Seeing this headline at the Newsweek website-- "Chavez Twists Twitter Into Tool of Repression"-- means you're likely to read the latest dispatch from the magazine's Latin America correspondent Mac Margolis, who has amassed a stunning record of creating panic about the region's leftist leaders. (See "Newsweek’s Name-Calling Neoliberal," from Extra!'s January 2010 issue.)

Margolis argues that when Iranian protesters used Twitter to criticize their government, it was seen as a "tool of revolution and freedom." Not so in Venezuela, though, where Chavez "has figured out how to twist this tool into one of repression."

"Far from embracing the democratic spirit of the Web," Margolis writes, Chavez ("the Venezuelan strongman")  want to use the technology to get people "to spy on each other." Margolis writes:

El Presidente has hired a staff of 200 to deal with tweeted "requests, denunciations, and other problems," which have resulted in actions against allegedly credit-stingy banks and currency speculators.

Banks and currency speculators? Well, that sounds chilling indeed.

Margolis adds that Chavez is "considering going a step further, and ruling that all Venezuelan websites must move from U.S.-based servers to domestic ones--which would, of course, make them far easier to control. Big Brother would be proud." That would seem to be a reference to a current debate in the Venezuelan parliament, so it's unclear how Chavez might "rule" that this happen. And it's worth reiterating that, as Chavez supporters have noted for years, the private media in the country are intensely critical of his politics, and were instrumental in supporting the coup that briefly removed him from power.

If Chavez wants to use media as a "tool of repression," he's not doing a very good job.

The front page of USA Today tells us (6/8/10)::

Oil Spills Escalated in This Decade

Experts: Red flag wasn't heeded

By Alan Levin
USA TODAY

The number of spills from offshore oil rigs and pipelines in U.S. waters more than quadrupled this decade, according to government data. The trend could have served as a warning for the massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico, safety experts say.

This would have come in handy when the White House was announcing plans to encourage more offshore drilling. Instead we got assurances like this from USA Today's editorial page:

Some of the most ironic objections come from those who say offshore exploration will destroy beaches and coastlines, citing the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska as an example. The last serious spill from a drilling accident in U.S. waters was in 1969, off Santa Barbara, California.
--USA Today editorial (4/2/10)

Think Progress (6/7/10) claims Sarah Palin's criticism of the press regarding Helen Thomas is wrong, but I can't even figure out what she's trying to say. Here's Palin's Twitter statement:

Helen Thomas press pals condone racism? Heaven forbid "esteemed" press corps represent society's enlightened elite; Rest of us choose truth.

"Enlightened elite" would seem to be sarcasm--Palin does not actually think the "elite" is "enlightened"--but so would "Heaven forbid," suggesting that she thinks the press corps actually should represent this non-enlightened elite. I honestly can't puzzle out her intended message.

As for Thomas' statement itself, the message was all too clear: It was a call for ethnic cleansing, and she was right to apologize for it. It's a sad way to end an admirable career. I would note, though, along with Glenn Greenwald, that the acceptability of calls for ethnic cleansing in the U.S. corporate media depends on which ethnicity is to be cleansed.

Witless commentary and breathtaking hypocrisy are no strangers to Fox News, but Bill O'Reilly was in rare form on June 1. Discussing Joe McGinniss, the journalist who moved next door to Sarah Palin's family home in Alaska in order to write about her, O'Reilly declared the move "immoral" and maybe even unconstitutional: "He's intruding upon them, all right? Their pursuit of happiness, which is guaranteed by the Constitution, basically has dropped 100 percent because he's there."  (The "pursuit of happiness" phrase actually appears in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.)

About now, listeners who have followed O'Reilly's sordid career are probably recalling the Fox host's practice of having his camera crews ambush news subjects at their homes, on vacation, even when they are with their children--in other words, "intruding on them, all right?" Of course, by O'Reilly's lights, only intrusions targeting those he cares about raise moral or "constitutional" questions. That is the beauty of an utter lack of self-awareness.

O'Reilly's guest, dyspeptic former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg, who often engages O'Reilly in a sort of stupid competition, was a voice of reason on this segment. On the Constitution, Goldberg said McGinniss had the right to live anywhere he wanted. But Goldberg didn't totally disappoint. While disagreeing that they were "immoral," Goldberg did say these sorts of intrusions were "wrong" and "creepy"--referring, of course, to McGinniss' intrusions, not O'Reilly's.

In his editor's note in the current edition of Newsweek, Jon Meacham surveys the failures of the past decade or so and comes to a completely unsurprising conclusion: the right and left both failed.

From the financial sector to the Roman Catholic Church, it has been a bad couple of years for--to borrow a phrase from a BP chieftain--"big, important" players in global life. Going only a bit further back in the decade, the occupation of Iraq and the response to Katrina seem to mark the beginning of an era in which apparently competent institutions have all too often proved incompetent. The history of these years fails to fit neatly into the ideological categories of left or right, for both public and private enterprises have managed to miss the mark in hours of crisis. Government is not the root of all evil; neither are corporations.

The pull quote in the print edition reads, "Recent debacles do not fit into the categories of left or right, for both public and private enterprises have failed spectacularly."

Huh. Actually, I think most of those examples do fit pretty nicely into one category: The left opposed the Iraq War, opposed financial deregulation and sounded warnings about the housing bubble. Meacham also cited the BP oil spill; the left has long opposed offshore drilling.  Meacham's trying to say that when "government" fails, it's evidence that the left is mistaken in putting so  much faith in government. But that would require one to attribute Bush's disastrous Iraq War to the "left."

If you stick to the examples Meacham offers, it would seem more logical to conclude that the left was right, and the right was mostly wrong. Unless, that is, Katrina and Catholic priest sexual abuse were ideas of the left.

Jon Meacham, who's the co-host of PBS's new Need to Know public affairs program, lives in a world where the answers are always found in the center-right part of the political spectrum. You really have to twist yourself in knots in order to try and get this to make any sense, though.

Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 6/3/10), in a compelling blog post on "Victimhood, Aggression and Tribalism," quotes Noam Chomsky from Imperial Ambitions:

In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, "There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them.  We are outnumbered fifteen to one.  If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have.  We have what they want."  That is a constant refrain of imperialism.  You have your jackboot on someone's neck and they're about to destroy you.

The same is true with any form of oppression.  And it's psychologically understandable.  If you're crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it, and it can't be, "I'm a murderous monster."  It has to be self-defense.  "I'm protecting myself against them.  Look what they're doing to me."  Oppression gets psychologically inverted; the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.

This is, in fact, one of the standard justifications for violence of the strong against the weak--up to and including genocide. (See FAIR Blog, 2/2/09). That's why when Israeli security forces kill more than 3,000 civilians in Gaza since 2001 and Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza kill 27 Israelis over the same time period, people can argue with a straight face that Israel's self-defense needs require it to impose a crushing blockade on Gaza that has forced 10 percent of the population into chronic malnutrition.

That the blockade's actual purpose has little to do with self-defense is illustrated by the wide array of prohibited goods that have nothing to do with security, as Peter Beinart pointed out in the Daily Beast (6/1/10; cited in Yglesias, 6/3/10):

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations greeted news of the flotilla disaster by repeating a common "pro-Israel" talking point: that Israel only blockades Gaza to prevent Hamas from building rockets that might kill Israeli citizens. If only that were true. In reality, the embargo has a broader and more sinister purpose: to impoverish the people of Gaza, and thus turn them against Hamas. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported, the Israeli officials in charge of the embargo adhere to what they call a policy of "no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis." In other words, the embargo must be tight enough to keep the people of Gaza miserable, but not so tight that they starve.

This explains why Israel prevents Gazans from importing, among other things, cilantro, sage, jam, chocolate, French fries, dried fruit, fabrics, notebooks, empty flowerpots and toys, none of which are particularly useful in building Kassam rockets. It's why Israel bans virtually all exports from Gaza, a policy that has helped to destroy the Strip's agriculture, contributed to the closing of some 95 percent of its factories, and left more 80 percent of its population dependent on food aid. It’s why Gaza's fishermen are not allowed to travel more than three miles from the coast, which dramatically reduces their catch.... There’s a name for all this: collective punishment.

On Tuesday (6/1/10), FAIR said this about the New York Times coverage of Gaza:

Other news accounts presented misleading context about the circumstances leading to Israel's blockade. [Isabel] Kershner (New York Times, 6/1/10) stressed that "Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, where Hamas, an organization sworn to Israel's destruction, took over by force in 2007." The Associated Press (6/1/10) reported that "Israel and Egypt sealed Gaza's borders after Hamas overran the territory in 2007, wresting control from Abbas-loyal forces"--the latter a reference to Fatah forces affiliated with Mahmoud Abbas.

Both accounts ignore the fact that Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006, which led the United States and Israel to step up existing economic restrictions on Gaza. An attempt to stoke a civil war in Gaza by arming Fatah militants--reported extensively by David Rose in Vanity Fair (4/08)--backfired, and Hamas prevailed (Extra!, 9-10/07).

Today (6/4/10), the New York Times printed this correction:

An article on Tuesday about the deadly Israeli naval commando raid on an aid flotilla that had attempted to defy Israel's blockade of Gaza referred incompletely to the governance of Gaza by Hamas, the militant group that opposes Israel’s existence. While Hamas took over Gaza by force in 2007, as the article said, the group’s representatives had won elections there in January 2006, defeating the more moderate rival Palestinian group Fatah. Subsequent tensions between Hamas and Fatah forces in Gaza led to open fighting, and Hamas routed Fatah from Gaza in June 2007.

ABC's Good Morning America got an "exclusive" with ACORN video hoaxters James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart on June 1.

Here's how host George Stephanopoulos set up the segment:

James O'Keefe became a media sensation after he and a friend posed as a pimp and prostitute and secretly recoded ACORN workers giving them advice on how to cheat on their taxes.

As FAIR noted in an action alert to the New York Times, O'Keefe didn't "pose" as a pimp--he didn't wear his absurd "pimp" get-up when he went in to ACORN offices, and in almost every case he presented himself as a concerned boyfriend trying to get his girlfriend away from an abusive pimp. And he didn't get any advice on how to "cheat" on his taxes. (Brad Friedman did the most thorough debunkings of these videos, and was on the case after the ABC interview).

What O'Keefe claimed happened during his visits to ACORN was not what actually happened--for instance, he videotaped himself wearing his garish "pimp" costume outside of ACORN offices in order to feed those misimpressions. But he never wore the get-up inside the ACORN facilities he targeted.

Stephanopoulos later alluded to "critics" who argue that O'Keefe "revised reality for political gain." The ABC host, on the other hand, said: "I have to give you credit for this, on ACORN, you did expose people doing things they shouldn't do."

Stephanopoulos was interrupted by Breitbart:  "Is it legal to help set up a prostitution ring in every single office?"

That is also false.

But instead of challenging these inaccuracies, Stephanopoulos defended his own record: "I was one of the few, if not the only journalist, who actually asked President Obama about the ACORN case, so I hold no brief."

Letters from FAIR and others eventually convinced the New York Times that treating O'Keefe and Breitbart as if they were actual journalists whose work could be trusted was a mistake. The paper issued a half-hearted correction, but the paper's subsequent ACORN reporting was very different. Here's how they put it on May 27: "In at least one video, ACORN workers advised a conservative activist who was posing as a prostitute how to conceal her criminal activities in the course of trying to buy a house."

The Times had previously written about the case in much more inflammatory--and inaccurate--language: "Their travels in the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of ACORN, the national community organizing group, caught its low-level employees in five cities sounding eager to assist with tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution."

It took a long time for the Times to admit even some of its errors. Public editor Clark Hoyt explained that part of the problem was that when O'Keefe appeared on television wearing a pimp costume to promote his videos, the Fox News hosts interviewing him said that he had worn the same outfit to ACORN offices--a claim O'Keefe did not correct. In other words, O'Keefe's work should be fact-checked by O'Keefe.

O'Keefe's ACORN hoax lives on only because journalists like Stephanopoulos fail to challenge him.

See Extra!: "Falling for the ACORN Hoax: The Strange Journalism of James O'Keefe" (4/10) by Veronica Cassidy.

Newsweek's "environmental issue" has an article (5/28/10) by correspondent Stefan Theil declaring climate change to be "Uncertain Science."  Giving the Reader's Digest condensed version of the denialist case, Theil refers to "e-mails and documents suggesting that researchers cherry-picked data and suppressed rival studies to play up global warming"--without mentioning that after sensationalistic media stories suggested a scientific conspiracy, subsequent academic investigations cleared the researchers of wrongdoing (Extra!, 2/10 ;  FAIR Blog, 4/19/10).

He talks about a U.S. scientist "under investigation for allegedly using exaggerated climate data to obtain public funds"--without mentioning that the scientist, Michael Mann, is being investigated by Virginia's Tea Party-aligned Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, whom the Washington Post has described as having "declared war on reality" (Climate Progress, 5/7/10).  Theil claims that there is a real scientific debate "over the extent and time frame" of CO2's greenhouse effect--and glosses over the fact that the actual debate in climate science circles is over whether the consensus predictions have underestimated how much the Earth will warm as a result of the burning of fossil fuels (Climate Progress, 5/31/10).

I suppose none of this should be surprising coming from a reporter who attacked Germany's "green technophobia" as a "sinister" and "disturbing" relic of the country's "powerful back-to-nature movements" and its "extreme desire for stability" (Newsweek, 7/18/09; Extra!, 2/10).

The media template for writing about Afghan civilian casualties requires that articles include some reference to the extreme care taken by U.S/NATO forces to avoid killing non-combatants. The practice reached a new low in this New York Times story (5/29/10) about a U.S. drone attack that killed 23 civilians:

The attack, in which three vehicles were destroyed, illustrated the extraordinary sensitivity to the inadvertent killing of noncombatants by NATO forces. Since taking command here last June, General McChrystal has made protection of civilians a high priority, and has sharply restricted airstrikes.

The attack on civilians illustrated the sensitivity to the killing of civilians. What?

Given that the report explains that the intelligence gathering was inadequate--including the fact that evidence about the presence of civilians went unheeded--doesn't this actually show that there isn't enough sensitivity around the killing of innocents?

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organized protests in Maryland at the homes of several bank executives, along with follow-up rallies in Washington, D.C., at bank branches and offices.

The events went largely uncovered by the Washington Post, which led Post ombud Andrew Alexander (5/29/10) to wonder  why the paper missed a major labor story that was covered by Mother Jones (5/16/10) and the Nation (5/20/10), among others.

The story has been getting a lot of attention from right-wing activists, though, who are arguing that a protest outside a banker's home is an outrageous infringement on someone's private life. A more important point is whether the Post is paying attention to labor activism:

But Huffington Post reporter Arthur Delaney said he learned of the protests from SEIU sources, which raises the question of whether the [Washington] Post is sufficiently plugged into the nation's most politically active labor organization.

That's a good point.

Unfortunately, Alexander's thoughts about what coverage of union activism should look like is a little, well, anti-union:

There were numerous ways the Post could have gotten back in the game on the story. For example, how did Chevy Chase neighbors react? Did protesters break trespass laws? When does First Amendment expression infringe on residential privacy? Does President Obama, who enjoyed SEIU electoral support, sanction these types of protests? And is a blitz on private residences a new protest tactic?

I don't know--maybe a more important question than what Obama thinks of the protests might be, "What were they protesting?"