Linking to a Felice Pace piece of June 14 that connects the near-absence of single-payer-focused NPR reportage to millions of dollars in underwriting the broadcaster has received from insurance industry heavies, NPR Check's Mytwords (6/17/09) includes his own comment left under Weekend Edition Saturday's "Health Care Reform From The Insurer's Perspective" segment:

Congratulations NPR--as a "public" news station you have done a great service by providing a voice to the voiceless: the health insurance industry, which lacks the funds and connections to get its message out. After yesterday's Republican slant on the public plan from [Mara] Liasson, [Julie] Rovner and [Steve] Inskeep--you showed a brave commitment to your mission statement ["'Fair' means that we present all important views on a subject"] by giving yet more airtime to the insurance lobby this morning.

Mytwords then offers his view that "it's time to tell your member stations to stop begging for support from the public (whose opinions don't seem to amount to much on NPR)," advising them instead "to just plug into the money stream from the insurance industry that you are so loyal to." Read the current edition of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Media Quarantine of Single-Payer Continues: Fifteen Years Later, Public Health Insurance Still Taboo" (6/09) by Julie Hollar & Isabel Macdonald.

Do they still teach the First Amendment in law school?

That's what you have to wonder when you see a lawyer for the Obama administration's Justice Department arguing that statements made by former Vice President Dick Cheney in the Scooter Libby probe ought to be kept secret because a future vice president might refuse to speak to a future investigation out of concern "that it's going to get on the Daily Show" (Washington Post, 6/19/09).

Really?  That's how we're going to ensure that officials cooperate with criminal investigations, by using government secrecy to guarantee that their statements will never be subjected to criticism in the media? Yes, that's the plan, according to "career civil division lawyer" Jeffrey M. Smith.

Here's an alternate plan: How about instead we allow the media to criticize and even satirize the statements of public officials, and make sure that officials cooperate with criminal investigations by subpoenaing them if they refuse to do so? Nope--that would be "unseemly," according to Smith.

It does make you wonder what they're teaching in constitutional law classes--particularly at the University of Chicago.

In today's New York Times (6/19/09), Kevin Sack's article about the prospects for healthcare reform devotes all of a paragraph to single-payer:

Seeking broad popular support, the president and congressional leaders have played between the 40-yard lines of the health policy spectrum. Those who favor a single-payer, government-run insurance system have been marginalized, along with those who would unleash the system to the free market.

This is exactly wrong. Single-payer is, in fact, broadly popular--at least according to many polls, including the most recent from the New York Times (1/11-15/09). The decision to marginalize single-payer is a decision to avoid playing between the 40-yard lines.  The Times and the rest of the corporate media are the ones who have decided that single-payer isn't popular--no matter what their polling tells them.

In Women In Media & News' announcement (6/18/09) that former FAIR staffer Jennifer Pozner has won a New Leaders Council "40 Under 40" Award--given to those "who exemplify the spirit of progressive political entrepreneurship"--Women's Rights blogger Jennifer Nedeau spells out why "women in media are crucial to the future of progressive leadership":

Because they can often best represent the issues that matter most to progressives. Women own a large stake in issues of equality, civil rights, a stable economy, a clean environment, accessible healthcare and education, among other progressive topics. More women need to be seen on television, read in newspapers, heard on the radio and seen in new media forums in order to make a positive impact in the progressive movement. However, just as consciousness-raising and media appearances matter--it is also incredibly important to stop and take a moment to thank those who ensure that the infrastructure exists to make this progress possible.

To this end, Pozner is recognized for having "'founded WIMN to strengthen that infrastructure and transform the media landscape for women." In fact, "for eight years, Women In Media & News has worked to increase diverse women's presence and power in the public debate."

Amanda Terkel of Think Progress (6/18/09) has posted video and transcript of an MSNBC segment in which Joe Scarborough asked CNBC's Jim Cramer about "a stunning poll the New York Times has this morning suggesting that Americans are more concerned about deficits than stimulus":

Cramer claimed that Americans aren't buying into healthcare reform right now because "it just means tax increases, and there's got to be someone who pays for it." According to Cramer, the solution that "everybody" wants is for Obama to "go away": "But until we get the economy moving again, I think everybody wishes that Obama would just kind of go away for a little bit."

If Cramer looked closer at the poll, it also shows that 57 percent of the American public approve of what Obama is doing on the economy overall. Of course, Cramer is someone who claimed that Obama's policies have resulted in “the most, greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president” and is known for his irresponsible financial cheerleading (e.g., “Bear Stearns is not in trouble“).

Terkel has to wonder if, in actuality, "maybe it's not Obama who Americans want to 'just kind of go away for a little bit.'”

Keeping up with corporate attempts to abuse new media technology, the activists at Free Press (6/18/09) have a new campaign pointing out exactly what's wrong with the fact that "AT&T is allowing Major League Baseball to stream video live to the iPhone on the carrier's 3G network, but is prohibiting other companies like SlingPlayer Mobile from doing the same":

Last month, AT&T admitted to restricting the SlingPlayer Mobile iPhone application from streaming live on its 3G network, claiming the service would cause congestion. But now, the New York Times reports that Major League Baseball's live stream "will play regardless of whether an iPhone is connected to a WiFi network or a 3G network."

This spring, Free Press sent a letter to the FCC asking the agency to confirm that wireless networks must adhere to the Internet Policy Statement, which protects consumers' right to access any online content and services on any device of their choosing.

Free Press policy director Ben Scott says that "this is exactly the kind of arbitrary intervention in the open Internet marketplace that consumers should fear in an industry dominated by powerful network owners," and states the need for AT&T to "provide consumers with the same access to any online video service of their choice."

Looking beyond "the yellow-tape segments that bleed and lead local TV news" Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 6/13/09) discerns what he dubs "Media's Love/Hate Affair with Violence"--as exemplified by

the kind of violence--rarely occurring in the light of day--that gets scant media attention. With somewhere around 2 million people behind bars in the United States, all kinds of violent acts are happening in the nation's prisons and jails. The violence that some guards inflict on prisoners is even less apt to make the news than what stressed-out prisoners do to one another.

Various forms of what could be called "institutionalized violence" are not identified as such in the standard reportorial lexicons. When children go to bed hungry--or when people can't see a doctor and then wind up in emergency rooms with serious medical conditions that could have been prevented with earlier healthcare--some very cruel hotwired violence is underway. But from a boilerplate media standpoint, it's part of the regular social order.

And that's all aside from journalistic adoration of "the U.S. war-fighting establishment--what outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower called the 'military-industrial complex.'" Solomon concludes: "In short, according to tacit judgments that dominate the media establishment, reprehensible violence doesn't include the violence that goes unrebuked by prevailing authority structures in our society."

Writing for CJR.org (6/16/09), Media Bloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson finds that "former CNN correspondent-turned-PR consultant Gene Randall's video 'report' for oil giant Chevron might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism," but is still more worried that "the Randall/Chevron production raises not only ethical questions, but also the question of whether a surge of newly pink-slipped reporters might go, as one media critic put it, 'over to the dark side,' and how that might further muddy the line between news and corporate advocacy":

As detailed in a recent New York Times article, when Chevron, America's third-largest corporation, heard that 60 Minutes was preparing a report about the $27 billion lawsuit filed against it for allegedly contaminating the Ecuador region of the Amazon rain forest, Chevron hired former TV newsman Randall to craft a video from the corporation's perspective, which was posted on YouTube and Chevron's website three weeks before the 60 Minutes report aired on May 3.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley's investigation presented multiple perspectives, while Randall's included only Chevron officials and consultants. Everyone interviewed in Randall's piece, in other words, was paid by Chevron, including Randall himself.

While "Randall's video also clearly strives to resemble an authentic news report, employing classic stylistic TV news techniques, while never informing the viewer it's a Chevron production," what Jacobson considers "most deceptive" is that "Randall--looking like the consummate TV newsman--begins the video with the accompanying graphic 'Gene Randall Reporting' and concludes with the voiceover: 'This is Gene Randall reporting.'"

Senator John Kerry's post to the SaveTheInternet.com blog (6/16/09) looks at the fact that "nine of the most popular 10 phones are locked in a deal with one of these big wireless carriers," and how this corporatization limits the new medium:

Here's the issue I think we need to wrestle with: Wireless service providers are largely deciding what phone you can use. We don't see that happening in similar markets.

Your broadband provider doesn't decide what kind of computer you can connect to at the end of your DSL or cable wire. And 40 years ago, the FCC ruled in the historic Carterfone decision that AT&T couldn't pick and choose which phones can and can't connect to its network.

The pertinent question Kerry comes to is: "Is the status quo the right model for maximizing innovation, competition and consumer choice? Or do we need a change?"

Robert Parry of Consortium News (6/15/09) gives hearing to a "strong case" to "undercut the widespread media assumption" of electoral fraud in Iran. But, true or not, "the rush to the 'fraud' judgment among much of the U.S. news media is shaping the political realities" and posing that "Ahmadinejad's 'theft' of the election proves that hardliners in Israel and neoconservatives in the United States were right all along about the impossibility of dealing rationally with Iran"--the predictable upshot being "that force is the only option to employ against Iran."

Parry also is "curious to see U.S. news organizations care suddenly about legitimate elections when most of them ignored, ridiculed or covered-up evidence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election in 2000 and possibly in 2004 as well":

In Election 2000, Florida--a state controlled by Bush’s brother Jeb and Jeb’s cronies--was the scene of widespread election irregularities. Then, when a recount was attempted, the Bush campaign sent well-dressed hooligans from Washington to Miami to stage a riot aimed at intimidating vote counters. Finally, Bush got five partisan Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes and award the White House to Bush.

Yet the U.S. press corps was extraordinarily passive about this well-documented election theft. Even when it became clear that Al Gore won the popular vote and would have carried Florida if all legal ballots had been counted, major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and CNN, misrepresented the facts to protect Bush’s "legitimacy."...

Similarly, serious irregularities in Election 2004, especially in the key state of Ohio, were never seriously investigated by the mainstream news media, which instead mocked Internet sites (including ours) and citizens groups as "conspiracy theorists" for citing some of the bizarre vote tallies favoring Bush.

"When an election occurs in another country and an 'unpopular' leader appears to win," Parry tells how "an opposite set of rules apply," and in corporate journalists' eyes, "anyone who doesn't immediately accept the assumption of voter fraud is naïve; every 'conspiracy theory' is cited respectfully while contrary evidence is downplayed or ignored."

In an affidavit supporting a lawsuit against a new novel related to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (New York Times, 6/17/09), Salinger's literary agent makes a statement that encapsulates a common misunderstanding of what copyright is for. Referring to Salinger, the agent said, "He feels strongly that he wants his fiction and his characters to remain intact as he wrote them."

Salinger may feel that as strongly as he likes, but the purpose of copyright is not to allow creators to protect the ideas they create from being used by other creators. The point is to give creators a period of  exclusive right to publish their works in order to give them an incentive to create those works in the first place--as the Constitution says, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." A key word here is "limited."

When Salinger first published Catcher in the Rye, in 1951, that period was 28 years, which could be extended at the creator's option another 28--for a total of 56. Evidently, the prospect of making money from his novel until 2007 was sufficient to get him to write the thing. And that's all the copyright law is supposed to do.

The fact that Congress has stretched the idea of "limited" so far--the latest revision extends copyright to the life of the author plus 70 years--does foster the misperception that ideas naturally belong to their creators, and they alone can decide what can and can't be done with them.  But  not even Sonny Bono can change the premise that the copyright system, as one of the few exceptions to the basic rule that people are free to publish whatever they want, is designed to be a financial inducement, and not a cudgel to keep people from messing with your ideas.  Salinger has no more right to tell someone that they can't write a book using his concepts than the heirs of Robert Burns could have told Salinger that he had no right to repurpose "Comin' Through the Rye" for his own creative ends.

The unlikely news source Voice of America (6/15/09) has Adam Phillips' profile of Amy Goodman and "the largest public media collaboration in the United States," Democracy Now!, in which Goodman lays out "her job as a journalist" as "to bring out 'the voices of people closest to the story at the grassroots'":

In Goodman's program, as well as in her column and the three bestselling books she has co-authored with her brother, David Goodman, she also accuses the mainstream media of dangerous laziness in its reliance on so-called "pundits."

"We need to bring out the voices of people who think outside the box, [and include] creative thinkers, [and] people at the grassroots, who know exactly what they're talking about, because they've experienced policy in a very real way," she says. "These are the stories we have to tell until they can tell their own."

The great disparity between complicit corporate reportage and Democracy Now!'s invaluable muckraking is boiled down to one crucial observation: "The media's job is 'to serve democratic society,' she adds 'not to win a popularity contest.'" Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Amy Goodman on The Exception to the Rulers" (5/21/04).

Blogging about a male-only film promotion contest at San Diego's Comic-Con, Charlie Jane Anders (io9.com, 6/15/09) also notices the "L.A. Times published an insulting 'guide for girls'" about the convention--which

starts out by assuring readers that contrary to what you might believe, the event "is not just for nerdy guys anymore. And it's not all just about the influx of squealing Twilight girls, either." Wow, really? You mean women can be into genre entertainment other than Twilight? Apparently so. Because there are more vampires, from True Blood and the upcoming show The Vampire Diaries. And there'll be "ass-kicking heroines" from TV shows like Dollhouse, plus maybe Brad Pitt will be there and you can ogle him!

Plus maybe Jake Gyllenhaal will be there for Prince of Persia: "Women will be rushing the stage, offering to do star Jake Gyllenhaal's laundry on those washboard abs that he acquired for the film, since he spends much of it fighting, shirtless or both."

Noting that the guide's "write-ups for other upcoming science fiction franchises assure us that they feature an 'emotion-driven storyline' or 'bittersweet tears,'" Anders distills the Times' message: "So girls, don't feel intimidated by Comic-Con. You can do Jake Gyllenhaal's laundry!"

NPR Check blogger Mytwords has some advice (6/14/09) "in these times of austerity and job 'shedding' at NPR": "Instead of spending all the money it must take to embed a reporter like Tom Bowman with the U.S. military in Afghanistan, why not cut him out of the picture and just hand a microphone to one of the officers or commanders there?":

Heck, if that's too expensive, why not just get on the Internets and pull some hard-hitting journalism from the military website of whatever unit Tom would have been embedded with? It sure would be a lot cheaper, even though it would mean we wouldn't get the kind of critical insight that Bowman coughed up for us this morning:

What they're going to be doing is something similar to what they did in Anbar province in Iraq. They're going to move out into the countryside and really live among the people--and that's the whole point here, is the counterinsurgency technique is to live among the people, provide security and eventually help rebuild this part of Afghanistan.

Momentarily dropping his sarcasm for some straightforward outrage, Mytwords asks, "Could you have a more sanitized, propaganda-laden description of the often repressive, brutal and violent strategy of counterinsurgency?"

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 6/14/09) has caught "Fox on 15th (a.k.a. 'The Washington Post')" once again "departing from normal news practice" with "another editorial complaining about President Obama's deficits on the front page." The piece's subhead--"Concern Mounts in White House as 2010 Elections Loom"--prompts some hard questions from Baker: "Who is concerned? The story doesn't tell us. Who says that they are concerned? The story doesn't tell us." His conclusion--"In short, it's not clear that there is any news here":

But the Washington Post wants to highlight the budget deficit, so it won't let such details stand in the way; after all, there were protesters in Wisconsin calling President Obama a socialist. That's enough for a front-page news story in the Washington Post.

Needless to say, the Washington Post has no problem ignoring completely far larger protests that don't agree with its editorial agenda, much less putting them on the front page. It is incredible that at a time when close to 15 million people are out of work that the Washington Post can continue to obsess about the deficit.

And, just so "there is no doubt which side the Washington Post is on," Baker reminds us that "of course this is also a paper that highlights on the front page that it is now easier to hire nannies."