Writing from the confines of what some Palestinians call the "Ramallah bubble" (Ha'aretz, 1/1/09), Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 6/30/10) thinks he knows how to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: "quietly support[ing]" the Palestinian Authority while it builds a "real economy, a professional security force and an effective, transparent government bureaucracy."

Friedman has a curious definition of a Palestinian state, which according to Friedman is “in the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.” Gaza is missing from this equation, and probably not by accident, as Friedman has a history of trying to dismiss Hamas-run Gaza as “undemocratic,” and therefore illegitimate--despite the fact that Hamas was democratically elected and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority is in power illegally (FAIR Blog, 6/16/10). Friedman seems to be following the “West Bank first” approach (New York Times, 6/19/07), first begun by the Bush administration and now followed by the Obama administration, that seeks to shower economic support on the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank while isolating Gaza. If the Gaza aid flotilla affair taught the world anything, though, those looking to end the violence in Palestine can’t ignore the situation in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The irony of Friedman’s column is that the same day it was published online, Al Jazeera English (6/29/10) reported that a new Save the Children UK report set to come out today paints picture of life in the West Bank, particularly the Israeli-administered zone known as Area C, that’s almost an exact opposite to Friedman’s cheery view:

"The international community has rightly focused its attention on the suffering of families in Gaza, but the plight of children in Area C must not be overlooked," Salam Kanaan, Save the Children's director in the occupied Palestinian Territories, said."

Palestinians in the West Bank are widely thought to enjoy a higher standard of living but tragically many families, particularly in Bedouin and herder communities, actually suffer significantly higher levels of malnutrition and poverty."

The organization called for Israel to immediately cease home demolitions and land confiscations in the West Bank and said the Palestinian authority should take "urgent action" to develop services and improve food security in Area C.

"Palestinian children cannot wait for the stalled peace talks between the Palestinian Authority, Israel and the United States to find solutions to this crisis," Kanaan said.

Friedman’s chat with an “upbeat” Salam Fayyad, the prime minister for the Palestinian Authority, apparently didn’t touch on what Save the Children calls “grinding poverty” in the West Bank. That discussion would surely put the kibosh on any benign and happy view of life under Israeli occupation.

Billionaire Pete Peterson has spent a lot of money trying to convince people that Social Security is a serious threat to the country's finances. And it's a message that the corporate media love to echo. So when Peterson's group decided to hold "town hall" meetings to promote fiscal austerity by cutting Social Security and Medicare, one would have guessed that the media would give it some attention.

But a funny thing happened this weekend at these "America Speaks" events. Members of the public, after being given what Roger Hickey calls "misleading background information about the federal deficit and economic options to achieve fiscal 'balance' and future prosperity," got a chance to weigh in on what they thought the most prudent course of action might be. As Thomas Frank points out in the Wall Street Journal today (6/30/10; subscription required), the results were likely a huge disappointment to Peterson:

The event took place as scheduled last Saturday, with thousands of citizens meeting in different cities. They duly absorbed a booklet alerting them to the danger of deficits. They deliberated. And then something funny happened on the way to the consensus.

According to a preliminary compilation of results, participants supported "an extra 5 percent tax" on incomes of greater than $1 million per year (by 68 percent) and an increase in the corporate income tax rate (59 percent). They thought a "carbon tax" was a good idea (64 percent) as well as a "securities transactions tax" (61 percent). On Social Security, austerity was nowhere in sight as 85 percent backed raising the limit on taxable income, and only a miserable 27 percent thought that we should "create personal savings accounts." Majorities favored cutting defense spending and expressed support for further recovery measures even if they increase the deficit.

Raising taxes on the wealthy, a carbon tax, cutting military spending--who ARE these people? It sounds a political agenda that most pundits would tell you is politically impossible. (It also happens to be what a lot of people want, but never mind that.)

Given the media's general enthusiasm for Peterson's propaganda on austerity and Social Security, it's striking how little coverage these town halls have received. But it's hard not to conclude that the public rejection of the media's conventional wisdom is the explanation. A few weeks ago, Washington Post columnist David Broder (5/2/10) lamented the fact that Peterson was apparently not having as much impact on the political discussion as the Tea Party movement: "Peterson's foundation could do the country a favor by uncovering a credible populist Republican who will buck his party's orthodoxy and take that message of fiscal responsibility to the country."

Instead, Peterson's people are trying to spread their message--but the public apparently wants something else entirely.

New York Times reporter Larry Rohter turned in a factually challenged fact-check of Oliver Stone's new film South of the Border. So Stone and the film's co-writers Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali wrote a devastating rebuttal. A reader passed along a link to that piece to Rohter, suggesting that he "should be embarrassed" by his review.

Unsurprisingly, Rohter would not seem to be embarrassed at all, judging his reply email, which FAIR has received:

Dear Mr. Fuentes:

Actually, it's Oliver Stone and company who need to heed your advice. I've been scrupulously honest in my reporting and writing, and they are offended and embarrassed at having their many errors and inaccuracies disclosed. Rather than owning up to those mistakes, they've chosen to double down and up the ante. Where they might merely have been mistaken before, they are now lying outright, the letter you link to below being the prime example.

Don't take my word for it. I urge you to go back and look at what Stone and his screenwriters are saying in that letter. As regards the issue of U.S. oil imports from OPEC countries, for example, go ahead and click on the two links that Stone & Weisbrot provide and look at the numbers contained there. You will see that the United States has imported more oil from Saudi Arabia than Venezuela every year since 2000. So no matter how Stone and company want to slice, dice bend or twist it, the assertion they make in the film about U.S. oil imports is simply wrong. The numbers are clear and indisputable.

Same thing goes for the 1998 Venezuela presidential race. The numbers don't lie: Irene Saez got only 3 percent of the vote, compared to 40 percent for Henrique Salas Romer, yet she is Chavez's "main opponent" and he is not? Let's apply that same pretzel logic to some other elections and see what we come up with. Was George Bush's "main opponent" in 2000 Al Gore or Ralph Nader? Was Harry Truman's "main opponent" in 1948 Thomas E. Dewey or the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond? Was Jimmy Carter's "main opponent" in 1980 Ronald Reagan or John Anderson?

It's also worthwhile using a little bit of simple logic to analyze the issue of the Cochabamba water privatization. Tariq Ali's argument seems to be that there is no substantial difference between a sale and a 40 year lease. Granted that the notion of private ownership may be anathema to someone with his ideological leanings, and therefore his understanding of different property regimens may be flawed. But the outright sale of an asset is not the same as granting a concession to use that asset for a fixed period of time, as anyone who has ever leased a car knows well. The devil is in the details, and Stone and company have chosen to ignore those. I could subject each of their other wild and erroneous claims to the same kind of dissection for you, but I trust you get the picture from the examples I've cited. Thank you for writing.

Talk about doubling down.

Rohter, for some reason, decided that this passing comment in the film deserved to be debunked: "We import more oil from Venezuela than any other OPEC nations." As the film makes clear, that comment was made by an oil industry analyst in a 2002 TV appearance, though Rohter's Times piece oddly cited 2004-10 data to contradict him. Stone and co. cite 1997-2001 as a more relevant time frame; in that period, the United States did in fact buy more oil from Venezuela than from Saudi Arabia (though in 2000-01, Saudi Arabia was the bigger supplier). In his emailed response, Rohter ignores this explanation, and says the links provided by Stone, Weisbrot and Ali don't support their point. It would seem that they do. It's a strange item to seize on, anyway; the filmmakers included the oil analyst to make the point that various business interests--including oil companies--supported the coup against Chavez, which is not at all controversial.

Rohter's complaint about Chavez's 1998 election is similarly tendentious. Irene Saez was considered by many observers to be Chavez's main rival in the presidential campaign. That's what reporter Bart Jones says in the documentary; it's also what the New York Times reported shortly after Chavez's victory (12/9/98):

Until last spring, Irene Saez, a former Miss Universe, had been leading in voter surveys, peaking at 35.7 percent to Mr. Chavez's 20.6 percent. Then the price of oil, which underpins Venezuela's entire economy, fell steeply. "We went from an optimistic country to a pessimistic one," said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Datanalysis polling agency.

The following month, Miss Saez accepted a lukewarm endorsement from one of the two traditional parties. The backing compromised her claims to being an outsider and her popularity ratings slid into the single digits.

On the debate over Bolivian water rights, the matter seems hardly worth reviewing; it comes down to how one chooses to characterize a deal that would hand a private company 40-year control over a nation's water supply. Apparently in Rohter's mind calling such a deal "privatization" is evidence that someone has the wrong "ideological leanings" to understand complex financial transactions.

Rohter assures that he "could subject each of their other wild and erroneous claims to the same kind of dissection for you." I think we've seen enough.

We've  rather amply documented Bill O'Reilly's record of misinformation on Arizona, immigration and crime. It's not surprising--but nonetheless worth documenting--that O'Reilly would bend reality in order to bash immigrants and defend the new Arizona law.

But the way the New York Times handled the matter is worth a look. The paper's June 19 piece, "On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas," should have told a simple story: Supporters of the law claimed that Arizona was seeing a dramatic increase in crime, and immigrants were to blame for this. This is simply not true. But in the name of journalistic balance, the Times opted for a "both sides are doing it" framing.

Times reporter Randal Archibald went to an academic who talked about this:

What social psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize information that does not. There is no better example than the role of crime in Arizona's tumultuous immigration debate.

So what is reality, then? Turns out it's complicated:

Crime figures, in fact, present a more mixed picture, with the likes of Russell Pearce, the Republican state senator behind the immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while immigrant advocacy groups like Coalicion de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem.

The Times explains that overall crime has been dropping in Arizona, as it has in most big cities. But there's the other side:

But the rate for property crime, the kind that people may experience most often, increased in the state, to 4,082 per 100,000 residents in 2008 from 3,682 in 2000. Preliminary data for 2009 suggests that this rate may also be falling in the state's biggest cities.

So the lesson apparently is that local officials who tell scare stories about immigrant crime aren't to be believed. But don't believe the pro-immigration crowd, either; they're being selective as well.

Turn to the Times yesterday, though, and you read this:

Correction: June 27, 2010

An article last Sunday about the debate over immigration reform and how people's perceptions sometimes run counter to crime statistics misstated the change in property crimes in Arizona between 2000 and 2008. The number of property crimes went down, not up.

Now, if you read that in passing, you'd think it was about as important as they made it sound-- i.e., not at all. But this was literally the only data that helped create the false balance in the article. Without this fact, the story is something entirely different: immigrant-bashers versus reality. But for some reason, that wasn't the story the New York Times wanted to tell.

It's not a huge surprise that a correspondent for a newspaper that supported the coup that ousted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would dislike a film that offers a more sympathetic view of Chavez's politics.

That said, Larry Rohter's review (New York Times, 6/26/10) of the new Oliver Stone film South of the Border still manages to surprise-- mostly because Rohter's attempt to fact-check the movie is such a failure.

Rohter's first big catch is this:

Mr. Stone argues in the film that Colombia, which "has a far worse human rights record than Venezuela," gets "a pass in the media that Chavez doesn't" because of his hostility to the United States.

Rohter doesn't attempt to demonstrate that this is false; instead, he points out that the Human Rights Watch logo "appears on the screen. That would seem to imply that the organization is part of the 'political double standard' of which Mr. Stone complains. "

Well, that could be. Or it could mean that they've studied the human rights situations in both countries. Rohter goes to the group for a response. And here's what he got:

"It's true that many of Chavez's fiercest critics in Washington have turned a blind eye to Colombia's appalling human rights record," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, director of the group's Americas division.

So the movie suggests that Colombia's rights record gets far less attention that Venezuela's--a contention that would seem to be true based on the amount of press attention granted to abuses in each country (Extra!, 2/09).  Rohter goes to Human Rights Watch, and they... agree with the film's argument that Colombia gets a pass in Washington.

Rohter devotes a lot of space to discussing the 2002 shootings in Caracas that preceded the coup. He seems to insinuate that Stone is getting things wrong (arguing that one expert in the film is a biased source, for example), but if there's a lesson here in how Oliver Stone abused the truth-- Rohter maligns Stone's "tendentious attitude"-- I am unable to locate it.

The movie isn't just about Hugo Chavez; the point is to take stock of the leftward political shift in Latin America. Rohter finds problems here, too (the Ali referenced here is Tariq Ali, who co-wrote the film with economist Mark Weisbrot):

Trying to explain the rise of Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia who is a Chávez acolyte, Mr. Ali refers to a controversial and botched water privatization in the city of Cochabamba.

The problem with that? Rohter explains:

In reality, the government did not sell the water supply: It granted a consortium that included Bechtel a 40-year management concession in return for injections of capital to expand and improve water service and construction of a dam for electricity and irrigation.

Oh, they didn't sell the water supply; they granted a private corporate a "a 40-year management concession."

Stone, Weisbrot and Ali have written a letter to the Times responding to the review. They point out that even some of the more mundane criticisms of the film are wrong:

Accusing the film of "misinformation," Rohter writes that "a flight from Caracas to La Paz, Bolivia, flies mostly over the Amazon, not the Andes. . .."  But the narration does not say that the flight is "mostly" over the Andes, just that it flies over the Andes, which is true.

But they also point out that Rohter's fixation on the shootings and coup might be explained by the fact that Rohter's reporting on those subjects was so problematic:

Rohter should have disclosed his own conflict of interest in this review. The film criticizes the New York Times for its editorial board’s endorsement of the military coup of April 11, 2002 against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, which was embarrassing to the Times. Moreover, Rohter himself wrote an article on April 12 that went even further than the Times' endorsement of the coup:

"Neither the overthrow of Mr. Chavez, a former army colonel, nor of Mr. Mahuad two years ago can be classified as a conventional Latin American military coup. The armed forces did not actually take power on Thursday. It was the ousted president's supporters who appear to have been responsible for deaths that numbered barely 12 rather than hundreds or thousands, and political rights and guarantees were restored rather than suspended." – Larry Rohter, New York Times, April 12, 2002

These allegations that the coup was not a coup--not only by Rohter--prompted a rebuttal by Rohter's colleague at the New York Times, Tim Weiner, who wrote a Sunday Week in Review piece two days later entitled "A Coup by Any Other Name" (New York Times, 4/14/02).

South of the Border aims to give viewers a glimpse of Latin American politics that could serve as as antidote to the one-sided, propagandistic treatment in the corporate media. Reviews like Rohter's only remind us of this fact.

In the wake of the Rolling Stone/Stanley McChrystal controversy, one might think that there could finally be some space to have a debate about the Afghanistan war--especially considering that the magazine article was really about fundamental questions about the war itself (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/25/10).

The Washington Post (6/27/10) ran one of its often-terrible Topic A features on Sunday--where the paper gathers up different contributors to weigh in on the same topic. As usual, readers mostly got a collection of familiar hawks.

The first two (Danielle Pletka from the American Enterprise Institute, former NATO ambassador Kurt Volker) seem to want to see a more aggressive war. Tod Lindberg from the right-wing Hoover Institute wants much the same--he's pleased with the Petraeus pick.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes, "It is time to focus on winning the war,"  and sees at least two more years of war before we can even tell if the current strategy is working. Zalmay Khalilzad (George W. Bush's Iraq and Afghanistan ambassador) lays out his plan for victory, and cautions against any rapid withdrawal. Erin Simpson from the Afghan International Security Assistance Force's Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team basically argues that good counterinsurgency doctrine does not permit all the "backbiting" revealed by Rolling Stone, so it was wise to remove McChrystal.

Meanwhile, on the other side, Gilles Dorronsoro from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace supports some sort of peace talks with Taliban officials, and argues that future military offensives be scaled back.

This is probably the point of view that comes closest to expressing the prevailing public sentiment; on the Post's editorial page, it amounts to a curious outlier.

To the paper's credit, the following day Boston University history professor Andrew Bacevich wrote a strong piece (not listed on their print edition website, for some reason) headlined, "Endless War, a Recipe for Four-Star Arrogance."

It's not that surprising that some in the corporate media, driven either by admiration for ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal or disdain for Rolling Stone's scoop, have rushed in to defend or explain away his behavior. In Saturday's Washington Post (6/26/10), anonymous military sources tell the newspaper that the comments from McChrystal and his staff were supposed to be off the record:

The command's own review of events, said the official, who was unwilling to speak on the record, found "no evidence to suggest" that any of the "salacious political quotes" in the article were made in situations in which ground rules permitted Hastings to use the material in his story.

The Post Karen DeYoung and Rajiv Chandrasekaran seem to think some of this military complaining is persuasive. They report that Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings took "minor liberties with the facts," based on the Post getting their hands on the fact-checking emails between Rolling Stone and the military. The magazine asked if McChrystal indeed had voted for Obama--which is something he told Hastings. The military handler responded, "IMPORTANT--PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE THIS--THIS IS PERSONAL AND PRIVATE INFORMATION AND UNRELATED TO HIS JOB. IT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE TO SHARE."

Rolling Stone published this fact, in spite of the all-caps warning that it would be "INAPPROPRIATE TO SHARE."  But how does reporting a fact someone else doesn't want reported qualify as taking "liberties with the facts"?

One gets the impression that many corporate media figures believe the real problem here is Michael Hastings. The right-wing Media Research Center has singled out CBS reporter Lara Logan for approval for her comments on CNN's Reliable Sources. Logan seems to believe the military's argument that the exchanges were meant to be off the record ("Something doesn't add up here"), in part because she's apparently not had the same experience with McChrystal and his staff: "I know these people. They never let their guard down like that."

Logan shows most clearly where she's coming from with this:

I mean, the question is, really, is what General McChrystal and his aides are doing so egregious, that they deserved to end a career like McChrystal's? Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an illuminating post (6/27/10) that argues that the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, with his "self-praising, desperately insecure need to tout his own wisdom, knowledge and expertise, while demeaning those who are not admitted to his Special Club...is a perfectly illustrative face of the American establishment media." Responding to Goldberg's assertion (Atlantic, 6/25/10) that the resignation of Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel after making anti-conservative comments in what he thought was a private forum reflected "a lack of adult supervision, and...the proper amount of toilet-training," Greenwald wrote:

In his first post arguing that Weigel's hiring evinced the Post's journalistic decline, Goldberg relied upon "one of [his] friends at the Post," to whom he granted anonymity to trash Weigel as an "idiot" and someone who has "destroyed" the paper's reputation.  Just think about that: In the very same post where Goldberg pretentiously grieved for the collapse of journalistic standards, his "source" was a cowardly "friend" of his at the Post who was granted anonymity solely to spit out catty, petulant name-calling.  Is that supposed to be journalism: granting anonymity to your friends to puke up conclusory condemnations of other reporters?  That's like lamenting the decline of American journalism while quoting the answers provided by one's Ouija board.

Greenwald has a lot more to say about Goldberg as an exemplar of what's wrong with corporate journalism.

National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger (Corner, 3/24/10), responding to CNN pairing disgraced Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer with a not-conservative-enough-for-National-Review Kathleen Parker, muses:

I'm reminded why conservatives had to build their own media outlets. It's sort of like Jews and country clubs. Jews built their own, not because they wanted to, necessarily, but because the other clubs wouldn't let them in. They weren't being "clannish." They wanted to play golf, on first-class courses....

Well, we conservatives built our own media outlets--because the other clubs wouldn't let us in. I guess it's working out OK.

Blogger Ryan McNeely (Yglesias, 3/24/10) takes issue with the comparison of put-upon conservative pundits with ethnic discrimination. But the idea that conservatives were ever excluded from corporate media in the first place is nothing but a delusion.

Presumably one of the outlets conservatives built that Nordlinger has in mind was his own National Review.  One of the writers founding editor William F. Buckley first recruited for his staff was Whittaker Chambers, the famous former Communist turned arch-conservative. Chambers' previous perch was at Time magazine,  where he was considered the magazine's most important writer. He had already made his conversion to the right when he went to Time ("Pinkos who did not bat an eye when the Soviet government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine will go for a good cry over the hardships of the Okies," he wrote in a movie review of The Grapes of Wrath--2/12/40), but Henry Luce had no problem taking him on board. (Buckley himself, of course, had a prominent 33-year-career on that notorious suppressor of conservatives, PBS.)

In the bad old days, when no one would let conservatives work in the media, who was the country's most prominent columnist? Walter Winchell, defender of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. Similar politics didn't stop Paul Harvey from getting a daily slot for commentary on the ABC Radio Network.

The fact is that many of the people who owned newspapers, magazines and radio stations--as you might expect of millionaire businessmen--were quite conservative: people like Robert McCormick, Harry Chandler and Frank Gannett. These are the bosses who would have been barring conservatives from working in the media industry.  Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?

Having your ethics challenged by a Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlet is like having your honesty challenged by Bernie Madoff.

Take the recent story about CNN hiring former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned from the office in 2008 following revelations that he had patronized prostitutes.

When rumors of the CNN hire began circulating weeks ago, Fox pundit Cal Thomas remarked on the Murdoch-owned network (Fox News Watch, 5/29/10), "Clearly, CNN is going after the adultery demographic." When the story broke, Murdoch's New York Post (6/24/10) scoffed at the hire with a piece  quoting anonymous sources saying it signaled the "destruction of a brand" and showed that CNN had "lost the struggle for its soul." Last year, the Murdoch paper (9/2/09) scoffed at the very notion that Spitzer should ever show his face in public life again with a story headlined  "You Can't Keep a Bad Man Down."

But patronizing prostitutes and committing adultery have never been a barrier to cable news stardom at Murdoch's cable channel. Think of pay-for-player Dick Morris, and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich, just the most prominent of Fox's stable of anointed johns and adulterers. In fact, Fox routinely embraces and elevates conservative men who’ve paid for sex and/or cheated on their wives, while condemning non-conservatives who've done the same.

Still not convinced that of the ethical vacuousness of Murdoch outlets? Consider this: Murdoch's New York Post gave a weekly column (e.g. 12/13/09) to Ashley Dupre, who the paper's editors introduced as "the former escort who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer."

Perhaps the key to Dupre's acceptability is hinted at in the Post's report about Spitzer's new CNN job, where she is quoted saying everyone "deserves a second chance," but adding, "As for the show, if it's not on Fox, I'm not watching it."

That's according to Time magazine's Alex Perry (7/5/10):

If you want to see what's wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa's heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more. Today AIDS and malaria are epidemic.

This is all a set-up to explain that China is venturing into the Heart of Darkness in a whole new way, investing billions on infrastructure projects in return for things like mineral concessions.

But if you're going to charge Congo with being "what's wrong with Africa," you'd better give credit where credit is due. Independent Congo didn't give the world Mobutu; that gift belongs to the U.S. and Belgium, who supported the overthrow and assassination of democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba and helped prop up the horror that was Mobutu for decades afterward.

Perry goes on to write that "the Western way of helping has been with aid" while, by contrast, "Beijing doesn't do gifts; it does deals." Besides "gifts" like Mobutu, the bulk of Western aid come with so many strings attached that the distinction between "gifts" and "deals" is little more than a semantic game.

The lesson from this article? If you want to see what's wrong with Africa, don't look to Time to find out.

(h/t Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo)

FAIR has a new Action Alert (6/24/10) on recent reports in the NY Times and Washington Post suggesting that voters are more concerned with the budget deficit than job creation. Please post copies of your letters to the papers, or responses on the alert, in the comments thread below.

The Washington Post (6/23/10)  allows an anonymous voice inside the White House to spill the beans on the decision to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus:

Said a senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations: "It's as seamless as it could be, not only in terms of operations but also because you put someone in who's widely respected. No one is going to doubt that he's the right guy for the job."

Indeed!

There's been a discussion (some of it neatly summarized on the Daily Show) of elite journalists' reaction to the explosive comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staffers to Rolling Stone freelancer Michael Hastings. One admission came via a Politico story, captured by NYU's Jay Rosen (6/24/10):

And as a freelance reporter, Hastings would be considered a bigger risk to be given unfettered access, compared with a beat reporter, who would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.

Rosen notes that this line in the Politico piece was subsequently removed, perhaps because it revealed too much:

Think about what the Politico is saying: an experienced beat reporter is less of a risk for a powerful figure like McChrystal because an experienced beat reporter would probably not want to "burn bridges" with key sources by telling the world what happens when those sources let their guard down.

This is revealing, perhaps, but completely unsurprising. Journalists have been admitting  to this sort of thing for years. Take one example (cited in FAIR's Extra! Update, 12/01) from an American University forum (10/1/01) where PBS correspondent Ray Suarez was asked about the failure to pose difficult questions to certain elite guests:

Well, yeah, access is like oxygen when you're a reporter. And if you're going to do something I guess that's going to jeopardize access in the future, you better be pretty sure that this person who is going to perceive what you are about to do to them as burning them is someone that you can do without in the future after you burn them. That's a tough straddle. It shouldn't be, but it is.

For an example of how a beat reporter normally operates, take ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz's assessment of Gen. David Petraeus (Nightline, 6/23/10):

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

Or recall the days when Donald Rumsfeld was considered a rock star by the Washington press corps. FAIR's Steve Rendall ran down the worst of that here:

"Sixty-nine years old, and you're America's stud," Tim Russert told Rumsfeld when he interviewed him on NBC's Meet the Press (1/20/02); Larry King informed him that "you now have this new image called sex symbol" (CNN's Larry King Live, 12/06/01). Fox News' Jim Angle (12/11/01) called him "a babe magnet for the 70-year-old set."

"I love you, Donald," Margaret Carlson announced on CNN's Capital Gang (12/23/01), where the Time magazine columnist appears regularly in the role of left-of-center pundit. Carlson's Time magazine colleague, veteran defense correspondent Mark Thompson, told the Chicago Tribune (10/22/01), "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure."

With Gen. David Petraeus back in the media spotlight after being tapped to take control of the Afghanistan war following General Stanley McChrystal's fall from grace, the corporate media are trumpeting the "successful" surge in Iraq (Extra, 9/10/08) that Petraeus oversaw and are looking to him as the man to turn around the Afghan war.

Columnist David Ignatius (Washington Post, 6/24/10) writes:

Gen. David Petraeus didn't sign on as the new Afghanistan commander because he expects to lose.

That's the boldest aspect of President Obama's decision: He has put a troubled Afghanistan campaign in the hands of a man who bent what looked like failure in Iraq toward an acceptable measure of success. Obama has doubled down on his bet, much as George W. Bush did with his risky surge of troops in Iraq under Petraeus' command.

Similarly, NBC (6/23/10) reports that the White House and the Pentagon are "hoping that by enacting this stunning change in leadership, by putting somebody like General Petraeus in charge, the one who engineered that successful surge operation in Iraq, that it could buy them some badly needed time."

But as Middle East expert Juan Cole (6/24/10) notes, Iraq is hardly a success story.  Over three months after Iraqi elections, their parliament remains deadlocked (Reuters, 6/24/10).  Violence is a daily reality (New York Times, 6/24/10), and protests have broken out denouncing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for failing to deliver on basic services like working electricity (Reuters, 6/21/10).

Cole writes that, while there has been a decrease in violence compared to the height of the Sunni/Shiite civil war in Iraq, the surge was not the main reason for the decline in fighting:

The main reason for decrease in the virulence of the civil war (it is not over) was that the Shiites succeeded in ethnically cleansing the Sunnis from Baghdad. Based on U.S. military and NGO statistics, on patterns of ambient light from West Baghdad visible by satellite, on the on-the-ground investigations of journalists like AP's Hamza Hendawi, and on subsequent voting patterns, I don’t think Baghdad is now more than 10-15 percent Sunni, whereas it was probably about half and half Sunni and Shiite at the time of Bush's invasion in 2003.

Also missing from the "surge turned around the Iraq War" trope is any discussion of firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's role in the reduction of violence.  While acknowledging that extra U.S. troops did play a role in the reduction of violence, a February 2008 International Crisis Group study states that "the dramatic decline in bloodshed in Iraq...is largely due to Muqtada al-Sadr's August 2007 unilateral ceasefire."

And as Cole notes, Iraq is not Afghanistan:

The Shiite victory in the Civil War was thus absolutely crucial as an Iraqi social-history background for what success Petraeus' policies had.

No such major social-historical change has occurred in Afghanistan or is likely to. The Taliban and other insurgents primarily spring from the Pashtun ethnic group that predominates in the east and southwest of the country. Pashtuns probably make up about 42 percent of Afghanistan’s some 34 million people. Pashtun clans provided the top political leadership to Afghanistan from the 18th century, through the Durrani monarchy, and they look down on the northern Tajik and Hazarah ethnic groups (who speak dialects of Persian). Although probably only 20-30 percent of Afghan Pashtuns view the Taliban favorably, more may admire the Taliban as a group that stands up for Afghanistan's independence from the Western nations now occupying it.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are complex and multifaceted.  But don't expect corporate media to throw nuance into the debate; instead, look forward to more pronouncements like this one from David Gergen, a CNN political analyst (6/23/10):  "[President Obama]...put in place the best general we have right now and a man who turned around the war in Iraq and possibly can turn around this war in Afghanistan, who can take over without losing momentum."