NPR's Brooke Gladstone (On the Media, 6/11/10) interviewed CNN's Ed Henry about the squirt-gun party at the vice president's mansion that Henry giddily tweeted about:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If these events don't influence coverage, why do you think the White House throws them? Do they just want to shoot you with a super-soaker?

ED HENRY: Maybe they wanna actually get to know us as people sometimes.

And Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 2/15/10) comments:

Marc Ambinder disclosed that it was the DNC that paid for the party.  But Ed Henry thinks that they do that because Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden and the other White House officials just decided they wanted an opportunity to get to know Ed and Wolf and the other members of the media just a little bit better as people.  They want to get behind the facade of the grizzly, ornery reporter and get in touch with the Real Ed, the Human Being.  That's how CNN's senior White House correspondent thinks.

The AP has a story today (6/14/10) noting the continuing problems Al Jazeera English is experiencing in getting on American television:

Frustrated by its continuing inability to crack the American television market, Al Jazeera English's new strategy is to make itself available for free on every other possible screen.

The Qatar-based news network said its 24-hour newscast has been streamed over the Internet for 18 months. The company said it will expand its presence on various smart phones, is launching an iPad application and is aggressively distributing content through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

So, a quick refresher about how our media system works. Every weeknight I could easily tune in to Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck. And part of my cable bill every month goes to paying for that programming, no matter what I think of Fox News Channel, or whether or not I even watch it.

But Al Jazeera English--with actual reporters around the world doing journalism--is largely unavailable on U.S. TV screens, and is forced to resort to Facebook and YouTube.

Does that seem like a good system?

Media Detector, a New York Times blog, has a post today (6/14/10) about a comic book adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses that Apple is insisting be bowdlerized before it can be turned into an app for the iPad--replacing an image of a bare-breasted "milk lady" with a close-up of her face. While calling Apple's decision "disappointing," artist Robert Berry told Media Detector he

did not feel "remotely censored by Apple." "It's their rules," he said. "We’re coming to their dinner party at their house."

When you watch TV on your Sony television, you're not attending a dinner party at Sony's house, at which Sony gets to set the rules. Nor, when you surf the Web on your IBM PC, are you IBM's guests, subject to whatever arbitrary choices IBM wants to make about what you can and cannot see.

If the iPad does become one of the main ways by which people access information and art, as Apple surely hopes, and Apple is able to treat that medium as a private preserve in which free speech rules do not apply, this will distinguish the iPad as a technological advance that is also a democratic retreat.

Last October we noted ("Iraq All Over Again?," Media Advisory, 10/7/09) that reporters and corporate pundits were often treating allegations about Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions as if they were facts. There have been no verifiable discoveries of an Iranian nuclear weapons program; the main question thus far concerns uranium enrichment, some of which could hypothetically be used in a weapon.

Yesterday was a good day to recall this history, as a Washington Post editorial (6/13/10) referred matter-of-factly to "ending the threat posed by Iran's support for terrorism and pursuit of nuclear weapons." And NBC's Meet the Press host David Gregory referenced "Iran's dangerous drive toward nuclear weapons." Gregory actually appeared in the October FAIR advisory, wondering if negotiations could "push that country to give up its nuclear weapons program."

It's worth recalling that Gregory not too long rebuffed the idea that Meet the Press needed any outside factchecking.

When the corporate media explain the logic behind Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, they turn to what Israel says officially and publicly. For example, today's New York Times, in an article on an Israeli government-backed investigation into the deadly Israeli raid on a flotilla heading to Gaza, states:

Israel argues that the blockade is necessary to prevent Hamas from smuggling in weapons or materials needed to make them, and to weaken Hamas control.

This sounds similar to a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Ha'aretz, 6/1/10), who justified the siege by saying:

Gaza is a terror state funded by the Iranians, and therefore we must try to prevent any weapons from being brought into Gaza by air, sea and land.

But the Israelis must know that the blockade has not accomplished this, as materials for weapons are reportedly smuggled in to Gaza via underground tunnels that go from Egypt to Gaza (Newsweek, 6/7/10).

So if the blockade is not working, why does it still exist? A recent article that appeared in McClatchy Newspapers (6/9/10) puts the Israeli logic behind blockading Gaza this way:

In response to a lawsuit by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, the Israeli government explained the blockade as an exercise of the right of economic warfare.

"A country has the right to decide that it chooses not to engage in economic relations or to give economic assistance to the other party to the conflict, or that it wishes to operate using 'economic warfare,'" the government said.

McClatchy obtained the government's written statement from Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which sued the government for information about the blockade. The Israeli high court upheld the suit, and the government delivered its statement earlier this year.

Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, said the documents prove that Israel isn't imposing its blockade for its stated reasons, but rather as collective punishment for the Palestinian population of Gaza.

The revelation that Israel's blockade is not about security and actually about punishing the Palestinians for putting Hamas in power isn't new, though. Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, infamously said (Guardian, 4/16/06) that the purpose of the economic sanctions against Gaza is to "put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."  Israel has also characterized the purpose behind the siege as one that promotes "no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis" in Gaza (FAIR Blog, 6/4/10).

These frank admissions that the blockade of Gaza is designed to punish its civilian population, however, are missing from the majority of our media outlets. A Nexis search only turns up mentions of the Israeli government document about "economic warfare" in publications associated with McClatchy. And before the document was revealed, the Weisglass comment was rarely mentioned in the U.S. media. Perhaps U.S. media outlets think that reporting that Israel is engaged in collective punishment is too harsh for American ears.

People have interpreted the Helen Thomas controversy an number of ways. Some were disappointed in her remarks,  since they are overshadowing the fact that for years she's asked questions about issues that the rest of the press corps didn't care about.

Others have suggested that Thomas' questions about war and the killings of civilians were a warning sign,  and that other journalists should have stepped in to stop her sooner.

That's the view of the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, who led his piece today (6/14/10) with this:

There she goes again.

That was the eye-rolling reaction in the White House pressroom when Helen Thomas would go off on one of her rants about the Middle East.

Kurtz explained that Thomas was protected by her eye-rolling colleagues:

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that she was a member in good standing of a tightly knit club that refused to question why a woman whose main job seemed to be to harangue press secretaries and presidents deserved a front-row seat in the briefing room....

Journalists, especially those who spend a great deal of time together, don't usually turn on each other. If Thomas was spewing bias and bile, the reasoning went, what was the harm?

Bias and bile? Kurtz delivered the proof:

There was something to admire in Thomas' determination to ask uncomfortable questions. But when she declared George W. Bush the "worst president ever" in 2003, she shed any pretense of fair-mindedness. As time went on, her questions turned into speeches, as in this 2007 challenge to Bush over Iraq:

"Mr. President, you started this war. It's a war of your choosing. You can end it, alone. Today. At this point bring in peacekeepers, U.N. peacekeepers. Two million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don't you understand? We brought the al-Qaeda into Iraq." One might agree or disagree with those sentiments, but she was performing as an activist, not a journalist.

Kurtz goes on to write that "Hearst bears some responsibility for keeping Thomas on as her behavior grew more disturbing."

This is reminiscent of the New York Times story about Thomas (6/7/10) lamenting the "increasingly hostile and outlandish nature of her questions"--which was illustrated by the observation that Thomas "seemed particularly critical of the Iraq War and repeatedly pointed out during White House briefings that the American-led invasion was costing civilian lives."

Kurtz also led his Sunday CNN show with the Thomas controversy (6/13/10). To drive home the point that Thomas was trouble, he showed these apparently damning excerpts:

THOMAS: Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression? It could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon. We have that much control with the Israelis.

TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I don't think so, Helen.

THOMAS: We have collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine.

SNOW: No, what's interesting, Helen--

THOMAS: And what's happening--and that's the perception of the United States.

SNOW: Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view.

THOMAS: Mr. President, you started this war, the war of your choosing. And you can end it alone today. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don't you understand?

Kurtz responded by wondering, "What correspondent or columnist gets to say things like that?"

He added:

If you look at some of the soundbites we just played, some of the questions that she's asked over the years, I would agree, to some extent, she basically didn't care what people thought of her. She was there to ask the kind of questions, particularly to President Bush, who she did not like, that she called one of the worst presidents ever.

Now hold on a second. Helen Thomas didn't care what people thought of her? And by "people," does that mean other White House correspondents? Scandalous indeed.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman argued yesterday (6/13/10) that,  when it comes down to it, we're all  to blame for the BP disaster. And that's not all we're to blame for:

We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We--both parties--created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people's lives. We--both parties--created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn't have the means to sustain them. And we--both parties--sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you're drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

So apparently "we" are all in "both parties," and "we" participated in some sort of referendum that endorsed certain Wall Street practices and/or encouraged offshore drilling without meaningful oversight.

It's also telling that this far into the crisis Tom Friedman still believes that the housing bubble was mainly a problem of selling houses to poor people.

But let's not sugarcoat things.  After all,  maybe "we" decided to give him a newspaper column, too.

You know, the fact of the matter is we have to change how we do things. We are on an imprudent and unsustainable path in a number of ways. You talk about debtors' prisons, we used to have debtors' prisons, now bankruptcy is no taint! Bankruptcy is an exit strategy! Our society and our culture has changed. We need to get back to the opportunity, we need to move away from entitlement, we need to provide reasonable risk but we need to hold people accountable when they do imprudent things. It's pretty fundamental.

--David Walker, CEO of the Peterson Foundation, an organization set up by billionaire Pete Peterson to promote cuts in Social Security and Medicare (CNBC's Squawk Box, 6/10/10; MichaelMoore.com, 6/11/10)

"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"

"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then?" said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."

--Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

One thing to add about coverage of Gaza's' rockets is the popularity of the phrase "thousands of rockets." To cite one of many examples, Joe Klein writes for Time (6/9/10):

There is reason to treat Hamas as an enemy of Israel; thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians attest to that.

If you described the threat of rockets from Gaza in terms of lives lost, it would sound much less impressive: Rockets fired from Gaza have killed some 16 people in Israel, going back to 2001. It's difficult to present that as a legitimate rationale for killing more than 3,000 Gazan civilians over the same time period.

If you describe the problem in terms of rockets launched, though, it sounds much more serious.  Who wouldn't take extreme action to stop thousands of potentially deadly attacks?

The problem is, if you're going to describe Palestinian attacks on Israel that way, shouldn't you describe Israeli attacks on Gaza the same way?  How many bombs and bullets do you have to drop or fire before you kill 3,000 civilians?  Surely some enterprising reporter with good sources in the Israeli military could make a credible ballpark estimate of the amount of ordnance used by Israel on Gaza, and then stories discussing the conflict could include a line like, "Israel, which has fired millions of rounds of ammunition into Gaza...."  Or however many the total turns out to be.

Until they have that figure, however, perhaps journalists could stick to giving the number of lives lost on each side as a means of conveying the degree of threat each faces.

In much of the coverage of Gaza, there is a media shorthand that is used to recall some of the most important recent history. Like in today's New York Times (6/11/10):

Israel imposed the embargo, allowing in charitable goods and letting out people with medical emergencies. It invaded in late 2008 to stop a flow of rockets and destroyed thousands of buildings.

Israel invaded Gaza in order to stop rockets, destroying buildings in the process--a shorthand that makes the invasion seem more defensible. But if reporters summarized this history accurately, they would be telling a far different story. It would go something like this:

A mid-2008 cease-fire between Hamas and Israel severely curtailed rocket fire from Gaza.  That was broken when Israel attacked and killed four Palestinians in early November. That breach of the cease-fire led to increased fighting and an escalation in rocket fire, culminating in a full-scale Israel invasion that killed over 1,000 Gaza civilians.

It would not be very difficult to report the story this way. (This graph would help make things relatively clear.) As FAIR noted (1/6/09), the New York Times has in the past reported these facts (12/19/08); in fact, the very same reporter, Ethan Bronner, who today wrote that Israel invaded "to stop a flow of rockets" had earlier acknowledged that Hamas had been "largely successful" in seriously curtailing rocket fire from Gaza. He noted then:

Hamas imposed its will and even imprisoned some of those who were firing rockets. Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

As Noam Chomsky wrote recently (In These Times, 6/8/10), the cease-fire rockets that were launched were not the work of Hamas, and that attempts to renew the ceasefire were rebuffed. That forgotten Times account also noted that an Israeli easing of the Gaza blockade--which was promised in return for reducing rocket fire--fell short of expectations.

Time magazine, meanwhile, floats the idea (under the headline, "Can Israel Learn How to Make Its Case?"), that many Israelis see a weakness in their PR strategy:

The way Israelis see it, the failure of the commando mission was compounded by a failure to communicate the danger in which Israel finds itself. The Gaza Strip, besides being home to 1.5 million overwhelmingly poor Palestinians, serves as a launching pad for missiles usually fired by Hamas, the fundamentalist Islamic group that does not shy away from terrorist attacks. The Qassam rockets that reach nearby Israeli towns are cobbled together inside Gaza. The fear is that Hamas will one day be able to stockpile larger rockets that could reach Tel Aviv. These would likely be supplied by Iran and arrive by ship. Hence the blockade.

This is absurd. There is constant stream of reporting and commentary that stresses the threats to Israel posed by Hamas rockets--in fact, as described above, the coverage actually distorts that history to Israel's benefit.

The Israeli raid on the Gaza flotilla that resulted in the deaths of eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American has led Israel and its supporters to argue (see The Weekly Standard, 5/31/10) that the Turkish government and a prominent Turkish humanitarian organization are "terrorist" sympathizers with ill intentions toward Israel and the United States. In a series of articles (e.g., New York Times, 6/8/10, and Washington Post, 6/7/10), the U.S. corporate press has joined in.

Today, the Washington Post reports that IHH, the Turkish aid group involved with the flotilla that attempted to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, has a "dual message of aid and confrontation." Their evidence for the confrontational attitude of IHH? A banner on the side of their building that reads, "Israel, murderers, hands off our boats!" Don't pay attention to the fact that IHH was attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and that it was Israel that confronted and killed people on the ship.

The Post goes on to report claims that IHH has links to Al-Qaeda, citing a 2006 report by "U.S. terrorism investigator" Evan Kohlmann. But two paragraphs down, the Post quotes a "think tank with ties to Israel's Defense Ministry, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center," that states there is "no known evidence of current links between IHH and 'global jihad elements.'"

What's not mentioned in the Post article is that no government besides Israel considers IHH a terrorist organization (The Christian Science Monitor, 6/1/10). In fact, IHH delivered humanitarian aid to Haiti in the aftermath of the January earthquake at a time when the United States military took a leading role in directing relief efforts there. Would the U.S. have allowed a terrorist organization into Haiti? IHH has also helped out in New Orleans (New York Times, 5/31/10).

Marsha B. Cohen (Mondoweiss, 6/4/10), an expert on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, has already debunked  IHH's "terror ties," and cast doubt on the credentials of Evan Kohlmann, pointing to a Spinwatch.org article on Kohlmann that thoroughly details his lack of expertise. Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, noted (Alternet, 8/6/08) that Kohlmann assisted in the prosecution of Osama bin Laden's former driver by producing a film that was "pure propaganda," raking in $45,000 for the film and his testimony as an "expert witness" in the much criticized trial.

But be scared! According to the Post:

In the group's two-story headquarters, IHH members -- mostly men in their 30s and 40s dressed in jeans or casual business attire -- oversee operations in dozens of countries. The group provides humanitarian aid such as freshwater wells and medical care, as well as Islamic services such as training for prayer leaders. A world map on one wall depicted Palestine, but not Israel.

Under the headline "President Bush Is No Nazi Torturer," Washington Post editorial writer Eva Rodriguez uses a blog post (6/9/10) to "take exception" to another Post blog item (6/9/10) written by Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. The point of contention: vanden Heuvel, responding to a report that the U.S. government has been conducting research on torture victims, wrote:

Granted, this "research" was not the Frankenstein stuff of Dr. Mengele--the experimentation seems to have been conducted in order to determine how sadistic American torturers could be before they crossed into illegality. But it is still appalling.

Now, you might think that when vanden Heuvel said the U.S. experiments were not like Nazi Auschwitz doctor Mengele's, she meant that Mengele's experiments were different from the U.S.'s.  But that's why you don't have a job writing editorials for the Washington Post. Actually, vanden Heuvel's "acutely insincere" blog post said that the American researchers were unlike Mengele because she meant to say that they were just like Mengele.  ("By raising the specter of Mengele, vanden Heuvel makes her point clear.") And that's not true!

Writes Rodriguez:

She's wrong. Mengele and his cohorts performed grotesque operations that left his victims with permanent physical, emotional and psychological scars--if they were lucky enough to survive. Most did not. Sometimes death was the objective; he would at times kill his "patients" so that he could get right to the business of dissecting the body. This is monstrous. This is evil incarnate. This is not what the Bush administration did.

Aside from vanden Heuvel's "insincere" denial that U.S. torturers were as bad as Mengele--note her lack of an "I really mean it!" or any other such guarantee of sincerity--Rodriguez seems to object to the use of the word "sadistic" to describe U.S. torture: "These weren’t experiments to gratify a sadistic streak; they were efforts to ensure the interrogations remained 'legal' and 'humane.'"

Here's a description, from the Washington Post (4/27/07) no less, of one interrogation that turned out to be less than "legal" or "humane":

In 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who'd never spent a night away from his dusty little village, got lost in the fog of war and took a wrong turn into an abyss from which he would never return. It was a detention center at Bagram Air Base, where he was grilled on suspicion of being a Taliban fighter. Military interrogators hung him from a cage in chains, kept him up all night and kicked him senseless, turning his legs into pulp.

He lasted only five days. The Army initially attributed his death to natural causes, even though coroners had ruled it a homicide. Low-level soldiers were punished. It turned out that Dilawar (who, like many Afghans, used only one name) was not an enemy fighter, had no terrorist connections and had committed no crime at all.

Don't call that "sadistic"--those are just what Rodriguez calls the "misguided acts of a president intent on protecting his country from another devastating attack."  They have nothing at all to do with the "impulses of a psychopath," no matter what Katrina vanden Heuvel didn't say.

Three weeks ago, under the headline "Activists Seize Control of Politics," Politico (5/19/10) was reporting that U.S. politics may have changed forever:

The 2010 electorate has swallowed an emetic--disgorging in a series of
retching convulsions officeholders in both parties who seem to embody
conventional Washington politics.

The anti-establishment, anti-incumbent fevers on display Tuesday are not
new.... What's now clear, in a way that wasn't before, is that these results reflect
a genuine national phenomenon, not simply isolated spasms in response to
single issues or local circumstances....

This is a stark and potentially durable change in politics. The old
structures that protected incumbent power are weakening. New structures,
from partisan news outlets to online social networks, are giving
anti-establishment politicians access to two essential elements of effective
campaigns: publicity and financial support. In effect, the
anti-institutional forces that coalesced in recent years now look like an
institutional force of their own.

These epochal changes, Politico reports today (6/9/10), lasted for approximately three weeks:

On the biggest primary night of the year so far, the wild 2010 plotline took a turn for the familiar: The political center--and the conventional politicians that gravitate there--showed some enduring power.

In a June 8 piece about a liberal summit in D.C. this week, the New York Times notes that the left's support for programs like Medicare and Social Security are out of touch with fiscal reality, and that budget cuts elsewhere aren't going to matter much:

In truth, none of the cuts in annual appropriations will significantly reduce the long-term deficit projections. Those are driven mostly by escalating costs for the benefit programs that liberals most aggressively protect--Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security--and by insufficient tax revenues to support them.

As has been noted many times, Social Security has amassed a surplus of over $2 trillion; that plus the expected revenue from Social Security taxes will keep the program solid for the next 25 years. Medicare is in much worse shape; why the two should be talked about together as if they are comparable drains on the federal government is unclear, unless one wants to associate Social Security with Medicare's more severe problems.

For an illustration of the difference, see this graph from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities:

The Washington Post's Lori Montgomery, meanwhile, goes after Social Security's "defenders" today (6/9/10), who have given a "sinister cast" to the White House's deficit commission, accusing it of having "a secret plan to gut Social Security." Social Security advocates are using "heated rhetoric" and are "threatening to rally the public against" benefit cuts, which is seen as an "ominous sign"  for the commission.

Of that group, Montgomery writes, "Adjusting Social Security benefits is a likely point of consensus, commission members say."  By "adjusting," she presumably means "cutting" in some form. So it's "ominous" that Social Security's "defenders" are pointing out this reality about the deficit commission.

Like the Times piece cited above, the Post portrays the issue as simple mathematics: "Budget experts say it would be difficult to significantly reduce future deficits without addressing the rising cost of Social Security."

The Post lays out the argument in favor of Social Security's viability:

The program's defenders argue that there is no crisis: If Treasury would repay billions of dollars in surplus Social Security taxes borrowed over the years, the program could pay full benefits through 2037. But many budget experts question whether supporting the existing benefit structure should be a cash-strapped nation's first priority.

So "experts" are on the side of the Post, while "defenders" are out to protect the status quo. As if to reiterate that point, the next graph quotes an analyst at the Heritage Foundation about the "intellectual consensus" on his side.  As Dean Baker notes at Beat the Press, this is in effect saying that the government should default on the portion of its debt held by the Social Security trust fund. That would be a rather radical idea--misappropriating trillions of dollars collected from working people that were to supposed to go to support the retired elderly, and instead using them to keep down tax rates for the wealthy--but one can count on outlets like the Post to portray it as a necessary solution offered up by the "experts."

I have a question for the surprising number of people who are defending Helen Thomas' comments: Don't you think, given Thomas' record, that if she thought she had said something she could stand behind, she would be standing behind it?