MSNBC host has been receiving praise for going after his NBC bosses--as the L.A. Times noted today (4/29/11):

MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell escalated attacks on NBC executives this week. On his MSNBC show the Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell Wednesday night, he accused NBC (another division of his own company) of allowing the Celebrity Apprentice host Donald Trump to spread "racist" lies against President Obama in demanding that Obama produce his long-form birth certificate....

"NBC has created a monster who is using his NBC fame to spew hatred reeking with racist overtones and undertones," O'Donnell said on his show.

This isn't the first time O'Donnell has done something like this--remember that when the news surfaced about GE's tax avoidance, O'Donnell slammed the company--which still owns a hefty chunk of NBC.

O'Donnell recently did an interview with Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast, where he expressed frustration with the cable television game and said, "I can't look up and imagine myself doing this for three years."

At this rate, he might not have to worry about hanging around that long.

The New York Times' David Kirkpatrick filed a report today (4/29/11) on one apparent problem with the move towards democracy in Egypt--the country might pursue policies more in line with what the Egyptian public supports. The most important news here is that Egypt doesn't want to maintain a blockade on its border with Gaza. In the Times, this news is filtered through the perspective of Israel-- thus the headline:

In Shift, Egypt Warms to Iran and Hamas, Israel's Foes

And then there is this  description of the crippling economic blockade that was enforced with the help of the Mubarak regime:

Israel had relied on Egypt's help to police the border with Gaza, where arms and other contraband were smuggled to Hamas through tunnels.

The blockade was about far more than that: blocking access to food, medicine and construction material necessary to rebuild what Israel destroyed in the recent war. (See Extra!, "Gaza's Ongoing Crisis Is Not News," 8/10.)

The Israeli government would like people to think blockading Gaza is just about weapons and tunnels contraband; the New York Times is doing its part to help that effort.

The San Francisco Chronicle is apparently in trouble with the White House for posting video of a protest against the White House's treatment of suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning. The Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead reports:

The White House threatened Thursday to exclude the San Francisco Chronicle from pooled coverage of its events in the Bay Area after the paper posted a video of a protest at a San Francisco fundraiser for President Obama last week, Chronicle editor Ward Bushee said. White House guidelines governing press coverage of such events are too restrictive, Bushee said, and the newspaper was within its rights to film the protest and post the video.

Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci was the designated "pool" reporter at an Obama fundraiser--meaning that her write-up would be shared with other reporters who were not allowed into the event.

But something truly newsworthy happened--and she reported it:

At the St. Regis event, a group of protesters who paid collectively $76,000 to attend the fundraiser interrupted Obama with a song complaining about the administration's treatment of PFC Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked U.S. classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.

As part of a "print-only pool," Marinucci was limited by White House guidelines to provide a print-only report, but Marinucci also took a video of the protest, which she posted in her written story on the online edition of the Chronicle at SFGate.com and on its politics blog after she sent her written pool report.

The Chronicle's story closes with this ironic point about the White House's view of technology and information-sharing:

At Facebook the day before the San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said, "The main reason we wanted to do this is, first of all, because more and more people, especially young people, are getting their information through different media. And obviously, what all of you have built together is helping to revolutionize how people get information, how they process information, how they're connecting with each other."

Apparently Marinucci posting a video was a little too much revolutionizing.

Is the Washington Post hoping readers only read headlines? At a glance, "Study: KIPP Charter Schools Have Extra Edge" (3/31/11) would seem to be just another in the Washington Post Co.'s toutings of charter schools in general and KIPP schools in particular (Extra!, 9/10)

Readers who actually click through though, might be surprised to learn what the "edge" consists of: A study by researchers at Western Michigan University found that the KIPP network "benefits from significant private funding and student attrition." Students receive more than $5,000 a year per pupil through private donations on top of regular sources of public funding; and the roughly 15 percent of KIPP students that leave each year are often not replaced. To the extent that these schools 'outperform' regular public schools, says the study’s author, "they're not doing it with the same students, and they're not doing it with the same dollars."

This is of course extremely relevant given that KIPP schools are often held up as a model, at least for some people's kids: "Every low-income school should be measured by how close it gets to that model, where kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and part of the summer," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter once explained (7/21/08), though he couldn't explain why rich kids wouldn't also benefit from a longer day than most adults spend at work.

It's interesting how, even while reporting research that should complicate the issue,  the Post still leaves undisturbed the thumbnail of the charter network as "known for lifting the achievements of poor children."  (KIPP, for its part, renounced the study, citing "flaws in the data" the paper left unspecified.)

Of course, the Post is, you might say, institutionally invested in such a portrayal. Washington Post Co. chair Donald Graham is on the board of trustees of KIPP's D.C. branch. Owners of test prep company Kaplan Inc. since 1984, the Post Co. is mostly an education company itself these days; Graham announced the rebranding in 2007, which he said reflected "the rise of Kaplan Inc. within the company and the decline of its flagship newspaper." Stories like this one encourage readers to question how interrelated those two phenomena may be.

A USA Today headline (4/28/11):

Americans, Here and There, Get Swept Up by the Royal Wedding

Much further down in the piece, evidence of that sweeping feeling:

Polls initially indicated that most Americans were underwhelmed by the royal nuptials, but interest has spiked as the wedding day nears. U.S. media outlets are publishing twice the amount of coverage as the British media, according to a new Nielsen study.

So people don't care about it, but the media care a lot--which is evidence of, well, something.

And more on that:

Jane Seymour, the actress-turned-correspondent for ET, says she hasn't met anyone in London who's apathetic about the wedding.

"This is completely insane," says the British-born Seymour. "I think there's nothing else happening in the world because all the media are here. I find it quite fun."

If all the media are in one place, there must be nothing else happening in the world--that pretty much says it all.

Some mystical power forces the corporate media to cover Donald Trump.

In the New York Times today:

But White House officials concluded about a month ago that the falsehoods had moved from "the nether regions of the Internet" into the mainstream political arena, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mr. Trump, the real estate developer and reality television host who has used the issue as a media magnet.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post elaborated on the PBS NewsHour:

I mean, I think that the press probably does bear some responsibility for this but there's no question that what Donald Trump had done over the last month, in bringing this issue back to the forefront, at a time when I think most people thought it had been pretty well settled politically, not that--not that there wasn't still some controversy, but that, for the most part, this wasn't a live issue.

But Donald Trump helped to make it a live issue. And all the press coverage attendant to that, some of it aimed at debunking what Donald Trump was saying, nonetheless contributed to this atmosphere.

"Issues" are not brought "to the forefront" and made a "live issue" by some series of accidents, or the physical properties of magnets. Media outlets make decisions about what to cover.  In Balz's world, Trump started talking and the press simply had to cover it. Trump didn't make anything a "live issue"--people who have television stations and newspapers decided to treat him as if he is a serious person.

The New York Times's Michael Shear (4/27/11) has this odd reference to Ron Paul's presidential campaign:

Surveys suggest that Mr. Paul’s support remains low. In most recent polls, Mr. Paul receives just over 5 percent of the support from potential Republican voters. That is similar to the level of support he received in contests four years ago, when he served mostly as a foil for discussion during the debates.

It's not clear what Shear's criteria for "low" polling is--according to Real Clear Politics, Paul averages 6 percent in recent polls, within three or four points of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, who get considerably more media attention. Paul in turn is doing 3 or 4 points better than candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels, who are certainly treated as serious prospects in media discussions.

And I'm not sure what a "foil for discussion" is,  but I'm guessing they're referring to the debate where Ron Paul said something completely uncontroversial at a debate, and Giuliani scored a "home run" by misrepresenting his point--to the delight of the media.

From a FAIR Media Advisory (5/31/07):

But the second Republican debate (5/15/07) flipped this media script, when Republican candidate Ron Paul dared to raise a taboo subject: Al-Qaeda's statements about the September 11 attacks. "They attack us because we've been over there, we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years," Paul said. "We've been in the Middle East.... Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?"

GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani responded by saying he'd never heard such an "absurd explanation" for the September 11 attacks, "that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq"—a response that got sustained applause from the audience, and much the same from the press corps.

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball (5/16/07), Washington Post editorial board member Jonathan Capehart called it "a big moment, a home run for Rudy.... I knew that what Rudy was saying was heartfelt, and he meant it, because, when you look at his eyes, you have never seen him more serious, more focused." Capehart added that Giuliani "was upset. He was angry. And I think he tapped into not only the mood of the crowd, but also the mood of the country, in a sense."

The media reacted strongly in support of Giuliani. Fox News Channel's John Gibson scored a twofer (5/17/07) by mangling Paul's words ("Paul suggested that the U.S. actually had a hand in the terrorist attacks") and then linking him to the Democratic Party, citing a poll that claims many Democrats "think President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand.... It wouldn't have stunned me had it come up in the Democratic debate, but it's a jaw-dropper to see it in the Republican debate." Time magazine's Joe Klein declared it to be Paul's "singular moment of weirdness," and that Giuliani "reduced Paul to history."

Lost amidst the media excitement over Giuliani's response was whether or not Paul was correct. The Nation's John Nichols wrote a column (5/16/07) pointing out that Paul's argument more or less echoed the findings of the 9/11 Commission, which noted that Osama bin Laden had called in 1996 for Muslims to drive U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia--whose mission there was largely to support air patrols over Iraq--and that subsequent statements rallied followers to oppose U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine and Iraq. Such discussions are common in academic and policy circles, but not so in the mainstream media.

Such evidence was rarely even considered. MSNBC host Chris Matthews declared (5/16/07), "Ron Paul has a big problem, by the way." While Matthews granted that it was important for Americans to "understand the simmering hatred and the hostility, the sea of hostility, over there," Paul's comments were unacceptable on factual grounds: "You can't say it's because we put troops in Iraq, over the no-fly zone, because they tried to blow up that same building back in '93, before all these skirmishes over the no-fly zone. You can't say that particular argument."

Paul actually made no reference to the no-fly zones in his debate remarks. But if that's what Matthews thought Paul was referring to, the cable news host should be aware that the no-fly policy was first declared in 1991, and that there was an extensive series of air raids in support of the no-fly zones in January 1993--a month before the 1993 attack.

When Paul convened a press conference on May 24 at the National Press Club featuring former CIA terrorism expert Michael Scheurer, the press ignored the event, although reporters have interviewed Scheurer regularly for several years. The fact that Scheurer essentially agrees with Paul's premise, as he explained to AntiWar radio (5/18/07), might explain the media's ambivalence.

CNN host Howard Kurtz (5/20/07) slammed Paul's "unorthodox theory" about the 9/11 attacks, declaring that "news organizations are allowing ego-driven fringe candidates to muck up debates among those with an actual shot at the White House." The real problem isn't that Ron Paul can't win the White House, or that he might "muck up" a debate; if anything, he started a debate the media don't want to have.

Today the New York Times describes the state of the war in Libya:

WASHINGTON — NATO plans to step up attacks on the palaces, headquarters and communications centers that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi uses to maintain his grip on power in Libya, according to Obama administration and allied officials.

This "more energetic bombing campaign" included "a separate raid on Monday that temporarily knocked Libyan state television off the air."

As the Times' Thom Shanker and David Sanger explain:

Officials in Europe and Washington said the strikes were meant to reduce the Libyan government’s ability to harm civilians by eliminating, link by link, the command-and-communications and supply chains that are required for military operations.

That is obviously the justification you're going to hear from the people doing the bombing. Legally speaking, you are supposed to bomb targets that provide some military function--otherwise the attacks could be war crimes. Whether state television provides some concrete military advantage that would make journalists a legitimate target is a topic media outlets should discuss, for obvious reasons. But the Times seems willing to let the U.S./NATO explanations stand on their own.

But a more revealing admission comes later in the piece, when the Times talks about Kosovo and the lessons it teaches us about Libya:

Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded United States Air Force units in Europe during the Kosovo campaign, recalled that allied "air power was getting its paper graded on the number of tanks killed"--even though taking out armored vehicles one by one was never going to halt "ethnic cleansing."

So NATO began to hit high-profile institutional targets in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, instead of forces in the field. Although they were legitimate military targets, General Jumper said, destroying them also had the effect of undermining popular support for the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic.

"It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade, and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that Milosevic's own people began to turn on him," General Jumper said.

A military official is explaining that attacking certain civilian infrastructure can help to achieve a desired political outcome. That would seem to meet the conventional definition of terrorism, as violence directed against civilians for political ends.  It's not that is new information--NATO airstrikes in Belgrade were intended to harm civilians, and pundits cheered as this happened. But if the point is that the war in Libya is going to be more like Kosovo, this is disturbing.

Washington Post editorialist Lee Hockstader wrote a puff profile on Haiti's thuggish President-elect Michel Martelly ("Haiti's 'Sweet Micky' Martelly Turns Presidential," 4/24/11), whom he depicts as

a fresh, vital force on the political scene, bringing with him energy and a new (mostly untested) crop of advisers, unbeholden to any recent political establishment. Little wonder that in the runoff election, Martelly, who is 50, beat a professorial 70-year-old former first lady 2 to 1.

How can you write about Martelly's run-off "victory" without noting that both rounds of the election had historically low turnout--not just for Haiti, but for the Western Hemisphere? According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (4/5/11), which follows Haiti closely, Martelly "won only 4.6 percent of the electorate in the first round and 16.7 percent in the second round." There is indeed "little wonder" that even a candidate with ties to the bloody Duvalier dictatorship who promises to restore the hated Haitian army can get that much support.

Speaking of Duvalier, Hockstader includes the usual spurious equation of the dictator with twice-deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, calling both "divisive former presidents who have recently returned to Haiti from exile and who might face prosecution." In the most recent election he was allowed to participate in, Aristide got 92 percent of the vote with a 68 percent turnout. So who's really the "divisive" president?
UPDATE: The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization, calculated the turnout for the 2000 election at 78 percent, which may be a more accurate number.

Today the Drudge Report (4/26/11) screams:

SHOCK POLL: ONLY 38% SAY OBAMA 'DEFINITELY' BORN IN USA

The all-caps headline links to a USA Today story that quotes that 38 percent figure, courtesy of a new Gallup poll.

For the record, the poll also asked respondents the same question about Donald Trump. Forty-three percent say they are definitely sure he was born in the United States.

Working in a time-honored corporate media genre (Extra!,  9-10/97, 9-10/05, 7/10), the Washington Post's Edward Cody (4/24/11) tells us that Europe just can't afford its generous social programs:

From blanket health insurance to long vacations and early retirement, the cozy social benefits that have been a way of life in Western Europe since World War II increasingly appear to be luxuries the continent can no longer afford.

Lest you think "appear" provides some wiggle room, Cody makes clear that, no, he's talking about objective truth here:

In the new reality, workers have been forced to accept salary freezes, decreased hours, postponed retirements and healthcare reductions.

Some people, of course, haven't gotten the message yet:

Many Europeans, particularly in left-wing political parties and labor unions, have interpreted the new winds as a triumph for ruthless free-market extremists who want to protect private wealth from higher taxes and as an aberration that can be undone by electing governments that are more worker-friendly. But many others, resigned to the new reality of globalization, have come to view the shift as the end of a golden era, perhaps never to be revived.

Note the reoccurrence of that handy word "reality." Hard to argue with reality, isn't it?

But let's give it a try. Cody's piece is largely about France, a place "emblematic of Europe’s social advances." In France in 1960--well after World War II--the per capita gross domestic product was $7,482 (in 2000 U.S. dollars). In 2009, it was $22,820--roughly three times as much. The obvious question: Why is a country no longer able to afford the social safety net it had when it was one-third as wealthy? That's a reality the Washington Post is not interested in exploring.

The New York Times and London Guardian both published stories yesterday (4/25/11) examining the WikiLeaks documents about the Guantanamo prison. While obviously just a snapshot, it is interesting to see how the papers have headlined their findings.

The Guardian:

The New York Times:

And today the Times stresses the potential danger allegedly posed by those imprisoned there:

This is not to suggest that the Times' pieces are particularly bad. But the difference in emphasis is striking--and reminiscent of how differently the papers treated previous WikiLeaks disclosures.

At his Beat the Press blog (4/23/11), Dean Baker caught this in the L.A. Times (4/23/11):

Congress is on its first recess since Republican leaders unveiled a plan to end the federal deficit by dramatically changing Medicare, cutting other government programs and reducing taxes.

As Baker points out, what the paper is referring to--the Paul Ryan budget proposal--does not "end the federal deficit." As he put it:

This is like saying they had a plan to fly to moon because they said they would build a rocket. The whole point is the specifics. How would they build a rocket? How would they raise taxes to meet their revenue targets?

But someone at the L.A. Times seems to like Paul Ryan's budget--at least judging by the unusually flattering (and misleading) descriptions of it that have appeared in the paper recently.

On April 11, the Times reported:

Ryan's 2012 budget proposed major changes to the longstanding federal programs.

For Medicare, seniors would receive a stipend to buy insurance on the private market. Analysts expect it would raise individual out-of-pocket health costs while making federal costs more stable and predictable.

Stabilizing costs--well, that's one way to put it. Making poor seniors pay much more for their healthcare in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy--that's another way.

About a week earlier (4/5/11), the L.A. Times debuted the Ryan budget this way:

The budget resolution unveiled Tuesday by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) would dramatically improve the nation's overall fiscal picture, reducing deficits projected in President Obama's budget and moving the federal government into surplus by 2040, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

As FAIR noted, one should be wary of claims about what the Congressional Budget Office is saying about the Ryan plan--Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post explained why:

The Post's Kessler, however, reports that this claim "seriously overstates the case," since the CBO analysis "reflects the scenarios that Ryan has concocted. There are, for instance, no real revenue estimates, just an assumption that federal revenues will remain at about 19 percent of GDP." The spending cuts imagined by Ryan are equally implausible--a "bare-bones government...not experienced since before the Great Depression."

The first role of the corporate press in an election cycle is to weed out candidates who they deem nonviable. This usually means choosing not to cover candidates whose ideas that fall outside the Beltway conventional wisdom (e.g., Dennis Kucinich), or those who reporters decide  have no real chance of winning the nomination.

The speculation that reality TV star/mogul Donald Trump might run in 2012 flips the narrative around--and demonstrates the fact that the media can change the "rules" whenever they want. Trump is extremely unlikely to actually run, and his "ideas" mostly revolve around a long-debunked conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born where he was born. So by any normal standard he would get no coverage. But he's perhaps the dominant feature of the early campaign coverage, making a string of television appearances that a supposedly marginal candidate would never enjoy.

What gives? Some reporters have tried to find ways to explain why this is so, or at least justify the attention. Take Dan Balz in the Washington Post (4/24/11):

The New York businessman has grabbed headlines with his provocative remarks on President Obama's birthplace. He continues to question whether the president was born in Hawaii, despite ample evidence that he was. But what he has had to say about real issues deserves as much attention as his "birther" comments.

I wish he were saying that since Trump's birtherism deserves no coverage,  his thoughts about "real issues" deserve the same.

But Balz seems to be arguing that since Trump's nutty conspiracy-mongering  makes news, his other ideas deserve to make news too.  All this coming from a guy no one seems to think has any intention of actually mounting a serious campaign. This is an extremely odd justification, at odds with the normal rules of Beltway journalism.

Amidst this backdrop, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas will apparently announce his intention today to run in 2012. He was a candidate in 2008 that media mostly left out of their campaign coverage, despite the fact that he had a core of dedicated volunteers and an impressive ability to raise money (one of the things that media normally treat as very important).

Ron Paul is, in other words, was an actual candidate, and is likely to be one again. But will he enjoy even a tiny fraction of the coverage given to Donald Trump? Don't bet on it.

Readers of the Washington Post can see this headline in today's edition (4/25/11) about the U.S. drone airstrikes:

Debates Underway on Combat Drones

But there is no actual debate in the article. Reporter Walter Pincus cites a British military study that calls the use of missile-firing drones "a genuine revolution in military affairs," adding that the "use of unmanned aircraft prevents the potential loss of aircrew lives and is thus in itself morally justified."

Pincus goes on to explain:

At a Washington conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last week, the issue of drones was also widely discussed.

That "wide discussion" would seem to have involved drone proponents from the CIA and the military. Those quoted by the Post were:

--"Lt. Col. Bruce Black, program manager for the Air Force Predator and Reaper aircraft."

--"former CIA director Michael V. Hayden," who explained that drone pilots "can call up computer maps that show the potential effects of each weapon." Hayden explained that teams can ask for an attack's likely impact on the ground--which is apparently called "the bug splat."

--"Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, former Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," who apparently talked about "potential problems with public perceptions."

--"Col. Dean Bushey, deputy director of the Air Force Joint Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center," who explained that drone pilots train like conventional pilots.

There are plenty of questions to ask about a government policy of assassination by remote-controlled drone aircraft--including whether or not this is even legal. The Post's "debate" would seem to exclude anyone who doesn't think this is a sound policy.