Longtime friend of FAIR Sam Husseini (Husseini.org, 8/21/09) has a new blog post responding to Robert Kuttner's recent Washington Post column, in which the American Prospect magazine editor "asks 'Where are the liberal protesters?'":

It seems like a good question. Until one considers the source of the complaint--and that rather helps answer the question.

Maybe the "liberal protests" are where the American Prospect's cover story of the "Baucus 13" is.Or the where the American Prospect's lengthy piece on Linda Allision's exchange with Obama is.

Since clicking on the above links yields absolutely zero results in the American Prospect coverage, Husseini urges you to "read up on the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison's questioning of Obama" while asking, "If 'liberal' mags like the American Prospect were serious about reform, wouldn't they have relentlessly plugged the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison?"

Eighteen-year-old Caster Semenya, a runner from South Africa, just blew away the competition in the women's 800-meter world championship race. But the news reports yesterday weren't about that--they were about whether she's "really" a woman or not. And supposedly serious outlets like the AP and CNN are sinking to tabloid levels of coverage on the issue.

The AP video of the controversy, posted on the L.A. Times website, kicks off: "Quick! Man--or woman?" The piece includes slow pans over Semenya's body, more tabloidy commentary ("She--and yes, SHE claims to be a woman"), and the offering of her voice as some sort of evidence that she's not what she claims to be. It's what you'd sadly expect to find on E! or some other tabloid show--not the AP, or the L.A. Times' website, for that matter.

CNN's Jack Cafferty's response to the news was: "Story creeps me out. It's weird. Do you think she's a man or a woman?" His colleague Campbell Brown teased the "bizarre story" and promised viewers "a whole lot more on this very strange case coming up a little bit later tonight." CNN's Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill called it "fascinating," "amazing" and "wild."

During her full story on the subject, Brown acknowledged one of the problems with the scrutiny: "I mean, this is a young woman, a young girl. It's a pretty cruel thing for this girl to have to go through emotionally, psychologically presuming it's not a scam." Yes indeed, scrutinizing someone's body and gender presentation (as well as your accomplishments) on television and calling it bizarre and creepy is pretty cruel, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, that sort of coverage of people with different gender presentations is not unusual--and awareness of that cruelty didn't stop Brown from feeding into it.

Think Progress' Matt Corley (8/19/09) has the depressing, if predictable, news that recent polling shows "'all the misinformation out there' about health care reform proposals in Congress is taking root with many Americans."

Corley is discouraged to see that, "for instance, 45 percent believe the false claim that legislation includes 'death panels' while 55 percent believe the false claim that coverage will be extended to illegal immigrants"--and an MSNBC passage says that, in particular,

self-identified viewers of Fox News are disproportionately misinformed":

In our poll, 72 percent of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly....

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, Fox News regularly distorts the truth about health care reform.

In fact, just "last week, Media Matters found that over a two day period opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters by a 6-to-1 margin on Fox." Hear a strong corrective to all this deceit on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Health Care Reform" (8/14/09).

Eater blog editor Amanda Kludt (8/20/09) has a sneak look at an embarrassingly fawning New York Times review of a new book by their own recently resigned food critic, Frank Bruni--and, "according to a tipster with a copy (not yet online), it's a looooovefest":

Exhibit A:

His writing has always been muscular and clear. Now that I have devoured his memoir, I hold him in even greater estimation, not only for his discernment and his accomplished prose but for his bravery.

OK, Dominique Browning, so you're impressed. But how about sending some more kisses Bruni's way? Exhibit B:

The love with which Bruni writes about his family is breathtaking. His relationship with his mother was one of ferocious tenderness; as I read Bruni's description of her struggle with cancer, I choked with tears.

"One benefit of holding a job of high import at the New York Times is that when you write a book, outlets line up to review it," notes Kludt--but isn't it a bit inappropriate that this should this be "including the esteemed Sunday Book Review"?

Seeing all the press attention given to pitbull-fighter and NFL star Michael Vick's return to football, David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 8/19/09) can't help but think that Vick

should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.

For those of his readers who may be "severely satire-impaired," Swanson explains that "No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured," but instead is simply "concerned" over how U.S. media "worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system."

"Of course I want torture prosecuted," Swanson writes, "but torture is a symptom. The illness is aggressive war."

Laura Northrup of Consumerist.com (8/15/09) reports that, after 40 years at the Hartford Courant, consumer affairs columnist George Gombossy now says he "'was fired for doing [his] job,' after his last column exposed the bedbug-infested mattresses sold by a major Courant advertiser."

The Connecticut paper killed Gombossy's account of an Attorney General investigation into Sleepy's--though it has published a stock defense that "our advertisers have no influence on what we report, including stories that may include them."

Gombossy exposes "some issues of credibility" when responding to the Courant's further claim that he "knew his job was being eliminated while we moved to a Courant-Fox 61 newly-defined consumer reporter position. He did not express interest in the position":

I wasn’t asked to apply for the job, nor was it offered to me, and it was set at a significant amount less than my salary....

I have been waiting for Courant management to get around to explaining to its staff why I was no longer there after 40 years--especially since management told everyone how they loved my column and blog until the first advertiser complaint came in May....

The new Courant policy which was instituted in May as the result of a complaint against me by Aiello, required me and all reporters and columnists to notify [VP and director of content] Jeff Levine or [editor] Naedine Hazell of any stories or columns that even had a negative tinge about a key advertiser. Naedine knows that, she must think she can just gloss over that little fact.

Those stories and columns would get special attention--Just like the Sleepy’s column did.

Mac Margolis, who wrote recently about the "selective zeal for democracy" of those who condemned the Honduran coup, wrote another little piece on Latin America for Newsweek this week: "Latin America Rights Itself" (print only). He argues that "the region now looks on the brink of a rightward shift," pointing to upcoming elections in Chile, Brazil and Uruguay in which the more liberal incumbent party is projected to lose, contrasting that with the great popularity of Colombia's president Uribe, "who enraged the left by befriending the Bush administration." Margolis suggests that "pragmatism is trumping charisma" and concludes: "Castigating the gringo devil may still make pulses race, but when it comes to casting ballots, Latin America looks likely to go for the middle ground."

Ok, except Lula's approval ratings are neck and neck with Uribe's, and Bachelet's have been on the rise and are pretty close--a main reason her party's candidate is looking weak is because there's a challenger to his left who's peeling off a hefty chunk of votes. Lula's party's candidate isn't all that well-known; once he starts campaigning for her (the election isn't until next year), observers expect her to jump in the polls. And a majority of Uruguayans want Uruguay's Vazquez to run for president again, even though a second consecutive term is barred by the constitution. All of which makes Margolis's argument about "pragmatism" (defined here as "shifting right") and the "middle ground" basically nonsensical.

According to Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald (8/18/09, ad-viewing required), pro-coup lobbyist and frequent news show guest Lanny Davis is merely "masquerading as a 'political analyst' and Democratic media pundit," when really he "is unmoored from any discernible political beliefs other than: 'I agree with whoever pays me.'"

Greenwald's present example is a new Politico and the Hill commentary in which Davis warns of "The Dangerous Joining of the Far Right and Far Left" and declares it "time for the vast center-left and center-right of this country to speak up and call them out" because "silence is no longer acceptable by responsible liberals towards the reckless far left or by responsible conservatives towards the reckless far right. Silence is complicity."

Greenwald breaks down this fraudulent balance, and Davis' true motivations for positing it:

As for the monsters of the Right, Davis lists "the shouters shouting down other people who wish to speak at town meetings, whacko 'birthers,' and liars inventing 'death panels' and obscenely and recklessly mentioning Adolph Hitler and Nazi symbols to scare people." And who are the equivalents on the Left? The people who do this:

on the far left--including the most vicious posters on the so-called liberal blogosphere, threatening businesses with one or more executives who offer personal ideas for achieving national health care reform different from the Administration's or Democratic congressional leaders' versions (full disclosure: I support all of President Obama's core principles for national health care legislation, though I still have many unanswered questions); hateful e-mails, phone calls, blogs, and personal attacks, distorting alternative ideas different from the Administration's approach and attacking the motives of those airing them.

Plainly, this whole rant has no purpose other than to argue that "the Left" is as bad as the screaming, gun-wielding right-wing townhall Limbaugh followers.

So surely it's just coincidence that "some progressives, in the wake of [Whole Foods CEO John] Mackey's anti-health-care-reform Op-Ed, organized a boycott of Whole Foods, Davis' client." Greenwald explains how "that's all Davis means when he complains of 'threatening businesses'": "they're harming the business interests of my paid client."

Columnist Rick Perlstein has a new analysis of "Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage" in the Washington Post (8/16/09).

In it, he tells why "liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage,"

and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. ... Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justifiable political claim.

"If 1963 were 2009," Perlstein asserts, "the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself." And "that, not the paranoia itself," according to Perlstein, "makes our present moment uniquely disturbing."

Back in May, CBS' 60 Minutes aired a terrible report on the Air Force's use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan-- see FAIR's action alert for all the details. CBS never responded to the criticism, but they did re-air the segment this past Sunday, without any major changes. To let CBS know how you feel about this one-sided reporting, here's the contact info:

CONTACT:
CBS
60 Minutes
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

Email: 60m@cbsnews.com
Phone: (212) 975-3247

Conservative columnist and TV pundit Robert Novak died this morning at the age of 78. While Novak will likely be best remembered for his involvement in the Valerie Plame scandal, it's worth recalling some of his other notable contributions to the public debate.

As we pointed out here on the FAIR Blog, Novak pronounced himself unimpressed by Barack Obama's margin of victory in the 2008 election (writing that "he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.") But in 2004, somehow George W. Bush's 51 percent margin was different (CNN's Capital Gang, 11/6/04):

MARK SHIELDS: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate?

BOB NOVAK: Of course it is. It's a 3.5 million vote margin.... So the people who say there's not a mandate want the president, now that he's won, to say, Oh, we're going to accept the liberalism that the voters rejected. But Mark, this is a conservative country, and it showed it on last Tuesday.

And two items from the pages of Extra!, FAIR's magazine:

(Extra!, Soundbites, 5-6/99)

Invisible ink

I was reading the Constitution the other day, and I found in it an injunction to protect the people of the country on the national defense. I didn't find anything in there about education. I didn't find anything in there about old people's prescriptions. I didn't find anything in there about hungry children. Did you--do you have some invisible writing in the Constitution?

--Robert Novak to Rep. Bernie Sanders (Crossfire, 3/17/99)

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

--Preamble of the United States Constitution (emphasis added)

(Extra!Update, Soundbites, 10/00)

Novak on “Color-Blindness”

Commentator Robert Novak wasn't happy with the ethnicity of the speakers at the Republican convention. He complained to Bush advisor Ralph Reed (Crossfire, 7/31/00):

You know, Mr. Reed, I used to think that one of the values of the Republican Party is they were color-blind while the Democrats had a quota system. I was looking at the schedule for tonight's proceedings…. We have tonight four African-Americans, two Jews, five Hispanics and an Asian…. Boy, I thought I was in San Francisco with the Democrats, what Jeane Kirkpatrick used to call the San Francisco Democrats. Have you abandoned the idea of we're color-blind and you're having this kind of quota system?

When Reed responded, "I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to have a convention that reflects diversity as a strength," Novak shot back: "What about white people? Not too many."

But Novak didn’t like the racial makeup of the Democratic convention, either. On Larry King Live (8/17/00), he warned: "The Democrats are skating on very thin ice. They are a party of minorities. They are a party of the African-Americans, the Hispanic-Americans, and a certain percentage of the women."

The big news in the health reform debate is that the White House seems to be willing to give up on the "public option," a government insurance program that would compete with private insurers. Everyone sees this as a big story, but there's something revealing about the way the Washington Post's Ceci Conolly led her piece:

Racing to regain control of the health-care debate, two top administration officials signaled Sunday that the White House may be willing to jettison a controversial government-run insurance plan favored by liberals.

In Beltay mediaspeak, "regain control" must mean doing something that right-wing Democrats and Republicans want. The Post's Dan Balz already made this recommendation about the public option, writing on August 12, "Some of his staunchest allies believe that course would be prudent and might change the dynamic of the debate in the administration's favor." And on the roundtable segment on ABC's This Week on August 9, host George Stephanopoulos wondered if Obama would accept a watered-down bill in order to break with the "Howard Dean wing of the party." This notion was seconded by panelist Cokie Roberts, with right-wing columnist Peggy Noonan chiming in to say, "Maybe it would be good for the President if the left got absolutely furious about something."

So the health reform debate has shifted even further to the right--exactly where the corporate media wanted it.

The escalation of the Afghanistan war is the "Topic A" discussion on the Washington Post op-ed page on Sunday (it's a regular feature where they ask a panel of Important People to weigh in on an issue of the day).

The title was "How Many Troops for Afghanistan?"--one can already spot the problem with that--but the panel they assembled left  a lot to be desired. On the one hand, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (a strong critic of escalation) was given space to make his argument. But his presenced was 'balanced' by four others, three of whom are definitely pro-escalation (they quibble over the details, perhaps) and one pollster who addressed the public opinion problems--i.e., the Afghanistan war isn't popular.

So besides Kucinich, the Post gave readers former Bush and Reagan aide Ed Rogers (escalation "is necessary to avoid the political and security debacle that would arise from an American failure there"), Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center ("The public opinion climate for sending more troops is difficult--but not impossible"), Harvard professor--and former special assistant to George W. Bush--Meghan Sullivan (Obama "should reject three arguments currently made against accepting a recommendation for more troops"), and Georgetown professor Andrew Natsios (stability in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan "can not be achieved without substantially more U.S. and allied troops conducting a classic counterinsurgency campaign to take and hold territory and protect the civilian population.")

Some debate.

Consortium News Robert Parry (8/13/09) is citing media-promoted "'deathers' who claim that President Barack Obama's healthcare plan would promote euthanasia," along with how the U.S. "population was persuaded that Iraq was some lethal threat" and "fear-mongering about Iraq somehow sending small remote-controlled airplanes across the Atlantic" as strong arguments against "hopeful slogans that 'the truth will out.'"

To Parry, "truth is a battle" and "the reality is that there are no automatic mechanisms for stopping lies and distortions":

What I have seen during more than three decades in Washington is that many truths remain effectively hidden, even if technically they have been revealed. A rare moment of truth-telling can be easily overwhelmed by a steady barrage of falsehoods and an infusion of well-calibrated doubts.

Before long, it is the oft-repeated faux reality that is remembered. It becomes Washington’s conventional wisdom and then the official history. [See, for instance, Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

In the United States today, there is a massive infrastructure for spreading lies and distortions--a right-wing media machine that reaches from newspapers, magazines and books to cable TV, talk radio and the Internet.

By simple repetition, this machine can transform any crazy theory or bald-faced lie into something that many Americans believe.

Case in point is "when the right-wing media... pushed the lies about Iraq's WMD and intimated that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks." See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "From Speculation to History: 'Saddam's Bluff' Becomes Conventional Wisdom--With No Evidence Presented" (5–6/04) by Seth Ackerman.

Women In Media & News has reposted Veronica Arreola's (8/15/09) elucidation of exactly "why women need to be at the freaking table, in the newsroom and holding the editor’s red pen." To her, "it's just as simple as women see things differently. Not better, not worse, just differently":

The latest example is the WaPo "Mouthpiece Theater" fiasco that ended with WaPo pulling the plug. Two men thought that calling the secretary of State a "bitch" was funny. Not only was it not funny, and not because the joke flopped, but it's old and tired. Seriously, guys, can’t you come up with something new? So some of us angry feminists wrote a letter demanding an apology. And gosh darn it, it freaking worked! OK, we didn't get two full apologies, but hey, no more crappy videos from WaPo…for now....

Of course, we can't be sure that if a random woman at WaPo had screened the video beforehand, [she] would have said, "Dude…we can't air that." Why? Because some women, I used to be one of them, know that there is power in being "one of the guys." You are constantly proving that you need to be where you are and you choose your battles. Is sticking up for Hillary Clinton worth it? Maybe? Maybe not.

"But," Arreola maintains, "women have different perspectives on things. We know that. And as I said before, it's different, not better, not worse."