A nice round-up from TVNewser of the evening newscasts. Will conservatives ever catch a break from the left-wing media?

How The Evening Newscasts Covered the Tea Parties

• NBC Nightly News led with two stories on tax day. Lee Cowan reported on the tea parties while Savannah Guthrie reported on the White House message of middle-class tax cuts. In his open, Brian Williams said the tea parties were "organized on the Internet and by some cable TV personalities."

• ABC's World News made it the third story. First a soundbite from President Obama and a Dan Harris story on the tea parties which were "cheered on by Fox News and talk radio," Harris explained. The Charles Gibson broadcast led with two stories on the pirate attacks--Jim Sciutto in Kenya with the crew of the Maersk Alabama and David Muir with a story on the attack of another U.S. ship.

• CBS Evening News led with tax day--a soundbite from President Obama, a live picture of a rally in Arlington, Texas and a tea party story from Dean Reynolds. Reynolds referenced "a fistful of rightward leaning websites and commentators...embraced the cause," while showing Neil Cavuto and Glenn Beck at two different rallies.

In today's New York Times (4/16/07), Jane Perlez is wondering about Pakistani government officials who complain about  U.S. drones attacks in their country. Perlez starts by floating the idea that Pakistan can't possibly be against the strikes, because the government has asked to have some control over the use of the drones:

In fact, both sides have grown accustomed to an unusual diplomatic dance around the drones. For all their public protests, behind the scenes, Pakistani officials may countenance the drones more than Mr. Qureshi's reprimand would suggest, Pakistan and American analysts and officials say.

Why else would Pakistani military officials be requesting that the United States give them the drones to operate, asked Professor Riffat Hussain, of the defense studies department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

I'm not sure how that adds up. Most governments would like to have better weapons, wouldn't they? Especially those that are being used against their own populations.

But in case you might believe that the Times thinks civilian deaths are the least relevant factor in this discussion, this piece comes out and more or less says so:

But as effective as the attacks have proved, the Pakistanis' discomfort with the drones is real. The larger issue surrounding the drone strikes is the trade-off between decapitating the militant hierarchy and the risk of further destabilizing Pakistan--by undercutting the military and civilian government, by provoking retaliatory attacks from the militants, and by driving the Taliban and Al-Qaeda deeper into Pakistan in search of new havens.

Then there is the matter of public perception, particularly over the civilian casualties caused by the drone strikes, which infuriate Pakistani politicians and the media.

The deaths make it difficult for any Pakistani leader to support the drones publicly. At the same time, the Pakistani disavowals only reinforce the popular notion that the war against the militants merely furthers America's interests, not Pakistan’s own.

Well, it's good that civilian deaths--"the matter of public perception"-- was tacked on after other "larger" issues. The Times goes on to cite a number of deaths, but then finds someone to justify the killings:

About 500 civilians have been killed in the drone attacks, Talat Masood, a former Pakistani general, estimates. But, he said, the government fails to point out that many of those killed are most likely hosting Qaeda militants and cannot be deemed entirely innocent.

That's not all; Perlez closes with a survey of Pakistani opinion that serves the piece's point of view nicely:

One intriguing aspect of the drone attacks is that people living in the tribal region under the militants' grip may be more accepting of them than other Pakistanis, according to a recent but limited survey.

Perlez acknowledges that the survey can be "described as unscientific," but it's clearly too important to the point of the piece to leave out.

With all the fuss about tea parties today, it's worth noting again that the original Boston tea party was not, as is often claimed, a protest against the British imposing a tax on tea.  What the colonists were actually objecting to was the British lowering the tax on tea in order to favor the East India Company, the era's corporate giant, and undercut illegal tea smugglers. The real successors to the civil disobedience initiated by Samuel Adams in 1773 are not today's media-boosted events, but the protests against corporate globalization, big business monopolies and the war on drugs.

Maureen Dowd today (New York Times, 4/15/09) writes about the newspaper industry's complaints about Google:

Robert Thomson, the top editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as "tapeworms." His boss, Rupert Murdoch, said that big newspapers do not have to let Google "steal our copyrights." The AP has threatened to take legal action against Google and others that use the work of news organizations without obtaining permission and sharing a "fair" portion of revenue. But what's fair will be hard to prove.

First of all, Google is not stealing anyone's copyrights; quoting the headline and a small bit of text to indicate what various news organizations are reporting about is clearly covered by the fair use exemption to copyright laws.

But Google, rather than insisting on the inherent right that we all have to quote minor amounts of copyrighted material, allows news outlets to opt out of Google News by adding a simple line of code to their websites.  Dowd's piece cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt pointing out that "newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free." Apparently they must think they get more from Google linking to them than from Google not linking from them.
So if Google has a right to quote the newspapers' material, and the newspapers see such quotation as beneficial to themselves, why should Google volunteer to write big checks to the newspapers?  Well, because the papers would like to get free money.  And who wouldn't?

With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting--and MSNBC mostly mocking-- the right-wing "tea party" demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn't be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn't just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events.

As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington Post today:

Some Fox News hosts have been pushing the tea party protests slated for hundreds of cities today, almost to the point that they seem to be the ringmasters of the event.  "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!" Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney said the other day.

But there's another side to this saga. Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.

The New York Times has run zero stories. (The only mention was Times columnist Paul Krugman taking a brief swipe at the parties.) The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4. The Chicago Tribune ran a 300-word story and an item on postal workers mistaking tea for a hazardous substance. The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today. The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party, nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday (followed by a piece by me on the coverage). MSNBC's coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the "teabagging" until Chris Matthews held a more serious debate on Monday.

I must say I'm struck by this new standard for coverage of citizen activism--papers should cover small protests, some of which haven't happened? Was this the standard for, say, anti-war protests in 2002 and early 2003?

The pressure to treat these events seriously seems to be having some effect. Moments ago CNN had a long introduction to its live report from the Boston tea party, explaining that the protests have spread across the country, stoked by plain old citizen passion. The correspondent on the scene in Boston then explained that there were perhaps a few dozen attendees on hand. I guess Howard Kurtz will be pleased.

Washington Post reporter Paul Kane proffered what blogger Matthew Yglesias aptly called a "full-throated defense of journalism-as-stenography." Kane had been criticized by Media Matters that he had quoted Sen. Olympia Snowe (R.-Maine) as saying that Barack Obama's use of the filibuster-avoiding budget reconciliation tool would make it "infinitely more difficult to bridge the partisan divide" without noting that Snowe had backed budget reconciliation when it was used by George W. Bush. Asked in a WashingtonPost.com chat to defend himself against this criticism, Kane responded:

I'm sorry, what’s to defend?

Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness. We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us. We are not opinion writers whose job is to play some sorta gotcha game with lawmakers.

It's a little dismaying that we have to explain this to professional journalists, but what we want them to do is to examine official claims and put them in context. It's not clear why society would need the kind of institution that Kane thinks he works for; if we want to find out what Olympia Snowe said, we can sign up for her RSS feed.

See Extra!: "Meet the Stenographers: Press Shirks Duty to Scrutinize Official Claims" (11-12/04), by Steve Rendall.

Richard Cohen's Washington Post column today (4/14/09) is about how the new George W. Bush Policy Institute should focus primarily on Bush's managerial errors:

Conventional wisdom holds that the bungling of the Iraq war was a consequence of ideology run amok. Maybe. But it was also an example of awful management. Whether you supported the war or opposed it, you have to concede that it should have ended years ago and, along with the invasion of Grenada, be a fit dissertation subject for a desperate PhD candidate and not, as it remains, a festering debacle.

I don't follow the logic. First of all, if one opposed the war, then one actually doesn't "have to concede" that it should have been a quick war. Some war opponents (you know, the people Cohen maligned-- "only a fool-- or possibly a Frenchman" could argue with Colin Powell's WMD presentation, he wrote) were against the invasion precisely because they thought it wouldn't work, and would lead to a bloody occupation. If people like Cohen had spent more time listening to the war's critics-- and less time insulting them-- he might be less inclined to conclude that George Bush was mostly an inept manager.

From the O'Reilly Factor last night (4/14/09):

So far, the United Nations has not responded to the pirate threat. Are you surprised? Talking Points believes the U.N. could blockade the Somali ports where the pirates live, thereby crushing the threat. Is that hard? No, all it takes is will.

I suppose what he's really saying is that the Somali people aren't suffering enough. Come to think of it, lashing out at civilians seems to be O'Reilly's knee-jerk solution to a lot of problems. Consider O'Reilly's advice in September 2001:

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly the channel's most popular host, declared on his September 17 broadcast that if the Afghan government did not extradite Osama bin Laden to the U.S., "the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble-- the airport, the power plants, their water facilities, and the roads." O'Reilly went on to say:

"This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period."

O'Reilly added that in Iraq, "their infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain.... Maybe then the people there will finally overthrow Saddam." If Libya's Moammar Khadafy does not relinquish power and go into exile, "we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mine the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. We also destroy all the airports in Libya. Let them eat sand."

And:

His tone remained the same a few nights later (9/19/01), as he recommended bombing Afghanistan "in strategic ways and hope that the people themselves would rise up and throw the Taliban out." Acknowledging that Afghans "are starving as it is," O'Reilly recommended that the U.S. intensify civilian suffering by knocking out "what little infrastructure they have" and blowing up "every truck you see" to make sure that "there's not going to be anything to eat."

There's nothing the corporate media love more than centrism and "bipartisanship," so the Washington Post offered up a double scoop on Sunday. Dan Balz's piece "Partisans Argue Over Partisanship" looked at whether Barack Obama has lived up to his campaign pledge to "move the country away from the red-blue divisions of the past." Balz notes that there has been virtually zero Republican support for the White House's stimulus and budget proposals, but turns his attention to budget reconciliation, something that has been worrying pundits of late:

There is talk that Obama may seek a parliamentary tactic that would allow a health-care package to pass with 51 votes, thereby avoiding a Republican filibuster. That could help achieve his goal of producing major reform of the health-care system but at the probable cost of further polarization. Who will pay the price for that?

It's hard to figure what Balz means could happen; the Republicans are about as unanimous in their opposition to the the Obama White House as they could possibly be. How could they get more partisan than that?

Balz seems to suggest that Obama needs to give some ground, or he could find himself in trouble:

As the next round of legislative battles begins later this month, the president must balance his desire to push through his agenda against a possible public backlash accusing him of embracing the politics of partisanship that he criticized on the campaign trail. Republicans risk being tagged as a party rooting for Obama to fail when the public clearly favors the president's priorities. Obama and Republicans face uncomfortable choices as they maneuver in the months ahead.

It's odd to treat Obama as having similar political problems as the Republicans, though; Obama is very popular at the moment, and the Republicans are not. But this sort of calculation is popular among pundits, who believe the surest path to success for Democrats is to move to the right.

One of the chief purveyors of that kind of thinking is Balz's Post colleague David Broder, whose Sunday column "Why the Center Still Holds" is basically the same column he's been writing for years. As Broder sees it, "political independents" are the "fastest-growing portion of the electorate," though they remain "badly underrepresented in Congress." Broder writes:

It is the reaction of those swing voters -- or the politicians' anticipation of their shifting opinion -- that drives the outcome of the big policy debates. You've had an example of this already with Obama's cap-and-trade proposal for protecting the environment from carbon discharges.

Once political independents, who like the idea of clean air, grasped that cap-and-trade would mean a big tax increase for them, Republican opposition was reinforced and Democratic support weakened to the point that the Obama plan may already be doomed this year.

So centrists were scared off by the "big tax increase" that would accompany the White House's environmental policy, thus making it a non-starter. Would there be such a tax increase? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and leading Republicans say so, though it's not clear that they're right (and some of those Republican claims have been totally misleading). Broder concludes that given the power of these independents, "it will continue to behoove Obama to woo Republican help." Which means shifting the White House's policy goals to the right-- exactly where folks like Broder want them to be.

Single-payer healthcare has proven to work well in other countries. It has been proposed  in a bill with considerable congressional support, it polls well with the public, and it's supported by a majority of physicians.

So why is it so rarely mentioned in corporate media?

In the wake of a Frontline documentary that failed to examine single-payer national healthcare system as a possible alternative to the U.S. healthcare system, even PBS's own ombud is asking the question.

Citing FAIR’s recent study, "Media Blackout on Single-Payer Health Insurance," which documented that single-payer advocates were all but shut out of the media discussion about healthcare reform, ombud Michael Getler stated:

I find myself in agreement with those who wrote initially and who felt it was a missed opportunity by Frontline to shed some light on where this specific idea--clearly telegraphed in the previous program about how other countries do it, enjoying some level of popular and professional support and formalized in a bill before Congress--stood in today's political environment.

The ombud's report marked a victory for media activists who wrote in to complain about the program in the wake of a critical article by Corporate Crime Reporter's Russell Mokhiber (founder of the website Single Payer Action) and a FAIR Action Alert.

FAIR had criticized the film for misrepresenting the findings of Frontline's earlier documentary, Sick Around the World, which had emphasized that other countries ban insurance companies from making a profit on basic care, and had discussed single-payer alternatives, including Taiwan's healthcare system.

The only alternative to the current U.S. healthcare system that was examined in any depth in Sick Around America was Massachusetts' system of mandating that people buy insurance from for-profit health insurance companies. The documentary implied that all developed countries that provide universal healthcare have similar systems.

Today, FAIR’s radio program Counterspin airs an interview with T.R. Reid--a Frontline reporter for Sick Around the World who quit the production of Sick Around America because it contradicted the earlier Frontline documentary.

A recent Frontline documentary (3/31/09) presented mandatory for-profit healthcare as the only alternative to the current U.S. healthcare system, suggesting that this was the system all other developed nations use--even though the documentary was a sequel to an earlier Frontline report (4/15/08) that examined a wide range of international options, including Taiwan's single-payer model.

If you'd like to ask Frontline why it distorted the healthcare policy options, you can take part in FAIR's Action Alert here.  And you can leave copies of letters you send to Frontline in the comments of this post.

In a column on media treatment of Michelle Obama, Katha Pollitt (Nation, 4/20/09) points out this forehead-smacking quote from New York magazine's David Samuels (3/15/09):

There are clear limits to Michelle's ambition. She went to excellent schools, got decent grades, stayed away from too much intellectual heavy lifting, and held a series of practical, modestly salaried jobs while accommodating her husband's wilder dreams and raising two lovely daughters. In this, she is a more practical role model for young women than Hillary Clinton, blending her calculations about family and career with an expectation of normal personal happiness.

To which Pollitt responds:

Would you like some manly condescension with that factual misinformation, ladies? By all means, avoid "too much intellectual heavy lifting"! If Samuels regards $273,618--Michelle Obama's salary in her last year as head of community affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals--as modest, he must be the richest magazine journalist in the world. Michelle Obama, who made almost twice as much as her husband the senator, earned more than 99 percent of the population, and 98 percent of men. Moreover, she did so while raising two small children, often without her husband, who was off legislating in Springfield and Washington. That Samuels, like a 1950s home ec teacher, advises "young women" to keep their ambitions "practical" if they want to be happy shows just how disturbing Hillary Clinton--or rather the nightmare fantasy of Hillary Clinton--has been to certain male psyches. Because what if women wanted to be the ones with the wild dreams? What if they wanted men to be the enablers and nurturers? That would be awful.

ABC's Good Morning America did a special 3-part series on race this week, "Black and White Now," to "look at race relations in America." All three parts revisited old experiments or news stories.

The first (3/31/09) was a repeat of an experiment with children playing with black and white dolls, showing that now kids don't tend to think that the black doll is mean and the white doll nice, like they did in the '40s--although some black girls still say the black doll is ugly and the white doll pretty. The report cited William Julius Wilson saying "there's still work to be done, especially with girls, even with Barack Obama as president, his family in the White House, to make sure the weight of a prejudice past doesn't secretly make its way into the hopes of a brand-new day."

Number two (4/1/09): another experiment repeated, black men trying to hail cabs in New York City. This time, in their very non-scientific experiment, black men do fine during the day, but have a harder time getting a cab once it's dark out. They also talk to people of color who feel discriminated against at high-end stores.

And number three (4/2/09): GMA anchors Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts went back to their hometowns in the South and talked to groups of white and black children, respectively, about their perceptions of race. Ten years ago, when they did this in Mobile, the kids talked about a racial divide and expressed negative stereotypes of the other race. This time, "the kids don't wanna talk a lot about skin color" and were "expressing one hope that a rainbow of kids can show grown-ups how to learn, have parties, live together." Roberts asks them why they think (old) people still want to talk about race a lot, and one kid says, "Because they're so happy it's not like that anymore."

These are, overall, encouraging stories. But it's only possible to tell such encouraging stories by limiting your focus to one kind of racism--the overt kind that plays out through individually held prejudices. Notice that none of GMA's episodes looked at the racial wealth gap, or the ways that the foreclosure crisis is impacting people of color more severely than white people, or the disproportionate number of people of color locked up in our criminal justice system versus white people (just to name a few examples). Sure, overt prejudice has diminished over the years, and that's a good thing (though there's still plenty of it out there). But ABC only perpetuates the very serious underlying racism by pretending prejudice is the only kind of racism there is.

A New York Post feature headlined "A Day in the Life of Bill O'Reilly" offers this insight into life working for the Fox host:

"The staff of 15 meets 7:30 every morning. Working for me, you've got to be a Navy SEAL. No mistakes. I need facts, or it'll get rammed down my throat."

Huh. When did this "no mistakes" policy start?

Of course, some former employees of O'Reilly recall a slightly different workplace experience....

Jim Cramer, CNBC: "I think Goldman is a great firm....  The good guys are in charge. [Lloyd] Blankfein is a fabulous guy. Do people want him in jail? Does Paul Krugman want him in jail? Where do they want these guys?"

Mike Barnicle, Boston Herald: "Paul Krugman wants anyone who makes over $75,000 a year in jail."

--MSNBC's Morning Joe (4/2/09), cited in Huffington Post (4/2/09)