Gabriel Sherman's new piece in New York magazine (5/22/11) about Roger Ailes and Fox News Channel offers more indications that what goes on behind the scenes at Fox is more or less what you'd expect, given the channel's obvious on-air slant.

The person hired to run the news division has some peculiar ideas about news:

Bill Sammon, a former Washington Times correspondent, angered Fox's political reporters, who saw him pushing coverage further to the right than they were comfortable with. Days after Obama’s inauguration, an ice storm caused major damage throughout the Midwest. At an editorial meeting in the D.C. bureau, Sammon told producers that Fox should compare Obama's response to Bush's handling of Katrina. "Bush got grief for Katrina," Sammon said.

"It's too early; give him some time to respond," a producer shot back. "This ice storm isn't Katrina."

The piece is mostly about presidential politics. We learn that Ailes is disappointed by the current Republican field, and wants to do something about it.  He's given airtime to several contenders--Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum--but also works behind the scenes:

A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he'd invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes' calls to run.

He doesn't just try to encourage Republicans to run. He also protects Republican candidates from various threats--like, say, Fox reporters:

In September 2008, he secretly met Palin during her swing through New York, when she toured the UN and had her photo op with Henry Kissinger. That afternoon, Shushannah Walshe, a young Fox producer who was covering Palin's campaign for the network, had gone on-air and criticized McCain's staff, who had prevented reporters from asking Palin questions during her UN visit. "There's not one chance that Governor Palin would have to answer a question," Walshe said on-camera. "They're eliminating even the chance of any kind of interaction with the candidate--it’s just unprecedented."

Ailes didn’t know Walshe, but he was furious when he heard her comments. Liberal media outlets like the Huffington Post were seizing on her statement and made it appear that Fox was turning on Palin. Ailes called Refet Kaplan, a senior Fox executive, and demanded Walshe be taken off the air. "It's not fair-and-­balanced coverage," Kaplan later told Walshe. Walshe was allowed to continue covering Palin but was barred from future on-air appearances. She later quit Fox to co-write a book about Palin.

Protecting Palin wasn't enough--Ailes needed to gear up for the Obama era:

By October 2008, Ailes recognized that Obama was likely to beat McCain. He needed to give his audience a reason to stay in the stands and watch his team. And so he went on a hiring spree. By the time Obama defeated McCain, Ailes had hired former Bush aide Karl Rove and Mike Huckabee and went on to assemble a whole lineup of prospective 2012 contenders: Palin, Gingrich, Santorum, and John Bolton.

For the record, CNN seemed to be trying to do the same:

Fox also had to compete with CNN for pundits. In early 2008, then–CNN-U.S. president Jon Klein invited Mike Huckabee to breakfast at the Time Warner Center. Klein sold Huckabee on the benefits of CNN. "If you believe what you’re saying, you should try and convince the middle," Klein told him. It was the same pitch he made later to Karl Rove and to Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes. All three turned down Klein and signed with Fox.

You can't say Ailes doesn't have a somewhat ironic sense of humor.  At one point, he reportedly worried that one Fox executive might have a conflict of interest:

Then, three weeks after the election, David Rhodes, Fox's vice-­president for news, quit to work for Bloomberg. Rhodes had started at Fox as a 22-year-old production assistant and risen through the ranks to become No. 2 in charge of news. His brother was a senior foreign-policy aide to Obama, and Rhodes told staffers that Ailes had expressed concern about this closeness to the White House.

You see, that kind of thing is not tolerated at Fox News Channel. It might leave people with the impression that things aren't on the up and up.

The New York Times had a good editorial on May 20 headlined "Gas Prices and Political Pandering." The paper slammed Republican rhetoric about domestic production and gas prices:

[Sen. Mitch] McConnell said his bill would bring relief at the pump by raising domestic output. That is fiction. Production will take years to come online and even then would have a tiny impact on prices set on the world market.

And they also pointed out that Obama was making similar arguments:

Last weekend, he, too, was out there pitching domestic production.... None will quickly lead to new drilling or have any effect on gas prices. Yet because his remarks were framed as a response to gas prices, he helped feed the Republicans' bogus narrative.

So who the heck is doing this bogus framing? Oh yeah--the New York Times, in its news section.  John Broder wrote this lead on May 15:

President Obama, facing voter anger over high gasoline prices and complaints from Republicans and business leaders that his policies are restricting the development of domestic energy resources, announced Saturday that he was taking several steps to speed oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters.

So the editorial page is where bogus narratives are questioned, while the news section is where they're propagated.

On Sunday the Pete Peterson Foundation took out an ad in the Washington Post touting its upcoming "Fiscal Summit," which will feature speeches by the likes of Bill Clinton, Paul Ryan and Alan Simpson.  Panels will be moderated by Gwen Ifill, George Will and others.

The hook is that Peterson is promoting a "Solutions Initiative," which in part involves giving money to different organizations to develop plans that focus on "solutions."

The grantees are the American Enterprise Institute, Bipartisan Policy Center, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, Heritage Foundation and the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network.

On the page next to the ad is the Post's usual Topic A op-ed feature, where they get short pieces on a single topic from different writers. The topic for Sunday was deficits and debt. The Post turned over the feature to Peterson:

With U.S. debt projected to grow more than 275 percent by 2035, the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation asked a range of think tanks to find ways to address the nation's long-term budget challenges. Below are details from plans that will be unveiled at a fiscal summit the foundation is hosting Wednesday in Washington.

In case you were wondering, the pieces in the Post came from all the Peterson grantees: American Enterprise Institute, Bipartisan Policy Center, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, Heritage Foundation and the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network.

So did Peterson buy the ad and the op-ed page, or did the Post throw that in for free? We know the Post has been willing to run articles from Peterson's Fiscal Times media outlet--with little to no explanation for readers who might be curious as to Peterson's long-standing political views on these issues. Are they doing the same with their Sunday op-ed page?

Lori Montgomery has a piece today in the Washington Post (5/20/11) noting that Senate Democrats have yet to unveil a budget plan that would "counter the budget blueprint approved last month by House Republicans."  Some Democrats do say that they will soon unveil a plan that "would offer a sharp contrast to the GOP budget."

Such a contrast exists already in Congress. It's called the People's Budget, and it is the work of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The most notable coverage of it in the Post came in the form of a red-baiting Dana Milbank column. The news pages of the Post, like most other papers, has chosen to ignore a budget plan that is politically inconvenient to them. Thus the debate over how the government should deal with debt/deficit problems omits one very real policy solution.

Last night's broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor (5/19/11) provided ample evidence--if more were needed--of Bill O'Reilly's bigotry.

He started by trying to explain why Barack Obama is unpopular in Muslim countries:

The answer is complicated but does reflect my opinion that there is a Muslim problem in the world. The United States and the West are largely secular societies that do believe in human rights. The Muslim world is centered on religion and may Muslims believe if you don't worship Allah you are an infidel and therefore you don't deserve human rights. In fact, in certain parts of the Muslim world if you are not the proper sect of Islam, you can be persecute and even killed.

It's quite odd for O'Reilly, who has loudly complained that the "traditions of Christmas are under fire by committed secularists, people who do not want any public demonstration of spirituality" (Extra!, 5-6/05), to assert that the difference between the United States and Muslim countries is that one is secular and the other religion-centered. He went on to elaborate:

In addition, you have the Jewish situation. Because the USA supports Israel and many Muslims hate Jews, we are tarred by that hatred. It's centuries old, it's not going away any time soon. The USA has poured trillions of dollars into the Muslim world. Fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan designed to liberate those people from tyrannical governments. But apparently vast majority of Muslims are not grateful.

It's hard to know which part of that is most offensive--that Muslims are anti-Semites, or they haven't thanked us for the Iraq War.

He closed the interview segment with this:

For every Muslim in the world that wants democracy and wants human rights, there is one who doesn't. And the one who doesn't,  doesn't have any rules. And it will blow the hell out of the one that does.

Keith Olbermann popped up on the David Letterman show and gave one reason--perhaps one big reason--why he left MSNBC. As transcribed by MediaBistro's TVNewser (where you can also watch the video):

At some point in the last few years that I have been doing the news in the way that I do, it has occurred to me that the best place to continue doing the news in that way would be to do it at a place that is just in the news business and nothing else. It doesn't also own an amusement park in Orlando, it doesn't have outdoor advertising, or beet plantations in the Azores.

The New York Times' Michael Shear has a piece today (5/19/11) reminding readers that presidential candidates often have early stumbles of the sort that Newt Gingrich has been having. He recalls several examples, most of which don't really offer much hope for Gingrich. One is Wesley Clark's brief 2004 campaign:

In 2004, General Clark's campaign was premised on his military credentials and his critique of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. So when the general said, within days of announcing, that he might have voted to authorize the Iraq War, it was a big deal.

That's not exactly how it happened.

FAIR played a pretty prominent role in this story, pointing out in a press release (9/16/03) that Clark's supposed anti-war credentials were mostly a fiction. The media chatter at the time was that Clark was strongly opposed to the Iraq War, which in the corporate media's worldview was a serious problem for him. But as FAIR pointed out, Clark was hardly a critic of the war:

On the question of Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, Clark seemed remarkably confident of their existence. Clark told CNN's Miles O'Brien that Saddam Hussein "does have weapons of mass destruction." When O'Brien asked, "And you could say that categorically?" Clark was resolute: "Absolutely" (1/18/03). When CNN's Zahn (4/2/03) asked if he had any doubts about finding the weapons, Clark responded: "I think they will be found. There's so much intelligence on this."

After the fall of Baghdad, any remaining qualms Clark had about the wisdom of the war seemed to evaporate. "Liberation is at hand. Liberation--the powerful balm that justifies painful sacrifice, erases lingering doubt and reinforces bold actions," Clark wrote in a London Times column (4/10/03). "Already the scent of victory is in the air." Though he had been critical of Pentagon tactics, Clark was exuberant about the results of "a lean plan, using only about a third of the ground combat power of the Gulf War. If the alternative to attacking in March with the equivalent of four divisions was to wait until late April to attack with five, they certainly made the right call."

After the FAIR release started circulating, reporters asked Clark about his position on the war. And that's what caused him the trouble--he was unable to live up to the storyline that much of the media were pushing.

What's the Israeli government's new "plan" for peace? Reading the New York Times doesn't help your understand where they stand. Earlier this week, the Times' Ethan Bronner (5/17/11) praised a speech by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for exhibiting "greater flexibility on territory." Bronner wrote that he showed "more willingness to yield territory than he had before, strongly implying that he would give up the vast majority of the West Bank." As Matthew Taylor wrote at Mondoweiss (5/17/11), there was little actual evidence that there was much going on here--just some "implying" and "suggesting."

A Times article today (5/19/11) from Bronner and Helene Cooper makes things more confusing. The piece describes Netanyahu as wanting three things: Israeli military along the Jordan River, control of Jerusalem and holding on to West Bank settlements. His other "condition" is that the Palestinian government cannot include Hamas; the Times notes that "Netanyahu knows that the Palestinians will find this condition unacceptable.... But since the United States labels Hamas as terrorists, Mr. Netanyahu is betting that he will appear more forthcoming than ever."

Well, he's already appeared that way in the pages of the New York Times. Though the piece today also says this:

Whether Mr. Netanyahu's offer, first outlined in a speech to Parliament on Monday, is a genuine attempt to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, or to make it appear that the Palestinians are the ones blocking progress, is not yet clear.

This is hard to square with Bronner's earlier report praising Netanyahu's supposed flexibility. Now it sounds like the Times isn't so sure that it's a sign of much of anything. But to help clarify things, the paper granted anonymity to an Israeli official in order to get the truth:

"On the one hand, the Palestinians are moving toward Hamas while on the other, the prime minister is showing a real willingness to make far-reaching territorial compromise," a top Netanyahu aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

What would be the condition for this? The official needed anonymity in order to more effusively praise his or her boss?

The New York Times has a piece today (5/18/11) previewing Barack Obama's Israel/Palestine speech, calling it a "chance to reshape the debate," whatever that's supposed to mean. One thing to always pay attention to in coverage of this issue is the language used to frame the discussion. The piece mentioned Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas' recent op-ed in the Times concerning the Palestinian drive to gain United Nations recognition for the Palestinian state. Abbas defined the state as "the lands framed by the 1967 border." In most of the world this is a rather uncontroversial starting point. But look how the Times described it:

In an Op-Ed article in the New York Times on Tuesday that analysts interpreted as the diplomatic equivalent of a declaration of war on the status quo, Mr. Abbas said flatly that he would request international recognition of the state of Palestine, based on the borders of Israel before the 1967 Arab/Israeli war.

Such a move would most likely get a lopsided majority of votes in the General Assembly, diplomats said, with Latin American, African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries all expected to vote in favor of it.

Unnamed "analysts" believe Abbas is declaring war on the "status quo"-- though the resolution he is suggesting would be endorsed in a lopsided U.N. vote. So the "status quo" is really a massively unpopular policy forced on the world. Which would seem to be much closer to the truth--and which apparently cannot be described as such.

At FAIR's 25th anniversary, Noam Chomsky tried to imagine a future where the New York Times, in a remarkable change, described this debate accurately.  In his hypothetical example, the "peace process" is being led by a truly neutral state, and the debate is understood as the view of the world's majority on one side, and the U.S.-backed minority view on the other. We're still a long way from that.

At Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah challenges the skewed history coming from Ethan Bronner in the New York Times (5/15/11). In trying to explain the context for the recent Palestinian protests, Bronner wrote:

After Israel declared independence on May 15, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed. The refugees and their descendants remain a central issue of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Abunimah replied:

This is standard Zionist propaganda that bears little resemblance to the facts. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces began in late 1947, so that by 15 May, 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been expelled from their villages and cities before a single soldier from any Arab army had intervened. The exodus from, for example, Jaffa began in early 1948 after Zionist terrorists belonging to the Stern Gang set off a massive car bomb destroying the Jaffa municipality building on 4 January. (This is all well-documented in books by right-wing Israeli historian Benny Morris, among others.) Many villages in the north of Palestine were also depopulated around that time.

Abunimah adds that the Deir Yassin massacre happened in April 1948--before Israel declared its independence.

This skewed history seems to be fairly common. NBC's Richard Engel presented it this way on the Today show on Monday (5/17/01):

What sparked this is Palestinians were commemorating what they call the Nakba, it's the Arabic word for "catastrophe," which is how many Palestinians describe the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The "catastrophe" is not the establishment of the state of Israel, it's the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that accompanied that establishment. It's an important distinction.

Labor journalist Mike Elk (In These Times, 5/16/11) made an excellent point after watching NBC host David Gregory interview Newt Gingrich on Sunday's Meet the Press (5/15/11). Elk wrote:

Speaking yesterday on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that "the Obama system of the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] is basically breaking the law to try to punish Boeing and to threaten every right-to-work state."

While Meet the Press host David Gregory vigorously challenged Newt Gingrich on details of his personal life, he failed to challenge Gingrich on his false assertion that the NLRB was breaking the law by finding that Boeing punished workers for striking in Washington state by moving a planned new production line there to nonunion South Carolina. Despite the NLRB complaint against Boeing being one of the most high-profile NLRB cases in decades and entirely consistent with past legal precedent, Gregory failed to say anything.

His decision not to challenge Gingrich on the Boeing case is especially troubling since the main sponsor of Meet the Press is none other than Boeing. The top of Meet the Press' website proudly boasts that the show is "sponsored by Boeing."  No other corporation is listed so prominently as a sponsor on the website. In addition, Boeing is the exclusive sponsor of Meet the Press'  iPhone app.

This reminded me of Gregory's response last year when ABC's This Week started posting factchecks (courtesy of Politifact) of their guests on their website:

An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."

I guess that's especially true when the subject is a sponsor.

Bill Moyers on the Tavis Smiley Show (5/13/11), talking about the elite bias in the media:

Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties, they do their job, they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.

Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology--two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job--those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear. You got voices like those on your show. You got them on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! and a few other places like that, but not as a steady presence in the public discourse.

Later in the program came this exchange about the mission of public broadcasting:

Smiley: I say this--and this might be politically incorrect to say on PBS--but we are not living up to that charter. We're not living up to it on public television; we're not living up to it on public radio when it comes to a diversity and inclusion of other voices. We're not living up to that. So I wonder whether or not, in some ways, we deserve being pricked a little bit, pushed a little bit, if we're not living up to the charter, but you tell me.

Moyers: I don't think we’re living up to that charter that Lyndon Johnson proclaimed. No, I don't. The conservatives have won to this extent. Too many people in public television and public radio are looking over their shoulders, fearing that the right is after them. We don't really have a left in this country. There's no organized left that comes after journalists the way that the right comes after journalists who offer a different alternative.

This is an old story, Tavis. Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan, his communications director, tried to do it in public broadcasting back in the early '70s when they accused us of being liberal when, in fact, we were just offering an alternative view of reality, something they don’t want.

Then Bob Dole when he was Senate minority leader came after public broadcasting. Newt Gingrich came after public broadcasting and, of course, under the George W. Bush administration, you had a Republican Corporation for Public Broadcasting more responsive to Karl Rove than they were to the stations out here.

So that constant harassment creates a kind of caution and self-censorship on the part of people who just don't want to--you know, we don’t get but about 17 percent of the total budget from the Congress, but that's enough to leave a big hole in what the local stations do if we don't have it.

But it creates almost a Pavlovian response, and I think there is an unintended, but inevitable, censorship that takes place on the part of people who are running the programs, booking the programs, lining up guests, to make sure that we don't give the right wing another opportunity to come in and accuse us of being liberal.

Read FAIR's recent study of public television, or FAIR's response to the news about Jim Lehrer's semi-retirement.

Corporate media coverage of tax/budget issues often seems to be an argument between right-leaning Democrats and conservative Republicans. In the midst of a national discussion of budget deficits, raising taxes on the wealthy is considered a non-starter--even though most Americans would support it.

The front page of the Washington Post on Saturday (5/14/11) offered a pretty typical example. Under the headline "Democrats Consider Political Cost of Taxes," Peter Wallstein explained that since some right-leaning Democrats aren't keen on the idea of raising taxes, the party is at a crossroads:

At issue for Democrats is whether the party risks going overboard in its embrace of tax increases--a perilous proposition for lawmakers from political battlegrounds.

Those tensions erupted at a private meeting this week of a handful of key Democratic members.

The piece went on to explain:

Several centrist Democrats have been voicing concern in private sessions that [Kent] Conrad's draft may be shifting too far to the left in order to placate liberals on the committee whose votes are needed to move the legislation, according to aides.

The Conrad idea is a 3 percent surtax for millionaires. To the Post, adopting something like that "could leave some Democrats vulnerable to the old tax-and-spend label that has long haunted the party in competitive elections." Deep into the piece, readers learn that liberal Democrats are worried that the White House is too quick to support spending cuts over tax increases on the wealthy, and that some even advocate larger tax hikes for millionaires.

It's hard to imagine seeing many pieces that are flipped around, politically speaking--where the People's Budget from the Progressive Caucus would be treated as a politically popular platform that reflected the wishes of the party base (not to mention the general population). Instead these policy ideas are mostly overlooked, while conservative Democrats who worry about what Republicans will say about them are given top billing--and called "centrists" to boot.

Last week, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz explained that Newt Gingrich was "an idea-spewing machine" and a "one-man think tank"--even warning that "a keen intellect can also translate into the appearance of intellectual superiority." Well OK.

A few days in Balz's paper, readers learned that in a recent speech Gingrich called Barack Obama a "food stamp president." Which I think must be some wonky think tank rhetoric.

Matthew Yglesias also noted that in the same appearance, Gingrich advocated a return to Jim Crow-era voting laws, saying: "But maybe we should also have a voting standard that says to vote, as a native born American, you should have to learn American history."

Well, he's definitely spewing something.

The Washington Post's Outlook section has a feature (5/15/11) about getting rid of certain concepts or products. Former ABC anchor Ted Koppel suggests dumping democracy: "The concept remains worthy, but the word is rapidly being exhausted of all residual value."

Koppel's point is that the Arab Spring uprisings might not produce wholly democratic outcomes: "The instant transfer of political power is intoxicating, but it should not be confused with democracy itself." Then Koppel turns his attention to U.S. policy:

Truth be told, our government's commitment to democracy in other countries is almost whimsically inconsistent: clearly greater in Libya than in Saudi Arabia, less in Bahrain than in Iran. We are constrained from actively promoting democracy in China by our enormous national interests there; but in Congo, where our interests are negligible and the outrages against democracy are constant, we do nothing. The misappropriation of the word is so great as to be silly.

That doesn't sound inconsistent at all--and that's assuming that the U.S. preference somewhere like Libya is democracy (a rather whimsical assumption). The U.S. position is to offer rhetorical support for democracy, and to do what we can to prevent it when it would conflict with elite interests. Someone who spent so much time fawning over Henry Kissinger should know this.