As you may have gathered by now, the deficit reduction plan offered by debt commission chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles is pretty unpopular, particularly on the left.

But one place it was well-received: The Charlie Rose Show, a comfortable place for CEOs and insiders to pontificate. The fact that this show is a staple of public television stations around the country is part of the problem FAIR identified in our new report, "Taking the Public Out of Public TV."

The Rose show presented a discussion of the Simpson/Bowles plan on November 11. One guest, Harvard's Martin Feldstein, had this to say:

There is a lot to like in it.  I think that it is very bold.  Every aspect of the fiscal problem has been put on the table.   And yet when I looked at the numbers I thought it didn’t go far enough.

The other guest--David Walker of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation--countered with his take:

I think it was a courageous plan.  It was very comprehensive.  There were changes in every major aspect of the budget.  It  demonstrates that we are in such a deep hole that nothing can be off the table and you have to make some tough choices.  Frankly, I think he could have been even more aggressive with respect  to some of the reforms.

Walker went on to complain, "It is amazing how much controversy there has been, especially from the left, with regard to the Social Security reform proposals, because they are not dramatic or draconian."  He added:  "You get the far right and far left that are out of touch with reality, we need to come up with sensible center solutions."

And just to make sure viewers knew that the guests weren't outside agitators:

ROSE: Did both of you have an opportunity to wade in on this commission to make your views clear?

FELDSTEIN: I did have a chance to talk with some of the commission members about my views on this.

ROSE: David?

WALKER: I had a chance as well, plus it's my understanding that most if not all of them read my book Comeback America.

Public television, giving voice to the voiceless.

It's never hard to figure out what side the media are on when it comes to corporate-friendly "free trade" deals. They're for them, because they're "free," and people who oppose them apparently prefer protectionism over freedom.

So Barack Obama's apparent failure to negotiate a trade deal with South Korea is bad news--though it's hard to read the papers and figure out why. The Washington Post (11/12/10) explained that

although the list of outstanding issues was short and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied heavily for the agreement, key labor and auto interests and their allies in Congress demanded a fuller opening of South Korea's market.

That would seem to be a reference to the fact that South Korea limits certain U.S. imports. Perhaps they have good reasons for this, but if these things are to be called "free" trade deals, then it would seem that the U.S. critics--the ones usually deemed anti-free trade--are demanding more freedom to sell U.S.-made goods in Korea.

Near the end of the piece, we're told:

Obama had hoped to use a completed South Korea deal to place the issue of free trade squarely on the U.S. agenda, over objections from protectionist voices that are loudest within his own party.

But then:

U.S. opponents of the South Korea pact, including lawmakers representing districts involved in the auto industry, complimented Obama for insisting on more concrete steps to ensure that South Korea would import more U.S. autos into a market dominated by local favorites Hyundai and Kia.

I'm confused. "Protectionists" who oppose "free" trade are pushing for South Korea to allow more U.S. imports--i.e., more trade "freedom"?

You get the sense that reporters know what names to call things--all trade deals are "free," and some Democrats and unions are anti-"free" trade protectionists--but they can't really explain how those labels correspond to reality.

The New York Times story (11/12/10) on this is similarly unhelpful; it refers to the party's positions like this:

with Republicans, who are more favorable toward free trade, controlling the House, Mr. Obama will still have to deal with a Democratic Senate, as well as a Republican Tea Party caucus whose members might be hostile to working with him and who are skeptical of trade deals.

Republicans are free traders, Democrats (and Tea Partiers) are "skeptical of trade deals." Again, those labels aren't very useful, especially when reporting suggests that opposing certain parts of certain trade deals amounts to opposing trade itself:

But trade is a tough sell at home. A survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found substantial skepticism about trade deals.

The poll found that 35 percent of adults said that free-trade agreements had been good for the United States, while 44 percent said they had been bad. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agreed with the Tea Party movement had a particularly negative view.

"Trade" and "free trade deals" like NAFTA are not the same thing.

To make matters even more confusing, we're told later that in Washington, "trade is an issue that cuts more along regional than party lines."

If this doesn't make sense, go read Dean Baker's critique of the Washington Post. It won't help you understand the paper's reporting, but it will help you appreciate which side they're on.

Time magazine's Joe Klein has read George W. Bush's memoir, and has a few criticisms (11/11/10); for instance, he points out that Bush

never stops to wonder if the UN inspectors, whom Saddam Hussein had allowed back into Iraq, were not finding weapons of mass destruction because, maybe, uh, the WMD didn't exist.

That's a good question, but it's not surprising that Bush didn't raise it, since Bush has repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein did not allow weapons inspectors into Iraq in the first place. As FAIR pointed out in an Action Alert ("Media Still Letting Bush Lie on Iraq Inspectors," 12/2/08), Bush peddled this absurd falsehood to ABC's Charlie Gibson, who failed to challenge him:

GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq War?

BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld.

The Washington Post's write-up (12/1/08) of the interview praised Bush's "new candor."

The alert noted that this wasn't Bush's first attempt to rewrite history:

As FAIR pointed out (7/18/03), in July 2003 Bush made a similar comment ("We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in"), which the Post soft-pedaled by saying these words "appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring." And reporter Robert Parry (Consortium News, 12/2/08) noted after the ABC interview that Bush has made similar declarations (1/27/04, 3/21/06, 5/24/07 )--none of which  generated much interest from the corporate media.

If these utterances had received more attention at the time, reporters like Joe Klein would surely be more familiar with them. But Bush's fantasy was kept quiet--perhaps because reporting it widely would have sent a message that Bush had no idea what he was doing.

Reporting on the proposal from debt commission chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a New York Times article (11/11/10) by Jackie Calmes framed the discussion this way:

Mr. Obama created the commission last February in the hope it would provide political cover for bold action against deficits in 2011. His stance now, in the wake of his party's drubbing, will go a long way toward telling whether he tacks to the political center-- by embracing such proposals--or shifts to the left and leaves them on a shelf.

The duo's proposal is a remarkably regressive plan to cut Social Security benefits and tax rates for the wealthy, while shifting a greater tax burden onto middle-class Americans. (Paul Krugman writes an excellent column in today's Times explaining all of this.) But by the political calculations of the Times' national desk, embracing these proposals is centrism.

Today (11/12/10), Calmes writes of Obama adviser David Axlerod's suggestion that the administration might extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthy:

While David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's senior strategist, subsequently denied that the White House position had shifted, the immediate suspicion among liberals that the administration was abandoning them reflected broader insecurity among the president's allies on the left that he would move to center for the rest of his term.

This would imply that giving tax cuts to the wealthy is also part of a move towards the center.

I think most people who follow politics pretty closely have a decent sense of what "liberal" and "conservative" mean, broadly speaking. The media preference is for politics that hew to the "center." But it's very difficult to know what that means; examples like this would suggest that the "center" is located somewhere well to the right.

Bill O'Reilly's recent "joke" about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview.

During the cable channel's 2008 election coverage, in what she later called an attempt at humor, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta linked Osama bin Laden to Barack Obama as people who both should be assassinated:

And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could.

A week before Trotta's "joke," Republican primary candidate Mike Huckabee was apologizing for his own Obama assassination quip. Addressing a gathering of the National Rifle Association, Huckabee joked that a loud thud heard backstage during his address was Barack Obama diving to the floor to avoid gun shots. Months later, Huckabee was given his own Fox News show.

With its biggest new star, Glenn Beck, Fox News hired a host well-known for on-air death fantasies--for instance, chattering about killing filmmaker Michael Moore with his bare hands and hoping out loud that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio) would burn to death. In a Fox News skit in September 2009, Beck portrayed himself poisoning Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It's a culture that apparently filters down to Fox News viewers and supporters. Over the years Fox Nation, the Fox News "owned and operated" fan website, has regularly featured comments expressing the desire to see Barack Obama's assassinated.

Yesterday  News Hounds (11/8/10) published a collection of such quotes, some of which can still be read at on the Fox site. Fox Nation purports to be self-policing, to depend on readers to report inappropriate and irresponsible remarks for removal. Apparently presidential assassination fantasies fall short of Fox Nation's standards for inappropriate or irresponsible commentary.

Recent examples of these assassination fantasies on Fox Nation include comments calling for President Obama to "get what Kennedy got," for the CIA to "take this pres down" and a warning to the president that the Koran "ain't thick enough to stop a .308 round."

There is some evidence that Fox's murder fantasy culture has already helped to spark violent action.  Reporting for Media Matters, journalist John Hamilton tells the story of Byron Williams, a Beck devotee who engaged in a shootout that injured two California Highway Patrol officers in July. After his apprehension, Williams told police he'd intended to travel Oakland California to kill people at the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.

In a jailhouse interview in which he described the right-wing media sources that informed his views, Williams returned again and again to Glenn Beck:

I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.

Among the things Beck did, according to Hamilton, was attack the Tides Foundation in 29 separate Fox News shows in the 18 months leading up to Williams' foiled mission to Oakland.

Moreover, as the ADL reports, Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski was so inspired by Beck's anti-government conspiracy theories, he reposted to a neo-Nazi website tape of Beck suggesting the government was building concentration camps for dissidents--before he was arrested after a shootout with police that left three officers dead.

If this all wasn't so deadly serious it would be seriously funny, because O'Reilly has spent years accusing liberal and progressive websites of fomenting hate speech. O'Reilly's crusade largely targets the comment and open forum sections of such websites, highlighting comments that generally  pale in comparison to those broadcast on Fox and posted on Fox Nation. To add to the irony, when O'Reilly is called out for failing to make distinctions between the editorial content and comment sections of these websites, he argues that the groups are responsible for everything on their websites:

Open forum is bull.... You can regulate what’s on your website.

When it comes to hypocrisy and Fox News, you really can't make this stuff up.

The hostility behind O'Reilly's creepy Milbank beheading joke was on display when the host appeared to make a veiled threat toward Milbank's boss in an appearance on another Fox show. Apparently angered that Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt permitted Milbank to publish columns critical of Fox News, O'Reilly had Fox host Megyn Kelly put a picture of Hiatt up on the screen, and told her audience:

This is the editor, Milbank's editor, Fred Hiatt. And Fred won't do anything about Milbank lying in his column. I just want everybody in America to know what the Washington Post has come to. All right, you can take Fred's picture off. Fred, have a nice weekend, buddy.

(Later in the same appearance, O'Reilly suggested that the host join him in physically assaulting Milbank: "I think you and I should go and beat him up.")

O'Reilly's veiled threat toward Hiatt  recalls one made in a recent interview with an Australian paper by Fox boss Rupert Murdoch (Australian Financial Review, 11/5/10):

People love Fox News.... We said to the cable operators when we put the price up, we said, do you want a monument to yourself....  Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down.

Perhaps the fish does rot from the head.

NBC star Matt Lauer's one-on-one interview with George W. Bush revealed very little in the way of information, though some lessons could be drawn from Lauer's mediocre performance. Here was one comment from near the top of the interview:

The Florida recount.  Hanging chads.  A divided Supreme Court.  George Bush had a rough road to the White House.

Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by half a million. By many reasonable standards, he should have lost the Florida recount too. The Supreme Court made him the president. I'm not sure "rough" is the right way to describe what happened to him.

And then there was this passage on the Iraq War:

LAUER: He says he eventually decided to go to war based on Saddam Hussein's defiance… and what seemed to be rock-solid intelligence.  [To Bush:] On the subject of WMD, George Tenet famously said, "It's a slam dunk."

BUSH: Yes. The intelligence.

LAUER: The intelligence is.  So by the time you gave the order to start military operations in Iraq, did you personally have any doubt, any shred of doubt, about that intelligence?

BUSH: No, I didn't.  I really didn't.

LAUER: Not everybody thought you should go to war, though.  There were dissenters.

BUSH: Of course there were.

LAUER: Did you filter them out?

BUSH: I was--I was a dissenting voice.  I didn't wanna use force.

Saddam Hussein's "defiance" of... what, exactly? The U.N. weapons inspections were underway (and were finding little to support U.S. claims about Iraq's WMD programs). The U.S. failed to win Security Council approval for the military strikes and invasion, but went forward nonetheless.

The problem isn't merely that Lauer did so little to push back against Bush's version of history-- in this case, he provided it. If Lauer is going to bring up the fact that there were "dissenters"--Bush's absurd claim that he was one surely deserved some response--he should have pointed out that some of that dissent came early, from people who believed the "slam dunk" intelligence on Iraq's weapons wasn't a slam dunk at all. But then you'd be pointing out that one of the favorite media tropes about the Iraq War--that "everyone got it wrong"--is false. And the kind of journalist who would do that is the kind of journalist who wouldn't win an exclusive interview with George W. Bush.

New York City school chancellor Joel Klein is stepping down to take a job with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, and will be replaced with Cathleen Black, chair of Hearst Magazines. Though Black has no experience with education and Klein had none going in, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense that the current pro-testing, anti-teacher educational fads be administered by executives connected to corporate media, where such nostrums are wildly popular. The irony, though, is that if you had to pick one institution that is a bigger failure at educating the public than the school system, you'd have to pick the industry that Black comes from and Klein is going home to.

Matt Bai (New York Times, 11/9/10), as a standard-issue corporate media political analyst, sees the Democrats being moved to the right as an upside to their disastrous showing in the '10 midterms. But he's worried that the party isn't learning the obvious lesson.

If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a catastrophic midterm election night, it was their assumption that now, at least, the party’s leaders would have to focus on recapturing the political center.... A lot of Democrats took it for granted that these defeats marked a repudiation of the speaker and of the party’s liberal agenda....

That is not, however, how Ms. [Nancy] Pelosi's liberal supporters see it. Even before the votes were cast, a counterargument was already taking hold — that it was the centrist Democrats, and not the liberals in Congress, who had imperiled the party’s majority....

The theory here, embraced by a lot of the most prominent liberal bloggers and activists, is that centrist Democrats doomed the party when they blocked liberals in Congress from making good on President Obama's promise of bold change. Specifically, they refused to adopt a more populist stance toward business and opposed greater stimulus spending and a government-run healthcare plan. As a result, the thinking goes, frustrated voters rejected the party for its timidity.

There are a few strange things about this argument, even beyond the contention that American voters--41 percent of whom described themselves as "conservative" this year, compared with 32 percent in 2006--somehow deem Congress to be insufficiently liberal.

Aside from the fact that "American voters" are not the same people from one election to the next, and the policies pursued by the party in power influence who those voters are, Bai misses a key point: The goal of a bigger stimulus bill would not be to make voters say, "A big stimulus bill? That sounds like something that accords with my philosophy of government.  I'll vote for that party!" The goal of a bigger stimulus bill, rather, would be to boost the economy, which history indicates is good for the party in power.

Likewise, the goal of a single-payer healthcare system or a robust public option is to deliver cheaper healthcare to more people--it's the effective delivery of healthcare, not the ideology behind the system that delivers it, that would be rewarded by voters.

People love Fox News.... We said to the cable operators when we put the price up, we said do you want a monument to yourself....  Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down.
--Rupert Murdoch (Australian Financial Review, 11/5/10)

--On Democracy Now! (11/8/10):

While Keith Olbermann's donations became front-page news, little attention has been paid to the massive amount of political spending by MSNBC's parent company General Electric, one of the nation's largest military contractors. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting reports GE made over $2 million in political contributions in the 2010 election cycle. The top recipient was Republican Senate candidate Rob Portman from Ohio. The company has also spent $32 million on lobbying this year and contributed over $1 million to campaign against a California ballot initiative aimed at eliminating tax loopholes for major corporations.

--George Curry, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer (11/3/10)  about the state of public broadcasting and NPR's decision to fire Juan Williams:

When NPR fired Williams, conservatives--who have campaigned for years to eliminate the network's federal subsidies--charged that it was violating Williams' First Amendment rights. Williams agreed in a column on Fox's website, saying: "To say the least, this is a chilling assault on free speech."

No it isn't. Juan Williams, a frequent critic of federal entitlements, is not entitled to a job at NPR or anywhere else. And NPR has done nothing to curtail his freedom of speech. Its executives have decided they no longer want his services, as is their right. It's a question of fee speech, not free speech.

I worked for a year as a commentator for a show Ed Gordon hosted on NPR. When my contract was not renewed, I did not assert that NPR had violated my First Amendment rights. There is nothing unconstitutional about not renewing a contract.

More important than NPR's firing Juan Williams for the wrong reason is its failure to fulfill its original mission. The watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting noted that the network "has consistently shown a tilt toward elite guests and sources--government officials, corporate representatives and journalists from commercial media."

FAIR observed, "If the pressure from the right is to be effectively countered, it's not enough to say, 'Don't Defund NPR.' What is needed is a call for public broadcasting to fulfill its mission" with "independent, provocative programming that features voices ignored or marginalized by the commercial media."

By definition, Juan Williams wouldn't fit that description.

Whatever lesson you want to draw the midterms, the nation's top editorial pages want to make one thing perfectly clear: Now is the time to move on bipartisan, corporate-friendly "free trade" agreements.

"A time for free trade," was the Washington Post's November 7 headline. "The Democratic majority in the House was heavily influenced by organized labor and hostile to trade," the paper announced. "Now that the Republicans are in the majority, all three trade agreements have better prospects--good news for the American companies and workers who would benefit from expanded exports, and for the American consumers who would benefit from more choices in the marketplace." American workers, consumers, companies--EVERYONE--wins!

The Post added that the election in Ohio suggests "that anti-trade animus has a more limited audience than is commonly believed," before summing up: "Trade, in short, may offer that rare policy area in which prospects for bipartisan cooperation improved on November 2. Mr. Obama would be wise to take advantage of that fact."

The next day (11/8/10) an editorial in the New York Times was headlined " South Korea Is a Start." The Times started off: " With protectionist policies gaining dangerous traction everywhere, the global economy needs a strong champion of free trade." The election outcome might be just the thing: "Getting these trade deals through Congress won't be easy, although Mr. Obama may find new allies in the Republican-controlled House. American trade unions, an important Democratic constituency, are decidedly unenthusiastic." The Times cheered the "symbolic value of these agreements," mostly as an antidote to "protectionism."

And over at the L.A. Times (11/6/10), the paper's editorial page declared that "Tuesday's takeover of the House of Representatives by the GOP raises hopes for progress on at least one important initiative: It might help President Obama win approval of a U.S./ South Korea free-trade pact."

The L.A. Times laments the fact that Obama is trying "appease" U.S. automakers who complain about lack of access to the Korean market, and "ranchers who fret" about the Korean restrictions on U.S. beef. (Funny that papers champion "free" trade but scold those who argue that free trade deals aren't, in fact, "free.") The paper lectures that it is "improbable that U.S. labor unions will ever support the deal--and where organized labor leads, the Democratic Party tends to follow." One more point: the Times argues that while it is "questionable whether Obama will have the political courage to upset the Democrats' political base by seriously pushing for the trade deal," it holds out hope that maybe this will be Obama's moment to shine:  "But if only Richard Nixon could go to China, it may be that only Obama, with his labor credentials, could get away with opening our markets to South Korea."

Explaining why these trade deals are unambiguously good is rarely, if ever, necessary in the corporate media—they just are, because the goal is "free trade," and who could be against that? To hear (or read) an argument about why such trade policies might not in fact be a win for U.S. workers or consumers, check out Todd Tucker from Public Citizen on CounterSpin (9/24/10).

Over at his Nation Media Fix blog (a must-read), Greg Mitchell watched Matt Lauer's NBC interview with George W. Bush, and wasn't impressed. He writes:

Time after time Bush would offer a whopper and Lauer either said nothing, or expressed sympathy for the poor man who was subjected to such harsh criticism. It went that way, from Bush saying there was "no intelligence" prior to 9/11 about terrorists maybe wanting to fly planes into buildings to stating flatly that lack of regulations had anything to do with  the financial meltdown.

Bush said he had zero doubts about the WMD intelligence on Iraq, not one--and Lauer eagerly pointed out (doing his Judy Miller impersonation) that George Tenet called it a "slam dunk." Bush said posing in front of the window when flying over New Orleans was a mistake but Lauer pointed to local officials who had not done enough.

I was thinking the same thing reading USA Today's Bush piece this morning, where we learn this:

He smiles and laughs readily. He calls a photographer he's just met "darlin'." He's not in a hurry to end the interview and there's no hint of annoyance, even when he's asked how he copes with the ridicule that hasn't abated much since he left office.

Bush doesn't get annoyed when he's asked about how he "copes" with all the "ridicule." Well that's a relief.

There are almost always stories in the Monday papers about what politicians said on the Sunday morning chat shows. Today's New York Times is no different, and given the election outcome the quotes are primarily from Republicans taking their victory laps. None of that is surprising, but it would make sense for journalists to fact check some of the egregiously misleading statements that these politicians are uttering. (In a perfect world, of course, they'd be pressed during their TV interviews, but we're nowhere near that reality.)

The Times story by Joseph Bergers (11/8/10) includes several such statements, none of which are challenged--such as this passage from Kentucky Republican Senator-elect Rand Paul:

To rein in annual deficits and cut that debt, he said he would reduce the federal work force and its wages by 10 percent and freeze hiring. He said an average federal worker earns $120,000 in wages and benefits a year, twice what an average worker in the private sector earns.

The government is paying twice as much? That sounds unlikely. The Times should have searched around for an assessment of this statement, which was likely derived from an August 10 USA Today article that FAIR's Jim Naureckas flagged right here for being totally misleading. There were also experts cited at TheAtlantic.com who explained that this USA Today analysis was flawed--one study found public workers were paid slightly less than their private counterparts, once education and experience were factored into the analysis.

The article also cited Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.):

Despite post-election talk of working with President Obama, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, took a hard line on one of the most pressing issues facing the government--whether to extend tax cuts put into effect during the Bush administration for those earning more than $250,000.

Mr. McConnell said rejecting an extension would amount to tax increases in the middle of a recession and would raise taxes on "750,000 of our most productive small businesses," whose payrolls support 25 percent of the American work force.

This is a familiar--and false--GOP talking point about tax cuts for the wealthy. There are very few small business that would even be affected by this increase on wealthy individual tax filers. The Times for some reason provides numbers detailing how much of the workforce is employed by small businesses, but doesn't think that a politician claiming a tax hardship for 750,000 small businesses is worth looking into?

The Times also quotes McConnell's characterization of the new healthcare law as "this awful 2,700-page monstrosity that took over one-sixth of our economy." It's generally understood that the healthcare industry comprises that share of our total economy (which in many ways is part of the problem, since it suggests health costs are out of control). But the law is in no way a "takeover" of the healthcare industry. Arguably the main part of the law is the requirement that the uninsured go out and buy coverage from private carriers. Unless a secret part of the law mandates the creation of a national healthcare system, McConnell's being wildly misleading.

We might have a more rational political conversation in the country if journalists were more willing to point this kind of stuff out.

"I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do." That's how George W. Bush referred to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in his new book Decision Points. The quote is featured in Time magazine's Verbatim section (11/15/10), and has been discussed pretty widely.

This is an interesting claim. When Bush appeared at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner on March 23, 2004, his sickening feeling was gone--and replaced by his funny bone . Bush's speech included a routine where he joked about the fruitless search for Iraq's deadly weapons, showing slides where administration officials hunted around the White House offices for the weapons. (You can see a partial video of that speech here or here; both include commentary critical of Bush.)

The media reaction at the time, as FAIR noted (Extra!, 5-6/04), was to defend Bush's jokes--the L.A. Times had an editorial called "Commander in Comedy." Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly said, "You know, trying to be funny at these things is so difficult, and he is quite good at it. I mean, he really is very good at self-deprecating humor. The pictures were funny. I laughed at the photos. I mean, he looks goofy, and he's got that great deadpan delivery." You can bet few media outlets will recall this now.

MSNBC has suspended host Keith Olbermann for making political contributions--even though GE/NBC executives and fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has made similar donations. If you'd like to urge MSNBC to follow a consistent standard, see FAIR's Action Alert (11/5/10). And please post copies of your messages, and/or comments on the alert, to the comments thread here.