Knowing how much "we reporters love a catch phrase," Iran writer Reese Erlich (ZNet, 6/28/09) wants you to know that, despite "Twitter being all a flutter in the west," current reporting is "highly misleading" in that "Iran is not undergoing a Twitter Revolution. The term simultaneously mischaracterizes and trivializes the important mass movement developing in Iran."

After tracing the concept's origins back to self-obsessed Western media--"desperate to find ways to show the large demonstrations...reporters were getting most of their information from Tweets and YouTube video clips"--Erlich gives us the reality of the situation:

First of all the vast majority of Iranians have no access to Twitter. While reporting in Tehran, I personally didn't encounter anyone who used it regularly. A relatively small number of young, economically well-off Iranians do use Twitter. A larger number have access to the Internet. However, in the beginning, most demonstrations were organized through word of mouth, mobile phone calls and text messaging.

But somehow "Text Messaging Revolution" doesn't have that modern, sexy ring, especially if you have to type it with your thumbs on a tiny keyboard.

More importantly, by focusing on the latest in Internet communications, cable TV networks intentionally or unintentionally characterize a genuine mass movement as something supported mainly by the Twittering classes.

In actuality, as "hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets in Tehran and cities around the country," they largely "organized silent marches through word of mouth and phone calls, since the government had shut down text messaging just prior to the election." Erlich makes clear it is important to understand that, "contrary to popular perception, these gatherings included women in chadors, workers and clerics--not just the Twittering classes."

Listen to FAIR's current radio program CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).

Veteran independent Mexico reporter John Ross (CounterPunch.com, 6/28/09) wants to know which countries come to mind when thinking about "a stolen election by an entrenched regime," "demands for a recount to which election officials respond by offering to recount just 10 percent of the vote," or even "a regime-controlled media that exalts the incumbent's victory and demonizes the loser"? Are you thinking "Iran 2009? Yes!" or "Mexico 2006? Yes and no."

Toward showing that "the stealing of the Mexican presidential election by the right-wing oligarchy stirred little indignation anywhere outside of Mexico," Ross finds that "a comparison of coverage extended to both instances of electoral fraud by the New York Times, the 'paper of record', is instructive":

NYT coverage of the upheaval in Iran has been overwhelming. During the first nine days of the electoral crisis, the Times ran at least one front-page story daily--from Election Day Friday, June 12 through Saturday, June 20, the Iranian electoral sham occupied the right-hand column (the lead story) in the international edition on eight out of nine days. The Times also ran a second Iran story on the front page in six out of the nine editions reviewed--on four of those days, the stories were accompanied by a four and sometimes five column color photo....

The Times sent four by-lined reporters into Tehran for the festivities--Robert Worth, Michael Slackman, Neil MacFarquhar and the Iranian Nazna Pathi, plus Eric Schmidt reporting from Washington. Bill Keller, the New York Times executive editor, flew to the Iranian capital to pen a daily journal.

As for the contested Mexican election: "The Times ran a front-page curtain raiser on election eve, but not in the right-hand column" and "a second front-pager July 3 just above the fold." Ross points out that "unlike the New York Times coverage from Tehran, news of the enormous gathering ran inside," even as "mobilizations were expanding exponentially to 2 million participants (police reports) by July 30, the largest outpourings of political protest in Mexican history."

In sum, Ross writes of how "the brand of corporate journalism that the New York Times practices distorts such stories as Iranian resistance to electoral fraud and leaves Mexico 2006, in which millions took to the streets to defy the fraudulent election of a U.S. proxy, in the dust of history." Listen to FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: "Chuck Collins on Mexican Election" (8/11/06).

Gawker blogger The Cajun Boy (6/24/09) is agog at "How Fox News Educates Its Viewers":

Last night Glenn Beck made crude drawings on a chalkboard, and tonight he and Bill O'Reilly used Barbie dolls to explain ACORN.

In the course of explaining how Nancy Pelosi is trying to stop noble Republicans from stopping ACORN from destroying America, Beck reached under the table and pulled out a Barbie kit. Now, we watched this demonstration twice and actually don't get what Beck is trying to convey, so either we're stupider than even the basest Fox viewer or our elitists brains just can't process anything that comes spewing from the mouths of these clowns. Maybe you'll have better luck.

While Beck's demonstration really doesn't make any sense in itself, another reason for the confusion generated is surely that his and O'Reilly's whole take on ACORN is nonsensical in its entirety; see the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "CNN, Fox Hype ACORN Threat" (12/08) by Daniel Ward.

Robert Parry of Consortium News (6/15/09) gives hearing to a "strong case" to "undercut the widespread media assumption" of electoral fraud in Iran. But, true or not, "the rush to the 'fraud' judgment among much of the U.S. news media is shaping the political realities" and posing that "Ahmadinejad's 'theft' of the election proves that hardliners in Israel and neoconservatives in the United States were right all along about the impossibility of dealing rationally with Iran"--the predictable upshot being "that force is the only option to employ against Iran."

Parry also is "curious to see U.S. news organizations care suddenly about legitimate elections when most of them ignored, ridiculed or covered-up evidence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election in 2000 and possibly in 2004 as well":

In Election 2000, Florida--a state controlled by Bush’s brother Jeb and Jeb’s cronies--was the scene of widespread election irregularities. Then, when a recount was attempted, the Bush campaign sent well-dressed hooligans from Washington to Miami to stage a riot aimed at intimidating vote counters. Finally, Bush got five partisan Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes and award the White House to Bush.

Yet the U.S. press corps was extraordinarily passive about this well-documented election theft. Even when it became clear that Al Gore won the popular vote and would have carried Florida if all legal ballots had been counted, major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and CNN, misrepresented the facts to protect Bush’s "legitimacy."...

Similarly, serious irregularities in Election 2004, especially in the key state of Ohio, were never seriously investigated by the mainstream news media, which instead mocked Internet sites (including ours) and citizens groups as "conspiracy theorists" for citing some of the bizarre vote tallies favoring Bush.

"When an election occurs in another country and an 'unpopular' leader appears to win," Parry tells how "an opposite set of rules apply," and in corporate journalists' eyes, "anyone who doesn't immediately accept the assumption of voter fraud is naïve; every 'conspiracy theory' is cited respectfully while contrary evidence is downplayed or ignored."

An AP story (6/7/09) previewing today's European Parliament election is headlined on MSNBC, "Europe Leans Right Ahead of Parliament Voting: Amid Economic Gloom, Conservatives Look Set to Win Big in Europe-Wide Poll." The article, by Michael Weissenstein and Robert Wielaard, begins:

Europe was leaning to the right ahead of European Parliament elections Sunday, with voters in many countries favoring conservative parties against a backdrop of economic crisis.

Opinion polling showed right-leaning governments with edges over their opposition in Germany, Italy and France. Conservative opposition parties were tied or ahead in Britain, Spain, and some smaller countries.

So how big is the right expected to win? In the 17th paragraph, after we've been told "the Europe-wide elections were most important as a snapshot of national political sentiment," we finally get some numbers:

An informal forecast by the political science website http://www.predict09.eu anticipated Conservatives winning 262 seats against 194 for the Socialists and 85 for the Liberals in 736-seat European Parliament, roughly the same proportions as in the last parliament.

And then the article notes that "right-leaning parties have taken up business regulation and social protection initiatives more traditionally associated with the left."

When you look at the site that AP references--which turns out to be a project of the PR group Burson-Marsteller--it turns out that its actual prediction is for slight gains for the left. (On the chart on the site's main page, the left parties are in red, pink and green; the centrist Liberal parties are in yellow; the conservative parties are in blue and light blue; and the far-right parties are in orange and gray.) The main change the PR group predicts is that the left parties will take a slightly larger slice of the pie and the Liberal parties will have a slightly smaller one.

Of course, it's the actual voting results that matter, not the predictions, and it's certainly possible that the European right actually will make major gains. But when the AP takes forecasts that Conservatives will do about as well as they did last time after moving their platforms to the left, and depicts that as evidence of "Europe...leaning to the right," that would seem to say more about the news service's political sentiments than about Europe's.

Despite the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism's new "State of the Media" report likening the current U.S. media condition to "someone about to begin physical therapy following a stroke suddenly contracting a debilitating secondary illness," Eric Alterman and Danielle Ivory spot (Center for American Progress, 3/26/09) "one sunny area in the news business, according to the report": "Cable 'shined' in 2008. Its audience grew by 38 percent. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC gained viewers and expected to see record profits."

While "unlike their paper-based compadres, they actually had money to burn on things like newsgathering and international bureaus," Alterman and Ivory write:

If cable news is more profitable than before, that's because, increasingly, it features less and less news. It certainly contains nothing that will likely replace the reporting role of the newspapers that are currently surviving on life-support. "State of the Media" juxtaposes these robust figures with some pretty unsettling data about what people actually see on their sets:

In a news year dominated by two major stories [the election and the economy], the television sector with the most time to fill, cable news, offered the narrowest news agenda of all. According to an analysis of the coverage examined by PEJ, the cable TV channels spent about three out of every five minutes on a single story: the 2008 presidential election.

The report found "obsessive, often irrelevant horserace coverage of the election eclipsed all other news" to the extent that "it accounted for 59 percent of the cable newshole in 2008, while coverage of the economy accounted for only 10 percent." And, of course, "coverage of the Iraq War fell everywhere, but it positively crashed on cable," where it "fell nearly 90 percent" and "accounted for just 2 percent of overall coverage."

Upon seeing that, "on her show Tuesday night, Fox News' Greta Van Susteren devoted an entire segment to criticizing David Letterman" for having "made jokes about Sarah Palin and her family," Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (3/19/09) notices that

there seems to be a pattern here. In fact, it's hard not to notice that Van Susteren seems to enjoy closer ties to Palin than most media professionals. Matt Corley explained, for example, "In September, she hosted a one-hour 'documentary' on the GOP vice presidential candidate, titled Governor Sarah Palin--An American Woman.... After the election ended, Palin chose Van Susteren for her first national television interview. Since then, Greta has consistently covered Palin, keeping an eye out for any potential sleights of the governor and gushing over her popularity."

As it turns out, there's a reason that helps explain why Fox News' Van Susteren has taken on the role of media publicist for the Alaska governor--Van Susteren's husband helps guide Palin's political image.

[John] Coale, a well-known Washington lawyer and the husband of Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren... in an interview with the Fix, described himself simply as a "friend" of the Alaska governor but acknowledged that he suggested she start a leadership PAC and helped her navigate through some of the questions surrounding her family that lingered after the campaign. Others familiar with Palin's political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on--essentially helping to run Sarah PAC.

Benen quite reasonably asks, "Doesn't this seem like the kind of thing Van Susteren might want to disclose to her viewers?" See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Sarah Palin: Maverick Feminist?" (12/08) by Candice O'Grady

More bad news for right-wingers longing to peddle the myth of liberal bias in the corporate media. Indiana University released a comprehensive study of the visuals used in presidential campaign coverage from 1992-2004, finding that the three major broadcast networks--NBC, CBS and ABC--all favored Republicans in each election. 

The study focused on the visual production of news: where each story was placed in the newscast, editing techniques and manipulations related to camera angles, shot lengths, eyewitness perspectives and zoom movement.  Among the most negative visual representations or "image bytes" is the "lip-flap shot," where a reporter's narration is placed over a candidate talking, which the report calls a "violation of professional television news production standards."

"Not only is lip-flap unflattering for the candidate who appears," the report notes, "but it also distracts from the reporter's narration because viewers focus attention on making sense of what the lip flapper appears to be saying." The technique was found to be used more often with Democratic candidates than with Republicans. A similar partisan bias was found in which candidates were given the last word, which were videotaped in flattering low-angle shots and which were given unflattering extreme close-ups and high angles.

In attempting to account for the pattern of favoring Republicans in four consecutive election cycles (during both Democratic and Republican administrations), Maria Elizabeth Gabe, one of the study's authors explained, "We don't think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they're just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage."  In other words, "working the refs" works.

The author of an upcoming "people's history of the Bolivarian Revolution entitled We Created Him," George Ciccariello-Maher tells (CounterPunch, 2/15/09) an eerily "familiar" tale of one unnamed political leader who, after being "in power for nearly eight years,"

no longer feels the need to comfort his opponents, and his discourse radicalizes as his view of term limits shifts. Dismissing his opposition as rigid "dogmatists," the leader now insists on the need to change course flexibly to meet circumstances. True and sustained change, he argues, requires the continuity of his successful leadership....

Not without controversy, then, was the decision of the region's largest newspaper--aligned politically with the leader--to wade into these conflictive waters with the following declaration: ..."The bedrock of… democracy is the voters' right to choose. Though well intentioned… the term limits law severely limits that right, which is why this page has opposed term limits from the outset… Term limits are...profoundly undemocratic, arbitrarily denying voters the ability to choose between good politicians and bad."

While the paper had previously insisted that any change to term limits come through popular referendum, it now reverses this view, taking the position that for reasons of political expediency, a simple vote in the small executive council will do.

While consumers of corporate U.S. media may recognize this as the common narrative against current official U.S. enemy Hugo Chávez, Ciccariello-Maher lets us know that this land where "weak-kneed apologists parade about under the banner of free press" really "is none other than New York City, the leader none other than Michael Bloomberg, and the newspaper none other than the New York Times." Cautioning "patience: we haven't even gotten to the hypocrisy part yet," Ciccariello-Maher then goes on to note how

the New York Times has never been bashful about the crush it has on this tale of hypocrisy’s third character: the narco-terrorist president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. Uribe is currently engaged in an effort to change the Colombian constitution for a second time to allow his own re-election, doing so not through popular plebiscite, but rather indirect legislative vote. But not that you would know this from reading the press.

Read the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall

Washington Post TV writer Lisa de Moraes' report (2/6/09) on a Barack Obama speech planned for networks' cherished prime-time hours gives plenty of room to TV executives' grievances--namely, Obama is going on national TV to talk about the economic crisis--during primetime, when some of their best shows are on! "His economic stimulus package apparently does not extend to the TV networks," she quotes one executive.

"Notice they're not going on Friday or Saturday," one network exec complained. "They're . . . preempting our better shows. You're not happy to lose a House if you are Fox, or two of the better comedies at CBS, or The Bachelor at ABC--we're all going to take a bath."

Absent from de Moraes' piece is any recollection of these same corporate broadcasters' recent glee over certain 2008 weeks in which Obama ad-spending exceeded the entire Bush ad budget for 2004--let alone any review of how TV abused the responsibility concomitant with this windfall; see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Top Troubling Tropes of Campaign '08: The Media-Created Narratives That Derail Election Coverage" (11-12/08) by Peter Hart

Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell gives another glimpse (Mother Jones, 2/5/09) at his Why Obama Won book, which found "reporters and pundits focused on flag pins, bowling and fairly trivial faux pas"--thus yielding "far more media lowlights than highlights." Resisting the urge to "do a full article just on William Kristol's errors and flubs at the New York Times," Mitchell instead lists "some defining media moments of the 2008 campaign," headed up by "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years":

On April 18... ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos focused mainly on small stuff when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the healthcare and mortgage crises, the state of the economy and other pressing issues had to wait until the midway point. Before then, Obama was pressed to explain (once again) his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his reason for not wearing a flag pin, while Clinton had to answer for her Bosnia trip exaggerations. Obama was also forced during this debate to defend his slim association with former 1960s radical Bill Ayers. This led to Obama's claim that Hillary's husband pardoned two other radicals. And so on.

Most damningly, Mitchell tells us that "Gibson only got excited when he complained about anyone daring to raise taxes on his capital gains"; read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Dubious Debates: How Media Moderators Lowered the Level of Election '08" (7-8/08) by Jacqueline Bacon

Unable to simply air the reality of George W. Bush's immense unpopularity manifesting in a chorus of boos for his last public appearance as U.S. "president," MSBNC newscasters (YouTube.com, 1/20/08) chide inauguration attendees for "bad form"--before eventually finding a camera shot to cut to instead showing the crowd cheering... for Obama.

Hardly a new phenomenon; read about corporate media censorship at the 2000 Bush inauguration in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Protesters Rain on ABC's Parade" (3-4/01) by Jim Naureckas

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon have compiled their 17th annual list of "P.U.-litzer Prizes" (OpEd News, 12/18/08). Among this year's "stinkiest media performances":

HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE -- MSNBC's Chris Matthews

This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac Primary in February--when Chris Matthews spoke of "the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

BEYOND PARODY PRIZE--Fox News

In August, a FoxNews.com teaser for the O'Reilly Factor program said: "Obama bombarded by personal attacks. Are they legit? Ann Coulter comments."...

GUTTER BALL PUNDITRY AWARD -- Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball

In program after program during the spring, Matthews repeatedly questioned whether Obama could connect with "regular" voters--"regular" meaning voters who are white or "who actually do know how to bowl." He once said of Obama: "This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody. But the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder."

And there's plenty more malodorous journalism to be found in FAIR's extensive archive on corporate news coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff (12/13/08) lays on the cloak-and-dagger prose when telling the tale of how, "in the spring of 2004," former Justice Department wiretapper Thomas M. Tamm "slipped through the parade of midday subway riders, his heart was pounding, his body trembling," to "call... the New York Times" and blow the whistle on "a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens."

After this dramatic lede, Isikoff mentions that "18 months after he first disclosed what he knew, the Times reported that President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to intercept phone calls and e-mails of individuals inside the United States without judicial warrants."

Hmmm, wasn't there some sort of important political event that occurred in the interim? Readers are left to wonder for themselves until--if they're still reading halfway through the 47-paragraph piece--they learn of how

Tamm grew frustrated when the story did not immediately appear.... It wasn't until more than a year later that the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, rejecting a personal appeal and warning by President Bush, gave the story a green light. (Bush had warned "there'll be blood on your hands" if another attack were to occur.) "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," read the headline in the paper's December 16, 2005, edition. The story--which the Times said relied on "nearly a dozen current and former officials"--had immediate repercussions.

That would be "immediate repercussions" as in "immediately after" the 2004 presidential election...

Read the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "A Scoop Delayed: Times Sat on Wiretap Story for a Year" (2/06) by Jim Naureckas

After comparing how "establishment news outlets... have praised the president-elect's cautious Cabinet choices" with the similar reaction after Bill Clinton's first election, Bob Parry writes (Consortium News, 12/15/08) that the reality for those "who resisted the corrupt Bush years--is that we cannot rest on our successes":

You might have thought there would have been a housecleaning at establishment news organizations where sycophantic journalists enabled George W. Bush and his disasters. But the roster of the mainstream/right-wing news media hasn’t changed much at all.

If anything, the neoconservatives have established an even stronger foothold in major news outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post. In other words, to the extent that President Obama does try to take the country in a significantly new direction--especially if he goes after "the mindset" that led us into the Iraq War, as he promised--he can expect strong resistance.

Parry's lesson: "If this status quo is to change, all of us must keep the pressure on."