Fox News host Bill O'Reilly tries to nail Obama on a "no more earmarks" flip-flop in his "talking points" commentary (3/4/09):

O'REILLY: We begin with this:

BARACK OBAMA: We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review.

O'REILLY: That's President Obama pledging last January to end earmarks in federal spending. But now the House has passed a new spending bill full of earmark pork, and if the Senate OKs the $400+ billion spending bonanza this week, Mr. Obama is expected to sign it into law.

Actually, that was Obama talking about the stimulus package--which is not the same as the budget, which is what passed the House and is currently tied up in the Senate. And the stimulus bill didn't (technically at least) have "earmarks."

Just last week (2/26/09), Nicholas Kristof, who has written often about the situation in Darfur, was rooting for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan's president, as a step towards "help[ing] end the long slaughter and instability in Sudan":

Next Wednesday, the International Criminal Court is expected to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

That would be historic--the first time the court has called for the arrest of a sitting head of state. It would be the clearest assertion that in the 21st century, mass murder is no longer a ruler’s prerogative.

There has been concern that Mr. Bashir will lash out by expelling aid workers or that Sudan’s fragile north/south peace agreement will become unglued if Mr. Bashir is ousted. Those fears are overblown. Time and again, Mr. Bashir has responded to pressure and scrutiny by improving his behavior and increasing his cooperation with the United Nations and Western countries.

Got it: Bashir would never expel aid workers in retaliation for the international community trying to arrest him, even though he keeps saying he will, and a lot of experts think he'll follow through.

Let's check in with Kristof again this week, now that the ICC did what he wanted:

One of Mr. Bashir’s first actions after the arrest warrant was to undertake yet another crime against humanity: He expelled major international aid groups, including the International Rescue Committee and the Dutch section of Doctors Without Borders. In effect, he is now preparing to massacre the Darfuri people in still another way, for Darfuris are living in camps and depend on aid workers for food, water and healthcare--even as deadly meningitis has broken out in one of the camps.

"The consequences are going to be dire," notes George Rupp, the president of the International Rescue Committee, on which 1.75 million Sudanese depend for water, sanitation, education and healthcare. “If Sudan persists in this decision, it’s difficult to see how the outcome will be anything other than serious suffering and death for hundreds of thousands of people.”

So the political move Kristof pushed for is now most likely going to result in serious suffering and death for hundreds of thousands of people the columnist is trying to "save." Yet Kristof doesn't acknowledge his error and continues to dispense advice: Obama should "insist" that Bashir reverse his decision. And what sort of leverage does Obama have for that, now that the ICC card has been played? It would appear to come in Kristof's step two: "Destroy one of Mr. Bashir’s military planes with a warning that if he takes his genocide to a new level by depriving Darfuris of food and medical care, he will lose the rest of his air force."

Alex de Waal, who has much more expertise on the Darfur situation than Kristof, thinks the ICC warrant was a pretty bad political decision:

The ICC is a terribly bad instrument of pressure, because (a) the pressure can never be removed and (b) pressure only works if the end point to which the pressure is applied can be accepted by the party being pressured. The ICC indictment meets neither of these criteria.

Independent journalist Julie Flint agrees:

The immediate future for Darfurians is a sharp decline in the remarkable humanitarian work that has reduced mortality rates to near-normal levels in the aftermath of the massacre years of 2003-04. Where’s the justice in that?

Unfortunately, astute observers like de Waal and Flint don't have the same media platform as interventionists like Kristof.

Consortium News' Robert Parry (3/5/09) uses New York Times do-gooder Nicholas Kristof as an example of blatant corporate media hypocrisy:

Kristof--like many of his American colleagues--is applauding the International Criminal Court's arrest order against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for his role in the Darfur conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives....

By all accounts, Kristof is a well-meaning journalist who travels to dangerous parts of the world, like Darfur, to report on human rights crimes. However, he also could be a case study of what's wrong with American journalism.

While Kristof writes movingly about atrocities that can be blamed on Third World despots like Bashir, he won't hold U.S. officials to the same standards.

Most notably, Kristof doesn't call for prosecuting former President George W. Bush for war crimes, despite hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of Bush’s illegal invasion of their country. Many Iraqi children also don't have hands--or legs or homes or parents.

Kristof is far from alone though--as Parry notes: "No one in a position of power in American journalism is demanding that former President Bush join President Bashir in the dock at The Hague." In fact, even the most modest attempts at accountability invariably are met by big media jeers; see the FAIR Action Alert: "CNN Scoffs at White House Critics: Anchor With Bush Ties Dismisses Abuse-of-Power Hearings as 'Stagecraft'" (7/31/08)

Real-life socialist Paul Street (ZNet, 3/5/09) takes issue with a Newsweek cover story "about the Obama administration's economic recovery and bailout plan... that '...has already--under a conservative Republican administration--effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries.'" Though the piece bore "the remarkable title 'We are All Socialists Now,'" Street lists "four key things missing from this remarkable Newsweek report":

1. Any remotely accurate understanding of socialism as it is grasped and advanced by its modern-day adherents: democratic workers' and peoples' control of economic and political life in the interests of social use, equality, and the common good instead of private gain and social hierarchy....

2. Any survey or other opinion data showing that most Americans think of themselves as "socialists." No such data exists, thanks in part to U.S. cultural and ideological authorities' longstanding success in identifying left-democratic and libertarian ideals with the arch-authoritarian, fake-socialist tyranny of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like.

3. Discussion with a single solitary actual U.S socialist to get his or her take on whether or not the broad mass of Americans have now suddenly embraced a socialist worldview and program.

4. Any reasonable understanding of the fact that capitalism and capitalists have long relied on state protection, subsidy and regulation--that supposedly "free market" capitalism has always been state capitalism.

Wondering "why on Earth they would advance" such a strange and "transparently false" claim, Street comes back to old motivations: "Part of the explanation, I suspect, is simply that they wanted to sell issues with a spectacular title" that "strike[s] a chord amidst the deepening capitalist economic crisis and in light of the Republican Party and right-wing media's hysterical neo-McCarthyite claims that the Obama administration is introducing, well, 'socialism.'"

The night before Obama's big healthcare summit, NBC Nightly News offered some advice. "There's a place where policymakers could look for some tips on how an affordable, well-run system operates," anchor Brian Williams told viewers. "It is already running here in the U.S."

Correspondent Robert Bazell explained: "Many experts agree that whatever happens in the health reform debate, a good model is Kaiser Permanente." Bazell went on to describe how Kaiser's salaried doctors "have no incentive to order unnecessary tests or office visits." He also pointed to cost savings from use of electronic medical records.

"To be sure, patients sometimes complain about Kaiser," Bazell concluded, "but it gets decent ratings in consumer surveys and tends to be one of the less expensive options when people get to chose health plans."

As NBC itself has documented (Dateline, 6/17/07), one of those complaints is patient-dumping; in 2007 Kaiser accepted a settlement after prosecutors charged it with sending a mentally ill homeless woman away from its emergency room in a cab. The woman was caught on camera being dumped by the cab on Skid Row, where she wandered in her hospital gown and slippers until a shelter worker found her. The shelter soon learned she was suffering from high blood pressure, anemia and pneumonia, and she had to be readmitted to a hospital.

The video aired many times on television and was featured prominently in Michael Moore's documentary Sicko--which also pointed out that it was Kaiser that helped convince Nixon HMO's were a good idea. Edgar Kaiser, son of Kaiser Permanente's founder, lobbied Nixon aide John Erlichman in 1971 for the HMO Act, who then successfully lobbied Nixon:

Ehrlichman: "Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can ... the reason he can do it .... I had Edgar Kaiser come in...talk to me about this, and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make."

President Nixon: "Fine." [Unclear]

Ehrlichman: [Unclear] "… and the incentives run the right way."

President Nixon: “Not bad.”

Kaiser's also the place the L.A. Times found (5/17/02) "awarded financial bonuses to call center clerks who spent the least amount of time on the phone with each patient and limited the number of doctors' appointments." And the Sacramento Bee recently reported (2/15/09) on lawsuits against Kaiser for "[trying] to bully outside doctors into transferring patients before it is safe, threatening to withhold payment otherwise" and for its "special, doctor-to-doctor call operation that has become a target of legal actions alleging malpractice and failure to pay claims."

All in all, sounds like a great model. Thanks for the suggestion, NBC!

For another healthcare model that you won't likely find NBC News personnel endorsing, see the new FAIR study, "Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare" (3/6/09).

Freelance writer Sally Lehrman (3/5/09) tells us the bad times for newspapers are even worse for ethnic media--and by extension, U.S. democracy as a whole:

AsianWeek, San Francisco's English-language weekly for Asian-Americans, and San Francisco Bay View, which has served the black community there for three decades, both have dumped their print editions.

Siglo21, a Spanish-language paper published in Lawrence, is returning to publishing weekly after three months as a daily due to declining advertising. Ming Pao Daily in New York will shut down entirely, while Hoy New York abandoned print at the end of last year. At the venerable Ebony and Jet in Chicago, all employees must reapply for their jobs--that is, the jobs that remain.

With the ever-deepening cuts across the news business, these losses may seem worth no more than a shrug. AsianWeek, after all, employs only 11 staffers. But the harm goes deep. Ethnic media play a vital role in the communities they serve and do a great deal of unrecognized work for journalism.

Ethnic media, like other news media, recognize that an informed populace will help keep government accountable. Armed with knowledge of current events and issues, the public can become wise participants in societal decision-making. Ethnic media also cultivate democracy in ways that the mainstream seems to have abandoned.

Univision, for instance, has led bipartisan citizenship and voter registration drives during the past two presidential elections. This involvement in the democratic process might appear unseemly to some traditionalists. But at least according to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, this is the U.S. news media's fundamental role: to further democracy.

As just one example of how "day after day, the various branches of the ethnic media follow some of the most important and contentious issues, ones that grab the attention of the mainstream only sporadically," Lehrman recounts how "the New Yorker and National Public Radio's Daniel Schorr declared that Barack Obama's campaign signaled a new, "post-racial" era" and "the rest of the mainstream took up the theme," it was black media that "were quick to point out that one black president might create dramatic change, but could not transform a history of institutionalized inequities."

See Extra!: "A Different Race: The Black Press Reveals Gaps in Mainstream Election Coverage" (11-12/04) by Jacqueline Bacon.

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified Sally Lehrman as a writer for AsianWeek.

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media has decided to give its new Izzy Award (3/4/09) "for special achievement in independent media" to Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, specifically lauding the "two pillars of independent journalism" for "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception and controversial issues":

Week after week, in meticulously documented and detailed blog posts, [Salon's Glenn Greenwald] skewers hypocrisy, deception and revisionism on the part of the powers that be in government and the media.... With devastatingly crisp arguments, Greenwald has inveighed against torture and defended constitutional rights for all, whether they be "enemy combatants" or American protesters. He has toughly criticized both Republicans and Democrats, and his blogging frequently sparks debate in major media and on Capitol Hill.

Over the past 12 years, Amy Goodman has built Democracy Now! into the largest public media collaboration--it can be found on television, radio and the Internet--in the country.... Democracy Now! offers a daily cutting-edge broadcast featuring issues, experts and debates rarely heard in corporate media, including the voices of both policymakers and those affected by policy. Through timely interviews with heads of state, opposition leaders, artists and organizers, Goodman in 2008 maintained an ongoing, tenacious focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions, racial justice issues such as the still-displaced poor of New Orleans, and political repression overseas.

The Izzy Award itself "is named after the legendary dissident journalist Isidor Feinstein 'Izzy' Stone, who launched his muckraking newsletter I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1953 during the height of the McCarthy witch hunts." An influential figure in the formation of FAIR's journalistic ideology, "Stone, who died in 1989, exposed government deceit and corruption while championing civil liberties, racial justice and international diplomacy." See our 20th Anniversary issue of Extra!: "On the Shoulders of Giants: The unbroken tradition of press criticism" (1-2/06) by Robin Andersen.

Prefacing a Daily Show segment (3/4/09) with his version of current big-media reporting: "Recent opinion polls indicate that six weeks into Barack Obama's administration, the American public thinks they approve of his performance--but it turns out they're wrong," Jon Stewart runs clips of celebrity news figures like Fox's Sean Hannity asking, "How did the market react to this latest liberal spending spree? Well, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped almost 400 points," and of Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto asking, "The Dow is down more than 1,500 points, nearly 3,000 since Election Day, now is this a vote of no confidence in this administration?" Mocking this common media canard, Stewart even calls the Dow

a real-time cause-and-effect precision barometer of how the president is doing. It's been that way for years. For example--little-known fact--Wall Street hated Ronald Reagan: Look at the numbers the day he got inaugurated. And they hated it when Truman announced we'd won World War II. And, to give you an idea of what a finely tuned measure of America's national mood the Dow is, when the Titanic sunk? Through the roof!

Stewart's take-away moral: "So what seems to be being suggested here is that opinion polls don't matter; the stock market is the only rational, objective indicator of a commander in chief's performance." Read the contrary evidence in FAIR's new Media Advisory: "What the Dow Isn't: Stocks Misused As 'Scorecard' of White House Policy" (3/5/09).

The capacity for U.S. editorial writers to twist reality when it comes to "free trade" is astounding. But when "free trade" collides with Colombia policy in the minds of the same editorialists, the potential for illogic becomes truly Orwellian.

Take Wednesday's Los Angeles Times editorial ("Obama Should Press for Colombia free-trade pact") pushing for passage of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The editors denounce U.S. labor activists as "special interests" who "are holding congressional Democrats hostage on the pact." They are upset because U.S. union leaders say Colombia is not sufficiently curbing human rights abuses--a supposed prerequisite for passage of the FTA--and that their views are causing some congressional Democrats to oppose the bill.

Disputing that view, the editors head deep into "War is Peace" territory, fabricating a rosy human rights scenario for Colombia's labor community, and arguing that president Álvaro Uribe's government has solved their problems with the creation of a special agency for their protection:

Colombian officials aren't even sure why the pact is controversial. For a time, human rights advocates and union organizers saw it as a means of pressuring the Colombian government to stop the persecution of labor organizers, who are routinely threatened and killed. The government responded by protecting organizers and prosecuting their attackers. Activists should declare victory and move on.

Note the odd construction: the government is "protecting organizers," but organizers "are routinely threatened and killed"--both in present tense. This would seem to suggest that labor leaders on both continents still have a valid complaint, that the government is not doing a very good job of "protecting" organizers from violence (largely perpetrated by government-linked death squads.)

And, indeed, they aren't. According to the U.S. State Department's 2008 human rights report on Colombia, violence against union activists not only continues, it increased over 2007 figures:

Violence and discrimination against union members discouraged some workers from joining and engaging in union activities. The MSP [Ministry of Social Protection] reported that 38 trade unionists were killed during the year, compared with 26 in 2007, while the National Labor College (ENS), a labor rights NGO, reported that 46 trade unionists were killed, compared with 39 in 2007. ENS and government figures differed because of different methodological conceptions of trade union membership.

A February 2008 editorial in the Hill ("Colombia's President Tacitly Supports Union Murders") provides more reasons why many people--if not "Colombian officials" or L.A. Times editors--might find the pact "controversial." According to the Hill editors, while violence against labor activists was significantly down compared to six or seven years ago, Colombia still leads the world in the category; they indicate that this scourge will likely continue, because Colombian president Uribe tacitly supports the killing of some labor leaders.

The editorial relates a (paraphrased) comment made by Uribe to an AFL-CIO delegation regarding three murdered unionists: "By the way, those three guys killed in Saravena were members of the guerrilla group ELN." The editors note:

Colombia’s own attorney general had said that was not true, and international human rights groups agree. But Uribe went on to tell Kovalik that he’d gone to the community and people there had assured him that the three were guerrillas. Based on hearsay, without any proof, and in direct contradiction of his own attorney general’s case, the president has decided that these three unionists were terrorists. Unfortunately, this was not the first time Uribe has endangered unionists by stigmatizing them guerrillas.

So perhaps it isn't so hard to understand why the pact is controversial, nor why U.S. labor leaders might find the situation in Colombia disquieting. Much harder to understand is the Times editors' ghoulish advice to labor activists to "declare victory and move on."

Finding new ways to keep his name in the news, far-right radio personality Rush Limbaugh has apparently decided that reporters who are (in his view) too fond of Barack Obama should be called "butt boys." TVNewser reported (3/4/09) that CNN's Ed Henry was one name on Rush's list ("Ed, you're a butt boy"), but that ABC's Jake Tapper "is the one guy that's outside the butt boy bubble." As TVNewser put it:

How does Tapper feel about it? In a tweet this afternoon he writes, "They love me today, they'll hate me tomorrow. How it works if I'm doing the job right. (Not Right.)"

This is a pretty familiar--not to mention lazy--way reporters deal with critics; if "both" sides have a problem with my work, I must be in the middle--which is where good journalists live. Of course, this assumes that all criticism is of equal merit, which is a pretty difficult case to make when one of the "critics" is making homophobic slurs. It's also worth noting that Tapper recently explained that liberal media critics tend to be more harsh: "I get a lot of heat from the right, too, but the vitriol is from the left."

Here's an easier way to assess your performance: If Rush Limbaugh is praising your work, you're probably doing something wrong.

From the end of the NBC Nightly News (3/3/09):

CHUCK TODD: And finally, let's close with Michelle Obama. Amazing numbers for a new first lady. Sixty-three percent positive rating. What makes it more remarkable, six months ago you and I were talking about at the Democratic Convention, she might be a liability if he's not careful. She's no liability.

Wait a second--you mean that some of the inane chatter heard in corporate media has no relationship to reality?!?! That is "remarkable."

Greg Sargent has some observations (Plum Line, 3/4/09) about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's

new website up called "I'm sorry, Rush" that lampoons the many GOPers who have been forced to prostrate themselves before Rush Limbaugh after criticizing him and enduring the Wrath of Rush or his listeners.

The site appears to be off to a pretty decent start: Nearly 150,000 people have already visited in its first day, DCCC spokesperson Jennifer Crider tells me. The DCCC will blast out an email to supporters telling them of the visit numbers a bit later this afternoon.

Amazingly, the site has gotten this number of visits despite the fact that it isn't linked on Drudge!

Judging this "yet another measure of the public's appetite for the 'Rush wants Obama to fail' storyline," Sargent says the enormous "level of public interest" is "one of the main things driving the Democratic strategy of hanging Rush around the necks of Republicans."

National Public Radio watchdog Mytwords (NPR Check, 3/3/09) is moved to declare the network's Palestine/Israel coverage "worse than worthless" after "yesterday morning first featured Michele Kelemen redelivering Secretary of State Clinton's talking points (Hamas is a terrorist organization, blah, blah, blah, Hamas has to renounce violence, blah, blah, blah, U.S. is giving tons of money to Gaza, blah, blah, etc.)":

After that four-minute-plus State Department summary, what does NPR offer? Who would you go to for expert analysis? How about someone who has "has advised six American secretaries of state." Yep, NPR serves up the stale ideas of Aaron David Miller--again....

Miller mentions Netanyahu's negotiations with Arafat at the Wye River and the Hebron withdrawal. Throughout the interview, Linda Wertheimer just nods along like a bobblehead. I think she forgot to see how the actual settlement policies went under Netanyahu back when he was Prime Minister. Nothing about what that great Hebron concession really meant for Palestinians. Nothing about Netanyahu's provocations that even an editor from the rightist WINEP takes note of. Nothing about Netanyahu's Jerusalem expansionist efforts.

Mytwords imagines "it would be hard to do more pro-Likud, pro-Zionist coverage of the Palestine conflict." Indeed, you can read about NPR's long history of biased reportage on the region in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Illusion of Balance: NPR's Coverage of Mideast Deaths Doesn't Match Reality" (11-12/01) by Seth Ackerman.

Noting that "Republicans and their adjunct outlets have been touting one specific lie above all others lately"--that of a fictitious "$8 billion earmark in the stimulus package to build a high-speed rail connector between Las Vegas and Disneyland"--Political Animal blogger Steve Benen reports (WashingtonMonthly.com, 3/3/09) that "yesterday, Fox News gave the story a twist, changing the details of the already-bogus claim to make a brand new lie":

Check out this exchange between Fox News's Megyn Kelly and Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) on the omnibus spending bill pending in the Senate:

Kelly: It's a super railroad, of sorts--a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney, we kid you not, to the doorstep of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. I say, to the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. So should your tax dollars be paying for these kinds of projects?

Note that the brothel in question is outside of Carson City, Nevada--more than 300 miles away from Las Vegas, where the imaginary earmark was previously delivering Disneyland visitors. Presumably this particular brothel was chosen by Fox because it includes the name of an animal, and the first rule of budget reporting is that animals are funny.

Benen particularly "love[s] the way Megyn Kelly adds 'we kid you not' while blatantly lying to a national television audience" and sees "an apparent attempt to win some kind of irony award" in Kelly's request that Rep. Franks "hold lawmakers accountable for made-up earmarks that don't exist outside Republican talking points and the GOP's cable news channel."

Media reporter DeWayne Wickham sees (USA Today, 3/3/09) the new Pentagon rules allowing photography of U.S. casualty coffins as "just the silver lining" around the dark cloud of a fact that "our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars." That the new regulations permit photos only "if the family of the war dead give permission" has Wickham acknowledging that "this will be a gut-wrenching decision for some families. But news organizations shouldn't let such a policy--or the family's wishes--dictate how they cover war news":

This month marks the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war. Nearly 4,300 U.S. military personnel have been killed there since fighting began in 2003. The war in Afghanistan started in October 2001 and has taken more than 650 [U.S.] lives. Those losses might have been smaller, and the U.S. involvement shorter, if newspapers hadn't given in to the Pentagon's effort to sanitize coverage of this nation's wars.

The pictures of war are an integral part of the storytelling of these great conflicts. And in a democratic society, people have a right to see these images and newspapers have an obligation to show readers both the good and bad that combat produces. That's because the cost of war--though borne most heavily by those who are killed and their grieving relatives--is exacted from all of us. We all have a right to know, and visualize, the ultimate price that some of the men and women America sends into battle are forced to pay.

"By allowing the Pentagon to establish the rules for photographing the most telling evidence of the human cost of war," Wickham tells us, "news organizations have abdicated a significant part of their reporting duty to those who manage America's war machine." If U.S. corporate media are this irresponsible about reportage of U.S. casualties, just imagine how they treat the deaths of U.S. "enemies"--or better yet, read about it in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "A Million Iraqi Dead?: The U.S. Press Buries the Evidence" (1-2/08) by Patrick McElwee.