On his Friday night show, Bill O'Reilly took his viewers to a magical place--one where the right-wing Koch brothers have no connection to the Tea Party movement, while Occupy Wall Street is a secret project directed and financed by the likes of Moveon.org, SEIU and  George Soros.

At the top of his broadcast, O'Reilly wondered if we are now in "phase two of the campaign to undermine America"--this would apparently be the phase where activists protest against police brutality, with an assist from "the radical MoveOn organization, which is funding some of the occupiers."

As he explained his conspiracy theory:

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is not a spontaneous protest against economic inequality. It is a well-thought-out campaign to bring down the infrastructure of this country, to turn us into a Western European-type entitlement state.

That's what George Soros, MoveOn, the SEIU and many far-left journalists want. And they are using the protests to that end.

Moments later, O'Reilly was "interviewing" Fox News contributor Leslie Marshall, who mentioned the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers. That left O'Reilly visibly upset:

O'REILLY: OK, well, you can believe anything you want, you're an American, but you made a statement that the Koch brothers were tied into the Tea Party financially. Can you prove that?

MARSHALL: Well, the Koch Brothers (INAUDIBLE) such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

O'REILLY: Can you prove it. Wait. Wait, wait, wait, Leslie.

MARSHALL: Yes.

O'REILLY: Leslie, you're a Fox News contributor. You have a responsibility. Can you prove the Koch brothers are tied into the Tea Party financially? Can you?

MARSHALL: With a check in hand, no.

O'REILLY: OK. Thank you.

While it's certainly the responsibility of a guest to be able to document such facts, it's rather unlikely that O'Reilly would have accepted any such facts anyway.

Do the Koch brothers have anything to do with the Tea Party? Well, yes. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation was founded by Charles Koch, and has served to train Tea Party activists. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker (8/30/10):

Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement's inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a website offering supporters "Tea Party Talking Points." The Arizona branch urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged members to sign up for "Taxpayer Tea Party Registration" and provided directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion. The North Carolina branch recently launched a "Tea Party Finder" website, advertised as "a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina."

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to "educate," fund and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.

Or as one source rather colorfully put it:

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party: "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud--and they're our candidates!"

And Dick Armey's FreedomWorks group, which has very publicly helped organize Tea Party activists, is the product of a merger between Empower America and Citizens for a Sound Economy--the latter heavily backed by the Koch brothers.

So other than founding and funding the groups that have been key organizers and trainers of the Tea Party movement, the Kochs have little to do with it.

Don't tell that to Bill O'Reilly, though. He can only connect certain dots:

This isn't a spontaneous demonstration against crony capitalism. If it were, they would be in front of the White House. This is organized by the unions backed up by George Soros and the MoveOn people.

The links between those groups and OWS prompted the other guest, Caroline Heldman,  to turn the tables on O'Reilly:

HELDMAN: Bill, do you have evidence to back up those links? Do you have evidence?

O'REILLY: Yes, absolutely, we have reporters down there all the time and the reporters ask people who they are, where they are going. The spontaneous people are back to their jobs; 85 percent of them, Dr. Heldman, have jobs. You can't stay off the job for a month. I can back what I say up.

Now THAT is evidence--Fox-style.

In Wednesday's New York Times (10/26/11), Michael Gordon wrote a piece headlined "Papers From Iraqi Archive Reveal Conspiratorial Mind-Set of Hussein," about some Iraqi archives that give an inside-the-bubble picture of Saddam Hussein's rule.

Not surprisingly, Hussein comes off as paranoid, incompetent and so on.  Gordon begins the story noting that Hussein was troubled by the Iran/Contra story, interpreting the U.S. deal with his Iranian enemies as some sort of "conspiracy against Iraq."

Gordon calmly explains, free of a conspiratorial mind-set, that Iran/Contra was just an operation "to open a private channel to the new leadership in Tehran and to generate secret profits that could be sent to Nicaraguan rebels. " You know, the way any superpower funnels support to a terrorist group. No big deal.

Gordon explains later that the Iraqis

could not understand why the Reagan administration had taken military action against Libya in 1986 but was reaching out to Iran, since, Mr. Hussein said, Iran "plays a greater role in terrorism."

"I am trying to understand exactly what happened here," he said.

Hussein saw such conspiracies everywhere:

But Mr. Hussein would not be moved from his conspiratorial view. He mentioned the arms sales again in his fateful meeting on July 25, 1990, with April Glaspie, the American ambassador in Baghdad, when he again misread Washington and assumed it would stand aside when his army invaded Kuwait a week later.

The Glaspie meeting with Hussein has been pretty well-known for years. As FAIR pointed out in 1991, Glaspie's apparent message to Hussein was that the United States would not actively object to Iraq invading Kuwait.

One of the WikiLeaks cables that was recently released covered that meeting. And from that account, it's not clear that Saddam Hussein misread anything. As Harvard professor Stephen Walt wrote back when the cable was released:

a careful reading of the cable suggests that Saddam could have easily interpreted Glaspie's conversation, along with other statements by U.S. officials, as a sign that the United States was not strongly committed to protecting Kuwait.

After Hussein rattled off his various grievances, what did Glaspie say? From Walt:

Her very first point in response is to thank him for the opportunity to discuss these matters directly, and she then says that "President Bush, too, wants friendship." Her next point is to tell Saddam that "the President had instructed her to broaden and deepen our relations with Iraq," and she reminds Saddam that though "some circles" might oppose that policy, "the U.S. administration is instructed by the President." And then she adds that "what is important is that the President has very recently reaffirmed his desire for a better relationship" and he has shown that desire by opposing some sanctions bills.

The meeting eventually turned to Iraq's escalating crisis with Kuwait:

According to the cable, she asks: "Is it not reasonable for the U.S. to ask, in a spirit of friendship, not confrontation, the simple question: What are your intentions?"

Saddam says it is a reasonable question, and he acknowledges that this is even our "duty" as a superpower. But he quickly returns to his list of grievances, and says he's tried everything to resolve his problem with Kuwait.  He subsequently leaves the room to take a phone call, and returns with the encouraging news (from Egyptian President Mubarak), that the Kuwaitis have agreed to further negotiations.  The meeting then ends on a friendly note, but when Saddam raises the question of his border dispute with Kuwait, Glaspie responds that "she had served in Kuwait 20 years before; then as now, we took no position on these Arab affairs."

The conspiracy-minded Hussein could also have "misread" the Washington Post (7/26/90), which reported right after the Glaspie meeting and six days before Iraq's invasion that administration officials were saying that "an Iraqi attack on Kuwait would not draw a U.S. military response." In Hussein's twisted mind, apparently, that meant that if he attacked Kuwait, the U.S. would not respond militarily.

With the bad news we've been talking about on the public broadcasting front, it's worth pointing out a bright spot: On Monday (10/24/11), Charlie Rose featured a discussion of Occupy Wall Street with Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman.

Goodman made an important point about media coverage of the protests:

CHARLIE ROSE: Does it have anything in common with the Tea Party?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's interesting you ask that. When the people gathered on September 16 and 17--what, 2000 people--hardly any coverage they got. If it was 2000 Tea Party activists who gathered on Wall Street, I would dare said there would have been 2,000 reporters there, if not more.

Watch the segment on the Charlie Rose website. And you can leave a comment there--as others already have--noting that it's refreshing to see these voices on a show that doesn't usually feature such guests.

A New York Times story today (10/28/11) by Jennifer Steinhauer on the state of bipartisanship in Washington noted:

Outside of a few recent flashes of light--the passage of three trade bills this month, and an agreement on patent reform--there have been no big bipartisan jobs initiatives in this Congress.

The idea that trade deals with Colombia and South Korea are "big" job creators is not a fact--it's an argument that proponents of the deals make. But a corporate media that gives a thumbs-up to anything labeled "free trade" are going to be just as eager to call these deals job creators.

As Janine Jackson noted in a recent article in Extra!, the media didn't seem interested in evaluating the job creation numbers peddled by the deal's promoters, who were claiming 70,000 jobs would be created by the Korea agreement. According to Public Citizen, the deal could result in a net loss of jobs.

The story with patent reform is similar--lawmakers make spectacular claims about the jobs that are going to be created, while critics suggest the effect will be minor.

Richard Engel on NBC Nightly News (10/21/11), speaking about the end of the Iraq War:

The training wheels off, Iraq will have to succeed or fail without American troops on the ground to guide the way.

That's quite a metaphor--invading and occupying a country for eight years as "training wheels."

Engel's report includes this reference to the death toll:

Iraqi deaths, almost 150,000, but many Iraqis believe it's a million.

Of course it's not just Iraqis who believe this--the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB), which has worked for the BBC, the British Conservative Party and the International Republican Institute, conducted a survey that arrived at the 1 million estimate.  A survey published in the Lancet medical journal  (10/11/06) estimated that the war caused 600,000 violent deaths between March 2003 and June 2006.

The "almost 150,000" number that Engel puts forward as reality appears to be based on the Iraq Family Health Survey, a joint effort by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government, which actually estimated that there were 151,000 violent deaths (and some 400,000 total excess deaths--MedPage Today, 7/23/08) as a result of the war--between March 2003 and June 2006.

Apparently some Americans believe the war hasn't killed anyone in the last five years.

Sending a letter to PBS NewsHour in response to their pro-inequality segment? Leave a copy of your letter in the comments section below.

The New York Times has a fascinating new poll out today (10/26/11); too bad the paper doesn't emphasize the most newsworthy findings.

The headline is:

New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government

That's based on the poll's finding that the public doesn't have much faith in government.  But paragraph four offers a more striking finding:

With nearly all Americans remaining fearful that the economy is stagnating or deteriorating further, two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly in the country. Seven in 10 Americans think the policies of congressional Republicans favor the rich. Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.

So the public favors--by a substantial margin--greater income redistribution and higher taxes on the super-wealthy. And they oppose cutting taxes on corporations.

Perhaps the unwillingness of the government to do those things contributes to public distrust of that government.

When he's not sharing his thoughts about Barack Obama's birth certificate, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is apparently unveiling a tax plan. It's a flat tax, with a few other details explained by the Washington Post (10/26/11):

Perry also would reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent; eliminate taxes on dividends and capital gains; make deep, unspecified cuts in federal spending; and establish individual retirement accounts outside the Social Security system.

The article, by Karen Tumulty, gets approving quotes from a Republican adviser and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. But it also says this, in the reporter's own voice:

The proposal would be a boon to the wealthiest Americans, and that is one reason why previous flat-tax proposals, though appealing in their simplicity, have never gone far politically.

Indeed. If there's one thing that doesn't go far politically, it's tax policy that favors the wealthy.

Last night by many reports the police crackdown on the Occupy Oakland encampment was severe: Tear gas and flash-bang grenades were used to disperse a crowd trying to retake the park.

Reading about the events in the nation's capital, though, and you got a different impression. The Washington Post--no stranger to minimizing the Occupy protests--ran a short AP dispatch under the headline "Protesters Wearing Out Their Welcome Nationwide."

As if that weren't dismissive enough, take a look at the photo the Post ran:

No matter where you live, local TV newscasts tend to be pretty awful: a mash-up of crime, spectacle and celebrity--along with sports and weather.

According to an item in the Hollywood Reporter, though, ABC has told its local affiliates not to cover one celebrity in particular: actor Johnny Depp.

The actor is doing interviews to promote a new film called The Rum Diary, based on a book by Hunter S. Thompson.  But according to the Reporter, Disney-owned ABC seems to think interviewing him about a movie that isn't part of the Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise would be bad business:

According to Houston's KHOU, no ABC affiliates were allowed to speak with or even shoot the actor at the event, due to a clause in his contract with Disney for its successful film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean.

"We came here expecting to talk to one of the biggest names in Hollywood," say KHOU news reporter Shelton Green. "But apparently Disney doesn’t want Johnny Depp's new movie premiering here at the Paramount [Theatre] to get more exposure than his new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. So they wouldn’t allow us to interview him, nor would they even allow us to get video of him, but hundreds of other people did."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/11), tipped off by at least one of his Post colleagues, decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza to see the festival of anti-Semitism firsthand. Lo and behold, he found none:

Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry--not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to google the phrase "Zionists control Wall St."  Google "nut case" instead.

Before you send your note of thanks to Cohen, wait until he gets to his real point:

This right-wing attempt to discredit both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party's hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible. It's made possible, however, because no one this side of the Moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it marches off to some location to highlight what we all know--that Wall Street guys are rich--and their slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.

Cohen goes on to call Occupy Wall Street "a destination for the aimless...a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." It is also

a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans...an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including--by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation--the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

For good measure, Cohen makes the argument that the right-wing smears of OWS are derived from the left:

The imputation of anti-Semitism, however, adds gravitas to this lighthearted event. The smear is in deadly earnest, a reminder that the devious tactics of the Old Left have been adopted by the New Right. (No accident, maybe, that the practitioners are the descendants of lefties.)

Well, he was on the right track with that first paragraph.

There's an old joke about how the pundit spectrum in corporate media debates goes from GE all the way to GM. On Sunday's Meet the Press, viewers got a chance to see that joke come to life.

On the panel was conservative former GE CEO Jack Welch, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell. The left end of the spectrum must have been former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr., best known for his time leading the center-right Democratic Leadership Council. Nowadays Ford is a TV pundit (the "liberal" who advises Democrats to move further right) and works as a managing director at Morgan Stanley--a move from his previous gig at Bank of America.

As for the actual debate, Welch praised Herman Cain's tax plan, called for more domestic oil drilling and complained about the White House's anti-business regulatory policies. Ford, as the TV liberal, pointed out that the administration thankfully did not pursue progressive policy goals like card check, and that the White House deserves credit for reining in some EPA regulation. Ford also included a slam of Occupy Wall Street:

We Democrats can't criticize Republicans for catering to the Tea Party and not say to our Democratic Party you got to look beyond Occupy and be willing to do what's in the best interest of the country.

Given his current job, this is not surprising--though NBC viewers may have wanted to know that the "liberal" in the debate has been working for several banks. Or maybe David Brooks was the liberal here...

Conservative writer/commentator David Frum--the man responsible for writing the Bush "axis of evil" speech--has been doing left/right debates for the public radio show Marketplace.

Until now, that is.

This week (Marketplace, 10/12/11), Frum came to the conclusion that while he's still conservative, he doesn't do a good job representing the right-wing position in that kind of  discussion anymore:

Well, we've been doing a point/counterpoint here between me and Bob Reich for a couple of years. And it's been a lot of fun. I've certainly learned a lot from it. But I think that there's a kind of expectation that when you do it, that you represent the broad point of view of your half of the political spectrum. And although I consider myself a conservative and a Republican, and I think that the right-hand side of the spectrum has the better answers for the long-term growth of economy--low taxes, restrained government, less regulation--it's pretty clear that facing the immediate crisis--very intense crisis--I'm just not representing the view of most people who call themselves Republicans and conservatives these days.

Good for Frum.

Now if only some of the people who are booked on corporate TV to represent "the left" would do the same.

As one would expect, corporate media reacted to the developments in Libya by turning to one of their favorite sources: Republican Sen. John McCain. He was on CNN this morning (and last night as well), and odds are that he'll be on a  Sunday show.

McCain's line on Libya is that the White House should have waged a more aggressive war.  If any of these outlets wanted to challenge him on his record on Libya, all they would need to do is talk about this ancient newspaper article from August 2009:

Or perhaps this item from Politico, from way back in August of this year:

There's quite a controversy brewing over freelance radio host Lisa Simeone for her participation with an activist group occupying a park in Washington, D.C. It's a worth a look at how this unfolded-- especially since it appears to have cost her one of her jobs.

A report at the Roll Call website (10/18/11) noted that Simeone was acting as a spokesperson for the group, which goes by the name October 11. Roll Call wondered if this violated NPR ethics guidelines, since Simeone acts as a host on two programs that air on some NPR affiliates: the long-running documentary series Soundprint and the NPR World of Opera. (Neither show is produced by NPR; World of Opera is distributed by the network.)

Shortly after the Roll Call story appeared (and was picked up by other outlets like the conservative Daily Caller), NPR sent this internal memo, which was posted by activist David Swanson (Warisacrime.org, 10/20/11):

From: NPR Communications

Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 6:12 PM
Subject: From Dana Rehm: Communications Alert
To:       All Staff
Fr:        Dana Davis Rehm
Re:      Communications Alert

We recently learned of World of Opera host Lisa Simeone’s participation in an Occupy DC group. World of Opera is produced by WDAV, a music and arts station based in Davidson, North Carolina. The program is distributed by NPR. Lisa is not an employee of WDAV or NPR; she is a freelancer with the station.

We're in conversations with WDAV about how they intend to handle this. We of course take this issue very seriously.

As a reminder, all public comment (including social media) on this matter is being managed by NPR Communications.

All media requests should be routed through NPR Communications at 202.513.2300 or mediarelations@npr.org. We will keep you updated as needed. Thanks.

NPR posted the first two paragraphs of the memo as a blog item shortly thereafter. Within a few hours, Soundprint fired Simeone (AP, 10/20/11), citing NPR ethics guidelines. It is not clear why the show, which has no apparent formal connection to NPR, would make this move. AP reported that Simeone was fired "after NPR questioned her involvement in a Washington protest," though NPR claims it had "no contact with the management of the program prior to their decision" (Poynter.org, 10/20/11).

Simeone is not an NPR host or employee, but the network did seem to be taking some sort of active role in the decisions about her employment status.

NPR's Ethics Code forbids journalists from participating "in marches and rallies involving causes or issues that NPR covers," and it also states that "NPR journalists may not engage in public relations work." The code "also applies to material provided to NPR by independent producers." But NPR there are exceptions, such as a "freelancer who primarily does arts coverage." The NPR code also states, "There may be instances in which the type of programming may not demand the application of a particular principle in this code."

WDAV, the station that produces World of Opera, decided today that Simeone could continue to host the show:

As host of World of Opera, Lisa Simeone is an independent contractor of WDAV Classical Public Radio. Ms. Simeone’s activities outside of this job are not in violation of any of WDAV's employee codes and have had no effect on her job performance at WDAV. Ms. Simeone remains the host of World of Opera.

That would seem like good news.

But NPR's handling of this is a reminder that it has never been entirely clear what kind of political positions NPR deems objectionable.  News reporter Mara Liasson once denounced antiwar Democratic politicians on Fox News Channel (10/3/02): "These guys are a disgrace. Look, everybody knows it's Politics 101 that you don't go to an adversary country, an enemy country, and badmouth the United States, its policies and the president of the United States. I mean, these guys ought to, I don't know, resign."

The comments caused some controversy (NPR's ombud wrote a column on 7/20/03), but obviously Liasson was not removed from her job as a reporter. Cokie Roberts is apparently free to take political stances, given her role as an analyst.

NPR's new president Gary Knell has stated his desire to "calm the waters" and "depoliticize" the debate over public radio (FAIR Blog, 10/7/11) in response to Republican politicians' desire to cut funding for public broadcasting. Incidents like the revelation of Simeone's activism are likely to provide fodder for right-wing complaints about the "liberal bias" of NPR. One understandable response is derision. Time's James Poniewozik writes:

Public radio listeners! Have you long worried that your station was undermining capitalism through its broadcasts of the Ring Cycle? Tired of having your children brainwashed by the socialistic messages of La Traviata?

Poniewozik argues that firing Simeone "would be a stupid, stupid decision"--but that due to the politicization of the funding debate NPR is "practically obligated to overreact when a staff member or even freelancer comes within 200 feet of a political opinion."

It's beyond absurd that there's really even a controversy over whether the freelance host of an opera show should be fired for political activism. But let it be a reminder to NPR's new president: It's going to be nearly impossible to  "depoliticize" this debate, given the vehemence of your right-wing critics.