In a piece about current media "Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did" by (belatedly) condemning the U.S. war on Vietnam, Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald (7/18/09, ad-viewing required) addresses another recently passed war reporter as well:

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them--as though they do what he did--even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism: "The better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.... By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are."

In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the "proudest moment" of his career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. generals in Vietnam, by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an "enemy" of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White House's claims about the war. (The President himself asked his editor to pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam.)

And what exactly did Halberstam do to incur such wrath from on high? Well, "he stood up to a general in a press conference in Saigon who was attempting to intimidate him for having actively doubted and aggressively investigated military claims, rather than taking and repeating them at face value"--something present-day reporters are conspicuously remiss in doing themselves--no matter how much they profess to idolize broadcast legends like Walter Cronkite.

In another sorry indication of the state of professional journalism, a New York Times appraisal of Cronkite's career (7/18/09) by error-prone reporter Alessandra Stanley required no less than seven corrections. The appraisal's headline: "Cronkite's Signature: Approachable Authority."

Tossing out old papers in preparation for an upcoming office move, I came across what was probably the best hate letter I've ever received.  It came in response to FAIR's work on talkshow host Bob Grant--who, after FAIR had documented his bigoted, violent rants and promotion of white supremacy, had been fired by Disney's ABC, and prompty hired by rival station WOR. The unsigned fax contained a page of doggerel:

Hey, "FAIR,"

Bob's still here.

Your little plan didn't work so well, so all of you can go to Hell.

Bob Grant lives, he talks, he rules,

And you look like a pack of mules. Or ghouls?

This is the Land of Liberty & it's what I take free speech to be.

When you monitor one, you monitor all, you have some gall,

To single out one to take the fall.

Bob's real name is Bob Gigante,

Don't try to be a vigilante.

It won't work, don't be a jerk,

As you lurk, to find a quirk, in everything he says.

Black & white is not the issue,

A pleasant day I do not wish you.

BOB GRANT RULES THE AIRWAVES!

I wrote "FAIR's Bob Grant Success" (Extra! Update, 6/96) pretty much in response to that poem. But while I disagreed with the critique of our work, I did appreciate the style with which it was expressed. And I do try not to be a vigilante.

Norman Solomon has noticed (Common Dreams, 7/20/09) that "media eulogies for Walter Cronkite--including from progressive commentators--rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968." An "obit omit" Solomon deems "essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller":

But facts are facts, and history is history--including what Cronkite actually did as TV's most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite's February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war "a stalemate," the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite's protracted support for the war.

In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm....

Also in 1965--the pivotal year of escalation--Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerrilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged."

Why does this matter now? Because citing Cronkite as an example of courageous reporting on a war is a dangerously low bar--as if reporting that a war can't be won, after cheerleading it for years, is somehow the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage.

See Solomon's book and film War Made Easy for an extended look at Cronkite's important contribution to the U.S.'s war on Vietnam.

Citing a Committee of Family Members of Detained and Disappeared in Honduras report "detailing hundreds of cases of human rights abuses committed by the coup regime, including four political assassinations," Ogg Blog's Chuck Ogg (7/17/09) notes that "the situation is getting worse in Honduras...but you wouldn't know this reading the New York Times":

In fact, the story no longer merits front-page headlines. If you dig deeper, you discover that the chief negotiator said Thursday a series of compromises had been achieved between the two "camps" claiming the right to rule Honduras. We are given a sense of optimism with the caution that tensions remain high and conflicts remain--particularly about who will be president. But this agreement is presented as progress. Still they repeat the lies of the coup leaders "fears" about President Zelaya seeking another term and subvert the Constitution. And in the name of "objectivity," the criminal gang of coup leaders are referred to by the more clinical term "de facto government."

Ogg asks you to support U.S. congressmembers Bill Delahunt, José Serrano and Jim McGovern's resolution 630, which "condemns 'the June 28 military coup in Honduras, led by graduates of the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC).'"

Toxic Avenger creator Lloyd Kaufmann has a new McClatchy column (7/16/09) "speaking out on behalf of the little guy--or, in the case of independent film and TV producers, the belittled guy," who generally is still "at the mercy of a handful of vertically integrated network-studio conglomerates, powerful giants that exercise control over the entertainment and media businesses."

Kaufmann says "the fact is that independents have produced the largest number of motion picture industry jobs," creating, between 2004–07, "more than 198,000 full-time motion picture jobs annually, accounting for 55 percent of all of those available in the industry":

Overall, independents were responsible for generating in excess of $14 billion per year in wages, which contributed nearly $2.7 billion to U.S. and state tax coffers.

Before the government repealed the Financial Interest & Syndication Rules in 1993, which had reasonably limited the amount of content broadcast networks could own, many independents might have been able to financially survive these tough economic times--preserving all of the jobs and tax revenues they have created.

Back then, we independents could generate substantial license fees selling series and TV movies to ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC.

"Sadly, however," Kaufmann writes, "we've seen programming from independent sources plummet from 50 percent of the networks' prime-time schedules in 1989 to 18 percent in 2006, while network-owned content soared from 15 to more than 75 percent."

In another example of how the racist record of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's top Republican questioner has gone down the memory hole, Associated Press had a whole story (7/19/09) about Sen. Jeff Sessions' assertions that Sotomayor was too prejudiced to get his vote without mentioning that the Senate Judiciary Committee had rejected Sessions when he was up for a federal judgeship precisely because of his long pro-discrimination history.

On MSNBC, the subhead of the story was "Top GOP Member of Senate Committee Still Concerned About Her Objectivity." And AP reporter Douglass Daniel would tell you, I expect, that "objectivity" required him to leave out the context of Sessions' racist background.

Afghanistan writer Ann Jones has an essay on TomDispatch (7/16/09) in which she calls The Fixer "the best documentary I've seen on Afghanistan--so good it's hard to imagine a better one." Her description of a scene she found particularly moving demonstrates the harsh reality of unembedded reporting, begetting a corporate media output that merits her headline, "Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions":

It is 2006, late in the year. A reporter stands on a rocky hillside near the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and points a wobbly camera at dark-clad gunmen ranged at a distance before him. They've wrapped the tails of their turbans to mask their faces. They carry their Kalashnikovs at the ready. The reporter shouts a question: "Does the Taliban receive support from Pakistan?"

As the camera jumps about to find the Talib who is speaking, a translator voices his answer: "Yes, Pakistan stands with us. On the other side of the border, we have our offices there. Some people in Pakistan is supporting us and the government of Pakistan does not say anything to us. They provide us with everything."

The reporter--Christian Parenti of the Nation magazine--has his story. For years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has charged Pakistan with backing the Taliban, while Pakistan's then-President Musharraf denied it, and officials of the Bush administration looked the other way. Now, Parenti has the word of armed Taliban. This is the kind of story a foreign correspondent can't get without a fixer; that is, a local guy who knows the language, the local politics, the protocols of custom--and how to arrange a meeting like this in the middle of nowhere with men who might kill you.

Having beaten a hasty retreat from "an approaching reconnaissance plane," a relieved Parenti smiles and "describes the man sitting beside him--Ajmal Nashqbandi, a 24-year-old Pashtun from Kabul--as 'the best fixer in Afghanistan.'" But Jones tells us that viewers "already know what Parenti doesn't (because filmmaker Ian Olds has told us up front before the titles even hit the screen): Soon the fixer will be dead, murdered by the Taliban."

In Katha Pollitt's latest Nation column (7/15/09), she finds it "not hard to poke holes in" the July 2 Time magazine cover story by "Caitlin Flanagan--professional antifeminist, author of a whole book of essays attacking working mothers, herself excepted"--being full of "Flanagan's predictions of universal doom for the children of divorced or never-married parents":

After all, President Clinton and President Obama turned out all right. Most children of divorce do. There are plenty of countries where divorce and unmarried parenthood are common, but children do fine--Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands. Some of the measured bad effects on kids are more about the way we divorce than the divorce itself--unstable living arrangements, disappearance of the father into a new family, moves and changes of school, new parental partners who don't stick around, loss of income, less attention from a mother who is now working all the time. It may be ideal for kids to grow up in a loving, sane, happy, stable, two-parent home, but that is not the alternative for couples contemplating divorce, still less for most never-married single mothers....

If the concern is really with children, especially poor children, we could improve their lives tremendously by concentrating on the things we actually can achieve. Healthcare. Excellent schools with music and drama and art and gym and after-school programs. Neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outdoors and air clean enough so they don't get asthma. Libraries. Summer camp. Counseling for kids in trouble--and their parents. Economic support for families, married or not. Housing for all. Free college. A public works job for anyone who wants one. All those necessities that, in America, are seen as the responsibility of individual families.

On such subjects, Pollitt has "noticed that conservatives express concern for low-income and especially black people--'the underclass'--only when they want to attack liberals." She writes that this actually is "a specialty of Flanagan's--the only time she writes about cleaning women is when she is blaming feminists for paying them too little."

Listen to the new edition of the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Katha Pollitt on Caitlin Flanagan in Time" (7/17/09).

Just Foreign Policy national Coordinator Robert Naiman has a follow-up (7/15/09) on his July 13 catch of major U.S. new outlets relying solely on Honduras' La Prensa, "a pro-coup newspaper, with a history of publishing inaccurate information," to falsely "indicate that a plurality of Hondurans support the military coup against democratically elected President Zelaya."

Naiman looks at the first question in the poll cited by the paper--"Rough translation: Do you consider that the actions that Mel Zelaya took with respect to the fourth ballot justified his removal from the office of President of the Republic?"--responded to affirmatively by 41 percent, negatively by 28 percent and "Don't know/No answer" by 31 percent. And at the results of the second query--"Rough translation: How much do you agree with the action that was taken last Sunday that removed President Zelaya from the country?"--being "Support 41 percent, Oppose 46 percent, Don't know/No Answer 13 percent."

To Naiman, "the difference between the two questions seems fairly clear":

The first is a hypothetical: Do you think that President Zelaya's actions with respect to the referendum justified his removal from office? The second describes the events that actually took place: Do you agree with the action that removed President Zelaya from the country?

And the difference between the responses also seems fairly clear. 18 percent of the sample were "Don't know/No answer" on the hypothetical but opposed to the actions that actually took place.

Apparently, La Prensa only reported the first result....

And then, it appears, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post and Reuters reported what was in La Prensa without doing any independent checking; whereas the Voice Of America, the New York Times and AP reported the poll result directly, without relying solely on La Prensa--thus strongly suggesting, to say the least, that independent checking was quite feasible.

Furthermore, Naiman notes, "the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor compounded the error by using the word 'coup' in their reports, which clearly refers to the actions that actually took place, to which 46 percent were opposed, not 28 percent." Which means, he explains, that "with the benefit of hindsight--having access to both questions and the responses--there is still no defense of the original CSM and WSJ reports as accurate."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup"(7/3/09).

The UNITY: Journalists of Color organization has a new press release (7/14/09) denouncing July 8 comments by Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade, in which he "made a crude and bafflingly ignorant attempt to dismiss a study on marriage and Alzheimer's that was conducted in Sweden and Finland." Kilmeade's remarks that "we [Americans] keep marrying other species and other ethnics," "Swedes have pure genes" and "in America we marry everybody" have the advocacy group declaring they "don't know where to begin":

Did the study not apply to Americans because of racial intermarriage? Are racially integrated couples more likely to exacerbate the symptoms of dementia?

Mr. Kilmeade's outlandish comments were more than silly and worthy of ridicule. They validate, under the guise of light-hearted humor, the basest of white supremacist ideologies, the notion that white people and non-white people are of different species, with the white race as "pure." Without question, the comments should have been denounced immediately as racist, ignorant and bigoted.

Instead, a baffled co-host Gretchen Carlson rightly questioned Kilmeade's mental state, and someone off-camera whistled "If I Only Had a Brain." The song was well-chosen, seeing as the comments lacked intelligence, heart and courage, and should not have a home on anything resembling a news program.

Watch the video here and then join UNITY in calling for Fox News to "issue an immediate apology for Mr. Kilmeade's offensive comments" and "enter into a serious discussion on the program regarding intermarriage and the value of diversity in our society."

Newsweek has a rather curious take this week (7/20/09) on the Honduras coup in a short piece headlined "The World Goes Bananas Over Honduras":

Poor, hot and fractious, Honduras--the original banana republic--rarely draws a second look from the global community. But on June 28, when President Manuel Zelaya was yanked out of bed by the military and bundled into exile, the world took notice. International leaders unanimously decried the "assault on democracy." The Organization of American States expelled Honduras, the only nation since Cuba to be so disgraced. Venezuela even threatened to send in troops to reinstate Zelaya. But in the rush to judgment, heads of state showed selective zeal for democracy, at best. "It's odd that world leaders have determined that coups can only be committed against presidents, [but] not against Congress or the courts," says Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan diplomat. In recent years, executives in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have stacked their benches and legislatures with yes men and muzzled the media--while international leaders looked the other way. And unlike those aspiring autocrats, the Honduran military could reasonably argue that it was acting in good faith by ejecting a leader hellbent on seeking re-election--despite an ironclad constitutional clause preventing such a move. Of course, it's a good thing when world leaders stand up for the people. But if it's going to mean much, they should try to be consistent.

Actually, it's not odd at all that world leaders are condemning Honduras as a coup but not Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador or Nicaragua; generally, coups are state takeovers by a small group with military/police backing, which hasn't happened anywhere in Latin America besides Honduras since...oh right, the anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela by folks on Arria's side.

And the Honduran military can't justify its coup by saying the leader they ejected was "hellbent on seeking re-election" for a number of reasons. First of all, it's clear that Zelaya wasn't even seeking re-election, since the actual advisory vote on amending the constitution was to happen in the same fall election that would choose Zelaya's successor. But the very word "election" in that excuse should give you a hint that perhaps there's something wrong with the logic involved. Asking voters if they want to vote on whether to change the constitution can hardly be considered such a threat to democracy that the military has to suspend that democracy in order to defend it.

It's notable that all the countries Newsweek listed have leftist governments aligned with Venezuela, while right-wing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who not long ago engineered a change to his country's constitution in order enable his re-election, didn't merit a mention--or much coverage at all when it happened, for that matter--nor did Venezuela's anti-Chavez coup, which U.S. media heartily endorsed. Perhaps the issue Newsweek ought to be probing is U.S. media's "selective zeal" for Latin American democracy.

In his front-page profile of movie industry blogger Nikki Finke, New York Times media reporter David Carr (7/17/09) can't resist a self-congratulatory dig: "Her liabilities in the world of print--a penchant for innuendo and unnamed sources--became assets online."

Those familiar with the print media world may recall that unnamed sources are not exactly unknown there. To find an example, I didn't have to go farther than the first half of Carr's own article, where he has a paragraph full of anonymous attacks on Finke:

"I'd prefer not to ever deal with her," said a senior communications executive at a studio who declined to be identified. Many others declined comment saying, variously, "she gave me a nervous breakdown," "she terrifies me," and "there's no percentage in me saying anything to you about Nikki no matter what it is."

Hmm, anonymous sources suggesting dire things about a subject without providing any specifics--in other words, innuendo. Are these liabilities in Carr's print-media world...or assets?

I give Peter Osnos credit for not being as nutty as Richard Posner or as self-pitying as Dana Milbank; his piece from CJR on "What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?" (7-8/09) is the most reasonable version I've seen of the news industry's case against the search engine company. Still, I can't help but think that he's missing the point in a fundamental way.

One of Osnos' key examples of the unfairness of Google involves Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com, and a story it ran (2/7/09) on pitcher Alex Rodriguez testing positive for steroids. Osnos relates SI.com's grievance: Though it broke the story, other websites got as much or more traffic from it:

Most galling was that the Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.

From a journalist's perspective, this is patently unfair: SI.com got the scoop, and ought to get the reward. But is that the right perspective to look at what Google does?  Journalists are not, after all, in the business of creating information; they're in the business of conveying information.  Sports Illustrated's reporters did not create Rodriguez's failing steroid test results; Major League Baseball did that. People with access to the test information passed it on to SI, and SI put it up on the Web.

But that's not where the process of information transmission stops. People can't check every website that might break a news story of interest to them every day, so they rely on news gathering institutions to bring information together for them--that's what newspapers do, that's what AP does, and, yes, that's what Huffington Post does too.

Osnos attributes the Google results to the fact that "Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines." And it may well be that the folks at HuffPo are better at that stuff than SI is--though you'd think with the $84 billion entity of Time Warner behind them, the sports mag could afford to figure it out.

More important for HuffPo's search results, however, is the fact that people who use the Web have gotten used to looking for breaking news there, and so when they link to a story they find interesting they link to it there. Google's methodology, looking for links as a surrogate for how people use the Web, finds more of them going to Huffington Post than to SI.com--and that's why HuffPo came out on top.

Osnos says that "human help" needs to be incorporated into Google's algorithm--given that the search engine last year announced that it had indexed more than 1 trillion urls, this suggestion would seem to be rather impractical. But it's not clear that the human-free algorithm is making the wrong choice by directing Web surfers to the sites people most often go to when looking for information.

Under the headline "Future Nominations Are at Stake in Hearing," New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Charlie Savage suggested that Sonia Sotomayor's nomination is a given; the real battle among partisans and legal activists is "to define the parameters of an acceptable nomination in case another seat opens up during Mr. Obama’s presidency." Interesting, then, to see what the parameters of debate are like in this report.

The Times solicits comments from five conservatives or Republicans--Rachel Brand, Fred McClure, James R. Copland, Manuel Miranda and Kenneth M. Duberstein. The Times also quoted one law professor with a liberal reputation who has been a forceful critic of Sotomayor (suggesting she was intellectually unqualified for the court), and Nan Aron "of the liberal Alliance for Justice."

The piece goes on to say, "Several legal experts said Judge Sotomayor’s testimony might make it harder for Mr. Obama to name a more liberal justice next time." Well, if you talk to that many right-wingers, you will hear that kind of thing quite a bit.

Asking his readers to "remember" that, on NBC, Chuck Todd "is billed as a reporter covering the White House, not a pundit expressing opinions," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/15/09, ad-viewing required) examines a Todd appearance on the MSNBC show Morning Joe "discussing reports that [U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Bush torture crimes. Needless to say, everyone agreed without question that investigations were a ridiculous distraction from what really matters and would be terribly unfair":

In response to virtually every media criticism (at least the few they acknowledge), establishment journalists will insist that their role is to be steadfastly neutral. They simply report on the debates, not take sides or express opinions about them. Taking one side or the other is not their role. Only partisan ideologues do that.

Yet here is Chuck Todd--who covers the White House for NBC News--explicitly arguing against investigations, and adopting the Bush/right-wing mentality to do so. Investigations are a distraction from what matters. It's extremely unfair to hold lawyers accountable when they authorize criminal conduct. It's "dangerous" for one administration to investigate the prior one where that prior administration had its DOJ lawyers authorize what was being done.

Wouldn't the standard claim of establishment journalists maintain that Chuck Todd shouldn't have (or at least not express) opinions on these topics? Yet here he is--as so many establishment journalists routinely do--explicitly advocating against investigations of Bush-era crimes. Even more notably, the arguments in favor of such investigations merit no mention whatsoever.

Reasonably asking, "Would anyone listening to this discussion even have the slightest idea what the arguments are in favor of investigating and prosecuting?," Greenwald can only conclude that "the notion that these establishment journalists don't choose sides and are mere honest brokers of debates is, rather obviously, transparent fiction."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9–10/08).