Independent investigative journalist John Pilger recently (7/6/09) gave Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman his view of the broad media landscape, informed by the fact that "we have many alternative sources of information now, not least of all your own program, though I wouldn't call that alternative":

But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the Internet, for all its subversiveness, is still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we're getting still this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call a contrived silence, a censorship by omission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today, because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars.

All of this, it seems to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama, who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras as quite subtly, but very directly, influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media.

Still, with all the non-corporate media available today, Pilger sees this as "a time when. I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we're going to let that opportunity pass." For more views on what Pilger calls "almost a historic opportunity that we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted" by so-called "mainstream" news providers, listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

Noting how "the president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now," FAIR associate Norman Solomon is letting Huffington Post readers know (7/9/09) "that's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually":

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

Solomon warns that "'escalation' isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States":

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad--nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper--nothing too abrupt or jarring....

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

While "Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set" and "sounded an open-ended note: 'There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan,'" Solomon writes that the announcement "was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place."

Solomon foresees that "war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come 'piecemeal'--'with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.'" For a look "beyond how many more troops and when to send them"--the only major questions about Afghanistan regularly given venue in corporate media--listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ann Jones on Afghanistan" (1/23/09).

On June 29, the day he was installed by Honduran coup leaders as the country's new interim foreign minister, Enrique Ortez Colindres repeatedly used racist slurs to describe U.S. president Barack Obama.

Using the word "negrito," a well-recognized and profoundly racist epithet, whose literal translation means "little black man" or "little black boy," Ortez referred to Obama as "that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing" ["ese negrito que no sabe nada de nada"] and "a little black man who doesn't know where Tegucigalpa is" ["el negrito, no conoce donde queda Tegucigalpa"]. In another case, he told the Honduran newspaper El Tiempo (translation from DailyKos):

I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, leftists, blacks, whites. This is my job; I studied for it. I am not racially prejudiced. I like the little black sugar plantation worker who is president of the United States.

For more than a week after they were uttered, Ortez's slurs were a big story in Latin American and around the world: The Chinese and French wire services Xinhua and Agence France Presse covered them, among others . But besides online sites like Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, the story was mostly ignored by U.S. journalists, who otherwise freely quoted Ortez about Honduras' coup and constitutional crisis.

That wasn’t the case when Hugo Chavez called George W. Bush the devil in an address at the U.N. in 2006. Then the arguably lesser insult was discussed for days in the U.S. media.

Wednesday, July 8, offered big new developments in the story when a U.S. diplomat in Honduras complained about the slurs and Ortez offered a brief apology. Then, later that afternoon, Ortez was fired and replaced by the coup government's president.

But today, two days later, the New York Times has yet to mention any aspect of the story, and the Washington Post only ran a brief 120-word Associated Press report about the apology (though nothing about the resignation) on July 9--its readers only then learning about the original slights.

And so it would appear that, at least in this case, few U.S. journalists think it's much of a story when a high-ranking foreign official, otherwise in the news, launches a racist attack, even one that targets the president of the United States.

Salon's Greenwald (6/27/09, ad-viewing required) has taken a hard look at Washington Post and ProPublica journalists Peter Finn's and Dafna Linzer's report--"relying exclusively on three Obama officials speaking behind a veil of anonymity"--"that the White House is 'crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely.'" Finding it "revealing" that "the article quotes two Bush national security officials justifying the need for detention without charges," Greenwald writes of how "anonymous trial balloon articles like this one are difficult to comment on because it's obviously designed to announce that a certain policy is being considered before it's actually written, and so none of the key details is known." That said, he gives it a shot anyway:

This specific article is even worse than the usual one of its type, since it's particularly uncritical in passing along administration claims without any skepticism.... Worse, the article does not provide any information about the Obama officials whose mission the reporters are dutifully carrying out, so there's no way to assess their motives.

Those journalistic practices produce egregious sentences like this: "'Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,' the official said."

Greenwald would really "love to know which so-called 'civil liberties groups' are pushing the White House for an executive order establishing the power of indefinite detention," telling us that "it's certainly not the ACLU or Center for Constitutional Rights, both of which issued statements vehemently condemning the proposal."

Proving his memory better (or at least less selective) than that of the institution of corporate journalism, Media Bloodhound blogger Brad Jacobson (6/24/09) is proposing that "It might be more difficult for Republicans to bash President Obama for being 'timid' in his comments about the Iranian government's violence against protesters if the U.S. media didn't consistently censor U.S./Iranian history":

Take CNN's recent Iran timeline, titled "A Brief Look at Iran's History."

According to the timeline, which begins in 1979, Iran has "been at odds with the West and some of its neighbors" since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It refers to the Shah as having been "pro-Western." Yet in the mother of all omissions, CNN leaves out how the U.S. government was directly involved in bringing the Shah to power in a 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Jacobson has to look overseas to cite reporting of the fact that "the CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, run until then in by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company." That Agence France-Presse piece goes on to explain how "for many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests."

So maybe its not Obama's "timidity" that really gets under corporate commentators' skin, but the fact that even the United States' president is more honest about these facts than the folks at our major Cable News Network: "You might remember Obama owning up to this bit of history during his recent trip to the Middle East, in a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo."

Listen to the related FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).

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.

Dirk Smillie's Forbes interview (6/18/09) with veteran news analyst Andrew Tyndall includes the observation that "mainstream press--network newscasts in particular--have been criticized for overly favorable coverage of the Obama administration." Tyndall takes the opportunity to make some important distinctions about this common allegation:

There may be a personality bias, not a liberal bias. Since the inauguration, Obama has completely dominated the news agenda. He's a ratings getter. Compare that with George W. Bush's early days in the White House. There was very little news until September 11. It's certainly true that there has been favoritism toward Obama, but only in the sense that the networks want to cover him.

The crucial point usually missed in this conversation: "That's not the same thing as reporting with a bias toward his policies." See FAIR's take on this trend from even before Obama won the presidency--Media Advisory: "Pro-Obama Media?: What Talk About Media Favoritism Really Means" (11/4/08).

Norman Solomon uses his most recent Creators Syndicate column (6/19/09) to call for journalism that "is open scrutiny of the dynamics of power. Reporters should shine a bright light on behind-the-scenes maneuvers that block congressional oversight of administration policies":

Last Tuesday, when the House of Representatives approved a supplemental spending bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there must have been celebration at the White House. Days of intense arm-twisting paid off.

The Obama administration had brandished the weapon of retribution against the newest Democratic arrivals in the House. Most news coverage seemed oblivious, but not all. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported just hours before the war-funding measure came to the floor, "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no."

Even though "journalists expect strong-arm tactics to come from the White House and may actually view them as evidence of the effective use of presidential power," Solomon maintains that "huge concentrations of power are hazardous to democracy": "We may shrug and say words to the effect of 'that's the way things are'--but the fact remains that we need journalism to scrutinize 'the way things are.'"

However, Solomon has several examples--from media failure "to scrutinize the Gulf of Tonkin incident" on up to "adulatory news coverage" of "drastically loosened" financial regulation in the '90s--that demonstrate how, "unfortunately, too many journalists behave as though levers pulled by the powerful are not notable enough to be questioned."

Amanda Terkel of Think Progress (6/18/09) has posted video and transcript of an MSNBC segment in which Joe Scarborough asked CNBC's Jim Cramer about "a stunning poll the New York Times has this morning suggesting that Americans are more concerned about deficits than stimulus":

Cramer claimed that Americans aren't buying into healthcare reform right now because "it just means tax increases, and there's got to be someone who pays for it." According to Cramer, the solution that "everybody" wants is for Obama to "go away": "But until we get the economy moving again, I think everybody wishes that Obama would just kind of go away for a little bit."

If Cramer looked closer at the poll, it also shows that 57 percent of the American public approve of what Obama is doing on the economy overall. Of course, Cramer is someone who claimed that Obama's policies have resulted in “the most, greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president” and is known for his irresponsible financial cheerleading (e.g., “Bear Stearns is not in trouble“).

Terkel has to wonder if, in actuality, "maybe it's not Obama who Americans want to 'just kind of go away for a little bit.'”

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 6/14/09) has caught "Fox on 15th (a.k.a. 'The Washington Post')" once again "departing from normal news practice" with "another editorial complaining about President Obama's deficits on the front page." The piece's subhead--"Concern Mounts in White House as 2010 Elections Loom"--prompts some hard questions from Baker: "Who is concerned? The story doesn't tell us. Who says that they are concerned? The story doesn't tell us." His conclusion--"In short, it's not clear that there is any news here":

But the Washington Post wants to highlight the budget deficit, so it won't let such details stand in the way; after all, there were protesters in Wisconsin calling President Obama a socialist. That's enough for a front-page news story in the Washington Post.

Needless to say, the Washington Post has no problem ignoring completely far larger protests that don't agree with its editorial agenda, much less putting them on the front page. It is incredible that at a time when close to 15 million people are out of work that the Washington Post can continue to obsess about the deficit.

And, just so "there is no doubt which side the Washington Post is on," Baker reminds us that "of course this is also a paper that highlights on the front page that it is now easier to hire nannies."

Responding to "both Likud Party members in Israel as well as their Americans supporters" who "complain that the Obama administration is unduly 'interfering' in Israeli politics"--as exemplified by Ben Smith of Politico reporting that "the administration's escalating pressure on Israel to freeze all growth of its settlements on Palestinian land has begun to stir concern among Israel's numerous allies"--Salon's Glenn Greenwald (6/3/09, ad-viewing required) likens the situation to "teenagers who tell their parents that they are not compelled to comply with parental dictates" and are told that "as long as they seek financial support, then the parents have the right to demand certain actions in return":

Identically, if Israel wants to be free of what it and some of its U.S. supporters call "interference" from the Obama administration, that's very easy to achieve: Israel can stop asking for tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayer money, huge amounts of military and weapons supplies for its various wars, and unyielding American diplomatic protection at the U.N. But as long as Israel remains dependent on the U.S. in countless ways, then Obama not only has the right--but he has the obligation--to demand that Israel cease activities which harm U.S. interests.

Continuing settlement expansions that the entire world recognizes as illegal--what Time's Joe Klein accurately calls "taking territory that the rest of the world, without exception, considers Palestinian"--clearly harms U.S. interests in all sorts of ways, as Obama himself has concluded. He would be abdicating one of his primary responsibilities in foreign policy--maximizing U.S. national security rather than those of other countries--if he failed to demand that Israel cease this activity and if he failed to use U.S. leverage to compel compliance with those demands.

Writing that "Israelis are taking Obama's pressure quite seriously, as are many of his Israel-centric supporters in the U.S," Greenwald encourages "those who want Obama to continue to depart from the Bush administration’s blind support for Israeli actions" to "continue to make themselves heard, since those who desire a continuation of that blind Israeli support certainly intend to"--and we all know which group is sure to get unquestioning encouragement from the big U.S. outlets...

Recapping at TPM Café (5/27/09) how the U.S. "press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans," Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell writes that "a hard-right [George W.] Bush, whether real or media-created, would have never beaten Gore--not that this one did either." Reminding us that "the New York Times, for example, had been very tough on [President Bill] Clinton on its editorial page," Mitchell says that "once in office, a long honeymoon between press and president ensued," and "just as Bush's approval ratings tanked and criticism was about to spread, 9/11 came along to torment the country, but save Bush." Mitchell then brings us into the present with shrewd insight into a hypothetical:

No one in the media criticized Bush for months, let alone suggested that maybe he had let down the country and invited a terrorist attack, or at least failed to prevent it. (Imagine that happening in the future if the country is attacked again under Obama--watch Fox and Friends howl.) Some have suggested that the New York Times, and others long accused of exhibiting liberal bias, went overboard on backing Bush after 9/11, given a rare chance to wave the flag and promote a war (Afghanistan) without shame for once and bolster their flagging image as super-patriots.

Of course, the problem was: They didn't stop there, and most went along like sheep in the run-up to the Iraq War.

"In fact," Mitchell notes, the date of his piece "marks the fifth anniversary of the day the Times belatedly admitted its failures on Iraq (while refusing to name or punish reporters and editors). It wasn't just a failure on WMD, it was a failure to recognize Bush and his crowd for what they were, individually and collectively."

Noticing how "in the past week, Republican politicians and pundits have been striving mightily to invoke fear in the hearts of the American people," News Corpse blogger Mark Howard has collected (5/25/09) some choice quotes from GOP members "blanketing the airwaves with assertions that President Obama's policies on national security (Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, torture, etc.) will result in another 9/11":

Cheney: "It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe."...

John Boehner: "I think this is a pre-9/11 mentality, and I think it’ll make our nation less safe."

Karl Rove: "They’re doing the wrong thing for our country, they're doing the wrong thing for our men and women in uniform, and they're making us less safe."

But another selection of quotations, from corporate journalists themselves, support Howard's observation that not only are Dick Cheney & Co. "accelerating the rhetoric," they also are "bringing along reinforcements to alert the terrorists that America is 'less safe' and therefore vulnerable":

Joe Scarborough (MSNBC): "I knew by the second day that America was less safe."

Laura Ingraham (Fox News): "I think you can make a pretty compelling case that we're less safe today."...

David Gregory (Meet the Press): "But do you agree with the vice president when he says that the country is less safe under President Obama?"
Newt Gingrich: "Absolutely."

Poking holes in the Brookings Institution's "preening conceit"--"they bequeath their website with an '.edu' suffix... They are 'scholars.' Just ask them and they'll tell you"--Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/26/09, ad-viewing required) quotes one blogger fundamentally debunking Brookings mainstay William Glaberson's May 22 New York Times contention that, as U.S. president, Barack Obama "has sworn an oath to protect the country": "Barack Obama did not swear an oath to 'protect the country.' He swore an oath to protect the principles upon which the country was founded and the document in which those principles are enshrined."

Looking more broadly at "Beltway world," in which "the Brookings Institution is a 'liberal' think tank," Greenwald explains that

when it comes to foreign policy and civil liberties, these are three of its most consequential contributions over the last several years: (1) the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, in the form of Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon (working in tandem, as usual, with the ultra-neoconservative American Enterprise Institute); (2) unquestioning devotion to Israel's right-wing policies, in the form of major funder Haim Saban ("I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.... On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk"); and (3) indefinite, preventive detention with no charges or trial in the form of Benjamin Wittes (with his close associate, Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith), who also serves at the right-wing Hoover Institution and writes for the Weekly Standard. Only in Washington would such a group be deemed anything other than extremist.

In fact, U.S. journalists see the Brookings Institute as so far from the "extreme" that they have made it the No. 1 most-cited think every single year since FAIR started tracking such things in 1995. See our annual Think Tank Spectrum report by longtime contributor Michael Dolny.

Wondering "why NPR decided it was appropriate to present Cheney's blatantly self-serving propaganda as anything remotely relevant to current policy," NPR Check contributor Brian (5/23/09) blogs about current president Barack Obama and former vice president Dick Cheney recently "attacking the policies of the other administration and defending their own positions in speeches." Even though each was given "in front of friendly audiences unable to challenge them," NPR's Morning Edition of May 22 "presented them as a face-to-face debate between the two men, alternating soundbites from each," and giving

Cheney equal billing with the president in a piece titled "Obama, Cheney: Different Views on National Security." The title is offensive not only because it presents Cheney's views as equally relevant as the current president's, but also because it refers to the crimes of torture, the prison at Guantánamo Bay and indefinite detention without trial as simply "national security." (At least the extended Web version of the "debate" is titled "Obama, Cheney Face Off on Torture.")

In case you've forgotten, Brian writes that, "yes, this is the same Dick Cheney who... has every motivation to cover up the various crimes committed under his reign in the Bush administration. So one might reasonably ask, Who gives a shit what Dick Cheney has to say now?"