When the International Atomic Energy Agency is about to release a report on an official enemy like Iran, you can be fairly confident that contents of the report--or what people believe should be in it--will be leaked to elite newspapers by anonymous sources in or near the IAEA, who will tend to make more alarming charges than the agency will eventually make in public.

That started happening this weekend. At the Washington Post, Joby Warrick had a piece on Monday headlined, "Iran Close to Nuclear Capability, IAEA Says." The most telling indication of what was going on was right in the lead:

Intelligence provided to UN nuclear officials shows that Iran's government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles, according to Western diplomats and nuclear experts briefed on the findings.

Read that closely and you can see that the key allegation is not that the IAEA will necessarily report any such thing, but that "intelligence" has been directed their way that makes such allegations. The United States and other countries have been lobbying the IAEA for years to take a harder line on Iran's nuclear program--a fact that renders the New York Times' headline, "U.S. Hangs Back as Inspectors Prepare Report on Iran’s Nuclear Program," rather odd. The Times, a bit like the Post, reports--via the usual leaks--that the IAEA will come down fairly hard:

An imminent report by United Nations weapons inspectors includes the strongest evidence yet that Iran has worked in recent years on a kind of sophisticated explosives technology that is primarily used to trigger a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials who have been briefed on the intelligence.

That's what the big papers are saying--but there are some good, critical pieces worth reading in order to get a good handle on this story.  Bob Dreyfuss at the Nation writes that the Iraq lesson should be foremost in people's minds:

In this case, the Post reports, the IAEA has "acquired satellite photos of a bus-size steel container" used to field test "the kinds of high-precision conventional explosives used to trigger a nuclear chain-reaction." The IAEA may be right, but those photographs ought to raise hackles among experts who were burned once, and badly, over Iraq's nonexistent WMD program.

Dreyfuss adds that much of the case seems built around a "former Soviet nuclear scientist" allegedly advising Iran--but that the advice seems to have been happening in the mid-1990s. And this Moon of Alabama blog makes the case that the scientist in question is an expert on nanodiamonds and detonation--which would require the kinds of facilities that are allegedly being flagged as nuclear weapons-related.

And on a more journalistic level, see how Antiwar.com writes about anonymous sources:

According to Western diplomats who refused to reveal their identity, the evidence will include satellite images of what of is supposedly a large steel container used for high-explosives tests related to nuclear arms as well as intelligence that Iran made computer models of a nuclear warhead.

FAIR raised the point two years ago that Iran nuclear claims can look a lot like Iraq WMD claims-- and the media should exercise the skepticism that was missing in 2002 and 2003. It's hard to say they've learned the lesson.

On his Friday night show, Bill O'Reilly took his viewers to a magical place--one where the right-wing Koch brothers have no connection to the Tea Party movement, while Occupy Wall Street is a secret project directed and financed by the likes of Moveon.org, SEIU and  George Soros.

At the top of his broadcast, O'Reilly wondered if we are now in "phase two of the campaign to undermine America"--this would apparently be the phase where activists protest against police brutality, with an assist from "the radical MoveOn organization, which is funding some of the occupiers."

As he explained his conspiracy theory:

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is not a spontaneous protest against economic inequality. It is a well-thought-out campaign to bring down the infrastructure of this country, to turn us into a Western European-type entitlement state.

That's what George Soros, MoveOn, the SEIU and many far-left journalists want. And they are using the protests to that end.

Moments later, O'Reilly was "interviewing" Fox News contributor Leslie Marshall, who mentioned the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers. That left O'Reilly visibly upset:

O'REILLY: OK, well, you can believe anything you want, you're an American, but you made a statement that the Koch brothers were tied into the Tea Party financially. Can you prove that?

MARSHALL: Well, the Koch Brothers (INAUDIBLE) such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

O'REILLY: Can you prove it. Wait. Wait, wait, wait, Leslie.

MARSHALL: Yes.

O'REILLY: Leslie, you're a Fox News contributor. You have a responsibility. Can you prove the Koch brothers are tied into the Tea Party financially? Can you?

MARSHALL: With a check in hand, no.

O'REILLY: OK. Thank you.

While it's certainly the responsibility of a guest to be able to document such facts, it's rather unlikely that O'Reilly would have accepted any such facts anyway.

Do the Koch brothers have anything to do with the Tea Party? Well, yes. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation was founded by Charles Koch, and has served to train Tea Party activists. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker (8/30/10):

Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement's inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a website offering supporters "Tea Party Talking Points." The Arizona branch urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged members to sign up for "Taxpayer Tea Party Registration" and provided directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion. The North Carolina branch recently launched a "Tea Party Finder" website, advertised as "a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina."

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to "educate," fund and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.

Or as one source rather colorfully put it:

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party: "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud--and they're our candidates!"

And Dick Armey's FreedomWorks group, which has very publicly helped organize Tea Party activists, is the product of a merger between Empower America and Citizens for a Sound Economy--the latter heavily backed by the Koch brothers.

So other than founding and funding the groups that have been key organizers and trainers of the Tea Party movement, the Kochs have little to do with it.

Don't tell that to Bill O'Reilly, though. He can only connect certain dots:

This isn't a spontaneous demonstration against crony capitalism. If it were, they would be in front of the White House. This is organized by the unions backed up by George Soros and the MoveOn people.

The links between those groups and OWS prompted the other guest, Caroline Heldman,  to turn the tables on O'Reilly:

HELDMAN: Bill, do you have evidence to back up those links? Do you have evidence?

O'REILLY: Yes, absolutely, we have reporters down there all the time and the reporters ask people who they are, where they are going. The spontaneous people are back to their jobs; 85 percent of them, Dr. Heldman, have jobs. You can't stay off the job for a month. I can back what I say up.

Now THAT is evidence--Fox-style.

Richard Engel on NBC Nightly News (10/21/11), speaking about the end of the Iraq War:

The training wheels off, Iraq will have to succeed or fail without American troops on the ground to guide the way.

That's quite a metaphor--invading and occupying a country for eight years as "training wheels."

Engel's report includes this reference to the death toll:

Iraqi deaths, almost 150,000, but many Iraqis believe it's a million.

Of course it's not just Iraqis who believe this--the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB), which has worked for the BBC, the British Conservative Party and the International Republican Institute, conducted a survey that arrived at the 1 million estimate.  A survey published in the Lancet medical journal  (10/11/06) estimated that the war caused 600,000 violent deaths between March 2003 and June 2006.

The "almost 150,000" number that Engel puts forward as reality appears to be based on the Iraq Family Health Survey, a joint effort by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government, which actually estimated that there were 151,000 violent deaths (and some 400,000 total excess deaths--MedPage Today, 7/23/08) as a result of the war--between March 2003 and June 2006.

Apparently some Americans believe the war hasn't killed anyone in the last five years.

Sending a letter to PBS NewsHour in response to their pro-inequality segment? Leave a copy of your letter in the comments section below.

No matter where you live, local TV newscasts tend to be pretty awful: a mash-up of crime, spectacle and celebrity--along with sports and weather.

According to an item in the Hollywood Reporter, though, ABC has told its local affiliates not to cover one celebrity in particular: actor Johnny Depp.

The actor is doing interviews to promote a new film called The Rum Diary, based on a book by Hunter S. Thompson.  But according to the Reporter, Disney-owned ABC seems to think interviewing him about a movie that isn't part of the Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise would be bad business:

According to Houston's KHOU, no ABC affiliates were allowed to speak with or even shoot the actor at the event, due to a clause in his contract with Disney for its successful film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean.

"We came here expecting to talk to one of the biggest names in Hollywood," say KHOU news reporter Shelton Green. "But apparently Disney doesn’t want Johnny Depp's new movie premiering here at the Paramount [Theatre] to get more exposure than his new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. So they wouldn’t allow us to interview him, nor would they even allow us to get video of him, but hundreds of other people did."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/11), tipped off by at least one of his Post colleagues, decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza to see the festival of anti-Semitism firsthand. Lo and behold, he found none:

Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry--not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to google the phrase "Zionists control Wall St."  Google "nut case" instead.

Before you send your note of thanks to Cohen, wait until he gets to his real point:

This right-wing attempt to discredit both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party's hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible. It's made possible, however, because no one this side of the Moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it marches off to some location to highlight what we all know--that Wall Street guys are rich--and their slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.

Cohen goes on to call Occupy Wall Street "a destination for the aimless...a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." It is also

a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans...an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including--by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation--the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

For good measure, Cohen makes the argument that the right-wing smears of OWS are derived from the left:

The imputation of anti-Semitism, however, adds gravitas to this lighthearted event. The smear is in deadly earnest, a reminder that the devious tactics of the Old Left have been adopted by the New Right. (No accident, maybe, that the practitioners are the descendants of lefties.)

Well, he was on the right track with that first paragraph.

Liberal writers are zeroing in on a new study from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism that found Barack Obama has been subjected to far more "negative" coverage than any of the Republican presidential candidates. The graphic accompanying the study is dramatic:

Slam dunk, right?

One of Eric Boehlert's blog items at Media Matters is headlined "So Much for the Liberal Media." In another post he acknowledges that there have been criticisms of the Pew methodology in the past, but the real issue here is how right-wing critics will react to the numbers.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly makes a similar point:

It's simply taken as a given in Republican circles that President Obama enjoys favorable coverage from major media outlets. This is generally pretty hard to believe among non-conservatives, but it's helpful to take this out of the realm of perception and into more quantifiable analysis.

If the point that liberals are making is that the liberal media conspiracy that exists in the minds of conservatives bears no resemblance to reality, they're right. But we didn't need a new study to confirm this.

A more important question (for media critics at least) is whether the study's methodology is sound. And this is where things get a little muddy.

Part of the  Pew study is attempting to measure "tone." This involves making some decisions about how you would measure that, as the study makes clear: "The unit of measure of tone is each assertion or statement contained in a story or blog post." Pew set up a computer algorithm to capture news content and code it accordingly.

The report gives an example of a Gannett story about Herman Cain's poll numbers. The report stated that he was making "good impressions," according to the poll's findings. Thus this would be coded as a "positive" assertion. A story that quoted someone speaking about Michele Bachmann's migraines is a "negative" assertion. The report explained, "A story that is entirely about a poll showing Mitt Romney ahead of the Republican field--and that his lead is growing, would be a good example to put in the 'positive' category."

It doesn't take long to spot the problem here. Candidates performing well are far more likely to rack up "positive" coverage, even if that coverage is, strictly speaking, unremarkable campaign reporting about fundraising, polls and so on. Newt Gingrich's campaign scores a lot of "negative" coverage. But given the state of his campaign, that is completely unsurprising--and does not reveal a media "bias" against Gingrich.

This would seem to be the main explanation for "negative" coverage of Obama. A number of Republican politicians are running to challenge him, and are thus likely to criticize his record. Those comments would be recorded as "negative" coverage. But so would coverage that simply relates bad news--Pew explains:

Even the week of May 2-8, immediately after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Obama’s coverage was overwhelmingly negative. One reason is that many of the references to his role in the hunt for bin Laden were matched by skepticism that he would receive any long-term political benefit from it. Another was that the bin Laden news was tempered with news about the nation's economy.

"A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the streets to wildly cheer President Barack Obama's announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decade-long manhunt," stated a May 2 AP story. "The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his re-election campaign."

They don't make it perfectly clear, but one can assume that a story like this would be coded as "negative"--because it mentions things like unemployment and partisanship.

The problem is that a study like this seems to confuse media bias with bad news. It's doubtful that Pew's point was to suggest that there is an overwhelming anti-Obama bias in the national media. But that's one conclusion people are likely to draw when a study talks about "positive" and "negative" media coverage.

It's hard to suggest with a straight face that politicians deserve coverage that is half friendly, half critical at all times. But without some non-arbitrary way to determine the tone of coverage a politician should be getting--and what would that look like, exactly?--it's hard to turn a count of "positive" and "negative" coverage into a gauge of media bias.

Today the New York Times (1/18/11) reports a big scoop.

A "Tea Party commission" convened  by Freedom Works is set to announce its crowd-sourced $6 trillion debt reduction plan--"A copy of the preliminary findings was provided to the New York Times," Kate Zernike reports.

The story's second paragraph critiques the plan from the right for not doing enough about Social Security and Medicare, which Zernike asserts "are two of the biggest contributors to the nation's deficit." This is not true, especially when it comes to Social Security--but corporate media prefer to have discussions of the deficit that bash Social Security.

The larger problem is why this proposal is being covered at all. Even Zernike's account suggests that it doesn't really add up:

FreedomWorks says that repealing the healthcare legislation would cut $1.2 trillion, but the Congressional Budget Office has projected that repealing the legislation would actually increase the deficit by $210 billion over the next 10 years.

It's useful to recall how the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was treated by outlets like the New York Times. This was a serious plan put forward by legislators and endorsed by several high-profile economists.  And it couldn't get into the news section of the New York Times. But this thing can.

I think people are genuinely surprised by the corporate media's shift on Occupy Wall Street: Things went from apathy, scorn and derision to front-page news rather quickly.

USA Today's editorial today (10/12/11) is headlined "Five Good Reasons Why Wall Street Breeds Protesters." It has the usual caveats--"The protesters' rhetoric against capitalism and 'corporate greed' is over the top, and they seem devoid of remedies," the paper notes--but on balance, the message is that there's plenty to protest.

What's galling is the sense that USA Today's been outraged all along. As when they explain:

Through lobbyists and campaign contributions, the banking industry has long had its way in Washington. This was evident in the Clinton-era legislation that repealed a post-Depression safeguard and allowed banking behemoths to combine banking and brokerages under one roof.

Boy, was it "evident," right? Remember all of those USA Today editorials denouncing the Glass-Steagall repeal? Neither do I.

In fact, this (4/9/98) is what the paper had to say about the removal of that "post-Depression safeguard":

It is nevertheless clear that banking laws designed for an economy 65 years ago don't work as well now. The goal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act was to keep banks separate from insurance and securities firms as a way to protect banks.

But the law has weakened banks. They've lost ground at home and abroad to more flexible foreign financial firms.

Responding to this concern, the Federal Reserve Board over the past decade used its authority as regulator of bank holding companies to chip away slowly at the Glass-Steagall wall, giving banks more leeway to set up securities subsidiaries. The Fed has gone about as far as it can under the law. Congress has to tear down the rest of the wall.

As lawmakers remove obstacles to the brave new world of finance, they must take care not to leave the consumer behind.

About  a year later, the paper (11/18/99) wrote that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was one of the few accomplishments of that congressional session:

On the eve of adjournment, after nearly 11 months in session, incumbents can point to only one major accomplishment: passage of compromise legislation overhauling Depression-era restrictions on banks, insurance companies and the securities industry.

If only we had listened then to what USA Today is saying now.

ABC's This Week (10/10/11) had a normally tilted panel on Sunday talking about, among other things,  Occupy Wall Street. The show had three different types of conservatives (former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, fixture George Will and columnist Peggy Noonan) along with Democratic pundit Donna Brazile.

But then host Christiane Amanpour actually interviewed someone involved with Occupy Wall Street--DailyKos blogger Jesse LaGreca. He is perhaps best know as the guy who was interviewed by Fox News Channel at the protest--and took the chance to bash Fox News Channel.

And he did media criticism on This Week too:

LAGRECA: I mean, the reality is, I'm the only working-class person you're going to see on Sunday news, political news maybe ever. And I think that's very indicative of the failures of our media to report on the news that matter most to working-class people.

AMANPOUR: We are trying our best, Jesse.

LAGRECA: And I thank you.

Points to the show for actually having him on, but is ABC really trying its best? That would be sad.

Republican New Jersey Gov.  Chris Christie isn't running for president after all. This is bad news for the journalists who seemed so eager to promote his candidacy, but also for establishment pundits like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who thought a Christie/Obama contest would have been a victory for.... wait for it... centrism!

He writes today (10/5/11):

Had Christie--a moderate on gun control, climate change and immigration who has also backed Simpson/Bowles--run and won significant support, he would have forced Obama back to the center.

Then, instead of a race between the Democratic left and the Republican right--in which the whole country would lose because the winner would not have had a mandate for the real change we need--we would have had a race between the Democratic center, independents and the Republican center. Then the whole country would win.

Apparently Barack Obama has been veering too far to the left, mostly because he rejected some sort of  Simpson/Bowles "Grand Bargain" fiscal reform plan. Friedman quotes economist Tyler Cowen saying that the plan Obama has proposed "seems to be an extreme Democratic response" because it "is moving away from entitlement reform and embracing multiple tax increases on the wealthy."

Friedman agrees--Obama decided to "shift back to his base with a weak fiscal plan." What he should have  proposed was something that "shares the burden of cutbacks fairly--takes from defense programs and entitlements and asks the wealthy to pay more but everyone to pay something."

This criticism is bizarre.  Most people should know that the Affordable Care Act included significant Medicare savings--contrary to the media messages about the failure to rein in spending. (Those cost controls are in large part what gave us a Republican House of Representatives in 2010.) And as Friedman's paper reported, Obama's new fiscal plan includes another round of rather serious cuts to Medicare and Medicaid:

Obama Proposes $320 Billion in Medicare and Medicaid Cuts Over 10 Years

Perhaps Friedman wants deeper cuts, or cuts to Social Security. To him, that is "centrism." But most people in the country don't support these policies--making it strange to call them "centrist."

Friedman has been making a habit of late of wishing that Obama would propose some economic policies that he's already proposed--some mix of cuts and tax increases. This is exactly what Obama has been offering--and none of it resembles what the "Democratic left" is calling for.

The discussion on the economy in the media and among political elites is basically between the far-right Republicans and Obama--whose policy ideas might be considered center or center-right. Tom Friedman wants that debate to move even further to the right.

There's an interesting piece at the Huffington Post (9/27/11) by Joy Resmovits about what some critics of the corporate-backed NBC Education Nation conference are saying. Even though some are crediting NBC for a more balanced program than last year, not everyone's ready to give the network a passing grade:

While some lauded the increased balance and depth at this year's Education Nation, retired New York City teacher and Grassroots Education Movement member Norm Scott gave [NBC News president Steve] Capus an earful on Tuesday. "People see an absence of the word 'class size' in these debates," he told Capus.

"This notion that somehow we're skewed too close to the reformers, I just don't buy it and completely disagree," Capus responded.

"How did a guy like Jonathan Alter end up as an expert on Sunday night's panel?" Scott asked. He was referring to the Bloomberg columnist and MSNBC contributor who has taken hard-line stances on charter schools and teacher evaluations.

"We had Jonathan Alter and 300 teachers," Capus countered.

Alter has long been one of the most vitriolic critics of teachers unions in the media--which would seem to be the only reason he'd be invited on a panel in the first place. (Teacher-bashing is one of the fastest paths to becoming an education pundit.)

But his presence on the stage wasn't the only area of criticism. Among the sponsors of the event, the controversial for-profit University of Phoenix:

The event took place in a tent whose central outside decoration was the logo of the for-profit University of Phoenix.

The University of Phoenix has 200 campuses and online degree programs. An ABC News investigation found that the school routinely makes promises about work eligibility that it can't deliver on, resulting in students mired in debt without the benefits of a degree.

A U.S. Senate committee investigation found that 66 percent of associates degree students and half of bachelor's degree students at the school withdrew after beginning their programs. About 22 percent of University of Phoenix students defaulted on their loans during 2008, while the school's owner, the Apollo Group, devoted 22 percent of its spending to marketing.

Capus defended University of Phoenix's sponsorship of Education Nation. "We have about seven decades worth of experience of building a dividing line between the...commercial sponsorship side and the reporting side of NBC News," Capus said. The Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and State Farm also sponsored the summit. "They don't shape the editorial content," Capus said.

Given the media's general tilt in favor of corporate "reformers," it's hard to imagine that Gates, Broad and the rest would need to intervene. Clearly they're happy to put their names on something that aligns with their views on education. (NBC's Brian Williams has acknowledged how deference to Gates was shaping his network's coverage of the summit, saying that "it's their facts that we're going to be referring to often to help along our conversation"--Answer Sheet Blog, 9/26/11.)

University of Phoenix, on the other hand, probably could use some good publicity. (Greenwashing isn't just for oil companies.)

As proof of their independence, Capus said: "The University of Phoenix has been subject to some tough news stories on NBC News."

Not many. Take this one from last year (Today, 9/29/10)--where the NBC anchor tells a company executive, "Good for you, helping young people":

ANN CURRY, anchor:

Welcome back to Learning Plaza, part of NBC's weeklong Education Nation. And most educators agree that personalized learning improves student performance. Well, joining us now is Rob Wrubel. He is the executive vice president for University of Phoenix and creators of the learning assessment test, which can be found on the Education Nation website.

And basically, the key is to find out what kind of learner we are, right, Rob? Good morning.

ROB WRUBEL (executive vice president, University of Phoenix): Yes, because each of us have different learning styles. Some of us are more visual, some of us are more auditory and we listen to things and learn. So by finding your learning style you can really optimize and personalize your learning outcomes.

CURRY: In fact, you've got a list of seven different kinds, and physical, as you say, aural, solitary, logical, social, verbal, visual. And by going to this Web site that you've created, people can take a test, and in just a few minutes they can find out what kind of learner they are.

Mr. WRUBEL: Right. You can go through this, it's 21 questions. And the kinds of questions they are ask you--just a range of questions about your activities, how you do things. Are you a good listener, do you do--do you talk with your hands. And then when we use our program we can give you a quick profile of what are your different types of learning styles.

CURRY: Mm-hmm.

WRUBEL: Sometimes you have a dominant learning style; sometimes you have a whole mix of different styles.

CURRY: But it would seem that it would be so important for, especially, parents of young people who may be, in fact, those young people may be having trouble in school, and may be showing some signs of having difficulty sitting still in class, that they go and maybe help their kids take this test, it would seem. The place you go is HowDoYouLearn.EducationNation.com?

WRUBEL: Yes, that's it.

CURRY: All right.

WRUBEL: And it is a very simple test. And for kids who are really trying to find a new way to learn, maybe they need more physical activity, it's a very successful tool to help parents find out what their learning style is.

CURRY: Good for you, helping young people...

WRUBEL: Right.

CURRY: ...this way. Congratulations, Rob Wrubel.

If you're in the New York area and you'd like to hear a conversation about education with a different point of view, come to FAIR's Miseducation Nation forum tonight at 7, at Manhattan's School of the Future.

I caught this MSNBC commercial last night featuring their own Chuck Todd, explaining (apparently) how he thinks about his job:

My job is to bring up issues that Americans care about.

It's my responsibility to ask the tough questions. No matter who's leading the country, they need to be held accountable.

I have unique access to the president, his advisers, the candidates and members of Congress.

I'd better use that access for a greater good. Use it for people who can't get through the White House gates. For people who can't be heard.

The American people deserve answers.

Huh. The Chuck Todd I see on television is more like this, this, and this--and don't forget the time he met a journalist (Jeremy Scahill) who actually does work that resembles Todd's self-description. Scahill appeared on a TV show panel with Todd, and criticized him for saying that investigating Bush-era torture policies would be a distraction. Off the air, Todd told Scahill that he shouldn't be so impolite:  "You sullied my reputation on TV."

I guess my question is this: Does Chuck Todd have another job? One that more closely resembles this description of a fearless truth-teller, giving voice to the voiceless?

From a Washington Post story today about Obama's speech at the United Nations:

In his remarks, Obama sought to celebrate the Arab Spring — the popular revolutions that have upended the political order of the Middle East — but his lack of support for the Palestinians’ U.N. bid may put him at odds with the region’s proponents of democracy. He has sometimes struggled to convince many Arab protesters that he supports their movements, in part because the United States has a long history of backing autocratic rulers in the region.

Perhaps they remain unconvinced not merely because of that "long history" but because present U.S. policy has mostly not been on their side either--despite corporate media assurances to the contrary.

Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC (9/19/11):

Or, if you prefer reading:

But last week when Wolf Blitzer and CNN had that debate, the CNN/Tea Party Express debate, and Wolf sat there and called them his partners--I just thought, this was amazing, because would you ever see the CNN nurses union debate or the CNN teachers union debate? Because I think there are a few more teachers and nurses in this country than there are members of the Tea Party.

But we'll never see that in the mainstream media. And liberal organizations which have many more members just don't get the attention. A thousand people arrested in front of the White House a couple of weeks ago on the tar sands environmental issue -- hardly any coverage of this.

Can you imagine if 1,000 Tea Party members had been arrested in front of the White House? It would be at the top of every news story.

People are down on Wall Street right now, holding a sit-in and a camp- in down there--virtually no news about this protest.

This goes on with liberals and the left all of the time, and it gets ignored. And, fortunately, there are shows like yours and others who aren't ignoring it. It doesn't mean it isn't happening, and it will continue to happen.