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."

This is how ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour introduced the roundtable pundit line-up on Sunday's show:

With pitched battles going on right now here in Washington and in statehouses from Florida to Wisconsin to California, with me now, our roundtable: George Will, Congressman Steve Southerland, a Republican freshman from Florida-- he was elected to public office for the very first time last November and sent here to Washington on a mission to cut spending. Also with us, ABC senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl and political strategist Donna Brazile, who calls herself a labor Democrat.

So the right wing Will, a right wing Congressman, an ABC journalist who came to Beltway journalism after participating in a right-wing journalism training institute... and from the left, Donna Brazile.

Rupert Murdoch's latest hire John Stossel, speaking at a Michigan college:

I quit ABC a couple weeks ago partly because they didn't like what I was doing. They viewed it as too biased.

Yes, ABC promoted Stossel to 20/20 anchor, gave him regular "Give Me a Break" commentary segments and one-hour, factually challenged primetime specials...all because they didn't like him. It's scary to think what the network would have done if they did like him.

While within the power-friendly environs of the corporate-funded Newseum, congressmembers John D. Rockefeller IV, Tim Pawlenty and Mary L. Landrieu probably felt pretty good about their ability to field such softballs from ABC's George Stephanopoulos as "What's the problem with the public health option?"

But upon leaving corporate TV's criticism-free zone, where such lies as Rockefeller's statement that "Medicare is gonna start going broke in 2017, which is like the day after tomorrow," pass completely unchallenged, they each were questioned by real-life journalist Sam Husseini of WashingtonStakeout.com (9/15/09).

Compare the treatment described above with Husseini's calm but determined questioning of the pols:

Sam Husseini: Health insurance mandates--don't they end up being a subsidy for the insurance companies, because you're mandating that people go out and buy their product?

Mary Landrieu: ...I'm not carrying water for the insurance companies....

SH: You say you're not carrying water, but your No. 1 contributor is JP Morgan Chase, PACs and individuals associated.... And you've precluded the Medicare-for-all type option. Why shouldn't somebody conclude that you are doing the bidding of the financial industry?

And to Rockefeller's platitude, "Don't worry about the insurance companies. Believe me, we're going to take care of them," Husseini responds in a most un-Stephanopoulos manner:

You say not to worry about the insurance companies, but even though you obviously come from a very wealthy family, you've raised money for your campaigns--the No. 1 sector, according to Open Secrets, is finance and insurance. Why shouldn't it be seen that a lot of people in Congress are in effect doing the bidding of the insurance companies?

The big news in the health reform debate is that the White House seems to be willing to give up on the "public option," a government insurance program that would compete with private insurers. Everyone sees this as a big story, but there's something revealing about the way the Washington Post's Ceci Conolly led her piece:

Racing to regain control of the health-care debate, two top administration officials signaled Sunday that the White House may be willing to jettison a controversial government-run insurance plan favored by liberals.

In Beltay mediaspeak, "regain control" must mean doing something that right-wing Democrats and Republicans want. The Post's Dan Balz already made this recommendation about the public option, writing on August 12, "Some of his staunchest allies believe that course would be prudent and might change the dynamic of the debate in the administration's favor." And on the roundtable segment on ABC's This Week on August 9, host George Stephanopoulos wondered if Obama would accept a watered-down bill in order to break with the "Howard Dean wing of the party." This notion was seconded by panelist Cokie Roberts, with right-wing columnist Peggy Noonan chiming in to say, "Maybe it would be good for the President if the left got absolutely furious about something."

So the health reform debate has shifted even further to the right--exactly where the corporate media wanted it.

An LA Times column today cited FAIR's petition demanding that the TV networks include single-payer in their coverage of the healthcare reform debate,  acknowledging that there is a "gaping hole in much of the media coverage--caused by the failure to investigate practices around the rest of the world, particularly European-style, single-payer programs."

The Times' James Rainey concluded his column, "TV Needs To Deepen Coverage of Healthcare Reform," with a report on the delivery of FAIR's petition at ABC--the network that disinvited Obama's longtime physician Dr. David Scheiner, a single-payer advocate, from its June 24 "Prescription for America" program:

The liberal media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting and a group of progressive activists delivered a petition Tuesday to ABC News in New York (which recently excluded one of the activists from a forum on healthcare) to demand broader reporting, including an assessment of government-managed health systems.

I suspect some in the big media have tiptoed lightly on that turf for the same reason as the politicians. Better to appear ill-informed about the world of healthcare than to appear open to anything, you know, French.

Noticing that "days ago, buried in a chart under the headline "How the Health Care Bills Compare," the New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information," Norman Solomon (Guernica, 7/23/09) has done some valuable decoding of a Senate committee bill's "public plan that would 'compete with private insurers,'" as "the Times chart explained on July 18":

The public plan "would provide 'only the essential health benefits,' as defined by the bill, 'except in states that offer additional benefits.'"

Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, "Democrats from three House committees are working on a single plan." Under that plan, "Different levels of coverage--'basic, enhanced and premium'--can be offered through the public option."

Those few grainy sentences, quickly swept beneath the waves from oceans of media, referred to a disturbing aspect of "public plan" scenarios. If the ostensible goal is healthcare for all, then--at best--some of the "all" would end up being much more equal than others.

The Republican Party is coming from such a right-wing place that any government action to improve healthcare access is ideologically unacceptable. In contrast, the broad outlines of a Democratic "public plan" at least embrace the precept that the not-so-tender-mercies of the market are insufficient to fully provide for the population's medical needs.

But as a practical matter, a "public plan" coexisting with the private health insurance system--generally touted by U.S. media as the pole of real options farthest from the Republican "free market" fixation--is inherently reconciled to major inequality in access to healthcare.

While "media accounts keep telling us that the current political debate on healthcare is unprecedented and groundbreaking," Solomon points to "an article in the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, by seasoned healthcare reporter Trudy Lieberman, makes a convincing case that little has changed within the frames of media parameters."

Sign on to FAIR's petition telling corporate media to stop censoring the healthcare debate.

And if you happen to be near New York City, join our July 28 Petition delivery at ABC.

ABC's Diane Sawyer claimed (CNN, 6/22/09) the network's June 24 forum on President Barack Obama's healthcare plan would feature "questions from every single vantage point."

Yet, ignoring calls from FAIR (Action Alert, 6/22/09) and advocacy groups such as Health Care Now!, the special did not include a single question from an advocate of single-payer national health insurance—despite the fact that the single-payer option polls well with the public (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09) and is seen by many experts as the best way of expanding coverage to the uninsured while also controlling costs.

In the wake of well-publicized flak ABC received from the Republican Party over the special, the Republicans' position that Obama's plan amounted to a "government takeover of healthcare" was reflected in the questions selected by ABC.

ABC's Charles Gibson asked Obama directly to respond to Republican criticism. Meanwhile, one of ABC's hand-selected questioners said he was concerned with "the big brother fear," asking, "How far is government going to go in reference to my personal life and healthcare treatments?" Another questioner, identified as an M.D., said he was "concerned" with "the government taking over healthcare."

The insurance industry's perspective was also well-represented in the forum, with ABC medical editor Timothy Johnson citing "critics" who say Obama's plan "would eventually put private insurers out of business." ABC also featured a question to Obama from the CEO of the major insurance company Aetna, as well as the head of the Lewin Group--which is owned by another major health insurance company, the United Healthcare Group.

(Four medical practitioners, the president of the American Medical Association, two family members of patients, a former government health official, two human resources managers and a small business owner were also selected by ABC to ask questions to the president.)

David Westin, president of ABC, had defended ABC's selection of guests for the forum, saying, "We will include a variety of perspectives coming from private individuals asking the president questions and taking issue with him, as they see fit." Just days before the forum, Sawyer stated on CNN (Reliable Sources, 6/22/09) that it was going to be "a room full of widely diverse ideas in which people who actually experience the reality of front-line healthcare are going to get a chance to pose their challenging questions to the president."

Yet the issue of single-payer was never raised by either the ABC interviewers or ABC's hand-selected guests, despite the fact that it is popular, and favored by 59 percent of physicians, according to recent peer-reviewed survey (Annals of Internal Medicine, 4/1/08). And despite the fact that even Obama's own doctor has criticized the government's plan in favor of a single-payer system.

In the entire ABC healthcare special, the single-payer option was only once mentioned, and dismissively, by Obama himself, in response to Republican charges that his healthcare proposal is a "Trojan horse" for "socialized medicine."

Yet, tellingly, for the corporate media's most influential media critic--Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz-– the main concern vis a vis the ABC forum was not the silencing of a popular reform proposal. Rather, it was the question of whether health insurance companies and other industry perspectives would be sufficiently represented in the forum.

In a segment on the ABC healthcare forum on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Kurtz stated to Sawyer:

You have the ultimate guest for this special, the president. Why not also include guests from the insurance industry, the hospital industry, the drug companies who also have a stake in this health care battle?

It would be a surprise to many Americans that they do not, in Kurtz's view, have a stake in healthcare reform.

But then again, corporate media's longstanding blackout on the single-payer option shows that corporate journalists have long seen the views of citizens as unimportant to the healthcare debate.

Images of the U.S. media's longtime foe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, with Obama at last weekend's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad prompted some corporate reporters to take the unusual step of questioning the political motivations behind an official photo-op.  On ABC's World News, Jake Tapper referred to Chavez's gift of The Open Veins of Latin America to Obama as a "stunt" (video available here).

George Stephanopoulos questioned whether Chavez was not just posing with Obama in order to take advantage of Obama's popularity. "You have to wonder who would win a popular vote between Obama and Chavez in Venezuela these days," Stephanopoulos stated in an early Sunday morning ABC News broadcast.

Yet, as even Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer--a Chavez critic--acknowledges in his latest column, "there are no recent polls on Obama's popularity in Venezuela." So just where does Stephanopoulos get the idea that Obama polls so favorably in Venezuela? Why, likely from Obama's own adviser on Latin America!

In an interview with Tapper broadcast on ABC, Jeffrey Davidow--a senior adviser to Obama on Latin American affairs and director of the Summit of the Americas, who is also president of the Institute of the Americas think tank, stated that Chavez

rushed photos of his handshake with president Obama on to his government's website, along with his express desire to be friends. That was for a reason.

There's a sizable population in Venezueala, probably the very, very vast majority of Venezuela Venezuelans, who have a more favorable attitude to president Obama than to him.

Tapper: You're saying president Obama is more popular in Venezuela than Chavez is?

Davidow: Yeah.

What better authority on what "probably the very, very vast majority of Venezuela Venezuelans" want than a White House senior advisor?

Today the New York Times is reporting that waterboarding was used far more often than we have been told--almost 300 times on two prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah. This stands in rather stark contrast to what we heard about the instant, positive effects of waterboarding--as the Times notes:

A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

Of course, someone who relented in "35 seconds" would not need to be waterboarded 83 times. And as been several accounts discussed, the information Zubaydah offered was of debatable value.

Those ABC reports by Brian Ross stood out at the time because they seemed so eager to take this information at face value. Listeners to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin on December 21, 2007, heard this critique of ABC's reporting:

On December 7, the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two high-ranking Al-Qaeda detainees. The tapes reportedly offered the most direct evidence of just exactly what types of interrogation techniques--including torture-- were employed during the 2002 sessions. The ensuing controversy has been big news. But three days after the story surfaced, ABC reporter Brian Ross offered up his version of a blockbuster exclusive-- a report that amounted to a defense of the CIA's torture.

Ross scored an exclusive interview with a former CIA field officer who was part of a team that waterboarded one detainee--Abu Zubaydah. His story must have been music to the White House's ears: Zubaydah wouldn't talk, but once they began torturing him he spilled the beans, and they disrupted dozens of attacks. But ABC's Ross never once raised the most basic question in all of this: Does torture actually produce reliable information? The consensus among law enforcement and military officials is that it does not. But that inconvenient bit of perspective could not find its way into Ross' breathless reporting.

The problems with Abu Zubaydah's interrogation have been well-covered by several other outlets, including Vanity Fair. There are serious doubts about whether any of the information he offered was of any value whatsoever-- facts that were laid out most recently by the Washington Post.

At the close of Brian Ross' report, anchor Charlie Gibson asked why this CIA source had come forward now to talk about torture. The answer would seem pretty clear: The administration's torture policies were once again under critical review, so that would make it a good time to present the argument that torture works. All that was needed was a credulous journalist to air this story. That's exactly what they found in ABC's Brian Ross.

ABC's Good Morning America did a special 3-part series on race this week, "Black and White Now," to "look at race relations in America." All three parts revisited old experiments or news stories.

The first (3/31/09) was a repeat of an experiment with children playing with black and white dolls, showing that now kids don't tend to think that the black doll is mean and the white doll nice, like they did in the '40s--although some black girls still say the black doll is ugly and the white doll pretty. The report cited William Julius Wilson saying "there's still work to be done, especially with girls, even with Barack Obama as president, his family in the White House, to make sure the weight of a prejudice past doesn't secretly make its way into the hopes of a brand-new day."

Number two (4/1/09): another experiment repeated, black men trying to hail cabs in New York City. This time, in their very non-scientific experiment, black men do fine during the day, but have a harder time getting a cab once it's dark out. They also talk to people of color who feel discriminated against at high-end stores.

And number three (4/2/09): GMA anchors Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts went back to their hometowns in the South and talked to groups of white and black children, respectively, about their perceptions of race. Ten years ago, when they did this in Mobile, the kids talked about a racial divide and expressed negative stereotypes of the other race. This time, "the kids don't wanna talk a lot about skin color" and were "expressing one hope that a rainbow of kids can show grown-ups how to learn, have parties, live together." Roberts asks them why they think (old) people still want to talk about race a lot, and one kid says, "Because they're so happy it's not like that anymore."

These are, overall, encouraging stories. But it's only possible to tell such encouraging stories by limiting your focus to one kind of racism--the overt kind that plays out through individually held prejudices. Notice that none of GMA's episodes looked at the racial wealth gap, or the ways that the foreclosure crisis is impacting people of color more severely than white people, or the disproportionate number of people of color locked up in our criminal justice system versus white people (just to name a few examples). Sure, overt prejudice has diminished over the years, and that's a good thing (though there's still plenty of it out there). But ABC only perpetuates the very serious underlying racism by pretending prejudice is the only kind of racism there is.

You'd think that reporting on federal budget bills costing billions of dollars would be difficult.  But it's easy, really: All you have to do is remember that budget items involving animals or unusual foods are funny.

ABC's Jonathan Karl has mastered the genre.  Reporting on the ominous spending bill (World News, 2/24/09), he declared: "The bill is supposed to fund government operations, but it includes things like more than $1 million for so-called 'Mormon crickets' in Utah, $200,000 for tattoo removal in Los Angeles and $443,000 to control beavers in Mississippi." Hee hee! Bugs are funny, as are government efforts to control agricultural pests! And the bill also mentions "beavers"--if you're in junior high, you'll probably find that particularly amusing.

You know what else is funny? Pig poop! Karl transforms it into comedy gold:

Democrat Tom Harkin put in $1.8 million for "swine odor and manure management" in Ames, Iowa. "20 million pigs in Iowa," he explained in a statement, "make odor problems a very real issue." Chuck Schumer secured $2.2 million for the Grape Genetics Center in Geneva, New York. He told us the program helps farmers produce "better hybrid grapes."

Any more comical animals or agricultural products mentioned in the bill, Karl? "Nearly $3 million for poultry and blueberry research in Georgia, courtesy of Republican Saxby Chambliss and Jack Kingston. $127,000 for 'blackbird management' in Kansas. Senator Pat Roberts says the birds cost farmers millions."

In summary: "With the exception of the period right after September 11, this bill includes the biggest increase in federal spending since 1978.* Thanks in part to the millions earmarked for blueberries, blackbirds and crickets. And it's your money."

Thanks for the informative report, Karl.

* This does not seem to be true. The bill increases the funding for a group of agencies by $31 billion.  Military spending alone increased by $44 billion in 2002, $56 billion in 2003, $51 billion in 2004, $40 billion in 2005 and $55 billion in 2008.

FAIR has a new Action Alert up about ABC's gross exaggeration of auto worker compensation. Feel free to post messages sent to ABC here--or any responses you get from the network.