Eva Paterson (Huffington Post, 8/28/09),  president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, has a response to Glenn Beck's assertion that "I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts" after having been "smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show."

Being "the person who first hired Van Jones," Paterson finds herself "in a unique position to know the truth." And falling squarely in the fabulously unsurprising category is that "the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts":

For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots....

This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week after the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police...stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people--including all the legal monitors.

The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).

So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march--for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated--is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.

Paterson reminds you that "you don't have to take my word for it," since "arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record." And of course, FAIR followers know all too well that "Beck is at best relying on Internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings."

Read a recent article from FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

Media Monitors Network has the latest column from Norman Solomon (8/26/09), in which the longtime analyst of corporate media boosterism for U.S. wars considers a recent swath of stories that "have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan."

True, "the comparisons are often valid," Solomon finds, "but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned--the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it":

This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time.... In fact, overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with war policymakers in Washington--insisting for the longest time that the war must go on....

A similar pattern took shape during Washington’s protracted war in Iraq. Year after year, the editorial positions of major dailies have been much more supportive of the U.S. war effort than the American public.

And today, when "top policymakers for what has become Obama’s Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation’s mighty newspapers," Solomon reiterates that "opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war"--noting how an August 13–17 ABC News-Washington Post poll "found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn't worth fighting."

See the recent FAIR Action Alert: "Where Is the Afghanistan Debate?: When Public Support Slips, TV Packs in War Boosters" (8/25/09).

On news that "today, a federal court threw out the Federal Communications Commission's rule to cap cable ownership at 30 percent," Free Press (8/28/09) comments "the rule served as an important consumer protection from media consolidation and growing cable cartels, and encouraged diversity in ownership in the cable industry."

The media advocacy group's Ben Scott further calls it

regrettable that the court tossed out an important public interest protection against excessive media consolidation. Congressional intent in the Cable Act of 1992 is very clear--the goals of federal policy in the cable industry are to promote competition, consumer choice and a diversity of programming. And yet today we have a cable cartel--the video industry is dominated by only a handful of large cable operators and studios.

Today consumers experience perpetual price hikes by large operators that already have market dominating purchasing power to decide the fate of new channels. The promises of lower prices through competition from satellite and telecom companies in the video business have never been realized.

While today "the court ruled the FCC's action as 'arbitrary and capricious,'" Free Press reminds us of how "the same court threw out the rule in 2001, but it was reinstated by the FCC in 2008 due to fears of growing market power of big cable companies."

It's about time someone stood up for the poor insurance companies! The New York Times today delves into what it's like to be "Dealing With Being the Healthcare 'Villains,'" eliciting sad stories from nice people who work for big insurance companies and feel they're under attack.

Times reporter Kevin Sack tells us, "Some workers said that unlike other contributors to the country's healthcare problems--the doctors who overprescribe, the hospitals that fail to control infection, the consumers who do not take care of themselves--insurance companies are faceless, impersonal and distant." Sack and the NYT to the rescue! Let's put a face on these victims.

Humana's employees want the politicians to know that, in the words of Aerion V. Miles, a customer service team leader, "We are human beings, too."

This is seriously absurd. Health insurance company employees are clearly not the villains; it's the private insurance system (and if you had to put a human face on it, the CEOs). What is happening is their jobs are being threatened by the possibility of lower insurance company profits, which the Times has managed to turn into a piece on how these employees do things like volunteer at a local hospice, so jeez, why are they under such heavy assault? The New York Times is not that stupid--but it apparently does think its readers are stupid enough to fall for  pure insurance industry PR.

Stars and Stripes reporters Charlie Reed, Kevin Baron and Leo Shane III (8/27/09) have an update on the military paper's recent exposure of Iraqi National Congress fabricators the Rendon Group helping the Pentagon in Screening New Embeds in Afghanistan "to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light."

A reporter profile obtained by Stars and Stripes "evaluates work published as recently as May, indicating that the rating practice did not in fact cease last October" as claimed by a Pentagon representative, and "explicit suggestions contained in the Rendon profiles detailing how best to manipulate reporters coverage... directly contradict the Pentagon’s stated policies"--purporting to be "in no way intended to prevent release of embarrassing, negative or derogatory information."

Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters' coverage is being graded as "positive," "neutral" or "negative."

Moreover, the documents--recent confidential profiles of the work of individual reporters prepared by a Pentagon contractor--indicate that the ratings are intended to help Pentagon image-makers manipulate the types of stories that reporters produce while they are embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

One reporter on the staff of one of America's pre-eminent newspapers is rated in a Pentagon report as "neutral to positive" in his coverage of the U.S. military. Any negative stories he writes "could possibly be neutralized" by feeding him mitigating quotes from military officials.

But really, what are the odds of that working?

Glenn Greenwald (8/27/09, ad-viewing required) of Salon's series of New Republic quotes morphing from condemning a perceived "anti-Lieberman jihad" to calling for "knocking off Democrats like Conrad and Joe Lieberman" charts the outlet's "rapid and total reversal--one effectuated without the slightest acknowledgment that it even occurred."

Calling the change "just the accountability-free nature of Beltway punditry," Greenwald also spies "a more important point highlighted here":

namely, it is a sign of how dysfunctional the Democratic Party is--and how meaningless is their glorious super-majority--that even the New Republic, which long prided itself on safeguarding the party from nefarious left-wing influences, is now calling for "centrist" Democratic senators (even including Joe Lieberman) to be thrown out of office by means of primary challenges (I believe that was once called a "purity purge"), even if doing so results in a loss of Democratic seats. [TNR editor Jonathan] Chait's rationale is that allowing "centrist" dominance within the party means that the same corporate interests (rather than the interests of constituents) and the same political agenda end up being served regardless of which party is in control, meaning that--as he put it--even "a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn't worth having" because nothing meaningful changes. You don't say.

But, notes Greenwald, "that, of course, was exactly the motivating premise of those who sought to remove Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006." Those were "the people Chait demonized back then as 'left-wing fanatics' who 'refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.'"

Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn "is the Wall Street Journal's 'Microtrend'-spotting columnist" and "also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller," Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that "only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter."

Alas, "Scumbag spotted!" is Nolan's cry when writing that

Penn's latest (old, and none too insightful) "Microtrend" column is about "glamping"--glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients.

Nolan goes on to remind us that "Penn was canned as Hillary Clinton's campaign strategist after it emerged that his firm was trying to get a contract to do PR work for the nation of Colombia—work that went against Clinton's own political position." It's particularly interesting to recall that scandal as "a story that the WSJ broke," considering how, as Nolan puts it, "moonlighting from his PR career has already screwed a politician," but "now he's screwing a newspaper the same way."

The problem with Rupert Murdoch's proposal to create an online news consortium, in which major publishers would all band together to put their news content behind pay walls (L.A. Times, 8/21/09), is that it's not illegal to discuss news events online.  And you don't want to make it illegal to discuss news events online.

And yet, absent a law forbidding such discussions, there's nothing to stop someone from buying subscriptions to the various pay news sites and starting a website (like this one, but more so) in which they write about what they've learned from them--thus offering for free what the Murdoch's news trust would be trying to get people to pay for.  You can't copyright facts, and any attempt to change the law to allow publishers to do so would run straight into the shoals of the First Amendment and the concept of democracy itself.

Let's say you could keep the "tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet" (as a Murdoch editor memorably calls them) from passing along the news for free.  According to the L.A. Times piece, News Corp points to the Wall Street Journal as a success story with its website's 1 million paying customers, and has encouraged the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co. to follow its lead. Imagine that each of those publishers was as successful, and that the paying readers they attracted did not significantly overlap (both rather unrealistic assumptions, it strikes me)--that would be great news for publishers but something of a disaster for democracy, with the news generated by these leading (and not-so-leading) outlets confined to an elite audience of 5 million--or roughly 1-2 percent of the citizenry.

It's not like we have a particularly well-informed electorate as it is; if Murdoch's plan for an online news cartel is at all successful, though, today's voters may seem like Encyclopedia Brown.

In the wake of growing public dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan, FAIR is challenging the Sunday morning shows to include war critics and peace advocates as guests on their programs. Click here to read FAIR's action alert about these shows' complicity in government officials' efforts to reverse the trend of declining public support for the war; then add your voice to our call for a real debate on Afghanistan by writing to the Sunday morning talkshows. (Email contacts are provided in the alert.)

You can share your letters by pasting them in the comments section below.

"Robert Samuelson Doesn't Like Trains" is what Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/24/09) takes to be "the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high-speed rail do not make a lot of sense."

In his August 24 broadside against what he dubs Barack Obama's "Rail Boondoggle," Samuelson trots out the tired argument against "almost $35 billion in subsidies into Amtrak" that "the federal government has poured" in the last four decades--with the usual corporate pundit omissions, like the fact that, as long ago as 1994 it was determined that "hidden subsidies for drivers amount to well over $2 for every gallon of gasoline sold."

Beyond that, "Samuelson tries to tell us that trains might be useful in Japan and Europe, but they won't work in the United States":

He tells readers that:

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it's 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile.

The density for the United States as a whole would be relevant if the plans were to build a train network going from Florida to Alaska, but that is not what is on the agenda. Instead, the issue is about deepening and improving the network in relatively densely populated parts of the country, like Ohio (277 people per square mile), New York (402) and New Jersey (1,134). The population densities of much of the United States are very comparable to the regions in Europe through which high-speed rails travel.

Baker then tells how "Samuelson also bizarrely compares long-distance train with the 140 million daily trips to work each day," even though "most people do not travel between cities every day, so it's not clear what the point of the comparison is."

Recapping, Baker writes that "Robert Samuelson doesn't like trains. He told us that this morning in his column." However, "he didn't tell us anything else."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Railroading of Amtrak: Trains, Planes and Automobiles Held to Different Standards" (7–8/02) by Christopher Ott.

In his Week in Review piece wondering if Obama's Afghanistan policy is akin to LBJ and Vietnam, New York Times reporter Peter Baker notes that the public mood is seeping into the media:

That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the Afghan war and newspapers are filled with more columns questioning America’s involvement.

Newspapers are filled with what now? It doesn't feel that way to me, but surely Baker must have some evidence. Which he does:

The cover of the latest Economist is headlined "Afghanistan: The Growing Threat of Failure."

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration official turned critic, wrote in the New York Times last week that what he once considered a war of necessity has become a war of choice. While he still supports it, he argued that there are now alternatives to a large-scale troop presence, like drone attacks on suspected terrorists, more development aid and expanded training of Afghan police and soldiers.

A British magazine and a Times op-ed from someone who supports the war? That's not exactly what I was expecting when I was told newspapers were "filled" with dissenting views.

As if journalists "embedding" with U.S. troops isn't troubling enough, Stars and Stripes is reporting that reporters looking to embed with U.S. troops in Afghanistan will face some troubling screening:

As more journalists seek permission to accompany U.S. forces engaged in escalating military operations in Afghanistan, many of them could be screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light.

U.S. public affairs officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to Stars and Stripes that any reporter seeking to embed with U.S. forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress. That opposition group, reportedly funded by the CIA, furnished much of the false information about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.

We're told that the review is not designed to exclude reporters who might be too critical, though in practice that is how it's been used:

U.S. Army officials in Iraq engaged in a similar vetting practice two months ago, when they barred a Stars and Stripes reporter from embedding with a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division because the reporter "refused to highlight" good news that military commanders wanted to emphasize.

Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill (The Nation, Democracy Now!) appeared on HBO's Real Time With Bill  Maher alongside NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.  Because Jeremy isn't the type to let such an opportunity to go to waste, he used some of his time to castigate the corporate media for failing to question the White House about the reliance on private contracting firms like Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he also brought up Todd's opinion that investigating Bush-era abuses would be a distraction.

Scahill shared with Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald what happened off camera:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me, "That was a cheap shot." I said, "What are you talking about?" and he said, "You know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "That's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

You can see part of their exchange on the show here. If Scahill repeating what Todd said is "sullying" his reputation, then didn't Todd really sully himself?

Diligent media reformers Free Press (8/19/09) have announced a nifty new "online interactive tool to expose phony grassroots groups hired by big phone and cable companies to advance their political agenda." They're talking about "'astroturf' organizations--many of which also work for the health insurance, energy and tobacco industries"-- that "are mobilizing to spread misinformation about Network Neutrality and Internet policies."

The group's graphic presentation "tracks the huge amounts of money that phone and cable companies spend on lobbyists and campaign contributions" and

reveals the contradictory and dishonest claims about Net Neutrality and other issues from top industry executives; and it puts a spotlight on the deceptive activities of groups like FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, NetCompetition and the Heartland Institute.

"The fake grassroots groups are spending major resources to deceive the public and promote agendas of the corporations that sign their paychecks," said Timothy Karr, campaign director of Free Press. "We need transparency, accountability and honest debate. The crucial policy decisions being made right now about the future of the Internet must be based on independent research, reliable data and facts. The phone and cable companies must stop distorting the issues and hiding behind their astroturf groups, sock puppets and hired shills."

Along with exposing astroturf groups, the interactive tool features "The Money Trail," which tabulates spending by big phone and cable on an army of lobbyists to push their agenda in Washington.

Some disturbing totals from the past two years: "Comcast spent more than $45 million on campaigns and lobbying," which otherwise "could have provided one year of broadband service to 150,000 households"; and Time Warner Cable spent $24 million on lobbying, instead of potentially having "subsidized 100,000 low-income households for one year of broadband service."

OpEd News has published an open letter from attorney Dana Jill Simpson (8/20/09) to "Mr. Murdoch and all the editors at the Wall Street Journal," in which she expresses her wish to "thank you from the very bottom of my heart for running Karl Rove's delusional article, 'Closing In on Rove,' on August 20, 2009":

The reason I want to thank you is that Mr. Rove has clearly lied about me in this article. You have captured and printed it without even checking to see if it is so or not. The lie he has told is and I quote, "Judiciary Democrats didn't get testimony from either Mr. Siegelman or Dana Jill Simpson, the eccentric Alabama lawyer, who drew attention by publicly supporting the allegations." In case you are unaware, I testified on September 14, 2007, before the House Judiciary Committee lawyers that were selected to question me. I most definitely gave sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Democrats. In fact, I gave over 143 pages of testimony before the Judiciary Democratic and Republican lawyers. It is unfortunate that your paper does not give a rip about the truth or you would have checked out the bold-faced lie that Karl Rove put in his article before you printed it.

The OpEd News mini-bio of Simpson notes that she "has appeared on 60 Minutes and Dan Abrams MSNBC," and that "stories were written in Time magazine, Harper's magazine, and the New York Times about her being a witness in the Don Siegelman case on corruption at the Justice Department."

Still, in closing, Simpson tells the Journal she's actually "happy today to call Mr. Rove a liar and you have provided the cold hard proof. You, Mr. Murdoch, gave me that opportunity. I am thankful that you run a paper that apparently does not check for the truth."