neighborhood is safe, almost double the level in 2007." But neither Gibson nor McCarthy mentioned some of the poll's other striking findings, which were outlined by Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell (3/17/09):

Last year, 70 percent of Iraqis in the same survey said we were doing a bad job there. This year that dropped all the way to...69 percent. And that includes the always more favorable views of the Kurds.

That means 90 percent of Sunnis are negative (remember, they are supposed to be "awakening" towards us), and two out of three Shiites agree--largely unchanged from 2008....

Fifty-six percent now say the U.S. was wrong to invade, actually up (despite the cooling of violence) since last year's 50 percent.

Mitchell quoted an ABC News online piece (3/16/09) that gave a more balanced account of the poll than that night's broadcast:

Just 27 percent [of Iraqis] are confident in U.S. forces (albeit nearly double its low). Just 30 percent say U.S. and coalition forces have done a good job carrying out their responsibilities in Iraq. Still fewer, 18 percent, have a positive opinion of the United States overall. Barely over a third think the election of Barack Obama will help their country.

The New York Times' Peter Baker reports today (3/18/09) that Obama has tapped "a Swahili-speaking retired Air Force officer who grew up in Africa as the son of missionaries" to be his special envoy to Sudan.

Does Baker or his Times editors realize that they don't speak Swahili in Sudan? It's like reporting that Obama appointed a French-speaking envoy to Germany, and meaning it in a flattering way. Sure, they don't speak French in Germany, but they're both in Europe, right?

Baker also writes:

The latest crisis began March 4, when the International Criminal Court in the Hague charged Mr. Bashir with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from the slaughter of 300,000 people in Darfur, the first such indictment of a sitting head of state by the tribunal.

But Baker is conflating violent and non-violent deaths. The ICC prosecutor only accuses Bashir of causing 35,000 violent deaths; the rest (there's no exact count, but most estimates put them at over 200,000) have died of war-related causes like disease and hunger. And most of the victims died in the first few years of the war; humanitarian aid succeeded in dramatically reducing death rates in Darfur to the point that they were "far below the emergency thresholds."

Deaths are deaths, but it's important to make that distinction between violent and non-violent deaths, particularly in the context of a piece that gives a lot of ink to Obama critics who long for the days when Clinton called for a no-fly zone over Darfur and Susan Rice pushed for urgent military planning to "stop the dying." The piece closes with the executive director of the Enough Project asking whether Obama would "force" Bashir to let humanitarian aid groups back in or simply "accept talking about the situation and seeing if that's enough."

When you understand that the dying had been dramatically reduced using diplomacy and humanitarian aid, and when you understand that the attempt at "forcing" via an ICC indictment led to the explusion of much of that humanitarian aid, you might reevaluate the idea that "talking" is less desirable than "forcing."

"I think the best journalism in America is business journalism precisely because they deal with real metrics. You can actually--they know things."
--George Will, ABC's This Week, 3/15/09

It's possible that Will actually believes this. Read Dean Starkman's piece in Mother Jones, "How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?," for another take. Or this piece from Extra!.

Or recall that, not too long ago, Will was lecturing us on how the economy was doing just fine, in spite of the gloomy message the media was delivering:

Conservative pundit George Will (ABC's This Week, 12/4/05) blamed media coverage for the public's failure to understand that "the economy is booming," attributing this misapprehension to "Will's two laws of economic journalism," one of which mandates that "there's no such thing as good news."

For the record, this was how Will described his "two laws of economic journalism:"

First law, all news is economic news. That is, all news either is a cause or a consequence of economic developments and can be given an economic spin. Second law, all economic news is bad. All economic news is bad. Housing prices go up. Housing bubble. Housing prices come down, slump in housing. Unemployment goes up. That's bad, 'cause unemployment is bad. Unemployment comes down, the labor market is overheating and inflation is coming back. There's no such thing as good news.

People dislike the Afghan war more than ever, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll; 42 percent of Americans now think invading that country was a mistake.

For some reason, the paper's front page write-up of the poll (3/17/09) quotes two experts: John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security and Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute. Both of them support sending additional troops to Afghanistan. USA Today is showing, once again, that it's very difficult for them to entertain debate over the Afghanistan war in their news pages.

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/17/09) weighs in on Richard Cohen's defense of Jim Cramer, accusing the Washington Post columnist of "continuing the stream of excuses for the financial media's failure to warn of the economic crisis." Baker sees "an effort to imply that the issues involved were very complex" lying "at the center of the cover-up for the media's incompetence."

Baker's reply to the Cohen claim that "there was not much they [financial reporters] could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at":

This is pathetic. Financial reporters did not need subpoena power, they did not need access to AIG's books, they did not even need to know what a credit default swap was. They just needed to know arithmetic.

The basic story is as simple as you can possible have. Nationwide house prices tracked inflation for 100 years from 1895 to 1995. In the decade from 1996 to 2006, they rose by more than 70 percent after adjusting for inflation, creating more than $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth.

There was no remotely plausible explanation for this increase in house prices on either the supply-side or the demand side. If there is a huge divergence from a 100-year long trend, with no explanation based on fundamentals, how could it be anything over than a bubble?

And who could have thought that the country could lose $8 trillion in housing wealth ($110,000 for every homeowner) without enormous consequences for the economy?

While assuring us that "exposing the corruption in the financial industry that supported the growth in the bubble...would have been a great public service," Baker insists that reporters "just needed to know arithmetic and have some common sense." His suggestion going forward: "How about a good news story explaining that even though nearly all economists completely failed to see the coming of the biggest economic disaster in their lifetime, none of them will suffer any consequences in their career? None will get fired and almost none of them will even miss a promotion. Reporting on the non-accountability of economists would be a very good story for financial reporters."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

As "the American foreign policy community worked itself into something resembling a frenzy over the appointment of Charles W. 'Chas' Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council"--because "at stake was, if not a direct policy battle of huge consequence, a real struggle over the range of viewpoints that will be permitted in an official government position"--Greg Marx says (CJR.org, 3/13/09) that "if you get your news from the New York Times, you were totally oblivious to this story as it unfolded":

To recap: On February 19, Laura Rozen reported on Foreign Policy's website that Freeman, who is known for his realist foreign policy views and colorful character, had been appointed by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to head the NIC. Within hours, Steve Rosen, formerly of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, had sounded the alarm on the grounds that Freeman is too sympathetic to Saudi Arabia and too hostile to Israel. Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, Freeman's critics pressed their case, adding to the complaints about his views on the Middle East allegations that he is unduly accommodating to China's leadership. Along the way, an inspector general began an investigation of Freeman's financial ties to foreign governments, and Freeman's supporters launched a counteroffensive. And, on Tuesday, as the campaign against him was gaining traction on Capitol Hill, Freeman withdrew from the position, blasting the "Israel Lobby" on his way out the door.

That's a lot of information, almost all of it from blogs or other Web publications. The Times did not address the controversy once until after Freeman withdrew, publishing a brief article by Mark Mazzetti in Wednesday's paper, and a front-page follow-up by Mazzetti and Helene Cooper on Thursday. The reticence of major newspapers--and especially the Times--about the story while it was unfolding was noticed, and criticized, by both pro- and anti-Freeman advocates.

Marx additionally notes that the Washington Post, being "the Times's big legacy-media competition on foreign policy stories, was also slow to cover the story, though it jumped in a day earlier than the Times--i.e., before Freeman withdrew."

Noting how "media have been pelting us with heart-wrenching stories about the neo-suffering of the Nouveau Poor"--"Sales of Gulfstream jets declining!"--Barbara Ehrenreich pretends (Barbara's Blog, 3/12/09) to be "tempted to delete 'class inequality' from my worry list" before doing some actual reporting:

But hard times are no more likely to abolish class inequality than Obama's inauguration is likely to eradicate racism. No one actually knows yet whether inequality has increased or decreased during the last year of recession, but the historical precedents are not promising. The economists I've talked to--like Biden's top economic advisor, Jared Bernstein--insist that recessions are particularly unkind to the poor and the middle class. Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan says, "Income polarization always gets worse during recessions." It makes sense. If the stock market has shrunk your assets of $500 million to a mere $250 million, you may have to pass on a third or fourth vacation home. But if you've just lost an $8 an hour job, you’re looking at no home at all.

Reminding us that "I'm a journalist and I understand how the media work," Ehrenreich writes that "when a millionaire cuts back on his crème fraiche and caviar consumption, you have a touching human interest story. But pitch a story about a laid-off roofer who loses his trailer home and you’re likely to get a big editorial yawn." In other words, "'Poor Get Poorer' is just not an eye-grabbing headline, even when the evidence is overwhelming." Read the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "The Recession and the 'Deserving Poor': Poverty Finally on Media Radar--but Only When It Hits the Middle Class" (3/09) by Neil deMause

Paying homage to "perhaps the first journalist to speak out on the racist and sexist implications of lynching," Black Agenda Report's Sikivu Hutchinson (3/11/09) says that the "relative obscurity" of Ida B. Wells doesn't reflect well on the present day:

Despite her challenges to the American criminal justice system, her long record of publication at home and abroad, and her influence on Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois (both of whom were ambivalent if not threatened by her single-mindedness), Wells’ legacy remains undervalued. Eclipsed by the cult of charismatic masculinity that privileged the contributions of male leaders like Douglas and DuBois, her relative obscurity parallels her conflicts with a black political establishment that deemed her too radical for her gender. Remarking that "the people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press," Wells remains a beacon of justice and a testament to the radical power of black feminist media literacy.

Hutchinson imagines that, "as a Chicago organizer ever skeptical of black politicians," Wells, "catapulted into 21st century America...might have initially celebrated the election of Barack Obama, then used her bully pulpit to separate the rhetoric of post-racial inclusion from the reality of racial apartheid."

Many observers praised the Daily Show's Jon Stewart for his hard-hitting interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer. Columnist Richard Cohen (Washington Post, 3/17/09) begs to differ.

Actually, Stewart was "wrong" to go after Cramer, Cohen wrote--it was a "cheap shot at business media." His main argument is that Stewart charged that Cramer "knew all the time what was happening" at game-playing financial companies, but Cohen has a list of CEOs at such firms who lost money on their own company's stock, so even they must not have known what was really going on: "When someone puts his money where his mouth is, you have to pay attention. The big shots believed." It's a variation on the "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" argument: If they're now poor, they must be innocent.

There are several things wrong with this line of reasoning. For one, it's really not so easy to take the money and run--or else Bernie Madoff would have made off with more of the $65 billion he stole. For companies slightly more legitimate than Madoff's, there are disclosure requirements that make a CEOs cashing in their stock the surest way to send the value of that stock hurtling toward zero.

And it's unlikely that any of Cohen's hard-luck moguls are actually now in the poor house. One of them, Citicorp's Sanford Weill, is still on Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in the world, though his net worth has fallen from $1.8 billion to $1.3 billion. That's still more than the GDP of 34 countries.

Cohen provides a helpful link to a story about his exhibit A, AIG's Maurice Greenberg, who lost a billion in stock. That piece ends with this:

Greenberg was forced out of AIG during a controversy in 2005 when the company restated its financial statements for the previous five years, acknowledging accounting improprieties including "improper or inappropriate transactions."

New York regulators later accused AIG, Greenberg and the company's former chief financial officer of orchestrating an accounting scheme that made AIG's financial picture appear brighter than it was, misleading both investors and regulators.

Yeah, in 2005.  Not actually very good evidence for Cohen's "how could anyone have known?" case.

Passing over Cohen's subsidiary argument that even Cohen himself was fooled by AIG, so what chance did Cramer have, what comes through most strongly in Cohen's column is his contempt for journalism:

The role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at.

As Cohen later spells out, this is a variation of the don't-blame-the-media argument about the Iraq War.  The fact is, there were exceptional journalists who pointed out the many holes in the WMD case before the invasion, and there were some economists who recognized that a financial system based on a housing bubble was a house of cards. The fact that Cohen didn't pay attention to these people doesn't mean they don't exist.

Cohen should note that Stewart's point about Cramer knowing that the market was manipulated was based on footage he had gathered of Cramer boasting about how easy it was for him, Cramer, to manipulate the market.  And Stewart didn't need subpoena power to get it.

On this morning's Fox & Friends, the hosts were having a laugh about Mauricio Funes, the new president of El Salvador. Funes won as the candidate of the FMLN, the political party of the former guerrilla group--and he was once a freelancer for CNN. Ergo, Fox could make jokes about CNN's "communist" ties.

One of the hosts (a substitute) tried to show that this was actually no laughing matter, since the FMLN "allegedly has ties to strongman Cesar Chavez." It takes the other hosts a little while to figure out that he means Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez--not the labor organizer regular host Steve Doocy refers to as "the lettuce guy."

Sigh.

Watch:

Hoping for "a trickle-down of a different sort, of compassion," media writer Edward Wasserman gives his personal take (Miami Herald, 3/16/09) on resurgent media interest in (some) impoverished Americans:

My own sense is that, in general, coverage of the poor has been so bad for so long that if indeed there is growing interest in the newly impoverished--even with the undertone of disdain FAIR finds toward other poor people--it's still an improvement. I've followed media treatment of poor people for the past several years as supervisor of a student-run website for journalists, www.onpoverty.org. The site aggregates poverty news from all over the country, broadcast as well as print.

Seldom does the reporting amount to much. Coverage is meager. It tilts strongly toward two areas: first, the homeless, particularly community responses to the blight associated with homelessness; second, bureaucratic foul-ups and corruption in delivering support to the needy.

In the reports, poor people don't often speak; they're spoken about. Rarely are the working poor or their struggles covered at all. Instead, emphasis is on those who are dependencies, burdens on the rest of us, taxing the good will and ingenuity of beleaguered officialdom.

In short, "the media overwhelmingly do what they do best, report on officialdom--market mavens, business owners, policymakers, lenders and the like--not on the people whose personal calamities constitute the real history of this economic disaster." See the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "The Recession and the 'Deserving Poor': Poverty Finally on Media Radar--but Only When It Hits the Middle Class" (3/09) by Neil deMause.

Veteran journalist Robert Parry (Consortium News, 3/15/09) has a message for anyone left who, when they "hear the name Washington Post," might "still think of... brave journalists facing down a corrupt president"--"today's version of the newspaper would be a sad disappointment, a betrayal of a noble past":

Over the last three decades, the Post has evolved into a neoconservative propaganda sheet, especially its opinion section which fronted for George W. Bush's false Iraq-WMD claims, led the long-term bashing of Iraq War critics, and defends whatever actions the Israeli government takes, including the recent war in Gaza and apparently its desire to preemptively bomb Iran.

Rather than a newspaper committed to the truth and favoring a broad debate about important issues, the Washington Post has become an enforcement mechanism for a neocon-dominated establishment, setting the parameters for permissible points of view and twisting facts for that purpose.

A recent example of this enforcement role was its March 12 lead editorial trashing former U.S. Ambassador Charles "Chas" Freeman for issuing a two-page statement pointing out that his nomination to serve as a top intelligence analyst had been torpedoed by Washington’s powerful Israel lobby.

Parry points out the Post editors' ridiculous stance that "there apparently is no Israel lobby; there has been no large-scale organized effort to bend U.S. foreign policy to the interests of Israeli governments over the years." In fact, Parry says that in the Post's view "even the suggestion that such a body exists is a sign of delusion, bigotry and a conspiratorial mindset."

Writing on CounterPunch, former Wall Street insider Pam Martens notes (3/16/09) that

the academics and economists (none of whom ever worked a day on Wall Street) have been telling us in op-eds and speeches and testimony before Congress that the crumbling Wall Street structure results from bundled subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and asset-backed securities.

Meanwhile, "in a week’s time, [the Daily Show's Jon Stewart] has zeroed in, like a heat-seeking missile, on the core of Wall Street's malady.... The core of Wall Street's corruption might well be the same core that it has drawn the darkest curtain around: trading." Writes Martens:

None of the toxic instruments would have grown to a problem capable of collapsing the country’s financial system if their trading had been regulated, transparent and fairly reported on by mainstream media. The security instruments were never the problem; how they were traded was the problem. For example, the mortgage and debt securities were, in reality, junk bonds but they were tradedas triple A. They were not traded on an exchange where price discovery would have shown them to be junk bonds, they were traded in an opaque over the counter market. In the case of credit default swaps, they were traded in a market created by the very firms who needed to hide for as long as possible (while executives reaped windfall compensation and bonuses) the dubious pricing of the securities and gargantuan amounts being issued.

Martens sees it as "testimony to how Orwellian life has become under the outrages of Wall Street hubris" that it takes "a comedian, who poses as an anchor on a fake news show, [to] grab the reins of the Wall Street investigation from the actual investigators in Congress."