I caught this story at Single Payer Action. The account is based on a talk veteran reporter Chris Hedges gave recently at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York:

"Knopf – which of course, like all of these large publishing houses is owned by a large transnational corporation--asked me to write a book on the press," Hedges told the Sanctuary for Independent Media last month in Troy, New York.

"The advance was pretty low--I said no. But after giving a talk at the Ford Foundation, they said they would kick in the money. And I agreed to do it."

"It was a bad idea. I learned never to write about somebody else's idea."

But Hedges produced the manuscript anyway--and turned it in on time.

"When Knopf got it they were horrified," Hedges reports. "Because it exposed the rot within the commercial media, the complicity of the commercial media with the power elite--and all of the things they won’t write about, the things they won’t tell you."

"The editor called me up and said they didn't like it. But that's all right--they would help me take out all the negativity. All the negativity would be removed and then Knopf would happily publish it."

"What they wanted was a mythic version of the press--without fear or favor, America's great investigative and truth telling enterprise of journalism--is collapsing under the onslaught of declining circulation and declining ad revenues. And American democracy will be irrevocably damaged."

Hedges shared with Knopf the feeling that the loss of a print-based media "will be deeply damaging."

"But I was not about to mythologize an institution that I know intimately and know far better than any editor at Knopf," Hedges said. "So, I called Nation Books and asked them to buy out the advance, which they did."

"I then reconfigured the entire book. I had written about one pillar of the liberal establishment and its collapse. What I realized in the process of writing it was that all of the pillars of the liberal establishment had collapsed. The liberal church, the universities, the press, labor, culture and the Democratic Party have all failed."

Beware: The dean of the D.C. press corps is disappointed.

In his Washington Post column today ("Dodgeball for Democrats," 11/18/10), David Broder leads off with this:

When the rules of the House of Representatives forced the Democrats to confront a painful choice among their leaders, they did what Democrats are often inclined to do. They changed the rules.

Usually, such a stunt would matter only to the members affected by the change. But this one sends a dangerous signal at a crucial moment, when both parties are being tested on their willingness to respond to the lessons of the last election. This is a disquieting development.

Egad! What was this disquieting stunt that the rule-breaking Democrats pulled off? As Broder explains, losing the Congressional majority normally means losing one leadership position (majority leader); so the party would have a minority leader, a whip and a chair. But since Pelosi is staying on to serve as minority leader, the Democrats have four leaders for three positions. So Pelosi created a position called "assistant leader" in order to keep veteran African-American lawmaker James Clyburn in a leadership role.

I know, I am as outraged as you by this "dangerous" rule-breaking. Funny thing is, a few days prior something very similar was  happening on the Republican side. The new Republican majority, facing leadership challenges from Tea Party-backed lawmakers,  created two new positions for incoming freshmen.

Does any of this actually matter much? Not to most people. But David Broder isn't most people; while he acknowledges that this wouldn't make a difference in normal times, these are certainly not normal times:

But we are about to start a Congress in which everything depends on the willingness of the leadership in both parties to face up to hard choices--on the budget, Afghanistan and a dozen other issues.

Too often in the past, Democrats have avoided making hard choices by throwing more money in the pot or taking similar self-indulgent steps. When it came to the stimulus legislation and health-care reform, for example, Democrats spent to buy votes rather than make tough choices.

The Democrats' unwillingness to face the hard choice in this internal fight sends exactly the wrong signal.

You see, it's not really about what James Clyburn's job title is at all. Democrats are "self-indulgent" money-wasters who "buy votes"--though the examples Broder cites (health care and stimulus) were instances where the party, in an effort to attract Republican and/or Blue Dog support, trimmed their sails, winding up with a stimulus package many thought was too small and a healthcare plan that lacked a public option or a serious effort to control drug costs.

It's too bad the Democrats aren't ready to be serious. I mean, they're not even willing (yet) to follow Broder's advice and start bombing Iran.

Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia caused a bit of an uproar at a hearing yesterday. As Brian Stelter reported at his New York Times blog (11/17/10), Rockefeller mused:

There's a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to Fox and to MSNBC, "Out. Off. End. Goodbye." It would be a big favor to political discourse, to our ability to do our work here in Congress and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and, more importantly, in their future.

Rockefeller should tell that "little bug" to keep quiet, for a number of reasons. For starters, the FCC can't--and obviously shouldn't--be in the business of killing cable channels that lawmakers find objectionable.

Rockefeller's remarks did not escape notice; "SHOCK VIDEO," says a link at the Drudge Report. And Keith Olbermann pointed out last night that Rockefeller has told him that he's a fan of the show--presumably he knows that Olbermann's show is on MSNBC, right?

But Rockefeller did make one point that's worth defending--that the rise in cable TV rates is in part due to the fact that subscribers are forced to pay for channels we don't watch (most of the channels you get with your cable package), or might find objectionable (Fox News, to pick an example at random). As Stelter noted:

Beyond the news media, Mr. Rockefeller also questioned why consumers have to buy bundles of channels, rather than ordering the channels they want and nothing else.

This is a good point, though there's no need to exclude the "news" channels from consideration. As we noted here recently, Fox boss Rupert Murdoch bragged that he could basically name his price with cable operators: "Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down" was how he described his negotiating strategy.  In most places, viewers pay far more for Fox News than MSNBC. In an era of seemingly endless digital media possibilities, why are TV viewers forced to send millions of dollars to pay Sean Hannity's salary?

The new film Fair Game, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, recreates the Bush administration's exposure of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson's public criticism of Bush's WMD claims. It also depicts the shameful role that the D.C. establishment media played in facilitating the government's efforts to marginalize and punish a dissident.

FAIR addressed the press's reprehensible performance in such pieces as "Spinning the Libby Indictment"  (Extra!, 11-12/05) and "Miller's Tale" (Media Advisory, 10/21/05).  (Judith Miller's name isn't mentioned in the film, but her wretched reporting in the New York Times makes a cameo appearance or two.)

I was curious who inspired the character identified as "right-wing reporter" in the credits, who harangues Joe Wilson in a restaurant.  Apparently, she's supposed to be Ann Coulter.

The Los Angeles Times reports today (11/16/10) that Barack Obama might give a tax break to the wealthy after all:

Obama has loosened his longstanding view that tax cuts should be extended permanently only for households earning less than $250,000 a year ($200,000 for singles).

When a reporter suggests that a politician has "loosened" his position on an important issue, it must be the kind of flip-flop the media don't find objectionable.

Counting tonight's episode, Charlie Rose has had five guests discussing the Simpson/Bowles deficit reduction plan, and all five have been right-leaning proponents of the plan's austerity measures. To call for a broader discussion, see FAIR's latest Action Alert. Please leave copies of your messages--or comments on the alert--in the comments thread here.

On Friday, Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher took a study that says there are 100,000 fewer Hispanics in Arizona than there were before the debate over the state's disputed anti-immigrant law, and reported it as 100,000 fewer "illegals."

By conflating Hispanics with "illegals," Gallagher inadvertently illustrates the case made by opponents of the law.

I agree with Keith Olbermann (11/15/10) about the dubious value of "objectivity" as a journalistic value; he makes a telling point about how journalistic icons like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow are most honored for the moments when they reached conclusions and asserted values.

And I think he's right that the U.S. media establishment's failure to see through the lies that sold the Iraq War is a singular failure of our journalistic system--one that does indeed suggest that we need an entirely different system that better serves our democracy.

Olbermann's MSNBC forerunner, Phil Donahue, was fired in the run up to the war not because he wasn't neutral enough, after all, but because he would hamper the network's ability to be "waving the flag" like its competitors (All Your TV, 2/25/03). What NBC and its corporate parent GE were looking for was not objectivity but the right kind of bias.

Which is to say, Olbermann is right that it's necessary to have journalists who express values and draw conclusions--but not sufficient.  We also need to talk about which values our corporate-dominated media system is likely to tolerate, and which conclusions are allowed to be drawn.

The New York Times' Ross Douthat (11/15/10) warns us about the nightmare world that "Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots" live in:

It's a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs.

Shudder!  Luckily, Pelosi and co.'s world seems to have diverged from ours around 2003, when the normal retirement age budged up two months, further budging by the same amount until 2008, when it reached 66 years. It's currently scheduled to begin budging again in 2021, until it budges up to 67 in 2026.

In sharp contrast to Pelosi's horrifying dystopia, where such budges are considered unthinkable, in our universe they are so routine that even some people who write about politics for a living seem completely unaware of them.

New York Times headline (11/15/10):

U.S. Plan Offers Path to Ending Afghan Combat

More accurate headline:

U.S. Plan Extends Afghan Combat by Three Years

You got a sense from some of the coverage of the Simpson/Bowles deficit commission report that their right-leaning prescription was exactly the kind of solution the corporate media could get behind. Charlie Rose could apparently only find two panelists who wished the commission had gone further with its spending cuts.

On NBC's Meet the Press (11/14/10), the panel discussion featured former Fed chair (and Ayn Rand devotee) Alan Greenspan and far right former Republican politician Newt Gingrich.

On the "other" side was Harold Ford, currently the chair of the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. A debate from the near-right to the far-right, in other words. Vanity Fair journalist Bethany McLean was on hand too.

As if the panel wasn't tilted enough on its own, host David Gregory was posing questions designed to keep the discussion off to the right:

I don't see why, for instance, some of these suggestions, Harold, on Social Security are going to be demagogued to death. Why, in 50 years, people can't look at raising the retirement age and have that be a serious discussion point?

It's worth repeating (as Dean Baker did here) that the retirement age is already rising, and will continue to do so--though for whatever reason many reporters and pundits either don't know this or just don't mention it.

And for his part, Ford was doing his part to bash the liberal wing of the Democratic party:

There are smart, sensible people in both parties. As long as you don't allow the far left and the far right, again, to crowd out the predominant middle, we can get a lot of this done. If that means making tough choices on Social Security--I'm 40, I'm willing to give mine up, and I think a lot of people my age who may reach a certain income level are willing to do the same.

I guess the good news is that Ford is wealthy enough to not need Social Security. Of course, rich people deciding not to take their benefits would have no serious impact; taxing their income, on the other hand, would. As Doug Henwood put it, raising the cap on taxable income "would eliminate the system's alleged long-term problems forever, according to the Congressional Budget Office." I wonder if Harold Ford would get behind that idea.

Last Wednesday (Glenn Beck Program, 11/10/10), we got a glimpse of how low Glenn Beck will go to smear a political opponent.  Beck's lie that philanthropist George Soros helped "send the Jews to the death camps" during World War II, was, in essence, an attack on a Jewish child for the heartbreaking things he was put through in the course of surviving the Holocaust.

But the smear was just part of the anti-Soros crusade Beck is carrying out on his national radio program and his Fox News show, portraying Soros as an "puppet master" who operates behind the scenes to destroy America as we know it and bring on a new international order. The language and imagery Beck employs in his attacks on Soros has provoked charges of  anti-Semitism from the Daily Beast's Michelle Goldberg, among others. According to Goldberg:

Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a "shadow government" that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his "puppet," Beck says. Soros has even "infiltrated the churches." He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain.

Goldberg leaves little doubt about whether she thinks Beck’s broadcasts are anti-Semitic--she calls them "a symphony of anti-Semitic dog whistles"-- but she allows that Beck may not fully understand the historical the terms and images he is dealing in:

It's entirely possible that Beck has waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently, that he picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance.

Whatever the case, it's not the first time Beck has been linked to anti-Semitism, or at least to anti-Semites. As Media Matters has observed, Beck's reading list, the roster of books he recommends to his viewers and listeners, includes titles by notorious anti-Semites:

On June 4, Beck took to the radio waves and told his audience all about this wonderful book he was reading called The Red Network: A "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. According to Beck, this book, from 1934, was proof that "McCarthy was absolutely right," and evidence that even back before McCarthy went on his Red hunts, people in America shared Beck's concern about the Communist infiltration of the country. "This is a book--and I'm a getting a ton of these--from people who were doing what we're doing now."

As it turned out, The Red Network's author, Elizabeth Dilling, was one of the anti-Communist movement's great anti-Semites. The book itself blamed "revolutionary Russian Jews" for the rise of anti-Semitic German fascism and called "racial intermixture" a communist plot. Dilling would go on to attend Nazi rallies in Germany and nickname Dwight Eisenhower "Ike the kike." Beck was unapologetic, instead making himself the martyr, saying that "the left" was calling him "a Jew-loving Nazi sympathizer."

On September 22, Beck went on Fox News and introduced his viewers to another book, called Secrets of the Federal Reserve, pulling a quote from it to attack Woodrow Wilson. The author of Secrets of the Federal Reserve was one Eustace Mullins, who passed away earlier this year. His obituary in his hometown paper began as follows: "Nationally known white supremacist and anti-Semite Eustace Mullins of Staunton, described in 2000 by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a one-man organization of hate, died Wednesday in Waller County, Texas, at age 86."

Secrets of the Federal Reserve details the conspiracy of German Jewish bankers to seize the wealth of the United States through the Federal Reserve. Mullins led a prolific and well-documented life of anti-Semitism and conspiracy mongering, two themes that converged when he blamed the 9/11 attacks on the Israeli Mossad.

Moreover, in May, Beck repeated one of the classic tropes of anti-Semitism. While attempting to refute a point of black liberation theology, Beck incidentally repeated the old anti-Semitic saw that the Jews killed Christ:

If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would've come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did.

As the anecdotes and evidence mount, it's harder to see Beck's repetition of the classic themes of anti-Semitism as inadvertent.

The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein (11/11/10), one of the few Americans (by his own account) who DOESN'T need to have his wages cut, writes:

Reducing the federal deficit won't by itself do much to balance the U.S. trade account by increasing exports, but to the degree it involves increases in taxes or decreases in employment and income of government workers, demand for foreign imports will also decline. Such are the harsh realities of bringing an economy back into balance.

The U.S. had a trade deficit of $380 billion last year. To eliminate this by lowering overall demand in the U.S., you'd have to reduce U.S. GDP by something like $1.5 trillion, since trade accounts for only about one-quarter of U.S. economic activity. So you'd be shrinking our economy somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 percent. Harsh realities, indeed.

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann's indefinite suspension for violating network policies regarding political donations lasted all of  two work days. On his Wednesday show (11/10/10), Olbermann brought up the point that FAIR made in our alert--the difficulty of squaring such a policy with MSNBC parent General Electric's political giving and multi-million dollar lobbying.

Olbermann was joined by Nation blogger Greg Mitchell and Howard Kurtz of CNN/Daily Beast. Olbermann asked Kurtz:

Howard, how far up the tree does it go?  If you and I and Greg can't donate, can our bosses donate?  Can our bosses' boss donate?  Can Rupert Murdoch donate?  Because surely, no matter what you might think of what I did, he must have more influence on what appears on TV news than I do.  And if it's not Rupert, what about the chairman of GE or of Comcast?

Kurtz replied:

Once you get up to the corporate level, where they're not meddling with newsroom decisions, whether it's Time Warner, General Electric, News Corp, then corporations are going to give money.  They lobby.  They have corporate interests.

That left Olbermann to say:

OLBERMANN: Greg, to your experience, is there a part of a company--another part of a company that puts on a news broadcast or publishes a newspaper that isn't involved, to some degree?  Do you know any chairman of the ultimate authorities who don't get involved in news decisions in some large sense, at least?

MITCHELL: You could probably talk about that better than I could, but, again, in the real world, the owners of companies have an interest.

Indeed. The temporary squelching of the Olbermann/Bill O'Reilly feud last year was reportedly arranged at the corporate level, between GE and NewsCorp executives.

And  during an interview with Al Franken (10/25/05), Olbermann once explained how political pressure from inside the news division worked:

You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president's office here and told, "Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?"

And a recent New York magazine article recounted the fight inside MSNBC over Phil Donahue's program, which was seen by some as too critical of the drive to war with Iraq. MSNBC heavyweights like Chris Matthews seemed to know that going to the bosses was how to change what was on the air:

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.

That piece also quotes NBC CEO Robert Wright saying that MSNBC's post-9/11 strategy was to try and outfox Fox News: "We have to be more conservative than they are."

The lead story in today's New York Times (1/12/10), written by Sewell Chan, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David E. Sanger, focused on allies' complaints about Barack Obama's economic policies:

There was no way to avoid discussion of the fundamental differences of economic strategy.... Major disputes broke out between Washington and China, Britain, Germany and Brazil.

Each rejected core elements of Mr. Obama's strategy of stimulating growth before focusing on deficit reduction. Several major nations continued to accuse the Federal Reserve of deliberately devaluing the dollar last week in an effort to put the costs of America's competitive troubles on trading partners, rather than taking politically tough measures to rein in spending at home.

You see the influence of Hoovernomics on the story, as "tough measures to rein in spending at home" are taken for granted as an answer to "America's competitive troubles"--rather than a sure way to exacerbate those troubles, as countries like Ireland, Spain and Greece are demonstrating anew (Guardian, 11/12/10).

After quoting German Chancellor Angela Merkel lecturing Obama ("I am not one, and Germany is not one, who says growth and fiscal consolidation are contradictory"), the story throws in an observation that has the effect of validating the conservative politician's pro-austerity rhetoric: "Mrs. Merkel is credited with avoiding spending heavily on stimulus programs and emerging with the most successful recovery in Europe."

There's a couple things wrong here: It's true that Merkel is credited with avoided stimulus, but in reality Germany had Europe's biggest stimulus program--82 billion euros, or $110 billion.  (Germany's economy is roughly one-fourth the size of the U.S.'s.)

Secondly, the phrase "most successful recovery in Europe" conceals the fact that Germany's recovery, so far, has been less successful than the United States', at least in terms of GDP growth--from the latest figures available, the U.S. is at 99.4 percent of its pre-recession GDP, while Germany is at 97.3 percent. Pointing this out, though, might have put a wet blanket on what the Times obviously felt was a stirring call for responsible fiscal policy.