Sometimes when you read reports about the Middle East, you get the impression that corporate journalists think Palestinians are another species entirely. Here's the New York Times' Mark Landler (3/4/09) explaining the theory of how better relations with Syria could help create a peace deal between Israel and Palestine:

By seeking an understanding with Syria, which has cultivated close ties to Iran, the United States could increase the pressure on Iran to respond to its offer of direct talks. Such an understanding would also give Arab states and moderate Palestinians the political cover to negotiate with Israel. That, in turn, could increase the burden on Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, to relax its hostile stance toward Israel.

Israel just recently launched an assault on the Gaza Strip that killed nearly 1,300 Palestinians, including 280 children under the age of 18 and 111 adult women. The Israelis killed roughly 1 out of every thousand residents of Gaza; the equivalent death toll in the U.S. would be almost 300,000.

If you were writing about human beings, you would assume that those massive losses, rather than a lack of "political cover," would probably result in a  "hostile stance" toward the country that inflicted them. Since Landler doesn't seem to think that those deaths are a significant factor in the political situation, he must think he's writing about a very different sort of creature.

David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press (3/1/09):

The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That's $2.3 trillion.  Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people--what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric.  It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.

The Dow is not a measure about what "people" think about government policies. It's a measure of what the tiny, elite group of people who trade stocks think stocks are worth, which is to say what they think other people would pay for them. These evaluations have little to do with the long-term health of the economy. In some cases, a declining stock market might be good news for the economy, particularly if stock prices have been unrealistically inflated.

If you want to find out what people in general actually think about President Obama's economic policies, a better way to do so is to ask a statistically representative sample of them. Such efforts generally provide much more positive results than the Dow Jones "metric."

Someone whose feelings you can predict based on what the Dow does, though, is Gregory's NBC colleague Chris Matthews. When stocks go down, Chris Matthews gets mad. Here he is a couple of weeks ago (Hardball, 2/23/09):

I want to ask you when we get back, how does he deal with the fact that he has a scorecard now. It's called the Dow Jones. Every day now--first of all, they're going to nationalize the banks. Then they're not going to nationalize the banks. No matter what they say, the Dow keeps going down. It's down to almost 7,000 now. I used to think 8,000 was the floor. It's heading toward 6,000! People are really getting angry! I'm getting angry!

People have saved money, who are facing retirement, are ripped right now. It's absolutely disturbing, to put it lightly, what this must be saying to people who are retired now. They have a nest egg, a 401(k) that's now a 101(k). They are ripped. I'm only saying it the nice way. They are really angry and they're going to get mad at him if we don't get this market turned around.

We'll be right back with Howard Fineman and see how the president does with his scorecard, and Gene Robinson, can he deal with that Dow Jones scorecard every day in decline?

If you're pulling down a multi-million salary like Chris Matthews, you probably invest quite a bit of it and therefore you might have a lot to lose when the stock market goes down. Your personal losses don't turn the Dow Jones into a "scorecard" for the president, however.

Bill O'Reilly explains the diversity of viewpoints available on the Fox News Channel (2/27/09):

The Fox News Channel features a variety of opinions. We parade in scores of guests each week with all kinds of views. Glenn Beck believes the nation is in crisis. Alan Colmes believes Obama could be the next FDR. Sean Hannity believes the Republican Party has the right formula. And I believe both parties need an overhaul. They need to start looking out for the folks. So you get a wide range of views, while our hard news people deliver solid facts.

Huh. Three right-wingers and Alan Colmes--who lost his show on Fox two months ago.

Keeping tabs on the "Fair and Balanced" network, Mark Howard (News Corpse, 3/2/09) details how

last year, prior to the election, Fox News was already fortifying its right flank. New multimillion dollar contracts were handed out to Roger Ailes, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Hannity's show shed the dead weight of alleged liberal Alan Colmes. Glenn Beck was brought in to shore up the daytime crowd. Neil Cavuto, a bully who is every bit as obnoxious as O'Reilly poisons the economic news, and he is also managing editor of Murdoch's Fox Business News. And just this week Bill Sammon, author of a shelf full of bitterly partisan books, was promoted to VP and Washington editor for the network.

The result is a full-court press of some of the dirtiest political assaults ever waged by what is advertised as a "news" network. Fox News is shamelessly pushing a campaign to characterize Obama as a socialist--a committed opponent of America and its values--from 6:00 am with the crew of Fox & Friends, to after midnight with broadcasts and repeats of their primetime neanderthal shoutcasters.

Howard even reminds us that, as usual, "they get their marching orders directly from Rupert Murdoch who last September said that… "[Obama's] policy is really very, very naive, old fashioned, 1960s socialist."

In examining how the "national news media remains largely enthralled by the pro-Republican rules of the past three decades," Robert Parry (Consortium News, 2/28/09) notes that "in both right-wing and mainstream news organizations, stories continue to be structured as faulting Obama and largely absolving Bush." Parry looks at recent major New York Times and Washington Post stories' framing of "the stomach-turning 6.2 percent drop in the gross domestic product during the last quarter of 2008": "Though that was the last economic quarter of the Bush administration, the stories instead were framed around Obama's failures."

The New York Times cites "a sense of disconnect between the projections of the [Obama] White House and the grim realities of everyday American life." The Washington Post says "the worse-than-expected data fueled doubts about whether the Obama administration had adequately sized up the challenges it faces."

What is remarkable about the two stories--and similar ones at other leading newspapers--is that the name "Bush" is nowhere to be found. Instead of a negative slant against Obama, the stories might reasonably have read that George W. Bush left behind an even worse economic mess than previously understood.

But such an approach, Parry argues, "would require a break from the media paradigm of the past few decades"--and, regrettably, Parry sees "no sign that the powerful right-wing news media has any intention of changing its ideological ways, nor that the mainstream news media will stop its endless attempts to prove it's not 'liberal.'"

Listen to the recent FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Robert Parry on Conservative Bias" (2/20/09)

"First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully."

--The official position of the U.S. government from October 23, 2001 until October 6, 2008

Why do I get the impression that this was seen as a feature, not a bug?

Reporting on last week's closure of the 150-year-old Denver Rocky Mountain News, Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, 2/27/09) give us the financial backstory behind the fact that "the newspaper industry is going through a major, major upheaval in these last few days": "A lot of the papers ended up being bought in recent years, and their owners took on heavy debt to buy these papers out, and now they’re finding now that the debt, the burden of the debt, plus the declining ad revenues, is creating major problems for them." That said, Gonzalez tells why he is "especially troubled by the Rocky Mountain News":

When I was president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, we started a whole program to change the coverage of Latinos and hire more Latinos around the country, and the Rocky Mountain News was the first paper that we worked with back in 2003.

And it was extraordinary, the change that the paper made in its coverage of the Latino community in Colorado, in its hiring. It started out with a mere, I think, 11 Hispanics in the newsroom, out of 204. Within a year, they had more than doubled the number. They changed the coverage. We held town meetings in the community, and the community was telling us, yes, this paper was finally changing.

And it even hired the first Native American journalist at that paper. And that’s especially important, because those who don’t know Colorado history won’t know that the Rocky Mountain News has a notorious history back in the 19h century, when it really stoked a massacre, the Sand Creek Massacre, of scores of Native Americans, and it’s always been hated by the Native American community because of that long history. But even there, the Rocky tried to make changes.

While calling it "really tragic that that paper has been lost to the people of Colorado," Gonzalez also is careful when answering Goodman's question, "So, you’re saying in a lot of these cases the newspapers actually are not failing, they are profitable?": "Yes, well, when the Knight chain... was bought out by McClatchy, and, of course, the Inquirer and the Daily News in Philadelphia were part of that deal--the chain was making 15 percent profit a year. It just wasn’t making enough for to satisfy the shareholders."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "'Wall Street Does Not Like Newspapers': CounterSpin Interview with Ben Bagdikian" (5-6/06)

Characterizing an "Incredibly Bad Economic Piece on NPR" as having "helped a blackmail effort," blogging economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/27/09) says "the piece concluded by telling listeners that 'the problem is us,' that we had borrowed too much and therefore we have to pay the cost in the form of big taxpayer bailouts":

Okay, this is wrong, wrong and wrong. First, the excessive borrowing wasn't just shear frivolity, it was attributable to something that got very little notice from NPR at the time and unfortunately still gets very little notice from NPR: an $8 trillion housing bubble.

People borrowed against this bubble wealth because the experts that NPR and other media outlets present to the public all said that this run-up in house prices was real and would persist. Economists who warned about the housing bubble were almost completely excluded from NPR.

That "these reporters now want the taxpayers, rather than the bankers who profited from the bubble, to pay for this failure" has Baker thinking the NPR segment's name, Planet Money, "may be appropriate because most listeners probably would not think it belongs on Planet Earth."

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

Having already caught "the infamous GOP talking point that the stimulus package contains gobs of cash for saving marsh mice" having "found its way into a New York Times story, without the paper mentioning that the claim is untrue," blogger Greg Sargent (Plum Line, 2/24/09) now finds that "earlier drafts of the story did describe the claim as 'misleading'--but Times editors removed that description from the copy":

A reader tells me that he emailed the author of the story, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, to discuss the omission. Here is part of her reply to him in her email, which I obtained:

I did write in the story I submitted that the assertion was misleading, but I’m sorry to report that language was removed by editors and that I didn’t notice the deletion. My initial text read like this:

“….as Republicans decry, often misleadingly, what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh mouse preservation.” [Sargent's emphasis]

So the words “often misleadingly” were removed by editors.

Often such editing decisions are made in haste or to save space. But this was only two words, and it’s worth recalling that the notion that there was millions in the bill to save the marsh mouse in Nancy Pelosi’s district isn’t just some garden variety talking point. It has been a major component of GOP push-back for weeks, repeated by high profile GOP officials in all sorts of settings.

Stolberg's contention that "wording as published was not inaccurate" is refuted by the simple observation by Sargent that "the story doesn’t note that there are no such funds in the bill"--to the contrary, "the paper removed its own reporter’s assertion that it was 'misleading' before publishing." Besides, we all know how much corporate media economic reporters love news about critters....

On the death of radio's Paul Harvey, it's hard for me not to think of his June 23, 2005 broadcast as his most revealing moment.

That's the episode where he delivered this memorable rant (Extra! Update, 8/05):

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people…he said, the American people, he said, and this is a direct quote, "We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy."

And that reminder was taken seriously. And we proceeded to develop and deliver the bomb, even though roughly 150,000 men, women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single blow, World War II was over.

Following New York, September 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity...and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.

Even now we're standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies--more moral, more civilized.

Our image is at stake, we insist.

But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.

So it goes with most great nation-states, which--feeling guilty about their savage pasts--eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.

To Harvey, in other words, failing to use nuclear and biological weapons because we feel guilty about genocide and slavery means that we're "made of sugar candy." And this will mean the end of U.S. civilization.

It's hard to know how to respond to that worldview, or to the fact that the person who promulgated it was one of the most popular and longest-running personalities, other than to note that he was taking Churchill out of context.   Churchill followed up his observation--which was made about the "peoples of the British empire," not about Americans--with the vow that "we shall never descend to the German and Japanese level," meaning the Nazis and the World War II-era Japanese Empire. Harvey seemed genuinely worried that we wouldn't descend to that level soon enough.

See also Extra!: "The Right of the Story: Harvey Peddles Tall Tales--With a Conservative Kick" (9-10/97) by Dan Wilson.