Reading Caitlin Flanagan's Time magazine cover story (7/2/09) on the "increasingly fragile construct" of marriage--which claims that "the divorce culture became a fact of life" over "the past 2½ decades"--one would never guess that U.S. divorce rates have actually dropped by almost a third since 1992, from 4.8 per thousand people to 3.5.

In the sixth paragraph of his front-page obituary of Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (7/7/09), the New York Times' Tim Weiner tries--and fails--to give some idea of the human cost of McNamara's war:

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

What's missing, of course, is the number of Vietnamese and other Indochinese who died as a result of the war whose escalation McNamara oversaw; estimates range from 1 million to more than 3 million, but Weiner never gets around to mentioning them. More than halfway through the piece, the article does quote a repentant McNamara talking about how escalating the war would cause "more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North"--though the reference is to unspecified "suffering," and even then the focus is on the "distress" such suffering would cause us.

Clearly, it's morally perverse to treat one's own nation's losses in a war that nation started as the important point, while ignoring the far greater losses of the lands your country invaded. It's that ability to set aside the evil that one inflicts on others that allows wars like Vietnam to be carried out.

"The lack of single-payer support by top politicians and elite media is striking" to veteran independent journalist Roger Bybee (Z Magazine, 7/09), who reminds us that "numerous surveys have shown the popularity of the single-payer approach." Bybee points out, for example, that "a January CBS/NY Times poll showed 59 percent for a single-payer system described in vague terms," Business Week, in 2005, "found '67 percent of all Americans think it's a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 percent dissenting" and "in April 2008, a survey of 1,100 U.S. doctors published in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed 59 percent backing among physicians for single-payer." Bybee reports on the industry response to these fairly unequivocal numbers--a response heartily welcomed by corporate news media:

Following the thinking outlined for Republicans by conservative pollster and strategist Frank Luntz, the insurers and their allies have adopted a conciliatory, "pro-reform" face. Of course, the insurers and the medical-industrial complex have a distinct vision of reform. As Dr. Don McCanne of PNHP has written: "For the insurance industry, reform means expanding their successful business model to include more individuals in their plans while shifting the higher costs to the government (taxpayers). Most people do not want to be required to purchase health plans at premiums they cannot afford, and then be stuck with inadequate coverage designed to keep premiums from climbing even higher."

Still, the insurers captured favorable media coverage for three rather hollow pledges: agreeing to drop "prior condition" considerations in signing up individual applicants in exchange for the government creating an individual mandate to purchase health insurance; accepting "much more aggressive regulation of insurance"; and announcing that they would cut $1.2 trillion from health care costs over the next decade. Each of these pledges is fraught with fundamental loopholes.

While these gestures have generated extensive media coverage and generated a sense of goodwill among some health-reform advocates, the health insurance industry has been fighting a less visible battle to ensure that the final plan emerges with insurer-designed loopholes intact.

Bybee gives an idea of the extent of the forces arrayed against the popular healthcare solution: "Toward that end, the health sector invested $134 million on lobbying in 2009's first quarter alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics." Do your part to fight back by adding your name to FAIR's petition to Tell Media: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate.

Considering how, "in recent months, news aggregators like the Huffington Post have received heated criticism from some who believe they’re stealing valuable traffic and ad revenue from newspapers," with even "appeals court Judge Richard Posner recently wr[iting] a widely-linked post arguing that copyright law should be changed in order to bar linking to websites and paraphrasing their content," media blogger Simon Owens (Bloggasm.com, 7/6/09) has conducted an experiment to evaluate the premise of corporate media management "that news aggregators simply repackage news so there’s little incentive to click on the actual link":

So how much traffic does a large news aggregator like Huffington Post bring? I’ve been linked several times within Huffington Post, but typically on its users blogs, which only send a few hundred readers at most. But on early Friday I was fortunate enough to be featured prominently on Huffington Post’s front page with a banner headline linking to one of my articles.

How much traffic did this link bring? Lots. For the first three hours I received approximately 4,000 unique visitors an hour to just that one article. Traffic for the rest of the day remained strong, not once dipping below 2,000 uniques an hour as the link began traveling down the front page. By midnight that night, Huffington Post had sent approximately 30,000 unique visitors to that one article.

But though the first day’s worth of traffic was the heaviest, the Huffington Post continued to send me strong traffic for two more days as the link moved down on its main page but remained prominent on its highly-trafficked Politics page.

"All together," Owens tells us, he "received a grand total of 37,739 unique visitors from a prominent link on the Huffington Post over a three day period," while days later "still seeing relatively strong traffic from there"--which all sounds like decidedly good news for linked-to big media outlets, doesn't it?

Furthering the story of "Washington Post executives--reeling...over a flier promoting a 'salon' for lobbyists to mingle with prominent newsmakers," Politico reporters Michael Calderone and Andy Barr (7/4/09) think the suits at the Post might reasonably ask "Why us?":

The fact is the Post's clumsy effort to make money on its brand name and market its access to the powerful was a belated effort to follow in the steps of at least two other prominent news organizations: The Wall Street Journal and the Economist magazine.

The Journal, for instance, is charging a $7,500 for its two-day CEO Council in November, an elite gathering that will include the paper's top editors and high-profile speakers like Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. And for a few thousand dollars, the Economist can open the door to intimate off-the-record meet-and-greets with world leaders.

These events illustrate how the basic transaction--charging big fees to special interests to arrange private, special-access encounters with powerful people--that caused the Post this week to be excoriated is a more endemic practice than many people in political and media circles realize. Some watchdogs hope this week's Post scandal will help put an end to a hard-to-defend practice by revenue-hungry news organizations.

The quote from one such watchdog, Pew Project director Tom Rosenstiel, makes it totally clear: "He said, news organizations are 'encouraging the notion in the reader's mind that [they're] part of some insider establishment that it considers more important than public knowledge'"--now where would we ever get that idea?

The Houston Chronicle's Susan Carroll (6/30/09) reports that Fox News celebrity journalist Geraldo Rivera "was touched" by the televised statement of a daughter mourning her law enforcement father who "was killed last week by a suspected illegal immigrant," but also stepped up to speak to the truth larger than divisive media coverage of the matter:

"We all deplore violent crime, but what has happened is that with these anecdotal tragedies, we have demonized an entire race of people in this country," Rivera said. "Immigrant and nonimmigrant alike. Citizen and noncitizen alike."...

Rivera...said the tone of the immigration debate has had serious consequences for Hispanics.

"We have created a slanderous condition and environment in our country, where the 46 million of us who have Latino roots now feel beleaguered, now feel besieged, now feel as if we are 'the other,'" he said.

Now, Rivera does regularly come down on the right side of this issue--albeit often in a typically bombastic cable news kind of way--but it still really speaks to the depths of Fox that this man is the network's voice of journalistic conscience. But then I suppose good sense that actually makes the corporate news should be welcome from any quarter: "Rivera called for President Barack Obama to end work site enforcement raids. He also said the Obama administration should better define guidelines for the federal government's 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as immigration agents."

Read more on the "slanderous condition" of immigration coverage in the featured content of a recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Media Patrol the Border" (6/09).

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an update (7/2/09, ad-viewing required) on "several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR's ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR's ban on using the word 'torture' to describe the Bush administration's interrogation tactics":

Given the utter vapidity of her rationale ("there are two sides to the issue. And I'm not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?"), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches "Media Ethics" to graduate students at Georgetown University....

NPR's "torture" ban and its ombudsman's incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR--and rightfully so. Yesterday, the Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day long, focusing on Shepard's refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a long column on Shepard's refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR's policy. (Indeed, this controversy began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR's steadfast refusal to use the word "torture" and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that.)

Despite Shepard's avoidance of him, Greenwald notes that she "went on another NPR-affiliated show" for a segment "that included several good questions" and "a very well-compiled, illustrative and cringe-inducing montage of NPR's repeatedly going out of its way to avoid calling Bush interrogation tactics 'torture,' juxtaposed with an excerpt where NPR explicitly accused Iraqis in Sadr City of 'using torture' against detainees."

Read more on NPR's longstanding problematic reporting on U.S. torture--and Alicia Shepard's inconsistent defense of it--in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Tortured Justifications for Bad Journalism" (12/07) by Jim Naureckas & Candice O'Grady.

Admitting "the temptation to join the growing legions of iPhone admirers is strong," independent reporter Megan Tady (In These Times, 7/2/09) is discussing "what's stopping me from signing up." Her own personal decision is based on the fact that "purchasing an iPhone means I have to become an AT&T subscriber. The company has an exclusive deal with Apple to provide wireless service to iPhoners"--which means, among other things, that Tady would be "backed into a corner. If I don't like AT&T, or it's not available in my area, I'm facing a digital impasse: no service, no phone":

This is unfortunate, not because I'm missing out on the iPhone's "bar finder" application, but because smart phones are setting the stage for the future of the mobile Internet. They are revolutionary because they free us from our home or office computers. We can catch breaking news, create and upload content, and navigate online social networks and movements from anywhere.

It's the Internet--some might say "the world"--in our pockets. Or at least, it could be. But companies like AT&T and Verizon are getting in the way by shackling innovative devices like the iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm to closed networks.

These exclusive deals limit consumer choice and stifle innovation. Rural residents who can’t get cellular service from the wireless carriers holding exclusive rights to popular smart phones like the iPhone are left watching the commercials for them. If smaller, more local wireless carriers were allowed to service them, these phones could be available to rural America.

Tady strongly asserts that "consumers should have the freedom to choose any phone on any network, to choose among many carriers in a competitive, low-cost marketplace and to access any Web content, applications or services they want"--and she asks your help in "protesting handset exclusivity" by "urging our lawmakers and the Federal Communications Commission to step in."

As Barack Obama and his pliant media pundits are "talking up the achievements of the six-year occupation," Consortium News' Robert Parry (7/1/09) is writing of the "public celebrations by Iraqis marking the American pullout from Iraq's cities." Parry's look back the last six years' reality clearly recalls how, "relying on false intelligence and laughable legal theories, Bush justified launching what the New York Times may call an 'unnecessary war' but what was in reality a 'war of aggression'"--constituting, Parry reminds us, "what the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II deemed 'the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole'":

While those crimes were underway, major U.S. media outlets avoided stating the obvious because any recognition that Bush waged "a war of aggression" would force other conclusions, such as the need to subject him, his senior advisers and some foreign allies (i.e., Tony Blair) to a war crimes tribunal.

The big news organizations also didn't want to admit their own complicity in this crime, since almost everyone in American journalism who wanted to keep a comfortable seat at the Establishment's table either endorsed the enterprise or kept quiet.

So even today--more than five months after Bush left office--it's still much easier to dismiss what happened as "unnecessary," to cite the pre-war "intelligence failures," and to criticize Bush primarily for his tactical misjudgments in planning an effective occupation--not committing enough troops and not having a detailed enough post-invasion plan.

Parry well knows that "accusing him of criminality is much trickier," since, "after all, in the view of the mainstream news media, war crimes are something that 'rogue states' commit, petty tyrants from Rwanda or Yugoslavia who can then be dragged off to The Hague and put on trial." Alas, "Such humiliations are not for the former 'Leader of the Free World' and his subordinates."

Check out the overriding corporate media reaction to even the most tepid congressional gestures toward accountability for members of the George W. Bush government in FAIR's Action Alert: "CNN Scoffs at White House Critics: Anchor With Bush Ties Dismisses Abuse-of-Power Hearings as 'Stagecraft'" (7/31/08).

Author and blogger Nikolas Kozloff has a BuzzFlash posting (7/1/09) about how, if you "read or listen to the mainstream media these days,"

you get the impression that [last] Sunday's coup in Honduras was all about a simple disagreement over the constitutionality of presidential term limits. But as the coup unfolds, it's becoming clear that the authorities want something more: the restoration of Honduras' conservative political order and an end to President Manuel Zelaya's independent foreign policy that had reached out to leftist countries such as Cuba and Venezuela.

As part of their effort to consolidate power, officials have moved quickly to restrain the free flow of information, in particular by cracking down on progressive-leaning media. Only TV stations sympathetic to the newly installed coup regime have been left alone, while others have been shut down. The climate of repression is similar to what we have seen elsewhere in Latin America in recent years. Specifically, there are eerie parallels to the April 2002 coup in Venezuela when the briefly installed right-wing government imposed a media blackout to further its own political ends.

Not that you would have read anything on that from prominent U.S. reporters. They reserve their free speech defenses exclusively for outlets helping the fight against official U.S. enemies--deserving or not. See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Coup Co-Conspirators as Free-Speech Martyrs: Distorting the Venezuelan Media Story" (5/25/07).

The business department at the Washington Post has gotten into trouble in what may be a case of too much truth in advertising.

As reported by Politico (7/2/09), the Post circulated a flyer offering--for the low, low cost of $25,000--an "intimate and exclusive Washington Post salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and publisher Katharine Weymouth." The circular promised the participation of "key Obama administration and congressional leaders" as well as "healthcare reporting and editorial staff members of the Washington Post."

Lest anyone be confused as to why dinner at the Post's publisher's house would be worth $25,000, the flyer helpfully points out that "an evening with the right people can alter the debate." It calls the event "an exclusive opportunity to participate in the healthcare reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done." It's quite straightforward: The Post is offering to help a deep-pocketed customer an opportunity to alter the healthcare reform process by granting access to government officials and its own journalists.

Naturally, one is not allowed to be that honest about the relationship between money, power and journalism in Washington, D.C.  A Post spokesperson told Politico that the advertisement was released "before it was properly vetted," and that the "draft does not represent what the company's vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers." Boy, that doesn't sound as much like it's worth 25 grand, does it?

Post publisher Katharine Weymouth then did an interview with employee Howard Kurtz in which she vowed they were "not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom." But she was aware "of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation." And Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli said that "he had been involved in discussions, stretching back to last year, about newsroom participation in conferences"--but the good kind of conference, not the kind that makes you look like a sleazy influence-peddler.

So it looks like they're going to go ahead with these things--"We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that the Post should be leading these conversations," the Post statement to Politico said--but presumably next time they won't market them so nakedly as an exchange of money for power.  Don't worry, Post Co., your clients will still know what they're buying.

Noticing that "the New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two U.S. Army soldiers under the headline 'Names of the Dead,'" Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 7/1/09) points out how apparently "there wasn't enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations."

Having observed wartime media long enough to know that "that's the way routine death stories go," Solomon has also observed that "reporting on life is like that, and reporting on death is like that: even more so when the media lenses are ground with ideology, nationalism and economic convenience":

The conventional wisdom of press and state insists that the U.S. war effort must do more than go on--it must escalate--in the name of human decency. The political rhetoric in Washington is close to 100 percent humanitarian, while the new supplemental infusion of U.S. spending for Afghanistan is 90 percent military.

Inside a contrived news frame, destruction can nurture life. In media myth, we can be well-informed and ignorant of war's realities. Along the way, the benefits of numbed quiescence and muffled dissent are vastly overrated.

Listen to Solomon's recent appearance on the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Norman Solomon on Obama's Inauguration" (1/23/09).

Reacting to media noise over the economic costs of the Waxman-Markey environmental bill currently before the U.S. Congress, Dean Baker (ZNet, 7/1/09) looks to the damages of a different annual spending bill, this one perpetually unexamined in corporate news:

Global Insight projected that after 20 years of higher defense spending, annual car sales would be down by more than 700,000. Housing starts would be almost 40,000 lower. Exports would be 1.8 percent lower and imports would be 2.7 percent higher, leading to a trade deficit that was almost $200 billion larger. The model also projected that there would be nearly 700,000 fewer jobs as a result of the higher level of defense spending.

In short, the economic harm projected from high levels of military spending is far larger than the damage projected from the Waxman-Markey bill. Given this situation, we should expect that all the oil and coal industry folks who are now so concerned about the average family's well-being would have been screaming about the economic pain that would result from sustaining the Iraq War levels of military spending.

Did anyone ever hear them raise this issue? Does anyone recall members of Congress giving speeches about how the job loss from the Iraq War levels of spending will be devastating? Does anyone recall any newspaper columns or editorials making this point? How about a news story that analyzed the economic impact of higher levels of military spending?

"For some reason," Baker says, "job loss and economic pain associated with the military are just not worth mentioning. These items only become newsworthy when the issue is saving the environment." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Miriam Pemberton on Military Budget" (4/17/09).

The folks at Fox News, so quick to denounce dissent as unpatriotic during the George W. Bush era, have now moved from generally hoping for the failure of the Obama government to wishing another September 11 upon a country too slow to violence for their taste. Mark Howard of News Corpse (7/1/09) gives us video and a transcript of Glenn Beck & Co.'s

suggestion for a remedy for our diseased nation that is so far gone now that there is only one solution: Another 9/11....

[guest Michael] Scheuer: ...The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grassroots, bottom-up pressure, because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. Only--it's an absurd situation. Again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why I was thinking this weekend if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

While "sure Bin Laden appreciates Beck's advice," Howard still thinks it's "a bit shocking that Beck's counsel to Bin Laden is to refrain from attacking the U.S. because it would benefit the country by motivating Americans to demand protection against such an attack"--which means, Howard explains, that Beck "actually believes that the slaughter of untold thousands of innocent Americans is not only beneficial, but is 'the only chance we have.'"

Critiquing some more of National Public Radio's healthcare reportage, blogger Mytwords (NPR Check, 6/29/09) highlights Julie Rovner of Morning Edition "reporting this morning for the private health insurance lobby": "The healthcare cost debate pretty much comes down to this: 'You can't cut costs without hurting someone.'"

Rovner then backs up her "analysis" with "a little Meet the Press sound-bite from Fred Thompson"--"The only way to really save cost is to have rationing or it can be done by a cram-down by the government and take it out of the hides of doctors, hospitals":

Rovner's report mainly serves to highlight and promote the research of Elliott Fisher of the Dartmouth Institute. The big deal is that Fisher has found that some areas in the U.S. with lower cost prices for healthcare have better outcomes. Funny thing is that on June 11, 2009, NPR featured this exact research. An interesting thing not mentioned on NPR is the chief "partners" of the Dartmouth Institute. On the list are

• Wellpoint Foundation
• Aetna Foundation
• United Health Foundation

I do smell a conflict of interest, eh?

Rovner fills out the report by going to a solid centrist--Len Nichols (no single-payer, he)--of the New America Foundation (as far left as NPR dare venture).

Don't worry, though--"the wrap-up is provided by Joe Antos of the far-right American Enterprise Institute, who concludes that real change to healthcare is a cultural/behavioral issue more than a cost issue." Read the new issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Media Quarantine of Single-Payer Continues: Fifteen Years Later, Public Health Insurance Still Taboo" (6/09) by Julie Hollar and Isabel Macdonald.