As Barack Obama and his pliant media pundits are "talking up the achievements of the six-year occupation," Consortium News' Robert Parry (7/1/09) is writing of the "public celebrations by Iraqis marking the American pullout from Iraq's cities." Parry's look back the last six years' reality clearly recalls how, "relying on false intelligence and laughable legal theories, Bush justified launching what the New York Times may call an 'unnecessary war' but what was in reality a 'war of aggression'"--constituting, Parry reminds us, "what the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II deemed 'the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole'":

While those crimes were underway, major U.S. media outlets avoided stating the obvious because any recognition that Bush waged "a war of aggression" would force other conclusions, such as the need to subject him, his senior advisers and some foreign allies (i.e., Tony Blair) to a war crimes tribunal.

The big news organizations also didn't want to admit their own complicity in this crime, since almost everyone in American journalism who wanted to keep a comfortable seat at the Establishment's table either endorsed the enterprise or kept quiet.

So even today--more than five months after Bush left office--it's still much easier to dismiss what happened as "unnecessary," to cite the pre-war "intelligence failures," and to criticize Bush primarily for his tactical misjudgments in planning an effective occupation--not committing enough troops and not having a detailed enough post-invasion plan.

Parry well knows that "accusing him of criminality is much trickier," since, "after all, in the view of the mainstream news media, war crimes are something that 'rogue states' commit, petty tyrants from Rwanda or Yugoslavia who can then be dragged off to The Hague and put on trial." Alas, "Such humiliations are not for the former 'Leader of the Free World' and his subordinates."

Check out the overriding corporate media reaction to even the most tepid congressional gestures toward accountability for members of the George W. Bush government in FAIR's Action Alert: "CNN Scoffs at White House Critics: Anchor With Bush Ties Dismisses Abuse-of-Power Hearings as 'Stagecraft'" (7/31/08).

Reacting to media noise over the economic costs of the Waxman-Markey environmental bill currently before the U.S. Congress, Dean Baker (ZNet, 7/1/09) looks to the damages of a different annual spending bill, this one perpetually unexamined in corporate news:

Global Insight projected that after 20 years of higher defense spending, annual car sales would be down by more than 700,000. Housing starts would be almost 40,000 lower. Exports would be 1.8 percent lower and imports would be 2.7 percent higher, leading to a trade deficit that was almost $200 billion larger. The model also projected that there would be nearly 700,000 fewer jobs as a result of the higher level of defense spending.

In short, the economic harm projected from high levels of military spending is far larger than the damage projected from the Waxman-Markey bill. Given this situation, we should expect that all the oil and coal industry folks who are now so concerned about the average family's well-being would have been screaming about the economic pain that would result from sustaining the Iraq War levels of military spending.

Did anyone ever hear them raise this issue? Does anyone recall members of Congress giving speeches about how the job loss from the Iraq War levels of spending will be devastating? Does anyone recall any newspaper columns or editorials making this point? How about a news story that analyzed the economic impact of higher levels of military spending?

"For some reason," Baker says, "job loss and economic pain associated with the military are just not worth mentioning. These items only become newsworthy when the issue is saving the environment." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Miriam Pemberton on Military Budget" (4/17/09).

In Dan Froomkin's last column for the Washington Post (6/26/09), he promises to "continue doing accountability journalism"--as good as any self-description to distinguish his work from his typical Post colleague's obsequiousness--and tries "hard to summarize the past five-and-a-half years" in which "George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes":

In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve.... How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

Read of some other journalists worth mentioning in this regard in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Wrong on Iraq? Not Everyone: Four in the Mainstream Media Who Got It Right" (3–4/06) by Steve Rendall.

Activist David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 6/24/09) has some problems with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's and Congressmember Tom Perriello's recent visit "generating a story and big color photo on page 1 of the Charlottesville Daily Progress" under the headline "In UVa Visit, Democrats Call Deficit Reckless":

The newspaper reported on Congressman Perriello warning that he could not vote for healthcare without a way to pay for it. There was no mention of the fact that the previous week, the day before Hoyer introduced his bill to fight deficits, both of these gentlemen had voted to spend another $97 billion on wars and to loan $100 billion to European bankers through the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Nobody in Washington had even hinted at where any of that money would come from, and apparently Hoyer and Perriello didn't care.

The article did include a quote from a Republican blaming Democrats for deficits. But that's doubly bad reporting. Republicans have pushed deficits up far more than Democrats, and just getting a haphazard (and inaccurate) quote from "the other side" misses the relevant context of the war supplemental vote. Here's the patently false quote from Congressman Eric Cantor: "We've amassed more debt over the last five months than this country has amassed in the last 200 years."

Swanson sees another example of this kind of overwhelmingly uncritical coverage in the same day's visit by "two top environmental officials from the White House": "Oddly, there was no particular news to announce at the press conference. Predictably, all the media outlets were there to trumpet the story anyway." Listen to Swanson on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "David Swanson on 'Benchmarks'" (5/18/07).

Blogger Jane Hamsher (FireDogLake.com, 6/19/09) thinks that Salon's "Glenn Greenwald says most of what needs to be said about the Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin," on June 18, but has her own "insight into "the early rounds of this battle" over the left-leaning columnist, having "watched it ferment over the years."

Hamsher explains that Post ombud Debbie Howell's characterization of Froomkin as "highly opinionated and liberal" really "was the consensus of the newsroom, where it was believed--correctly--that Froomkin's writing about the war and U.S. foreign policy were an inherent criticism of the WaPo's own coverage and editorial position":

And so they wanted to make it clear that he was Not One Of Them, nor did he rise to their high standards. Here was [then-executive editor] Len Downie at the time:

"We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column because it contains opinion," Downie told E&P. "And that readers of the Web site understand that, too."

And here's [then-national politics editor] John Harris (now chief of Politico):

They have never complained in a formal way to me, but I have heard from Republicans in informal ways making clear they think his work is tendentious and unfair. I do not have to agree with them in every instance that it is tendentious and unfair for me to be concerned about making clear who Dan is and who he is not regarding his relationship with the newsroom.

But aside from the desire to play access footsie with the White House, Downie and Harris were bristling at Froomkin's critique of--well, them. While they were fawning over Bush, his war and his codpiece, Froomkin was writing about Bob Woodward's "unique relationship" with the White House.

Lamenting how "the arrogant presumption that they were carrying on some sort of noble journalistic tradition that Froomkin violated is just baked into the concrete over there," Hamsher sees that "in the end, the bitter petty people who discredited the entire profession with their coverage of the war and its fallout just did not like the mirror he held up to them."

Norman Solomon uses his most recent Creators Syndicate column (6/19/09) to call for journalism that "is open scrutiny of the dynamics of power. Reporters should shine a bright light on behind-the-scenes maneuvers that block congressional oversight of administration policies":

Last Tuesday, when the House of Representatives approved a supplemental spending bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there must have been celebration at the White House. Days of intense arm-twisting paid off.

The Obama administration had brandished the weapon of retribution against the newest Democratic arrivals in the House. Most news coverage seemed oblivious, but not all. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported just hours before the war-funding measure came to the floor, "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no."

Even though "journalists expect strong-arm tactics to come from the White House and may actually view them as evidence of the effective use of presidential power," Solomon maintains that "huge concentrations of power are hazardous to democracy": "We may shrug and say words to the effect of 'that's the way things are'--but the fact remains that we need journalism to scrutinize 'the way things are.'"

However, Solomon has several examples--from media failure "to scrutinize the Gulf of Tonkin incident" on up to "adulatory news coverage" of "drastically loosened" financial regulation in the '90s--that demonstrate how, "unfortunately, too many journalists behave as though levers pulled by the powerful are not notable enough to be questioned."

Finding the May 21 New York Times article on unconvicted (often even uncharged) former Guantánamo prisoners supposedly "rejoining" terrorist groups "especially troubling" in that "it turns the truth upside-down," Dan Kennedy (UTV, 6/9/09) explains how reporter Elisabeth "Bumiller's story played into the darkest fears promoted by Cheney and his fellow conservatives by making it appear that terrorists captured on the battlefield and sent to Guantánamo would resume their jihadist ways upon being released." In reality, "the far more disturbing truth, borne out by the Pentagon's own figures, is that we are creating terrorists at Guantánamo."

Yet it has to be said that Bumiller herself is something of a recidivist. In a March 2004 presidential debate among the Democratic contenders, Bumiller asked what may have been the dumbest question ever uttered in such a forum: "Really quick, is God on America's side?"

At the time, Bumiller's question seemed like a faint echo of the insanity that had fallen over much of the American media following the terrorist attacks of 9/11--insanity that was practically defined by Bumiller's former colleague Judith Miller, whose credulous reporting on Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties helped set the stage for war and disaster.

Kennedy notes that "this time, at least, it didn't take years for the Times to come to terms with how it had been manipulated"--not that the Times' eventual "mea sorta culpa" for staggeringly deceptive and damaging WMD coverage exactly came to terms with much. See the FAIR Activism Update: "NY Times Ombud Agrees with Activists: Paper Failed to Question Pentagon Propaganda on Gitmo Prisoners" (6/8/09).

Pratap Chatterjee's new TomDispatch essay (5/31/09) explores how Dick Cheney's mercenary corporation Halliburton recently has managed to largely "Stay Out of Sight While Profiting From the War in Iraq" despite what Tom Engelhardt's introduction calls "hatfuls of charges against the company for a laundry list of alleged misdeeds":

There were no protesters outside the [annual Halliburton shareholders] meeting this year, nor the kind of national media stakeouts commonplace when [CEO David] Lesar addressed the same crew at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston in May 2004. Then, dozens of mounted police faced off against 300 protesters in the streets outside, while a San Francisco group that dubbed itself the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane fielded activists in Bush and Cheney masks, offering fake $100 bills to passersby in a mock protest against war profiteering. And don't forget the 25-foot inflatable pig there to mock shareholders. Local TV crews swarmed, a national crew from NBC flew in from New York, and reporters from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal eagerly scribbled notes.

Now the 25-foot pigs are gone and all is quiet on the western front. How did Halliburton, once branded the ugly stepchild of Dick Cheney--the company's former CEO--and a poster child of war profiteering, receive such absolution from anti-war activists and the media?

Naming "a general apathy towards the ongoing but lower-level war in Iraq" as just "part of the answer," Chatterjee urges readers to not, as U.S. media have, "ignore a potentially brilliant financial sleight of hand by Halliburton either. That move played a crucial role in the cleansing of the company." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jason Leopold on Halliburton" (9/3/04).

"Amid all the recent negatives in the worlds of intelligence and journalism," Consortium News' Robert Parry (6/2/09) has spotted "one encouraging development": "the recognition of common ground between two beleaguered groups, honest U.S. intelligence analysts and honest American journalists, two groups that previously had been on opposite sides of the secrecy divide." The strangeness of which is not lost on Parry, who says that "what brought them together, ironically, was that they both were targeted by the same dishonest forces":

Through the 1980s, the neocons spearheaded an assault on the CIA's analytical division by pushing a politicization of intelligence that reversed the tradition of giving policymakers the best possible information. Instead, careerists got rewarded for tailoring intelligence to fit the neocon agenda--and those who wouldn't go along were pushed aside or out the door.

Simultaneously, within the Washington news media, the neocons and allied right-wing attack groups took aim at journalists who dug up unwanted information. Instead of rewards for such work, there were punishments. Many truth-telling reporters were "controversialized," while journalists who played ball moved to the center of the profession.

That last point is on a phenomenon Parry is regrettably quite familiar with--see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "America's Debt to Gary Webb: Punished for Reporting the Truth While Those Who Covered It Up Thrived" (3–4/05) by Robert Parry.

Recapping at TPM Café (5/27/09) how the U.S. "press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans," Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell writes that "a hard-right [George W.] Bush, whether real or media-created, would have never beaten Gore--not that this one did either." Reminding us that "the New York Times, for example, had been very tough on [President Bill] Clinton on its editorial page," Mitchell says that "once in office, a long honeymoon between press and president ensued," and "just as Bush's approval ratings tanked and criticism was about to spread, 9/11 came along to torment the country, but save Bush." Mitchell then brings us into the present with shrewd insight into a hypothetical:

No one in the media criticized Bush for months, let alone suggested that maybe he had let down the country and invited a terrorist attack, or at least failed to prevent it. (Imagine that happening in the future if the country is attacked again under Obama--watch Fox and Friends howl.) Some have suggested that the New York Times, and others long accused of exhibiting liberal bias, went overboard on backing Bush after 9/11, given a rare chance to wave the flag and promote a war (Afghanistan) without shame for once and bolster their flagging image as super-patriots.

Of course, the problem was: They didn't stop there, and most went along like sheep in the run-up to the Iraq War.

"In fact," Mitchell notes, the date of his piece "marks the fifth anniversary of the day the Times belatedly admitted its failures on Iraq (while refusing to name or punish reporters and editors). It wasn't just a failure on WMD, it was a failure to recognize Bush and his crowd for what they were, individually and collectively."

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site's lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was "Tortured in a Chinese Prison." Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer's ordeal--"kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door...handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air"--to be "a major editorial breach" for the paper that so agilely dances around the T-word when reporting on U.S. actions:

So that's torture now?... Using the editorial standards of America's journalistic institutions--as explained recently by the NYT public editor--shouldn't this be called "torture" rather than torture--or "harsh tactics some critics decry as torture"? Why are the much less brutal methods used by the Chinese on Fischer called torture by the NYT, whereas much harsher methods used by Americans do not merit that term? Here we find what is clearly the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: Everything is different, and better, when we do it. In fact, it is that exact mentality that was and continues to be the primary justification for our torture regime and so much else that we do.

Along those same lines, I learned from reading the New York Times this week (via the New Yorker's Amy Davidson) that Iraq is suffering a very serious problem. Tragically, that country is struggling with what the Times calls a "culture of impunity." What this means is that politically connected Iraqis who clearly broke the law are nonetheless not being prosecuted because of their political influence!

Luckily for us, such a scenario could never play out under the press' watchful eye (let alone with its outright endorsement) here in the U.S. where "everything is different, and better."

The current Democracy Now! (5/8/09) features New York Times Pentagon Pundits reporter David Barstow giving Amy Goodman the background on the U.S. military's retraction of a report clearing itself of domestic propaganda wrongdoing:

So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.

And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who's probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors.

In a piece of reality too large for even the Pentagon to deny, the most prominent paper in the U.S. had published Barstow's "5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors" as board-member, consultant and adviser--which much corporate media apparently cared little about, offering as they do, to this day, a platform for propaganda-worker McCaffrey's conflicted views.

Reading Mark Lander's and Elizabeth Bumiller's New York Times "tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: 'President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive,'" Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch, 5/7/09) decides to toss some cold water on "this kind of atmosphere that naturally produces the bureaucratic equivalent of mass hysteria":

Reports indicate that Obama's national security team has been convening regular "crisis" meetings and having "nearly nonstop discussions" at the White House, not to mention issuing alarming and alarmist statements of all sorts about the devolving situation in Pakistan, the dangers to Islamabad, our fears for the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and so on. In fact, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landy of McClatchy news service quote "a senior U.S. intelligence official" (from among the legion of anonymous officials who populate our nation's capital) saying: "The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse, and no one has any idea about how to reverse it. I don't think 'panic' is too strong a word to describe the mood here."...

You know, that offensive in the Lower Dir Valley. That's near the Buner District. You remember, right next to the Swat Valley and, in case you're still not completely keyed in, geographically speaking, close to the Malakand Division. I mean, if the Pakistani government were in crisis over the deteriorating situation in Fargo, North Dakota, we would consider it material for late night jokesters.

Reminding you that "if Pakistan poses a mortal threat to you in New York, Toledo or El Paso," you'll just have to "get in line"--and "it will be a long one and you'll be toward the back"--Engelhardt sees "a certain irony" in that "we essentially know what those crisis meetings will result in. After all, the U.S. government has been embroiled with Pakistan for at least 40 years and for just that long, its top officials have regularly come to the same policy conclusions--to support Pakistani military dictatorships." Even McClatchy reports on how "that, another senior official acknowledged Wednesday, 'means another coup.'"

Eyeing a new poll that "revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the 'faux' news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing 'real' news sources as viable outlets," Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 5/5/09) has to wonder "if the remaining (if relatively low) public respect for the press is gone for good":

Yes, the delivery platform of the future will change--the Kindle, iPhone apps or rubbery plastic may replace paper everywhere--but the content still has to be credible. And now it must be said: The media blew both of the major catastrophes of our time.

I speak, of course, of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown. I wrote a book about the first, calling it So Wrong for So Long. I could write a sequel on the second disaster, and maybe title it So Wrong Again.

Even though "individual reporters at certain papers did some fine watchdog work," Mitchell writes that their efforts were "to no avail" and that "defenders of the press in this matter are cherry-picking the good stuff, much like Bush with his intelligence on Iraqi WMDs."

See Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) By Veronica Cassidy.

With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting--and MSNBC mostly mocking-- the right-wing "tea party" demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn't be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn't just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events.

As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington Post today:

Some Fox News hosts have been pushing the tea party protests slated for hundreds of cities today, almost to the point that they seem to be the ringmasters of the event.  "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!" Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney said the other day.

But there's another side to this saga. Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.

The New York Times has run zero stories. (The only mention was Times columnist Paul Krugman taking a brief swipe at the parties.) The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4. The Chicago Tribune ran a 300-word story and an item on postal workers mistaking tea for a hazardous substance. The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today. The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party, nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday (followed by a piece by me on the coverage). MSNBC's coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the "teabagging" until Chris Matthews held a more serious debate on Monday.

I must say I'm struck by this new standard for coverage of citizen activism--papers should cover small protests, some of which haven't happened? Was this the standard for, say, anti-war protests in 2002 and early 2003?

The pressure to treat these events seriously seems to be having some effect. Moments ago CNN had a long introduction to its live report from the Boston tea party, explaining that the protests have spread across the country, stoked by plain old citizen passion. The correspondent on the scene in Boston then explained that there were perhaps a few dozen attendees on hand. I guess Howard Kurtz will be pleased.