Following his death last week, various network news tributes replayed footage of Cronkite's influential '68 on-air editorial. Yet scrubbed from the memorializing were similar instances of Cronkite's journalistic candor regarding Iraq, such as his 2006 call for withdrawal from a war he went on to describe as "illegal from the start," initiated on "false pretenses" and a "terrible disaster" serving "no purpose" that has "probably made us less safe."

But the most revealing omission from these tributes--especially in context to the pageant of eulogies extolling Cronkite's journalistic integrity--may be his response to a reporter's question during a 2006 news conference.

As reported in the Independent UK at the time:

When a reporter asked [Cronkite] whether, given the chance, he would offer similar advice on Iraq [as he had on Vietnam], he did not even wait until the end of the question. "Yes," he said flatly. "It's my belief that we should get out now."

In the fact that, "for Cronkite, the question was simple, his answer emphatic," Jacobson perceives some journalistic ideals distinctly unfashionable nowadays: "No need to chew it over, to seek a mealy-mouthed moderate reaction to address the Bush administration's unprecedented extremism, brutality and lawlessness. Doing so would mean that he was operating within their narrative, not his."

The current example being their July 7 front-page headliner, "In Sex Film Industry, Some Long for a Real Plot":

No, this isn't satire. It's a cover story on our nation's paper of record.... The article opens:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. "I couldn’t wait to get my next script," she said.

There's no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

Jacobson commiserates with the Times editors' concerns: "Two wars. Jobless rate at nearly 10 percent. Healthcare in crisis. And if that weren't enough to bear, now there are dwindling plot lines in our pornography!"

Meanwhile, the same day's placement of an "In Senate, Debate on Detainee Legal Rights" piece way back on page A18 has Jacobson convinced that "apparently the Times thinks Americans are, as the kids say, so over the issue of detainee rights that the dearth of pornography plots trumped this story by 18 pages":

Intro:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts....

"So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?" Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

Looking past "this article's banishment to the back pages," Jacobson notes how "the story fails to include a substantive factual rejoinder to Senator McCain's misleading statement"--the facts being that "scores of detainees have already been released by the U.S.," but only "after being held for years with no charge and incurring what the Times calls 'brutal' interrogation techniques but the rest of the world calls 'torture.'"

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).

As detailed in a recent New York Times article, when Chevron, America's third-largest corporation, heard that 60 Minutes was preparing a report about the $27 billion lawsuit filed against it for allegedly contaminating the Ecuador region of the Amazon rain forest, Chevron hired former TV newsman Randall to craft a video from the corporation's perspective, which was posted on YouTube and Chevron's website three weeks before the 60 Minutes report aired on May 3.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley's investigation presented multiple perspectives, while Randall's included only Chevron officials and consultants. Everyone interviewed in Randall's piece, in other words, was paid by Chevron, including Randall himself.

While "Randall's video also clearly strives to resemble an authentic news report, employing classic stylistic TV news techniques, while never informing the viewer it's a Chevron production," what Jacobson considers "most deceptive" is that "Randall--looking like the consummate TV newsman--begins the video with the accompanying graphic 'Gene Randall Reporting' and concludes with the voiceover: 'This is Gene Randall reporting.'"