Independent investigative journalist John Pilger recently (7/6/09) gave Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman his view of the broad media landscape, informed by the fact that "we have many alternative sources of information now, not least of all your own program, though I wouldn't call that alternative":

But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the Internet, for all its subversiveness, is still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we're getting still this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call a contrived silence, a censorship by omission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today, because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars.

All of this, it seems to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama, who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras as quite subtly, but very directly, influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media.

Still, with all the non-corporate media available today, Pilger sees this as "a time when. I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we're going to let that opportunity pass." For more views on what Pilger calls "almost a historic opportunity that we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted" by so-called "mainstream" news providers, listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

In a News Analysis piece (7/11/09), New York Times reporter Adam Nossiter attempts to illustrate the difference between some African countries and more enlightened nations, writing:

The gulf separating the West and many African leaders on fundamental issues like human rights was on display just last week. The African Union announced that it would refuse to cooperate with the International Criminal Court in its attempt to prosecute the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity, over the mass killings in Darfur.

Whatever you think of the ICC's pursuit of Al-Bashir (some human rights observers thought it an unwise move), is enthusiasm for the International Criminal Court really a good test for whether a country is really similar to "the West"? If so, then the United States of America, with our history of determined opposition to the court,  would not seem to meet the test for membership in "the West" either.

The Women's Media Center has a new action (7/10/09) asking you to support "Media Justice for Sotomayor" against the fact that ,"since the announcement of [her] nomination to the Supreme Court, some in the media have engaged in sexist and racist attacks against her" which are "often packaged as 'news' and endlessly discussed in mainstream media outlets":

The Women's Media Center is releasing its new video, "Media Justice for Sotomayor." It documents some of these racist and sexist comments already delivered on high-profile television programs, radio, print and online outlets.

As Judge Sotomayor's confirmation hearings approach on July 13, the Women's Media Center expects vigorous debate of Sotomayor's qualifications and abilities. But we call on the media to refrain from allowing sexist and racist remarks to go unchecked....

Sign on to our WMC statement....

I join the Women's Media Center in strongly opposing the use of sexist and racist attacks against Judge Sonia Sotomayor. The characterizations of her as an "affirmative action pick," “Hispanic Chick lady," "a brown woman," "an angry woman" and "a school marm" shown in the WMC's "Media Justice for Sotomayor" video are unacceptable....

Additionally, the WMC requests that, "if you see examples of sexism, racism or classism against Sotomayor in the media's coverage of her confirmation hearings, please send them to us." Also see the recent FAIR Media Advisory: "Misquoting Sotomayor: Media Let Right-Wing Critics Frame Debate" (6/2/09).

Noting how "the president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now," FAIR associate Norman Solomon is letting Huffington Post readers know (7/9/09) "that's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually":

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

Solomon warns that "'escalation' isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States":

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad--nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper--nothing too abrupt or jarring....

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

While "Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set" and "sounded an open-ended note: 'There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan,'" Solomon writes that the announcement "was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place."

Solomon foresees that "war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come 'piecemeal'--'with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.'" For a look "beyond how many more troops and when to send them"--the only major questions about Afghanistan regularly given venue in corporate media--listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ann Jones on Afghanistan" (1/23/09).

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (7/9/09) has posted a reminder that "back in March Phillip Swagel, who'd been assistant treasury secretary under Hank Paulson, wrote a long article about the TARP bailout called 'The Financial Crisis: An Inside View.'"

Thinking that maybe "it would be news if Swagel had stated that Paulson, Bernanke and Bush's attempts to foment panic to pass the bailout have 'surely' contributed to the current recession," Schwarz lays out some quotes showing that actually "he did": "The way in which the TARP was proposed and eventually enacted surely must have contributed to the lockup in spending," and "they could plainly see that the U.S. political system appeared insufficient to the task of a considered response to the crisis. Surely these circumstances contributed to the economic downturn."

To Schwarz, "this was obvious at the time. Back on September 26, I (among many, many others) asked: 'How have things turned out before when the president, Treasury secretary, Federal Reserve chairman and a leading presidential contender all scream in public constantly about how we're on the verge of a giant financial meltdown?'":

In any case, there are no references to Swagel's statement anywhere online except in the original document.

Likewise, Swagel suggests the mid-September financial situation might have been dealt with without an immediate appropriations bill by Congress: "A counterfactual to consider is that the Treasury and Fed could have acted incrementally, with backstops and a flood of liquidity focused on money markets and commercial paper—but not the TARP."

That too has been mentioned nowhere online. Oh well.

All of which earns Schwarz' scathing headline declaring the corporate media silence "Another Triumph for American Journalism." Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Going All Out for Bank Bailout: Media Paint Crisis as Too 'Urgent' for Skepticism" (1/09) by Dean Baker & Kris Warner.

Michael Schwartz' (TomDispatch, 7/9/09) quote from a New York Times Baghdad report that "much of the complicated work of dismantling and removing millions of dollars of equipment from the combat outposts in the city has been done during the dark of night" includes the reason for this secrecy having to "take place at night": "Fewer Iraqis are likely to see that the American withdrawal is not total."

To Schwartz, "acting in the dark of night, in fact, seems to catch the nature of American plans for Iraq in a particularly striking way":

Last week, despite the death of Michael Jackson, Iraq made it back into the TV news as Iraqis celebrated a highly publicized American military withdrawal from their cities....

Unfortunately, not just for the Iraqis, but for the American public, it's what's happening in "the dark"--beyond the glare of lights and TV cameras--that counts....

An anonymous senior State Department official described this new "dark of night" policy recently to Christian Science Monitor reporter Jane Arraf this way: "One of the challenges of that new relationship is how the U.S. can continue to wield influence on key decisions without being seen to do so."

Without being seen to do so.... As a result, the crucial thing you can say about the Obama administration's military and civilian planning so far is this: Ignore the headlines, the fireworks and the briefly cheering crowds of Iraqis on your TV screen. Put all that talk of withdrawal aside for a moment and--if you take a closer look, letting your eyes adjust to the darkness.

Schwartz predicts that, "as your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, you begin to identify a deepening effort to ensure that Iraq remains a U.S. client state." In fact, "what seems to be coming into focus shouldn't be too unfamiliar to students of history. Once upon a time, it used to have a name: colonialism." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Catherine Lutz on Iraq Bases" (6/13/08).

On June 29, the day he was installed by Honduran coup leaders as the country's new interim foreign minister, Enrique Ortez Colindres repeatedly used racist slurs to describe U.S. president Barack Obama.

Using the word "negrito," a well-recognized and profoundly racist epithet, whose literal translation means "little black man" or "little black boy," Ortez referred to Obama as "that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing" ["ese negrito que no sabe nada de nada"] and "a little black man who doesn't know where Tegucigalpa is" ["el negrito, no conoce donde queda Tegucigalpa"]. In another case, he told the Honduran newspaper El Tiempo (translation from DailyKos):

I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, leftists, blacks, whites. This is my job; I studied for it. I am not racially prejudiced. I like the little black sugar plantation worker who is president of the United States.

For more than a week after they were uttered, Ortez's slurs were a big story in Latin American and around the world: The Chinese and French wire services Xinhua and Agence France Presse covered them, among others . But besides online sites like Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, the story was mostly ignored by U.S. journalists, who otherwise freely quoted Ortez about Honduras' coup and constitutional crisis.

That wasn’t the case when Hugo Chavez called George W. Bush the devil in an address at the U.N. in 2006. Then the arguably lesser insult was discussed for days in the U.S. media.

Wednesday, July 8, offered big new developments in the story when a U.S. diplomat in Honduras complained about the slurs and Ortez offered a brief apology. Then, later that afternoon, Ortez was fired and replaced by the coup government's president.

But today, two days later, the New York Times has yet to mention any aspect of the story, and the Washington Post only ran a brief 120-word Associated Press report about the apology (though nothing about the resignation) on July 9--its readers only then learning about the original slights.

And so it would appear that, at least in this case, few U.S. journalists think it's much of a story when a high-ranking foreign official, otherwise in the news, launches a racist attack, even one that targets the president of the United States.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/9/09, ad-viewing required) is extolling "The Significance of McClatchy's Act of Journalism" when reporting that recently released six-year Guantánamo prisoner Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil--one of many who supposedly "returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release"--"far from being in hiding, operates openly among officials of Afghanistan's U.S.-allied government."

Labeling Nancy Youssef's piece "a consummate example of excellent journalism," Greenwald also wants us to

note the central role the New York Times played--yet again--in spreading and given credence to pure government propaganda. And the method used to accomplish that is exactly what led them to help disseminate lies about the "Iraq threat" in the run-up to the war: Anonymous government sources leak something, they mindlessly print it without identifying who gave it to them, Dick Cheney cites the NYT article to bolster the lie, and then--even once the NYT is forced to admit they were used--they not only protect the identity of the anonymous sources who manipulated them, but they'll use the same exact method tomorrow--and the day after and the day after that--to report the "news."

What Judy Miller and Michael Gordon did in September, 2002 on the front page--that the NYT supposedly regrets so much--is exactly what Elisabeth Bumiller and her editors did here on the front page.

"As a result," Greenwald writes, "a blatant lie--that 1 in 7 released Guantánamo detainees 'returned to jihad'--became, as intended, embedded fact in our political debates." Read the FAIR Activism Update: "NY Times Ombud Agrees with Activists: Paper Failed to Question Pentagon Propaganda on Gitmo Prisoners" (6/8/09).

Jennifer L. Pozner has a version of her new NPR commentary on the Women In Media & News website she founded (7/8/09), in which she asks you to "think carefully: Can you remember any passionate TV news debates about whether journalists or voters might want to get naked with former vice president Dick Cheney?" If you're answer is no, that's not only unsurprising, but also, says Pozner, "good. Because such an insulting, irrelevant topic would--and should--never be considered newsworthy." She then calls attention to the fact that, "unfortunately, this sort of drivel frequently passes for journalism when the politician at the center of the story is female":

Take Alaska's soon-to-be-former governor, Sarah Palin. When she dropped her resignation bombshell--dubbed "breathless" "girlish burbling" by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd--CNN's Rick Sanchez wondered, "Hey, could she be pregnant again?," while others chalked it up to post-partum depression. Meanwhile, MSNBC analyst Donny Deutsch told Morning Joe viewers that the Quittah from Wasilla is divisive specifically because: "This is the first woman in power with sexual appeal.... We're used to seeing a woman in power as non-threatening."...

The ugly, nonpartisan truth is that corporate media have always seen women in power as threatening. That's why they trivialize women who dare seek office by obsessing over their bodies, hair, shoes, makeup and motherhood--as if these have anything to do with their abilities and track records. Whether it's cable news branding Hillary Clinton a "bitch," the New York Times reporting that Condoleezza Rice wears a size six, or the Washington Post detailing Loretta and Linda Sanchez' hairstyles, housekeeping preferences and "hootchy shoes," journalistic double standards condition us to consider women as ladies first, leaders a distant second--and inherently less qualified.

Pozner describes the consequences: "We'll never know how many talented people were dissuaded from politics because they knew it would be significantly harder for them to run, win and govern." See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Beyond Clinton & Palin: Coverage of Women in Election Misses Real Women's Issues" (1/09) by Julie Hollar.

Sports media critic Dave Zirin has posted on his Edge of Sports blog (7/6/09) about Wimbledon tennis tournament host All England Club having "blithely admitted that for women players 'physical attractiveness is taken into consideration' when it comes to court assignments" and how "several players, including some of these 'easy-on-the-eye unknowns,' were upset with the setup":

But much of the media dismissed the story as unimportant. L.Z. Granderson, a normally sane voice in the ESPN archipelago, wrote a column in which he stated simply, "I don't see the harm." After conceding the obvious--that the policy is sexist--Granderson played devil's advocate: "I actually find the Wimbledon officials' honesty quite refreshing.... Last I checked, gender equity in the workplace wasn't a beer on tap at the Kit Kat Club. Sometimes people like what they like, and accepting that also requires a certain degree of tolerance."

That would mean tolerance for sexism, an acceptance of the fact that no matter what their skills, women athletes should be prepared to be seen as objects first and athletes second.

Having written for some time of such matters, for Zirin, "the fact that sportswriters don't only ignore this practice but defend it is more than just annoying, upsetting or infuriating. It's tired."

The Washington Post's editorial (7/7/09) on the death of Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara managed to outdo even the New York Times' victim-erasing obituary. The Times cited the number of invading troops killed by McNamara's war of aggression while ignoring the vastly larger number of Indochinese deaths--but for the Post, neither the aggressors nor their victims are as important as the "agonizing" that the architect of the war went through. As the editorial concludes, "The true McNamara's War, as it turned out, was longer than Vietnam, and was fought mostly within himself."

It's a given that the Washington Post empathizes and identifies with the denizens of official Washington. But it takes a real moral narcissism to suggest that the real tragedy of Vietnam is that "Mr. McNamara was never forgiven by many of his bitter enemies from the Vietnam days."

Writing at his regular Beat the Press blog (7/8/09), economist Dean Baker says that the New York Times' David Leonhardt "rightly complains that President Obama's health care plan does nothing to change the incentives for doctors to prescribe expensive forms of care, even when there is no evidence that this care will lead to better outcomes." But "Leonhardt fails to take the extra step and ask why this care is expensive":

In most cases, the care is more expensive because it involves expensive medical equipment and drugs, with a healthy dash of high doctors' fees as well. The reason that medical equipment and drugs are expensive is that they have government-granted patent monopolies. In the absence of such monopolies, medical equipment and drugs would be cheap in nearly all cases. The huge patent rents that these monopolies allow medical supply companies and drug companies to earn also give them incentive to mislead doctors and the public about the benefits of their products.

The patent monopolies are justified as being necessary to support the development of new equipment and drugs; however, there are more efficient alternatives. However, that would require bigger thinking than NYT columnists are yet prepared to undertake.

This being far from a new story, the Times really has no excuse for ignoring the factors described by Baker, except maybe that they're corporate media reporting on corporate medicine--and don't worry, Baker tells us that "the WaPo has the same problem." See FAIR"s magazine Extra!: "Media on Medicare: Don’t Mess With Success—or Corporate Profits" (1–2/07) by Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas.

Guest blogging at Double X (7/2/09), Linda Hirshman takes on a Time magazine "cover story by working mother-scourge Caitlin Flanagan" that uses "the occasion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that 'Marriage Matters.'" Specifically, Hirshman writes of Flanagan's contention that

Marriage matters, because single-parent families are bad for children, the only people who count. "Drastically" bad: "On every single significant outcome ... children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households.... If you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others."

OK, maybe poor people, more often single than their critics from the elite Flanagan class, have worse outcomes, but aren't those problems more about, say, poverty than single-parent families? And, in fact, sociologists have been looking for reliable data that sorts that out since the invention of sociology in the 19th century and as recently as 2005.

But instead of looking at the recent work, Flanagan gives us her usual brew of autobiography (my parents' 50-year marriage, my husband’s caretaking), outmoded studies and interviews with experts from right-wing foundations such as David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values (and a loud spokesman against marriage for same-sex people), and Heritage's Robert Rector.

Hirshman points to a 2005 report from "the centrist Brookings Institution" that apparently is "unbeknownst to Flanagan": "Looking at a decade's work, [Penn State Professor of Family Sociology and Demography Paul R.] Amato reported 'the results of individual studies vary considerably: Some suggest serious negative effects of divorce, others suggest modest effects, and yet others suggest no effects.'"

One of Amato's conclusions is that "if the share of adolescents living in two-parent families returned to its 1970 level, it would have ... a relatively small effect on the share of children experiencing these problems." His educated guess that "in general, these findings... are likely to disappoint some readers" appears true enough, except when corporate media pundits like Flanagan choose not to read them at all. See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Career Women, Go Home: Media Return to a Favorite Obsession" (11–12/06) by Keely Savoie.

Media blogger Eli Stephens (left i on the news, 7/2/09) has posted on a Washington Post lede claiming that "Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran." Stephens explains how, as "one of the major pieces of 'evidence' used to justify the invasion of Iraq at the time," this "repetition now, from the mouth of Saddam Hussein no less, would be an important post-facto justification for the invasion." There's just one problem:

The claim itself was bullshit at the time. The truth, as I wrote at the time, was that while Gen. Colin Powell was at the U.N. lying through his teeth (or spouting lies put in his mouth by others, if you prefer to be generous to Powell) about the "evidence" the U.S. had, Iraqi Gen. Amer Al-Saadi (still imprisoned, as far as we know) was saying clearly and quite publicly that Iraq had no WMD whatsoever. That's one funny way to "allow the world to believe that you have WMD."

And, guess what? No such statement from Saddam Hussein appears in the interviews, which are all online at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The interviews aren't even transcripts, they are all simply summaries of the conversations made by an FBI agent, with only a tiny amount of direct quotations embedded within them. But even in those summaries, no such claim appears.

Having "twice" read "every word of the five 'casual conversations'" the Post says Hussein's comments are drawn from, Stephens is compelled to "repeat--no such claim by Saddam Hussein appears (nor does it appear in the summary of the documents prepared by the NSA)--that is entirely a fiction created by the Post." Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Saddam's 'Secret': Hussein Told CBS About WMDs--but CBS Wasn't Watching" (3–4/08) by Seth Ackerman.

Robin Varghese's 3 Quarks Daily link (6/30/09) to a Boston Review piece purporting that, "over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself," has engendered some homespun media criticism from a commenter logged-in as "Pepito," who argues that "this canard about Chávez and Chavismo being anti-Semitic has been debunked several times in the past, but it comes backs very often."

In response to the excerpt's lead example of "15 heavily armed men" who attacked a Caracas synagogue, "held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple" with swastika graffiti, Pepito illustrates exactly "how ridiculously inaccurate that article is" with "a couple of points":

Not mentioned in that article was that the attack on the synagogue was perpetrated by a band of thieves led by a night guard who had worked at the place for years and who used the anti-Semitic slogans so they could throw off the police investigation. They were captured a few days later with a hundred thousand dollars they had stolen from the synagogue's vault.

After the attack on the synagogue, Chávez himself talked live on TV to Elias Farache, president of one of Venezuela's main Jewish associations, and gave him his word that he was not going to tolerate anti-Semitic attacks in his country and that he was going to protect the Jewish community. Farache himself denied the government's supposed culpability in the attack....

Also, the article does not mention that Fred Pressner, president of [the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, a group] representative of Venezuela's Jewish community, repeatedly complained to the Wiesenthal Center, asking them to consult with the Venezuelan Jewish community before accusing Chávez of anti-Semitism.

Pepito's parting shot at 3 Quarks Daily and the Boston Review: "Pointing the finger at Chávez's government for some isolated anti-Semitic events in the street while ignoring the fact that for many years (and before Chávez was elected) there have been small groups with anti-Semitic leanings (usually formed by conservative ultra-Catholics) is disingenuous, to say the least." See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur: Some Outlets Spread Spurious Charges of Anti-Semitism" (1/23/06).