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Michael Moore celebrates FAIR's 25th anniversary

Left-wing activist and author Noam Chomsky is in the New York Times today:

The American linguist Noam Chomsky, a prominent source of intellectual inspiration for President Hugo Chávez, made a new appeal on Wednesday for the release of María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge arrested two years ago by the secret intelligence police.

If you find it a little surprising that Chomsky's views on international affairs would be reported in the Paper of Record, and if you'd be inclined to believe the Times finds his views newsworthy only because Chomsky is criticizing Chavez (which they've done before)... well, you might  not be the only one. Here's what Chomsky said about it to the Guardian:

Despite his appeal for Afiuni's release, Chomsky has been critical of the media's coverage of the case. On Wednesday he suggested the case had received so much media attention only "because Venezuela is an official enemy" [of the United States]. "I am involved in these appeals all the time but I get no calls unless it is an enemy of the US," Chomsky said. "This is more a comment on the media than on the case."

"Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Not So Much" was the headline on a National Journal post yesterday (12/21/11). "The Texan's campaign has raised millions of dollars to combat the alleged media conspiracy that, they claim, is out to destroy the candidate the media fears most," the Journal's Sarah Mimms reported. "There is just one problem: The Ron Paul revolution is being televised."

By Mimms' count, "since announcing his campaign on May 13, Paul has made 87 appearances on cable television and Sunday news programs. That's more than any other candidate currently running for president." She stresses that "he has appeared on Fox News 63 times since June 1, more than any of his primary rivals."

It's true that Fox News is an important outlet for GOP candidates. If Paul's been on Fox 63 times, though, that means he's been on other TV outlets at most 24 times; how that compares with other GOP candidates, Mimms doesn't say. (Note: Of course, this doesn't include Paul's CNN appearance yesterday, when he walked off an interview with Gloria Borger about the racist newsletters he was publishing in the 1980s and 1990s.) She does acknowledge later down that on broader measures of media exposure, Paul is doing very poorly:

Paul is mentioned on air far less frequently than most of his rivals, including Bachmann and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, both of whom trail him in national and state-level polls. And when pundits talk about him, they frequently do so in a far more negative tone.

It is also true, as his campaign has asserted, that Paul gets less time to air his views in debates.

Here's a graph from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism (10/21/11) that gives a more informative impression of the relative attention paid to the various leading GOP candidates:

A more accurate headline for the National Journal piece? "Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Pretty Much."

The Monday broadcast of CBS Evening News (12/19/11) began with big news, with anchor Scott Pelley announcing:

The secretary of Defense says tonight that the United States will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. In an interview with CBS News, Leon Panetta says that despite efforts to disrupt their nuclear program, the Iranians have reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year or potentially less.

To ratchet up the drama, Pelley told viewers that Panetta was aboard  "the jet nicknamed the Doomsday Plane. This is the command post where he and the president would direct a nuclear war."

Pelley reiterated that, according to Panetta, "Iran needs only one year to build a nuclear weapon." Then came this exchange:

PELLEY: So are you saying that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in 2012?

PANETTA: It would be sometime around a year that they would be able to do it. Perhaps a little less. The one proviso, Scott, is if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel.

PELLEY: So that they could develop a weapon even more quickly than we believed?

PANETTA: That's correct.

Near the end of the segment, Pelley made this remark:

Panetta told us that while the Iranians need a year or less to assemble the weapon, he has no indication yet that they have made the decision to go ahead.

So Iran could have a weapon in a year--or maybe not at all.

In today's New York Times, we see a story headlined, "Aides Qualify Panetta’s Comments on Iran," which leads with this:

An assertion by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that Iran could have a nuclear weapon as soon as next year was based on a highly aggressive timeline and a series of actions that Iran has not yet taken, senior Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

The report added these comments from a Pentagon spokesperson (bolded for emphasis):

"The secretary was clear that we have no indication that the Iranians have made a decision to develop a nuclear weapon," Mr. Little said. "He was asked to comment on prospective and aggressive timelines on Iran’s possible production of nuclear weapons--and he said if, and only if, they made such a decision. He didn't say that Iran would, in fact, have a nuclear weapon in 2012."

Now without knowing what was actually said in the full interview, it's hard to know whether Panetta's office is trying to walk back his careless, inaccurate rhetoric, or whether the CBS interviewer was pushing a hard line on Iran and nuclear weapons, treating the allegations being made about that country's nuclear program as if they were facts.

If it's the latter, it wouldn't be unprecedented. At the December 15 Republican debate, Fox host Bret Baier posed this question to Ron Paul:

Congressman Paul, many Middle East experts now say Iran may be less than one year away from getting a nuclear weapon. Now, judging from your past statements, even if you had solid intelligence that Iran, in fact, was going to get a nuclear weapon, President Paul would remove the U.S. sanctions on Iran, included those added by the Obama administration. So, to be clear, GOP nominee Paul would be running left of President Obama on the issue of Iran?

Paul tried to explain to Baier that there is not, in fact, any intelligence suggesting Iran is less than a year from having the bomb. As Paul explained:

For you to say that there is some scientific evidence and some people arguing that maybe in a year they might have a weapon, there's a lot more saying they don't have it. There's no UN evidence of that happening. Clapper at the--in our national security department, he says there is no evidence. It's no different than it was in 2003. You know what I really fear about what's happening here? It's another Iraq coming. There's war propaganda going on.

Baier, for his part, followed up by demanding that the candidate answer a question based on a false premise:

Congressman Paul, the question was based on the premise that you had solid intelligence, you actually had solid intelligence as President Paul, and yet you still at that point would pull back U.S. sanctions, and again, as a GOP nominee, would be running left of President Obama on this issue?

It's probably not that these journalists want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But they do seem to want to have a public debate that assumes Iran is about to have a nuclear weapon. Given the possible repercussions, that's bad enough.

On Sunday (12/18/11), ABC's This Week presented an installment of what it's calling "The Great American Debates." What it really was, though, was a perfect example of how corporate media adopt right-wing assumptions when framing a discussion.

In this case, it was a debate over Big Government. The show's opening sounded like a Tea Party rally:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: This week, a special program on the defining issue of 2012. Has Uncle Sam become too big, too powerful? A bailout bonanza, a welfare state? A tax-and-spend Goliath crushing the entrepreneurial spirit when America can't afford to fall behind? That's the rallying cry of the Tea Party, the mantra of Republican candidates everywhere.

GOV. RICK PERRY, R-TEXAS: Washington doesn't need a new coat of paint. It needs a complete overall.

AMANPOUR: At the heart of Ronald Reagan's famous declaration.

RONALD REAGAN: The government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.

AMANPOUR: Today, ABC News and the Miller Center of the University of Virginia present The Great American Debate. Facing off here in Washington, the intellectual heavyweights of both parties. For the right, Congressman Paul Ryan and ABC's own George Will. And from the left, Congressman Barney Frank and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

About all you can say about this is that it's relatively balanced in terms of  ideology.

But all the rhetoric about a "welfare state" and a "tax-and-spend Goliath" are staples of right-wing talk radio. Has the government gone on a spending binge in the Obama years? Not really, as Paul Krugman has explained a few times. Government spending as a share of GDP has gone up, but there are reasonable explanations--a massive recession, the cost of unemployment insurance--that have nothing to do with enterpreneur-crushing Big Government.

Reich tried to point out the flaws in the framing of this discussion at least once: "The idea of big government as a framing device in terms of a debate such as this inevitably sets it up kind of in favor of the side that doesn't want big government."

To suggest this is the "defining issue" of 2012 is rather remarkable. Most people think there's a jobs crisis, and understand that government spending might be the most efficient way to fix the problem. But I don't expect ABC to convene a "Great Debate" that is premised on a question like, "Why isn't the government spending enough money to create jobs?"

Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about:

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?

Huh. A collaborative effort with the people of Iraq? Friedman goes on:

But was it a wise choice?

My answer is twofold: "No" and "Maybe, sort of, we'll see."

Hmm.

Others remember a different Tom Friedman, interviewed by Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.

"Now that the war is over," Rose began his question--a conclusion widely jumped to in the early days of the war. When asked if invading Iraq was worth it, Friedman responded that it was "unquestionably worth doing."

The war, back then, was an attack on the "terrorist bubble," which in Friedman's mind meant that "we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick... and there was only one way to do it."

He went on:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, suck. On. This." That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

The house-to-house, "suck on this" democracy campaign. That's how it's normally done.

I guess one great thing about being a Times columnist is that you not only  get to write about the present--you can also re-write your own past.

The Sunday New York Times (12/18/11) featured a powerful investigation of civilian casualties resulting from the NATO war in Libya--casualties that, to hear NATO officials tell it, maybe don't even exist.

The Times' C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt report:

But an on-the-ground examination by The New York Times of airstrike sites across Libya--including interviews with survivors, doctors and witnesses, and the collection of munitions remnants, medical reports, death certificates and photographs--found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. The victims, including at least 29 women or children, often had been asleep in homes when the ordnance hit.

The Times even took its research--based on a small number of incidents--to NATO, which seemed to change its story immediately:

Two weeks after being provided a 27-page memorandum from the Times containing extensive details of nine separate attacks in which evidence indicated that allied planes had killed or wounded unintended victims, NATO modified its stance.

"From what you have gathered on the ground, it appears that innocent civilians may have been killed or injured, despite all the care and precision," said Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO headquarters in Brussels. "We deeply regret any loss of life."

The Times reports that  it "found significant damage to civilian infrastructure from certain attacks for which a rationale was not evident or risks to civilians were clear." The paper also noted that many witnesses talked about "warplanes restriking targets minutes after a first attack, a practice that imperiled, and sometimes killed, civilians rushing to the wounded." That is a tactic often associated with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.

The Times also offers a sickening glimpse into the denial of NATO leaders after civilians were killed in an airstrike in Tripoli:

Initially, NATO almost acknowledged its mistake. "A military missile site was the intended target," an alliance statement said soon after. "There may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties."

Then it backtracked. Kristele Younes, director of field operations for Civic, the victims' group, examined the site and delivered her findings to NATO. She met a cold response. "They said, 'We have no confirmed reports of civilian casualties,'"  Ms. Younes said.

The reason, she said, was that the alliance had created its own definition for "confirmed": Only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed. But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations, its casualty tally by definition could not budge--from zero.

If you recall the corporate media coverage of the war while it was happening, Libyan leaders were churning out laughably clumsy propaganda about civilian deaths.  "Libya Stokes Its Machine Generating Propaganda" was the June 7 headline of a New York Times story by John Burns, who scoffed at the "nightly propaganda tour" of the Libyan capitol. It seemed obvious at the time that Burns and his ilk were offended by by the Libyan government's inability to lie as effectively as the NATO generals.

The Times also investigated August airstrikes that it termed "NATO's bloodiest known accidents in the war"--a series of strikes on buildings in the town of Majer:

The attack began with a series of 500-pound laser-guided bombs, called GBU-12s, ordnance remnants suggest. The first house, owned by Ali Hamid Gafez, 61, was crowded with Mr. Gafez's relatives, who had been dislocated by the war, he and his neighbors said.

The bomb destroyed the second floor and much of the first. Five women and seven children were killed; several more people were wounded, including Mr. Gafez's wife, whose her lower left leg had to be amputated, the doctor who performed the procedure said.

Minutes later, NATO aircraft attacked two buildings in a second compound, owned by brothers in the Jarud family. Four people were killed, the family said.

Several minutes after the first strikes, as neighbors rushed to dig for victims, another bomb struck. The blast killed 18 civilians, both families said.

The death toll has been a source of confusion. The Qaddafi government said 85 civilians died. That claim does not seem to be credible. With the Qaddafi propaganda machine now gone, an official list of dead, issued by the new government, includes 35 victims, among them the late-term fetus of a fatally wounded woman the Gafez family said went into labor as she died.

The Zlitan hospital confirmed 34 deaths. Five doctors there also told of treating dozens of wounded people, including many women and children.

The airstrikes in Majer were discussed by FAIR in an August 18 media advisory, where it was noted that several reports talked about a death toll of about 30. The deaths were barely covered at all. As we pointed out, the Paper of Record did not think much at the time:

The New York Times (8/10/11) ran a 170-word version of a Reuters dispatch which noted: "There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but there were no bodies there, either. Nor was there blood."

Corporate media were more offended by inflated Libyan claims about civilian casualties than they were about the false denials coming from the people doing the killing. What's worse, to kill people and then deny that you did so, or to overstate how many people your enemies were killing? Many reporters--too many--seemed to think the latter was the more serious crime.

New York Times reporter David Carr (12/19/11) takes a look at comedian Louis C.K.'s recent decision to webcast his own comedy special:

A scabrous and successful champion of the everyman, Louis C. K. decided last week to go direct with his fans: no cable special, no middleman, just a simple download for $5 on his website to see his comedy show Louis C. K.: Live at the Beacon Theater.

The show could be viewed as the consumer wished, with no rights protection or expensive subscription. A buy-it-and-watch-it proposition, no cable company involved. He was also, of course, enabling people to watch it free--without digital rights management, it was there for the pirating--and some went right to the torrent sites and did so.

How many people did? Close to 200,000, which means the comedian could earn somewhere in the neighborhood of $750,000. But more interesting was his take on the modern media landscape:

"OK, so NBC is this huge company and they have all these studios and these satellites to beam stuff out," he said, "but on the Web, both NBC.com and LouisCK.com have the same amount of bandwidth. We are equals and there are things you can do with that. This has been a fun little experiment."

That, in a nutshell, is what the discussion about net neutrality should be about.

Last night (12/15/11), MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes were impressed by a new Pew poll--flagged by Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent--showing that a vast majority of the public believes that corporations and the wealthy have too much power.

The picture one gets from the poll is pretty dramatic:

The question that seemed most important to Maddow and Hayes was why Republican politicians aren't shifting their policies in response to this apparent surge in anti-corporate populism:

MADDOW: The national sentiment right now being expressed to pollsters is that the people at the top are getting way too much of the spoils of both our economy and our political system and I resent it, and I think that even if I'm a Republican.

HAYES: Majority of Republicans say that wealthy people--corporations and people with money--have too much power in this country, a majority of Republicans in the poll.

MADDOW: Are you seeing politicians behave in a way that reflects a desire to meet that concern?

HAYES: What's amazing to me is how unresponsive Republican state level officials are and how much they're responsive to all of their ideological priors, all of the interests that they promised fealty to before they got into office, and how little trimming of the sails they've done.

I mean, Rick Scott just seems to be perfectly happy to plow along at 25 percent, doing all these things that are wildly unpopular. And I think there's a different set of incentive structures on the right, partly because of the way the money works over there, partly because of the ideological cohesiveness of the base.

But what we have not seen largely are course corrections.

MADDOW: Yes.

Of course, MSNBC is likely to focus more on what Republicans are doing wrong, or not doing at all; that's their bread and butter. But setting up a political discussion along these lines presents some problems.

If you're wondering why Republican politicians haven't become more anti-corporate, what about the Democratic Party? Democrats in the poll are far more critical of corporate power than Republicans. Does their party seem politically responsive to this?

(Of course, the first question to ask is whether you really believe politicians are actually sensitive to public opinion at all--read about Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics for another take.)

The most important thing to know is that this new populism isn't new. ABC's been polling on this for a while (results are posted on PollingReport.com):

And FAIR took note of this in 1998 (press release, 6/1/98)  when we compared public opinion to a survey of elite media:

The general public is more critical of the concentration of corporate power in the United States than are journalists. When asked whether they felt "too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies," 57 percent of the journalists agreed, while 43 percent felt they did not have too much power. The numbers were quite different, though, when the Times Mirror Center asked the same question of the general public in October 1995. A full 77 percent of the public felt that corporations had too much power, with only 18 percent feeling that they did not.

The fact that Time magazine named "The Protester" its Person of the Year was maybe a little surprising. Totally unsurprising, though, was the choice of a runners-up: Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a hero to many in the corporate media for his bold calls to slash government spending on the poor.

It's hard to know where to start with reporter David Von Drehle's tribute. But let's try here:

Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.

Dealing with the rising debt. Remember that idea.

He goes on:

The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe. Did he deliver a perfect plan? Not even he claims that. But Ryan, 41, offered a budget that began to convey the scale of change necessary to defuse the American debt bomb: Sweeping tax reform. Unprecedented spending freezes. Most important, a thorough reinvention of federal entitlements.

Ryan's plan isn't perfect? And he admitted this?  What a guy! Ryan's heroic stance, readers learn, caused fury in both parties. Republicans were forced to make  difficult choices, while "Democrats howled at the sacrilege and Ryan's refusal to raise income tax rates on the wealthy."

Ryan's is a "tough budget"  that "brought President Obama down from his cloud of happy talk about windmills and high-speed trains to acknowledge that America has a plateful of peas to choke down after its binge at the dessert bar." That's right--massive cuts in social spending are good for you, just like eating your veggies.

The crux of the whole piece comes down to this:

Ryan's dramatic proposal would not have gained any traction if it did not address a widely acknowledged problem: Over the next two generations, the U.S. government is on track to spend many tens of trillions of dollars more than it plans to raise. Unless changes are made, that will force so much borrowing that interest payments alone will sink the federal budget.

Thankfully, Time tells us, Paul Ryan has "the courage to look the future in the eye. It is a seer's work to glimpse around the corner and sound an alarm."

The piece closes by noting that this brave bold plan "wouldn't balance the federal budget until 2040. The prophet of 2011 will be 70 years old."

Wait a second. I thought this was a bold deficit-reducing roadmap to deal with the debt?

The secret to the Ryan plan--the thing media don't talk about much--is that it doesn't do the thing they say they like about it-- namely, reduce the deficit. As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times, the projected deficit in 2020 under the Ryan plan would be

about the same as the budget office's estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration's plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible--which you shouldn't--the Roadmap wouldn't reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

Or as James Horney of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities wrote of Ryan (4/8/11):

Despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history--two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes--the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That's because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.

Dean Baker writes that "Representative Ryan's program would imply a massive upward redistribution to the one percent." Maybe that explains why he's a Time runner-up. If "The Protester" is the Person of the Year, journalistic "balance" requires saying nice things about the One Percent.

The Washington Post's Scott Wilson has a piece (12/13/11) looking back on the Iraq War, where he writes of  the "arc of the American experience in Iraq" being "from hope to barbarity, from swaggering invasion to quiet departure."

When it comes to the rationale for the entire war, things get a bit fuzzy. Like we pointed out recently about CBS Evening News, the main driver of the invasion--the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--is reduced to something like a footnote:

The premise was contested from the start, a new doctrine of preemptive war tailored to an era in which stateless militants could batter the once-distant United States with the everyday tools of modern society--commercial jets as missiles, cellphones as triggers, trucks as bombs.

The neoconservatives at the Pentagon and in the West Wing argued that the invasion of Iraq was necessary. Hussein, the longtime U.S. nemesis who once tried to kill then-President Bush's father, was openly encouraging Palestinian militancy at a time when Hamas was blowing up cafes and pizzerias in Jerusalem. A model of democracy in the Middle East--imposed by the U.S. military--would inspire change in its neighbors or frighten them into reform.

Besides, Hussein had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to put down a Shiite rebellion that the United States failed to support after pledging to do so--a broken promise that helped fill the mass graves of Hilla, south of Baghdad. And he supposedly had an arsenal of some of the world’s nastiest weapons that had to be found and destroyed before they ended up with Al-Qaeda.

In this bizarre re-telling, Saddam Hussein's support for Hamas and a plot to kill George H. W. Bush seem to matter more than the bogus stories about Iraq's WMDs. Perhaps all you can say about this is that it makes a certain kind of sense for the U.S. government and elite media to want people to forget the falsehoods that launched the war.

The Washington Post's series of candidate profiles continues. Today it's Ron Paul's turn.

In Joel Achenbach's main piece (12/15/11), readers learn, in the lead paragraph, that Paul is

not the standard presidential candidate--he lacks the factory-built appearance of Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. He's thin, bony, a bantam rooster.

Thankfully, the rest of the piece is focused more on substance. But a second article is peculiarly focused on Paul's looks and the sound of his voice--suggesting that this explains why he doesn't get much "attention" (which, when reporters say it, should be taken to mean "media attention," since Paul obviously is attracting the interest of actual voters).

Sarah Kaufman writes (12/15/11):

So why, with his long-held views and an enthusiastic base of support, does Paul get so little attention? It's not only his anti-establishment message. Part of his acceptance issue is the way he presents himself. As much as he is a refreshing departure from the mold, he also comes across as a gadfly.

Consider if Paul had the heftier, more serious bearing of a Romney or a Gingrich. Would he be so easy to dismiss? In the Darwinian world of public perception, it's easy to discount what you hear from someone who looks a little smaller, and perhaps a little weaker. Especially when his voice tends to spiral into the upper registers.

Yep, if only he could look like Newt Gingrich--with his "more serious bearing"--then the media would take him seriously. It's hard to criticize the media when they explain their deficiencies on their own.

The Winter Garden is one of New York City's largest and most beautiful indoor public spaces. Graced by giant palm trees that would look impressive on Sunset Boulevard and a vast skylight that provides year-round balmy sunlight, this crossroads of Manhattan's Battery Park City became a symbol of Downtown's rebirth when it was reconstructed after being devastated in the September 11 attacks.

Yet this crucial community gathering space--which provides a much-needed public square that's hospitable throughout the year--is actually privately owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a multinational real-estate developer that owns the World Financial Center that the Winter Garden is a part of, and has received some recent media attention as the owner of Liberty Plaza, the initial site of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. (Brookfield in recent years has rebranded Liberty Plaza as Zuccotti Park, after the chair of Brookfield's board, former New York City Planning Commission chair John Zuccotti. Incidentally, another of Brookfield's directors, Diana Taylor, also serves as girlfriend to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.)

The Winter Garden is not a favor that Brookfield is doing for the citizens of New York City out of the goodness of its corporate heart, any more than Liberty Plaza is; such amenities, as they're called, are promised by developers to the city in exchange for various exceptions and relaxations of zoning and other rules that make the developers' projects more profitable.

So as paradoxical as it sounds, these privately owned public spaces truly do belong to the public; their corporate managers have invited us in in exchange for official concessions, and they can't revoke that invitation on a whim--or because they object to community members using that space to express political viewpoints, as people are wont to do in a public square.

But that's exactly what the city of New York, presumably acting on behalf of Brookfield, did on December 12, when it arrested 17 people who were either participating in or reporting on an Occupy Wall Street protest--directed against Brookfield as the landowner of Liberty Plaza and thus the beneficiary of New York City's eviction of OWS from the park. One of those arrested was FAIR intern John Knefel, a writer, comedian and co-producer (with his sister Molly) of an Internet radio show called Radio Dispatch.

The arrestees were charged with criminal trespass and in some cases with resisting arrest, but the actual offense was attempt to engage in political life--in attempting to persuade others, or in conveying via journalism those attempts to persuade--in what the police (at the orders of Bloomberg and/or Brookfield) had arbitrarily determined to be a politics-free zone. They would be held for some 37 hours before being taken before a judge to be arraigned and released.

In an article for Salon (12/13/11), Molly Knefel described what happened when people tried to exercise First Amendment rights in the Winter Garden:

The protesters--maybe 100 or so--had gathered in the center of the floor and were dancing and chanting, "Occupy Brookfield!"  A long line of police began to form in the periphery, and John and the other media people dispersed to take pictures.  As the police formed an outer circle to surround the large group, the crowd began to disperse.  Many of the protesters headed up the marble staircase away from the cops, and a small group bolted up a nearby escalator.

That was when everything escalated completely out of control.  The escalator was stopped.  Suddenly, the outer circle of cops was swarming in and violently pushing people away.  John had been standing near the crowd, taking video.  I was about 20 feet from him, and when I looked back in his direction, I saw his blue hood on the ground.  I ran toward him and slid to the ground, leaning in between people's knees to take pictures.  John was face down on the ground being handcuffed, his glasses flung across the floor and people screaming, "Stop, stop, he didn’t do anything!"

A cop pulled me up by my shoulders and told me to step back.  I said, "He's my brother."  Several cops pushed me away as I asked, "What is he being arrested for?  He was taking pictures."  A cop said, "He didn’t produce an official press pass, so that means he was resisting arrest."

On Twitter,  (12/13/11), Molly noted: "There were no instructions that I heard. They only told us to 'get out' after the violent arrests started." Which is patently unfair, but in a way more honest than going through the rigamarole about announcing that protesters and journalists are operating in a space where the First Amendment is suspended--the NYPD prefers the term "frozen zone." If the government is going to drive people out of public spaces for engaging in the most crucial forms of public participation, there's really no need to create the impression that the citizenry have any choice in the matter.

The national hardware chain Lowe's pulled its advertising from the TLC reality show All-American Muslim--explaining that the question of whether Muslims can be presented as regular human beings is a "hotly contested debate."

All-American Muslim is a reality show described by TLC, the cable channel that airs it, as "a look at life in Dearborn, Michigan--home to the largest mosque in the United States--through the lens of five Muslim American families...an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community."

But the Florida Family Association, a right-wing group leading the charge against the program, saw it as part of a sinister plot:

The Learning Channel's new show All-American Muslim is propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law. The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.

Note the parallel between this argument and a complaint that Jersey Shore doesn't depict any of its Italian-American cast members as members of the Mafia.

Mobilizing its members to send emails calling on advertisers to boycott the show, FFA scored a victory. The company responded to the group (Hollywood Reporter, 12/9/11), "While we continue to advertise on various cable networks, including TLC, there are certain programs that do not meet Lowe's advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe's will no longer be advertising on that program."

Lowe's decision prompted an outraged response--one activist wrote, "Will you next consider KKK's demands to pull ads from BET?" (Hollywood Reporter, 12/9/11)--leading to an explanation of sorts posted on the company's Facebook page:

It appears that we managed to step into a hotly contested debate with strong views from virtually every angle and perspective--social, political and otherwise--and we’ve managed to make some people very unhappy. We are sincerely sorry. We have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, across our workforce and our customers, and we’re proud of that longstanding commitment.

Lowe's has received a significant amount of communication on this program, from every perspective possible. Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lighting rod for many of those views. As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance.

Unfortunately, pulling your ads from a television show because it depicts a group of people as normal Americans is not a way to "respectfully defer"--it's taking the side of bigots who believe that that group must always be portrayed as frightening and dangerous.

Lowe's concluded its message:  "We strongly support and respect the right of our customers, the community at large, and our employees to have different views. If we have made anyone question that commitment, we apologize." One might well question the commitment of Lowe's to the right of people to express the viewpoint that Muslims are human beings when it withholds its advertising from programs that make that point.  The calculation that it's safer not to associate oneself with groups that are hated by a vocal minority highlights the danger of relying on corporate sponsorship to support a media system that one hopes would actually embody the values that Lowe's pretends to have.

Of course Newt Gingrich (you know, the "big thinker" in the Republican campaign) made a lot of news by declaring that the Palestinians are an "invented" people.

As As'ad AbuKhalill--aka Angry Arab--pointed out, the New York Times ran a piece on this controversy on December 10 quoting exactly two sources: former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and David A. Harris, chief executive of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

Times reporter Trip Gabriel also noted of Gingrich:

He described Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, as denying Israel's right to exist.

"You have Abbas, who says in the United Nations, 'We do not necessarily concede Israel's right to exist,'" Mr. Gingrich said. "So you have to start with this question: 'Who are you making peace with?'"

It would be rather unusual for Abbas to have said such a thing. I cannot find any evidence of it (a conclusion reached by others, too).  A Reuters piece about Abbas' UN speech noted that he "told the United Nations he had no intention of denying Israel's right to exist, but said he did want to delegitimize the settler movement."

So "invented" people aren't given a chance to respond,  and apparently words can be put in their mouths by history professor Republican candidates.