Former Sean Hannity show regular Hal Turner recently was arrested for blogging that "we have enough bullets to put... down" those not heeding his "warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die." While criminal prosecution most definitely is not the general solution for hateful commentary, the Hartford Courant's Edmund H. Mahony (6/25/09) reports facts that clearly move the Internet radio host's rantings from the realm of First Amendment protection solidly into incitement of violence. Turner, Mahony writes,

was arrested again Wednesday on charges that he threatened to assault and murder three federal judges in retaliation for a ruling upholding handgun bans in the Chicago area....

The federal charges in Chicago arise from Internet postings on June 2 and 3 in which Turner allegedly proclaimed his "outrage" over a June 2 decision by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook and Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer of the Chicago-based U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed," said the postings, which also included photographs, phone numbers, work addresses and room numbers of the judges, along with a photo of the building in which they work and a map of its location.

The upholding of this handgun ban--stemming from white supremacist Matt Hale having contracted the slaughter of a U.S. District Court judge, her mother and her husband--offended Turner so much that he commented that "apparently, the 7th U.S. Circuit court didn't get the hint after those killings.... It appears another lesson is needed." One has to wonder if this further intensely violent call to arms will be enough to force Sean Hannity's  repudiation of his documented history of association with Turner.

Proving his memory better (or at least less selective) than that of the institution of corporate journalism, Media Bloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson (6/24/09) is proposing that "It might be more difficult for Republicans to bash President Obama for being 'timid' in his comments about the Iranian government's violence against protesters if the U.S. media didn't consistently censor U.S./Iranian history":

Take CNN's recent Iran timeline, titled "A Brief Look at Iran's History."

According to the timeline, which begins in 1979, Iran has "been at odds with the West and some of its neighbors" since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It refers to the Shah as having been "pro-Western." Yet in the mother of all omissions, CNN leaves out how the U.S. government was directly involved in bringing the Shah to power in a 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Jacobson has to look overseas to cite reporting of the fact that "the CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, run until then in by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company." That Agence France-Presse piece goes on to explain how "for many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests."

So maybe its not Obama's "timidity" that really gets under corporate commentators' skin, but the fact that even the United States' president is more honest about these facts than the folks at our major Cable News Network: "You might remember Obama owning up to this bit of history during his recent trip to the Middle East, in a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo."

Listen to the related FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).

ABC's Diane Sawyer claimed (CNN, 6/22/09) the network's June 24 forum on President Barack Obama's healthcare plan would feature "questions from every single vantage point."

Yet, ignoring calls from FAIR (Action Alert, 6/22/09) and advocacy groups such as Health Care Now!, the special did not include a single question from an advocate of single-payer national health insurance—despite the fact that the single-payer option polls well with the public (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09) and is seen by many experts as the best way of expanding coverage to the uninsured while also controlling costs.

In the wake of well-publicized flak ABC received from the Republican Party over the special, the Republicans' position that Obama's plan amounted to a "government takeover of healthcare" was reflected in the questions selected by ABC.

ABC's Charles Gibson asked Obama directly to respond to Republican criticism. Meanwhile, one of ABC's hand-selected questioners said he was concerned with "the big brother fear," asking, "How far is government going to go in reference to my personal life and healthcare treatments?" Another questioner, identified as an M.D., said he was "concerned" with "the government taking over healthcare."

The insurance industry's perspective was also well-represented in the forum, with ABC medical editor Timothy Johnson citing "critics" who say Obama's plan "would eventually put private insurers out of business." ABC also featured a question to Obama from the CEO of the major insurance company Aetna, as well as the head of the Lewin Group--which is owned by another major health insurance company, the United Healthcare Group.

(Four medical practitioners, the president of the American Medical Association, two family members of patients, a former government health official, two human resources managers and a small business owner were also selected by ABC to ask questions to the president.)

David Westin, president of ABC, had defended ABC's selection of guests for the forum, saying, "We will include a variety of perspectives coming from private individuals asking the president questions and taking issue with him, as they see fit." Just days before the forum, Sawyer stated on CNN (Reliable Sources, 6/22/09) that it was going to be "a room full of widely diverse ideas in which people who actually experience the reality of front-line healthcare are going to get a chance to pose their challenging questions to the president."

Yet the issue of single-payer was never raised by either the ABC interviewers or ABC's hand-selected guests, despite the fact that it is popular, and favored by 59 percent of physicians, according to recent peer-reviewed survey (Annals of Internal Medicine, 4/1/08). And despite the fact that even Obama's own doctor has criticized the government's plan in favor of a single-payer system.

In the entire ABC healthcare special, the single-payer option was only once mentioned, and dismissively, by Obama himself, in response to Republican charges that his healthcare proposal is a "Trojan horse" for "socialized medicine."

Yet, tellingly, for the corporate media's most influential media critic--Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz-– the main concern vis a vis the ABC forum was not the silencing of a popular reform proposal. Rather, it was the question of whether health insurance companies and other industry perspectives would be sufficiently represented in the forum.

In a segment on the ABC healthcare forum on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Kurtz stated to Sawyer:

You have the ultimate guest for this special, the president. Why not also include guests from the insurance industry, the hospital industry, the drug companies who also have a stake in this health care battle?

It would be a surprise to many Americans that they do not, in Kurtz's view, have a stake in healthcare reform.

But then again, corporate media's longstanding blackout on the single-payer option shows that corporate journalists have long seen the views of citizens as unimportant to the healthcare debate.

I wrote a short item on Dan Froomkin's firing for FAIR's radio show CounterSpin today:

One of the bright spots at the Washington Post media enterprise was Dan Froomkin's column, "White House Watch," for WashingtonPost.com.  It often struck us that Froomkin had a whole different attitude--skeptical of those in power, and critical of their journalistic enablers--than most of his colleagues at the Post Co. So it was perhaps not too surprising to hear that Froomkin, one of the Post's most popular online writers, had been fired--not long after his column was placed under the authority of editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who's one of the journalists who best exemplifies the Post's dominant ethic of service to authority.

Those who had accepted the premise that the purpose of journalism was to advance the agenda of official Washington were understandably resentful of Froomkin, who was a constant reminder that that was not, in fact, the only way to report the news.  Post ombud Deborah Howell wrote a column back in 2005  complaining that Froomkin was "highly opinionated and liberal"--hilariously quoting the Post's then-national political editor John Harris as saying that Froomkin's column "dilutes our only asset--our credibility."

Let's be clear--it's not that they don't like you injecting opinion into the news at the Washington Post; in fact, they do that so much that economist Dean Baker refers to them as "Fox on 15th Street." But they have to be the right opinions--if, like Post columnist Dana Milbank, you think single-payer advocates are pathetic and ridiculous, that's an opinion the Post Co. is happy to showcase.  If your opinion is, like Froomkin's, that torture performed by the U.S. government ought to be called "torture," well, that might be putting at risk what the Washington Post calls "credibility."

I was struck in writing this item by what I couldn't do, which is quote Froomkin's powerful statement about the importance of journalists pointing out when officials aren't telling the truth--because Froomkin repeatedly refers to this key journalistic function as "calling bullshit"--and if we had quoted that on the air, the stations that run our show would risk being fined by the FCC.  (I could have translated that to "calling BS," but somehow euphemizing Froomkin's unvarnished call for journalistic forthrightness didn't feel right.)  Just a reminder that the petty censorship policies of the FCC do have political consequences.

Blogger Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 6/24/09) has noted that when "CBS ran a story about the latest batch of Nixon tapes made public... they included a section of a February 21, 1973 conversation with Billy Graham that showed Nixon at his psycho best," addressing anti-Semitism thus: "This has happened to the Jews, happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it's happening, and now it's gonna happen in America if these people don't start behaving. It may be they have a death wish."

But the real problem comes in CBS's quote of the Graham response: "Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity." Schwarz asks us,

What do you think about Graham's response there? True, he didn't stand up to Nixon's rambling insanity, but at least he deflected it. He comes out looking pretty good!

Too bad this is how the conversation actually went (mp3):

Graham: Well, you know I told you one time that the Bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They're the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They're the ones putting out these obscene films.

[three minutes of talking]

Nixon: It may be they have a death wish, that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

Graham: Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity.

Schwarz closes with a further "P.S.": "CBS is also wrong that Nixon was talking about anti-Semitism being generated by the shooting down of the Libyan plane. Nixon was actually responded to Graham being angry about a rabbi criticizing a new attempt at widespread evangelism." But this is all part of a great tradition in the U.S. press: Corporate media have diligently worked to clean up the good reverend's image for just about as long as he's been around.

Activist David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 6/24/09) has some problems with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's and Congressmember Tom Perriello's recent visit "generating a story and big color photo on page 1 of the Charlottesville Daily Progress" under the headline "In UVa Visit, Democrats Call Deficit Reckless":

The newspaper reported on Congressman Perriello warning that he could not vote for healthcare without a way to pay for it. There was no mention of the fact that the previous week, the day before Hoyer introduced his bill to fight deficits, both of these gentlemen had voted to spend another $97 billion on wars and to loan $100 billion to European bankers through the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Nobody in Washington had even hinted at where any of that money would come from, and apparently Hoyer and Perriello didn't care.

The article did include a quote from a Republican blaming Democrats for deficits. But that's doubly bad reporting. Republicans have pushed deficits up far more than Democrats, and just getting a haphazard (and inaccurate) quote from "the other side" misses the relevant context of the war supplemental vote. Here's the patently false quote from Congressman Eric Cantor: "We've amassed more debt over the last five months than this country has amassed in the last 200 years."

Swanson sees another example of this kind of overwhelmingly uncritical coverage in the same day's visit by "two top environmental officials from the White House": "Oddly, there was no particular news to announce at the press conference. Predictably, all the media outlets were there to trumpet the story anyway." Listen to Swanson on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "David Swanson on 'Benchmarks'" (5/18/07).

Gawker blogger The Cajun Boy (6/24/09) is agog at "How Fox News Educates Its Viewers":

Last night Glenn Beck made crude drawings on a chalkboard, and tonight he and Bill O'Reilly used Barbie dolls to explain ACORN.

In the course of explaining how Nancy Pelosi is trying to stop noble Republicans from stopping ACORN from destroying America, Beck reached under the table and pulled out a Barbie kit. Now, we watched this demonstration twice and actually don't get what Beck is trying to convey, so either we're stupider than even the basest Fox viewer or our elitists brains just can't process anything that comes spewing from the mouths of these clowns. Maybe you'll have better luck.

While Beck's demonstration really doesn't make any sense in itself, another reason for the confusion generated is surely that his and O'Reilly's whole take on ACORN is nonsensical in its entirety; see the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "CNN, Fox Hype ACORN Threat" (12/08) by Daniel Ward.

Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 6/20/09) has requested you try to "imagine a front-page Washington Post article that talked about how the United States had a shortage of small cars." He reasonable assumes such a piece would address "the limited capacity of the various small-car assembly plants" and "discuss the amount of lead time needed to build new plants. It would also talk about the need to raise small-car prices because it is so much more profitable to build big cars":

Imagine that the article never once mentioned the possibility of importing small cars. That's the front-page Washington Post (a.k.a. "Fox on 15th") editorial warning readers that "Primary-Care Doctor Shortage May Undermine Reform Efforts."

Yes, the United States already has a shortage of primary-care physicians. Any serious reform plan will make this shortage worse by cutting back our excessive reliance on specialists. However, primary-care physicians can be trained (to our standards) anywhere in the world. There are millions of very smart people in the developing world who would be delighted to train to U.S. standards and work for the $170,000 year (net of malpractice insurance) that our primary -care physicians. (Developing countries could train 2-3 physicians for everyone that came to the United States if we placed a modest tax [e.g., 10 percent] on the earnings of foreign-trained physicians and repatriated it to the home country.)

"Writing about the potential to increase the number of foreign-trained primary-care physicians in the United States by removing legal and professional barriers," Baker tells us, would only be possible "if the Post were not such an ardently protectionist newspaper.... However, trade never even enters the Post's discussion. It was only interested in telling readers about problems with President Obama's healthcare plan."

After the conservative site Forbes.com published a story headlined "Obama's Doctor Knocks ObamaCare," it was quickly picked up by the right-wing Drudge Report, where, presumably because of its conservative pedigree, right-wing commentators ran with it as if it were a point scored by the right against the White House.

Some conservative blogs suggested that the story showed that Obama’s own doctor opposed "socialized" healthcare, (e.g., here and here).

On the popular right-wing site National Review Online (NRO), blogger Mark Hemingway joined in, posting three paragraphs of the Forbes report, followed by the triumphant, one-word commentary: "Ouch."

Had Hemingway and his conservative colleagues failed to actually read the brief story before commenting on it? It's possible, because any minimally careful reading would reveal that Dr. David Scheiner was criticizing "ObamaCare" from the left:

What should the president be focused on? Scheiner thinks that a good health reform would be "Medicare for all," a single-payer system where the government would cover everyone and pay for it by cutting out waste in the system. "A neurosurgeon gets paid $20,000 for cutting into the neck of my patient. Have him get paid $1 million a year instead of $2 million or $3 million. He won't starve," Scheiner says.

It's not at all clear that NRO's Hemingway realized this at first, because after publishing the item omitting mention that Dr. Scheiner supported "Medicare for all," he revisited the story, writing:

Update: I didn't intend to present this as one-sided, I quickly cut and pasted the first three grafs. Suffice to say, you should keep in mind the Hyde Park doc is criticizing ObamaCare from the left. Either way, that people close to the president feel free to express these kinds of opinions doesn't seem to bode well for healthcare reform politically.

Beyond Hemingway's odd suggestion that it's a bad thing for a president to know people who openly disagree with him, it seems somewhat unlikely that he, as an NRO blogger, would have approvingly quoted a single-payer advocate's criticism of the president--that is, if he knew the critic was a single-payer supporter.

We've all heard of stories that were too good to check out--for some on the right, this one may have been too good to even read.

Steven T. Jones and Sarah Phelan are reporting (San Francisco Bay Guardian online, 6/19/09) on San Francisco Chronicle immigration reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken's acceptance of "an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies--which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda":

Van Derbeken and Ken Conner, the Chron's assistant managing editor for news (whom the reporter consulted before accepting the award), told the Guardian that they see nothing wrong with accepting the award and they don't see it as validating the views of a group that has been desperately seeking mainstream credibility with which to push its anti-immigrant agenda.

Somewhat confusingly, Van Derbeken claims of his smiling acceptance at the public ceremony, "No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs." But the group's appreciation for his work does make sense, considering that the stories they specifically laud "have been roundly criticized by immigrant rights groups as inflaming anti-immigrant sentiments and allowing policies that punish the innocent and divide families."

While "Conner both cited the fact that past recipients of the award included the Washington Post and Dallas Morning News," the Bay Guardian writers note that

that's true, but over the last six years since immigration has become such a hot button issue, the awards have gone mostly to right-wing publications and scary nativists. Three of the last six awards have gone to writers for the Washington Times, a right-wing newspaper created by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

And, in case you had any more doubts about what's going on here: "The ultra-conservative National Review and anti-immigrant television commentator Lou Dobbs also [are] among the recent recipients." See the cover feature of the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra: "Media Patrol the Border" (6/09).

Dirk Smillie's Forbes interview (6/18/09) with veteran news analyst Andrew Tyndall includes the observation that "mainstream press--network newscasts in particular--have been criticized for overly favorable coverage of the Obama administration." Tyndall takes the opportunity to make some important distinctions about this common allegation:

There may be a personality bias, not a liberal bias. Since the inauguration, Obama has completely dominated the news agenda. He's a ratings getter. Compare that with George W. Bush's early days in the White House. There was very little news until September 11. It's certainly true that there has been favoritism toward Obama, but only in the sense that the networks want to cover him.

The crucial point usually missed in this conversation: "That's not the same thing as reporting with a bias toward his policies." See FAIR's take on this trend from even before Obama won the presidency--Media Advisory: "Pro-Obama Media?: What Talk About Media Favoritism Really Means" (11/4/08).

A posting on Timothy Karr's Media Citizen blog (6/17/09) contrasts Crooks & Liars' collection of cable news pundits like Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly likening the anti-immigrant Minutemen to a giant, friendly "neighborhood watch" organization with the "chilling double-murder" Minutemen leader Shawna Forde is accused of--describing "the 911 recording of the mother as she witnessed the execution of her 9-year-old daughter and husband. But what's even more infuriating is the way many prominent right-wing media pundits have made this group the darlings of 21st century patriotism":

Frank Rich's most recent New York Times column explains how crimes of this sort are part of a bigger problem egged on by right-wing media:

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O'Reilly's Holocaust analogies to liken Obama's policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to "the final solution" and the quest for "a master race." After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a "lone gunman nutjob." Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that "the pot in America is boiling," as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

We have a real right-wing media accountability moment. Ask yourself how this compares to the mainstream media's current obsession over David Letterman's apology to Palin.

Shouldn't they be more concerned about the harm caused by the shrill pundits of the right?

Seeing "a strange double standard in effect" here, Karr feels the murders to be so "horrible that it's silly to have to compare it to the Letterman/Palin affair. And yet the mainstream media seems to think that one deserves more attention than the other."

Blogger Jane Hamsher (FireDogLake.com, 6/19/09) thinks that Salon's "Glenn Greenwald says most of what needs to be said about the Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin," on June 18, but has her own "insight into "the early rounds of this battle" over the left-leaning columnist, having "watched it ferment over the years."

Hamsher explains that Post ombud Debbie Howell's characterization of Froomkin as "highly opinionated and liberal" really "was the consensus of the newsroom, where it was believed--correctly--that Froomkin's writing about the war and U.S. foreign policy were an inherent criticism of the WaPo's own coverage and editorial position":

And so they wanted to make it clear that he was Not One Of Them, nor did he rise to their high standards. Here was [then-executive editor] Len Downie at the time:

"We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column because it contains opinion," Downie told E&P. "And that readers of the Web site understand that, too."

And here's [then-national politics editor] John Harris (now chief of Politico):

They have never complained in a formal way to me, but I have heard from Republicans in informal ways making clear they think his work is tendentious and unfair. I do not have to agree with them in every instance that it is tendentious and unfair for me to be concerned about making clear who Dan is and who he is not regarding his relationship with the newsroom.

But aside from the desire to play access footsie with the White House, Downie and Harris were bristling at Froomkin's critique of--well, them. While they were fawning over Bush, his war and his codpiece, Froomkin was writing about Bob Woodward's "unique relationship" with the White House.

Lamenting how "the arrogant presumption that they were carrying on some sort of noble journalistic tradition that Froomkin violated is just baked into the concrete over there," Hamsher sees that "in the end, the bitter petty people who discredited the entire profession with their coverage of the war and its fallout just did not like the mirror he held up to them."

Norman Solomon uses his most recent Creators Syndicate column (6/19/09) to call for journalism that "is open scrutiny of the dynamics of power. Reporters should shine a bright light on behind-the-scenes maneuvers that block congressional oversight of administration policies":

Last Tuesday, when the House of Representatives approved a supplemental spending bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there must have been celebration at the White House. Days of intense arm-twisting paid off.

The Obama administration had brandished the weapon of retribution against the newest Democratic arrivals in the House. Most news coverage seemed oblivious, but not all. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported just hours before the war-funding measure came to the floor, "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no."

Even though "journalists expect strong-arm tactics to come from the White House and may actually view them as evidence of the effective use of presidential power," Solomon maintains that "huge concentrations of power are hazardous to democracy": "We may shrug and say words to the effect of 'that's the way things are'--but the fact remains that we need journalism to scrutinize 'the way things are.'"

However, Solomon has several examples--from media failure "to scrutinize the Gulf of Tonkin incident" on up to "adulatory news coverage" of "drastically loosened" financial regulation in the '90s--that demonstrate how, "unfortunately, too many journalists behave as though levers pulled by the powerful are not notable enough to be questioned."

Doling out "a little positive reinforcement" when Fox News "actually gets something right," Mark Howard of News Corpse (6/18/09) agrees with Sean Hannity's declaration of "the death of journalism"--though disagreeing with the context of Fox's pronouncement, being their assertion that a scheduled ABC News broadcast "that would delve into the pros and cons of the president's policy" on healthcare amounts to "an infomercial for Obama's plan. They assert that nothing like this has ever happened before":

Once again, Fox News is either pathetically ignorant or desperately dishonest. (Yeah, I know. It's both.) Last year Fox News broadcast a special from the Bush White House they called Fighting to the Finish. And there was also their highly promoted exclusive, Dick Cheney: No Retreat. These are just two blatant examples of hypocrisy by Fox. There are many more incidents of Fox serving as the PR agency for the Republican Party. But somehow, ABC having a town hall, where they assert that multiple views will be discussed, is an abomination that (finally) heralds the end of journalism.

In the end, Howard bemoans how "I guess that I should just be satisfied that they are acknowledging something close to reality at all. Even though they don't grasp their own role in journalism's demise."