This is an actual CNN.com headline:

Palin Re-Tweet Raises Questions

And the actual lead paragraph:

Normally, it's what Sarah Palin tweets that makes news. This time it’s what she has re-tweeted.

The "substance" is that Palin retweeted a comment promoting Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal.

The piece ends:

A Palin spokesperson was not immediately available for comment but Rebecca Mansour, a Palin aide, subsequently expressed skepticism on Twitter that the media would take notice of Palin re-tweeting "something that stands [with] gays."

The media not taking notice of something that Sarah Palin said? Don't bet on it.

This reminds of NBC reporter Kelly O'Donnell's New Year's Resolution for Palin on this weekend's Chris Matthews Show:

MATTHEWS: And how about a resolution for Sarah Palin? Kelly?

O'DONNELL: Well, I think when people talk about her not knowing enough on big issues...

MATTHEWS:Yeah.

O'DONNELL: ...instead of reaching all the way to look like she's worldly and so knowledgeable on big issues, demonstrate competence on smaller issues as they come up, things where she does not already have a wheelhouse, not energy where she was good in Alaska...

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

O'DONNELL: ...but new issues. Not reach too much, build a base of people who think she knows what she's talking about.

How about a New Year's resolution for all corporate media pundits and reporters: Don't spend any time talking about what the half-term former governor of Alaska says.

New York Times reporter Matt Bai has tried to argue that the public is really worried about the budget deficit. He's tried to find polling evidence to show the public favors some form of budget-cutting austerity, which usually leads him to focus on numbers that support his argument while ignoring those that run counter to his political preference.

He's back at it today (11/5/10), in a piece warning Republicans to not confuse their midterm for some sort of mandate. He tries to make a case that the voters were really with the Tea Party on some key issues:

All of this implies that Republicans think the voters are with their most ardent activists on the economic issues of the day. And there is a persuasive case to be made that they're right about this, at least as far as the conservative critique of federal spending is concerned.

In exit polling in November, 56 percent of voters said government was doing too much that should be left to the private sector and individuals, compared with 38 percent who thought it should be doing more.

It's important to remember that this is a poll of 2010 midterm voters--a subset of the total voting population, and one that would skew Republican, given the electoral outcome. It's hard to draw many conclusions from such a vague idea anyway, but Bai has better evidence:

In a Pew poll from December, 70 percent of voters said they saw the federal deficit as a major problem that needed to be addressed now--a powerful show of support for the Tea Party argument.

Huh. When  I clicked on that link--which is a different Pew poll--I saw that when people were asked what was more important, jobs or the deficit, jobs won 45-22. And the other Pew poll--an exit poll of voters--showed "cutting spending to reduce the deficit" running neck and neck with "spending to create jobs." I don't see any of that supporting "the Tea Party argument," as best I can understand what that argument might be.

Looking at other polls doesn't much help--if you scan some of the summaries at PollingReport.com, for instance, you see surveys like a recent CBS poll where voters express far more concern about jobs (56 percent) than the deficit (4 percent).

Bai's reporting style seems reminiscent of John Stossel. He starts with a premise--some Tea Party ideas are popular, people want to attack the deficit-- and cherrypicks evidence to support that conclusion. So he can write things like "voters endorsed the Tea Party ideal of a radically more parsimonious federal government" and point to evidence that maybe--if you squint really hard--supports that conclusion, while rejecting substantial evidence to the contrary.

Remember the toppling of that Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad (4/9/03) that signified the "end" of the Iraq War? At the time, there were critics who pointed out that the extensively televised images of a jubilant crowd of Iraqis were misleading. The sense of media excitement was unmistakable; as FAIR pointed out, the Los Angeles Times ran a headline the next day, "Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"

The incident is rehashed and examined in the New Yorker this week by Peter Maass, who was reporting from the scene that day. He states early on that both sides of the war debate got the event wrong:

The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television--victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq--was a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by the military.

This struck me as an example of a sort of media "false balance," where blame must be assigned to both sides, even when one side is clearly more blameworthy. That's unfortunate, because Maass' report pretty clearly demonstrates that war propaganda need not be orchestrated by clever military censorship or clever public relations--corporate media are eager to misconstrue and distort events on their own.

So what did the "skeptics" get wrong? They believed an Army report that credited the statue operation--from the placement of an Iraqi flag on the statue's head to the pulling down of the statue itself--to an Army psychological operations unit.  Maass notes that this report

was picked up by the news media ("Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue," the headline in the Los Angeles Times [7/3/04] read) and circulated widely on the Web, fueling the conspiracy notion that a psyops team masterminded not only the Iraqi flag but the entire toppling.

The report got very little attention when it was released. (I actually remember a prominent journalist asking me to help him find it.) It's strange to call it a "conspiracy notion," unless you believe that a government report taking credit for a particular action qualifies as a conspiracy.

What Maass reports is that a handful of military personnel, some of whom had a keen understanding of the sort of imagery that would appeal to the press corps working from Baghdad, decided largely on their own to deliver a spectacle that would attract substantial media coverage. And they were right. If anything, they were slightly quicker than the psyops unit that was on the scene that day, broadcasting messages in Arabic. Maass wrote:

But problems with the coverage at Firdos soon emerged, including the duration, which was non-stop, the tone, which was celebratory, and the uncritical obsession with the toppling.

One of the first TV reporters to broadcast from Firdos was David Chater, a correspondent for Sky News, the British satellite channel whose feed from Baghdad was carried by Fox News. (Both channels are owned by News Corp.) Before the marines arrived, Chater had believed, as many journalists did, that his life was at risk from American shells, Iraqi thugs and looting mobs.

"That's an amazing sight, isn't it?" Chater said as the tanks rolled in. "A great relief, a great sight for all the journalists here.... The Americans waving to us now--fantastic, fantastic to see they're here at last." Moments later, outside the Palestine, Chater smiled broadly and told one Marine, "Bloody good to see you." Noticing an American flag in another marine's hands, Chater cheerily said, "Get that flag going!"

Another correspondent, John Burns of the Times, had similar feelings. Representing the most prominent American publication, Burns had a particularly hard time with the security thugs who had menaced many journalists at the Palestine. His gratitude toward the marines was explicit. "They were my liberators, too," he later wrote. "They seemed like ministering angels to me."

Maass writes that reporters and executives watching back at home "were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war":

Wilson Surratt was the senior executive producer in charge of CNN’s control room in Atlanta that morning. The room, dominated by almost 50 screens that showed incoming feeds from CNN crews and affiliated networks, was filled with not just the usual complement of producers but also with executives who wanted to be at the nerve center of the network during one of the biggest stories of their lives. Surratt had been told by the newsroom that Marines were expected to arrive at Firdos any moment, so he kept his eyes on two monitors that showed the still empty square.

"The climax, at the time, was going to be the troops coming into Firdos Square," Surratt told me. "We didn't really anticipate that Hussein was going to be captured. There wasn't going to be a surrender. So what we were looking for was some sort of culminating event."

On that day, Baghdad was violent and chaotic. The city was already being looted by swarms of people using trucks, taxis, horses and wheelbarrows to cart away whatever they could from government buildings and banks, museums and even hospitals. There continued to be armed opposition to the American advance. One of CNN's embedded correspondents, Martin Savidge, was reporting from a Marine unit that was taking fire in the city. Savidge was ready to go on the air, under fire, at the exact moment that Surratt noticed the tanks entering Firdos Square. Surratt vividly recalls that moment, because he shouted out in the control room, "There they are!"

He immediately switched the network's coverage to Firdos, and it stayed there almost non-stop until the statue came down, more than two hours later. I asked Surratt whether, by focusing on Firdos rather than on Savidge and the chaos of Baghdad, he had made the right call.

"What were we supposed to do?" Surratt replied. "Not show what was going on in the square? We did the responsible thing. We were careful to say it was not the end. At some point, you’ve got to trust the viewer to understand what they’re seeing."

That problem of reporters being told to go find the news that was on TV, as opposed to the things they were actually seeing firsthand, was apparently common:

A visual echo chamber developed: Rather than encouraging reporters to find the news, editors urged them to report what was on TV. CNN, which did not have a reporter at the Palestine, because its team had been expelled when the invasion began, was desperate to get one of its embedded correspondents there. Walter Rodgers, whose Army unit was on the other side of the Tigris, was ordered by his editors to disembed and drive across town to the Palestine. Rodgers reminded his editors that combat continued and that his vehicle, moving on its own, would likely be hit by American or Iraqi forces. This said much about the coverage that day: Rodgers could not provide reports of the war's end because the war had not ended.

And:

Anne Garrels, NPR's reporter in Baghdad at the time, has said that her editors requested, after her first dispatch about Marines rolling into Firdos, that she emphasize the celebratory angle, because the television coverage was more upbeat. In an oral history that was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Garrels recalled telling her editors that they were getting the story wrong: "There are so few people trying to pull down the statue that they can't do it themselves.... Many people were just sort of standing, hoping for the best, but they weren't joyous."

[Newsweek photographer] Gary Knight...had a similar problem as he talked with one of his editors on his satellite phone. The editor, watching the event on TV, asked why Knight wasn’t taking pictures. Knight replied that few Iraqis were involved and the ones who were seemed to be doing so for the benefit of the legions of photographers; it was a show. The editor told him to get off the phone and start taking pictures.

And Maass reports the same happened to at least one newspaper reporter:

Robert Collier, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, filed a dispatch that noted a small number of Iraqis at Firdos, many of whom were not enthusiastic. When he woke up the next day, he found that his editors had recast the story. The published version said that "a jubilant crowd roared its approval" as onlookers shouted, 'We are free! Thank you, President Bush!" According to Collier, the original version was considerably more tempered. "That was the one case in my time in Iraq when I can clearly say there was editorial interference in my work," he said recently. "They threw in a lot of triumphalism. I was told by my editor that I had screwed up and had not seen the importance of the historical event. They took out quite a few of my qualifiers."

Given all the evidence he collects, it's odd for Maass to spend any time at all on how "skeptics" believed in a conspiracy that the statue toppling was a manufactured event. It most clearly was; as he documents, it was manufactured primarily by major U.S. media outlets. In a way, that's far worse than blaming it on official military propaganda efforts.

Stephen L. Carter has a piece over at Newsweek that points out that Barack Obama hardly differs from George W. Bush when it comes to war; as the subhead explains:  "How does Barack Obama differ as a commander in chief from his swaggering predecessor? A lot less than you might think."

Now that's something you don't hear very often in the corporate media. But Carter means this more as a compliment than a criticism, explaining that

there were people on the left and right alike who thought that America had elected an antiwar president, but that simply turned out not to be true. Rather, the nation elected a president in the tradition of American wartime leaders: a man ultimately willing, whether or not it was his original intention, to sacrifice idealism for pragmatism in pursuit of his primary duty of keeping the nation safe.

So a massive troop surge in Afghanistan equals pragmatism and keeping the country safe.

He also writes:

We have all seen the passion with which he battles for his vision of what the nation's health-care system should look like, or how the financial sector should be regulated. If he would bring the same determination to rallying the public in support of his wars—yes, his wars now, nobody else’s—he would do more than anyone else can to truly support the troops.

I'm not sure I saw Obama passionately explain his ideas about Wall Street reform or healthcare. But apparently convincing people to support the Afghan War by keeping U.S. forces there for an indeterminate period of time is how you "truly support the troops."

The Scott sisters (Gladys and Jamie) were serving double life sentences in a Mississippi state prison over the supposed role they played in an armed robbery that amounted to $11. At the end of 2010 their sentences were suspended by Governor Haley Barbour, provided that Jamie receive a kidney donation from her sister.

The sisters' ordeal, as columnist Richard Prince wrote back in November, came to national attention thanks largely to a November 2008 piece in the Black Commentator by Nancy Lockhart, which then spread throughout black-oriented blogs and talk radio, as well as the alternative media (Prince cites a piece by James Ridgeway of  Mother Jones).

The story then began to get national attention, mostly thanks to African-American columnists like Bob Herbert and Leonard Pitts, and NPR's Michel Martin of Tell Me More. Prince joined us on CounterSpin (12/3/10) to tell the story behind this story.

Bob Herbert was back on the story on December 31, writing a strong column that ended: "The Scott sisters may go free, but they will never receive justice." That they're free at all is a testament to activism and the role of the independent media. And it should serve as a reminder that diversity inside the mainstream media certainly mattered; as Janine Jackson put it during that CounterSpin interview with Prince:

But it seems reasonable to consider whether this case would have even the so-called "big" media presence that it's gained at this point, if it weren't for Bob Herbert at the New York Times, who's written about it; Leonard Pitts, syndicated columnist; Michel Martin at NPR. It has been not entirely, but it's had a lot to do with highly placed black journalists that the story has kind of bubbled up.

A letter in the new issue of Time magazine offers an alternate suggestion for Person of the Year (the magazine chose Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg):

Chris Hedges has a new column about the state of the progressive movement, and in it Ralph Nader goes on a tear about the corporate media that can't really be summarized--so here's the whole thing:

The banishment from the corporate media, Nader argues, has been one of the major contributors to the demoralization and weakening of the left. Protests by the left, which get little national or local coverage, have steadily dwindled in strength across the country. The first protest gets little or no coverage and this leads to movements, as well as the voices of activists, being diminished and finally suffocated.

"The so-called liberal media, along with Fox, is touting the tea party and publicizing Palin," Nader said. "There was an editorial on December 27 in The New York Times on the Repeal Amendment, the right-wing constitutional amendment to allow states to overturn federal law. The editorial writer at the end had the nerve to say there is no progressive champion. The editorial said that the liberals and progressives have faded out to let the tea party make history. And yet, for months, all the New York Times has done is promote Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. They promote Newt Gingrich and the neocons on the Op-Ed pages. The book pages of the newspaper ignore progressive authors and pump all the right-wing authors.

"If we don't raise hell, we won't get any media," Nader said. "If we don't get any media, the perception will be that the tea party is the big deal.

"On one notorious Sunday, October 10, two of the New York Times' segments led with a big story about Ann Coulter and how she will change her strategy because she is being outflanked by others," Nader said. "There was also a huge article on this anti-Semite against Arabs, this Islamaphobe Pam Geller. Do you know how many pictures they had of Geller? Twenty on this front-page segment. The number of anti-war op-eds in the Washington Post over nine months in 2009 was 6-to-1 pro-war. We don't raise hell. We don't say Terry Gross is a censor. We don't say that Charlie Rose is a censor. We have got to blast publicly. We have got to hammer them, because they are the tribune of right-wing fascist forces.

"Three thousand people rallied to protest the invasion and massacre in Gaza two years ago," Nader said. "It was held four blocks from The Washington Post. It did not get a single paragraph. People should march over to the Post and say ‘Fuck you! What are you doing here? You cover every little blip by the right-wing and you don't cover us?'

"They are afraid of the right-wing because the right-wing bellows, and they have become right-wing," Nader said of the commercial press. "They have become fascinated by the bias of Fox. And they publicize what Fox is biased on. The coverage of O'Reilly and Beck and their fights is insane. In the heyday of coverage in the 1960s of what we were doing, it was always less than it should have been, but now it is almost zero. Why do we take this? Why do we accept this? Why isn't Chris Hedges three times a year in the op-ed? Why is it always Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and all these homicidal maniacs? Why are they there? Why is John Bolton constantly published in the Washington Post and the New York Times? Where is Andrew Bacevich? Bacevich told me he has had five straight Op-Eds rejected by the Post and the Times in the last two years. And he said he is not inclined to send anymore. How many times do you hear Hoover Institution? American Enterprise Institute? Manhattan Institute. These goddamned newspapers should be picketed."

According to NPR ombud Alicia Shepard (12/30/10), one very persistent letter writer named Henry Norr managed to get NPR to correct an error made several times by different programs-- that WikiLeaks 'published' the many thousands of State Department cables in its posession. The site has actually published few of them-- less than 2,000.

Shepard wrote:

On Dec. 21, I sent Norr’s 9 examples to NPR top editors and asked that a staff memo be sent out reminding everyone to be more careful in talking about the November document release. The memo went out on Christmas Eve.

Still Norr was (rightly) not satisfied. “Aren’t you going to run a correction as well?” he asked. He prodded me. I prodded Stu Seidel, NPR’s deputy managing editor who handles corrections. (corrections@npr.org)

And, so thanks to Norr’s doggedness the correction is on the Web and hopefully, NPR won’t make the same mistake again.

It's a reminder that media activism works.

Another reminder-- Henry Norr was a journalist suspended by the San Francisco Chronicle over his opposition to the Iraq War, as FAIR noted here:

Henry Norr, a technology writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, was suspended without pay by his paper for using a sick day to get arrested at an anti-war protest. According to Norr (Berkeley Daily Planet, 4/1/03), his supervisors knew in advance he would be doing civil disobedience that day. Defending the punishment, Chronicle readers' representative Dick Rogers (4/3/03) noted that subsequent to Norr's suspension, the paper had "strengthened its policy to prohibit public political activity related to the war." Rogers argued that the Chronicle ought to have a sign at its entrance reading, "Check your activism at the door."

I was struck by this December 30 headline at the Huffington Post: "Only 21 Percent Of U.S. Voters Support Net Neutrality."

Really? Well it turns out the poll was conducted by Scott Rasmussen, whose polling has made him a favorite at Fox News Channel. The real story here is that the poll question was clearly cooked up to achieve the desired outcome. As Amy Lee noted near the bottom of the piece,  Rasmussen asked this question: "Should the Federal Communications Commission regulate the Internet like it does radio and television?"

But the FCC's proposed net neutrality rules do not at all resemble regulation of radio and television, which (among other things) requires station owners obtain a government license to broadcast on the public airwaves. Lee writes that the question "defines net neutrality in a very restricted way." But that's putting it way too kindly. The poll is a fraud, and a familiar one. In 2009 Rasmussen did a survey about the Fairness Doctrine, which was debunked here at the FAIR Blog (2/17/09). Rasmussen asked respondents if "the government should require all radio stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary." The Fairness Doctrine never did any such thing, but conservatives have long argued that it would squelch right-wing talk radio. They've been trying to do something similar with net neutrality, scaring people about a supposed government takeover of the internet.