Michael Moore says he won't appear on Glenn Beck's or Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show to promote his new film Capitalism: A Love Story because there's too much hate speech on those shows. Last night, O'Reilly strengthened Moore's argument in a segment in which he discussed Michael Moore's body language with regular guest Tonya Reimer:

O'REILLY: Right. Would it be wrong if I slapped him?

REIMAN: We'll have to let him judge that.

O'REILLY: You just want....

REIMAN: Not a big fan, are we?

O'REILLY: You know, it's an interesting question. I admire his entrepreneurship. I admire his creativity. But there's just something about him, you know.

Add to this that Glenn Beck once fantasized about killing Moore with his bare hands (not to mention seeing Dennis Kucinich burned alive), and you have a network whose two leading hosts have expressed a desire to physically attack Moore for expressing beliefs with which they disapprove.

Naturally, O'Reilly whined during the same segment that Moore refused to appear on his show:  "I might remind everybody Michael Moore would not come on the program. Even though he's got a dopey belief to publicize, he's too afraid." Maybe with good reason.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes today of Iran's nuclear program:

They then turned themselves in to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and, as usual, said the site was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. These Persians lie like a rug.

Classy.

The fact that this appears in a column chastising Barack Obama for not being serious enough only makes it worse ("Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States."). But it's worth remembering that Cohen also wrote that "only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman" would have argued with Colin Powell's 2003 UN presentation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The Times has a report about their new poll on today's front page.  As Adam Nagourney and Dalia Sussman put it in their lead, Obama "is confronting declining support for his handling of the war in Afghanistan and an electorate confused and anxious about a healthcare overhaul." While that's true, the most interesting part of the poll isn't reported until near the end of the story, where we find this:

On one of the most contentious issues in the health care debate--whether to establish a government-run health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurers--nearly two-thirds of the country continues to favor the proposal, which is backed by Mr. Obama but has drawn intense fire from most Republicans and some moderate Democrats.

Indeed, what the Times asked was whether people supported "the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare."  That would be more ambitious than even some of the "public option" proposals discussed in Congress, which would not necessarily be available to "everyone." In other words, the public--in the face of a hostile and/or dismissive media system--prefers a substantially more progressive health care plan than anything being discussed in the Beltway or in the corporate media. In fact, they seem to support something resembling the "Medicare for all" concept that was trashed in the Sunday New York Times.  You might find that newsworthy...but not if you're the New York Times.

David Ignatius starts off his Washington Post column today ("A New Deal for the CIA," 9/17/09) with a story about Jeannie de Clarens, a 90-year-old Frenchwoman who infiltrated the Nazi army, discovered information about German rockets that "saved London," was captured by the Gestapo and survived a year in a concentration camp without betraying her secrets.

De Clarens sounds like a real hero with a great story. But the moral Ignatius draws from it is not so great: "When we read about waterboarding and other techniques that shock the conscience, it's easy to lose sight of what intelligence agents like my friend Jeannie do most of the time--and their importance in protecting the country."

Somehow I suspect, contrary to Ignatius, that CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work like de Clarens.  In any case, we admire someone like her because she stood up to a ruthless force that used torture routinely; to suggest that her example should make us pay less attention to torturers working for our own government is rather perverse.

Ignatius goes on to endorse the proposal of David Omand, former coordinator of British intelligence, for a "paradigm shift"--replacing the old system "in which  intelligence agencies could do pretty much as they liked" with a new system where "the public gives the intelligence agencies certain powers needed to keep the country safe." Well, the latter certainly sounds preferable to the former--but as far as the public is concerned, we've always been living under the second system, passing laws through our elected representatives that limited the powers of intelligence agencies. If the agencies decided to act as though they lived under the other system, that's called "breaking the law."

But for Ignatius, expecting that intelligence agencies will follow the law is a new, rather radical idea, and it will require concessions on the part of the citizenry:

In this new "grand bargain," Omand stressed, the public must understand that if it decides--for moral and political reasons--to limit certain activities (as in interrogation or surveillance techniques), it also accepts the risk that there will be "normal accidents."

Ignatius really ought to understand that the U.S. public made that decision a long time ago--back in 1791, when it ratified the Bill of Rights.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (9/14/09) writes of the Van Jones controversy, in which Fox News' Glenn Beck took credit for the resignation of a White House staffer:

In the Jones case, there is little question that the traditional media botched the story of an Obama administration official who, wittingly or otherwise, lent his name to those who believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deliberately allowed thousands of Americans to be slaughtered. Some conservatives accused journalists of liberal bias; it is just as likely that their radar malfunctioned, or that they collectively dismissed Beck as a rabble-rouser.

Kurtz presented his evidence:

By the time White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned over Labor Day weekend, the New York Times had not run a single story. Neither had USA Today, which also didn't cover the resignation. The Washington Post had done one piece, on the day before he quit. The Los Angeles Times had carried a short article the previous week questioning Glenn Beck's assault on the White House aide. There had been nothing on the network newscasts.

Kurtz's piece concluded: "The followup news pieces focused on the administration's failure to vet Jones' background. Perhaps the media bloodhounds should be just as curious why they failed to sniff out a story that ended with a White House resignation."

Well, if that's the question they're going to be asking themselves, they'll have to start by figuring out why they paid so little attention to Philip Cooney. Who, you might well ask?  In the Bush II administration, Cooney was chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality, the same rather obscure White House office to which Jones was a special adviser; in other words, he was a higher-ranking official than Jones. Cooney, a former oil industry advocate, resigned in 2005 after a New York Times expose (6/8/05) charged him with editing climate-change reports to make them more industry-friendly. That is, he was accused of actual malfeasance in office, on a matter of global consequence, rather than of holding objectionable opinions unrelated to his job. Cooney almost immediately got a job with ExxonMobil, giving the story a newsworthy whiff of corruption.

The New York Times, which broke the story, ran a total of five news stories on it and four editorials.  The Washington Post had one editorial (6/11/05) that mentioned Cooney in passing before his resignation, and one news story (6/15/05) on his new oil industry job, along with three opinion pieces that referenced the controversy; Cooney's name also came up in a news story (8/5/05) about Exxon Mobil more than a month later.  USA Today (6/15/05) mentioned him in an editorial after the resignation, but had no news coverage. The L.A. Times had a news brief (6/15/05) after the resignation, and later dropped Cooney's name in an editorial (6/19/05) and an op-ed (6/24/05).

CBS TV didn't mention Cooney in all of 2005, according to Nexis transcripts; nor did ABC.  NBC Nightly News (6/8/05, 6/11/05) ran two pieces on the subject, and Tim Russert (6/19/05) brought him up in an interview with John McCain. ("I'm shocked," was McCain's response.) CNN mentioned the Bush official three times, while he came up once on MSNBC's Countdown (6/16/05). Cooney doesn't come up at all in Fox News' Nexis transcripts, an omission that leaves me feeling as shocked as John McCain.

Note that almost all of what little coverage there was appeared after Cooney resigned--so evidently these outlets did not find documented evidence that a Bush administration official was altering scientific documents to benefit his corporate pals to be newsworthy in itself. Yet conspicuously absent from the Cooney story was any complaining by Howard Kurtz about the paucity of coverage.

A curious mention in the Politico today:

One of the summer's surprises has been the degree to which angry "town halls" filled with opponents of healthcare reform has driven the political narrative-- no matter that Democrats own both the White House and Congress, no matter that many news organizations were slow to reckon with the consequences of a movement gathering power far from the traditional corridors of power.

Whatever your impression of those town hall events, it's hard to conclude that the media were "slow to reckon" with them. They were blasted all over television, after all.

When Tom Rosensteil of the Project for Excellence in Journalism appeared on the PBS NewsHour on August 31 to talk about the press and health policy, he noted that his group's studies found that  "the protests have gotten more coverage, actually, than description of the healthcare plans, or -- and twice as much coverage as the stories about the state of the healthcare system." He later elaborated:

What, really, I think, surprises me in the coverage is how little coverage there is of how our healthcare system works, what's wrong with what -- what's wrong with it, and what the alternatives could be, based on other countries, other systems, alternative programs in the United States.

That represents only 8 percent of all the coverage that we have seen this year, vs. 55 percent about the political horse races and battles over this, and another 16 percent of the coverage on the protests.

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.

The Washington Post had another "Topic A" feature on August 31, headlined "Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?" A crucial debate, to be sure; the Post found one person (Andrew Bacevich) to argue that it is not, which is probably a position close to the majority view of the American public. That position is "balanced" by four contributors who argue the war is worth fighting, in different ways or for different reasons. This imbalance echoes the Post's previous presentation of the Afghanistan debate, showing once again that the paper seems to believe that a public that increasingly sees the war as a lost cause needs to be talked out of that position.

It's worth noting that conservative Post columnist George Will has written today against escalating the war (9/1/09)-- under the headline "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." While Will calls the idea of a long occupation with increased troop levels "inconceivable," it's worth noting what he's actually for:

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

More bombing, drones and cruise missiles. That's the Post's peacenik.

The Washington Post gathered several contributors for an August 30 "Topic A" feature headlined, "How Can President Obama Regain His Political Footing?"

The list of contributors, though, leaned well to the right. There were six high-profile Republicans and/or conservatives: Newt Gingrich, Christine Todd Whitman, Dan Schnur, Ed Rogers and Ed Gillespie.  There were three Democrats: former Mondale staffer Michael Berman, Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile and Harold Ford of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Two others--a pollster and a Harvard professor--were also included, neither of whom offered a discernible  ideological viewpoint.

At a time when many progressives are expressing disappointment at Obama's policies so far, it's striking that the Post wouldn't give space to that point of view, especially in a debate about how Obama can reverse his political fortunes. Perhaps that's because the idea that Obama should move to the left is considered unthinkable in elite media, where progressives exist mainly as an example of the kinds of folks Democratic politicians should avoid.

In the wake of growing public dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan, FAIR is challenging the Sunday morning shows to include war critics and peace advocates as guests on their programs. Click here to read FAIR's action alert about these shows' complicity in government officials' efforts to reverse the trend of declining public support for the war; then add your voice to our call for a real debate on Afghanistan by writing to the Sunday morning talkshows. (Email contacts are provided in the alert.)

You can share your letters by pasting them in the comments section below.

In his Week in Review piece wondering if Obama's Afghanistan policy is akin to LBJ and Vietnam, New York Times reporter Peter Baker notes that the public mood is seeping into the media:

That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the Afghan war and newspapers are filled with more columns questioning America’s involvement.

Newspapers are filled with what now? It doesn't feel that way to me, but surely Baker must have some evidence. Which he does:

The cover of the latest Economist is headlined "Afghanistan: The Growing Threat of Failure."

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration official turned critic, wrote in the New York Times last week that what he once considered a war of necessity has become a war of choice. While he still supports it, he argued that there are now alternatives to a large-scale troop presence, like drone attacks on suspected terrorists, more development aid and expanded training of Afghan police and soldiers.

A British magazine and a Times op-ed from someone who supports the war? That's not exactly what I was expecting when I was told newspapers were "filled" with dissenting views.

As if journalists "embedding" with U.S. troops isn't troubling enough, Stars and Stripes is reporting that reporters looking to embed with U.S. troops in Afghanistan will face some troubling screening:

As more journalists seek permission to accompany U.S. forces engaged in escalating military operations in Afghanistan, many of them could be screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light.

U.S. public affairs officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to Stars and Stripes that any reporter seeking to embed with U.S. forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress. That opposition group, reportedly funded by the CIA, furnished much of the false information about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.

We're told that the review is not designed to exclude reporters who might be too critical, though in practice that is how it's been used:

U.S. Army officials in Iraq engaged in a similar vetting practice two months ago, when they barred a Stars and Stripes reporter from embedding with a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division because the reporter "refused to highlight" good news that military commanders wanted to emphasize.

Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill (The Nation, Democracy Now!) appeared on HBO's Real Time With Bill  Maher alongside NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.  Because Jeremy isn't the type to let such an opportunity to go to waste, he used some of his time to castigate the corporate media for failing to question the White House about the reliance on private contracting firms like Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he also brought up Todd's opinion that investigating Bush-era abuses would be a distraction.

Scahill shared with Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald what happened off camera:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me, "That was a cheap shot." I said, "What are you talking about?" and he said, "You know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "That's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

You can see part of their exchange on the show here. If Scahill repeating what Todd said is "sullying" his reputation, then didn't Todd really sully himself?

Eighteen-year-old Caster Semenya, a runner from South Africa, just blew away the competition in the women's 800-meter world championship race. But the news reports yesterday weren't about that--they were about whether she's "really" a woman or not. And supposedly serious outlets like the AP and CNN are sinking to tabloid levels of coverage on the issue.

The AP video of the controversy, posted on the L.A. Times website, kicks off: "Quick! Man--or woman?" The piece includes slow pans over Semenya's body, more tabloidy commentary ("She--and yes, SHE claims to be a woman"), and the offering of her voice as some sort of evidence that she's not what she claims to be. It's what you'd sadly expect to find on E! or some other tabloid show--not the AP, or the L.A. Times' website, for that matter.

CNN's Jack Cafferty's response to the news was: "Story creeps me out. It's weird. Do you think she's a man or a woman?" His colleague Campbell Brown teased the "bizarre story" and promised viewers "a whole lot more on this very strange case coming up a little bit later tonight." CNN's Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill called it "fascinating," "amazing" and "wild."

During her full story on the subject, Brown acknowledged one of the problems with the scrutiny: "I mean, this is a young woman, a young girl. It's a pretty cruel thing for this girl to have to go through emotionally, psychologically presuming it's not a scam." Yes indeed, scrutinizing someone's body and gender presentation (as well as your accomplishments) on television and calling it bizarre and creepy is pretty cruel, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, that sort of coverage of people with different gender presentations is not unusual--and awareness of that cruelty didn't stop Brown from feeding into it.

Back in May, CBS' 60 Minutes aired a terrible report on the Air Force's use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan-- see FAIR's action alert for all the details. CBS never responded to the criticism, but they did re-air the segment this past Sunday, without any major changes. To let CBS know how you feel about this one-sided reporting, here's the contact info:

CONTACT:
CBS
60 Minutes
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

Email: 60m@cbsnews.com
Phone: (212) 975-3247