Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp (9/4/09) has an update on U.S. papers' "mixed reaction to the controversial Associated Press photo distributed today of a Marine who died in combat in Afghanistan last month."

The picture's inclusion in "a group of images taken by AP photographer Julie Jacobson" predictably was "blasted" by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, whose censure came via "a formal letter of complaint."

Strupp reports that

the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times ran the photo on its website with an AP story about the images, while the Commercial Appeal in Memphis provided an online photo gallery of all of Jacobson's images from the coverage. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin also carried the photo.

The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., also ran the image, with a lengthy editorial explaining why. It said, in part: "Not all news outlets will choose to publish the picture, distributed by the Associated Press. We feel we owe it to our readers to explain why we have decided to use the image."

While the Intelligencer also felt the need to declare themselves "entirely in support of the war against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq," Strupp's list of those entirely "withholding the shot of [Lance Cpl. Joshua] Bernard being fatally wounded" is long--including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Boston Herald, Stars and Stripes and the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, which further ingratiated itself with Robert Gates' propaganda machine by condemning such evidence of the reality of war as "in poor taste."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Self-Censorship to Official Censorship: Ban on Images of Wounded GIs Raises No Media Objections" (3–4/07) by Pat Arnow.

Having on its debut dethroned Glenn Beck from Amazon's bestseller rankings to become "the No. 1 nonfiction book in all categories," David Swanson's Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union title looks to "how we can reform the systemic weaknesses in our representative government that deny us healthcare and many other things we want."

One main "corrupting influence" named by Swanson (Prosperity Agenda, 9/2/09) is

corporate media, which had always whited out single-payer and eagerly aired lies and distortions about the public option, moving the center of the debate somewhere to the right of that proposal. This is not--I repeat, not--because the right-wingers are smarter or wittier or more disciplined. It is primarily because the corporate media shares their agenda, no matter how sloppily or inarticulately they present it. The media companies share board members with the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, not to mention selling them advertisements. There is no more common excuse for hesitancy from progressive congressmembers than "But the media would attack me."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates: The Corporate Ties Between Insurers and Media Companies" (8/09) by Kate Murphy.

Somehow the Drudge-friendly news site Politico managed to write an entire piece today about pressure on the White House from anti-war left ("W.H. Fears Liberal War Pressure") without actually quoting anyone who might apply that pressure. Reporter Mike Allen did gather thoughts from Matt Bennett of the Third Way think tank (a self-consciously centrist group incoherently labeled  the "moderate voice of the progressive movement"), White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell and several anonymous White House officials. Bennett commented that Obama's supporters "are fighting a really serious political battle to keep the criticism under control." They probably don't need to work that hard at it--not with the help they're getting from establishment media outlets like Politico.

In his Time column this week, Klein writes:

So what should Obama do about Afghanistan? His dilemma isn't as stark as has been posed in recent press accounts, with screamers on the right demanding slavish devotion to the military's wish list and screamers on the left demanding a withdrawal. The U.S. military has become far more ... nuanced when it comes to making requests of presidents. The negotiations about what [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal can officially request will not take place anywhere near the public eye. It is very likely that more troops will be sent--to build and train the Afghan security forces, it will be said. Obama's problems on the left will be mitigated by the fact that most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves. They don't want to hurt the President, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time.

OK, "screamers on the left" are demanding withdrawal. That would make "the left" the majority of the public, right? Klein counsels that left opposition will have little effect, since "most Democrats have also supported this war--as opposed to Iraq's--and have little desire to reverse themselves."  It's hard to figure out why this is true, or frankly why it would matter--the general public has reversed its opinion quite dramatically, hasn't it?

Apparently that doesn't much matter;  the real issue here are the Democratic politicians, who "don't want to hurt the president, and they don't want to be perceived as weak on defense come election time." Funny, then, that the public doesn't seem to mind being seen as "weak on defense," if that's really how one would describe opposition to escalating the war in Afghanistan.

Media Monitors Network has the latest column from Norman Solomon (8/26/09), in which the longtime analyst of corporate media boosterism for U.S. wars considers a recent swath of stories that "have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan."

True, "the comparisons are often valid," Solomon finds, "but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned--the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it":

This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time.... In fact, overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with war policymakers in Washington--insisting for the longest time that the war must go on....

A similar pattern took shape during Washington’s protracted war in Iraq. Year after year, the editorial positions of major dailies have been much more supportive of the U.S. war effort than the American public.

And today, when "top policymakers for what has become Obama’s Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation’s mighty newspapers," Solomon reiterates that "opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war"--noting how an August 13–17 ABC News-Washington Post poll "found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn't worth fighting."

See the recent FAIR Action Alert: "Where Is the Afghanistan Debate?: When Public Support Slips, TV Packs in War Boosters" (8/25/09).

Stars and Stripes reporters Charlie Reed, Kevin Baron and Leo Shane III (8/27/09) have an update on the military paper's recent exposure of Iraqi National Congress fabricators the Rendon Group helping the Pentagon in Screening New Embeds in Afghanistan "to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light."

A reporter profile obtained by Stars and Stripes "evaluates work published as recently as May, indicating that the rating practice did not in fact cease last October" as claimed by a Pentagon representative, and "explicit suggestions contained in the Rendon profiles detailing how best to manipulate reporters coverage... directly contradict the Pentagon’s stated policies"--purporting to be "in no way intended to prevent release of embarrassing, negative or derogatory information."

Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters' coverage is being graded as "positive," "neutral" or "negative."

Moreover, the documents--recent confidential profiles of the work of individual reporters prepared by a Pentagon contractor--indicate that the ratings are intended to help Pentagon image-makers manipulate the types of stories that reporters produce while they are embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

One reporter on the staff of one of America's pre-eminent newspapers is rated in a Pentagon report as "neutral to positive" in his coverage of the U.S. military. Any negative stories he writes "could possibly be neutralized" by feeding him mitigating quotes from military officials.

But really, what are the odds of that working?

Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn "is the Wall Street Journal's 'Microtrend'-spotting columnist" and "also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller," Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that "only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter."

Alas, "Scumbag spotted!" is Nolan's cry when writing that

Penn's latest (old, and none too insightful) "Microtrend" column is about "glamping"--glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients.

Nolan goes on to remind us that "Penn was canned as Hillary Clinton's campaign strategist after it emerged that his firm was trying to get a contract to do PR work for the nation of Colombia—work that went against Clinton's own political position." It's particularly interesting to recall that scandal as "a story that the WSJ broke," considering how, as Nolan puts it, "moonlighting from his PR career has already screwed a politician," but "now he's screwing a newspaper the same way."

Seeing all the press attention given to pitbull-fighter and NFL star Michael Vick's return to football, David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 8/19/09) can't help but think that Vick

should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.

For those of his readers who may be "severely satire-impaired," Swanson explains that "No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured," but instead is simply "concerned" over how U.S. media "worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system."

"Of course I want torture prosecuted," Swanson writes, "but torture is a symptom. The illness is aggressive war."

Mac Margolis, who wrote recently about the "selective zeal for democracy" of those who condemned the Honduran coup, wrote another little piece on Latin America for Newsweek this week: "Latin America Rights Itself" (print only). He argues that "the region now looks on the brink of a rightward shift," pointing to upcoming elections in Chile, Brazil and Uruguay in which the more liberal incumbent party is projected to lose, contrasting that with the great popularity of Colombia's president Uribe, "who enraged the left by befriending the Bush administration." Margolis suggests that "pragmatism is trumping charisma" and concludes: "Castigating the gringo devil may still make pulses race, but when it comes to casting ballots, Latin America looks likely to go for the middle ground."

Ok, except Lula's approval ratings are neck and neck with Uribe's, and Bachelet's have been on the rise and are pretty close--a main reason her party's candidate is looking weak is because there's a challenger to his left who's peeling off a hefty chunk of votes. Lula's party's candidate isn't all that well-known; once he starts campaigning for her (the election isn't until next year), observers expect her to jump in the polls. And a majority of Uruguayans want Uruguay's Vazquez to run for president again, even though a second consecutive term is barred by the constitution. All of which makes Margolis's argument about "pragmatism" (defined here as "shifting right") and the "middle ground" basically nonsensical.

The escalation of the Afghanistan war is the "Topic A" discussion on the Washington Post op-ed page on Sunday (it's a regular feature where they ask a panel of Important People to weigh in on an issue of the day).

The title was "How Many Troops for Afghanistan?"--one can already spot the problem with that--but the panel they assembled left  a lot to be desired. On the one hand, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (a strong critic of escalation) was given space to make his argument. But his presenced was 'balanced' by four others, three of whom are definitely pro-escalation (they quibble over the details, perhaps) and one pollster who addressed the public opinion problems--i.e., the Afghanistan war isn't popular.

So besides Kucinich, the Post gave readers former Bush and Reagan aide Ed Rogers (escalation "is necessary to avoid the political and security debacle that would arise from an American failure there"), Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center ("The public opinion climate for sending more troops is difficult--but not impossible"), Harvard professor--and former special assistant to George W. Bush--Meghan Sullivan (Obama "should reject three arguments currently made against accepting a recommendation for more troops"), and Georgetown professor Andrew Natsios (stability in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan "can not be achieved without substantially more U.S. and allied troops conducting a classic counterinsurgency campaign to take and hold territory and protect the civilian population.")

Some debate.

As "official Washington is buzzing about 'metrics'" of success in the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (ZNet, 8/13/09) notes of media's persistent question, "Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?"--"Don't ask the dead":

On August 7, under the headline "White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success," a New York Times story made a splash. "As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won."

Don't ask the dead. They don't count.

The Times article went on: "Those 'metrics' of success, demanded by Congress and eagerly awaited by the military, are seen as crucial if the president is to convince Capitol Hill and the country that his revamped strategy is working."

But, Solomon says, "routinely, the dominant political and media calculus renders the dead as digits and widgets, moved around on spreadsheets and news pages. The victims of war are hardly seen as people by the numbed sophisticates who can measure just about anything but the value of a human life." Thus prompting Solomon's question to all of us: "The dead can't speak up. What's our excuse?"

The dominant story from Hillary Clinton's trip to Africa was not her comments about combating rape and sexual violence in Congo.  No, the top story was Clinton's testy response to a question about what her husband thought of Chinese business interests in Kenya Congo.

That exchange prompted a whole story in today's New York Times by Jeffrey Gettleman ("Clinton's Flash of Pique in Congo"). While that's already kind of sad, it turns out that the questioner misspoke; he actually meant to ask what Barack Obama thought of these deals. But either way, apparently, you get to psychoanalyze Hillary Clinton:

After the forum, her aides told the traveling press corps that there might have been a mistranslation, and that the student actually wanted to know the opinion of her boss, not her husband. But that interpretation did not dispel the controversy either, since it gave new life to the nagging question of whether Mrs. Clinton felt marginalized in the Obama administration.

See? If the question was really about Obama, you can take the answer she gave to the question about her husband and use it to gauge her true feelings about her role in the Obama administration. Neat trick.

Gettleman's piece concludes:

No matter the issues she was talking about--encouraging good governing, ending Africa's wars, lifting women up from their lowly position in a place like Congo. The interest in this trip, it seemed, was not about the problems facing Africa. It was about her.

As one journalist covering her trip put it: "She is a celebrity. We have a celebrity secretary of state. When you have a celebrity, you get celebrity coverage."

Well, it's nice to know that journalists covering U.S. foreign policy see their jobs this way.

When "journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling stepped back onto American soil after being detained in North Korea for over four months. Their safe return was covered widely in the American media, and rightfully so," writes Women In Media & News guest blogger Tristin Aaron (8/12/09), "yet their reason for traveling to North Korea has been all but forgotten in the media reports on Lee and Ling":

Euna Lee and Laura Ling were reporting on the trafficking of women from North Korea into China. As Ji-Yeon Yuh notes in, "What Were Laura Ling and Euna Lee Looking For in North Korea?": "Of North Korean women and girl refugees in China, an estimated 80 to 90 percent are victims of trafficking. This is likely the highest percentage of trafficking in a single population."...

Further, these victims of human trafficking are treated as criminals by North Korea, and as illegal immigrants in China. Writing for the Women’s Media Center, Ji-Yeon Yuh highlights a gap in the media's coverage not only of the story Euna Lee and Laura Ling were reporting, but of coverage of North Korea in general: "The wider world takes little notice of these victims, with mainstream media closely focused on the issue of North Korea’s nuclear weapons."

Read all of Ji-Yeon Yuh's story on the website for Aaron's Women’s Media Center. And listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "John Feffer on North Korea" (5/29/09).

Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Conn Hallinan (8/6/09) has yet another debunking of "the story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup" in Honduras, being "that Zelaya--an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez--was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power."

Calling this dominant media narrative "a massive distortion of the facts," Hallinan patiently explains that "all Zelaya was trying to do is to put a non-binding referendum on the ballot calling for a constitutional convention"--which, Hallinan notes, was "a move that trade unions, indigenous groups and social activist organizations had long been lobbying for," since the country's current "one-term limit allows the brass-hats to dominate the politics of the country."

But things get really interesting when Hallinan spots a "U.S. Connection"--via one of our largest media conglomerates:

While Zelaya is indeed friendly with Chávez, he is at best a liberal reformer whose major accomplishment was raising the minimum wage....

One of those "little reforms" was aimed at ensuring public control of the Honduran telecommunications industry, which may well have been the trip-wire that triggered the coup....

One of the charges that [right wing Latin America operative Otto] Reich levels at Zelaya is that the Honduran president is supposedly involved with bribes paid out by the state-run telecommunications company Hondutel. Zelaya is threatening to file a defamation suit over the accusation.

Reich's charges against Hondutel are hardly happenstance, as he is a former AT&T lobbyist and served as Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) Latin American advisor during the senator's 2008 presidential campaign.

Writing that "AT&T, McCain's second largest donor, also generously funds the International Republican Institute, which has warred with Latin American regimes that have resisted telecommunications privatization," Hallinan perceives the seeds of Zelaya's fate in the fact that he "was known to be a fierce critic of telecommunications privatization."

National Public Radio monitor mytwords (NPR Check, 8/9/09) has observed what he dubs a "Blackwater Blackout" on the publicly funded "alternative" to corporate radio:

On Tuesday, August 4 Jeremy Scahill broke the story about two sworn statements implicating Blackwater (now Xe) founder Erik Prince in the murder of employees or former employees who were cooperating in the federal investigation of Blackwater. He also revealed that sworn statements indicated that Blackwater was organized and run as an anti-Muslim, Christian identity paramilitary force. By any measure this is a major news story. It was picked up by ABC, Boston Herald, CNN, the [London] Times, etc. Of course, Democracy Now! featured Scahill the next day for a substantial interview, and Scahill also was promptly featured on Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC.

But "how about our nation's public radio news" stories?--well, mytwords will give "you a hint: it's less than one...."