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.

The front page of USA Today (9/19/11) tells us that Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is taking "the heat," but not to worry--he says he can handle it.

That's especially true with reporters like Susan Page on his side:

He's not worried, he said, because only one issue really matters to Americans in this election. It's the one he plans to ride first against his Republican rivals and then against President Obama.

Jobs.

"I'll be asked about a hundred different issues a thousand different ways," he said in the interview Friday, one of only a few he has done since announcing his candidacy last month. "But it is about who has the record, who has the vision to get Americans working again." That's what "Republicans, independents and even, I think, a number of Democrats … are looking for."

As he told those at a county GOP dinner in Jefferson, a coffeehouse crowd in Newton and workers at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Atlantic, he can cite job-creation statistics in Texas that are the envy of the nation's other 49 governors. The Lone Star State has accounted for 40 percent of the jobs created in the United States since June 2009.

We've been through this before (and we'll go through it many, many more times).

It's likely that a competent governor--and certainly a competent reporter--would be more concerned about the unemployment rate in a given state, which takes into account not only how many people have jobs but how many people need jobs. On that score, Texas is right in the middle of the pack. So there are plenty of governors who actually wouldn't envy Texas.

Page goes on:

Now Perry is pouncing on [Mitt] Romney with the brio of a rodeo cowboy lassoing a bull.

To every audience, he ridicules Romney's record on jobs when he was governor (Massachusetts ranked 47th nationwide)....

The unemployment rate in Massachusetts is more than a point lower than it is in Texas. Something Page could have found out even without a lasso.

Finally, they will have a voice in the corporate media (New York Times, 9/19/11):

When Discovery Communications set out to reformat HD Theater, the nine-year-old home of high-definition documentaries, its executives assessed the crowded cable programming landscape and asked what was missing--where there was "white space," as one later put it.

What was missing, they decided, was a channel for the Rich Man--the successful, college-educated man who earns $150,000 or more a year and who wants to know how to spend his time and money.

That's how Velocity was hatched. Replacing the low-rated HD Theater on October 4, Velocity is being billed as a high-end men's lifestyle channel about fast cars, fancy auctions and football stars.

At long last, the unjust marginalization of wealthy male consumers is beginning to come to an end.

From Time magazine's Rick Perry cover story (9/26/11):

When you look at Perry, it's easy to picture him in an old Western. His late arrival in the primary field in August certainly felt like that moment when the big stranger steps through the swinging saloon doors and all heads pivot and the plinky-plunk piano dies away.

Wait-- there's more!

Moreover, Perry doesn't mind kicking over idols in the high church of conventional wisdom, a favorite Tea Party pastime. He's the one who calls Social Security a "monstrous lie," throwing in "Ponzi scheme" for good measure. Social Security is called the third rail of American politics, which is, of course, a reference to the electrified portion of a subway track. Touch it and you die. But there aren't any subways where Rick Perry comes from.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly knows a thing or two about boundaries.

As he told his TV audience Monday night, some "far-left" radicals crossed the line on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a blog post about how some Republican politicians turned the attacks into a "wedge issue," and referred to George W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani as "fake heroes."

O'Reilly's reaction: Krugman is "insulting his country on the anniversary of 9/11. That is truly despicable."

O'Reilly had a little left in tank, so he went after former Times reporter Chris Hedges for writing this:

Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement.... We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists, too.

O'Reilly got down to his point:

The reason I am even pointing out the rantings of these far-left loons is that some of their more moderate confederates do not condemn the statements. I mean, the New York Times actually pays Krugman to spout this stuff. Yeah, we have freedom of speech, but there's also a responsibility in the journalistic and political communities, is there not?

Sure, let's talk about media figures using responsible rhetoric. Let's start with Bill O'Reilly's call for brutal attacks on a number of countries right after 9/11:

Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, the channel's most popular host, declared on his September 17 broadcast that if the Afghan government did not extradite Osama bin Laden to the U.S., "the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble--the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads." O'Reilly went on to say:

This is a very primitive country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.

O'Reilly added that in Iraq, "their infrastructure must be destroyed and the population made to endure yet another round of intense pain.... Maybe then the people there will finally overthrow Saddam." If Libya's Moammar Gadhafi does not relinquish power and go into exile, "we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mine the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. We also destroy all the airports in Libya. Let them eat sand."

Lucky for O'Reilly, there are few sanctions in corporate media--at Fox or anywhere else--for that kind of bloodthirsty rhetoric.

Frontrunner-of-the-moment Rick Perry is getting a lot of press for his performance at the recent Republican debate--especially because he's standing by his belief that Social Security is a "monstrous lie" and a Ponzi scheme, and that climate change is an untested theory advanced by corrupt, discredited scientists.

You can call such ideas a lot of things. "False" or "untrue," for example, would work. But a lot of reporters characterized Perry's performance in positive terms. In today's New York Times (9/9/11), Michael Shear writes that Perry

made clear in his first national appearance that he would campaign as an unabashed Southern conservative who is unafraid to speak bluntly, would double-down on controversial statements and planned to shrug off the concerns of the Republican establishment.

Shear later added that "Perry did not back down Wednesday night from his assertion that Social Security was a failure, even in the face of direct criticism by Mr. Romney."

"Unabashed," "unafraid," not backing down--these are all more or less positive descriptions.

Likewise, on NBC Nightly News (9/8/11), Andrea Mitchell said: "Perry proved he could throw a punch and take one. And he was unapologetic about attacking Social Security as a monstrous lie."

So he's not only a fearlessly blunt speaker, he's also an unapologetic punch-thrower. This is the kind of coverage the Perry campaign would probably pay for. Yes, there are pieces here and there that point out that, you know, Social Security isn't actually a massive scam. On the other hand, Washington Post liberal Ruth Marcus writes today (9/9/11): "On the substance, Perry’s point about Social Security-as-Ponzi scheme has some grounding in reality." She gets around to criticizing him, but that's a lot of ground to cede to a falsehood.

As Greg Marx notes at CJR,  the media designation of certain pieces as "factchecks" is strange because one might logically conclude that run-of-the-mill articles don't dwell on checking the facts of politicians (a conclusion that would largely be a correct one). He points to a CBS News piece on Perry and Social Security that quotes other Republicans disagreeing with his stance. Readers are apparently being asked to believe either Karl Rove or Rick Perry on the issue. That's a lot to ask of anyone.

The Obama White House made (yet another) move bound to disappoint progressive activists.  But good luck trying to get corporate media to explain the impact.

Here's how the September 3 New York Times piece by John Broder started off:

WASHINGTON — President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Business groups and Republicans in Congress had complained that meeting the new standard, which governs emissions of so-called ground-level ozone, would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So this new standard would lead to HUNDREDS of thousands of lost jobs? Wow. That's a powerful argument against it. Where does that figure come from? Is  it correct? The Times is of no help--"balance" requires that both sides get a hearing, no matter the details.

But a little history would be helpful. Similar claims were made during 1997 debates about provisions of the Clean Air Act; as this Center for American Progress report demonstrated, the massive job losses that industry warned about are difficult to spot.

Broder was back on the job-killing beat on September 5, writing (along with Motoko Rich) a piece with this lead:

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/5/11) takes the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to say that he's sorry:

I went home on September 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war--against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term.

Wait--we all did what now?

Someone who was really sorry for stoking war fever would be honest enough to point out that not everyone was on board. And of course Richard Cohen knows this--he was writing columns attacking those who weren't "going along with it." As he wrote about Dennis Kucinich, "How did this fool get on Meet the Press?"

Under the headline "Nations Hope Veil Lifts From Libya's History of Terrorism," John Burns writes in today's New York Times (8/30/11):

Television footage of the only man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing lying in bed, purportedly comatose with advanced prostate cancer at his Tripoli home, has provided a focal point for a question asked with new urgency in places far from Libya: With Col. Muammar el-Gadhafi's government in ruins, what reckoning is likely for the terrorist bombings that were once a signature of the former Libyan leader's war with the Western world?

So terrorism was Gadhafi's "signature," and many "nations" hope a full accounting will be forthcoming. What's the record that Burns has put together?

Obviously he talks about Pan Am 103, which is the most visible example. But there are serious questions about the link between Libya and the Lockerbie bombing. Burns mentions the 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing, which killed three people. The judge at the 2001 trial said the  Libyan government bore some responsibility, but a connection to Gadhafi could not be established. The Times account of the trial mentioned in passing that prosecutors alleged that the disco bombing was launched  "to retaliate against the sinking of two Libyan boats by the United States in the Gulf of Sirte." It's unlikely that many people remember these acts, which likely killed a fair number of Libyans.

The other examples Burns cites are support for the Irish Republican Army--similar schemes were undertaken around the world, including here in the United States--a shooting outside a British embassy that killed a police officer and the disappearance of a religious leader in Lebanon during a visit to Libya.

This is not to suggest that Gadhafi was innocent of any of these charges. His rule in Libya was marked by vicious attacks and repression inside the country.

But it's difficult to imagine someone at the Times writing about international hunger for accountability for terrorist acts supported, linked to or committed by George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. It's not as if it would be difficult to point to their "signature" acts--support for deadly, anti-democratic death squads in Latin America, the massive destruction and violence unleashed on Iraq, or the torture and prisoner deaths that occurred on Bush's watch. But something tells that if you were to to try to write about these "signature" acts of American terrorism in connection to either--or even to Henry Kissinger's record--someone at the New York Times might try to have you committed.

In case you were wondering whether Irene sparked any discussions of climate change, here's a moment from the panel discussion on ABC's This Week (8/30/11):

RON BROWNSTEIN (National Journal): Do we want to get into a global warming and a hurricanes discussion?

DONNA BRAZILE (Democratic Strategist): No.

BROWNSTEIN: I mean, I don't know if we want to open that door.

Let that serve as a reminder to read Neil deMause's piece from the last issue of Extra!

This was a laugh line, so I guess take it for what it's worth.  On the other hand, Cokie Roberts seemed to be serious when she said this about George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina:

It was surprising to me, his reaction, because his father's example with Hurricane Andrew had been such that you would think that he would, you know, understand that he needed to get out front on Katrina. But in his case, a huge part of his appeal post September 11th, was that he was keeping the country safe. And suddenly, people didn't feel safe. They weren't safe. They were in a very dangerous situation.

Back in reality, Bush's job approval rating was hovering around 50 percent for about 18 months prior to Katrina--which would suggest quite a number of people weren't sure about Bush's "appeal" before that storm hit. More jarring, though, is to hear someone say that people liked Bush after the 9/11 attacks because "he was keeping the country safe." Really?

The coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza is following  some predictable patterns. The New York Times has a headline today (8/26/11), "Israeli Strikes in Retaliation Kill Nine Gazans."  Readers should ask: Retaliation for what?

It's widely understood that this violence stems from the attack last week in the southern Israeli town of Eilat. As the Times puts it:  "The recent round of violence started a week ago, with a terrorist attack on southern Israel in which eight Israelis were killed."

The real question, though, is who committed these acts.  The Times says:

Israeli officials said the perpetrators and planners of the terrorist attack were originally from Gaza, and Israel has retaliated with strikes that have killed at least 23 Palestinians. Gazan officials say they know nothing about the source of the attack.

That's a massive understatement.

To date, no armed Palestinian groups have claimed responsibility for the Eilat attack. Israeli officials claimed the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) were behind it, but have offered no proof to back up these allegations.  And there has been almost no critical coverage of the weakness of the Israeli case.  On NPR (8/18/11), for example, listeners have heard Israeli ambassador Michael Oren claim that Palestinian militants carried out the attack, and five days later London Times reporter James Hider (8/23/11) stated the same thing as if it were a well-established fact.

A handful of journalists have been persistently pointing out that the weakness of this case. One of those writers, Yossi Gurvitz, explains in his latest piece at the Israeli website +972 (8/25/11) that Israeli media are beginning to raise serious questions:

Since Monday, there have been a few more reports in the Israeli media, casting more doubt on the official story. Yediot reported on Tuesday (Hebrew) that nameless people in the security apparatus doubt the PRC were responsible for the attacks, and raise an interesting question: If they were responsible, why was the PRC's entire leadership in the same place?

According to Yediot’s anonymous intelligence sources (bear in mind that such sources should always be viewed with skepticism; by their very nature they cannot be corroborated, and they tend to be unreliable even when speaking openly), the attribution of the attacks to the PRC stems from one somewhat incoherent comment on some Jihadi message board.

Ha'aretz reported on Tuesday (Hebrew) that at least three on the attackers were Egyptian Jihadis. American intelligence sources – the same caveat above applies here--told Globes (Hebrew) that they, too, doubt the PRC are responsible, though they may have had a small role in the attacks.

Two days ago, the IAF attacked the Gaza Strip again--naturally, it does not consider itself bound by the ceasefire; only the Palestinians are, and only them can be blamed for breaking it--and killed some Islamic Jihad apparatchick. Yesterday, the IDF claimed (Hebrew) that he was in charge of funding the Eilat attacks. Hold on a minute, I'm confused: I thought you said the attacks were carried out by the PRC, and now it’s the Islamic Jihad left holding the bag? As of yesterday, reported Amira Hass in Ha'aretz (Hebrew), there are no mourning tents in Gaza. As of today, one week after the attack, the IDF refrains from exposing the identity of the attackers it killed.

This is a remarkable story that deserves serious coverage. Two dozen people in Gaza have been killed in "retaliation" for an attack that very well could have originated somewhere else.

New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer takes a look (8/26/11) at U.S. trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that are currently languishing in Congress. The piece calls them "free-trade" agreements, which is generally misleading: Trade deals usually involve complicated horse-trade negotiations regarding tariffs, patent protection and the like--meaning they make trade in some ways less free.

But more important are the other assumptions in the piece:

The three free-trade agreements, which originated with the Bush administration, would eliminate tariffs on cross-border transactions, expanding exports of American goods by about $12 billion a year, according to estimates by the United States International Trade Commission. Under the agreements, American service providers would be able to compete in the three countries, ostensibly adding new jobs to the American economy. Because of this, they are widely supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business trade groups.

First is the assumption that these deals do something special to increase U.S. exports. A study from Public Citizen last year found more export growth to countries that don't have "free trade" agreements with the United States.  (Todd Tucker joined us on CounterSpin to talk about it at the time.) And the estimates of export growth haven been called into question as well.

"Ostensibly adding new jobs to the American economy" seems like a rather generous leap of faith.  Critics have consistently argued that these deals will cost jobs-- even the New York Times concluded last year that the Korea pact "is likely to result in little if any net job creation in the short run, according to the government's own analysis."

Lastly--is there any reason to suspect that the "U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business trade groups" support these trade deals because they create U.S. jobs? As Dean Baker put it:

Corporations do not exist to create jobs, nor do they claim this as a goal. Invariably, corporate CEOs will say that their responsibility is to produce returns for shareholders as they announce large layoffs. If the Chamber of Commerce is supporting these deals, it is because it believes that they will increase profits, end of story.

The FCC announced it was doing away with dozens of rules today, including the Fairness Doctrine--perhaps one of the most widely misunderstood media policy concepts of all time. As the Hollywood Reporter put it:

Bound to get the most attention though is ditching the Fairness Doctrine, an idea that was meant to force radio broadcasters into offering as much left wing political content as they offer right wing commentary.

This is the Fairness Doctrine as imagined by right-wing talk show hosts as a way to scare listeners. Rush Limbaugh called it the "Hush Rush Bill," and claimed that it would force radio stations to air liberal programs or face FCC sanctions.  That was nonsense.

As FAIR's Steve Rendall explained in a fantastic piece in Extra! (1-2/05), the Fairness Doctrine did not mandate anything resembling equal time (a misconception advanced by an array of conservatives, but also by liberals hoping to force ideological balance on the nation's airwaves).

He wrote:

The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.

Rendall went on to describe the upside of the Fairness Doctrine:

Indeed, when it was in place, citizen groups used the Fairness Doctrine as a tool to expand speech and debate. For instance, it prevented stations from allowing only one side to be heard on ballot measures. Over the years, it had been supported by grassroots groups across the political spectrum, including the ACLU, National Rifle Association and the right-wing Accuracy In Media.

Typically, when an individual or citizens group complained to a station about imbalance, the station would set aside time for an on-air response for the omitted perspective: “Reasonable opportunity for presentation of opposing points of view,” was the relevant phrase. If a station disagreed with the complaint, feeling that an adequate range of views had already been presented, the decision would be appealed to the FCC for a judgment.

According to Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of Media Access Project, scheduling response time was based on time of day, frequency and duration of the original perspective. “If one view received a lot of coverage in primetime,” Schwartzman told Extra!, “then at least some response time would have to be in primetime. Likewise if one side received many short spots or really long spots.” But the remedy did not amount to equal time; the ratio of airtime between the original perspective and the response “could be as much as five to one,” said Schwartzman.

As a guarantor of balance and inclusion, the Fairness Doctrine was no panacea. It was somewhat vague, and depended on the vigilance of listeners and viewers to notice imbalance. But its value, beyond the occasional remedies it provided, was in its codification of the principle that broadcasters had a responsibility to present a range of views on controversial issues.

ProPublica's factcheck of seven economic myths facing the country makes some good points: Taxes aren't going up, for instance. Some of the "myths" are a bit muddled: "The stimulus has been full of/free of fraud, waste and abuse." Is someone really saying the latter?

But overall the piece tries vainly to balance myths that will please both the right and the left.

For instance, Myth #3 doesn’t appear to be a myth at all, but a difference of opinion between economists. But labeling it a myth serves the conservative perspective:

The stimulus should have been bigger.

This is a red herring. Politically, the initial stimulus package almost certainly couldn't have been bigger because the moderate senators who provided the key votes wouldn't stomach a package over $800 billion. Indeed, late in the game, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and others were looking to trim the bill to $650 billion.

Regardless of the politics, many economists, including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, insist the stimulus was too weak to deal with the crisis. Other economists, including John F. Cogan and John B. Taylor at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, argue that the amount of stimulus spending wouldn't have mattered because it mainly reduced borrowing by state and local governments rather than increasing spending. So, they contend, the predicted benefits were washed out.

In any case, the total stimulus is bigger than you might have thought. Since the Recovery Act, Congress has approved hundreds of billions of dollars in additional stimulus measures, including the renewal of unemployment benefits, this year's payroll tax cut and the extensions of the education jobs fund and the homebuyer tax credit. The total is now well over a trillion dollars.

But even that isn't sufficient knowing what we do now, according to Romer. As she recently told the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, the economy "probably needed about $2 trillion given what we were actually up against."

It's hard to see how the political viability of a larger stimulus has any bearing on the question of whether one was needed. And if the proposition "The stimulus should have been bigger" is false, as ProPublica seems to be saying, they offer no evidence for the claim.

When a super-wealthy guy like Warren Buffett talks about taxing the rich-- in the pages of the New York Times, no less-- it gets the rest of the media talking. But that doesn't mean that talk will get things right.

Here's one example from ABC World News (8/15/11):

BIANNA GOLODRYGA (ABC NEWS): Much of Buffett's income comes from capital gains, profits resulting from investments, and they're taxed at only 15%. Buffett's solution, rates should be raised for the 300,000 Americans who make more than a million a year, left alone for everyone else. An additional 1% tax on the richest Americans is estimated to raise $100 billion in extra revenue during the next decade. But tax experts say it's not enough for just the super-rich to pay more.

MAYA MACGUINEAS (PRESIDENT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR A RESPONSIBLE FEDERAL BUDGET)

The bottom line is that the fiscal hole that we face is so large that everybody is going to have to be prepared to pay more in revenues in the end.

Nowhere does Buffett propose that his income tax rate should be increased one percentage point. In fact he talks about how his income tax rate is about half of what people who work in his office are paying. His column also talks about how the super-rich get a break on capital gains;  as Buffett sees it,  when the capital gains rate was 39.9 percent-- over twice what it is now-- it didn't stop people from investing.

So why is ABC low-balling his call to tax the wealthy? More realistic projections of how much can be gained by rolling back tax cuts for the wealthy tell a different story.   Chuck Marr at Center on Budget & Policy Priorities pointed out one way to raise a trillion dollars over 10 years:

Returning the average tax rate on the top 1 percent of taxpayers to its 1996 level of 29 percent could raise about $100 billion a year, or $1 trillion over the next decade.

Chuck Collins and Alison Goldberg note that

Almost 500 high-income taxpayers support the Fairness in Taxation Act, that would increase top tax rates on millionaires, generating an additional $78 billion in urgently needed revenue.

A New York Times story following up on Buffett's column pointed out that

his proposal would put a significant dent in the nation’s budget shortfall. Based on projections by the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Congressional Budget Office and the Treasury, the tax increase on all three fronts would generate as much as $500 billion in new revenue over the next decade — about a third of what the Congressional committee is supposed to cut from the deficit.

The ABC report does conclude by pointing out that this $100 billion figure could build 7,000 new elementary schools. But Buffett's actually proposing to raise far more money than that. Why is ABC trying to give the super-wealthy a break?