Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed columnist Harold Jackson (5/20/09) writes that most of those who have criticized his paper for hiring of pro-torture lawyer John Yoo as his colleague "have their facts wrong."
After making a gratuitous swipe at bloggers ("who never let the facts get in the way when they're trying to whip people into a frenzy to boost website hits"), Jackson gets down to specifics: "To set the record straight, no one tried to hide Yoo's becoming a regular columnist," he declares. If that's the case, why isn't Yoo listed on the Inquirer's website along with its other regular columnists?

That seems to be the one specific fact that the critics got "wrong," actually. The rest of the column is a defense of the Inquirer's judgment in hiring Yoo to "counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left," and to "make sure our pages present alternative points of view."

It's kind of funny, the line about countering criticism--the whole point of the column is that the paper's gotten a lot of criticism about hiring Yoo, but the response to that criticism is not to hire someone representing the critics' point of view, but to tell them to stop reading blogs.

In point of fact, the Inquirer's columnists do not all represent the left. In addition to Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who got 16 percent of the Philadelphia vote in his last election, the lineup also features Kevin Ferris, who writes his own defenses of torture and condemns Barack Obama's "Dangerous Naivete in Foreign Policy." And Michael Smerconish, a more moderate conservative who has filled in as a substitute host for Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough.

There's five other columnists listed by the paper, all with backgrounds in corporate journalism. Some of them are mildly liberal; none of them are likely to be mistaken for I.F. Stone. Certainly none of them are prominent figures in progressive politics, a left-wing counterpart to Santorum.

And who would be the left-wing counterpart to Yoo, exactly? Bill Ayers? That's unfair to Ayers, whose actions, however reckless, didn't end up killing anybody.

This is the trouble with treating Yoo as someone who merely "provide[s] the catalyst for intelligent discourse": Torture is illegal under U.S. law and a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And, despite the indignation Jackson seems to feel over the "very pleasant" Yoo being called a "war criminal" by emailers, it's classified as, yes, a war crime by international law.

When influential institutions treat those responsible for such things as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than "thoughtful conversation."

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib wrote a piece today (5/20/09--subscription required) that offers California as a model for understanding the difficulties in overhauling the healthcare system:

California's experience, in fact, represented a kind of trial run for the healthcare overhaul the president and Congress are about to attempt on the national level, offering useful lessons as well as warning signs about the potholes ahead.

Well, yes and no. Seib writes that the "California example showed the importance of securing at least some bipartisan support, the need to reassure those who have insurance as well as those who don't, and the imperative of showing the public that healthcare costs can be tamed." But there's another layer to this story, one that Seib mostly avoids: the support for a single-payer system in the state.

Seib writes that "California's effort was launched by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in early 2007." That would leave out the nine years of single-payer legislative action prior to that year; in fact, in 2006 the single-payer bill SB 840 passed the state legislature, only to be vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It was reintroduced the following year, and thanks to a massive organizing effort (aided by Michael Moore's film SiCKO) it once again passed the state legislature--and was once again vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It has been reintroduced this year.

Different lessons can be drawn from this experience, of course. But in Seib's version of California history, we get only a glancing mention of this: "Some liberals pushed a government-run health plan." The corporate media (along with various politicians) are determined to keep single-payer "off the table" in the current national debate; Seib seenms to want to erase it from the past, too.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/19/09, ad-viewing required) "gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism":

Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country's institutions--particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media--acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it. And they still do.

Nothing has produced as much media praise for Obama as his embrace of what [the New Republic's Jack] Goldsmith calls the "essential elements" of "the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy." That's because--contrary to the ceremonial displays of regret and denouncements of Bush--the dominant media view is this: the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism was right; those policies are "centrist"; Obama is acting commendably by embracing them; most of the country wants those policies; and only the far left opposes the Bush/Cheney approach.

Anyone who doubts that should consider this most extraordinary paragraph from Associated Press' Liz Sidoti:

Increasingly, President Barack Obama and Democrats who run Congress are being pulled between the competing interests of party liberals and the rest of the country on Bush-era wartime matters of torture, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Beyond quoting Sidoti having "described Obama's embrace of Bush's policies as 'governing from the center,'" Greenwald goes on to note that "her AP colleague Tom Raum said virtually the same thing today":

Internationally, Obama reversed course and is seeking to block the court-ordered release of detainee-abuse photos, revived military trials for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and is markedly increasing the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan....

Still, even though Obama may be irritating liberal purists on both national security and domestic policy, he has no real choice but to move toward the middle.

Greenwald quips that "apparently, Bush/Cheney terrorism policies are Centrist. Who knew?"

Taking note of Bill O'Reilly's "cheerleading the downfall" of newspapers--"he reacted with glee when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was forced to go Web-only. More recently in his column, O'Reilly similarly wisecracked about the New York Times' financial woes"--MediaWeek editor Mike Shields (Editor & Publisher, 5/18/09) challenges "O'Reilly's theory for why these publications are in such deep trouble":

Because they have suddenly shifted radically left in their coverage, and readers are rejecting it. That's why he's happy.

That theory doesn't sync with the thinking of most sensible people in the media who understand the industry is going through massive macro changes, and that many Americans--particularly the young--are permanently changing their reading habits away from newspapers and magazines. Not because of political leanings, mind you, but because the generally free technology of the Web trumps the tradition of carbon-based, physically distributed media every time.

Not to mention the deleterious effects of an ever-greedy Wall Street, phenomenally irresponsible corporate ownership and the press' own efforts to destroy any remaining trust the public may have in their reportage. But to Shields, "there's another interesting aspect to O'Reilly's anti-newspaper diatribe":

During this horrid economic cycle, when millions of Americans are out of jobs and terrified about their future employment prospects, rooting for American businesses to go under seems way out of touch to me, especially for a commentator who's constantly talking about sticking up for regular "folks." It kind of sounds, well, un-American.

NACLA has Latin America writer Daniel Denvir's review (5/11/09) of a new Bart Jones biography of Hugo Chávez. In it, Denvir's reasons for having "never been a big reader of biographies"--"the product of our most unfortunate and idol-indulging tendencies"--give way to the fact that some leaders' "images become proxies for larger ideological, social and cultural debates--often to the point of caricature." Denvir's contention that "a good biography can take on this echo chamber residuum and tell a more reality-based story" becomes that much more urgent when, "in the case of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, this is a politically necessary task":

The New York Times editorial board claims Chávez aids guerrillas. Ethically challenged televangelist Pat Robertson called for his assassination. And when talking heads aren't calling him a terrorist, they take up the Venezuelan right wing’s cartoonish image of Chávez as hyperbolic and verbose buffoon. Admittedly, recent conservative attempts to provoke hysteria over the Chávez-Obama handshake at the Summit of the Americas seem to have fallen flat.

The Jones book crucially "takes on mainstream media coverage of Chávez and explains the Bolivarian Revolution's victories--and thus its high level of public support" while it also "acknowledges that Chávez is a leader with serious faults... but methodically knocks down the charge that he is a dictator." Denvir further notes that "conservative talk radio and mainstream media have eagerly spilled copious ink cataloguing Chávez's sins. Meanwhile, far less attention is given to President Álvaro Uribe and the Colombian political establishment's ties to right-wing paramilitaries, who actually kill their political opponents," and suggests that "a comparative Lexis-Nexis study on the subject would be enlightening." Well... see Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall

Corporate media's arguments against Google are getting stranger and stranger. While previously the Washington Post had accused the search engine of "vacuum[ing] up their content without paying a dime," now the Post has media lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown (5/16/09) charging that search engines "crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path."

Can anything be done to stop these terrifying monsters?  Yes, the two Bruces say--you could change the law to require search engines to "obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index websites." Given that the point of this would be to force search engines to "negotiate with copyright holders over the value of their content"--that is, with millions of copyright holders located all over the world--this would likely eliminate all problems associated with search engines...by eliminating search engines.  Then I'm sure we'd have a golden age of journalism once again.

Media critic blogger Mark Howard (News Corpse, 5/16/09) has a problem with the voluble media controversy over "the fact that Obama’s pro-choice position is in conflict with [Notre Dame] University's Catholic principles"--namely, "neither the Catholic protesters nor the media ever threw similar tantrums when George W. Bush delivered the commencement speech in 2001, after receiving his honorary degree":

Every good Catholic knows that the church is strictly opposed to capital punishment. Since Bush set records for carrying out death sentences when he was governor of Texas, you would think that the same guardians of virtue that are protesting Obama, who has never personally signed an abortion certificate, would have been out in force for a man who presided over 152 executions. But there was nary a peep. There were no bishops signing petitions opposing Bush's appearance. There were no protests on campus. There were no students refusing to participate in graduation ceremonies. And there were no cameras from national news networks circling like buzzards.

If these Catholic Crusaders are truly interested in demonstrating their piety without prejudice, they should immediately call for Notre Dame to revoke Bush's honorary degree. If the press is honestly endeavoring to be objective, they should pose this question to the protesters.

Making clear that he doesn't "fault the pro-life movement's efforts to advance their beliefs through protest and civil disobedience," Howard maintains his own right to "fault the media for the inflated sense of importance they bestow on such a tiny assemblage of adversaries. Polls show overwhelming support for the president's visit to Notre Dame."

In his introduction (TomDispatch, 5/12/09) to Pepe Escobar analyzing the current politics of the Aghanistan/Pakistan region, Tom Engelhardt describes how "there, the skies are filled with planes and unmanned aerial drones, and civilians as well as combatants die every day in increasing numbers as ever more frequent attacks and expanding conflicts make daily headlines." But there's more to the story:

Those are, of course, the front-page stories. Energy, especially in the form of oil and natural gas, fuels everything from civilization to its various discontents and means of destruction, and yet it remains largely on the business pages of our papers. Even in a time of relatively depressed oil and gas prices, energy runs like an undercurrent just beneath global headlines. Under the carnage of war, that is, courses what Escobar likes to call the Liquid War, and just how the energy flows and through which territories controlled by whom does turn out to make--quite literally--a world of difference, even if that isn't what captures our attention most of the time.

Of "The Real Afghan War," Escobar writes in his essay: "In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question--why Afghanistan matters--is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten."

Quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham's statement at a May 13 Senate hearing that "one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work," Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/16/09) explains that this is "implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition's brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the 15th to 17th centuries," and posits that "in a normal world, one might have expected national outrage over a prominent U.S. senator speaking favorably of the Spanish Inquisition, which pioneered innovations in torture... including the water torture now known as waterboarding":

Beyond the inhumanity of the Inquisition, there is the troubling fact that the torture tactics did "work" only in the sense that they extracted many false confessions and got victims to implicate other individuals who were, in turn, persecuted, tortured and put to death for their religious beliefs.

But Graham's praise for the efficacy of the Inquisition's torture tactics passed largely unnoticed--and without any perceptible criticism--in the American news media. The Washington Post article on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing didn't even mention Graham's extraordinary remark; a brief New York Times article about the hearing mentioned it only in passing.

Remarking on how "Graham is still considered a Republican 'moderate' regarding Bush’s 'war on terror' policies," Parry notes a stark "contrast to the quiet acceptance of Graham’s views on the Inquisition’s torture tactics" and how "Washington news media flew into near hysteria over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tortured explanations of what she knew about Bush's torture policies."

Taking down "Michael Wolff's fat masterpiece of sycophancy about Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News," Murdoch Archipelago co-author Bruce Page (CounterPunch, 5/15/09) counters Wolff's "astigmatic lens of gossip" with "a true outline" of Fox/Wall Street Journal mogul Murdoch's roots:

Rupert's father, Sir Keith, founded the dynasty during World War I as a dirty-tricks minion for "Billy" Hughes, probably Australia's nastiest prime minister. His cover myth as a heroic war reporter has been so thoroughly dismantled that now it impresses none but family retainers and--of course--Mr. Wolff.

At Versailles, Keith was Billy's ever-present aide in striving to make the Peace Conference into a vicious cock-up, rich in racist and imperialist content. Curiously, the pair would have had zero leverage but for the failure of a plot of Keith's, which sought in 1918 to remove Australia's battlefield commander on the Western Front, John Monash, for being an unheroic Jew.... Monash's divisions led the British breakthrough...which...put Germany--suddenly, unexpectedly--at the Allies' mercy.

[Australian] soldiers hoped there might be space for a decent peace. But politicians of various brands thought otherwise, and none outdid Keith's boss in vengeful demagoguery, destroying at last all the credit Monash had gained for Australia. Billy and Keith weren't prime authors of the Versailles debacle in 1919. But none toiled harder in its cause.

Page sees "two items of present relevance" in "this ironic history" of the treaty that precipitated the rise of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich: "We see the core of the Murdoch business: offering political propaganda services, disguised thinly as journalism," and then "there's the stunning Murdoch talent for seizing the wrong end of any available political or military stick," calling "Keith's estimate of Monash and Rupert's of the pseudo-warrior Bush Jr... reciprocals, to be sure, but identically crass."

Pointing to a May 9 Boston Globe editorial saying that Barack "Obama conveyed the right message last week by hosting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari" to emphasize "the close link between Pakistan and the anti-Taliban struggle in Afghanistan," before admitting that "U.S. military strikes against militants in both countries inevitably provoke anger and indignation among civilians," Palestine Chronicle editor Ramzy Baroud (5/14/09) notes that "this is as much as most U.S. media... are willing to concede as far as U.S. responsibility in lethal wars, civil strife and militancy in both countries is concerned."

Baroud elaborates in ways unheard in corporate media:

The escalation in Pakistan is not entirely surprising, however, as U.S. officials and media pundits have been adamant in advising the new administration that it was not Afghanistan that posed the greater threat to U.S. interests, but Pakistan. It was similar to the attitude of neoconservatives in the Bush administration after its failure in Iraq. It was not Iraq that the U.S. should have attacked, but Iran, they tirelessly parroted, hoping to generate yet another war.

What we are not told, however, is that unremitting U.S. bombings of the utterly poor and neglected northern provinces of Pakistan have garnered untold animosity towards the U.S. and its central government allies. It provoked, in some areas, total chaos and lawlessness, which in turn gave rise to the Pakistani "Taliban."

Closing with distressing estimates of "1 million Pakistanis already on the run in the northern and eastern parts of the country," Baroud tells us how "they are threatened by fighting, hunger and all sorts of predators, including U.S. drones circling overhead"--which U.S. media also are keen to push as the latest bloody solution in the region. See the new FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Pro-Drone Propaganda: 60 Minutes Slights Critics of Controversial Weapons" (5/12/09).

Giving us a glimpse at "a large part of what was left on the editor's floor" from his On the Media NPR interview, Harpers.org's Scott Horton (5/12/09) writes of "the New York Times and its history of dealing with the word 'torture'":

I noted that in the pre-Bush era, the Times had absolutely no compunction about calling certain practices "torture," but when the Bush administration began to use them, the word was suddenly off-limits, or only used in the most circumspect way ("a practice which critics of the administration call 'torture,'" for instance). A good example can be found in reporting about the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, on which the Times played an essential role. The Khmer Rouge's waterboarding was "torture." But Bush Administration waterboarding is just an "enhanced interrogation technique." What’s behind the distinction? It's a blend of fear and hypocrisy.

To Horton, the reality is that "the Times policy enables torture"--here's his quote from a 1945 George Orwell letter on the matter:

The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization.... I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.

Horton says "the Times needs to make that moral effort,"calling their "failure to do so... alarming." Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to 'Waterboarding': Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5–6/08) by Isabel Macdonald

Blogger and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch has a review (Attytood, 5/11/09) of how, "by late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top Justice Department lawyer lies at the root of the period of greatest peril to the U.S. Constitution in modern memory":

It was widely known in 2008, for example, that Yoo had argued for presidential powers far beyond anything either real or implied in the Constitution--that the commander-in-chief could trample the powers of Congress or a free press in an endless undeclared war, or that the 4th Amendment barring unreasonable search and seizure didn't apply in fighting what Yoo called domestic terrorism.

Most famously, Yoo was known as the author of the infamous "torture memos" that in 2002 and 2003 gave the Bush and Cheney the legal cover to violate the human rights of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere, based on the now mostly ridiculed claim that international and U.S. laws against such torture practices did not apply. Working closely with Dick Cheney, Cheney's staff and others, Yoo set into motion the brutal actions that left a deep, indelible stain on the American soul.

Bunch notifies us that, despite all this, his "colleagues upstairs at the Philadelphia Inquirer--with none of the fanfare that might normally accompany such a move"--decided "to sign a contract with Yoo in late 2008 to give him a regular monthly column." Bunch explains that the paper "thus handed Yoo a loud megaphone on what was once a hallowed piece of real estate in American journalism--to write on the very subjects that have now led Justice Department investigators to reportedly recommend disbarment proceedings against Yoo."

CBS anchor Bob Schieffer was profiled by Marketwatch, where we learn:

But don't get the false impression that Schieffer is a pushover for his important guests. When I asked him how he feels when subjects lie to him on the air or try to mislead the audience, he got right to the point.

"I want to jump across the table and choke them," he said.

Wow. First of all, this Marketwatch piece is largely about Schieffer's recent interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney. The irony is almost too much; as Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson put it to Rachel Maddow:

This is the man who, after all, said we know with absolutely certainty Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.  We know he has an active nuclear program.  We know he has contacts with Al-Qaeda.  This is the man who told more lies from a public pulpit than almost anyone else I know.

For the record, Schieffer did not choke Dick Cheney when he appeared on Face the Nation. He did seem weirdly proud of the interview, primarily because when he asked Cheney if he'd prefer Rush Limbaugh or Colin Powell's vision for the GOP, Cheney (totally unsurprisingly) picked Limbaugh. "I've never done anything that had as much resonance," says Schieffer.

Beyond that-- when it comes to misleading an audience, what about Schieffer's record?

--CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer announced (2/9/06) that "for the first time President Bush confirmed today that in the months after 9/11, the government broke up another terrorist plot to fly a plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles." The fact that Bush says something does not "confirm" that what he is saying is true--and, in fact, earlier reporting by the Los Angeles Times casts doubts on Bush's claims. (FAIR Media Advisory, 2/13/06)

--CBS's Bob Schieffer (12/8/02) remarked of an earlier disavowal of banned weaponry by Hussein, "Saddam Hussein says he has no weapons of mass destruction, but should we believe him?" Schieffer asked a visiting senator on Face the Nation what would happen if U.S. experts "conclude that Saddam Hussein is once again lying, as he has so often in the past.claiming he doesn't have the weapons, when in fact we know that he has." (FAIR Action Alert, 2/1/08)

--CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asserted (6/6/04), "You could hate his policies, but it was hard not to like Ronald Reagan." But Reagan's "likeability" numbers did not score much higher than other modern presidents, including Jimmy Carter. (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/9/04)

Responding to a "stupid" critique of his May 1 column defending the use of terror in "ticking timebomb" scenarios, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (5/15/09) asserts that there has too been a real-life example of such a situation:

On October 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held."

Who was that prime minister? Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Peace laureate. The fact that Waxman died in the rescue raid compounds the tragedy but changes nothing of Rabin's moral calculus.

Krauthammer's column leaves out a key point of his argument, which is that Hamas was threatening to kill the captive unless Israel released 200 prisoners--that's the ticking time bomb.

It's certainly true that the fact that the Israeli prisoner was killed does not change Rabin's, or Krauthammer's, moral calculus.  Because the calculation is this: The value of the life of one individual from a group we identify with so far outweighs the human rights of a disfavored group that even the chance of saving him justifies torture.

Hamas made the same calculation from the opposite perspective: For them, threatening the life of one Israeli was worth it if it meant a chance of freedom for 200 Palestinians. And though Krauthammer is sarcastic about people who charge him with "moral deficiencies," I don't think his pro-torture ethics give him much ability to explain to them why they're wrong.