Under the headline "Washington Post Publishes More Information About Exciting Alternate Universe," A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (9/13/09) lets us know that, while "lots of banks had to get a bailout from the federal government," do "you know who didn't? The ultra-smart guys at BlackRock investment management, that's who"--at least according to the September 13 Post, which featured this passage:

BlackRock emerged as one of their principal advisers as the agencies bailed out major companies and tried to put a price on their toxic assets. BlackRock is also managing tens of billions of dollars worth of AIG assets for the government. In August, officials selected the company to help arrange the purchase, partly using taxpayer money, of toxic assets from banks. Although BlackRock, which avoided the plague of toxic assets, has turned to Washington by choice, some firms have been forced to Washington.

Schwarz's response can hardly contain his excitement:

Impressive! Impressive work there by BlackRock! Let's stroll over to BlackRock's own website, so we can find out who owns them and extend our congratulations:

Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bank of America Corporation, and The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. own approximately...47.4 percent and 31.5 percent of BlackRock’s capital stock...

Whoops!

Bailout Recipients

Bank of America $45.0 billion
Bank of America, NA $6.0 billion
PNC Financial Services $7.6 billion

But Schwarz really feels "there's no need for the Washington Post to report on what's going on in this universe," since "it would only upset and confuse their readers."

A Tiny Revolution's John Caruso (9/5/09) caught an instance of the Public Broadcasting System "Putting the 'BS' in PBS" when they recently "took a break to blandish us thusly: 'If you are seeking a unique sponsorship opportunity for your business and want to reach a prime demographic group through multiple platforms email us today.'"

Reacting to the crass appeal for a California Bay Area underwriter, Caruso reminds the broadcasters: "C'mon, guys, we're sitting right here. Can't you at least do us the courtesy of being subtle about the fact that as far as you're concerned, we're nothing but pairs of eyes for corporate sponsors?"

Citing 15-year-old FAIR warnings of the hazards of such "enhanced underwriting," Caruso also remembers

a day not that long ago when PBS's purpose was to provide, you know, broadcasting services for the public. Now that they're just selling audiences to advertisers like the rest of the corporate media, they really should change the name—though I suppose "Supplier of Prime Demographic Groups to Underwriters through Multiple Platforms" doesn't quite have the same ring (and SPDGUMP doesn't exactly roll off the tongue either).

Caruso even has a suggested rewrite of their longtime "standard sponsorship message as well": "This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from Upwardly Mobile Middle Class Consumers Like You. Thank You! But seriously, we're just as happy getting our money from ExxonMobil."

A Tiny Revolution blogger Bernard Chazelle (8/2/09) thinks it's  possible that "people fail to appreciate how tough it is to run the government." As evidence, he offers "two questions Treasury officials and politicians will soon have to answer":

• Should a Connecticut trader receive $100 million in executive pay from a bank that would be dead had it not received $45 billion in taxpayer money? Apparently, the guy's genius was to drive up the price of gas to $4 a gallon. Does he deserve 100 million bucks from you for that?
• Should unemployment benefits be extended for 1.5 million jobless Americans who will otherwise run out of money by the end of the year and fall into destitution and, sometimes, homelessness?

Chazelle notes that "the New York Times features both stories on its front page, but never connects the two" --their job "explaining the complexity of the issue" encapsulated by him as, "If the trader fails to be paid, it'll get truly ugly: The guy will go trade somewhere else!"

"On the other hand," writes Chazelle, "if mom and dad don't get their unemployment benefits, things are not quite nearly as bad: Only their kids will die." Leading him to sarcastically exclaim, "Thank god I am not in government having to make tough choices like that!"

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Recession and the 'Deserving Poor': Poverty Finally on Media Radar—but Only When It Hits the Middle Class" (3/09) by Neil deMause.

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

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

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

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

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (7/9/09) has posted a reminder that "back in March Phillip Swagel, who'd been assistant treasury secretary under Hank Paulson, wrote a long article about the TARP bailout called 'The Financial Crisis: An Inside View.'"

Thinking that maybe "it would be news if Swagel had stated that Paulson, Bernanke and Bush's attempts to foment panic to pass the bailout have 'surely' contributed to the current recession," Schwarz lays out some quotes showing that actually "he did": "The way in which the TARP was proposed and eventually enacted surely must have contributed to the lockup in spending," and "they could plainly see that the U.S. political system appeared insufficient to the task of a considered response to the crisis. Surely these circumstances contributed to the economic downturn."

To Schwarz, "this was obvious at the time. Back on September 26, I (among many, many others) asked: 'How have things turned out before when the president, Treasury secretary, Federal Reserve chairman and a leading presidential contender all scream in public constantly about how we're on the verge of a giant financial meltdown?'":

In any case, there are no references to Swagel's statement anywhere online except in the original document.

Likewise, Swagel suggests the mid-September financial situation might have been dealt with without an immediate appropriations bill by Congress: "A counterfactual to consider is that the Treasury and Fed could have acted incrementally, with backstops and a flood of liquidity focused on money markets and commercial paper—but not the TARP."

That too has been mentioned nowhere online. Oh well.

All of which earns Schwarz' scathing headline declaring the corporate media silence "Another Triumph for American Journalism." Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Going All Out for Bank Bailout: Media Paint Crisis as Too 'Urgent' for Skepticism" (1/09) by Dean Baker & Kris Warner.

Looking at a June 28 New York Times report that the "Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup," A Tiny Revolution blogger Bernard Chazelle (6/28/09) writes that "from the byline alone, you know this is going to be good": "Elisabeth Malkin, in Mexico City, with reporting by Simon Romero from Caracas." To Chazelle this all "makes perfect sense since, as we all know, Mexico City and Caracas are the two major cities in Honduras. (Too bad they had no reporter in Bangkok. I hope the Pulitzer committee doesn't notice.)"

Moving on to the piece's actual content [since altered by the Times], Chazelle responds to the peculiar opening line stating that "The Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the army on Sunday after pressing ahead with plans for a referendum":

A referendum? OK, but for what? "... a referendum that opponents said could lay the groundwork for his eventual re-election"

OK, so we ask his opponents what the referendum is about. How about asking a more neutral observer? Like? "Mr. Zelaya pressed ahead with plans for a nonbinding referendum that opponents said would open the way for him to rewrite the constitution to run for re-election despite a one-term limit."

Yes, I think we got that point. Opponents of the referendum really don't like that referendum. But what's the referendum about? I'll go out on a limb and, on the basis of what our crack reporters have told us, I'll take a wild guess: "Can I, el Caudillo Zelaya, run for president again and again and again? Yes or no?"

Let's check with Dr. Wikipedia to see how well I'm doing: "Incumbent President Manuel Zelaya wanted to hold a non-binding referendum on whether to convene congress to modify the constitution."

So, "it's non-binding, meaning that it has no enforcement power," and "it's not a referendum to change the constitution," but only "a referendum to convene a constitutional assembly to modify the constitution." No wonder the Times lede has Chazelle reduced to this: "Hmm... me very confused."

One thing Chazelle is sure of: "There's no way this would have happened if the U.S. had said no. And if anyone doubts there's bad blood between Honduras and the U.S., one has to go back only nine months for Honduras' decision to delay the accreditation of the U.S. ambassador in solidarity with Bolivia."

Blogger Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 6/24/09) has noted that when "CBS ran a story about the latest batch of Nixon tapes made public... they included a section of a February 21, 1973 conversation with Billy Graham that showed Nixon at his psycho best," addressing anti-Semitism thus: "This has happened to the Jews, happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it's happening, and now it's gonna happen in America if these people don't start behaving. It may be they have a death wish."

But the real problem comes in CBS's quote of the Graham response: "Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity." Schwarz asks us,

What do you think about Graham's response there? True, he didn't stand up to Nixon's rambling insanity, but at least he deflected it. He comes out looking pretty good!

Too bad this is how the conversation actually went (mp3):

Graham: Well, you know I told you one time that the Bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They're the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They're the ones putting out these obscene films.

[three minutes of talking]

Nixon: It may be they have a death wish, that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

Graham: Well, they've always been through the Bible at least, God's timepiece. He has judged them from generation to generation and yet used them and they've kept their identity.

Schwarz closes with a further "P.S.": "CBS is also wrong that Nixon was talking about anti-Semitism being generated by the shooting down of the Libyan plane. Nixon was actually responded to Graham being angry about a rabbi criticizing a new attempt at widespread evangelism." But this is all part of a great tradition in the U.S. press: Corporate media have diligently worked to clean up the good reverend's image for just about as long as he's been around.

Jonathan Schwarz recently caught the Washington Post crediting the author of an anti-progressive tax op-ed as just "an economics professor," when in fact he sat on tax-funded bailout beneficiary "AIG's board of directors. He's also a member of the board's finance committee." Now, continuing (A Tiny Revolution, 5/21/09) to mine the Post's editorial page for insights into "Their Cozy Little Village," Schwarz writes that

I don't think there's anything wrong with the Washington Post publishing op-eds by Bob Graham. But it does seem like they might mention that he's a member of the family that owns the Post, and the great-uncle of the current publisher.

I guess they figure everyone who deserves to know already does, so why bother? It would just make the peasants upset and confused, and set a bad precedent.

But then the Post is far from alone among corporate outlets in failing to meet even minimal disclosure requirements....

Sure that Andrew Sullivan "would be horrified" by the idea that he and Cindy Sheehan agree on anything, Jonathan Schwarz nonetheless quotes (A Tiny Revolution, 4/25/09) the Atlantic.com blogger's declaration of "love" for the Internet, because "can you imagine what those thugs would have gotten away with without it?" Sheehan's similar 2005 statement--"Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state"--spurs Schwarz to celebrate the democratizing power of online media:

I'm not sure we'd be a fascist state without the beautiful, beautiful tubes. But the difference they've made is gigantic. Recall this story about Obama's decision to release the torture memos:

Mr. Obama wrestled with the decision into Wednesday night...

One key factor was the online publication last week by the New York Review of Books of an International Committee of the Red Cross account of detainee interrogations [penned by Mark Danner]. The president read the account and concluded "virtually everything that was in these memos was out in the public domain," said the senior official.

Without the internet, would Obama have cared the Red Cross report had appeared in an ultra-egghead publication with a circulation of 140,000? Would he even have known? Likely no to both. As Donald Johnson commented over at Obsidian Wings:

[T]he issue has come much further than I would have ever expected--if you'd asked me in 2001 if the U.S. would torture people in the war on terror I would have guessed we would, but I wouldn't have expected it to have ever reached the mainstream press, except maybe in scattered articles that wouldn't receive much notice.

Schwarz opines that, "in any case, there's no question the Internet will have a deeply chilling effect on the Cheneys of the future," imagining how "during every meeting in which they organize their criminal conspiracies, someone will say: 'What would this look like if it ends up online?'"

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (4/18/09) samples the response to Mike Allen of Politico's quote of "a former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush" calling the publishing of U.S. torture memos "damaging because these are techniques that work":

This, from Andrew Sullivan, is a representative example of the reaction:

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?

But things get really interesting when, in Allen's "attempt to explain his behavior," he wound up "revealing the devouring black hole of corruption at the heart of Washington 'journalism'":

While I was writing the piece, a very well-known former Bush administration official e-mailed some caustic criticism of Obama’s decision to release the memos. I asked the former official to be quoted by name, but this person refused, e-mailing: "Please use only on background." I wasn’t surprised....

I figured that readers could decide whether the former Bush official’s comments sounded defensive or vindictive. And Politico readers aren’t so delicate that we have to deceptively pretend there's no other side to a major issue.

Schwarz explains that what Allen is "accidentally telling us here" is "that the Bush official initiated the contact, and without Allen agreeing to any conditions. In other words--even if Allen believes there's some value to printing unsubstantiated, blatantly self-serving assertions--he had absolutely no obligation to ask permission to quote the official, by name or otherwise. But since he's a well-trained little lad, he did anyway."

In a blog post about how it must have been "So Much Nicer To Be George Will Before The Internet" (2/17/09), A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz looks back over how "on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn't happening" to "a funny story of Noam Chomsky's from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982":

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: He said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek--you know, four lines--in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it's false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We're kind of interested in your letter; where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they're published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971" --which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

Theorizing that these days "it must be hard for Will to get used to bluggs, because he's spent his entire career with total impunity," Schwarz doesn't spare those people responsible for publishing Will's damaging claptrap either: "Two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won't explain their behavior." See the newest FAIR Action Alert: "Does the Post Fact-Check George Will?: Columnist's Climate Change Denial Distorts Reality" (2/18/09)