Reporting on New York's Javed Iqbal receiving a 69-month prison sentence for "assisting Hezbollah... by providing satellite television services that included broadcasts by the party's television station, Al Manar," Peter Daniels (World Socialist Web Site, 4/27/09) mentions that the broadcast packages included "Christian evangelists as well as Hezbollah" before explaining how

the law under which Iqbal was charged had been amended by the Patriot Act after the September 11. The revised statute was used to target individuals accused of providing aid to organizations designated as terrorist by the U.S. State Department.

Iqbal's prosecution had the effect of criminalizing speech and utilized the technique of guilt by association. Law professor and civil liberties advocate David Cole pointed this out at the time.

"Mr. Iqbal is being penalized for doing nothing more than facilitating speech, and is being punished not because the speech itself is harmful, but because it is associated with Hezbollah," Cole said.

All of this despite the fact that "the original legislation had been amended in 1988 to include an exemption for news content."

Today the Washington Post devoted front-page real estate to an examination of how some wealthy people who don't think of themselves as wealthy will suffer under Obama's proposed tax plans. Their primary example is Gail Johnson, who, along with her husband, earns about $515,000 in a typical year from the chain of preschools and after-school programs they own:

"You hear 'tax the rich,' and you think, 'I don't make that much money,' " said Johnson, whose Rainbow Station programs are headquartered near Richmond. "But then you realize: 'Oh, if I put my business income with my wages, then, suddenly, I'm there.' "

The piece claims that, under Obama's plan, Johnson's federal taxes would increase by 19 percent, or $23,000.

As economist Dean Baker points out, Johnson's situation "would describe that of less than 1 percent of all small business owners, so it is difficult to understand why such a person would be prominently featured in an article on President Obama's tax plans."

The Post piece goes on to note that "Republicans argue that those who fall into the upper brackets tend to be firms with the greatest capacity for job creation"--a claim which, as Baker writes, contradicts extensive economic analysis.

Also interviewed for the piece are the chief lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a VP at the National Foreign Trade Council, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, and two other small business owners likely to pay more in taxes under Obama's plan--all critics of the plan, except for the last small business owner, tacked on at the very end as the Post's apparent effort to distinguish its reporting from pure PR for the wealthy.

Post writers Lori Montgomery and V. Dion Haynes report that Johnson says she and her husband actually take home "substantially less" than their taxable income, and that potential tax increases would face her with a difficult choice:

"You can try to pass it on to consumers. But if you raise tuition, you put pressure on family budgets," she said. "For us, we're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea."

Or, gee, maybe you could try to get by with a post-federal tax income of $372,000 a year instead of $395,000.

Jim Murphy, the other critical small business owner interviewed, "said his accountant estimates that Obama's proposals could add $60,000 to his $120,000 tax bill."

"Said his accountant estimates"? Is this what passes for reporting at the Washington Post? Apparently so, at least when the coverage is of the embattled upper class.

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria is giving Obama high marks on his first 100 days in office in the magazine's May 4 issue. What's interesting, though, is when Zakaria explains why. He writes that while the country is more liberal than its been in 20 years, he (predictably enough) zeroes in on Obama's genius in charting a "middle course": no changes to NAFTA, no serious challenge to corporate power ("the old Democratic hostility to big business doesn't resonate so strongly anymore"), no real challenge to Wall Street ("he has steered a careful middle course on the bank bailouts") and no accountability for Bush-era torture ("he does not want to criminalize a policy disagreement") . It's just the sort of thing pundits like Zakaria love to see.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly has been passionately defending Bush-era torture for some time. But on April 23 he went further; not only does torture "work," but it is actually broadly popular, too:

According to a new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, most Americans want tough interrogations of top terror killers. When asked if they would support using torture on Osama bin Laden to get information, 56 percent say they favor doing that, including 42 percent of the Democrats polled. Thirty-nine percent oppose.

So there is little doubt that most Americans believe, in rare cases, tough interrogation is necessary.

A poll that asks whether Americans support torture Osama bin Laden wouldn't seem to tell us much; you might as well ask if people support torturing Satan.

But did Fox really just ask about torturing bin Laden? No. But O'Reilly had to cite that response, because the other responses from the same poll undermine his case. (It would appear to be the only relevant Fox poll on their site; it's a few months old, but the figures are the same as those cited by O'Reilly.) In reality, the Fox poll found the public far more ambivalent about torture than Man-of-the-People Bill O'Reilly:

Opinions on the use of torture are sharply divided. Forty-three percent of Americans favor allowing the CIA to use torture in extreme circumstances to obtain information from prisoners that "might protect the United States from terrorist attacks" and 48 percent oppose it. These results are consistent with findings from polling conducted in 2003 and 2002.

The number in favor of allowing the use of torture increases to 56 percent when the suspect in custody is Osama bin Laden.

So do most Americans favor torture captured "top terror killers?" Apparently not:

17. Do you favor or oppose allowing the CIA, in extreme circumstances, to use enhanced interrogation techniques, even torture, to obtain information from prisoners that might protect the United States from terrorist attacks?

Favor 43%
Oppose 48%
(Depends) 7%
(Don't know) 3%

David Swanson has noted (Consortium News, 4/23/09) that, as "much of elite U.S. punditry is backing away from torture," the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby is bucking that trend with an April 22 column in which "he both opposes torture under all circumstances and excuses it given the current circumstances." Jacoby's main justification for U.S. torture tactics are "the successes with which they have been credited"--such as "the foiling of Al-Qaeda's planned 'Second Wave'--a 9/11-like plot to crash a hijacked airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper." Swanson gives the lie to this zombie resurrected from the graveyard of Bush administration propaganda:

In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush claimed: "We stopped an Al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast."

However, an October 8, 2005, Los Angeles Times story, headlined "Scope of Plots Bush Says Were Foiled Is Questioned," cited "several counter-terrorism officials" as saying that "the plot never progressed past the planning stages.... 'To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,' said one senior FBI official.... At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities."

On February 10, 2006, the L.A. Times quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism," who said that "the Library Tower plot was one of many Al-Qaeda operations that had not gone much past the conceptual stage. … The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that those familiar with the plot feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan that that of the president."

Swanson further writes what at this this late date should be common knowledge to all political columnists: "Bush and his supporters have claimed other similar successes that have all turned out to be fictional. Most are more off-base than this one." See FAIR's contemporaneous Media Advisory: "'Terror Plot' Reporting Lacks Skepticism: Networks Treat White House Allegations As Fact" (2/13/06)

Demonstrating his trademark ability to move effortlessly from belligerent grandstanding to completely fictive political commentary, Fox star Bill O'Reilly claimed on April 22 that current and former attorney generals "Eric Holder and Janet Reno put the wall up between the FBI and the CIA, which led to the 9/11 attacks." But Media Matters points out (4/23/09):

in fact, the 1995 Justice Department memo and guidelines to which O'Reilly referred only addressed communications among divisions within DOJ, clarifying longtime unwritten restrictions on the sharing of information between the FBI's intelligence arm and DOJ's criminal division. They had no impact on communications between the FBI and the CIA, the Department of Defense, or any other agencies.

And "O'Reilly should know this," considering that, "when he previously adopted the 'wall' falsehood, 9/11 Commission member and former Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA) told O'Reilly that the policies in question made 'no limitation on any intelligence agency sharing anything with any other intelligence agency at all.'" But O'Reilly has never been one to let simple reality get in the way of what he chooses to know or not know.

Writing at Salon (4/23/09, ad-viewing required) of how the "sheer criminality" of George W. Bush-era torture, "really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates," Glenn Greenwald is thoroughly unsurprised by their behavior as "media stars are forced to address it":

Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses--things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions and accountability when they abuse their power.

To Greenwald,

This remains the single most notable and revealing fact of American political life: that (with some very important exceptions) those most devoted to maintaining and advocating government secrecy is our journalist class, of all people. It would be as if the leading proponents of cigarette smoking were physicians, or those most vocally touting the virtues of illiteracy were school teachers. Nothing proves the true function of these media stars as government spokespeople more than their eagerness to shield government actions from examination and demand that government criminality not be punished.

Listen to the current edition of the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09).

Describing his previous "ill-starred tenure at New York magazine" as having been "a crash course in the staggering unselfawareness of Manhattan class privilege," Chris Lehmann (The Awl, 4/21/09) now applies his insight to the magazine's recent "Rage of the Rich" issue, in which Gabriel Sherman "spells out with admirable, if analytically bankrupt, clarity" what Lehmann sees as "the secret conviction coursing through Wall Street's caverns": "Those who select careers in finance play an exceptional role in our society. They distribute capital to where it's most effective, and by some Ayn Randian logic, the virtue of efficient markets distributing capital to where it is most needed justifies extreme salaries." Lehmann asks readers to "consider the plain wrongness" of this:

By no measure, was capital distributed "efficiently"--let alone to places "where it was most effective" in the investor-invented calamity known as the mortgage meltdown. What's more, the question of where capital "is most needed" is inherently a political one. Post-Katrina New Orleans certainly could make do with a whole lot of efficiently delivered private capital, but somehow it was never kicked up, even in the headiest days of the housing bubble. Likewise, the "exceptional role" played by the nation's princeling capital-herders, as the piece goes on to ploddingly rehearse, consists largely of emailing to their foreign-market counterparts at odd off-work hours; what they're really up in arms about--with their New York magazine enablers feverishly goading them on--is seeing their social status in free-fall.

Andrew Revkin's April 24 piece, about how an energy industry group publicly denied links between emissions and global warming even as their own scientists confirmed such links, is pretty damning, if utterly unsurprising.

This part leaps out:

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

"They didn't have to win the argument to succeed," Mr. Monbiot said, "only to cause as much confusion as possible."

Note that it isn't Monbiot who refers to media's "neutral coverage," but the Times. In reality, what the industry counted on, successfully, was not neutrality at all, but the corporate media's entirely artificial balancing of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists with the patently self-interested views of industries profiting from fossil fuels.

The Times' rendering has a tone of "our strength was, ironically, a weakness is this case." But really it was just their weakness being a weakness. Again.

Voter turnout in last weekend's Haitian Senate elections was very low; observers cited in a Reuters report, "Haitians Largely Boycott Senate Election,” estimated it at less than 10 percent, which an Al Jazeera report attributed in part to "resentment over the banning of a popular party"--Fanmi Lavalas--as well as disenchantment with the ruling government and poverty. A short Associated Press report published in the New York Times (4/20/09) about the vote had an odd spin on these issues:

The success of Sunday's election was threatened by voter apathy and opposition from the Fanmi Lavalas Party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The party's candidates were disqualified by Haiti's provisional electoral council.

So the election's "success" was threatened by a popular political party's "opposition" to its own exclusion from the democratic process? It's a rather peculiar idea of what constitutes a threat to democracy--especially as the Times article makes no mention of the fact that Aristide, Haiti's twice-elected former president, remains in exile in South Africa, effectively barred from returning to Haiti after being overthrown five years ago in a U.S.-backed coup.

Images of the U.S. media's longtime foe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, with Obama at last weekend's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad prompted some corporate reporters to take the unusual step of questioning the political motivations behind an official photo-op.  On ABC's World News, Jake Tapper referred to Chavez's gift of The Open Veins of Latin America to Obama as a "stunt" (video available here).

George Stephanopoulos questioned whether Chavez was not just posing with Obama in order to take advantage of Obama's popularity. "You have to wonder who would win a popular vote between Obama and Chavez in Venezuela these days," Stephanopoulos stated in an early Sunday morning ABC News broadcast.

Yet, as even Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer--a Chavez critic--acknowledges in his latest column, "there are no recent polls on Obama's popularity in Venezuela." So just where does Stephanopoulos get the idea that Obama polls so favorably in Venezuela? Why, likely from Obama's own adviser on Latin America!

In an interview with Tapper broadcast on ABC, Jeffrey Davidow--a senior adviser to Obama on Latin American affairs and director of the Summit of the Americas, who is also president of the Institute of the Americas think tank, stated that Chavez

rushed photos of his handshake with president Obama on to his government's website, along with his express desire to be friends. That was for a reason.

There's a sizable population in Venezueala, probably the very, very vast majority of Venezuela Venezuelans, who have a more favorable attitude to president Obama than to him.

Tapper: You're saying president Obama is more popular in Venezuela than Chavez is?

Davidow: Yeah.

What better authority on what "probably the very, very vast majority of Venezuela Venezuelans" want than a White House senior advisor?

New York Times reporter Robert Pear (4/23/09) joined the rest of the media world expressing discomfort with the idea that the Senate Democrats might adopt budget reconciliation rules, which would they would use to pass major legislation on a majority vote rather than seeking 60 votes. His lead:

With solid majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats are tempted to use their political muscle to speed passage of health care legislation with minimal concessions to the Republican minority.

That approach may be the only way they can fulfill President Obama's campaign promises, but it carries high risks as well.

In the budget blueprint for the coming year, Democrats may resort to an obscure procedure known as reconciliation to clear the way for Senate passage of a comprehensive health bill with a 51-vote majority, rather than the 60 votes that would otherwise be needed.

"Muscle," "high risk"-- you get the picture. Until you read, many paragraphs later:

House Democrats say the Republican protests are overheated. The fast-track procedures have been used 19 times since 1980 to pass major legislation, including much of President Ronald Reagan’s domestic policy agenda in 1981, welfare overhaul in 1996 and President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.

Well, hold on. Pear says reconciliation is "obscure" and "high risk." Then later he says it's been used 19 times in the past three decades to pass major legislation. How can both be true?

It's hard to recall corporate media worrying much over the divisive, obscure tactics used to pass the Bush tax cuts or welfare reform.

The school voucher program in Washington, D.C., has been the subject of serious research, with opponents and supporters of vouchers using at as a test for whether the idea works in practice. Conservatives tend to insist that it's been a success, though the studies of the program don't seem to bear that out.

Washington Post columnist George Will (4/23/09), though, sees a new Education Department study bolstering the case for vouchers, which means the White House's decision to curtail the program is a horrible blow to children in the struggling D.C. schools:

After Congress debated the program, the Education Department released--on a Friday afternoon, a news cemetery--a congressionally mandated study showing that, measured by student improvement and parental satisfaction, the District's program works. The department could not suppress the Heritage Foundation's report that 38 percent of members of Congress sent or are sending their children to private schools.

Huh. Given all the attention paid to the D.C. voucher experiment, it's striking that this apparently significant news would pass with so little comment. But if you go to the Department of Education website to find this report proving that the "District's program works," you find this summary of the research (OSP stands for Opportunity Scholarship Program):

The evaluation found that the OSP improved reading, but not math, achievement overall and for 5 of 10 subgroups of students examined. The group designated as the highest priority by Congress--students applying from "schools in need of improvement" (SINI)--did not experience achievement impacts. Students offered scholarships did not report being more satisfied or feeling safer than those who were not offered scholarships, however the OSP did have a positive impact on parent satisfaction and perceptions of school safety. This same pattern of findings holds when the analysis is conducted to determine the impact of using a scholarship rather than being offered a scholarship.

So improved reading scores, but not math, and no discernable positive impact on the students most in need.  Maybe these results, which are in keeping with previous studies of the D.C. system, didn't get much attention because they actually aren't helpful to conservatives pushing to expand school vouchers--no matter what George Will seems to think.

Brad Jacobson has a new Media Bloodhound post (4/21/09) lauding CNN anchor Anderson Cooper for his "refreshing" refusal of "a generic phony Devil's advocate stance" when scholar Mark Danner "torpedoed" CNN analyst David Gergen's claim that

the number of people who were interrogated [by U.S. personnel] with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited. It was, of the thousands of people who were captured, it was about some 30 or 35 whom these techniques were used.

Instead, Cooper "actually set up Danner's response to Gergen's allegations with...facts and context":

Cooper: Do we know how many people died in U.S. custody? I've read reports of more than 100 or about 100 or maybe about a quarter of those were being investigated as actual homicides....

Danner: I think the rough figure is slightly more than 100 and 30, 29 or 30 were actually investigated as homicides.

But Jacobson also tells how this positivity actually illustrates the lacking state of corporate reportage overall:

This was not your normal CNN news program segment during which two guests spout differing opinions and the host plays the "fair and balanced" referee.

Cooper's approach in this circumstance, his effort to ferret out the facts from his guests and put those facts in context--however absurd it is that this should be unique--is unique for a CNN program, just as it still is for far too much of broadcast and cable network news shows.

Listen to the recent edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Mark Danner on Torture" (4/10/09)

Asking a simple question about a large issue--"How Do Trillion Dollar Bank Bailouts Fit With 'Free-Market Fundamentalism?'"--Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 4/19/09) tells his readers that "the obvious answer is, they don't"--since, "if you are a free-market fundamentalist, then you are absolutely opposed to bank bailouts" that "involve taking taxpayer dollars and handing them to banks that would go belly up if left to the market":

However simple this distinction might seem, it somehow escaped the NYT, which discussed the policies promoted in recent decades as though they could be plausibly described as "free-market fundamentalism." It should be perfectly apparent to everyone at this point that the people designing economic policy in recent decades had no philosophical commitment to "free markets"; they were trying to design policies that had the effect of redistributing income upwards.

In the case of the banks, this meant giving them implicit government insurance, both through the FDIC and the "too big to fail" policy, without constraints on their behavior or making them pay for it. This approach has nothing to do with free markets; it is a story of wealthy people using their political power to get valuable benefits from the government.

The upshot, according to Baker, is that "the NYT is insulting its readers by implying that these policies had anything to do with free market philosophy."