Women In Media & News has reposted Veronica Arreola's (8/15/09) elucidation of exactly "why women need to be at the freaking table, in the newsroom and holding the editor’s red pen." To her, "it's just as simple as women see things differently. Not better, not worse, just differently":

The latest example is the WaPo "Mouthpiece Theater" fiasco that ended with WaPo pulling the plug. Two men thought that calling the secretary of State a "bitch" was funny. Not only was it not funny, and not because the joke flopped, but it's old and tired. Seriously, guys, can’t you come up with something new? So some of us angry feminists wrote a letter demanding an apology. And gosh darn it, it freaking worked! OK, we didn't get two full apologies, but hey, no more crappy videos from WaPo…for now....

Of course, we can't be sure that if a random woman at WaPo had screened the video beforehand, [she] would have said, "Dude…we can't air that." Why? Because some women, I used to be one of them, know that there is power in being "one of the guys." You are constantly proving that you need to be where you are and you choose your battles. Is sticking up for Hillary Clinton worth it? Maybe? Maybe not.

"But," Arreola maintains, "women have different perspectives on things. We know that. And as I said before, it's different, not better, not worse."

Media Matters research director Jeremy Schulman (8/12/09) writes that "Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs have used their radio and television shows to incite hatred and push wild conspiracy theories, leading several of Beck's advertisers to reportedly pull out of his broadcasts"--one of the hazards inherent in for-profit media.

But "many advertisers have nonetheless sponsored these hosts' hate speech in recent weeks, including major corporations and organizations that, in 2006, reportedly requested that ABC Radio Networks not air their advertisements during any Air America programs":

At the time,

ABC subsequently provided a statement to Media Matters, which read: "It is not uncommon for advertisers and/or agencies to request that their ads run or not run in specific programming environments or dayparts. ABC Radio Networks does not solicit nor encourage these requests from advertisers. If a request is made by an advertiser and /or agency we make our best effort to comply."...

The New York Times reported at the time that "the advertisers' avoidance of Air America's liberal programming seems pointed when contrasted with the commercial success of right-wing talk radio programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity." [New York Times, 11/6/06]

Indeed, Schulman tells us how, "despite their appearance on ABC's Air America 'blackout' list in 2006, a number of those same advertisers have recently run ads during broadcasts of one or more of the following: Limbaugh's radio show, Beck's Fox News show, Beck's radio show, Dobbs' CNN show and Dobbs' radio show." He then provides for your perusal a handy list of said advertisers, including--no surprise--General Electric.

News Corpse blogger Mark Howard (8/10/09) calls the fact that "industry sources are reporting that Don Imus is in talks with the Fox Business Network to simulcast his Imus in the Morning radio program" a "de facto admission by FBN that they have failed to attract an audience capable of sustaining the network."

Howard sees further evidence of the network's struggles in that "they are approaching their second anniversary and still do not permit Nielsen to publish their ratings." And their rumored acquisition bodes ill for whatever credibility may remain:

Acquiring Imus would be a desperation play for eyeballs. While Imus suffered a devastating blow as a result of his "nappy-headed hos" remarks, losing his top-rated radio program and the MSNBC simulcast, he still has a smaller but significant fan base. However, for a business network to hand over the prime morning hours as the stock market opens to a shock jock with no business credibility tells you that they no longer consider business news their mission. They are grasping for any viewers they can round up.

"Remember," Howard urges, "this is the network that interviewed New York's Naked Cowboy on their first day of broadcasting. They haven’t come very far since then, have they?"

In a wide-ranging ZNet interview on both the history and future of U.S. media, Robert McChesney (8/11/09) gets to the kernel of reform activism:

The media is one of the key areas in society where power is exercised, reinforced and contested. It is hard to imagine a successful left political project that does not have a media platform. The media was not a major political issue for earlier generations of the left. In the 19th century, a very different media system was in place. 19th century socialists wouldn't be talking much about the need to criticize the New York Herald Tribune because they weren't organizing people who read the New York Herald Tribune. It was much easier and more common for the left to have its own media. The workers had worker papers. They weren't consuming mass-produced commercial media products. But this started changing in the first half of the 20th century. Capital accumulation colonized much more of popular culture and communications. Capitalism became the dominant mode of producing and distributing information in society. The media has since become central to politics; it is a central concern for anyone that wants to understand politics and intervene politically.

Which leaves all concerned with a serious "challenge": "to understand, use and struggle to change the existing media." Listen to some ideas on how to meet that challenge on the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

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."

Glenn Greenwald has responded via his regular Salon feature (8/6/09, ad-viewing required) to Rush Limbaugh, "speaking to his audience of 15 million, compar[ing] Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler and Nancy Pelosi to Nazi leaders," by asking you to instead

compare (a) the way that a single anonymous person's comparison of Bush and Hitler swamped our political discourse and forever altered the image of MoveOn with (b) what the (non)-reaction will be to the identical comparison coming from the leader of the Republican Party who spouts his hate-mongering to an audience of 15 million people. Within that comparison one finds many central truths about how our political debates and media discussions function.

Looking beyond how corporate media pilloried Democratic activist group MoveOn over user-submitted (and never-published) video, Greenwald gives a maddeningly extensive history of corporate media compliance with right-wingers' Nazi smears, and simultaneous reprobation of even spurious such instances from the left.

See the FAIR Action Alert: "When Are Nazi Comparisons Deplorable?: For Fox News, Only When Republicans Are the Target" (1/16/04).

Reporting for Associated Press (7/3/09), David Bauder has an update on CNN's insistence on "standing behind" Lou Dobbs, who has "become a publicity nightmare for CNN, embarrassed his boss and...on top of all that, his ratings are slipping."

Bauder asks outright: "How does Lou Dobbs keep his job" while plugging the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama "wasn't born in the United States despite convincing evidence to the contrary"?

Dobbs' work has been so unpopular that even Ann Coulter has criticized him.

Dobbs has acknowledged that he believes Obama was born in Hawaii. But he gives airtime to disbelievers, and has said the president should try to put questions fully to rest by releasing a long version of his birth certificate. He's twice done stories on his show after the public leak of a memo from CNN U.S. president Jon Klein saying that "it seems this story is dead."

To be clear, "Klein said those stories were OK because they were about the controversy and weren't actually questioning the facts."

But Bauder reports that "critics suggest Klein is parsing words, that even raising the issue lends it credence"--such criticism even coming from "the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes: It 'explains their upcoming documentary: "The World: Flat. We Report—You Decide."'"

Quipping that "usually newspapers are big defenders of free speech, but not the Washington Post," economic reporting critic Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/2/09) takes down the paper's recent piece giving over "nearly 2,000 words to complain that a website had ripped off" one reporter's story.

Careful to say that "the problem was not that the website had plagiarized the piece"--indeed, the "story was credited and even linked to by the website, which was a major source of readers for the original article"--Baker tells us that the Post "is upset that the website may have made money off his work, because it sells ads based on viewership."

The Post "wants 'news organizations' to have the right to sue others that use their work without permission and profit from it"--even though, as Baker writes, "if people opt to read the piece on another website rather than the Post, then there must be some reason. Obviously they prefer something about this alternative venue":

If the protectionist measure advocated in this piece succeeded in shutting down the competition, then there would be a clear loss to readers. This loss would likely dwarf the loss to consumers that the Post routinely whines about so loudly when anyone suggests a tariff on imports or any other barrier to trade. After all, those forms of protection rarely add more than 10–15 percent to the price of a product. In this case, the Post's proposal may make the product unavailable altogether. Yet again, we see that protectionism is just fine with "free traders." The only issue is who is being protected.

Finally, let's consider what the enforcement of the Post's measure looks like. First, who is a "news organization?" Is this a title that one registers for with the government? Does the Post get the title but not its website competitors? I suppose those big bucks dinners with lobbyists and policymakers really are worth something.

As a practical matter, it would be an incredible affront to the First Amendment if the Post and other major newspapers and established news outlets were given any special ability to sue under such an act, compared to websites, or for that matter think tanks.

Going with his usual inclination to "think this one through for a moment," Baker finds the whole argument somewhat moot, considering how the paper's reporter "does not even know that he was harmed by the website piece." In fact, "it is entirely possible that more people viewed his piece on the Post's site as a result of the version appearing on the website."

Read lots of related content in the special Future of Journalism issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Did Google Kill the Newspaper Star?" (7/09) by Peter Hart.

Free Press's newest release (7/31/09) touts some fresh congressional legislation that "Would Protect Net Neutrality Once and for All." According to the media reform activists, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 "would protect Network Neutrality under the Communications Act, safeguarding the future of the open Internet and protecting Internet users from discrimination online."

Policy director Ben Scott explains how

the future of the Internet as we know it depends on maintaining freedom and openness online. This crucial legislation will help to ensure that the public--not big phone and cable companies--controls the fate of the Internet.

The rules that govern the Internet must protect economic innovation, democratic participation and free speech online. If we don't make Net Neutrality the law once and for all, we could see the innovation and promise of the Internet derailed forever.

While warning that "an army of lobbyists has been unleashed by the phone and cable companies to kill Net Neutrality so they can become the Internet's gatekeepers," Scott maintains that "the momentum is shifting in the public's favor," with "popular support...growing every day"--as evidenced by the fact that "millions have already called on our lawmakers to take action."

Having recently "published a report on 1,200 photos of U.S. torture that I have examined but the public at large has not seen," activist David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 7/21/09) now relates how he

talked about the photos on a few progressive radio shows. I received calls from some advocacy groups that have been trying for years to get hold of these photos. But I received not one single inquiry from the corporate media. Even most good blogs ignored this story, despite a handful of prominent blogs promoting it. This started me thinking and fantasizing: What would the world look like if we had major media outlets that were worth more than a warm bucket of spit?

Imagine if the media monopolies were busted, a diversity of private outlets were free to compete, and public media were developed, including free substantive air time for election campaigns. Imagine media outlets with democratic accountability. Imagine media outlets that judged a story important if the majority of the public said so, and not if those in power said so.

The majority of the public favors single-payer healthcare. Corporate media outlets are crammed with endless, often pointless, stories about healthcare that never mention single-payer.

"Our existing media outlets (whose lead blogs follow more than bloggers admit to themselves) decide what's important based on the preferences of a small number of powerful people," says Swanson--"and the fact that these preferences almost always differ wildly from majority opinion does not lead to any rethinking of the acceptability of this approach in a democratic republic."

For further imaginings on the potential of a non-corporate U.S. press, read the latest issue of the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Future of Journalism" (7/09)

Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher (7/21/09) is reporting that newspaper union representatives claim a victory of sorts in the Boston Newspaper Guild's refusal to accept a deal that "called for smaller benefit cuts and a furlough, but a higher 8.3 percent salary reduction." The Boston Globe eventually agreed instead to "a 5.94 percent salary cut, a one-week furlough, a pension freeze and healthcare cost increase."

Strupp quotes Guild president Bernie Lunzer saying the result "does demonstrate that there is strength in bargaining," that "people can push back" and they "are correct now to question what management is doing, to pursue more control over their futures":

Boston is among the few guild locals in the past year to reject contracts that called for concessions. In many cases, from the Denver Post to the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, guild members have approved furloughs, pay cuts and various benefit reductions when management asked....

"People will take concessions and take less when they believe it is being done fairly," says Lunzer. "There is not a [guild contract] situation out there that isn't a difficult one."

But Boston was somewhat different in that the guild rejected an initial offer even amid threats of a shutdown and sale of the paper, a sale that appears inevitable. In recent weeks, guild locals at the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., and the Indianapolis Star have also rejected contract proposals. But leaders in both of those units believe new contracts will be approved.

On the subject of negotiations "being done fairly," Lunzer goes into details when describing how the "New York Times Company, which owns the Globe, used the controversial lifetime job guarantees of some 170 guild members as an unfair issue in the recent bargaining." While "the guild agreed to give up that protection in this latest agreement," Lunzer asserts that "the issue was exploited by New York Times management... to cause divisiveness."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: Jonathan Tasini on the Boston Globe/GM (6/12/09).

Toxic Avenger creator Lloyd Kaufmann has a new McClatchy column (7/16/09) "speaking out on behalf of the little guy--or, in the case of independent film and TV producers, the belittled guy," who generally is still "at the mercy of a handful of vertically integrated network-studio conglomerates, powerful giants that exercise control over the entertainment and media businesses."

Kaufmann says "the fact is that independents have produced the largest number of motion picture industry jobs," creating, between 2004–07, "more than 198,000 full-time motion picture jobs annually, accounting for 55 percent of all of those available in the industry":

Overall, independents were responsible for generating in excess of $14 billion per year in wages, which contributed nearly $2.7 billion to U.S. and state tax coffers.

Before the government repealed the Financial Interest & Syndication Rules in 1993, which had reasonably limited the amount of content broadcast networks could own, many independents might have been able to financially survive these tough economic times--preserving all of the jobs and tax revenues they have created.

Back then, we independents could generate substantial license fees selling series and TV movies to ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC.

"Sadly, however," Kaufmann writes, "we've seen programming from independent sources plummet from 50 percent of the networks' prime-time schedules in 1989 to 18 percent in 2006, while network-owned content soared from 15 to more than 75 percent."

I give Peter Osnos credit for not being as nutty as Richard Posner or as self-pitying as Dana Milbank; his piece from CJR on "What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?" (7-8/09) is the most reasonable version I've seen of the news industry's case against the search engine company. Still, I can't help but think that he's missing the point in a fundamental way.

One of Osnos' key examples of the unfairness of Google involves Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com, and a story it ran (2/7/09) on pitcher Alex Rodriguez testing positive for steroids. Osnos relates SI.com's grievance: Though it broke the story, other websites got as much or more traffic from it:

Most galling was that the Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.

From a journalist's perspective, this is patently unfair: SI.com got the scoop, and ought to get the reward. But is that the right perspective to look at what Google does?  Journalists are not, after all, in the business of creating information; they're in the business of conveying information.  Sports Illustrated's reporters did not create Rodriguez's failing steroid test results; Major League Baseball did that. People with access to the test information passed it on to SI, and SI put it up on the Web.

But that's not where the process of information transmission stops. People can't check every website that might break a news story of interest to them every day, so they rely on news gathering institutions to bring information together for them--that's what newspapers do, that's what AP does, and, yes, that's what Huffington Post does too.

Osnos attributes the Google results to the fact that "Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines." And it may well be that the folks at HuffPo are better at that stuff than SI is--though you'd think with the $84 billion entity of Time Warner behind them, the sports mag could afford to figure it out.

More important for HuffPo's search results, however, is the fact that people who use the Web have gotten used to looking for breaking news there, and so when they link to a story they find interesting they link to it there. Google's methodology, looking for links as a surrogate for how people use the Web, finds more of them going to Huffington Post than to SI.com--and that's why HuffPo came out on top.

Osnos says that "human help" needs to be incorporated into Google's algorithm--given that the search engine last year announced that it had indexed more than 1 trillion urls, this suggestion would seem to be rather impractical. But it's not clear that the human-free algorithm is making the wrong choice by directing Web surfers to the sites people most often go to when looking for information.

Arianna Huffington's latest column (Huffington Post, 7/13/09) presents a compelling portrayal of the power of new democratic media--versus the self-preserving corporate model of news gathering--in the Chinese government response to major riots last week: "It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest." But here's the rub: "At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area":

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media--and offered traditional reporters a front-row seat.

China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bussed-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.

The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.

As Huffington reminds us, "the truth is, you don't have to 'be there' to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."

Driving home the point that "the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing," Huffington then excerpts one of the most damaging journalistic examples of this in our time:

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the New York Times in April 2003.

Viewing "two excellent pieces by the American News Project about the Fed's astonishing actions during the current meltdown," A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz (7/12/09) confirms that "ANP does great work, and I commend them for taking on this subject—especially since it's covered nowhere else, including on progressive blurms." But he's nonetheless reminded of a June 29 TruthDig piece in which war reporter Chris Hedges tells why "The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free":

The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone...make little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis, we must also communicate in new forms... This style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion and passion...will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda....

We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased.

Despite their great efforts, Schwarz feels ANP still are "suffering from exactly the problem Hedges describes. To start with, what is the Fed? How does it work? Perhaps 900 people total in the U.S. could tell you. So for everyone else it's automatically like gossip about strangers--i.e., extremely boring."