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."

Education author Alfie Kohn's got a beef (Nation, 12/10/08) with corporate news coverage of Barack Obama's choices for his cabinet, where "progressives are in short supply":

When he turns his attention to the Education Department, what are the chances he'll choose someone who is educationally progressive?

In fact, just such a person is said to be in the running and, perhaps for that very reason, has been singled out for scorn in Washington Post and Chicago Tribune editorials, a New York Times column by David Brooks and a New Republic article, all published almost simultaneously this month.

Depressingly predictable is the "eerily similar language" in these pieces urging rejection of Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond for fear she is "allied with the teachers' unions" and an opponent of "reform"--defined as "a heavy reliance on fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests," " a behaviorist model of motivation" and "a corporate sensibility."
(Kohn points out that the educational model promoted by "reformers" is "already pervasive, which means 'reform' actually signals more of the same--or, perhaps, intensification of the status quo.")

Darling-Hammond is not a "reformer," Kohn writes, since she argues that "experiments with high-stakes testing have mostly served to increase the dropout rate," and that "all the talk of 'rigor' and 'raising the bar' has produced sterile, scripted curriculums that have been imposed disproportionately on children of color."

See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Media Cheer for 'Non-Ideological' Centrists" (11/26/08)

Salon's Glenn Greenwald "marvels" (12/8/08, ad-viewing required) at "how easily [John Brennan-for-CIA-head proponents] can implant their message into establishment media outlets far and wide, which uncritically publish what they're told from their cherished 'intelligence sources' and without even the pretense of verifying whether any of it is true and/or hearing any divergent views":

All of this illustrates the unparalleled power which the "intelligence community" exerts over our political debates, how easy it is for them to manipulate intelligence reporters who depend on cooperation with their intelligence sources and who thus identify with them and happily amplify whatever they are fed, and--most of all--how profoundly unrealistic is the expectation that, now that Democrats are "in control," they're just going to blithely proceed to impose all sorts of new restrictions on the CIA and the rest of the Surveillance State--let alone launch probing investigations and impose accountability for past crimes--without much of a major fight.

Greenwald's extensive citations find much blaming of "liberal critics," "liberal bloggers" and "left-leaning bloggers and columnists" for Brennan's rejection, yet "unmentioned are his emphatic advocacy for rendition and 'enhanced interrogation tactics.'"

Tom Engelhardt's nearly interminable list of media blogs and features about Barack Obama's presidential transition has him urging us (TomDispatch, 12/7/08) to "think of all this as Entertainment Weekly married to People magazine for post-election political junkies":

Obama--thank goodness--isn't George Bush. He doesn't arrive in office with a crew wedded to a "unitary executive theory" of the presidency, or an urge to loose the executive from the supposed "chains" of the Watergate-era Congress, or to "take off the gloves" globally. He doesn't have strange, twisted, oppressive ideas about how the Constitution should work, nor assumedly do visions of a "commander-in-chief presidency" (or vice presidency) dance in his head like so many sugar plums.

But don't ignore the architecture, the deep structure of the American political system. Make no mistake, Obama is moving full-speed ahead into an executive mansion rebuilt and endlessly expanded by the national security state over the last half-century-plus, and then built up in major ways by George W.'s "team." Despite the prospect of a new dog and a mother-in-law in the White House, the president-elect and his transition team show no signs of wanting to change the basic furniture.

"With so many catastrophes impending and so many pundits and journalists merrily applauding the most efficient transition in American history," Engelhardt can't help but notice that "no one, it seems, is even thinking about the architecture."

But really, to do any different would constitute a major break from corporate media protocol.

This week FAIR's CounterSpin radio show (12/5/08) takes on an important issue from the last U.S. invasion of Iraq:

For years, veterans claiming to suffer from Gulf War Syndrome were derided as cranky and hysterical by the Department of Defense and even by some journalists. Will that change now that a definitive report says the Gulf War illnesses are real, incurable, and caused by toxic materials used by the U.S. military during the 1991 Gulf War? We'll talk to Paul Sullivan, a veteran and the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

Also this week:

As the Obama White House takes shape, Americans are asking what the president-elect's cabinet choices suggest about the political direction his administration may take. Corporate media are making no effort to hide what they think are smart, responsible choices for Obama, but the reasons for those strong preferences are rarely explored. We'll talk with FAIR's Peter Hart about the press reception of the new cabinet picks.

Last week's program is still available online as well-- CounterSpin: "Mark Brenner on Big 3 bailout, Steve Rendall on the Fairness Doctrine" (11/28/08)--along with all our shows since 2004.

Feeling "especially exasperated by the readiness of TV pundits and op-ed writers to make sweeping statements about the state of the electorate without ever talking to an actual voter," veteran media critic Michael Massing took an October trip to Ohio (New York Review of Books, 12/18/08) in search of "the concerns and attitudes of ordinary voters [that] tended to get overlooked." On the way he listened to "the toxic, overheated combine of right-wing talk radio [and] cable television programs":

Americans who do not regularly tune in to it have little idea how nasty and venomous a campaign was waged there against Barack Obama. Day after day, night after night, a steady stream of poison was directed at him not only by Limbaugh but also by Sean Hannity, on his daily radio show and nightly Fox broadcast; by Bill O'Reilly, on Fox, the radio and the Internet...all joining together to produce firestorms of manufactured rage about Obama's purported ties to Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, Castro, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and Karl Marx.

In one especially lunatic salvo, a conservative writer named Andy Martin claimed, in an hour-long special hosted by Sean Hannity on Fox News on October 5, that William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, was using Barack Obama as part of a radical political movement that would bring about a social revolution in America comparable to the ones in Castro's Cuba and Chávez's Venezuela. This allegation was then picked up and frequently repeated on conservative talk shows and blogs.

"Amounting to a six-month-long exercise in Swift Boating," Massing finds that "these attacks, taken together, constituted perhaps the most vicious smear campaign ever mounted against an American politician."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Myth of Pro-Obama Media Bias: Little Evidence for Self-Proclaimed 'Lovefest'" (9-10/08) by John K. Wilson

Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to "traditional Democratic constituencies" like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a "grassroots army of millions"--seemingly unconnected to such constituencies--"propelled" Obama's win.

It's worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic Party set free from the voting blocs that support it is a longstanding dream of corporate media and the political establishment--represented in the Globe piece by corporate Democrat Steve McMahon and conservative think-tanker Norman Ornstein. Ornstein, in fact, offers the same argument in the paper that he gave to CNN (11/14/92) during a similar round of "liberal interest group" bashing after Bill Clinton's election in 1992, when Ornstein claimed that Clinton "enters office with the fewest debts owed to interest groups in his own party of any Democratic president in modern times."

But the reality is not exactly as corporate media dream it. The Globe quotes McMahon--who it identifies as a "Democratic strategist," but not as a flak for PhRMA, the prescription drug lobby--as saying that Obama "owes nothing to anyone except the people who elected him." That's not actually how politics works, as any corporate lobbyist knows full well, but it's instructive to look at who the voters were who "propelled" Obama's victory.

Among white voters, according to exit polls, Obama lost by 12 percentage points, but he more than made up this deficit with his margins with African-American (91 points), Latino (36) and Asian (27) and "other" (35) voters. Women gave Obama a decisive 13-point advantage, compared to his narrow 1-point win among men.

Obama won among those making less than $50,000 a year by a 22-point margin; the votes of those who made more than $50,000 were evenly split. Union households went for the Democrat by a 20-point margin, vs. 4 points for non-union households. Seventy-six percent of those who disapprove of the Iraq War supported Obama; 86 percent of Iraq War supporters went for McCain.

Obviously, voters' opinions don't translate directly into politicians' actions; we'd live in a much different world if they did. But voters do matter enough that corporate media routinely try to wish them away.

ZNet has Noam Chomsky's in-depth analysis (11/25/08) of the recent U.S. presidential election--its likely ramifications, and its overall democratic qualities as compared to other countries. Chomsky here addresses the corporate media aspect:

In the liberal Boston Globe, the headline of the lead story observed that Obama's "grassroots strategy leaves few debts to interest groups": labor unions, women, minorities or other "traditional Democratic constituencies." That is only partially right, because massive funding by concentrated sectors of capital is ignored. But leaving that detail aside, the report is correct in saying that Obama's hands are not tied, because his only debt is to "a grassroots army of millions"--who took instructions, but contributed essentially nothing to formulating his program.

At the other end of the doctrinal spectrum, a headline in the Wall Street Journal reads "Grassroots Army Is Still at the Ready"--namely, ready to follow instructions to "push his agenda," whatever it may be.

Obama's organizers regard the network they constructed "as a mass movement with unprecedented potential to influence voters," the Los Angeles Times reported. The movement, organized around the "Obama brand," can pressure Congress to "hew to the Obama agenda." But they are not to develop ideas and programs and call on their representatives to implement them. These would be among the "old ways of doing politics," from which the new "idealists" are "breaking free."