A New York Times piece today (11/29/11) about the U.S. airstrikes that apparently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers opens with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani speaking publicly about the incident, as does Pakistani military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.

Readers are then treated to a lesson in how U.S. officials speak to important news outlets about an emerging, controversial story. They don't use their names. Instead, we hear from:

• "A United States official" who comments  on the "growing frustration in Washington about the increasingly harsh language coming out of Islamabad." He "spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the need not to personally alienate Pakistani officials."That same official then is allowed to mischaracterize the Pakistani complaint:  "You hear what they’re saying, and they’re making it sound like we're just bombing Pakistani military positions for the hell of it."
• "Another American official," who "disputed the Pakistani assertions that the border posts were in areas that had been largely cleared of insurgents."
• "Yet another American official... who asked not to be identified in discussing a case that is under investigation."
• And, finally, a "third American official briefed on the raid."

Elsewhere in the paper, a Times editorial explained its regrets over this incident and others:

It's not clear what led to NATO strikes on two Pakistani border posts this weekend, but there can be no dispute that the loss of lives is tragic. At least 24 Pakistani troops were killed. We regret those deaths, as we do those of all American, NATO and Afghan troops and Pakistani and Afghan civilians killed by extremists.

So any deaths in the wars in Afghanistan or Pakistan are regrettable--except for civilians killed by U.S./NATO forces.

Back in March, we wondered when U.S. corporate news outlets would find U.S./NATO killing of Afghan kids newsworthy. Back then, it was nine children killed in a March 1 airstrike. This resulted in two network news stories on the evening or morning newscasts, and two brief references on the PBS NewsHour.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

NBC Nightly News (10/7/11) marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War on October 7 with a segment that linked the war to the Occupy Wall Street protests. As anchor Brian Williams put it in the introduction:

Tonight protesters remain in the streets of a dozen U.S. cities, angry over what's happened to their lives and our country; and a big part of that, over these last 10 years, the two wars we've been fighting, starting 10 years ago today. This is the anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, longer now than World War II and the Civil War combined.

That's pretty unusual. The report that followed was not.  Quoted in Jim Miklaszewski's report: Retired general Karl Eikenberry, retired general David Barno and retired general Barry McCaffrey (who some might recall for his role as part of Pentagon propaganda effort to feed talking points to TV pundits; he's also on the board of military companies that profit from government contracts).

Not to worry--also quoted in the piece was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is not retired. Getting current and former military officials into a story counts is a kind of balance, right?

Fox host Bill O'Reilly knows a thing or two about boundaries.

As he told his TV audience Monday night, some "far-left" radicals crossed the line on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a blog post about how some Republican politicians turned the attacks into a "wedge issue," and referred to George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani as "fake heroes."

O'Reilly's reaction: Krugman is "insulting his country on the anniversary of 9/11. That is truly despicable."

O'Reilly had a little left in tank, so he went after former Times reporter Chris Hedges for writing this:

Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement.... We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists, too.

O'Reilly got down to his point:

The reason I am even pointing out the rantings of these far-left loons is that some of their more moderate confederates do not condemn the statements. I mean, the New York Times actually pays Krugman to spout this stuff. Yeah, we have freedom of speech, but there's also a responsibility in the journalistic and political communities, is there not?

Sure, let's talk about media figures using responsible rhetoric. Let's start with Bill O'Reilly's call for brutal attacks on a number of countries right after 9/11:

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, the channel's most popular host, declared on his September 17 broadcast that if the Afghan government did not extradite Osama bin Laden to the U.S., "the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble--the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads." O'Reilly went on to say:

This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.

O'Reilly added that in Iraq, "their infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain.... Maybe then the people there will finally overthrow Saddam." If Libya's Moammar Gadhafi does not relinquish power and go into exile, "we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mine the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. We also destroy all the airports in Libya. Let them eat sand."

Lucky for O'Reilly, there are few sanctions in corporate media--at Fox or anywhere else--for that kind of bloodthirsty rhetoric.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/5/11) takes the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to say that he's sorry:

I went home on September 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war--against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term.

Wait--we all did what now?

Someone who was really sorry for stoking war fever would be honest enough to point out that not everyone was on board. And of course Richard Cohen knows this--he was writing columns attacking those who weren't "going along with it." As he wrote about Dennis Kucinich, "How did this fool get on Meet the Press?"

August 6, 2011, when 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, were killed when their helicopter was shot down, was the "deadliest day" of the Afghan War, several media outlets told us:

• David Muir (ABC World News Saturday, 8/6/11): "It was the deadliest day of the war in Afghanistan, 30 Americans, 22 Navy SEALs lost."

• David Gregory (NBC Meet the Press, 8/7/11): "This was the single deadliest day of the war."

• Chicago Tribune headline (8/7/11): "Taliban Says It Downed Copter in Deadliest Day of War in Afghanistan"

• ABC This Week graphic (8/7/11): "DEADLIEST DAY IN AFGHANISTAN"

• Terrell Brown, CBS Morning News (8/8/11): "America mourns the loss of 30 warriors killed in Afghanistan on the war's deadliest day."

• AP (8/9/11): "Troops killed in the deadliest day of the Afghan War are coming home today."

But, of course, it wasn't the war's deadliest day--that unhappy distinction goes to May 4, 2009, when the U.S. military attacked the village of Granai, killing 140 people, 93 of them children, according to an Afghan government investigation (Reuters, 5/16/09). (The U.S. government says it does not know how many people it killed that day.)

Other deadlier days in Afghanistan include July 6, 2008, when U.S. bombing killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, attending a wedding in Nangarhar province (Guardian, 7/11/08); August 22, 2008, when a U.S. airstrike killed at least 90 civilians, including 60 children, in the village of Azizabad (UN News Centre, 8/26/08); and July 23, 2010, when the U.S. killed 39 civilians in the village of Sangin (RTTNews, 8/5/10).

To be sure, many U.S. news reports, unlike those cited above, remembered to add "for Americans" to their descriptions of August 6 as the "deadliest day." But there's little evidence that anyone in U.S. media remembers the village of Granai.

Newsweek (7/17/11) begins a piece on David Petraeus becoming CIA director with an account of how he got the "short-term job done" after he was named commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan:

Now, after 13 months, the 58-year-old Petraeus is coming home to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Since that day in the Oval Office, hopeful signs have begun appearing that he may have performed the seemingly impossible task of stabilizing the Afghan battlefield.

The article, by reporter John Barry, doesn't provide much detail on what these "hopeful signs" are, but Afghan civilian deaths are up 15 percent in the first half of 2011 vs. the first half of 2010.  (Maybe that's why an Afghan media executive cited in the piece contends that "not everyone in Afghanistan fully appreciates what Petraeus has achieved in his year there.")

As for U.S. troops and their non-Afghan allies, 705 of them were killed in the 13 months Petraeus was in charge of Afghanistan--as opposed to 725 in the 13 months before that. Other than that, I'm sure he had a great war.

The end of a Wall Street Journal article (7/14/11) on a new report on Afghan deaths highlights the peculiarity of their culture:

Of civilian casualties, 2 percent were caused by night raids, slightly down from last year, with 30 fatalities, the report says. Night raids have been a contentious issue between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. military officers and civilian leaders. The raids are sensitive in Afghanistan, because foreign soldiers burst into civilian homes, where strangers are unwelcome in the country's conservative Islamic traditions.

What a strange place. I guess in a civilized society, when a foreign soldier bursts into your home in the middle of night brandishing a weapon, you offer them dinner.

An analysis in USA Today (6/23/11) by Richard Wolf claims:

President Obama's decision to remove 10,000 troops from Afghanistan this year and a total of 33,000 by next September was deemed a step in the right direction Wednesday by a growing, and bipartisan, anti-war movement.

Really? I'm not aware of many people in the "anti-war movement" who have expressed that sentiment. And neither is USA Today, judging by the quotes that are included in the article. The piece notes that "Many Democrats called for a faster drawdown" and "Many liberal Democrats demanded more troops home sooner"-- naming Sen. Carl Levin, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dick Durbin, and Sen. Patty Murray as expressing such sentiments.

The paper goes on to note that the "most liberal Democrats' patience are the least satisfied with Obama's timetable, " and then quotes Moveon.org and the Campaign for America's Future.  It's good to see the paper reporting on the dissatisfaction that exists among those to the left of Obama-- but there's no reason to suggest that such folks consider his policies a "step in the right direction."

The headline in today's Post, previewing Obama's speech tonight:

Obama’s challenge: Leaving, but not too quickly

Funny how it's not the other way around-- leaving too slowly would seem to be a larger political problem, given the state of public opinion.

The Post reports:

President Obama will face a stiff political challenge Wednesday in presenting his plan for a gradual end to the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. His prime-time address must remind a skeptical electorate and a concerned Congress that the country’s longest war remains worth fighting — and funding — for several more years.

Why is it that Obama must "remind" the public that the war is worth fighting--and not convince? You can't really remind people of something they disagree with.

One of the most common criticisms of the PBS NewsHour is that it too often mimics the elite bias of the commercial media.

A recent broadcast of the NewsHour (6/8/11) had two segments about the debate over the Afghan War--the first a news report covering the Senate nomination hearings for Ryan Crocker, Obama's nominee to be ambassador to Afghanistan. Quoted in the piece were senators Jim Webb (D.-Va.) and Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.), Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Barack Obama.

The discussion segment that accompanied it featured two more senators: Republican Saxby Chambliss  of Georgia and New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez. Chambliss is a supporter of the war, with some reservations, while Menendez wants to continue the war with a different strategy: 

I think you could do more of a counterterrorism effort, where you are striking at Al-Qaeda and along the Afghan/Pakistan border, even striking at the Taliban to just to continue destabilize them.

As FAIR pointed out in our most recent study of the NewsHour, actual opponents of the war are hard to find.

On June 7, the NewsHour had a discussion about the state of the economy, and what the White House might be able to do to turn things around. Again, the guestlist was disappointing. Here's Gwen Ifill's introduction:

We explore that now with Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wells Fargo in Charlotte, N.C., and Tom Binnings, senior partner at Summit Economics in Colorado.

A Beltway political reporter for a mainstream daily, an economist for a bank and a partner at an economic forecasting firm. The banker expressed a view common in corporate America--that there's too much government regulation. ("It seems that regulation has increased.... Companies are really kind of put off by the amount of regulations that are hitting them all at once.")

There was little challenge to that sentiment--a predictable outcome, given the guests that the show booked to talk about the issue. The NewsHour should do better.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai denounced once again U.S./NATO airstrikes that killed civilians. In this recent incident,  14 were killed, including 11 children. This prompted ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer (5/31/11) to call in ABC reporters to sort things out, leading to this exchange with Pentagon reporter Martha Raddatz:

SAWYER: He's talking to the Afghan people. But Martha, he put restrictions on what U.S. troops can do, what the NATO troops can do. How onerous are these?

RADDATZ: Well, he's trying to put restrictions on. I mean they simply have to carry out air strikes over there. It's a very rapid response. It's real-time intelligence. It's certainly flawed at some points.

But I've been on these missions. I've been on a combat mission in a fighter jet. I've seen all the very, very careful steps they take. They go through what's called the nine line. In fact, the mission I went on, some French soldiers were calling for them to bomb and the pilot and the weapons officer said, "We can't bomb, we think there's a school, we think there might be people in there."

So I think you will see a real fight over these restrictions, but the airstrikes and these night raids just simply have to continue if they're going to go after the enemy.

So bombing raids in Afghanistan "have to continue," for the sake of having a "rapid response" to "real-time intelligence." And Raddatz, who has "been on a combat mission," can assure you how "very, very careful" they are--why, on the mission she flew, they didn't bomb a target simply because they thought it was a school! This great care taken to not kill civilians sometimes gets more attention than the actual killing of civilians.

The piece helpfully included footage of Raddatz on her combat mission, gathering all the "facts" necessary to produce this kind of journalism.

OK, this isn't Sean Hannity's byline in the Post today, but it might as well be. The headline should stop you:

In bin Laden Victory, Echoes of the Bush Years

The piece--actually written by Scott Wilson and Anne Kornblut--lays out the argument:

As President Obama celebrates the signature national-security success of his tenure, he has a long list of people to thank. On the list: George W. Bush.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication. Public tolerance for military operations over the past decade has shifted to the degree that a mission carried out deep inside a sovereign country has raised little domestic protest.

And a detention and interrogation system that Obama once condemned as contrary to American values produced one early lead that, years later, brought U.S. forces to the high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and a fatal encounter with an unarmed Osama bin Laden.

So not only did torture work, but the illegal, baseless war against Iraq "forged a military so skilled that it carried out a complicated covert raid with only a minor complication."  In other words, the Iraq War led to catching bin Laden. This could give Fox News a new theme to pound for the next couple of days.

Will Ferrell did a one-man show at the end of the Bush years, in his W. character, called "You're Welcome, America." It was pretty funny. This is not.

During an interview on CNN last night (5/1/11) with New York firefighter and 9/11 first responder Kenny Specht:

BLITZER: Did you ever give up hope, Kenny, that the U.S. would kill bin Laden?

SPECHT: No, but I'd be lying to you, Wolf, I'd be lying to you if I thought about it every night. No, I didn't give up hope. That's all we had. That's all we had. It's like anything else, though. It's just sometimes we think that when it's not spoken about anymore, we wonder really what's being done.

I mean, we're in a quagmire, for lack of a better term, in Afghanistan. I hope to God that tonight is one large step to maybe wrapping up operations in Afghanistan.

BLITZER: Kenny, I'm going to interrupt because I think I've lost contact with you. But I want you to--I want you to stand by, Kenny, if you can. Stand by for a moment because Peter Bergen is joining us now, our national security contributor.

(Thanks to reader Blake Wood for the tip. See something that should be written up? Send us a note:  fair@fair.org)

Readers of the Washington Post can see this headline in today's edition (4/25/11) about the U.S. drone airstrikes:

Debates Underway on Combat Drones

But there is no actual debate in the article. Reporter Walter Pincus cites a British military study that calls the use of missile-firing drones "a genuine revolution in military affairs," adding that the "use of unmanned aircraft prevents the potential loss of aircrew lives and is thus in itself morally justified."

Pincus goes on to explain:

At a Washington conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last week, the issue of drones was also widely discussed.

That "wide discussion" would seem to have involved drone proponents from the CIA and the military. Those quoted by the Post were:

--"Lt. Col. Bruce Black, program manager for the Air Force Predator and Reaper aircraft."

--"former CIA director Michael V. Hayden," who explained that drone pilots "can call up computer maps that show the potential effects of each weapon." Hayden explained that teams can ask for an attack's likely impact on the ground--which is apparently called "the bug splat."

--"Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, former Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," who apparently talked about "potential problems with public perceptions."

--"Col. Dean Bushey, deputy director of the Air Force Joint Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center," who explained that drone pilots train like conventional pilots.

There are plenty of questions to ask about a government policy of assassination by remote-controlled drone aircraft--including whether or not this is even legal. The Post's "debate" would seem to exclude anyone who doesn't think this is a sound policy.