Crooks and Liars blogger Cernig posts (12/15/08) the video of George W. Bush responding to an ABC interviewer's point that Al-Qaeda did not actually "take their stand" in Iraq "until after the U.S. invaded": "Yeah, that's right. So what?" The sad part is that Martha Raddatz's correction of the inverted justification timeline shows what can be considered an extraordinary amount of spine by corporate news standards. Cernig thinks "Raddatz should have thrown out her script at that point and eaten him alive, but she didn't. Yet another failure of the tame media, who are too afraid of losing their precious access to ask the obvious questions even now." Cernig further quotes the London Guardian's Ian Williams finding it

surprising that so many reporters can be polite and deferential with someone who has turned the U.S. Federal Reserve into a giant Ponzi scheme and broken the world's strongest economy. They defer humbly to someone who has contrived the deaths of 4,200 U.S. servicemen and -women in Iraq. It even failed to follow through on questions about the president's murky military record with the Texas Air National Guard while his peers were dying in Vietnam. This intrepid press corps showed no compunction in following in minute detail Clinton's screwing around, but kept silent as Bush screwed entire nations.

Williams reminds us that just "last week, a Senate report pointed the finger directly at Bush and his senior officials for authorizing--indeed, ordering--torture and abuse of detainees. But no one threw any shoes."

Glenn Greenwald has a Salon update (12/15/08, ad-viewing required) on corporate media apathy toward the U.S. Senate report finding George W. Bush and his highest appointees responsible for U.S. detainee "deaths caused by abusive treatment"--many of which "have been formally characterized as 'homicides' by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan":

This report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not his job" to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes....

Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was voyeuristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits--many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals

Greenwald finds "the media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. war crimes," to be "perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks."

See items No. 17-20 in the retrospective published by FAIR's magazine Extra!: "20 Stories That Made a Difference: For Better or Worse" (1-2/06) by Steve Rendall, Peter Hart & Julie Hollar

By now most people have seen the video footage of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. The New York Times helps you put it in perspective:

The shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad punctuated Mr. Bush's visit here--his fourth--in a deeply symbolic way, reflecting the conflicted views in Iraq of a man who toppled Saddam Hussein, ordered the occupation of the country and brought it freedoms unthinkable under Mr. Hussein’s rule but at enormous costs.

From the Times' account, al-Zaidi yelled at Bush, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!" This would not seem at all conflicted, would it?

The Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch has propaganda watchdog Diane Farsetta asking (12/5/08) "when will the cable and network television stations that featured the Pentagon's pundits tell viewers that their war commentary was anything but independent?" Her "prime example" is NBC analyst former general Barry McCaffrey, who shilled Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the Pentagon and news audiences without revealing he was paid by the combat vehicle's supplier.

It's regrettable, but perhaps not surprising, that a military man wouldn't appreciate the need to disclose such conflicts of interest in his media appearances. McCaffrey's response... does not address the issue of disclosure....

However, the reporters at NBC News also failed to understand the importance of disclosure. NBC News president Steve Capus claimed that while McCaffrey is not held to the network's conflict-of-interest rules because of his status as a consultant, he is an "independent voice" whose business interests simply don't impact his commentary. According to emails obtained by Glenn Greenwald, NBC coordinated its response to Barstow's article with McCaffrey. Worse, NBC has yet to report on the Pentagon pundit scandal.

What "further shows the journalistic bankruptcy of war commentary," according to Farsetta, is the fact that "In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, McCaffrey had 'significant doubts' about the size of the U.S. invasion force and the lack of post-invasion planning. Yet, in his appearances on NBC and its cable affiliates, McCaffrey was a cheerleader for the imminent war." Farsetta tells us that even "days before the invasion, McCaffrey told Tom Brokaw that he had no 'real serious' concerns about invading Iraq."

See FAIR's publication Extra! Update: "Network News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits" (6/08) By Isabel Macdonald

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.

Thanks in advance to all the folks who are participating in FAIR's action alert, "Media Still Letting Bush Lie on Iraq Inspectors." Please post any responses you receive from ABC and the Washington Post in the comments section of this blog.

Update: Feel free to post your letters to ABC and the Washington Post here as well.

Well aware that "from the aftermath of the 2003 'shock and awe' bombing campaign all the way through Thanksgiving Day 2008, major U.S. news outlets have nearly uniformly blacked out or downplayed reports of the Iraqi death toll," critic Brad Jacobson notes (MediaBloodhound, 11/30/08)
that "a recent Associated Press article reveals the depths to which these outlets are still willing to delve to censor this information":

In the November 27 article "Iraqi Parliament OKs U.S. Troops for 3 More Years," by Christopher Torchia and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP editors approved the following characterization of Iraqi deaths suffered since the US invasion: "The war has claimed more than 4,200 American lives and killed a far greater, untold number of Iraqis."...

How's that for a statistically rigorous accounting? With the exactitude of a third-grader's book report cribbed from a novel's dust jacket copy, the AP--America's No. 1 wire news service--blankets U.S. news outlets with a quantification of Iraqi casualties that would've made Stalin proud.

While the AP completely giving up on estimating Iraqi deaths at all may appear outrageous to any American with a conscience, Jacobson sees precedent in the fact that

last April, when Opinion Research Business... released its January 2008 follow-up report estimating over 1 million Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion--which both reconfirmed its September 2007 estimate as well as supported prior findings of the 2006 John Hopkins study published in the British medical journal Lancet (650,000 deaths)--a LexisNexis search showed no U.S. mainstream news outlet carried the story.

See FAIR's recent Action Alert: "The Washington Post Undercounts Iraq Deaths: Paper's Feature Low-Balls Iraqi Casualties (10/27/08)

A New York Times headline today about President-elect Barack Obama's nomination of Susan Rice to be U.N. ambassador declared "Obama's Choice for U.N. Is Advocate of Strong Action Against Mass Killings."

Undoubtedly, one of the greatest mass killings of recent years has been the Iraq War, which Just Foreign Policy estimates has killed nearly 1.3 million Iraqis.

So where did Rice stand on that?

As Jeremy Scahill recently pointed out on AlterNet, she

promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. "It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat," she said in 2002. "It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on." (After the invasion, discussing Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs, she said, "I don't think many informed people doubted that.")

As the Times piece notes, she has also been an advocate of military force in Darfur--despite the fact that Medicins Sans Frontieres has warned (2/22/07) that "a nonconsensual military intervention would lead to a collapse of humanitarian activities in Darfur--just as it did in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq . . . and is very unlikely to translate into less violence against civilians."

In an article she penned with Anthony Lake (Washington Post, 10/2/06), she advocated bombing Sudan even outside of the U.N.:

The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy--by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.

If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it.... [Critics] will insist that, without the consent of the United Nations or a relevant regional body, we would be breaking international law. Perhaps, but the Security Council recently codified a new international norm prescribing "the responsibility to protect." It commits U.N. members to decisive action, including enforcement, when peaceful measures fail to halt genocide or crimes against humanity. This genocide has lasted three long years. Peaceful measures have failed. The Sudanese government is poised to launch a second round. The real question is this: Will we use force to save Africans in Darfur as we did to save Europeans in Kosovo?

For more on the media's role in cheering for Obama's choices of Clinton-era centrists for cabinet positions, see FAIR's media advisory (11/26/08). For more on the media's role in distorting the Darfur crisis, see Mahmoud Mamdani's article from the London Review of Books and his interview on CounterSpin (transcript available here), and Julie Hollar's Extra! article, "The Humanitarian Temptation."

The headline (and subhead) in today's print edition:

National Security Team Would Be Diverse Mix
Obama Picks Span Eras; Some Espouse More Centrist Views

And what, exactly, makes for a "diverse mix?" Holding "moderate" views against a troop withdrawal from Iraq, apparently:

Obama's latest picks would give him a foreign policy team with a moderate cast. Both Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden have taken a more cautious approach to withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq than Obama, who wanted it done within 16 months of taking office. Jones, who last year chaired an independent commission appointed by Congress to assess the Iraq situation, called political reconciliation by the religious and ethnic factions in Iraq vital--a view shared by Obama. Jones, however, said a deadline for troop withdrawal would be "against our national interest."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald contrasts (11/26/08, ad-viewing required) Joe Klein in the current Time magazine declaiming George W. Bush's "ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the 'Mission Accomplished' sign" as a "defining moment... of the Bush failure" with Klein's May 4, 2003 Face the Nation response to Bob Schieffer calling the image "one of the great pictures of all time": "Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day." Greenwald goes on to tell exactly why he finds it "simply intolerable to watch those who cheered on many of the worst excesses try now to pretend that they were skeptical, adversarial critics all along":

I'm glad that many people, including some journalists, seem to have learned some lessons from the Bush era now that he's almost certainly the single most unpopular president in modern American history. People who regret their mistakes and learn from them should be welcomed and encouraged. But a vital aspect of what happened over the last eight years is the role the media--our leading media stars--played in glorifying and venerating George Bush, and that can't be re-written or forgotten.

Truly learning from one's mistakes--as opposed to wet-finger-in-the-air abandonment of previously revered leaders when they are revealed as failures and lose their power--requires, at the very least, an acknowledgment of one's own role in what happened. There have been very few mea culpas from establishment media journalists, many--most--of whom, to this day, think they did nothing wrong ("It was all Judy Miller!").

Greenwald's premise is simple enough: "Journalists with influential platforms have responsibilities, the primary one of which is to be accountable for what they say and do."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Mitchell on NY Times' Mea Culpa"(5/28/04)