New York Times reporter Rod Norland (5/29/11) gave readers a lighter look at the war in Libya from rebel-controlled Benghazi. Some versions of the story were actually headlined, "In Benghazi, Warmth for West Doesn't Come from Burning Flags"--which pretty well captures the tone of the piece.

Norland observes:

Americans and, for that matter, all Westerners are treated hereabouts with a warmth and gratitude rarely seen in any Muslim country--even those with 100,000 American troops--in probably half a century or more.

I'm not sure there's a reliable survey of Muslim hospitality, but the idea that even Iraqis or Afghans aren't fond of Americans despite our massive military presence in their countries--well, that's pretty close to Bill O'Reilly territory.

He also writes:

The pizza, too, is respectable, especially at Pisa Pizza in Benghazi, where the pies are about a yard in diameter. Proof that Italian colonialism accomplished something after all.

Funny! You know what else the Italian occupation accomplished? Concentration camps, death and disease. But it's harder to milk those things for laughs.

On Sunday George Will wrote a strong Washington Post column about Obama, the  Libya War and the law:

In a bipartisan cascade of hypocrisies, a liberal president, with the collaborative silence of most congressional conservatives, is traducing the War Powers Resolution.

Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon's veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it.

"Liberals are situational ethicists regarding presidential warmaking," Will explained, going on to suggest that George W. Bush would have been treated much differently than Obama. And Will had harsh words for John McCain:

"No president," says Sen. John McCain, "has ever recognized the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and neither do I. So I don’t feel bound by any deadline." Oh? No law is actually a law if presidents and senators do not "recognize" it? Now, there is an interesting alternative to judicial review, and an indicator of how executive aggrandizement and legislative dereliction of duty degrade the rule of law.

So liberals are inconsistent, and John McCain is making an absurd argument about the Act being unconstitutional.

George Will's record on the War Powers Act, though, has been all over the map (not unlike his position--or positions--on the filibuster). Here's where he seems to have started:

September 15, 1983:

President Nixon was wrong to veto the War Powers Act, which Congress passed over his veto in 1973. A veto was too good for it. He should have mailed it back to Capitol Hill unsigned, with postage due, and with a note saying that although it always is entertaining to read Congress' opinions about constitutional construction, the Constitution clearly vests in the president the power to control the armed forces.

November 11, 1984:

Repeal of the War Powers Act. It is unwieldy, unclear and clearly unconstitutional as a derogation of the responsibilities of the commander in chief vested in the presidency and exercised by most occupants of that office. No president has yet quite complied with the act. Repeal would be the straightforward approach.

During the run up to the first Gulf War (11/15/90), Will seemed to be softening a bit, but his take still seemed pretty clear:

The War Powers Act is of dubious constitutionality and cumbersome formality, and the president's war of nerves with Iraq should not be undercut by a clock controlling when Congress must ratify or reject Desert Shield.

And then something seemed to switch. Under the headline "McCain's Honest Passion," Will expressed fondness (5/9/99) for McCain's anti-War Powers position during the Yugoslavia war, where he called on Bill Clinton to embrace his executive authority and wage as wide a war as he deemed necessary--including using U.S. ground forces.  The House of Representatives, on the other hand, wasn't so supportive--some Republicans cited the War Powers Act to oppose Clinton's bombing.

McCain was, in Will's estimation, getting things right:

McCain said he found himself in the "curious" but "not unexpected" position of defending the president's constitutional authority without the president's support. Although McCain thought his resolution constitutionally redundant, he offered it "in the forlorn hope that the president would take courage from it, and find the resolve to do his duty." Said McCain, "The president does not want the power he possesses by law because the risks inherent in its exercise have paralyzed him."

A week earlier the House, with an incoherence produced by the timidity of careerists, voted against declaring war, against supporting the air war, against withdrawal of U.S. forces, against use of ground troops without congressional approval and against stopping what they will not support. Many House Republicans embraced what McCain considers the War Powers Act's unconstitutional presumptions about the limits on presidential war-making.

Will went on to argue that "many House Republicans, claiming an authority Congress neither possesses constitutionally nor cares to exercise, embraced the Act."

Like George Will said, liberals need to figure out where they stand on the War Powers Act. Otherwise they just seem wildly inconsistent.

Newsweek has a new piece wondering why it is that the United States doesn't seem to muster protest movements like we're seeing in Europe and in a number of Arab countries.

The headline and image on their website:

If you read that caption you see that protest happened on March 12* May 12-- one of several mass mobilizations that have attracted almost no corporate media attention--a subject we discussed on CounterSpin last week with journalist Allison Kilkenny, who's been covering them for a variety of independent outlets.

Yes, there could certainly be a sensible discussion about why the political system in the United States discourages citizen activism. But there's something strange about using an image from a rather sizable demonstration in New York City to accompany a story about why there are so few sizable demonstrations in this country.

*Date corrected-- the Newsweek caption had it wrong, and I repeated their error.

There was some Congressional debate over extending certain parts of the Patriot Act last week-- this Institute for Public Accuracy release is a helpful guide to some of the criticisms of the Act.

But don't let anyone tell you there wasn't much coverage of this. On Friday, NBC Nightly News skipped reporting on what was at stake and went right for what really matters:

May 27, 2011 Friday

BRIAN WILLIAMS, anchor:

Back in D.C., a four-year extension of the revised Patriot Act passed by Congress was signed into law minutes before midnight last night. You would be correct to ask, with the president overseas, how exactly did he sign the bill in Washington. Well, by machine, the so-called autopen used by about the last dozen U.S. presidents. They sign their name initially by hand onto a template, then the machine recreates it countless number of times exactly, and in this case the signature had the force of law.

Civil liberties? No thanks--I just want to know about the President's magic pen.

According to Tim Dickinson's new piece in Rolling Stone, Fox honcho Roger Ailes lives in fear of "those gays":

Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox's second floor at 1211  Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was  close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to  attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing a demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having "bombproof glass" installed in the windows--even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. "They'll be down there protesting," Ailes said. "Those gays."

And also Muslims (or janitors who look like they could be Muslim):

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home--in the aptly named village of Garrison--is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: "We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox's offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive 'the package.' The package is taken in, and I'm taken on to my destination."

Ailes is certain that he's a top target of Al-Qaeda terrorists. "You know, they're coming to get me," he tells friends. "I'm fully prepared. I've taken care of it." (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.)

Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. "What the hell!" Ailes shouted. "This guy could be bombing me!" The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. "Roger tore up the whole floor," recalls a source close to Ailes. "He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim--which is consistent with the ideology of his network."

It's a good thing he doesn't run his cable news channel based on this sort of paranoia and fear-mongering.

A good friend of FAIR happened to catch this segment on MSNBC.

Turns out it was a false alarm; the noted Peace Prize winner was a guest, talking about another war criminal.

NPR ombud Alicia Shepard has a piece (5/25/11) about internal discomfort with a recent $1.8 million grant from the George Soros-connected Open Society Foundation.

Shepard writes:

The money is for a worthy purpose.

NPR is using the two-year grant as seed money to start a local-national initiative, known as the Impact on Government project. Eventually, the plan is to have two public radio reporters in every state keeping tabs on state government issues that are woefully under-reported by the media. This is to be a multi-media project for radio, the Web and social media.

It's hard to argue against the need for more vigorous coverage of statehouse issues. Corporate-owned media are not likely to do this, so local public radio would seem like a good fit.

Shepard writes that some NPR journalists are uncomfortable with taking money from a foundation tied to someone with well-known political views. Shepard cites one:

"I do have problems with it precisely because he is so left wing and were he on the other side I would still have problems with it," said a long-time NPR producer. "I don't have a problem with people supporting particular causes but I do have a problem when obvious partisanship spills over into your support of those causes."

Shepard seems to share the unease, writing that having other funders for the project would help alleviate perception problems:

Diversification of funders would go a long way toward diluting any suspicions about a Soros connection. The sooner NPR can provide a varied list of funders for this project, the quicker valid concerns about perceptions and reality will diminish--if not go away.

If the goal is to quiet the critics on the right, who have made a lot of noise about the Soros money, then having a few other funders is not likely to matter.

But it's worth pointing out the fact NPR gets a lot of money from major (and not so major) corporations. If the problem with Soros funding is that his politics might affect the journalistic product, are similar worries expressed about NPR's connections to this (very partial) list of corporate donors listed in NPR's 2009 annual report?  If not, why not? Many of them have political agendas they pursue in Washington and elsewhere.

American Express Company

America's Natural Gas Alliance

Anheuser-Busch

Bank of America

BP

Caterpillar

Citibank

Constellation Energy Group

Dow Chemical Company

General Motors Company

Georgia-Pacific

IBM Corporation

MasterCard Worldwide

Microsoft Corporation

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney

Toyota Motor Corporation

University of Phoenix

Wells Fargo Advisors

MSNBC host Ed Schultz has been suspended without pay for a week for calling right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut" on his radio show. Schultz apologized on MSNBC last night, calling his words "terribly vile."

This is not a new thing at MSNBC.  In 2006, Keith Olbermann did a bit about Paris Hilton being assaulted--joking that she has "had worse things happen to her face."  The on-screen graphic was "A Slut and Battery." In 2009 he called right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

Every so often reports surface about the Justice Department's prosecution of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling--often due to the government's attempts to convince New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about his interactions with Sterling. The Times reported on the latest such efforts yesterday (5/25/11):

Federal prosecutors are trying to force the author of a book on the CIA to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about the agency's effort to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.

Such efforts to get journalists to testify often lead media outlets to champion their First Amendment rights and the necessity of protecting valuable sources (though, as in the case of Judith Miller, the arguments are sometimes rather unconvincing).

The story Risen told--which the government thinks came from Sterling--is pretty fascinating. As the Times summed it up:

The chapter details an effort by the CIA in 2000 to disrupt Iran's nuclear program by sending a former Russian scientist to give it blueprints for a nuclear triggering device with a hidden design flaw. Mr. Risen portrayed the operation as botched, saying the agency may have helped Iranian scientists gain valuable and accurate information.

Now that sounds pretty damn newsworthy, right?  Well, you didn't read about it in the New York Times:

The material in that chapter did not appear in the New York Times. Mr. Sterling's indictment said that Mr. Risen had worked on an article about the program in 2003, but that the newspaper decided not to publish it after government officials told editors that such a disclosure would jeopardize national security.

I guess it would be a little awkward for the Times to spend much time championing Risen's cause. "We must defend our reporters' need to protect their sources for the sake of a story we didn't publish because the government told us not to" is hardly a stirring defense of journalistic freedom.

On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, conservative pundit Shelby Steele lays out the argument that Barack Obama's blackness is a unique asset that makes him difficult to beat in 2012. The argument--which, on some level, is worth taking seriously--is that "his presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to compete with. He literally validates the American democratic experiment, if not the broader Enlightenment that gave birth to it."

You can see how this might be true for a segment of the American population--I wrote in 2007 about pundits who made such arguments--but it's unclear how this phenomenon might fare against widespread paranoia on the right about Obama's birthplace, religion, rejection of  "American exceptionalism" and so on.

There is a way a Republican can win in 2012, Shelby argues--so long as the candidate can "break through the barrier of political correctness." The fact that he cites Donald Trump as serious example of how to do this is puzzling.

The bio at the bottom of the piece reads:

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is White Guilt (Harper/Collins, 2007).

White Guilt actually came out in May 2006. Steele did have a book that came out in 2007, but I can see why the Journal wouldn't want to draw attention to A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win.

Perhaps he meant that Obama wouldn't get re-elected.

In today's New York Times (5/25/11), columnist Tom Friedman issues yet another call for Palestinians to practice non-violence:

May I suggest a Tahrir Square alternative? Announce that every Friday from today forward will be "Peace Day," and have thousands of West Bank Palestinians march nonviolently to Jerusalem, carrying two things--an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other. The sign should say: "Two states for two peoples. We, the Palestinian people, offer the Jewish people a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders--with mutually agreed adjustments--including Jerusalem, where the Arabs will control their neighborhoods and the Jews theirs."

If Palestinians peacefully march to Jerusalem by the thousands every Friday with a clear peace message, it would become a global news event. Every network in the world would be there.

The implication--a familiar one in corporate media--is that there's never been much Palestinian non-violent resistance. This is false--see here, here, here, or especially here--a piece by Yousef Munayyer titled,"Palestine's Hidden History of Nonviolence: You Wouldn't Know It From the Media Coverage, but Peaceful Protests Are Nothing New for Palestinians."

The other part of Friedman's argument is that media would pay this movement serious attention. Again, we don't need to imagine what might happen if Palestinians were to take Friedman's advice. Regular non-violent protests against the West Bank separation wall are ignored in the U.S. media, as Patrick O'Connor documented in 2005. A 2009 Guardian report is a reminder of what often happens in response to such demonstrations. As the subhead put it, "Palestinian demonstrations intended to be peaceful met with Israeli teargas, stun grenades and sometimes live ammunition." And one of the most prominent non-violent Palestinian activists is Adeeb Abu Rahma, who was held in an Israeli prison for 17 months before being released late last year.

Or take a more recent example:

On March 24, the Israeli government arrested Bassem Tamimi, a 44-year-old resident of the small Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, which is just west of Ramallah. Tamimi was arrested for leading a group of his neighbors in protest marches on a settlement that had "expropriated" the village's spring--the symbolic center of Nabi Saleh's life.

Tamimi was brought before the Ofer military court and charged with "incitement, organizing unpermitted marches, disobeying the duty to report to questioning" and "obstruction of justice"--for giving young Palestinians advice on how to act under Israeli police interrogation. He was remanded to an Israeli military prison to await a hearing and a trial. The detention of Tamimi is not a formality: Under Israeli military decree 101 he is being charged with attempting "verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order." As in Syria, this is an "emergency decree" disguised as protecting public security. It carries a sentence of 10 years.

And activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah:

Abu Rahmah, a high school teacher at the Latin Patriarch School in Ramallah, began organizing Bil'in's protests in 2004, even as the violence of the Second Intifada was beginning to wane. Every Friday after prayers, Abu Rahmah would lead a group of Bil'in residents on a protest march towards a local settlement--and every Friday his march would be intercepted by the IDF.

In one demonstration, an IDF sniper used a .22 caliber rifle to disburse the protesters, killing a Palestinian boy. Twenty-one unarmed demonstrators, among them five children, have been killed in nonviolent West Bank demonstrations since the beginnings of the movement.

So when do the TV cameras arrive, Tom Friedman?

The New York Times (5/25/11) is reporting, perhaps accurately, that Newt Gingrich may have trouble living down his $500,000 credit line at Tiffany's. But this sentence by Sheryl Gay Stolberg is so Timesian:

The way some voters out in the rest of America might see it, he's a guy who paid more for jewelry than some people pay for their houses.

It will no doubt come as a surprise to folks at a newspaper that reports (1/1/97) that $100-a-bottle wine was an "everyday occurrence," and told readers where they could have dinner for two for under $100 as "an experiment for lean times" (12/10/08; Extra!, 2/09), but the median price for a single-family house in the United States in 2011 is $158,700. That means that Gingrich was spending over three times more on jewelry than most people pay for their houses.

The "rest of America"--the New York Times should come visit us some time.

There have been a lot of complaints about New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin being too cozy with the Wall Street powers that he's covering. Some of those critics are in-house; a New York magazine article went so far as to quote a Times staffer who (like several others at the paper) likened Sorkin to disgraced WMD reporter Judith Miller.

Sorkin was on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, part of a roundtable discussion that followed an appearance by Republican Paul Ryan. And that's where Sorkin said this:

SORKIN: I got to tell you, I got an email while the show was going on, while Ryan was just speaking, and even though the Medicare plan may be unpopular, the view by a Wall Street CEO was this guy at least is proposing something.

GREGORY: Yeah.

SORKIN: I think they like the idea of leadership.  They want to get behind that.

Huh--Wall Street CEOs like a plan that gives them tax cuts and makes seniors pay more for healthcare. What other surprises are lurking in his email?

Perhaps someone from the Progressive Caucus should email him about the People's Budget, since he doesn't seem to know about it.

Frank Bruni has been named the new Sunday op-ed columnist at the New York Times. Bruni has been writing restaurant reviews for the past few years, but came to a lot of people's attention as the reporter covering the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush. Bruni went on to write a book about that experience, and one of the lessons in the book was that what Bruni actually thought about Bush's campaign rhetoric and debate performances wasn't really what he was reporting at the time.

I wrote something about this when the book came out, though I can't recall whether or not it was ever used anywhere. Part of this was adapted for an episode of CounterSpin, that much I know for sure.

Covering Bush, or Covering Up for Him?

By Peter Hart

Though conservatives still pound away at the idea that the media won't cut them a break, it's hard to argue that Bush has been given anything but kid glove treatment from the mainstream press, all the way back to the early days of his candidacy.

A new book by New York Times correspondent Frank Bruni fills in some of the details in Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. While it is a peek behind the curtains of one of the most guarded and careful administrations in recent memory, the book also tells another, perhaps more important story about a rather lazy and inconsistent press corps.

Though he doesn't make much of it, Bruni offers some valuable evidence that he pulled his punches while covering Bush. Sometimes the evidence is clear. Bruni explains that at one point he "deliberately soft-pedaled" Bush's difficulties explaining his tax cut and his apparent trouble communicating in his native tongue. In the home stretch of the campaign, Bruni writes that he gave only cursory attention to Bush's late acknowledgment of an arrest for driving under the influence. Bruni's story led not with the arrest details but with Bush's "lashing out" at Al Gore over an unrelated matter. The curious news judgment earned Bruni a hearty endorsement from the Texas governor: "You're a good man."

In other areas, Bruni is not so forthcoming. In the book, Bush is "at best mediocre" in his first debate with Al Gore, and from where Bruni sat it looked like "Bush was in the process of losing the presidency." Sadly, his newspaper reporting was almost a mirror image: Bruni led his October 4 debate report not with how bad Bush was, but how obnoxious Al Gore was. In fact, the first four paragraphs are all Gore, whose "self-satisfied grin" and "oratorical intimidation" just rubbed Bruni the wrong way. It's nice to now Bruni's now getting around to telling us how he really felt--long after it matters.

This revisionism continued once Bush took office. As Bruni explains in the book, on Bush's first day in office he reinstated a ban on federal funding for groups overseas that provide abortion counseling, sometimes called the "gag rule." Bush's explanation was different, though; he said that he was acting to limit federal dollars from being used to promote abortion. A good catch, but one Bruni failed to make at the time, preferring instead to accept Bush's "conviction" without a word to suggest Bush was not telling the whole truth.  Other reporters managed to nail Bush for his deception.

Since Bruni provides little evidence to suggest that he was a cut above his peers on the campaign trail, one can assume that the image of a president that seems aloof, careless or even inattentive has nothing to do with media being too critical of him. In fact, it's more likely that we only know the half of it. And who's to blame for that? Bruni, for one, thinks that "modern politics wasn't just superficial because the politicians made it so. It was superficial because the voters let it be." If that’s the case, then those charged with exposing political chicanery--namely, folks like Bruni himself--have plenty of work to do. It's too bad they seem so unlikely to step up to the plate.

Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler also documented the wide gap between what Bruni wrote in his book and what he wrote in the New York Times.

The public broadcasting newspaper Current (5/18/11) reports that public television--you know, the non-commercial outlet--will start airing more commercials:

The move could be controversial for the network, which has traditionally prided itself on offering uninterrupted programming over its 40-year history.

PBS will begin breaking into programs with underwriting and promo spots four times per hour on an experimental basis beginning this fall, it told station members at the PBS National Meeting here.

PBS corporate communications official Anne Bentley issued a response that actually begins, "We are always looking at ways to improve the viewer experience." It goes on to say that "It is all about the viewer," and--perhaps most bizarrely--claims, "Initial testing showed that viewers didn't really notice the change." Really? People didn't notice a commercial in the middle of a PBS show?

In other PBS news, some stations are apparently considering leaving PBS altogether, according to a report in the New York Times (5/22/11). The main complaint seems to be about money--the stations think they're paying too much to air the national programming.

There is, of course, a possible silver lining in all of this. One could imagine public TV stations breaking free from PBS and seeking out more independent programming to fill out their schedules. (Democracy Now! instead of the NewsHour-- how does that sound?). It's a long shot, perhaps, but one can at least imagine a brighter future for public television stations that doesn't necessarily involve airing the conventional PBS programming.