To me, the most interesting observation after the South Carolina primary came from New York magazine reporter and regular TV pundit John Heilemann, who said this on MSNBC (h/t Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars):

Gingrich is going to get so much free media attention over the next few days. It is going to be wall to wall Gingrich, and I think it is fair to say that, in some ways,  the "liberal media," as Gingrich would put it, is kind of rooting for Gingrich right now. They want this--they/we, want this race to go on, so he is gonna have, he is gonna get more attention and in some ways more favorable coverage, at least for the next couple days, than he would ordinarily from people who would normally give him tougher scrutiny…

So the guy who's been running against the "liberal media" might actually see his campaign boosted by that very same media? Yes. Heilemann thinks it's about the press wanting to see a competitive race, which is certainly part of it.

But it's worth pointing out that Gingrich's attacks on the media from the debate podium don't tell us much about how he really feels about the media. As  Ginger Gibson of Politico reported (1/20/12), Gingrich can be quite the charmer when the cameras are off:

The same candidate who on Thursday decried "the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media" shows another face to the cadre of reporters who follow his campaign day-to-day. He jokes with them, publicly celebrates their birthdays, teases them about the early hour they are often forced out of bed to cover his events.

Gibson added that "Gingrich also appears to make a distinction between individual reporters and the media as a whole and comprehends the insatiable nature of the modern news hole."

Or to get at it more succinctly,  read this post by Daily Mail reporter Toby Harnden. Or just read the headline: "Newt Gingrich's Big, Slobbering Mutual Love Affair With the Elite Media."

Harnden even posted a photo of the press pass reporters were given for Gingrich's post-election event:

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 New York Times reports that Chelsea Clinton will be a full time special correspondent for NBC News, starting more or less immediately. Salon's Glenn Greenwald connected this news to the media careers of Meghan McCain (MSNBC), Luke Russert (NBC) and Jenna Bush Hager (NBC), and reached this conclusion about the state of our meritocracy:

We all owe our gratitude to NBC News for single-handedly correcting the shameful, long-standing exclusion from our media discourse of the views of young, journalistically accomplished heirs and heiresses to political power and great fortune; it is long overdue that former NYT executive editor Bill Keller, son of the CEO and chairman of Chevron, be joined by the next generation.

The only other thing to add is that the Times' account included this anonymous source, who offered the kind of remarkable insight one expects from someone who is granted anonymity to speak the truth:

One person close to Ms. Clinton said she had been quietly raising her profile for some time, though the public had not been completely aware of it. That person, who asked not to be identified because of a reluctance to speak for her, said Ms. Clinton had been more active in causes backed by her family’s William J. Clinton Foundation.

On his MSNBC show (10/15/11), Chris Hayes went through the NBC archives to look at Martin Luther King's appearances on Meet the Press. He was struck by the tone of the questions King was asked--and the show put together this clip reel (apologies for the ad you're likely to be forced to watch before the clips play; it's mercifully brief):

I caught this MSNBC commercial last night featuring their own Chuck Todd, explaining (apparently) how he thinks about his job:

My job is to bring up issues that Americans care about.

It's my responsibility to ask the tough questions. No matter who's leading the country, they need to be held accountable.

I have unique access to the president, his advisers, the candidates and members of Congress.

I'd better use that access for a greater good. Use it for people who can't get through the White House gates. For people who can't be heard.

The American people deserve answers.

Huh. The Chuck Todd I see on television is more like this, this, and this--and don't forget the time he met a journalist (Jeremy Scahill) who actually does work that resembles Todd's self-description. Scahill appeared on a TV show panel with Todd, and criticized him for saying that investigating Bush-era torture policies would be a distraction. Off the air, Todd told Scahill that he shouldn't be so impolite:  "You sullied my reputation on TV."

I guess my question is this: Does Chuck Todd have another job? One that more closely resembles this description of a fearless truth-teller, giving voice to the voiceless?

Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC (9/19/11):

Or, if you prefer reading:

But last week when Wolf Blitzer and CNN had that debate, the CNN/Tea Party Express debate, and Wolf sat there and called them his partners--I just thought, this was amazing, because would you ever see the CNN nurses union debate or the CNN teachers union debate? Because I think there are a few more teachers and nurses in this country than there are members of the Tea Party.

But we'll never see that in the mainstream media. And liberal organizations which have many more members just don't get the attention. A thousand people arrested in front of the White House a couple of weeks ago on the tar sands environmental issue -- hardly any coverage of this.

Can you imagine if 1,000 Tea Party members had been arrested in front of the White House? It would be at the top of every news story.

People are down on Wall Street right now, holding a sit-in and a camp- in down there--virtually no news about this protest.

This goes on with liberals and the left all of the time, and it gets ignored. And, fortunately, there are shows like yours and others who aren't ignoring it. It doesn't mean it isn't happening, and it will continue to happen.

New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley has a piece (8/31/11) about Al Sharpton's debut as an MSNBC host. It seems his show, like others on the channel, could use more of a debate:

On Monday Mr. Sharpton followed the patented formula, bringing in two experts who agreed with him that recent efforts in North Carolina and other states to stiffen voter-identity requirements and restrict early voting would mostly affect the minorities and younger voters who turned out in record numbers for Barack Obama in 2008. Mr. Sharpton called it a "poll tax by another name." It’s an interesting issue, and not one that other MSNBC talkshows have addressed with the same degree of passion, but it would also have been helpful to viewers to learn how proponents of voting restrictions justify the legislation.

While diversity of viewpoints is a nice goal, this is one of those issues where the "other side" doesn't have much of a case. Voter ID laws are, in theory, supposed to protect against voter fraud--which is an almost completely nonexistent problem. Stanley's paper has written a couple of  editorials about this, citing the Brennan Center's excellent work on the issue.

There are obviously plenty of things you can say about Al Sharpton or MSNBC. Wishing that his show would feature more guests spewing misinformation is hardly "helpful."

The headline of Al Neuharth's column in USA Today (7/15/11) summed up his case: "Murdoch Media Give You What You Want."

That sort of depends on who "you" is. Neuharth explains:

Murdoch has an uncanny knack for figuring out what a sizable segment of readers and viewers want and giving it to them. Straight or slanted.

His Fox News television network is as blatantly right-wing as Murdoch intended it to be when he started it in 1996 to counter the left-wing MSNBC.

Oh, so that's what explained the launch of Fox News Channel in October 1996--the rampant left-wing bias of MSNBC, which had been on the air for... just about three months. The channel with all the left-wing hosts--like the show that featured Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. The channel that made a big deal of hiring Don Imus in 1998.

The channel that would go on, in those early years, to bring viewers the likes of Michael Savage, Tucker Carlson, Alan Keyes, Oliver North and Joe Scarborough. Yep, Fox was launched to counter all of that.

Or maybe Neuharth means that Murdoch is so smart that he started a right-wing cable network knowing that his competitors would try to imitate his political slant for the better part of a decade, until finally deciding that counter-programming made more sense. So that in the late 2000s, Fox would finally have a liberal foil.

If that's what he means, then Murdoch really is an evil genius.

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

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

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

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

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.

MSNBC host has been receiving praise for going after his NBC bosses--as the L.A. Times noted today (4/29/11):

MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell escalated attacks on NBC executives this week. On his MSNBC show the Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell Wednesday night, he accused NBC (another division of his own company) of allowing the Celebrity Apprentice host Donald Trump to spread "racist" lies against President Obama in demanding that Obama produce his long-form birth certificate....

"NBC has created a monster who is using his NBC fame to spew hatred reeking with racist overtones and undertones," O'Donnell said on his show.

This isn't the first time O'Donnell has done something like this--remember that when the news surfaced about GE's tax avoidance, O'Donnell slammed the company--which still owns a hefty chunk of NBC.

O'Donnell recently did an interview with Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast, where he expressed frustration with the cable television game and said, "I can't look up and imagine myself doing this for three years."

At this rate, he might not have to worry about hanging around that long.

The Sunday New York Times (4/17/11) ran a big front-page piece on John Tanton, founder of the anti-immigration organizations Federation for American Immigration Reform and Center for Immigration Studies. I guess it's positive that someone in corporate media is finally paying attention to Tanton's racism (long documented here at FAIR--1/1/93--and by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center--Winter/08), and reporter Jason DeParle does include a good deal of damning information about Tanton and some of his own racist words.

But he also manages to interview almost exclusively people currently or formerly affiliated with Tanton's groups (six of these people in all) plus a few GOP officials--none of whom have anything bad to say about the Federation, CIS or Numbers USA (another Tanton-connected group), even if they're mildly critical of Tanton himself. A single critic is quoted, Frank Sharry of the progressive immigration reform group America's Voice. The result is that the piece essentially portrays Tanton as the only problem with these anti-immigrant groups, and though they won't kick him off their boards, THEY'RE not actually racist themselves--they just roll their eyes at their racist founder and tolerate his eccentricities.

DeParle explained the trouble with critics of the groups:

Accusations of bigotry could alienate moderates the immigrant rights groups need. Allies of Dr. Tanton say their accusers are discrediting themselves with a guilt-by-association campaign that twists his ideas and projects them onto groups where, they say, his influence long ago waned.

The idea is attributed to allies of Tanton, but that's the basic framing of the entire piece. If critics were given more space, they might have been able to point out that it's not just a Tanton problem--although the fact that he remains on the board of the Federation ought to be plenty damning in itself. As the SPLC documents (3/16/10), the racism at the Federation and CIS extends far beyond Tanton, permeating the board, staff and programming. Mark Krikorian, executive director of CIS, wrote in the National Review Online (1/21/10) that

Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.... Unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn’t stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation, was asked by Tucker Carlson (Wall Street Journal, 10/2/97) to respond to a quote from another Federation board member, eugenicist Garrett Hardin, who had warned that "breeders" were reproducing uncontrollably "in Third World countries," and that the "less intelligent" should be discouraged from "breeding." Stein's response: "Yeah, so what? What is your problem with that? Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?"

Rachel Maddow (MSNBC, 4/29/10) recently confronted Stein with this quote and other evidence of racism at the Federation compiled by the SPLC. Stein claimed that all of the SPLC's factual allegations about his group were wrong. The next night (4/30/10), Maddow factchecked Stein's claims, demonstrating that he, in Maddow's words, "was flat-out, totally shamelessly uncomplicatedly lying."

That's the kind of reporting that needs to be done on Stein and his colleagues.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had a discussion last week (3/31/11) about the U.S. role in the Libya War with Col. Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC military consultant. Jacobs described the U.S. military's "ability to jam communications that take place between units or among units of Gadhafi‘s army," then referred to the U.S.'s

ability to jam electronic transmissions that occur when Gadhafi's army, ground forces try to fire at allied planes. The instant that a radar system is turned on on the ground, we can detect it and in very short order, send a precision-guided munition that follows the radar beam all the way down to its source.

After responding to that with "Wow," Maddow asked:

One of the things that people have questioned is if the U.S. has this high level of electronic capability, why is Libyan state TV still on the air? Is that not one of the things they would want to shut down?

Maddow's questions echo similar calls by U.S. journalists during the Iraq invasion for an attack on Iraqi government TV--calls that were heeded when the U.S. destroyed the TV studios with a missile attack on March 25, 2003. As FAIR wrote in a media advisory, "U.S. Media Applaud Bombing of Iraqi TV" (3/27/03):

Prior to the bombing, some even seemed anxious to know why the broadcast facilities hadn't been attacked yet. Fox News Channel's John Gibson wondered (3/24/03): "Should we take Iraqi TV off the air? Should we put one down the stove pipe there?" Fox's Bill O'Reilly (3/24/03) agreed: "I think they should have taken out the television, the Iraqi television.... Why haven't they taken out the Iraqi television towers?" MSNBC correspondent David Shuster offered: "A lot of questions about why state-run television is allowed to continue broadcasting. After all, the coalition forces know where those broadcast towers are located."

There is a good reason, actually, why Iraqi TV should not have been attacked: Journalists are civilians, even those who enthusiastically support their country's military efforts, and therefore targeting them is a war crime. The idea that journalists reporting in a country the U.S. is at war with deserve protection seems to have been rejected by the Pentagon, however. As FAIR wrote in "IS Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?" (4/10/03):

In the Kosovo War, the U.S. attacked the offices of state-owned Radio-Television Serbia, in what Amnesty International called a "direct attack on a civilian object" which "therefore constitutes a war crime." On March 25, the U.S. began airstrikes on government-run Iraqi TV, in what the International Federation of Journalists (Reuters, 3/26/03) suggested might also be a Geneva Convention violation, since it the U.S. was "targeting a television network simply because they don't like the message it gives out."

The Committee to Protect Journalists declined to count the Serbian journalists killed by the United States in its annual list of murdered journalists, a move that FAIR warned at the time would contribute to a sense that "enemy" journalists are fair game (Extra!, 9-10/00). Maddow's question suggests that treating reporters as enemy combatants has indeed become the new normal.

You may have heard about the New York Times report (3/25/11) explaining that General Electric made $14 billion in worldwide profits in 2010--and paid the federal government exactly nothing in taxes. The Times explained this is "based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore."

Despite the Comcast purchase, GE is still a part owner of NBC and MSNBC--the latter conventionally thought to be a liberal-leaning outlet. So did they say much about a giant corporation keeping profits offshore in order to avoid paying taxes? Not really; Paul Abrams pointed out at the Huffington Post (3/26/11), host Lawrence O'Donnell deserves credit for going after the company.

What about NBC? Checking Nexis doesn't turn up much, though I did come across this conversation between Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb on the Today show, which is apparently about various Prince William-Kate Middleton royal wedding memorabilia (3/24/11):

KOTB: That's the top of the cake, so if you cut it....

GIFFORD: Oh my gosh. They've never looked so unattractive. That's terrible.

KOTB: Well, anyway, the baker, Michelle Wibowo, she did it, spent eight hours on it.

GIFFORD: Oh, sorry, baker.

KOTB: All right.

GIFFORD: Sorry. It's lovely. Gosh.

KOTB: And if you need a place to put your cake, just--how about the Will and Kate refrigerator by GE? Who's part owner of this company.

GIFFORD: Yes.

KOTB: Yes.

For the record, there really is a GE refrigerator honoring Will and Kate.

Outside the GE media world, ABC's Jake Tapper turned in a good report on ABC World News.

UPDATE:  Over at ThinkProgress Zaid Jilani notes that one outlet has expressed a keen interest in GE's tax avoidance: the Fox News Channel.