Alexander Cockburn's latest piece at CounterPunch (2/10/12) included this from a tipster:

I was visiting ABC News the other day to see a friend who works on graphics. When I went to his room, he showed me all the graphics he was making in anticipation of the Israeli attack on Iran; not just maps, but flight patterns, trajectories and 3-D models of U.S. aircraft carrier fleets.

But what was most disturbing--was that ABC, and presumably other networks, have been rehearsing these scenarios for over two weeks, with newscasters and retired generals in front of maps talking about missiles and delivery systems, and at their newsdesks-–the screens are emblazoned with "This Is a Drill" to assure they don't go out on air (like War of the Worlds).

Then reports of counter-attacks by Hezbollah in Lebanon with rockets on Israeli cities--it was mind-numbing. Very disturbing--when pre-visualization becomes real.

Does that kind of thing actually happen? Well, yeah.

CBS "practiced" covering a U.S. bombing of Iraq back in 1998--and the footage was apparently fed to a satellite (L.A. Times, 2/20/98):

CBS jumped the gun Friday on a possible U.S. attack on Iraq: The network inadvertently transmitted a practice news report via satellite that could be picked up by television stations and viewers with special equipment.

To try out new graphics for combat coverage in the event the U.S. goes forward with the threatened bombing of Iraq, CBS anchor Dan Rather was rehearsing with Pentagon correspondent David Martin over a closed line between CBS's New York headquarters and its Washington news bureau. The report was mistakenly sent up to a communications satellite.

Today's front page of USA Today:

The paper adds that "Obama was putting politics ahead of jobs and the nation's energy security by rejecting the pipeline now, Republicans and oil industry leaders said." It closes with this:

Business leaders and Republicans say approving the project now would create as many as 20,000 jobs for an ailing U.S. economy and lessen dependence on foreign oil.

"This political decision offers hard evidence that creating jobs is not a high priority for this administration," said Tom Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

If the argument in favor of this pipeline is that it creates jobs, then reporters should look into the claims about job creation. USA Today doesn't do that, but others have. A piece by CBS reporter Alain Sherter (1/18/12) explained that the 20,000 figure, while lower than some estimates, still has some problems:

But subsequent analysis suggests that Keystone's job-creating potential is more modest. The U.S. State Department calculated last year that the underground pipeline would add 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. jobs. One independent review of Keystone puts that number even lower, with the Cornell University Global Labor Institute finding that the pipeline would add only 500 to 1,400 temporary construction jobs. The authors of the September report also said that much of the new employment stemming from Keystone would be outside the U.S.

Transcanada itself cast doubt on its employment forecast when a vice president for the company told CNN last fall that the 20,000 jobs Keystone would create were temporary and that the project would likely yield only "hundreds" of permanent positions.

Another reason for the discrepancy appears to stem from what that 20,000 figure really means. As Transcanada has conceded, its estimate counted up "job years" spent on the project, not jobs. In other words, the company was counting a single construction worker who worked for two years on Keystone as two jobs, lending fuel to critics who said advocates of the pipeline were overstating its benefits.

The inflated claims will continue to fly, though--especially when reporters don't push back.

The Monday broadcast of CBS Evening News (12/19/11) began with big news, with anchor Scott Pelley announcing:

The secretary of Defense says tonight that the United States will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. In an interview with CBS News, Leon Panetta says that despite efforts to disrupt their nuclear program, the Iranians have reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year or potentially less.

To ratchet up the drama, Pelley told viewers that Panetta was aboard  "the jet nicknamed the Doomsday Plane. This is the command post where he and the president would direct a nuclear war."

Pelley reiterated that, according to Panetta, "Iran needs only one year to build a nuclear weapon." Then came this exchange:

PELLEY: So are you saying that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in 2012?

PANETTA: It would be sometime around a year that they would be able to do it. Perhaps a little less. The one proviso, Scott, is if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel.

PELLEY: So that they could develop a weapon even more quickly than we believed?

PANETTA: That's correct.

Near the end of the segment, Pelley made this remark:

Panetta told us that while the Iranians need a year or less to assemble the weapon, he has no indication yet that they have made the decision to go ahead.

So Iran could have a weapon in a year--or maybe not at all.

In today's New York Times, we see a story headlined, "Aides Qualify Panetta’s Comments on Iran," which leads with this:

An assertion by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that Iran could have a nuclear weapon as soon as next year was based on a highly aggressive timeline and a series of actions that Iran has not yet taken, senior Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

The report added these comments from a Pentagon spokesperson (bolded for emphasis):

"The secretary was clear that we have no indication that the Iranians have made a decision to develop a nuclear weapon," Mr. Little said. "He was asked to comment on prospective and aggressive timelines on Iran’s possible production of nuclear weapons--and he said if, and only if, they made such a decision. He didn't say that Iran would, in fact, have a nuclear weapon in 2012."

Now without knowing what was actually said in the full interview, it's hard to know whether Panetta's office is trying to walk back his careless, inaccurate rhetoric, or whether the CBS interviewer was pushing a hard line on Iran and nuclear weapons, treating the allegations being made about that country's nuclear program as if they were facts.

If it's the latter, it wouldn't be unprecedented. At the December 15 Republican debate, Fox host Bret Baier posed this question to Ron Paul:

Congressman Paul, many Middle East experts now say Iran may be less than one year away from getting a nuclear weapon. Now, judging from your past statements, even if you had solid intelligence that Iran, in fact, was going to get a nuclear weapon, President Paul would remove the U.S. sanctions on Iran, included those added by the Obama administration. So, to be clear, GOP nominee Paul would be running left of President Obama on the issue of Iran?

Paul tried to explain to Baier that there is not, in fact, any intelligence suggesting Iran is less than a year from having the bomb. As Paul explained:

For you to say that there is some scientific evidence and some people arguing that maybe in a year they might have a weapon, there's a lot more saying they don't have it. There's no UN evidence of that happening. Clapper at the--in our national security department, he says there is no evidence. It's no different than it was in 2003. You know what I really fear about what's happening here? It's another Iraq coming. There's war propaganda going on.

Baier, for his part, followed up by demanding that the candidate answer a question based on a false premise:

Congressman Paul, the question was based on the premise that you had solid intelligence, you actually had solid intelligence as President Paul, and yet you still at that point would pull back U.S. sanctions, and again, as a GOP nominee, would be running left of President Obama on this issue?

It's probably not that these journalists want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But they do seem to want to have a public debate that assumes Iran is about to have a nuclear weapon. Given the possible repercussions, that's bad enough.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry's new TV commercial is based on a lie. Will reporters say so?

The ad starts with a Barack Obama quote: ''We've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.''

To which Perry responds:  ''Can you believe that? That's what our president thinks is wrong with America? That Americans are lazy? That's pathetic. It's time to clean house in Washington.''

Now, it would be rather unusual for a president to say that.

Obama didn't.

The quote comes from an event where Obama spoke about efforts to woo corporations to do more business in America. Obama's response was that government should being doing more to improve the business environment for corporations--to "make it easier for foreign investors to build a plant in the United States."

If anything, Obama is saying the government has been lazy in its approach to pleasing corporations. As MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell explained last night, this is the kind of thing you can imagine coming from the mouths of Republican politicians and candidates.

So how are media doing fact-checking Perry's claim?

Today (11/18/11) the New York Times has a piece headlined "Perry's Latest Attacks Distort Obama's Words and Past." That's pretty good--though it's a little strange to see the paper's somewhat passive description of Perry's mendacity: "Some of his recent attacks have drifted into the realm of falsehood." How on Earth did they drift into that realm?

But the piece is an improvement over the Times' take on the ad a day earlier, written by the same reporter (Richard Oppel). That article led with the news that that the  commercial "takes a sharper tone" than Perry's previous ads, and that it "may be an effort to shift attention from Mr. Perry's recent stumbles by attacking the White House."

In the sixth paragraph, readers are finally told that "the ad takes Mr. Obama's remark out of context."

Mitt Romney has also been twisting Obama's "lazy" comment, with little push back from the press. Another Times piece described Romney's attack:

Mr. Romney's critique sounded a familiar theme in the Republican primary contest--that the president is out of touch with the ordinary American worker.

Later in the article, an Obama spokesperson says Romney is taking the comments out of context--which is the kind of thing journalists should point out themselves.

In the Washington Post, Chris Cilizza reported the Perry ad this way:

His latest ad, which began airing Wednesday in Iowa and on national cable stations, takes Obama to task for a recent comment that America has grown "a little bit lazy" in attracting foreign investment.

He added:

Romney also took issue with the comment this week, accusing Obama of calling Americans lazy. "I don't think that describes Americans," he said.

And once again, an Obama spokesperson steps in, near the end of the piece, to try and set things straight.

If this is any indication of how the press is going to handle campaign season lying, things look pretty bleak.

One bright spot came on the CBS Evening News (11/17/11):

SCOTT PELLEY: As we get pulled into this campaign season, you'll be seeing a lot of ads by the candidates. And from time to time, we're going to offer some background on the claims that all the candidates are making. This one caught our eye today. Texas Governor Rick Perry is running a spot about what he describes as an outrageous comment made by President Obama.

OBAMA: We've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades.

GOV. RICK PERRY (R), TEXAS: Can you believe that? That's what our president thinks is wrong with America, that Americans are lazy? That's pathetic.

PELLEY: That would be pathetic. So we hunted down the full comments the president made during an interview Saturday at the Pacific Economic Summit. He'd been asked about U.S. businesses marketing themselves overseas.

OBAMA: There are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity. Our stability, our openness, our innovative, free-market culture. But, you know, we've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We've kind of taken for granted, well, people will want to come here, and we aren't out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.

PELLEY: There it is in context.

There--that wasn't so hard, was it?

UPDATE: Syntactical glitch in first sentence fixed.

The Michele Bachmann presidential campaign--formerly treated as atop-tier juggernaut by Beltway media--has been floundering for weeks. Which makes right now as good a time as any for them to grab some headlines by shouting about liberal media bias.

The Bachmann campaign was furious about email correspondence concerning a possible Bachmann appearance on a CBS Web show after the Saturday night debate.  The network's political director, John Dickerson, was lukewarm on the idea, mentioning that Bachmann's poll numbers are quite low and that she wasn't likely to be much of a factor in the debate.  Even though Dickerson is correct, these are generally not good reasons to exclude candidates, as FAIR has argued over the years.

The value to the Bachmann campaign was pretty clear, as the New York Times reported today:

"Last night, as Michele prepared her plans to debate on CBS, we received concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows--the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message," Keith Nahigian, Mrs. Bachmann's campaign manager, wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

Back in reality, Bachmann's message was still being suppressed on Sunday morning--as she appeared on NBC's Meet the Press to talk about her candidacy.

The truth is that the corporate media have been remarkably generous, granting Bachmann an extraordinary amount of coverage. And the CBS Sunday morning show Face the Nation, as FAIR noted here, has produced factcheck articles on its website after Bachmann has made appearances on the show--without ever telling its much larger viewing audience about her wildly inaccurate claims.

In case you missed it, Bachmann's Meet the Press appearance included, among other things, a call to make Iraq compensate the families of American servicemembers killed in the invasion of that country. A few million dollars would suffice.

ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/6/11) kicked the show off with a pretty funny joke:

Clash of the titans in Texas last night, as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich met for the first of a series of one-on-one Lincoln/Douglas-style debates.

Less funny was the show's very imbalanced roundtable discussion:

So let's bring in our roundtable: George Will, the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington, former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, and historian and Newsweek columnist Niall Ferguson, author of the new book Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Three conservatives and the left-liberal Huffington.

But if anything, ABC's panel was teetering leftward.  On NBC's Meet the Press:

Finally, our roundtable will discuss if the state of the Republican race in flux now that the front-runner is engulfed in controversy. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kim Strassel, author of the new book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero and host of MSNBC's Hardball Chris Matthews, and Politico senior political writer Maggie Haberman give their views.

Two conservatives, a Beltway reporter and Matthews, who described himself recently as a George W. Bush-voting pragmatist.

And on CBS's Face the Nation:

The guests are Ed Gillespie, former Republican National Committee Chair; Ed Rollins, former Bachmann campaign manager; Ken Blackwell, Perry supporter, Liz Cheney, Republican consultant and John Dickerson, CBS news political analyst.

So four conservatives and a reporter.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's call for a referendum on the EU bailout package seems to have prompted media outlets to rummage through their store of Greek cliches.

The Washington Post's editorial against "Mr. Papandreou's ill-advised announcement of a referendum" led with a classical reference:

Not since the night when soldiers emerged from the belly of a giant wooden horse in ancient Troy has Greece engineered a more stunning surprise.

On the CBS Evening News (11/1/11), Mark Phillips weighed in with a culinary metaphor:

This was supposed to be the week that world leaders gathered in France to chart the next course of the economic battle. All through the week, the demonstrators gathered to tell them what they were doing wrong. Now the whole agenda has been tossed up in the air like a Greek salad.

Is that what people do with Greek salads? I thought it was plates they were supposed to throw around.

And on the Today show (11/2/11), CNBC reporter Mandy Drury skipped the imagery and just vented directly about how irritating she thought Greece was:

Yes, that news that Greece has called a referendum on its bailout scuttled stocks yesterday, and it looks like it could be a drag on stocks today as well. I know, it is so annoying that one small country could have that much of an impact on worldwide markets and indeed, essentially, your 401(k), but there you have it, our globalized and interconnected world.

On a happier note, though, starting today Starbucks is going to collect donations of $5 or more from customers in order to stimulate jobs through its Jobs for USA program. I guess that's just another reason to reach for the java, Natalie.

Well, thank goodness for Starbucks.

There's a piece at the CBS website (9/21/11) by Robert Hendin marking Bob Schieffer's 20 years hosting the network's Sunday morning show Face the Nation. Hendin, a senior producer for the show, writes:

From the get go, Bob made his plans known. "Our aim is to going to be very simple here: to find interesting people from all segments of American life who have something to say and give them a chance to say it," he said that morning.

The piece goes on to reveal--likely by accident--a lot about what they mean by "all segments of American life."

So to celebrate Bob's 20th Anniversary, we went through the files and looked at exactly who he's had on the broadcast. Here's a look at Bob Schieffer's 20 years at Face the Nation by the numbers:

Bob has interviewed:

Three presidents of the United States, four vice presidents, seven secretaries of state, six secretaries of Defense and 45 different cabinet members. He's also interviewed 123 senators and 109 different representatives.

Of those, a few notable names come up more frequently than others: Vice President Joe Biden has been interviewed by Bob on Face the Nation 46 times. House Speaker John Boehner, seven times. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been on the broadcast 16 times, including this past Sunday's program. By far though, the number one guest of Bob's tenure as host of Face the Nation is none other than Senator John McCain, who has been on the program 76 times.

All segments of American life.  When did they give up on that idea?

Newsweek has a feature called "My Favorite Mistake," where a famous person talks about something they've done wrong.http://www.fair.org/blog/wp-admin/edit.php

This week (7/24/11) it's former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The mistake she cited was when she wore the wrong pin to a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and then said something critical about his Chechnya policy. (The best mistakes are the most self-serving ones, apparently.)

When I saw the headline, I was half-wondering if she'd talk about her famous defense of killing Iraqi children on 60 Minutes (5/12/96):

Leslie Stahl asks Albright: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

To which Albright replies: "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price--we think the price is worth it."

Iraq did come up in the Newsweek piece, when Albright wrote, "We had sanctions on Iraq then, and I was instructed to keep saying terrible things about Saddam Hussein."

I would agree that she said something terrible.

Guess who's booked to appear on the CBS Sunday morning chat show Face the Nation this weekend? None other than Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan.

It has, after all, been an eternity since Sunday TV viewers had a chance to listen to Ryan talk about his Medicare-slashing budget plan.

May 22 on Meet the Press, to be exact.

FAIR's new petition to the television networks asks why Ryan's far-right plan has been getting so much more coverage than the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Add your voice today!

Of the 24 members of Congress who have appeared three or more times in 2011 on any of the five Sunday morning shows (i.e., CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox or CNN), according to Roll Call's ongoing tally, 16, or two-thirds, have been Republicans. Just seven, or 29 percent, have been Democrats. (The other one was Sen. Joe Lieberman.)

We've looked at the right-wing slant on Sunday morning before (Extra!, 9-10/01,  12/10), but this more-than-2-to-1 bias is extreme. For the record, Democrats control one of the two houses of Congress.

You can probably guess who the Sunday shows' favorite congressional guest is.

It's bad enough that corporate media are having such an ill-informed debate about whether torturing some prisoners helped find Osama bin Laden. But considering whom the media invite to this debate, it's probably not a surprise. Take yesterday's Sunday shows (please!).

On NBC's Meet the Press, Obama national security adviser Thomas Donilon basically refused to take a definitive position on torture, waterboarding and intelligence.  "No single piece of intelligence led to this," was his line. They followed up with a segment with former CIA head Michael Hayden and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom basically endorsed the idea that torture worked.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Donald Rumsfeld declared that these tactics worked.

Fox News Sunday had an "exclusive" with Dick Cheney, which followed a pretty contentious interview with Donilon. Cheney did not surprise.

On ABC's This Week, torture advocate Liz Cheney was on the roundtable to say exactly what you'd expect.  ("That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn't torture. It was legal.")  This came after host Christiane Amanpour seemed to overstate the White House's view, saying that that Obama officials have admitted that waterboarding "did, in fact, yield fruitful information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden."

But give ABC credit for having a  critic of torture on their show.  Former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks said this:

I never thought I'd live in a country where we would debate whether we should endorse torture as an official policy. Was some information obtained through torture? Probably yeah. Could it have been obtained through more professional methods the intelligence professionals recommended? Almost certainly yes. We could have gotten it sooner and better.

Also, what we know is that the use of torture became the prime recruiting tool for Al Qaida and for insurgents in Iraq, and so directly resulted in the death of American troops.

While the Fukushima nuclear disaster has gotten plenty of attention on network programming, the debate has consistently overlooked the most fundamental question of whether nuclear power can be harnessed safely (FAIR Blog, 3/14/11). In asking why this question remains muted, a look at their boards of directors reveals that all three major broadcast networks share at least two members with companies that produce or transmit nuclear energy.

With nuclear powerhouse General Electric as co-owner of NBC, it's not surprising that GE's CEO Jeffery Immelt and CFO Keith Sherin both sit as directors on the network's board. But it's not the only network whose board has nuclear energy connections: ABC's directors include a representative from Halliburton as well as from Edison Mission Energy. Not to be outdone, CBS, a former subsidiary of the energy giant Westinghouse, seats three board members from the nuclear energy industry's Southern Company, NSTAR and Consolidated Edison.

Can nuclear power be harnessed safely? The livelihood of these network board members depends on answering the question in the affirmative.

As best I can tell, the labor battle in Wisconsin is a big story--and maybe the biggest labor story in years. But as Amanda Terkel reported at the Huffington Post, that doesn't mean you're going to see union advocates on the Sunday chat shows. Terkel noted:

A union official told the Huffington Post that when none of the Sunday shows' producers reached out to them to book a labor representative this week, several unions started to pitch the shows with affected workers and local and national leaders who they felt could discuss the protests. The official said the response from the shows was essentially "thanks, but no thanks."

Terkel's original post has been updated to reflect the fact that NBC's Meet the Press has announced that it will add Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO to its roundtable. The show will include an array of Republicans and conservatives: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, John McCain (because how could you have a Sunday show without him?), Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.*). Liberal MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell will also be on hand.

Shutting out labor is nothing new. A FAIR survey in 1995-96 found:

John Sweeney and Thomas Donahue, candidates for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, were the only guests who were labor leaders. Instead of worker representatives, the shows invited the CEO of United Airlines, the CEO of Continental Airlines, a Goldman Sachs analyst, retired basketball stars and political satirists.

Last week on ABC's This Week the roundtable segment was titled (on the show's website) "Roundtable: Unions vs. Tea Party." They did manage to find a Tea Party congressman (Steve Southerland), along with right-wing regular George Will and right-leaning reporter Jonathan Karl. On the other side? Democratic strategist Donna Brazile.

(Corrected: Emanuel is a Democrat)

The long 60 Minutes segment on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange from last night (1/30/11) is definitely worth a look. But this set-up from correspondent Steve Kroft was certainly odd:

Julian Assange is not your average journalist or publisher, and some have argued that he is not really a journalist at all. He is an anti-establishment ideologue with conspiratorial views. He believes large government institutions use secrecy to suppress the truth and he distrusts the mainstream media for playing along.

Assange believes the government keeps important secrets? And that mainstream media play along? That is kooky.