I agree with much of what Timothy Egan has to say in his recent New York Times blog post (1/20/10), but I'm tired of hearing this:

Democrats have to govern in a country that is essentially center-right.

What does that even mean? To the right of the center of what? It's like saying that all the kids are above average.

digby (1/19/10) spotted a telling moment on the Ed Show (MSNBC, 1/19/10), when host Ed Schultz asked Politico's Mike Allen "what's the next move for progressives" if the Democrat lost in the Massachusetts Senate race. Allen's response:

I would remind you that when Republicans started to eat each other up, we talked about how it wasn‘t very smart.  I think a lot of people will make that point about Democrats as well.

digby's rejoinder:

OK. Eight or nine months ago, the villagers were all saying that the Republicans were eating at each other and that it wasn't very smart. And the Republicans told them to go to hell, Fox News started the tea party movement and the right-wing media in general launched what seemed like a lunatic campaign to demonize Barack Obama as a socialist. All that seems to be working pretty well for them at the moment, so Allen's admonishment doesn't make a lot of sense.

In fact, the only lesson to be learned is to not listen to anything the village media say. Ever. The Republicans learned that a long time ago. The Democrats need to learn it too.

The New York Times is one of the most effective tools for limiting discussion in the U.S. political system. Falsely perceived as a left-leaning outlet, it has the power to make the most reasonable proposals seem ultra-radical by placing them beyond the pale.

Take yesterday's review by Times book critic Michiko Kakutani (1/19/10) of progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz's Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy. Kakutani says Stiglitz's accurate prediction of the financial crisis " lends credibility to his trenchant analysis of the causes of the fiscal meltdown," though at the same time she accuses him of "an I-told-you-so sanctimoniousness about both the recession and Washington’s response."

It's when it comes to policy proposals, however, that Kakutani really has problems with the book: "Some of the suggestions that Mr. Stiglitz makes in these pages for reconfiguring the American economy (and American society) stray far from the realm of practical policy recommendations that actually have a chance of winning broad public support or being enacted by Congress."  What are these way-out ideas?  Well, for one thing, he suggests that "a 'redistribution of income' and more progressive taxation might help stabilize the economy." He also calls for "a new global reserve system" and criticizes America's "unrelenting pursuit of profits." Concludes Kakutani:

Such remarks not only give ammunition to conservative critics who want to dismiss Mr. Stiglitz as a European-style liberal, but they also have the unfortunate effect of diverting the reader's attention from the many shrewd assessments that he makes in Freefall about the causes and consequences of the great financial meltdown of 2008.

In other words, proposals like progressive taxation should be avoided because people might call you a liberal.  This from the daily news outlet that was named by journalists most often when asked to name one that was "especially liberal."

For the record, taxing the rich is not an idea that has "a chance of winning broad public support"--it already has broad public support.

It's striking how the coverage of the Republicans' gaining a 41st vote in the Senate accepts without question the idea that there is nothing unusual or objectionable about a majority party needing 60 votes to pass any legislation there.  This normalization of the filibuster, as I wrote in the December 2009 issue of Extra!, amounts to a radical change in the U.S. political system--but expect this change to be temporary.  You can bet that the next time the Democrats are in the minority, and the Republicans don't have 60 votes, corporate media will not consider it normal and natural for the minority party to dictate what the majority party can and cannot do.

Sam Husseini (1/15/10) recalls a great media quote from one of Martin Luther King's most powerful sermons, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church (4/30/67):

Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they've applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, "We can't do it this way." They applauded us in the sit-in movement--we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, "Be non-violent toward Bull Connor"; when I was saying, "Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark." There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, "Be non-violent toward Jim Clark," but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children." There's something wrong with that press!

Read the whole text, or hear the whole sermon listen to excerpts on YouTube.

While many are opening their hearts and purses to Haiti's suffering, it’s important to note the corporate media's high profile exceptions. Televangelist Pat Robertson, carried on Disney's Family Channel, suggested Haiti invited the disaster by making a deal with the devil 200 years ago (FAIR Blog, 1/14/09). Radio big Rush Limbaugh discouraged donating to Haiti disaster relief on his January 13 show, saying:  "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax.... You just can’t keep throwing money at it." Meanwhile, Fox's Bill O'Reilly and New York Times columnist David Brooks each presented nauseatingly patronizing prescriptions for Haiti’s rehabilitation.

On his January 13 show, O'Reilly said the way to cure Haiti's economic and social problems was to impose discipline on Haitians:

My travels there have been illuminating. Only half the population can read and write. Unemployment's more than 50 percent. Most Haitians live on less than $2 a day. No matter how much charity is given, no matter how many good intentions there are, Haiti will remain chaotic until discipline is imposed.

In his January 15 Times column, David Brooks offered his prescription: To "fix"  their "progress-resistant culture," Haiti needs to develop "No Excuses countercultures," and turn to paternalism:

It's time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

But according to the human rights group MADRE,  the U.S. has already tried that:

Ironically, Brooks' prescription of "intrusive paternalism" to "fix the culture," aptly sums up U.S. policy towards Haiti for the past 100 years: a brutal military occupation from 1915 to 1934; support for dictatorship from 1957 to 1986; and, more recently, the imposition of trade policies that have further impoverished people. What the outside world needs to "fix" is not Haitian culture, but its own self-serving policies that have left thousands of Haitians literally buried alive.

Bill Fletcher, executive editor of Black Commentator, had more to say on this subject on the latest edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin (1/15/10).

Various forces have been accused of being behind the January 12 killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi--including the Iranian government, the Iranian opposition, the United States and Israel.  To sort through this murky subject, MSNBC (1/12/10) turned to Democratic congressmember Jane Harman, who confidently told Andrea Mitchell:

I think the logic here is that the Iranian government or some group associated with them took this guy out.   I mean, it's a sign of desperation to start killing your own nuclear scientists.

So who is Harman, that we should trust her sense of what the "logic" behind Middle East violence is? A military hawk, she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee until 2006; when Democrats retook the House, she was not named as the new Intelligence chair, in part because  Time magazine (10/20/06) had reported that Harman in 2005 had promised an Israeli agent that she would try to help pro-Israel lobbyists who had been accused of espionage; in return, the lobbyists' organization, AIPAC, would push Nancy Pelosi, then expected to become House speaker, to make Harman Intelligence chair.

Congressional Quarterly (4/19/09) later advanced the story by reporting that Harman's promise had been recorded by a Bush administration wiretap, and that the reason Harman was not prosecuted for what would seem to be illegal influence-peddling was that Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, wanted to use Harman to try to stop the New York Times from publishing the story that revealed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.  And Harman did, indeed, call the Times to try to get them to kill the piece (Who Runs Gov, 4/21/09).

What was it exactly about this background that suggested to MSNBC that Harman would be a trustworthy source on the question of which player in the Middle East, with Israel among the suspects, might have killed Mohammadi?  And what led NBC Nightly News (1/12/10) to take that quote from Harman's interview and use it as the last word in its January 12 report on the assassination? The answers to those questions may be as hard to discover as the identity of Mohammadi's killers.

While other cable news programmers responded to the grim news out of Haiti by calling for emergency aid and furnishing directions for how to help, right-wing religious broadcaster Pat Robertson took to the air with commentary disparaging the earthquake victims in a way that could very possibly discourage needed aid to the stricken nation.

Robertson told viewers of his 700 Club (1/13/10) that Haiti has been visited by so much tragedy over the years because it had signed a deal with the Devil. As Robertson told his co-host, when Haiti was

under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever...they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal." And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

Robertson's audience reportedly runs into the millions, and many of them who might normally be willing to give support for disaster relief could  take Robertson's words to heart and close their purses rather than give aid to servants of the Devil. Unsurprisingly, Robertson’s history is also wacky: The Haitian revolution, which embraced the principles of the enlightenment and the American Revolution, achieved victory in 1804 against Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon III  would not even born until 1808.

We weren’t expecting a treatise from Robertson about how Haiti, with the help of U.S.-backed tyrants, has become the one of the world's poorest nations. But imagine how sick someone must be to respond to news of wide-scale death and destruction by saying, in effect, "Well, they got what they signed up for." Unfortunately, we don't have to imagine--we've got Pat Robertson.

Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 1/12/10) makes an excellent point about the corrosive effect of the widespread use of anonymous sourcing by the most powerful U.S. news outlets. After listing a number of false stories that got prominent coverage in U.S. media, Greenwald writes:

Unjustified anonymity--especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret--is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful "reporting."... None of the falsehoods documented here will ever lead to any accountability, because the identity of the falsehood-producers will be shielded by their loyal journalist-servants, and the journalists themselves will simply claim that they wrote what they did because their hidden sources told them to.  That's not only the effect, but the intent, of the central method of American journalism:  to disseminate outright falsehoods to the American public and ensure that neither the liars nor their loyal message-carriers ever face any consequences or even reputational loss.... Lying is so much easier--and thus so much more common--when you get to do it while remaining hidden.

Greenwald complains that reporters who quote anonymous sources "barely even bother any longer to explain why it's justified, notwithstanding numerous policies of media outlets requiring exactly that explanation." Actually, though, such policies are generally taken to mean that the news outlet should explain why the source wanted to be anonymous--an explanation that generally boils down to the idea that the source wasn't authorized to speak on the record.  That's fairly useless.

A potentially more helpful rule would require the news outlet to explain, every time it quoted an unnamed source, why this particular quotation deserved to be an exception to the general rule that anonymity is to be avoided. Such a rule might actually discourage some of the more pernicious examples of anonymity--or at least produce some revealing rationalizations.

One of the frustrating things about corporate media coverage is that it's so focused on horserace coverage--who's likely to win or lose in voting that might be months or years away--and yet they're so bad at it.

Take the matter of Jonathan Tasini, running in the Democratic senatorial primary in New York against incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand--and an apparent nonperson to the state's most powerful newspaper, the New York Times.

The Times has lately run two extensive stories (1/11/11, 1/13/10) on whether Harold Ford, a former representative from Tennessee, would also run against Gillibrand--both of which ignored the fact that it was already a two-person race. Tasini, a writer and labor organizer, ran once before for the same seat, and got 17 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton--a politician with greater name recognition than either Gillibrand or Ford.

You don't have to be Nate Silver to realize that a candidate who has the possibility to get 17 percent of the vote could have a major impact in a three-person race; even if you have a crystal ball that tells you that Tasini won't get more than that this time,  it's impossible to handicap the primary without having some sense of who those voters are and what they are likely to do faced with three choices.

But the Times, playing the traditional role of gatekeeper that powerful media outlets assign themselves in covering elections, evidently views Tasini as a gatecrasher and seems determined to ignore him--even if it means giving readers an incomplete and misleading view of the electoral landscape.

(I should note that I know Tasini, who wrote a report on media coverage of labor for Extra! back in 1990.)

The New York Times ran a front-page story (1/11/10) on the race for the Senate seat held by New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand  that omits mention of the sole Democratic candidate running a serious campaign against her. Jonathan Tasini (who garnered 125,000 votes in a bid for the seat against Hillary Clinton in 2006) declared in June of last year.

But while the paper of record has logged numerous stories on the race--including several, like today’s, focusing on people who are "thinking about" challenging Gillibrand (e.g., "Thompson Won't Rule Out Pursuing U.S. Senate Seat," 12/19/09)--they have so far completely ignored someone who’s actually doing so. Yesterday's piece, on the possible candidacy of former Tennessee congressmember Harold Ford, begins by stating that Gillibrand's "allies have elbowed out her would-be Democratic challengers one by one."

In contrast, Long Island's Newsday (1/11/10) deems Tasini newsworthy; the paper’s Dan Janison notes: "Quite a list of supposed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand 'rivals' in both parties soaked up attention only to punt: Reps. Carolyn McCarthy, Peter King, Steve Israel and Carolyn Maloney; Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer; Suffolk Legis. Jon Cooper; Rudy Giuliani; and Caroline Kennedy. So far, only Manhattan labor activist Jonathan Tasini, who declared last June, bothers to run."

Tasini was lead plaintiff against the New York Times in a lawsuit over writers' electronic rights that went to the Supreme Court in 2001. But Tasini doesn't think that’s the behind the paper's avoidance. He even said as much in a letter to Times columnist Clyde Haberman:

We have received scores of complaints  from our supporters who are angry about the Times' refusal to write about our  campaign. A number of them believe that refusal is precisely because I was the lead plaintiff against the New York Times in the landmark electronic rights lawsuit decided by the Supreme Court in 2001 in our favor. Frankly, I doubt that the lawsuit has much to do with the blackout.

Sadly, it has more to do with a narrow view of what should be used as a measuring stick by journalists to bestow on a candidate the blessing of coverage. And, so, while  you should be applauded for taking on the Democratic Party’s power brokers, I  think it is simply a truth that, while complaining about elites and the lack  of democracy, the Times is itself closing down the democratic debate.

Haberman's response was defensive and off-point:

Suggestions from within your political camp that I am affected by your having been the lead plaintiff in that suit against the Times couldn't be wider of the mark. Until you just mentioned it, I had completely forgotten about that lawsuit. You might want to work harder to hold the conspiracy theorists at bay, at least in regard to me.

But he never addressed Tasini's actual point: that by deciding to exclude candidates from coverage, the Times is forcing an undemocratic "winnowing" of the field before voters have an opportunity to inform themselves. Such gatekeeping runs counter to the goal of journalism to inform and encourage debate, and is surely part of the reason for the ever-increasing public cynicism about the electoral process.

A late December NATO attack in eastern Afghanistan reportedly killed nine people--or, according to NATO, nine militants. According to Afghans, nine young civilians. The first round of reporting showed that some outlets, as usual, were willing to take the U.S./NATO line at face value--so long as that line was delivered anonymously, as in the December 28 New York Times:

A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

According to the NATO official, nine men were killed. "These were people who had a well-established network, they were IED smugglers and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition forces in those areas," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

"When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making IEDs," the official added.

Senior American military officials cautioned that such episodes tended to be complex and that because of the anger about civilian casualties, Mr. Karzai was under enormous pressure to speak out quickly, sometimes before investigations were complete. NATO will investigate the killings in conjunction with Mr. Karzai's staff, the official said.

A triumph for propaganda: assurances from "officials" that the raid killed exactly who they say it did, and the reminder that another version of reality may soon emerge from the Afghan side, due to "anger" that their politicians must react to. The Times account added:

But the conflicting accounts and Mr. Karzai's public statements underlined the tensions over civilian casualties that have become among the most contentious issues between the Afghan president and his international backers, as well as one of the most politically fraught for Afghans.

One has to think that maybe it's not "conflicting accounts" that bother Afghans. It could be their dead relatives.