USA Today (10/15/10) has a valuable article by Kevin Johnson on citizen's use of video to document police brutality--citing numerous examples where such recording was instrumental in exposing violent behavior on the part of cops.

The piece also includes the perspective of cops who don't want to be videotaped, who produce zero evidence for their assertion that such taping "has had a chilling effect on some officers who are now afraid to act for fear of retribution by video."

USA Today's editors, though, put those unsubstantiated claims in the article's subhead in the print edition--"Are Incidents Caught on Tape Hindering Officers?"--as well as in the main headline over the continuation of the story on page 2: "Some Fear Videos Create a 'Chilling Effect' by Making Police Hesitant."

It's a striking demonstration of the corporate media's instinctive attraction to power.

After the miners' rescue Wednesday, talk in Chile turned to mine safety and the  conduct of Compañía Minera San Esteban, the corporation that owns the San Jose mines where the miners were trapped. On Thursday, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera publicly addressed safety issues,  vowing "fundamental changes in how businesses treat their workers."

Stories about San Esteban's horrible record are legion (e.g., here and here). The company has been host to a number of deaths at its mines in recent years, and accusations of safety violations including the charge that it ignored orders to install safety equipment--a condition of its reopening after a previous accident--which might have made an earlier escape possible for some miners.

Moreover, during the debacle, San Esteban, which played no part in the miners' rescue, pled poverty and claimed it could not pay the trapped miners wages. As London's Independent reported, San Esteban "says it has no money to continue paying their wages, let alone cope with the lawsuits that will inevitably arise from the ordeal."

All in all, one might say it wasn't an episode in which capitalism cloaked itself in glory. That is, unless one is Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page director and "Wonder Land" columnist Daniel Henninger. In his October 14 column, "Capitalism Saved the Miners: The Profit = Innovation Dynamic Was Everywhere at the Mine Rescue Site," Henninger argued that the miners owed their rescue to a special drill bit developed by a private U.S. company. That was his entire argument.

Henninger's real motive seemed to be to use the miners' rescue to rebut a bit of Obama campaign rhetoric in which the president had sarcastically dismissed notion of unqualified faith in markets:

The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.

Henninger’s response to Obama's remark:

Uh, yeah. That's a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that's right. Ask the miners.

I'm sure the miners are thankful for the heroic drill bit, but their opinion of the role of capitalism in their debacle might be less breathless than Henninger's. Indeed, most of the miners have weighed in on the central capitalist actor in the story: At least 29 of the 33 miners' families have filed lawsuits against San Esteban.

Also inconvenient for Henninger's argument: The rescue was run by the Chilean government and its relevant ministries, not by the capitalist company. Oh, and the U.S. government's space agency, NASA, also played a crucial role, designing the rescue capsule and consulting on safety issues.

Moreover, it's worth noting that, while Chile's larger, government-owned mines have relatively good safety records, the same cannot be said for its smaller, capitalist-run mines, such as San Esteban's.

No one argues that capitalism does not produce new innovations (while sometimes stifling innovations too), but in Henninger's capitalist Wonder Land, the bad actions of capitalists, as well as the the good and vital acts of governments, are banished to the real world.

David Broder--or an automated David Broderesque column-generator--bemoaned once again (Washington Post, 10/14/10) that "As the Gulf Between GOP and Democrats Widens, the Center Is Lost." To illustrate this dire situation, Broder (or the Broderbot) cited congressional voting patterns:

Bill Galston, the Brookings Institution's resident political philosopher, was the first of the day to point out that, statistically speaking, the center had already disappeared. He was referring to the congressional voting studies, which I have previously cited, showing that, apparently for the first time, there is no overlap between the most liberal Republican in the House and the most conservative Democrat when it comes to roll-call votes.

Historically, there have always been a few Republicans who voted often with the Democrats and a few more Democrats who lined up regularly with the Republicans. But now the ideological lines are more sharply drawn, and the distance between the parties is greater.

The phenomenon of party polarization is not brand new, though--Broder is referring to VoteView, a mathematical model that arranges lawmakers by how often they vote together, producing a scale that corresponds to the left/right spectrum. It's been finding that every House Republican has been to the right of every House Democrat since 2003. Before that, in the 107th Congress, there was one Democratic representative who voted to the right of several Republicans: James Traficant, who is best remembered for being expelled from the House after being convicted of bribery, racketeering and tax evasion. If only we had more politicians like him....

The fact is that the era of "bipartisanship" that Broder is so nostalgic for was a reflection of the fact that the Democratic Party once had, for historical and tactical reasons, a sizable number of conservative segregationists in it. After the battle for state-enforced segregation was lost, these conservatives drifted to their natural home in the Republican Party. Looking back on a time when urban liberals campaigned under the same banner as Southern racists as some kind of golden age is rather perverse--even for the Broderbot.

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote a piece yesterday (10/13/10) headlined "Wage Cuts Hurt, but They May Be the Only Way to Get Americans Back to Work." The point--in case you didn't catch the drift of the headline--is that workers are going to need to take pay cuts in order to get the U.S. economy back on track. U.S. workers simply make too much in comparison to international competitors.

Pearlstein cheers the move by some U.S. autoworkers to take a pay cut--the kind of "structural adjustments that are necessary if the U.S. economy is to find a new equilibrium." But taking a 20 percent pay cut sure isn't for everyone:

I'm sure many of you are reading this and thinking that if anyone is forced to take a pay cut to rebalance the economy, surely it ought to be overpaid investment bankers, corporate executives and newspaper columnists. That's how things would work in a socialist paradise, but not in market economies, which are much better at producing efficiency than fairness.

While it's good that Pearlstein anticipates the reaction of his readers, his argument is entirely unconvincing. Investment bankers operate in a "market economy"?  Then why did Wall Street require a massive government intervention in order to avoid what we're often told could have been a total economic meltdown?

The idea that one would hold up the newspaper business as any sort of "market" model is questionable. (Certainly the Washington Post would not qualify as a business success at the moment.) But let's say that a paper like the Post operated on the principle that thoughtful opinion columnists should compete for space in the paper. Given that many people would give the Post a column for something close to free (the Internet is full of free opinion, some of it quite good), it's hard to see how Steven Pearlstein would have a job anymore--or at least one that pays very much. And that outcome wouldn't even depend on the creation of a "socialist paradise."

Dean Baker has more thoughts on Pearstein here, which as usual are worth reading.

USA Today (10/13/10):

The Guardian (10/13/10):

In the era of social media, the audience itself has a big say in how big the audience is. If you'd like FAIR's messages to reach more people, there's a number of simple things you can do to help.

1. Comment on the blog. A lively comment section draws readers to a blog. If you want an interesting conversation about media criticism, post the kinds of comments you think are interesting.

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3. Post links on Facebook. Sharing sources of information with your friends is one of the key functions of the leading social networking site. If you click on the "Share" link at the bottom of each blog post, there's a Facebook button that should streamline the sharing process. But copying and pasting the link works just as well. Of course, if you and your friends are on other social networking sites, those can spread the word too.

4. Recommend us on bookmarking sites. One of the most helpful things you can do in terms of bringing new people to the blog is putting our posts on social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, reddit, Delicious and Digg. These are sites people go to to find and rank places they haven't been to before on the Web, and if a page does well there, it can attract thousands of new visitors. StumbleUpon seems to work best for us, but if there's one you're familiar with, that's probably the best one for you to use. The "Share" button will take you to a few of these sites--they generally require you to open an account with them to participate.

5. Blog about us. If you have a blog of your own, feel free to recommend our posts, expand upon our points or criticize our takes. In most cases, our blog will find your post and add a link to it to the comments section of ours. If that doesn't happen, please leave a url in the comments section. You can also include links to our posts in the comments sections of other blogs if we make an appropriate point.

6. Tweet about us. Aside from reviving the art of the aphorism, the main point of Twitter is to swap links people find interesting. Again, you have to set up an account to join in. To fit the link into the 140-character limit, you're probably going to want to use a link-shortener, like bit.ly or TinyURL. If you're already on Twitter, please follow FAIR at @FAIRmediawatch--most FAIR Blog posts get tweeted there, and you can retweet any that strike your fancy.

There are no doubt FAIR Blog readers who know things we don't about social media. If you have any further tips--for readers or for us--please leave them in comments.

In light of the recent and tragic spate of gay youth suicides, the Washington Post's On Faith blog chose to honor National Coming Out day with a guest post (10/11/10) by raging homophobe Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.

The post, titled "Christian Compassion Requires the Truth About Harms of Homosexuality," accused "homosexual activist groups" like the Gay Lesbian and Straight Educators Network (GLSEN) of being the real bullies, pushing kids to come out and believe they can't change, which he argues  is "likely exacerbating the very problem they claim they want to solve."

As evidence, Perkins cites two studies, claiming that they show that depression amongst gays is not connected to discrimination. Trouble is, as Box Turtle Bulletin's Jim Burroway explains, the two studies show exactly the opposite. Which wouldn't be unusual for Perkins, whose group (as John Aravosis points out) often relies on the pseudo-scientific "studies" of the Family Research Institute, which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "churns out hate literature masquerading as legitimate science." (Its head, Paul Cameron, once argued that "extermination of homosexuals" might be needed in the next three to four years.)

Yet Perkins is a regular in the corporate media Rolodex. In response to the push for repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell (Extra!, 5/10), Perkins put out a press statement saying a repeal would "jeopardize our nation’s security to advance the agenda of radical homosexual lobby."  CNN felt that merited not one but two chances for Perkins to talk about the issue (Larry King, 2/2/10; Newsroom, 2/2/10). With Perkins so busy at CNN, MSNBC had to settle for his colleague Peter Sprigg (2/2/10), who warned that repealing DADT was "guaranteed" to lead to sexual assault--by, not against, gays.

The heartening thing about the Post column is that the comments on the post are overwhelmingly, and fiercely, critical of "On Faith" blog editor Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn's decision to give space to Perkins on this subject and not factchecking his propaganda. The question is, when will corporate media outlets finally start listening to them and stop lending legitimacy to bigots spouting lies?

UPDATE: If you'd like to contact the editors about their decision, here's the email: onfaith@washingtonpost.com

Sunday's Washington Post (10/10/10) featured a story by Jon Cohen and Dan Balz that led with this claim:

If there is an overarching theme of election 2010, it is the question of how big the government should be and how far it should reach into people's lives.

The piece is actually an explanation of the results of a new poll conducted by the Post along with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. As Dean Baker noted (10/10/10), "There is absolutely nothing in this article that supports this assertion." He is correct. The Post's report deals with the supposedly conflicted nature of public opinion, where people complain about the performance of the federal government but then also express strong support for certain government programs. Even this seems a tad oversold; one can very easily think highly of Social Security and believe in additional government spending to spur the economy while also having little confidence "in the government's ability to solve problems."

So why is there this "big government" framing of the issue, then?  Baker points out that certain politicians benefit from it:

There are no candidates anywhere in the country who are running in support of "big government," there are candidates who are running in support of programs which have varying degrees of support. There are many candidates (virtually all Republicans) who are running against "big government." While this position has nothing to do with the world (we all oppose waste, fraud and abuse; the question is always the status of specific programs), it is certainly helpful to the Republicans to have the election framed in this way.

And in his column today (New York Times, 10/11/10) , Paul Krugman helpfully pushes back against this entire theme:

Here's the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can't create jobs.

Here's what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: We never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

In his Washington Post column yesterday (10/10/10), George Will offered the kind of analysis one has come to expect from George Will:

Today, Barack Obama, a chronic campaigner, is out and about trying to arouse the masses against the inequity of not raising taxes on "the rich." He opposes extending the Bush tax rates--they are due to expire December 31, when a higher rate is restored--for "millionaires and billionaires."

And for quarter-millionaires. Expiration would mean an increase for households with incomes of at least $250,000. Obama's $750,000 fudge sweeps many people into the plutocracy. In Obama's Chicago, a high school principal can earn $148,000. A police officer with 25 years on the force can earn $114,000--not counting overtime. If the principal and the officer are married, supposedly they are rich.

It's too bad the Post feels the need to print this kind of drivel.  A few weeks ago (8/12/10), the paper published a helpful table that explains, using data from the Joint Committee on Taxation, how the competing Democratic and Republican tax plans would impact different income groups.

For families making between $200-500K, the Democrats are looking to preserve an annual tax cut of $6,743 (compared to pre-Bush tax cut rates).  The Republicans are looking to save the same taxpayer $7,152.  So the difference for this category--which includes Will's principal-and-police officer married couple--amounts to about $400 a year. And Will's couple would presumably pay less than that, since their total income just barely crosses the $250,000 mark.

In the same Post graphic, you can see that actual millionaires are the ones that would get significantly different treatment under the competing tax plans. Under the Democrats' plan, those with incomes of $1 million and above would still see their taxes more than $6,000 lower when compared to pre-Bush tax rates--but they would not be allowed to extend, as the Republicans' tax plan does, the full $100,000 tax break that Bush gave them.

So  when Obama talks about a tax increase on "millionaires and billionaires," that's because that's what it would actually be. Will might say he's fighting for the Chicago beat cop, but what allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on the wealthy would really mean is a hefty tax hike for George Will. "Save the tax cuts for people like me," though, would probably be a less compelling argument for the average newspaper reader.

This past Sunday's edition of NBC's Meet the Press (10/10/10)  featured two guests talking about the midterms, the economy and public sentiment: conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and Time magazine's Joe Klein.

Klein has been on a road trip through the middle of the country to assess how Americans are feeling (that is, Americans who don't live in "urban" areas or the "deep South," as Klein explained).

Trying to explain how voters feel about Washington, Klein provided this anecdote:

They have no idea what the Democrats stand for, except for these big, slovenly pieces of legislation that we've seen which inevitably contain ridiculous provisions.  One candidate in Nevada, a Republican running for Congress, said that there's a provision in the healthcare reform bill that small businesses have to set aside areas for breastfeeding women to use their breast pumps.  My dad was a small businessman.  He didn't need to be told by the government to do that... He would have just said, "Use my office."

The idea that businesses easily accommodate working mothers will likely come as a surprise to working mothers--most of whom would probably disagree with the idea that a dedicated place to express breast milk is a "ridiculous provision" in the healthcare law.

Perhaps working mothers should all work for someone like Joe Klein's father. Since that's not possible, then maybe laws to protect such workers are necessary after all.

And for the record, there does not appear to be anything in the law that is directed primarily at "small businesses." If anything, such employers (those with fewer than 50 employees) would seem to be eligible for a "undue hardship" exemption.

Isabel Macdonald, a former FAIR staff member, published an article in the Nation (10/7/10) revealing that undocumented workers had been landscaping Lou Dobbs' Florida home and looking after his daughter's show horses.  As a hardline commentator on the issue of "illegal immigrant workers," one would think Dobbs would be a little embarrassed about this discovery.

When Dobbs and Macdonald appeared on MSNBC's Last Word (10/7/10) yesterday to debate the issue, Macdonald pointed out that "Lou Dobbs, who has made himself an emblem of this get-tough approach to immigration...had been exploiting undocumented labor."

Dobbs attempted to sidestep the issue by claiming that he had never "directly or indirectly hired an undocumented worker." To which host Lawrence O'Donnell replied, "Someone hired by your landscaping contractor had an undocumented worker on your property . That, Lou, is indirect."

Dobbs, though, had his own definition of "indirectly": "intentionally hiring a contractor...for the specific purpose of hiring an illegal immigrant."

Dobbs, Macdonald said, has criticized others in the past for not verifying contract workers: "[In] 2007, you called employers ridiculous for insisting that they should not have to be held accountable for their contractors' employees."

In his debate with Macdonald, however, Dobbs claimed that not only was he not obligated to find out the immigration status of those who were working for him, he was legally prevented from doing so: "The reality is this: There is a law against you or me inquiring about a legal status for a person in this country.... That's a violation of their rights."

Dobbs is scheduled to speak at a Tea Party conference this weekend.

Jodi Jacobson from RH Reality Check joins CounterSpin this week to talk about the media's decision to let Tea Party activists define their movement as one that doesn't focus on red meat "social issues." As Jacobson argues, that distinction doesn't really square with the far-right views espoused by leading Tea Party Republican candidates.

The New York Times (10/7/10) offered a fresh example of this kind of reporting, in a piece by Kirk Johnson headlined "Democrats in Tight Races Put Focus on Abortion Rights." Johnson notes the perils of this strategy:

 The Democratic strategy is at least drawing the attention of voters. But it comes with a risk, too: Does selling the idea that Republican fiscal warriors are social zealots in disguise send a shiver of fear down voters' spines, or make Democrats look like they are avoiding the subject on most voters' minds?

The premise seems to be that because Tea Party Republicans insist that they really care about the deficit, it would be unwise to talk about anything else that these candidates believe that might give some voters pause. It's a bizarre standard. And let's not forget Johnson's suggestion that being a "fiscal warrior" is "the subject on most voters' minds." The media have been telling us this for quite some time--the voters-care-about-the-deficit mantra. The Times recently changed its tune on this somewhat, noting that in their most recent poll "the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries." That was two weeks ago. Now, somehow, fighting deficits is back to being "the subject on most voters' minds."

Gabriel Sherman's piece in New York magazine (10/3/10) on the cable news wars includes a bit of history on MSNBC's firing of progressive host Phil Donahue in 2003; an internal memo at the time worried that the show would be  "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." Sherman focuses on MSNBC personality Chris Matthews--who sometimes claims he was opposed to the Iraq War--and his desire to get Donahue fired:

Donahue's problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews was a rising force at the network, with a reported salary of $5 million. He cultivated former GE CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of NBC CEO Bob Wright. (The two summered together on Nantucket.) Matthews saw himself as MSNBC's biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue's show. In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.

After the item was published, Matthews showed up at Donahue's office and apologized. "He didn’t deny it," Donahue remembers. With the war looming, Sorenson and Griffin decided to take him off the air to make way for 24/7 war coverage.

You may have heard that Barack Obama shared some thoughts about Fox News Channel in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. When asked about the channel, Obama pointed out that media outlets with a political perspective have been relatively common throughout U.S. history, but that he believed Fox's perspective is "ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class."

The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg had a piece (10/2/10) on Fox's political activism this year--particularly News Corp's million-dollar donations to the Republican Governors' Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But Fox's response to Obama's criticism of the network gets the last word in the piece--in the form of an anonymous source:

An executive at Fox News who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity expressed "astonishment" over Mr. Obama's focus on the network. "We are so in his head," he said. "Can you believe with all the other things going on in this world he's preoccupied with Fox News?"

The Times--mostly in the wake of the Iraq War/Judith Miller debacles--attempted to clamp down on the use of anonymous sources. But such sourcing patterns persist. Former Times public editor critiqued the paper on these failures a few times, in one case (3/21/09) pointing to specfic rules that would seem to apply here:

The policy says anonymous sources should be used only as "a last resort when the story is of compelling public interest and the information is not available any other way."

And:

The policy says the newspaper will not allow personal or partisan attacks from behind a mask of anonymity.

Rutenberg's piece seems to fail on both those counts. You learn nothing of real value from the anonymous Fox source, and it would seem to constitute an attack of some sort, since the Fox executive is saying that Obama is "preoccupied" with Fox News instead of dealing with more important matters.

Apparently not, judging by the Washington Post's October 3 story ("Military Drones Aid CIA's mission") about the CIA's expansion of its drone war in Pakistan. It is "part of a high-stakes attempt by the Obama administration to deal decisive blows to Taliban insurgents," and also  "a significant evolution of an already controversial targeted killing program."

Post readers get details from "a U.S. official"--who says things like, "Our intelligence has gotten a lot better." The only other perspective comes from Bruce Reidel at Brookings, who is "a former CIA analyst who led the Obama administration's initial overhaul of its Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy." In other words, not much of a critic.

There are obviously fundamental questions about this policy--such as whether it's legal, something Jim Lobe wrote about recently for Inter Press Service (4/2/10).