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).

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).

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.

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."

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.

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."