Today's New York Times report (4/25/11) on the WikiLeaks Guantánamo files provides an answer:

The documents show that a major reason a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera, Sami al-Hajj, was held at Guantánamo for six years was for questioning about the television network’s "training program, telecommunications equipment and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan," including contacts with terrorist groups.

The Times' piece is definitely worth reading, though I wish they didn't feel the need to add this type of equivocation:

The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America's most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

This would seem to be true of most policy debates about controversial subjects, so it doesn't seem worth noting.

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.) is used to being celebrated by pundits for his "courageous," "bold," "serious" budget proposals (even though his numbers don't add up). Indeed, Ryan has become a genuine media darling.

So it must have been a little surprising to find himself being booed earlier this week, at a town hall meeting he hosted in his congressional district.

It happened after one attendee at the event, a constituent describing himself as a "life-long conservative" challenged GOP views on income disparity, taxes on the wealthy, and raising the income cap on Social Security taxes:

The middle class is disappearing right now. During this time of prosperity, the top 1 percent was taking about 10 percent of the total annual income, but yet today we are fighting to not let the tax breaks for the wealthy expire? And we're fighting to not raise the Social Security cap from $87,000? I think we're wrong.

The boos came a moment later when Ryan responded insisting, "We do tax that top."

The contrast between the easy ride Ryan's had from professional journalists and the way he was challenged by his constituents demonstrates (once again) the disconnect between pundits and the people they often claim to speak for. (As Think Progress reports, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll "found that 72 percent of Americans wanted Congress to raise taxes on wealthy Americans making more than $250,000 per year.")

In the summer of 2009, the corporate media frequently covered town hall meetings where Democratic politicians were challenged, sometimes even shouted down, by opponents of the party's healthcare initiatives. So far Ryan's awkward town hall moment has created an online buzz, but besides a few mentions on MSNBC (e.g., 4/20/11, 4/22/11) and 0ne Chicago Tribune report, it's received scant corporate media attention.

Renee "McMontagne" brought NPR listeners another McDonald's PR story yesterday morning. On April 5, Montange and her Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep uncritically previewed McDonald's big PR campaign revolving around a one-day hiring blitz to "recast its jobs not as dead-end work, but in ads starring its happy employees as desirable employment" (FAIR Blog, 4/6/11). I noted that McDonald's heiress Joan Kroc gave NPR a 9-figure bequest a few years ago.

Well, Montagne returned to the story yesterday with an on-the-ground report from the scene of a McDonald's hiring event in Philadelphia, where an NPR correspondent interviewed three of those "happy employees" recasting McJobs as, in the words of one of them, "more than just flipping burgers and working on fry. There's a potential for you to come through all the ranks."

What percent of the 50,000 jobs McDonald's is hiring for will be full time? How many will get laid off after the summer rush is over? What are the odds that any of them will actually advance? NPR didn't bother asking. But based on the McDonald's press release that says it will be spending $518 million on the new hires over the coming year, MSNBC.com (4/4/11) pointed out that works out to about $10,000 per worker--which kind of sounds exactly like a typical McJob.

Newsweek's cover story this week is on the plight of college-educated white men aged 35-64. The magazine laments that "this hitherto privileged demo isn't just on its knees, it's flat on on its face." The subhead of the piece asks, "Can manhood survive the lost decade?"

Now, I have much sympathy for all who are struggling with unemployment. But are middle-aged, college-educated white males flat on their face and worthy of a trend cover story? It's hard to square that with the piece's own admission that their jobless rate is just above 5 percent. Most demographic groups would give anything for that kind of unemployment rate; black male college grads last year had an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent, and for blacks as a whole it was a whopping 16 percent. (Notice, too, that the subhead assumes manhood is white.) A search of the Nexis database turns up no Newsweek cover stories on the epidemic of black male unemployment in the last five years.

I would also point out to Newsweek that single white men have a median wealth of nearly $44,000, and married white households have a median wealth of $167,500.  Black married households, by comparison, stand at $31,500, single black men at $7,900, and single black women at $100 (Extra!, 6/10).  When their Beached White Males lose their jobs, they have much more of a safety net to fall back on than pretty much any other demographic. No doubt Newsweek is at least vaguely aware of this--though they're probably more acutely aware that Beached White Males and their employed counterparts also have more money to waste on magazines that feed into their anxieties.

The Sunday New York Times (4/17/11) ran a big front-page piece on John Tanton, founder of the anti-immigration organizations Federation for American Immigration Reform and Center for Immigration Studies. I guess it's positive that someone in corporate media is finally paying attention to Tanton's racism (long documented here at FAIR--1/1/93--and by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center--Winter/08), and reporter Jason DeParle does include a good deal of damning information about Tanton and some of his own racist words.

But he also manages to interview almost exclusively people currently or formerly affiliated with Tanton's groups (six of these people in all) plus a few GOP officials--none of whom have anything bad to say about the Federation, CIS or Numbers USA (another Tanton-connected group), even if they're mildly critical of Tanton himself. A single critic is quoted, Frank Sharry of the progressive immigration reform group America's Voice. The result is that the piece essentially portrays Tanton as the only problem with these anti-immigrant groups, and though they won't kick him off their boards, THEY'RE not actually racist themselves--they just roll their eyes at their racist founder and tolerate his eccentricities.

DeParle explained the trouble with critics of the groups:

Accusations of bigotry could alienate moderates the immigrant rights groups need. Allies of Dr. Tanton say their accusers are discrediting themselves with a guilt-by-association campaign that twists his ideas and projects them onto groups where, they say, his influence long ago waned.

The idea is attributed to allies of Tanton, but that's the basic framing of the entire piece. If critics were given more space, they might have been able to point out that it's not just a Tanton problem--although the fact that he remains on the board of the Federation ought to be plenty damning in itself. As the SPLC documents (3/16/10), the racism at the Federation and CIS extends far beyond Tanton, permeating the board, staff and programming. Mark Krikorian, executive director of CIS, wrote in the National Review Online (1/21/10) that

Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.... Unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn’t stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation, was asked by Tucker Carlson (Wall Street Journal, 10/2/97) to respond to a quote from another Federation board member, eugenicist Garrett Hardin, who had warned that "breeders" were reproducing uncontrollably "in Third World countries," and that the "less intelligent" should be discouraged from "breeding." Stein's response: "Yeah, so what? What is your problem with that? Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?"

Rachel Maddow (MSNBC, 4/29/10) recently confronted Stein with this quote and other evidence of racism at the Federation compiled by the SPLC. Stein claimed that all of the SPLC's factual allegations about his group were wrong. The next night (4/30/10), Maddow factchecked Stein's claims, demonstrating that he, in Maddow's words, "was flat-out, totally shamelessly uncomplicatedly lying."

That's the kind of reporting that needs to be done on Stein and his colleagues.

"Gadhafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas," declares a New York Times headline (4/15/11). The lead of the story makes clear that these weapons are considered in many countries to be illegal:

Military forces loyal to Col. Moammar el-Gadhafi have been firing into residential neighborhoods in this embattled city with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world.

The story, by C.J. Chivers, goes on to explain why these weapons have been banned:

These so-called indiscriminate weapons, which strike large areas with a dense succession of high-explosive munitions, by their nature cannot be fired precisely. When fired into populated areas, they place civilians at grave risk.

Then it gives a graphic description of the human toll of these weapons:

The dangers were evident beside one of the impact craters on Friday, where eight people had been killed while standing in a bread line. Where a crowd had assembled for food, bits of human flesh had been blasted against a cinder-block wall.

And it strongly suggests that the use of cluster bombs deserves to have serious international consequences:

The use of such weapons in these ways could add urgency to the arguments by Britain and France that the alliance needs to step up attacks on the Gadhafi forces, to better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

After all this, the story gets out of the way an awkward fact that complicates this presentation of the use of cluster bombs as proof that Moammar Gadhafi is an international outlaw whose bloodthirstiness must be countered by an intensified military campaign by the civilized world:

At the same time, the United States has used cluster munitions itself, in battlefield situations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in a strike on suspected militants in Yemen in 2009.

Oh--so these "indiscriminate weapons" that "place civilians at grave risk" have been used by the United States as well? But only in "battlefield situations," far from civilians, right? Well, not exactly. The U.S. was criticized by Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs in populated areas in Afghanistan, killing and injuring scores of civilians (Washington Post, 12/18/02). Amnesty International (4/2/03) called the U.S.'s use of cluster bombs in civilian areas of Iraq "a grave violation of international humanitarian law." (See FAIR Action Alert, 5/6/03.) NATO employed cluster bombs in its bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo War, with one attack killing 15 civilians in the town of Nis (BBC, 5/7/99); more than 2,000 unexploded munitions from cluster bombs are estimated to remain on Serbian territory, continuing to endanger civilians (AFP, 3/10/09).

The "suspected militants" attacked by a cluster bomb in Yemen in 2009 turned out to be "21 children and 20 innocent women and men" (NewYorkTimes.com, 12/9/10)--all killed in the U.S. attack.

You can be sure that none of these examples of U.S. use of cluster bombs in civilian areas prompted the New York Times to suggest that they justified military attacks on the United States in order to protect civilians. And you'd be hard-pressed to find any descriptions in the Times of the "bits of human flesh" resulting from any U.S. military action.

As for cluster bombs being "banned in much of the world," that includes Britain. But as WikiLeaks revealed, the U.S. colluded with the British government to circumvent the ban and allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on British soil. WikiLeaks also disclosed that the U.S. has been lobbying for countries to keep cluster bombs legal, arguing that they are "legitimate weapons that provide a vital military capability" (Guardian, 12/1/10).

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank seems to like to mock progressives almost as much as he likes to go after Glenn Beck. So it's no surprise that he turned out to "cover" the unveiling of a budget plan by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (4/13/11).

Milbank seems to think that little explanation is needed--these crazy ideas are just obviously crazy:

Among the highlights: a $4 trillion tax increase over 10 years. An increase in the top tax rate to 49 percent. A $2.3 trillion defense spending cut--and an increase in domestic spending. Oh, and they would revive the "public option" to offer government-run healthcare.

Putting "increase" in italics is Milbank's way of saying, "Can you believe these people?!" And it's worth pointing out that the "public option" isn't "government-run healthcare," but these are details.

He goes to present the nightmare vision of the future:

Still, it gives a sense of how things would be if liberals ran the world: no cuts in Social Security benefits, government-negotiated Medicare drug prices, and increased income and Social Security taxes for the wealthy. Corporations and investors would be hit with a variety of new fees and taxes. And the military would face a shock-and-awe accounting: a 22 percent cut in Army soldiers, 30 percent for the Marines, 20 percent for the Navy and 15 percent for the Air Force. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would end, and weapons programs would go begging.

Keeping Social Security as is, reducing Medicare drug prices, raising taxes on corporations, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... I'm sorry, are these ideas supposed to sound absurd on their face? Someone should tell the people, since much of this would be broadly popular. At least, that seems to be the case when the people are asked what they think.

Better watch our language, though--Milbank points out that this talk about "the people" is a little creepy:

Their oft-repeated slogan, "The People’s Budget," conveyed an unhelpful association with "the people's republic" and other socialist undertakings.

An "unhelpful association" made by the writer. Glenn Beck might be leaving Fox, which might open up some room for others in the media to ferret out the socialists among us.

Tom Friedman, writing today about the Arab Spring (4/13/11--the same column Jim Naureckas critiqued for FAIR Blog here):

Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states.

It's been a while since I've played an organized sport, but if any coach or referee did anything resembling what the U.S. has done in Iraq, they would be removed from the league, and probably put in jail.

That analogy sounded familiar, though. Turns out he's used it before:

Iraq teaches what it takes to democratize a big tribalized Arab country once the iron-fisted leader is removed (in that case by us). It takes billions of dollars, 150,000 U.S. soldiers to referee, myriad casualties, a civil war where both sides have to test each other's power and then a wrenching process, which we midwifed, of Iraqi sects and tribes writing their own constitution defining how to live together without an iron fist. --3/23/11

The U.S. military is still needed as referee. It still is not clear that Iraq is a country that can be held together by anything other than an iron fist. It’s still not clear that its government is anything more than a collection of sectarian fiefs. --6/18/08

It's time to blow the whistle on Friedman for abusive use of analogy.

One thing Thomas Friedman demonstrates over and over is that you don't need to know much to be an expert. Take today's column (New York Times, 4/13/11), which is based around a contrast between the European wave of democratization in 1989 and the current "Arab spring":

Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In Europe, virtually every state was like Germany, a homogenous nation, except Yugoslavia. The Arab world is exactly the opposite. There, virtually every state is like Yugoslavia--except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.

That is to say, in Europe, when the iron fist of Communism was removed, the big, largely homogenous states, with traditions of civil society, were able to move relatively quickly and stably to more self-government--except Yugoslavia, a multiethnic, multireligious country that exploded into pieces.

In the Arab world, almost all these countries are Yugoslavia-like assemblages of ethnic, religious and tribal groups put together by colonial powers--except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, which have big homogeneous majorities. So when you take the lid off these countries, you potentially unleash not civil society but civil war.

Does Friedman remember 1989? Not just Yugoslavia, but also the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia ended up dividing along ethnic lines. In fact, of the 20 formerly Communist nations of Eastern Europe, only five--Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Albania--are not the result of these ethnic splits. And the countries that remain are far from homogeneous, either ethnically or religiously: Latvia is only 59 percent Latvian, Ukraine is 78 percent Ukrainian, Russia is 80 percent Russian, Moldova is 78 percent Moldovan (and involved in a secession battle with the other 22 percent). And so on. (I get these figures from the CIA World Fact Book--handily available online for use by columnists and media critics alike!) Even Germany, which is Friedman's model of homogeneity, is just 92 percent German.

As an example of the lack of homogeneity of the Middle East, Friedman cites Saudi Arabia as being 90 percent Sunni and 10 percent Shi'ite Muslim. Compare that with supposedly monolithic Bulgaria--83 percent Bulgarian Orthodox, 12 percent Muslim. Or, for that matter, with Egypt, which Friedman says had an easy transition from authoritarianism because it's an exception to the region's multiculturalism--yet has a Christian Coptic minority that makes up 9 percent of the population.

Friedman starts off his column with an anecdote about an Egyptian hotel worker who, when she finds out he works for the New York Times, asks him, "Are we going to be OK?" I'd advise her to ask the next guest who checks in at random--she's almost certainly going to an opinion that's at least as well-informed.

Corrected: Replaced a "Christian" that should have been "Muslim."

From a Q&A with NPR ombud Alicia Shepard (CJR, 4/11/11):

I also got a call last week from Ralph Nader. He was saying how NPR is really just a corporate toady, and that they don't have enough progressive voices on, and I hear that quite a bit. I hear that more from people who actually listen to NPR.

Funny how that works.

ABC reporter Jonathan Karl clarifies the budget stalemate that nearly shut down the federal government (ABC World News, 4/7/11):

KARL: And believe it or not, the issue of abortion could be what causes the government to shut down.

GRAPHICS: DEMOCRATS CLAIM

KARL: Democrats say Republicans are trying to use the funding bill to force new restrictions on abortion rights.

GRAPHICS: REPUBLICANS CLAIM

KARL: But Republicans say they are simply trying to restrict public funding of abortion.

"Democrats say, Republicans say." ABC could save money and program a computer to do this.

Later Karl said this:

Today, House Republicans did pass a bill that could keep the government funded for the next week and fund the Pentagon for the rest of the year. But Democrats say that they will oppose it. Again, Diane, because it includes restrictions on public funding of abortion.

As plenty of people have noted--see Katha Pollitt-- federal money does not go to Planned Parenthood to pay for abortion services, which constitute a very small part of the group's work. Though the Republicans would like to say that abortion is what they're fighting over, the debate is actually about funding Planned Parenthood, period.

So Jonathan Karl manages to do useless "he said, she said" reporting, and then goes on to mislead viewers about the actual issue being debated. A computer program might actually do a better job.

NBC anchor David Gregory on NBC Nightly News (4/9/11) explaining how sees Obama's 2012 strategy:

And I thought what was striking about what the president said, if you listen to his comments made Friday night, he sounded very much like a Republican talking about the need to cut spending. That's the re-election play here. He wants the American people to know, particularly those independent voters, that he is in line with what a lot of Americans want, which is less government, trimming down the size and the scope of government. He wants to be able to say, "Look, I brought the sides together, I averted the shutdown, and I'm on board with cutting government spending." That's the message he wants to drive next year.

You could have a good argument about whether Obama is really behaving like a Republican. But to me the more revealing part is that Gregory seems to believes this is a wise political strategy, based on his notion that this is what voters want.

As we've pointed out before, public opinion polls indicate that voters mostly want someone to do something about jobs. The media believe that the public wants spending cuts--an idea, generally speaking, that is more in line with conservative or Republican ideology.  Thus, a Democrat who embraces budget cuts will be portrayed as one doing what the public wants--no matter what the public actually wants.

This is, of course, the very same media that will be covering the 2012 election.

While the Fukushima nuclear disaster has gotten plenty of attention on network programming, the debate has consistently overlooked the most fundamental question of whether nuclear power can be harnessed safely (FAIR Blog, 3/14/11). In asking why this question remains muted, a look at their boards of directors reveals that all three major broadcast networks share at least two members with companies that produce or transmit nuclear energy.

With nuclear powerhouse General Electric as co-owner of NBC, it's not surprising that GE's CEO Jeffery Immelt and CFO Keith Sherin both sit as directors on the network's board. But it's not the only network whose board has nuclear energy connections: ABC's directors include a representative from Halliburton as well as from Edison Mission Energy. Not to be outdone, CBS, a former subsidiary of the energy giant Westinghouse, seats three board members from the nuclear energy industry's Southern Company, NSTAR and Consolidated Edison.

Can nuclear power be harnessed safely? The livelihood of these network board members depends on answering the question in the affirmative.

Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune writes:

One estimate has 8,000 TV and radio reporters and support staff from around the world in London covering the nuptials. CNN alone is said to be sending 50 U.S. staffers to complement 75 from its London bureau.

It's bound to be better television than the federal government's budget negotiations. In any case, it provides a momentary diversion from the Middle East, Japan and whatever the next crisis turns out to be.

"There are a lot of other more important stories going on in the world. That's clear," said Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC World News." "But it's nice every once in a while to cover a story where nobody gets hurt. It's a celebration."

This would seem like an obviously obscene waste of time and resources, with no plausible journalistic rationale.

Then again, as someone who has to watch the corporate media more closely than most, it's worth pointing out that there's very little news on the TV news anyway. Behold the results of an actual Nexis search of nightly newscasts:

Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding guestlist
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 422 words

Bob Dylan performs in China and Vietnam
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 132 words

Verdict may come tomorrow in Barry Bonds perjury trial
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 337 words

Gas prices continue to rise
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 59 words

Wildfires in Texas
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 47 words

New theory about serial killer on Long Island
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 402 words

Tiger Woods comes on strong at the Masters
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 144 words

Japan citizens frustrated in aftermath of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster find an escape in baseball
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 332 words

To be fair, there were some stories of actual substance.

And there was also this:

Results of peanut butter sandwich contest
NBC News Transcripts, April 10, 2011 Sunday, 418 words

A headline in yesterday's New York Times (4/10/11):

Violence Rises as Israel and Hamas Trade Blows

This "blow trading" has resulted in 18 deaths, all in Gaza--roughly half civilians and half militants. On the Israeli side, one boy was seriously injured. The Times account tells us:

The Israeli military said that if civilians were hit, it was because militants shot from among them.

But the deaths on Friday of 19-year-old Nidal Qudeh, who was studying to be a medical secretary, and her mother, Najah, 40, outside the southeastern city of Khan Yunis did not fit that pattern, witnesses said.

It would be difficult to imagine how to present such fighting as somehow "balanced," but the Times manages to pull it off.

In a story in today's Times (4/11/11), Isabel Kershner presents the timeline of the current violence, which--as is often the case--we're told began with an attack from the Palestinian side:

The most recent escalation began when the military wing of Hamas fired a Kornet antitank missile at the school bus from a distance of about two miles. It was the first time the group used an advanced, laser-guided weapon against a civilian target.

To make things more confusing, the very next paragraph would seem to undermine that:

Hamas said the attack was meant to avenge Israel's killing of three of the group's militants on April 2, an act that Hamas said violated an earlier cease-fire.

That would suggest that the "escalation" did not begin with a Hamas attack, but with an Israeli attack that broke a week-long cease-fire. But, as FAIR once pointed out, "In U.S. Media, Palestinians Attack, Israel Retaliates."