NBC Nightly News (10/7/11) marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War on October 7 with a segment that linked the war to the Occupy Wall Street protests. As anchor Brian Williams put it in the introduction:

Tonight protesters remain in the streets of a dozen U.S. cities, angry over what's happened to their lives and our country; and a big part of that, over these last 10 years, the two wars we've been fighting, starting 10 years ago today. This is the anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, longer now than World War II and the Civil War combined.

That's pretty unusual. The report that followed was not.  Quoted in Jim Miklaszewski's report: Retired general Karl Eikenberry, retired general David Barno and retired general Barry McCaffrey (who some might recall for his role as part of Pentagon propaganda effort to feed talking points to TV pundits; he's also on the board of military companies that profit from government contracts).

Not to worry--also quoted in the piece was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is not retired. Getting current and former military officials into a story counts is a kind of balance, right?

NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11):

GREGORY: What's going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street?

EMANUEL: Yeah.

GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street.  Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create an environment...

EMANUEL: Well...

GREGORY: ...to get the banks to hire?

EMANUEL: The--it's not...

GREGORY: Is this not a reverse tea party tactic?

ABC's This Week (10/10/11) had a normally tilted panel on Sunday talking about, among other things,  Occupy Wall Street. The show had three different types of conservatives (former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, fixture George Will and columnist Peggy Noonan) along with Democratic pundit Donna Brazile.

But then host Christiane Amanpour actually interviewed someone involved with Occupy Wall Street--DailyKos blogger Jesse LaGreca. He is perhaps best know as the guy who was interviewed by Fox News Channel at the protest--and took the chance to bash Fox News Channel.

And he did media criticism on This Week too:

LAGRECA: I mean, the reality is, I'm the only working-class person you're going to see on Sunday news, political news maybe ever. And I think that's very indicative of the failures of our media to report on the news that matter most to working-class people.

AMANPOUR: We are trying our best, Jesse.

LAGRECA: And I thank you.

Points to the show for actually having him on, but is ABC really trying its best? That would be sad.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a tedious column today (10/11/11) about how the real radicals are the centrists, not the Wall Street occupiers. (Read Dean Baker to see what Brooks is getting wrong.) But this jumped out at me:

A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New York magazine survey.

How would someone "survey" a leaderless, ever-shifting mass of protesters? I am not sure, and it's not really what New York did. They asked a series of questions--some of them obviously cheeky--to 100 activists at Liberty Plaza. As you can see:

Rank yourself on the following Scale of Liberalism:

Not liberal at all: 6

Liberal but fairly mainstream (i.e., Barack Obama): 3

Strongly liberal (i.e., Paul Krugman): 12

Fed up with Democrats, believe country needs overhaul (i.e., Ralph Nader): 41

Convinced the U.S. government is no better than, say, Al-Qaeda (i.e., Noam Chomsky): 34

It's not surprising that activists at Occupy Wall Street say they identify more with Chomsky than with Obama, regardless of whether you put a description that doesn't reflect Chomsky's worldview next to his name. It's hard to believe that the magazine took this very seriously anyway. But it does provided Brooks with useful anti-protester fodder for his column defending the top 1 percent.

Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He's "Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics...whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax."

But don't think reporter Shaila Dewan picked some unrepresentative oddball to highlight just to make a political point about "how divisive the question has become of providing a bigger safety net to the long-term jobless." Oh no--quite the contrary:

Even among those struggling to find work, Mr. Tolleson is not alone in his views. In a recent survey of the unemployed by Rutgers University, more than one in four respondents was opposed to renewing the current extended unemployment benefits. Three out of five said recipients should be required to take training courses.

But when you click on that link, you find that the Rutgers survey is not "of the unemployed"--the sample includes recently jobless people who are currently working, and of those respondents who are jobless right now, a large majority haven't gotten unemployment benefits in the past year. So how many people are like Donald Tolleson, collecting benefits that they don't the government should be giving them? Maybe none--the results aren't broken down that way.

Further, the survey asked about whether "longer and higher benefits from Unemployment Insurance" were a good idea in the context of "ideas that are being considered by government officials to help bring down high unemployment." So if you supported extending unemployment benefits because they would be good for the unemployed but didn't think they would help bring down unemployment, should you answer yes or no?

The question was asked in a more straightforward way by CNN the last time President Obama signed a bill extending benefits (12/17-19/10). Questioned whether they favored or opposed "an extension of unemployment benefits for workers who lose their jobs," 76 percent of a sample of adults nationwide were in favor, with only 22 percent opposed. Could it be that extending unemployment benefits is not as "divisive" as the New York Times would like you to think?

In the When Will They Learn? department, incoming National Public Radio president Gary Knell seems to suffer from the same misunderstanding that has plagued public broadcasting executives for years.

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reports that Knell says he hopes to "calm the waters a bit" at NPR after recent political controversies, and to "depoliticize" debate over the future of  public radio. Knell is quoted saying, "It's not about liberal or conservative; it's about fairness.... We've got to make the case we're delivering a fair service."

Sigh. It's as if he doesn't see the road behind him strewn with efforts to "depoliticize" the public broadcasting debate, which is code for appeasing public broadcasting's conservative enemies by adding more right-wing content and censoring things they might not like.

But the thing is, politicians are political, and some of them want there to be no more publicly funded...anything, but certainly not broadcasting, which they demonstrate by voting to zero out its resources every chance they get. No matter how calm the waters are.

It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O'Reilly channeling Beck's Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard:

On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren't exactly sure.

What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are being organized by some very interesting people. Does the name MoveOn.org mean anything to you? How about George Soros? Well, for the first time, MoveOn, funded in part by Soros, has openly allied itself with the protesters.

In addition, we have some unions in the mix: the United Auto Workers, the United Federation of Teachers and, of course, the always reliable SEIU. Of course, not all workers in those unions support bringing down capitalism. They don't. But their leadership is certainly sympathetic to the demonstrators.

But, again, what do these people want?

The common thread seems to be "income equality." Groups like the Working Families Party and the Strong Economy for All Coalition are basically socialistic outfits. They want the government to take money away from the affluent and give it to them, a nice deal if you can get it. And you can get it in places like Cuba and Zimbabwe.

The big money behind these protesters, Soros, he doesn't want socialism. Soros is the biggest capitalist on the planet. He wants power and these groups are using the far-left zealots to try to achieve that.

In case your tinfoil hat is not getting good reception, O'Reilly's point is that MoveOn endorsed Occupy Wall Street two weeks after it started, and George Soros contributed to MoveOn in 2003-04, and therefore Soros is "the big money behind these protesters."

Maybe the chalkboard would help.

Republican New Jersey Gov.  Chris Christie isn't running for president after all. This is bad news for the journalists who seemed so eager to promote his candidacy, but also for establishment pundits like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who thought a Christie/Obama contest would have been a victory for.... wait for it... centrism!

He writes today (10/5/11):

Had Christie--a moderate on gun control, climate change and immigration who has also backed Simpson/Bowles--run and won significant support, he would have forced Obama back to the center.

Then, instead of a race between the Democratic left and the Republican right--in which the whole country would lose because the winner would not have had a mandate for the real change we need--we would have had a race between the Democratic center, independents and the Republican center. Then the whole country would win.

Apparently Barack Obama has been veering too far to the left, mostly because he rejected some sort of  Simpson/Bowles "Grand Bargain" fiscal reform plan. Friedman quotes economist Tyler Cowen saying that the plan Obama has proposed "seems to be an extreme Democratic response" because it "is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy."

Friedman agrees--Obama decided to "shift back to his base with a weak fiscal plan." What he should have  proposed was something that "shares the burden of cutbacks fairly--takes from defense programs and entitlements and asks the wealthy to pay more but everyone to pay something."

This criticism is bizarre.  Most people should know that the Affordable Care Act included significant Medicare savings--contrary to the media messages about the failure to rein in spending. (Those cost controls are in large part what gave us a Republican House of Representatives in 2010.) And as Friedman's paper reported, Obama's new fiscal plan includes another round of rather serious cuts to Medicare and Medicaid:

Obama Proposes $320 Billion in Medicare and Medicaid Cuts Over 10 Years

Perhaps Friedman wants deeper cuts, or cuts to Social Security. To him, that is "centrism." But most people in the country don't support these policies--making it strange to call them "centrist."

Friedman has been making a habit of late of wishing that Obama would propose some economic policies that he's already proposed--some mix of cuts and tax increases. This is exactly what Obama has been offering--and none of it resembles what the "Democratic left" is calling for.

The discussion on the economy in the media and among political elites is basically between the far-right Republicans and Obama--whose policy ideas might be considered center or center-right. Tom Friedman wants that debate to move even further to the right.

Last night (10/4/11) CNN host Erin Burnett noted that her  fact check of the Occupy Wall Street protests had drawn some criticism. But she still doesn't seem to get it.  "Well, our story got noted documentarian Michael Moore, who watched the show last night," she reported before playing a video response from Moore:

I just don't understand that piece, you know, that new show. These companies, these banks, Goldman Sachs up here, they took billions and billions of dollars of citizens' money, and they ask us to pay for their crime and we're supposed to be OK because some of them have paid some of it back with interest. I mean, it just boggles the mind.

Burnett then replayed the exchange highlighted in FAIR's Action Alert--where Burnett tells a protester that the TARP bailout funds were paid back (hence, there is apparently no reason to be protesting on Wall Street).

As we noted--as did Moore--this misses the point of the protests,  and doesn't even understand the criticism of the TARP bailouts in the first place.  But Burnett still thinks she's done some kind of service:

As I said last night, Dan was an earnest person and he wanted facts. And the best we can do all is have accurate information and then have serious conversations.... So, Michael Moore, come on, please, come OutFront.

Journalists like Burnett make choices about which guests to have on their show. If she were actually interested in hearing from an advocate for the Occupy Wall Street protests, or from an economic or policy expert who could talk about TARP bailouts or economic inequality, these people are not hard to find--they've been showing up on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann's Current show and so on. One such critic--Harold Meyerson--wrote a column in the Washington Post that was particularly informative. Erin Burnett chose instead to have a former speechwriter for Rudolph Giuliani on to dismiss the protests, and then attempted to do so herself.

She can plead with Michael Moore to appear on her show, or she can actually address the criticism of her report. That's the way to have an actual serious conversation.

New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he's supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street--which he's decided to check out because it's beginning to make some CEOs nervous:

I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?" the CEO asked me. I didn't have an answer. "We're trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this," he continued, clearly concerned. "Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?"

As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don't have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group--at least not yet.

Ah, the protesters aren't brutal--yet.

He goes on:

But the underlying message of Occupy Wall Street--which spread to Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles on Monday--is something the big banks and corporate America may finally have to grapple with before it actually does become dangerous.

What's the message?

At times it can be hard to discern, but, at least to me, the message was clear: The demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.

And that message is a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge--as we've seen in some European countries--if our economy continues to struggle.

To give Sorkin credit, he does seem to have summarized the message of the protest movement accurately. The fact that he does so in the service of telling a CEO whether or not he should be worried about a popular uprising--well, that says a lot about the function of business journalism, doesn't it?

CNN's newest show--OutFront, featuring Erin Burnett--did a "factcheck" of the protest in Lower Manhattan that was long on attitude and short on accuracy. If you'd like the network to take another look, see FAIR's latest Action Alert.

Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or responses to the alert, in the comment thread below.

I checked out a post from the Web-based publication Capital (9/28/11) about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest because CJR (9/29/11) told me it was a "smart post" that "crunched the numbers" and showed "how there really is no media blackout." I have to say I would have thought CJR would have higher standards when it came to crunching media numbers.

Capital's Joe Pompeo states his thesis early on:

The idea that there is a media blackout has gained appeal on the left with support from Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, who said on the September 21 edition of his primetime show on Current TV: "The majority of the media is ignoring the public uprising."

In fact, an (admittedly unscientific) survey of news organizations suggests the protest, despite lacking any clear goal or purpose (that's by design), has been making headlines since it began on September 17.

OK, so Pompeo is trying to show that Olbermann was wrong when he said on September 21 that "the majority of the media" was ignoring the protest. (Michael Moore made a similar statement on the Rachel Maddow Show on September 19.) He does this by doing Nexis and Google searches that include a full week of additional coverage:

A Nexis query for "Occupy Wall Street" yielded 428 results as of press time [i.e, September 28], including 248 items that appeared on blogs, 71 in newspapers, 63 on the wires, 31 in "Web-based publications," 18 as news transcripts, nine as "aggregate news sources," one in the industry trade press and one in a legal news publication. Google News has indexed more than 2,000 articles between September 17 and today.

That is "admittedly unscientific"--not to mention patently unfair.

How much coverage had Occupy Wall Street actually gotten when Olbermann made his claim? Well, Nexis gives me 17 articles from September 16 through September 21 in the "Newspaper Stories, Combined Articles" database with the words "Occupy Wall Street" in them.  Of these, 10 are from overseas papers--from Britain, Australia, Canada, China and Pakistan. Another four are from the St. Joseph News Press, a Missouri paper that reprints tiny items from CNN's wire service. So when Olbermann made his comment, there had been three actual U.S. newspaper stories during five days of demonstrations in the heart of the nation's media capital--the New York Daily News (9/17/11),  Newark Star Ledger (9/18/11) and New York Newsday (9/19/11)--that are at least in-depth enough to mention the name of the event. That's a grand total of 1,047 words.

That Newsday piece, by the way, was headlined "Protests Close Wall Street Second Day." Nothing to see here--move along!

A full-page ad in USA Today reminded me that today is the debut of Erin Burnett's CNN show OutFront.  Burnett gained a following at CNBC, and came to the attention of many conservatives with a report on the Today show (7/17/07) that managed to touch on almost every conservative myth about the economy, earning praise from Rush Limbaugh in the process.

After a clip of Hillary Clinton saying that soaring corporate profits were "like trickle-down economics but without the trickle," Burnett made these claims:

But while the rich are getting richer, you may be, too. Here's why: More than half of Americans are invested in the market whether through a 401(k) plan or buying stocks or mutual funds, and many of those investments are surging. The Dow Jones industrial average is up 12 percent so far this year. And if your retirement plan invested in oil, that alone is up 21 percent. It's also worth noting that while politicians talk about two Americas, virtually all Americans are seeing wages rise, and unemployment is at an historic low.

The idea that a surging stock market is great news for everyone because we all have a piece of the Wall Street pie is totally misleading--most people have little invested in the market, even when retirement accounts are counted.  But Burnett really wanted to push that point--she even squeezed it into an NBC Nightly News segment the same evening (7/17/07), claiming that because everyone has a piece of the action this "means the majority of Americans directly benefit from what happens on Wall Street."

And when a deal was cut to keep low tax rates on dividends and capital gains at the end of 2010, Burnett explained: "With capital gains and dividend taxes staying low, the half of Americans that own stocks get a benefit there as well." Except they don't--very few Americans report any such income.

Back to her Today show segment:

You know, for a while, Matt, wage growth had lagged inflation for most Americans. Right now, though, that's not the case. Wages are growing more quickly than they have over the past few years. And, you know, you've been talking so much about whether the tide lifts all boats, the issue of taxes is important here. The top 1 percent of Americans, Matt, pay 30 percent of taxes in this country. The bottom 20 percent of American wage earners pay only 5 percent.

Over this period there was very little growth in median household income;  it's not clear what Burnett was excited about.  And, of course, nothing warms conservative hearts more than complaining about the heavy tax burden of the wealthy. The bottom 20 percent, who are mostly below the poverty live, pay relatively little in taxes because they don't have much money--according to the Congressional Budget Office (6/10), they make 4 percent of the income in the country, so if they were paying 5 percent of the taxes, as Burnett says, that would be more than their share.

That report earned her praise from right-wing talker Rush Limbaugh. When he reiterated his support for her work on MSNBC, she responded: "You made my day. I'm done now, I'm going home."

That wasn't Burnett's only chance to stick up for the wealthy. She attempted to bat away criticism that TARP bailout funds weren't going to pay sky-high bonuses--only the evidence would seem to indicate that they were.

Then again, Burnett may be best known for these comments about China:

I think people should be careful what they wish for on China. Ya know, if China were to revalue it's currency or China is to start making say, toys that don't have lead in them or food that isn't poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-Mart here in the United States are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now, they're keeping prices low and they're keeping the prices for mortgages low, too.

When Limbaugh cheered Burnett, he teased that he was  "probably now ruining her career because I have praised her." Quite the opposite.

The New York Times had a headline on Saturday that read, "Imagining a Christie Campaign for President."

That seems appropriate--if we're talking about how it's the corporate media doing the imagining.

On ABC's This Week (10/2/11), Jonathan Karl announced that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's speech at the Reagan Library "was  the most electrifying event of the campaign so far."

That speech was treated like a big event on the NBC Nightly News (9/28/11), with anchor Brian Williams saying up front that Christie is  "the man whose every word is being watched and listened to so very carefully." Reporter Chuck Todd--you know, the voice of the voiceless--explains that there is a "twist" in the presidential race:  "Chris Christie opened the door a crack to running for president."

What does that mean? Apparently he didn't say he's not running:

It's what New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did not say at the Reagan Library Tuesday night that froze the Republican presidential race in place. He didn't say no.

In the NBC segment, Christie tells people to go check out a Politico story--which is a compilation of all the times he's said he's not running for president. Which kind of sounds like he doesn't think he's running for president, right?

And if that doesn't convince you, surely this will:

TODD: But when an audience member pleaded with him:

Offscreen Voice #2: I mean this with all my heart. We can't wait another four years to 2016. We need you. Your country needs you to run for president.

TODD: Christie stopped joking and left an opening.

Gov. CHRISTIE: I thank you for what you're saying and I take it in and I'm listening to every word of it and feeling it, too.

TODD: Everything about Christie's speech screamed national campaign.

Everything except, you know, the part where he says he's running for president.