The Washington Post's latest attack on Venezuela comes in an editorial headlined: "Colombia Proves Again That Venezuela Is Harboring FARC Terrorists."

The editors don't say why a point already proved needs be proved again, but before offering the new evidence, they recount the old claim that laptops captured by Colombia from FARC guerrillas have clearly established links between the Venezuelan government and  the FARC:

That Venezuela is backing a terrorist movement against a neighboring democratic government has been beyond dispute since at least 2008, when Colombia recovered laptops from a FARC camp in Ecuador containing extensive documentation of Mr. Chávez's political and material support.

The alleged FARC laptop evidence certainly is in dispute. (On March 11 of this year, Gen. Doug Fraser, head of U.S. Southern Command, testified before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that he knew of no official Venezuela/FARC links--"We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection"--before retracting his statement a day later after an apparent trip to the woodshed.)

The new evidence? The Post cites a presentation to the Organization of American States (OAS) by Colombia's ambassador to that body, who said he could pinpoint the locations of 75 FARC camps within Venezuela, and then offered up more concrete evidence in the form of photos and videos.  Brace yourselves: The single piece of such evidence the Post editors chose to describe was a photo of a man purported to be a top commander in the ELN--which is not the FARC, but a smaller Colombian guerrilla group--"sipping Venezuelan beer on a popular Venezuelan beach." So a photo of an alleged official of a different organization drinking beer in (allegedly) Venezuela is proof that Hugo Chavez' government is working with the FARC?

The last time the media pushed allegations (Washington Post, 2/5/03) that an official U.S. enemy (then, Saddam Hussein) was harboring a terrorist leader (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), it turned out to be a bogus claim (Washington Post, 4/6/07) that played a crucial role in tricking the nation into war.

A USA Today story by Susan Page (7/27/10), on the impact of the WikiLeaks revelations, reports that despite some erosion, "Most Americans continue to support the war in Afghanistan."

To back up this assertion, Page cites Gallup poll findings (7/8-11/10) that 58 percent of Americans think it was "not a mistake" for the U.S. to have sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001. Clearly, though, it's possible to believe that U.S. troops should have been sent to Afghanistan in 2001 without thinking that they should still be there almost nine years later.

Much more to the point was the July 11 ABC/Washington Post poll, where  just 42 percent of respondents said that the Afghan War was, in the present tense, "worth fighting"--with a majority, 55 percent, saying they did not think it was.  Or the CNN poll (5/29/10) that asked respondents if they favored or opposed the war, and found  56 percent opposed, with 42 percent in support.

And Americans could not  "continue" to support the war, because public opinion, as measured by polls that stick to the point, have found a majority of the American public opposing the Afghan War for most of the past two years. As Extra! reported in December 2009:

In three surveys since July, the AP/GfKpoll has reported that at least 53 percent of respondents say they oppose the Afghanistan War. In September, 51 percent told the Washington Post/ABC News poll (9/10–12/09) that the war was not "worth fighting."

In case you thought the WikiLeaks story might change everything: The forthcoming Time magazine (out tomorrow) has a cover photo of a disfigured Afghan woman with the headline "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan."

The implication would seem to be that the Taliban will commit similar atrocities without the presence of U.S. forces. You can see the cover (and a portion of the story) here.

Something tells me that no one at a the magazine's editorial meeting suggested a "What Happens If We Stay in Afghanistan" cover headline, which would have been accompanied by a photo of the corpse of an Afghan child killed in an airstrike or a house raid.

Time magazine editor Rick Stengel explains the cover decision in some detail, writing that the cover subject "posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years." The accompanying story, writes Stengel, addresses "how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban."

Stengel voices his concern about the effect the cover might have on children, but decides in the end that

bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them. In the end, I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening--and what can happen--in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan.

Of course, what Time is depicting is only part of "the reality of what is happening" in Afghanistan.

Stengel notes that the "much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war," and that Time is  trying "to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it."

He writes:

As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.

The idea that the way to respond to the WikiLeaks documents is to highlight atrocities by the Taliban is precisely what CBS correspondent Lara Logan called for. It's also propaganda.

UPDATE: woodward bernstein notes in comments:

this incident occurred while the us was in afghanistan….shouldn't the time headline reflect that?

When ABC announced that CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour would take over as host of their Sunday chat show This Week, there were rumblings about how different things would be. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote a nasty hit piece on Amanpour in which he worried that the show focuses on "inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour is widely considered to be deficient." He seemed to mean that was a bad thing. ABC president David Westin, meanwhile, wrote in a memo to ABC staffers, "With Christiane we have the opportunity to provide our audiences with something different on Sunday mornings."

Something different, something not so Beltway-oriented. Sounds good.

Oh, the show starts this weekend. And they've announced the guests: Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Not exactly strangers to inside-the-Beltway palaver.

Well, will the pundit roundtable change, then? Not according to this recent interview with Amanpour (TVNewser, 3/18/10), where she calls George Will a "national treasure."

For those of you not following right-wing non-stories, there is a mini-scandal brewing over something called JournoList, a now defunct private email list started by a liberal blogger named Ezra Klein. It came to include something like 400 members, many of whom were other liberal bloggers, academics and pundits.

Someone leaked many of the emails on the list to the conservative Daily Caller website, which has since run several stories alleging that the messages on the list amounted to a liberal media plot to coordinate their coverage in support of Barack Obama. The only problem is that the messages don't show that ever happening, unless you happen to think that political opinions expressed by politically opinionated people are the stuff of conspiracy.

Nevertheless, there are some in the media who are taking this story very seriously. (I know--a right-wing pseudo-scandal getting serious coverage--stop the presses!!)  Politico columnist Roger Simon writes a lengthy piece (7/28/10) about how journalism was once a "holy calling," but things like JournoList--a "Frankenstein monster"--have contributed to the degradation of the profession.

Simon quotes NBC's Chuck Todd, who has been similarly wounded by this completely contrived tale:

Journolist was pretty offensive. Those of us who are mainstream journalists got mixed in with journalists with an agenda. Those folks who thought they were improving journalism are destroying the credibility of journalism.

This has kept me up nights. I try to be fair. It’s very depressing.

Really? He can't sleep because of this?

I'm all for journalists feeling in some way responsible for the reputation of their profession. In that spirit, I wonder if the media's coverage of the Iraq War keeps Chuck Todd up at night, many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives later? Does Andrew Breitbart's destruction of a community organizing group--aided by credulous media coverage--bother him much?

I know these issues are not as important as private emails exchanged between liberally-minded writers....

Feel free to list your own examples of media failures that SHOULD keep Chuck Todd up at night in the comments thread.

Fresh from her comments slamming Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings for reporting things the military wouldn't like, CBS reporter Lara Logan weighed in on the WikiLeaks story on last night's CBS Evening News, where she argued that reporters should do more to stress the Taliban's record of killing civilians:

KATIE COURIC: Also mentioned in these documents is the number of Afghan civilians who have been killed. How do you think this will damage the war effort?

LARA LOGAN: Well, the issue of civilian casualties is a major one. And the U.S. has taken a lot of criticism because of this. However, what's interesting to note is that according to the documents, 195 Afghan civilians have been killed. But also according to the documents, 2,000 Afghan civilians have been killed by the Taliban, which is more than 10 times the number said to be killed by U.S. and NATO forces. And very little is being made of that. If the coverage would indicate that it's more of an issue for the U.S. to kill Afghan civilians than it is for the Taliban to do so.

It would be absurd to suggest that only 195 Afghan civilians have been killed in the war. That tally from the WikiLeaks data is incomplete, as the Guardian reported:

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Afghan human rights advocate Erica Gaston points out (Huffington Post, 7/27/10), the WikiLeaks database on civilian casualties is by no means definitive--many well-known incidents are missing.  A summary of estimates of U.S./coalition-caused civilian deaths provided by Wikipedia suggests that the number Logan seemed to think was credible is off by a factor of at least 28.

As for who bears more responsibility for civilian killings, there have been various attempts to make such determinations. In 2008, U.N. monitors counted over 2,000 civilian casualties; when responsibility could be determined, 41 percent of the deaths were attributed to U.S./NATO forces.  On a CBS Evening News broadcast in early 2009, however, military sources were telling viewers that 80 percent of the dead were killed by the Taliban, in a segment devoted to the propaganda tactics of the Taliban enemy (a report that relied entirely on U.S. military sources). That would seem to be the type of journalism Logan would like to see more of.

On the same broadcast in which Logan gave her critique, CBS reporter Chip Reid seemed afraid that the media were likely to obsess over civilian deaths, noting that the Obama White House

may be underestimating the problems here because, yes, people were aware and certainly the president was aware of the problem with civilian casualties, but if we're now going to be bombarded for days on end with a long series of specific examples, that's going to make it more difficult for both the Afghan people and the American people to support this war.

Somehow I doubt there is any danger that corporate media will be "bombarding" anyone "for days on end" with stories of dead Afghan civilians.

The stories in today's Washington Post tell you everything you need to know about the media establishment's reaction to the Wikileaks Afghanistan documents:

WikiLeaks Disclosures Unlikely to Change Course of Afghanistan War

By Greg Jaffe and Peter Finn

...The documents' release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war's importance, military analysts said....

Senior White House officials said the classified accounts bolstered Obama's decision in December to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration....

In the near term, the Obama administration seems intent on casting the voluminous leak as old news and ignoring it.....The same dismissive attitude dominated the national security think tanks in Washington where analysts closely follow the war. By Monday afternoon, most of these experts had given up on searching through the huge WikiLeaks database for new information....

WikiLeaks Documents Cause Little Concern Over Public Perception of War

By Glenn Kessler and Karen Tumulty

The Obama administration and its allies in Congress sought Monday to turn the leak of more than 91,000 classified documents about operations in Afghanistan into an affirmation of the president's decision to shift strategy and boost troop levels in the nearly nine-year-long war....

Editorial: Wikileaks' Release of Classified Field Reports on Afghan War Reveals Not Much

Though it may represent one of the most voluminous leaks of classified military information in U.S. history, the release by Wikileaks of 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan hardly merits the hype offered by the website's founder....

The British newspaper in turn highlights what it says are 144 reported incidents in which Afghan civilians were killed or wounded by coalition forces. But the 195 deaths it counts in those episodes, though regrettable, do not constitute a shocking total for a four-year period....

Even though columnist Eugene Robinson's generally anti-war stance is still more or less intact, he feels obligated to argue there's really nothing here. On civilian casualties, for example: "The documents merely reveal episodes that were previously unpublicized." Oh, is that all?

We already knew that U.S. and other coalition forces were inflicting civilian casualties that had the effect of enraging local villagers and often driving them into the enemy camp. The documents merely reveal episodes that were previously unpublicized--an October 2008 incident in which French troops opened fire on a bus near Kabul and wounded eight children, for example, and a tragedy two months later when a U.S. squad riddled another bus with gunfire, killing four passengers and wounding 11 others.

Old news, apparently.

Former special ops squad leader/current think tank fellow Andrew Exum noisily yawns at the WikiLeaks Afghan document release on the New York Times op-ed page today (7/27/10):

The news media have done a good job of showing the public that the Afghan war is a highly complex environment stretching beyond the borders of the fractured country. Often what appears to be a two-way conflict between the government and an insurgency is better described as intertribal rivalry. And often that intertribal rivalry is worsened or overshadowed by the violent trade in drugs.

As it happens, Extra! (12/09) devoted an entire article to the question of how U.S. media have examined the role of interethnic conflict in the Afghan War, and the answer is that by and large they've done a terrible job: Acknowledging that the conflict is largely a civil war between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups does not help the U.S. military sell the war, and so U.S. journalists, following the lead of their Pentagon handlers, barely ever describe it that way. Wrote Robert Naiman in that Extra! piece:

Searching through the Washington Post and the New York Times for the past year, Extra! could not find a single news article that mentioned the idea that Afghanistan was in a state of civil war at any time following the 2001 U.S. invasion--with the exception of the Post article [10/27/09] about [civilian official Matthew] Hoh's resignation.

If the WikiLeaks dump encourages U.S. news outlets to take another look at the war through the civil war prism, that in itself will be a valuable service.

Exum also pooh-poohs WikiLeaks' "documentation of Afghan civilian casualties caused by United States and allied military operations," because "civilians inevitably suffer in war"--ho hum! But perhaps readers conditioned to the "Afghan Casualties Disputed" school of journalism will be nevertheless surprised to read a discussion of how such suffering actually occurs that's informed by the WikiLeaks documents. As the Guardian, which has shown considerably more interest than the Times in the documents' revelations regarding civilian deaths, reported Sunday (7/25/10):

Most of the assaults on civilians recorded here do not appear to have been investigated. French troops "opened fire on a bus that came too close to convoy" near the village of Tangi Kalay outside Kabul on 2 October 2008, according to the logs. They wounded eight children who were in the bus.

Two months later, U.S. troops gunned down a group of bus passengers even more peremptorily, as the logs record.

Patrolling on foot, a Kentucky-based squad from 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, known as "Red Currahee," decided to flag down the approaching bus, so their patrol could cross the road. Before sunrise, a soldier stepped out on to Afghanistan's main highway and raised both hands in the air.

When the bus failed to slow--travelers are often wary of being flagged down in Afghanistan's bandit lands--a trooper raked it with machine-gun fire. They killed four passengers and wounded 11 others.

Stories like this may be old news to an Afghan War vet who researches the conflict for a living--but I suspect that for most people, WikiLeaks' glimpse behind the scenes at how the war is actually fought will be a real eye-opener.

Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger sent a memo to staffers on July 8 with the subject line "How Social Media Impacts Your Professional Life," suggesting new rules for journalists' private expressions of opinion. So far, the memo seems to have only been discussed on a German language media blog (Ruhr Barone, 7/22/10).

Jumping off from the cases of Dave Weigel and Octavia Nasr, who had to leave jobs at  WashingtonPost.com and CNN, respectively, after their online communication became controversial,  Schlesinger declares that " in a linked and searchable world, your online persona can reflect on how or even whether you can do your job." The editor writes: "If you give people cause or reason to doubt your ability to be a fair and objective journalist, that will necessarily impact on our ability to give you assignments or allow you on the file."

He then lays down in a series of bullet points "some lines we can draw"--and most of them are more or less common sense. Like, "Don't start or get involved in flame wars"--does anyone think that journalists hurling insults online is a good idea?  Or, "Remember that the published word lasts forever"--that's self-evident. And "be prepared to stand behind what you say" is good advice for anyone.

One of the bulleted points seems rather broad, however: "Don't compromise your objectivity privately if you still want to use it professionally." What does it mean to "compromise your objectivity"--expressing any opinion on a subject that you cover? That would seem to be a rather draconian prohibition. But if that's not what it means, what kind of guidance is being offered here?

The memo's emphasis on "objectivity" reminds me that Matthew Yglesias has written some insightful posts on the subject lately, reminding us that this journalistic convention arose primarily a business strategy, and it's one that depends on some fairly odd ethical principles:

Something that pops up every time old/new media tensions emerge is the view--which I find, frankly, bizarre--common in the newspaper world that pretending to not have opinions makes your work better. One underlying presumption here is the odd notion that the ideal reporter would be someone who actually doesn’t have opinions, as if "the facts" were purely transparent and could be merely observed, processed and then regurgitated into inverted pyramid form without passing through the muck of "judgment" or "thoughts about the world."

Then the secondary presumption is that you can somehow make things real by pretending. Like if you want to express judgments about politicians in conversations with your friends, that’s fine, but you have to never publish them.... Somehow keeping the views secret is supposed to be a close substitute for not having them. But of course having a secret is totally different from having nothing. The conceit that make-believe is just as good as the real thing only arises because the real thing is impossible to achieve. That should make you rethink why you would deem it desirable, but instead leads to the odd conclusion that the best journalist is a consistently dishonest one.

Here's the full text of the Reuters memo:

All –

Two recent incidents in the United States have shown how hard it is to keep our social media personae separate from our professional lives.

First David Weigel had to resign from the Washington Post after inflammatory comments he made on a supposedly closed journalists' mailing list were made public. Then, CNN fired its senior editor for Middle Eastern Affairs, Octavia Nasr, after she tweeted "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot", a comment that immediately called into question her ability to cover her subject objectively.

Now I don’t want to get involved in other organisations' personnel issues. But I've repeatedly said and believe very strongly that in a linked and searchable world, your online persona can reflect on how or even whether you can do your job.

If you give people cause or reason to doubt your ability to be a fair and objective journalist, that will necessarily impact on our ability to give you assignments or allow you on the file.

We are in the early days of social media and there is no question that the journalistic landscape is changing. But there are some lines we can draw:

* Don't start or get involved in flame wars--arguments using heated language and personal attacks. As a journalist, rely on facts and reasoned arguments, not on invective. I don't care how angry you might be at a person or a company or even a country; just don't do it.

* Don't compromise your objectivity privately if you still want to use it professionally.

* Remember that the published word lasts forever and can go everywhere. A tweet by a journalist is simply not the same as a joke shared over the dinner table.

* Anything that can be forwarded probably will be at some point, so be prepared to stand behind what you say--its content and its tone.

Thanks/das

David Schlesinger
Editor In Chief, Reuters

The lesson of the Shirley Sherrod story would seem to be a simple one: A conservative blogger with a history of promoting inaccurate, racially charged stories published another one, and people in the media (not to mention the White House) fell for it--again.

But New York Times reporter Matt Bai wrote a piece in the paper's Week in Review section (7/25/10) that sought to make things a lot more complicated. Under the headline, "Race: Still Too Hot to Touch," Bai laments that the country is still not having a meaningful discussion about race:

In many ways, Ms. Sherrod's ordeal followed a depressingly familiar pattern in American life, in which anyone who even tries to talk about race risks public outrage and humiliation.

We might have hoped that the election of a black president would somehow make the subject less sensitive and volatile, in the way that John F. Kennedy's election seemed to allay the last, lingering tension between American Catholics and the country’s Protestant establishment. But as the week's events made clear, Mr. Obama's presence alone isn't going to deliver us from a racial dialogue characterized by cable-TV conflagration--and it may even complicate the conversation.

It's hard to square Bai's story with reality. It seemed to me that the consensus view of her speech after Breitbart's lie was exposed was that it was a thoughtful examination of some potentially uncomfortable ideas. Even people like Bob Schieffer and Andersen Cooper--hardly ones to court controversy or throw elbows--were criticizing Breitbart's stunt.

The real lesson to be drawn is about a gullible corporate media--not some grand lesson about the problems in "American life." Perhaps that's why some writers try too hard to make it into something else.

Thankfully, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne does a good job today:

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors.

And Dionne points to the manufactured "controversy" over the New Black Panther Party (which the Post's ombud believed deserved more media coverage): "It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites."

That's the real story here--that right-wing outlets are eager to push these tall tales, and that centrist outlets often give them additional coverage for fear of being considered too left-wing.

The story of the day is obviously the large pieces in the London Guardian and the New York Times that are based on tens of thousands of documents related to the Afghanistan War published by WikiLeaks. The leak is already being compared to the Pentagon Papers.

How newspapers determine what is most newsworthy about the leaks is interesting. The Guardian's lead is:

A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.

So the first item of interest are hundreds of unreported civilian killings.

The New York Times lead, on the other hand, reports that the archive of  classified documents "offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." The second paragraph describes it as a "daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year. " Ten paragraphs into the piece there is a reference to special ops commando missions that "claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment."

But the fact that "coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents"? If the Times found that in the WikiLeaks documents, it didn't think it was worth mentioning.

Reporting on Andrew Breitbart's latest bit of deceit--using a selectively edited video to paint a low-level USDA official Shirley Sherrod as a racist--has given the media a chance to resurrect one of their favorite myths: Breitbart's triumphant takedown of the community-organizing group ACORN.

In September 2009, Breitbart's website BigGovernment.com posted videos, made by conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, supposedly showing ACORN employees counseling the pair--ostensibly pretending to be a prostitute and a pimp--on how to avoid paying taxes and other illegal activities.  The videos were later found to be completely misleading. Among other things, it was revealed that O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp in ACORN's offices, and in many cases he pretended to be Giles concerned boyfriend protecting her from abuse.

In covering the Shirley Sherrod story, many outlets have mentioned the videos--not as an example of Breitbart's established incredibility, but rather as a vindication of his heroic muckraking track record.

Answering for viewers the question, "Just who is Andrew Breitbart?," CNN American Morning anchors Kiran Chetry and John Roberts (7/21/10) said Breitbart "built a brand around his 'big' websites, and that includes BigGovernment.com, the site that first posted the video of Sherrod. There is also BigHollywood.com, BigJournalism.com, BigPeace.com." Roberts then reminded viewers that BigGovernment.com "was also the first site to post those undercover ACORN videos featuring the pimp and prostitute."

In their initial report on the Sherrod story, AP's Ben Evans and Mary Clare Jalonick (7/20/10) applauded BigGovernment.com as the site that "gained fame after releasing video of workers for the community organizing group ACORN counseling actors posing as a pimp and prostitute." Later versions of the story were changed to read "prostitute and her boyfriend." However, in a more recent article (7/21/10), Evans and Jalonick reverted to the less accurate "prostitute and her pimp."

Slate (7/22/10) even saw Breitbart's latest smear as reason to "recycle" Christopher Beam's fawning profile of Breitbart, where he praises him as the one who posted "the now-famous videos that showed two young conservatives, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, entering several offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, posing as a pimp and a prostitute looking to open a brothel for underage, illegal immigrant girls."  This statement is made even stranger by the fact that, much further down in the profile, Beam quietly relents that O'Keefe was actually wearing "business casual" clothing. Beam also repeats the lie that Giles and O'Keefe "had been instructed to, among other things, bury their sex money in a tin in their back yard."

Again, O'Keefe never wore his ludicrous "pimp" out fit in the ACORN offices. Most times he was asking employees how to protect his girlfriend from an abusive pimp. The "tin in the backyard" suggestion was in response to a question from Giles on how to hide her money from the same fictitious pimp.  Also, it is now clear the videos were heavily edited to make employees appear to be answering questions in more sinister ways. In fact, Juan Carlos Vera, a San Diego ACORN employee who was fired as a result of the videos, was found to have called his cousin, a police detective, after the pair left to report their activities. Furthermore, ACORN has now been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing by three separate independent investigations.

All of this has been noted numerous times by FAIR (Action Alert, 3/11/10) and others (Brad Blog, 3/3/10). But considering the pervasiveness of this myth within the corporate media, it apparently needs to be pointed out again.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz  (7/22/10) defends  Fox News against charges it promoted Andrew Breitbart's fraudulent Shirley Sherrod story--because, he says, Fox's news division didn't even address the story until after Sherrod resigned. In an extensive defense of Fox, Kurtz also cites an e-mail circulated by a Fox executive to the channel's news division, cautioning news staff to be careful with the story. Here's Kurtz:

But for all the chatter--some of it from Sherrod herself--that she was done in by Fox News, the network didn't touch the story until her forced resignation was made public Monday evening, with the exception of brief comments by O'Reilly. After a news meeting Monday afternoon, an e-mail directive was sent to the news staff in which Fox senior vice president Michael Clemente said: "Let's take our time and get the facts straight on this story. Can we get confirmation and comments from Sherrod before going on-air. Let's make sure we do this right."

In fact, as a Media Matters time line of Sherrod coverage clearly reveals, Fox did "touch the story" before Sherrod's resignation. Before the resignation, FoxNews.com published a report stating,  "Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy."

Though not part of the news division, Fox Nation, an activist arm of the cable channel owned and operated by Fox News, hosted discussions smearing Sherrod--and by association, the Obama administration--as racist prior to Sherrod's resignation. So O'Reilly was not the only facet of Fox News advancing the smears before Sherrod was forced to step down.

By limiting himself to Fox stories and segments appearing before the resignation, Kurtz sets up an artificial time frame that discounts Fox programming that continued to smear Sherrod well afterwards: O'Reilly was joined by a virtual chorus of Fox News hosts (e.g., Sean Hannity, 7/19/10), substitute hosts (e.g., Dana Perino, On the Record With Greta Van Susteren, 7/19/10) and contributors (Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes on O'Reilly--see MediaMatters, 7/20/10) advancing the Breitbart smears. Why such stories aren't worthy of Kurtz's scrutiny is not explained.

If the question is whether Sherrod was "done in" by Fox, you have to ask a question that doesn't seem to concern Kurtz: How did the doctored videotape come to the attention of the Obama administration? As the Media Matters timeline discloses, many blogs and conservative websites, including Foxnews.com and Fox  Nation, were discussing Sherrod's "racism" hours before her resignation. Isn't it likely that the Fox News website was among the most prominent of these; and, in turn, isn't it possible that that's where the White House learned about the story? The fact that Sherrod claims somebody from the administration told her she was going to be on Glenn Beck's show on Monday night suggest that the White House believed, correctly, that Fox News was on the story.

In another passage, Kurtz mentions Andrew Breitbart's promotion of the notorious undercover ACORN video tapes:

Breitbart has worked closely with Fox opinion hosts in the past, most notably when he posted videos of two young activists ostensibly posing as a pimp and prostitute and seeking help from ACORN offices. Breitbart promoted those tapes on Sean Hannity's Fox program and the network gave them heavy play.

A reader who was learning about this story from Kurtz's reporting would be unaware that the  ACORN tapes, like the Sherrod video, were also a hoax, misleadingly edited to suggest things that never happened. For instance, the man Kurtz refers to as "ostensibly posing as a pimp...and seeking help from ACORN offices," never wore the pimp outfit into ACORN offices, and generally presented himself as trying to protect his "girlfriend" from a pimp (Extra!, 4/10).

Kurtz has a history of defending Fox News against self-evident claims that the cable channel harbors pro-conservative and pro-GOP biases. To be fair, Kurtz has distinguished Fox's news shows from its opinion programs, which he once said (Washington Post, 2/5/01) "may cast an unwarranted cloud on the news reporting which tends to be straightforward."

However, the evidence of Fox's right-wing bias, even on its news shows--which earn relatively low ratings next to the opinion shows the network is actually famous for--is extensive. (See here and here.)

In fact, earlier this month, Kurtz (Washington Post, 7/12/10) backed off from his defense of Fox news programs, reporting that the daytime news show Fox's America's Newsroom had a lopsidedly conservative guest list.

But Kurtz's brush with reality has apparently passed, as he reverts to his previous position in defense of Fox News.

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen writes a tribute to Mary Reed Shepard, one of FAIR's longest-serving and most effective local activists.

I met Mary Shepard, an incredibly energetic activist and media critic from Minneapolis/St. Paul, when she was young--about 70-years-young. "If we had a Mary Shepard in every city," I thought, "we'd be on the verge of (nonviolent) revolution." Mary passed away peacefully Saturday; she was 91.

Born into privilege, she worked 24/7 for decades for a redistribution of wealth and power away from traditional economic elites-–which is what should happen in well-functioning democracies.

In the early years of FAIR, she was a huge inspiration to me. A moving force in Women Against Military Madness (WAMM), Mary became an instant force for FAIR. Tireless and blunt in telling local MSM outlets where they were wrong--whether on issues of nuclear weapons or Central America--I was amazed at how many journalist friends she had at those outlets. They respected her integrity--and passion for justice.

In the 1990s, WAMM protested a speech by NBC anchor Tom Brokaw in Minneapolis, accusing NBC of a conflict of interest in Iraq coverage because of the huge profits corporate parent GE was making on aircraft that were bombing Iraq. I've never forgotten Brokaw's response when a local daily asked him about the conflict-of-interest charge: Brokaw said, according to the paper, "he did not know if GE-made weapons were used against Iraq." That's a breathtaking admission of lack of interest in powerful institutions. Some journalists know about the dubious conduct of their parent companies and look away; Brokaw apparently knew not to look there in the first place.

Mary Shepard never looked away. She knew of the inequities and cruelties inflicted by the powerful, and she spread the word-–in spite of the gatekeepers in corporate media.

Unlike a lot of critiques of Amazon from the publishers' point of view, Colin Robertson's article in the latest issue of the Nation (8/2-9/10) does describe actual bad behavior on the part of the online bookseller:

Dennis Loy Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent Melville House, is one of the few publishers who have dared to speak openly about Amazon's bullying. His story is far from atypical. In 2004 a representative of the retailer contacted Melville's distributor demanding an additional discount. Such payments are illegal under antitrust law, which precludes selling at different prices to different customers. Large retailers circumvent this restriction by disguising the extra discount under the rubric of "co-op," money paid to the bookseller for promotional services, often notional. In this case the distributor did not bother with such niceties, describing what Amazon was after as "kickback."

Johnson resisted Amazon's pressure and complained to Publishers Weekly about what he saw as the retailer's capo-like tactics. What happened next evidently still rankles. "I was at the Book Expo in New York and two guys from Amazon came to see me. They said that the company was watching what we were doing and that they strongly advised us to get in line. I was shocked at how blatant the pressure was." Within a couple of days Johnson noticed that the buy buttons for his books had been taken off Amazon's site, making Melville's titles unavailable.

If Amazon is violating anti-trust laws, the Justice Department should take action; certainly, putting an embargo on one's critics is creepy. But when Robertson suggests that the treatment Johnson describes is akin to Amazon's interaction with Macmillan chief John Sargent, "another man who recently lost his Amazon buy buttons," he seems to be seeking underdog sympathy for the publishing giant that is not really deserved.

The dispute between Macmillan and Amazon had to do with the pricing of ebooks; Amazon wanted them at 10 bucks, Macmillan at $13 or $15. The $10 price, Robertson writes, "was a concern throughout an industry worried that low prices of electronic versions would undermine profits from printed books and generally lower the perceived value of the product."

But as the New York Times' Motoko Rich has pointed out--and a more publisher-friendly reporter you could not hope for--publishers make about as much profit per-unit on a $10 ebook as they do on a $26 hardcover, and would get considerably higher profits on a $12 or $15 ebook. What Macmillan and other big publishers are trying to do is use a technological change to get windfall profits--just as the record labels did when they moved from vinyl to CDs (which even back then cost less to make), and just as the movie studios are doing right now with 3-D films. This is understandable behavior on the part of for-profit entities, but it's not particularly noble.

If Tower Records, say, had had the market clout to tell the labels that they should pass CDs' manufacturing savings along to the consumer, would it have been accused of trying to destroy music? If Loews told the studios that their 3-D markups had to come down, would people say the theater chain was going to be the doom of cinema? Corporate publishers are engaged in the same profit-maximizing behavior at the expense of consumers.