The New York Times' Jonathan Hicks (11/17/08), writing about newly elected Staten Island Rep. Michael McMahon:

Mr. McMahon...stresses his working-class roots, telling voters of his Irish father’s lifelong job as an insurance underwriter.

That must be the same working class that Bill O'Reilly comes from.

The Huffington Post publishes male critic Jeff Cohen's challenge (11/13/08) to "independent media outlets that contributed so mightily to the stunning election result":

With Democrats in control, will these outlets be guided by principle or just partisanship? Will they speak truth to power and expose corruption and injustice over the long haul--no matter who's in charge?...

From the start of the Republic, bold entrepreneurs (often sole proprietors like many of today's bloggers) stood up to censorship, jail and violence to sustain independent outlets that transformed our country....

Study any cause that has improved our country since and you'll find stubbornly independent journalists who challenged injustice in the face of ridicule and scorn from the mainstream media of their day.

Giving props to Rodger Streitmatter's 2001 Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America, in which many of "these journalistic heroes are chronicled," Cohen dispenses hard-won wisdom, culminating in "Stay stubbornly independent: This is the ultimate lesson."

See the retrospective in FAIR's magazine Extra!: "On the Shoulders of Giants: The Unbroken Tradition of Press Criticism" (1-2/06) by Robin Andersen

Media reformer Josh Silver's "Look at Media in 2009" (Huffington Post, 11/13/08) necessarily surveys the dire record of corporate news in '08:

The real problem is not the media favoring one candidate
over another, but rather its utter failure to practice critical journalism. Turn on your television or radio, and it's 24/7 horserace political coverage, partisan shouting matches and salacious crap. There is no effort to tell voters the difference between the candidates' rhetoric and reality, how their proclamations match their voting records, and what their policy proposals would actually do. While there were a few notable moments when news outlets actually did this during the campaign, they were few and far between.

"Now that the champagne has been put away," Silver cautions us to keep in mind that "the disastrous members of mainstream media remain firmly in place. Ignore the problem at your--and the nation's--peril."

For more review, check out the FAIR study published in our magazine Extra!: "TV's Low-Cal Campaign Coverage: How 385 Stories Can Tell You Next to Nothing About Whom to Vote For" (5-6/08) by Jon Whiten

Speaking out again now that the U.S. presidential election has been decided, Bill Ayers tells Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, 11/14/08) exactly why his family "actually didn't pay a lot of attention to" the ongoing media controversy over him:

We recognized that there was this cartoon character kind of thrust up on the screen, and I was an unwitting and unwilling part of his presidential campaign. We tried not to watch it, because, pretty much, it was distracting and kind of crazy-producing.... There's so much that's dishonest in it that it's kind of impossible to kind of know where to enter it.

First of all, the idea that Bill O'Reilly says, you know, that I was in hiding. I wasn't in hiding.... What I wasn't doing was commenting on the presidential campaign to the media...because we couldn't figure out a way to interrupt what we took to be a profoundly dishonest narrative.... We had no way into it.

The idea that the Weather Underground carried out terrorism is nonsense. We never killed or hurt a person. We never intended to. We existed from 1970 to 1976, the last years, the last half-decade of the war in Vietnam. And by contrast, the war in Vietnam really was a terrorist undertaking. The war in Vietnam was terror on a mass scale, with thousands of people every month being murdered, mostly from the air. And we were doing everything we could to stop it.

And so the government-friendly media version of that war--going strong to this day--continues to influence national U.S. politics, and has Ayers proclaiming "again, it's hard to know where to start to interrupt that narrative."

Observing (Creator's Syndicate, 11/14/08) that "overall, the news media like winners, and an incoming president is the biggest winner of all," Norman Solomon knows "the period between his opponent's concession speech and the swearing-in has traditionally been a time of many media upsides without the burdens of actual incumbency." As a result,

despite the vast amount of media analysis and commentary occurring between election and inauguration, the new president's actual policy outlooks aren't likely to receive a lot of tough scrutiny during that period.... While news coverage is focused elsewhere, there are some very important points being made right now by progressive commentators who are warning that some Obama positions will be--or at least should be--on a collision course with substantial portions of his political base....

[Author Tom] Engelhardt has some good advice about how to approach the substance of Barack Obama's policy proclivities: "Pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for 'change we can believe in,' which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror."

But Solomon is savvy enough to realize that's "not exactly the kind of assessment we're liable to encounter as we click through the network channels or turn the mass-media pages."

One interesting post-election story has been the treatment of Rahm Emanuel, a center-right Clinton Democrat who will serve as Obama's chief of staff. While some Republicans claim Emanuel is too "partisan," some media defenders argue that he's not, since his politics are not all that liberal. Time magazine's Karen Tumulty explains:

The strongest signal of how that White House will operate has been Obama's pick of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel to be its chief of staff. Emanuel is a win-at-any-cost partisan but not an ideologue; in his earlier White House stint as a top aide to Clinton, he was a key figure in shepherding through the North American Free Trade Agreement, a crime bill and welfare reform--none of them popular with the Democratic Party's liberal base.

Apparently pushing for a corporate "free trade" pact and gutting public assistance for the poor are not "ideological"--they're just the sort of common sense the media like to cheer. As for the idea that pushing policies unpopular with the party base is evidence of a "win-at-any-cost" outlook--well, that depends on your definition of "win." When FAIR founder Jeff Cohen examined the Democratic Party's electoral performance in the Clinton years (L.A. Times, 4/9/00), here's what he found:

Let's do the numbers. When Clinton entered the White House, his party dominated the U.S. Senate, 57-43; the U.S. House, 258-176; the country's governorships, 30-18, and a large majority of state legislatures. Today, Republicans control the Senate, 55-45; the House, 222-211; governorships, 30-18, and almost half of state legislatures.

In his Unclaimed Territory feature at Salon (11/13/08, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald has more on mainstream journalists' affinity for those "urging the new Obama administration to avoid any investigations or prosecutions of Bush lawbreaking":

This is what has been advocated by everyone from David Broder to top Obama adviser Cass Sunstein. There are few things more difficult than finding someone of prominence in the establishment that disagrees with this view....

Nobody believes that "policy differences" should be criminalized. That's a strawman--an obfuscating term--erected by those who are defending presidential lawbreaking license without having the intellectual honesty to admit they're doing that. This is about having laws in place that clearly and explicitly say that "X shall be a felony," only to then watch as the President does X, and thereafter have our political establishment announce that it's more important to avoid partisan anger than it is to hold high political officials accountable under the rule of law.

This contradiction is summed up nicely in Greenwald's headline: "Post-Partisan Harmony vs. the Rule of Law."

Corporate media gave the same counsel the last time a Democratic administration replaced a Republican one; see Extra!: "Iran/Contra: Sweep It Away" (3/93)

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz quotes (11/12/08) Iraq War booster Michael Hanlon writing on the Politico website that "it is important that Senator Obama hear from centrists on Iraq, and Susan [Rice] may not be such a person on that subject." In response to the Hanlon assertion that former Bill Clinton official Rice "is indeed a progressive," Schwarz gives us some examples of "Susan Rice, left-wing radical, expressing her views on Iraq":

"I think he [then-Secretary of State Colin Powell] has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don't think many informed people doubted that." (NPR, 2/6/03)

..."It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on. I think the question becomes whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any, even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side." (NPR, 12/20/02)

Rice's war-mongering credentials also extend beyond current U.S. wars into lobbying for "military... preparation" to "stop the dying in Darfur"; see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "The Humanitarian Temptation: Calling for War to Bring Peace to Darfur" (1-2/08) by Julie Hollar

Washington Post ombud Deborah Howell (11/9/08) charged her paper with "a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama." But her evidence for this pro-Obama bias was remarkably weak.

She presented some counts of stories and pictures, like "the number of Obama stories since November 11 [2007] was 946, compared with [John] McCain's 786." But she noted that much of this disparity was because of Obama's longer primary fight. Looking at the race since Obama captured the nomination, she had some less striking stats, e.g., "Counting from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282."

She found bias on the opinion pages too:

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Blogger Matthew Yglesias (11/10/08) described this as a "call...for less intellectual honesty on the Post's op-ed page," and he's got a point. It's not clear what the point of an opinion page that would praise and condemn every politician in equal measure would be; you might as well just print the slogan "six of one, half a dozen of the other" and save yourself the effort.

The only really substantive passage in Howell's finding of pro-Obama bias in the Post was this paragraph:

Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

Actually, the Post did a front-page, 1,250-word article on Obama's use of drugs (1/3/07), but that was before Howell's survey period. During her survey period, I count at least 11 mentions of Obama's adolescent drug use (e.g., 12/14/07, 8/24/08, 10/10/08); it's not clear how many times it would have to be brought up before it would count as more than "nothing."

A Nexis search for "Obama and Rezko" turns up 54 stories in the Post during Howell's survey period. That seems like an awful lot, actually, given how little substance there really was to the Obama/Rezko "story."

And "his undergraduate years" and "his start in Chicago" needed "tougher scrutiny"? I think it's hard to make a case that what's missing from election coverage is more muckraking of the candidates' college years.

Beneath the TPM Café headline "Excitement Is Not Hysteria" (11/11/08), critic William Hartung takes on a Washington Post op-ed that gets scary about those celebrations of Barack Obama's election:

According to Anne Applebaum... the excitement around the world about the election of Barack Obama has reached the point of "mass hysteria."... She says the following:

Things could get worse, too: Mass hysteria can inspire the world's crazed assassins, as the RFK analogy shows. This subject is borderline taboo, but I don't think I was the only one momentarily gripped by terror when Obama walked on to that stage in Chicago: What if something awful was about to happen? In some of the weirder realms of the Internet, you can already find verses from Nostradamus allegedly predicting that Obama's election heralds the end of the world, and someone out there probably believes them.

While careful to say that "the potential threat to Obama is real enough," Hartung thinks "the idea that somehow his popularity in and of itself will 'inspire the world's assassins' is as irresponsible as it is illogical," and instead is "all for calming down and figuring out what can realistically be accomplished in an Obama administration, but the fact that his election inspires people is nothing to sneer at, or to be afraid of, for that matter."

A current CNN interview of Sarah Palin gives the failed candidate yet more airtime in which she, in the words of In These Times editor Jarrett Dapier, "continues her campaign against Barack Obama and again calls forth the specter of Bill Ayers." Wolf Blitzer opens the door wide yet again by asking her about her assertion that Obama "is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country" and Palin decides to "plow through that door":

Palin: Well, I still am concerned about that association with Bill Ayers. And if anybody still wants to talk about it, I will, because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol. That's an association that still bothers me.

As the pithy headline of Dapier's blog post has it (11/12/08): "Sarah Palin Still Worried About Bill Ayers, Media Inexplicably Still Interested."

Writing on his Consortium News website (11/11/08), Robert Parry warns Barack Obama--who "is being told to forego investigations of George W. Bush's war crimes"--to "Beware the Lessons of '93" when "the last Democratic president got burned with similar advice." Parry lays odds that "had the full stories [of George H. W. Bush's Iran/Contra involvement] been told...it's unlikely that [his son] ever would have gained the momentum to propel him to... the White House in Election 2000." And here's the ironic part: Just "16 months into his presidency, Clinton was getting clobbered by the Republicans--and by the news media--over his Whitewater real-estate deal":

Clinton felt besieged not only by aggressive Republicans but by the national press corps. Since the last Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, left office in 1981, a powerful right-wing media had come into its own, built in part as a defense mechanism to shield presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush from criticism.

Besides Limbaugh and the bevy of other talk radio hosts, right-wing print outlets had grown in number and in influence, the likes of the American Spectator and the Washington Times, not to mention the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages and conservative columnists in newspapers across the country. Many of the commentators also appeared on TV political chat shows to reprise their opinions for millions of more Americans nationwide....

Indeed, it was the Washington Post, the newspaper credited with unraveling Richard Nixon's Watergate mystery, which had led the charge on the Whitewater case with front-page stories that put Clinton in a public relations corner and forced him to acquiesce to a special prosecutor.

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Hast Seen the Whitewater Whale?: The Journal's Quest for Conspiracy" (9-10/95) by Robert Parry

The Media Matters staff has more (11/7/08) on the prominent press fallacy of "a 'center-right' country":

In a November 7 Washington Times column, [Heritage Foundation president Ed] Feulner claimed that Obama "campaigned on conservative themes throughout the fall," and that Obama "took some conservative positions on issues like taxes (promising to cut them)." Yet prior to the election, in an August 10 column, Feulner had claimed that by "unveil[ing] an economic plan that revolves around raising taxes on the wealthy," Obama indicated that he "want[s] to go back to the policies of the 1970s."... Feulner also asserted in the August column that "Mr. Obama promises to 'soak the rich.'"

Media Matters contrasts this and many other examples of such nonsense with some crazy concept called "reality":

These media figures ignore the central components of his platform, including repeal of tax cuts for the wealthy, near-universal healthcare coverage, and redeployment of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling group, released a poll on November 7 that showed strong support for the positions that Obama has articulated on these issues. The poll also included questions that provided a direct choice between the position taken by Obama on a given issue and that taken by Sen. John McCain.... For most questions that juxtaposed a clear progressive view with a clear conservative view, the progressive position was more popular.

See FAIR's regrettably more-relevant-than-ever article in our magazine Extra!: "Move Over--Over and Over: Media's Rightward Push for Democrats" (7-8/06) by Peter Hart & Steve Rendall

Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell (11/8/08) notes conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's "misty-eyed" writing (11/7/08) about the Obama victory: "The little speck of difference that kept us imperceptibly apart had been dissolved in a lovely instant of national consensus that race no longer matters." But he notes that not so long ago, that "little speck of difference" loomed much larger to Parker, who wrote back in May (5/14/08) that the election was about

fullbloodedness...about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.... there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity. We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants--and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

Of course, Obama's "bloodline"--that is, his mother's family--has been in this country for centuries; his grandfather fought in World War II. But one gets the sense, reading that May column, that the main point is that the opposite of "fullbloodedness" is "mixedbloodedness."

Mitchell points to Peggy Noonan as another columnist whose writings on Obama have gone from creepy to celebratory. In April, Noonan had been wondering (Wall Street Journal, 4/25/08) "about Obama and America"--" Who would have taught him to love it?"--contrasting his purportedly dubious attitude toward America's heritage with John McCain's, who "carries it in his bones." Now she's writing that "the explosion of joy in large pockets of the country Tuesday night was beautiful to see, and moving."

Currently a well-respected and widely published educator, Bill Ayers discusses the periodic "media episodes of fleeting notoriety" around his former membership in the Weather Underground--"it was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season"--and charts (In These Times, 11/7/08) how the '08 campaign mania around him was amplified while bouncing from political operatives to the punditry and back again:

During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama.... Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-N.Y.) campaign provided the script, which included guilt by association....

On March 13, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), apparently in an attempt to reassure the "base," sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months, and so Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant "terrorist," he explained....

On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled.

Ayers illustrates the end results of Hannity's crusade by writing of how "when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral" and "she said Obama was 'pallin' around with terrorists": "The crowd began chanting, 'Kill him!' 'Kill him!' It was downhill from there."

See FAIR's Media Advisory: Ayers = Keating?: Media Falsely Balance Obama, McCain Attacks (10/10/08)