Veteran publisher Tom Engelhardt's rundown on the decimation of book publishers' staff (TomDispatch, 12/17/08) compares "collapsing worlds" with newspapers--"a disaster area long before the greatest downturn 'since the Great Depression' hit":

The bad news about the news has been flooding in for years, even if it's worsened under the weight of more general economic tough times. If, for instance, you were even reading a newspaper in print on Tuesday, December 9 (and, if you're under 25, odds are you weren't), then you undoubtedly caught the story about the debt-ridden Tribune Company, a news monster which owns, among other properties, the Los Angeles Times (almost half its staff lost since 2001), the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune (almost a third of its staff lost since 2005) and even the Chicago Cubs, filing for "bankruptcy."...

Only the week before the Tribune filed, America's largest newspaper company Gannett announced a 10 percent cut in its workforce due to "declining revenue," on top of a 3 percent cut last August (neither evidently being part of the 5 percent "trim" at its flagship paper USA Today in late November). And don't get me started on the rest of America's newspapers. At least 30 of them are for sale right now, including the 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News, which lost $11 million in the first nine months of this year, with few buyers in sight.

Writing that the Tribune Co. "even had the nerve to claim that bankruptcy meant it could 'cease all severance payments and deferred compensation to employees who have been laid off.' (Pity the poor reporters who took those buyouts)," Engelhardt notes that, ironically, "it also hired the investment bank Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin as consultants. In case you're worried, they surely will get paid."

Listen to FAIR's recent radio program CounterSpin: "Bob McChesney on Tribune Bankruptcy" (12/12/08)

Discussing the failed auto bailout on CBS Evening News (12/12/08):

KATIE COURIC: And it's almost, meanwhile, turning to Washington, Bob, impossible to figure out just what happened to this auto bailout in the Senate. There's all this finger pointing going on. What is your take? Can you explain it to us in simple terms?

BOB SCHIEFFER: I think frankly what happened, Katie, is that this is overwhelmingly unpopular, bailing out these auto companies with the public in general. And every poll suggests that. These leaders of the auto industry came to town first in their jet planes and now you find that the members of the union are not willing to consider a pay cut for the next two years. It was a very easy vote for Republicans to vote to block this thing. They were just doing what their constituents across the country kind of wanted them to do. That may not be the right thing, but I think in the end that's really what did them in.

Every poll suggests that bailing out the auto industry is overwhelmingly unpopular? Actually, no--really, the polls are all over the map on the auto bailout, ranging from a CNN/Opinion Research poll (12/1-2/08) where the public is opposed 61 percent to 36 percent to an L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll (12/6-8/08) finding 47 percent to 42 percent support for a bailout. One of the polls that did not find an auto rescue to be overwhelmingly unpopular was CBS's own--the network's December 4-7 poll found 45 percent approving of a bailout and 44 percent disapproving. Guess Schieffer doesn't read his network's own polls--or doesn't trust them.

The new edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin (12/12/08) examines the financial collapse of a major U.S. media force:

The Tribune Company that owns the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times, along with much else, declared bankruptcy this week, just a year after new owner Sam Zell took over, with his notable lack of background or interest in newspapers. It sounds like workers will wind up with the short end of the stick but what does it mean in the bigger picture? Are capitalists losing interest in media and if so, what do we think about that?

After listening to Robert McChesney's analysis of that story, hear about the latest labor news:

The fight over "card check" union organizing was somewhat low-key during the general election. But the issue soon became a favorite topic for pundits who were either warning that Obama would lurch to the left, or those who held out the hope that Obama would turn his back on the labor movement. What is card check, and why does it have corporate America--and much of the corporate media-up in arms? We'll find out from labor journalist Steve Early.

More on Corporate Ownership of news outlets and media coverage of Labor can be founds in FAIR's online Issues Archives.

Blogging economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 12/12/08) gives
the New York Times headline "Goldman, Once Warning of $200 Oil, Sees $45 in 2009" as an example of his radical idea that "this is exactly what the media should be doing when they present forecasts from various experts":

For example, when they share the views of people like Alan Greenspan on the economy, they can preface them with a comment like, "Alan Greenspan, who insisted there was no housing bubble." In fact, the media should preface the predictions of almost all their economic experts with this comment.

With some experts this assertion would be especially important information. For example, predictions from Frederick Mishkin, a New York University professor and a former governor of the Federal Reserve Board, should carry the preface "who recently praised Iceland's economy for its effective inflation-targeting." Statements from Frank Nodthrift, the former chief economist with Freddie Mac, should include the phrase, "who asserted that house prices never fall."

It really doesn't seem like such a stretch that "reporters should be familiar with the track record of the experts they rely upon and they should share this information with the public."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

The dismal state of corporate newspaper journalism has Philadelphia Inquirer columnist George Curry reconsidering (12/11/08) the value of his lifelong dedication to improving the trade:

I have spent most of my career urging young people to consider careers in journalism. I was founding director of workshops affiliated with the National Association of Black Journalists chapters in St. Louis, Washington and New York, which encouraged minority high school students to enter the profession. As a past chairman of Youth Communication, a news service for teen papers across the country, and as a board member of Young D.C., a regional teen paper, I have worked with hundreds of young people over the years, many of whom entered the field.

This has always been a source of great pride for me. But now, for the first time, I am wondering if I did the right thing. That's not because I have any less love for my profession, but because the news business is changing--for the worse. Many big-city newspapers are putting less emphasis on social issues and providing less coverage of the poor than when I first entered the business in 1970.

Having chosen his profession "not only because I could write, but also because I thought newspapers did a poor job of covering the poor, and I wanted to help change that," Curry now thinks that, "though there has been some improvement, it looks as if much of that progress is about to be eroded."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "A Poverty of Coverage: Why Aren't the Poor on the Media Agenda?" (9-10/07) by Steve Rendall

Harold Meyerson's latest dispatch (WashingtonPost.com, 12/8/08) on Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell retells how "Zell repeatedly and profanely expressed his disdain for quality journalism," gutting major dailies like the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune because he thought they "carried too much national and international news." After "hundreds of excellent reporters and editors were unceremoniously shown the door" comes news that the Tribune Co. is filing for bankruptcy protection, but Meyerson writes that

Sam Zell never really had much skin in the game. Last year, when he purchased the Tribune Company... he put up $315 million of his own money and paid the balance of the purchase price, $8.2 billion, with the employee stock ownership plan--a move in which Tribune employees had no say whatever. But that actually overstates the amount of Zell's investment. Of the $315 million he sunk into the company, it turns out that $225 million was simply a promissory note. Due to the vagaries of bankruptcy law, writes business analyst Mark Lacter on LAobserved.com, that means that Zell has better protection for his stake than all his employees.

And how are those employees faring? Well, even the New York Times headlined its December 8 report "Workers Pay for Debacle at Tribune."

Actual headline today (12/10/08) in the New York Times Dining section:

Great Meals for Two, Under $100 (It’s Possible)

Times food writer Frank Bruni stressed that it "was an experiment for lean times, but not an exercise in cheap eats." In case there was any doubt.

Looking back in the FAIR archives, one recalls that in 1997, the Times' wine columnist wrote: "The $100-a-bottle wine, once an example of vulgar excess, is now an everyday occurrence."

Earlier (12/18/92), the Times ran a story that dared readers to believe that it was possible to eat lunch and dinner in New York City for less than $50. "'Lunch and dinner in New York City for $50 a day?' sniggered a seasoned veteran of Manhattan restaurants. 'Is that sitting down?'" The story came with maps to show readers where this amazing feat might be possible.

As long ago as 1988 (3/11/88), the Times was announcing that "dinner for two in the average New York restaurant has broken the three-digit barrier." This is a special usage of the word "average" pioneered by the New York Times--meaning "catering to the extremely affluent."

FAIR has a new Action Alert up about ABC's gross exaggeration of auto worker compensation. Feel free to post messages sent to ABC here--or any responses you get from the network.

Noticing how "the U.S. press slowly accepted that this wasn't an attack on Westerners, that Indians weren't merely collateral damage" in the Mumbai attacks, Alexander Cockburn is reminded (Nation, 12/3/08) of Victorian novelists' "scores of selfless characters" for whom "the only thing was to protect the guests." Other aspects of colonial attitudes have changed--though not necessarily for the better:

In the old days the Western press had absolutely no comprehension of fatalities among Asians in numbers less than 50,000--the lower benchmark for newsworthy fatalities. Now it's the other way round. In Western news reports, Indians are individually categorized as among the 188 dead in the Mumbai attack. These days, the larger the number of dead, the less visible they become. The nature of the catastrophe makes a big difference too. No Western journalist chose to bewail a huge human catastrophe when [an Indian minister] supervised the destruction of 84,000 homes in Mumbai in 2004-05, nearly three times the number rendered homeless in Nagapattinam by the tsunami.

Wondering whether "the Times and Washington Post and their leading journalists... ever... admitted that their economic analyses of the past two decades have been lethally wrong," Cockburn recalls that

there was no talk of "moral responsibility" in the Western press about the barbarism of making 84,000 families homeless.... 2006 figures issued by [Indian government] bureaucrats recorded 1,400 suicides (undoubtedly a huge underestimate) of Indian farmers in six districts in the Vidarbha region of his state, driven to death by a carefully planned "liberalization" of the farm economy.... That state terrorism was of Western origin, promoted by economists, World Bank officials and journalists like the New York Times' Thomas Friedman and Keith Bradsher, stepping onto Indian soil armed with Friedmanite recipes.

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "World's Worst Disasters Overlooked: Survey Identifies Biggest 'Forgotten' Crises" (5-6/05) by Carole J.L. Collins

The media trope that presidents-elect ought to break progressive campaign promises really displays the anti-democratic and pro-corporate biases of the press at their most glaring. Who cares what you told the voters? Here's what the interests that really matter want you to do.

The latest instance in this sad series is a USA Today editorial (12/2/08), which eagerly spots a silver lining in the economic crisis:

During his campaign...Obama endorsed a number of smaller bore ideas more for the sake of their political appeal than for their economic usefulness. The financial crisis gives the incoming president a compelling rationale to make a few modest course corrections.

The paper then offers three of its own "modest" proposals for how Obama should best rewrite his platform in a more big business-friendly direction. One is to drop the idea of a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, arguing that "windfall profits taxes...aren't a very reliable or stable source of revenue." Since windfall profits are by definition sudden and unexpected, that seems like a rather peculiar objection--like saying that receiving emergency aid isn't something you can count on every year.

Another way that USA Today hopes that Obama will betray the people who voted for him is by dropping the idea of renegotiating NAFTA. "Outside of a handful of heavily unionized states where the trade pact with Canada and Mexico has become a scapegoat for job losses, NAFTA is not seen as such a bad thing," the editorial claims--which ignores not only national polling but the fact that the entire country expressed its opinion by voting by a substantial margin for a candidate who promised to reopen the deal in no uncertain terms.

USA Today went on to assert that "the addition of 18 million jobs in the decade following [NAFTA's] enactment suggests that it produced more winners than losers." Actually, since the total U.S. population grew by an estimated 35 million between 1994 and 2004, adding 18 million new jobs is not particularly impressive. A more relevant statistic is that the U.S. trade deficit grew from $150 billion in 1994 to $650 billion in 2004, suggesting that U.S. trade policies during this period resulted in the transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth overseas.

Finally, echoing other corporate media pleas for Obama to abandon his progressive campaign pledges, USA Today singles out Obama's long-standing support of card-check union certification as a promise to break, saying, "It is hard to see how ending the secret ballot would do much besides initiating campaigns of subtle, and not so subtle, intimidation as workers contemplate their decisions."

The argument turns reality on its head: The current system, which treats worker organization as a matter to be contested with the employer rather than decided on by the workers themselves, allows those employers to intimidate workers in ways that are not subtle at all--a study by CEPR (1/07) based on NRLB data concluded that as many as one in five union organizers are illegally fired during the course of a typical union certification campaign.

The paper concludes that "pushing this idea through Congress would position Obama less as an agent of change and more as a pal of Big Labor." It's corporate media's Orwellian notion of change in action: Changing the Bush administration's hostile attitude toward labor--big or otherwise--would not be change; continuing that attitude would be change.