Alarmist corporate media coverage of the "threat" from Iran is everywhere, thanks to a Senate appearance yesterday by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

But Clapper said very little in his remarks that would justify the propagandistic coverage we're seeing.  His main point was that Iran could launch attacks if it felt threatened. It is hard to see how this is particularly surprising. Clapper pointed to the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. as evidence that Iran seems more eager to assert itself, perhaps even inside the United States. But there were many people who raised serious questions about that rather implausible scenario (which involved hiring a Mexican drug gang to carry out the assassination).

As the Wall Street Journal reported (one of the few corporate outlets I saw pushing back against the official alarmism):

There is still widespread doubt that an alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was authorized at the highest levels in Tehran, said Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"If that's the only data point, I think it's a stretch to conclude that the regime is now looking to commit acts of terror on U.S. soil," he said.

That kind of caution was in short supply on the network newscasts. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (1/31/12) announced:

Iran's threat. Not just the nuclear program. Tonight, U.S. intelligence warns Iran may be prepared to strike on American soil.

Williams called Clapper's testimony  a "chilling new assessment about the scope of the threat from Iran." As correspondent Andrea Mitchell explained,  "Experts warn that the U.S. is even more vulnerable than Israel if Iran retaliates or launches a pre-emptive bomb plot.... Soft U.S. targets like embassies throughout the Persian Gulf, and 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan, next door to Iran."

It wasn't until the end of Mitchell's report that any notes of caution were sounded:

Still, intelligence officials told the Senate today they don't think Iran has taken the final step, deciding to build a bomb. But Israel does think Iran has crossed that red line, and U.S. officials say if attacked, Iran would not hesitate to retaliate against both Israel and the U.S.

So Iran is a substantial threat, though then again it might not even be developing the weapons the U.S. and Israel claim are in the works. And really, the "threat" seems mostly that Iran might be ready to respond to an attack on its country--something virtually any country in the world would do.

But for sheer propaganda value, ABC World News' January 31 broadcast would be tough to top.

First, start with alarming graphic:

Then Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz announced, "The saber rattling from Iran has been constant."

Match that with threatening B-roll footage from the enemy country. Weapons  on display at a military parade, for instance:

Iran "may be more ready than ever to launch terror attacks in the United States," Raddatz explained. Cue footage of apparently menacing soldiers:

Don't forget to show the enemy county's leader (or, rather, a close approximation) meeting with other Official Enemies. Like this:

And why not one more, while reminding viewers that such figures "have little love for the U.S.":

It's important to remember, amidst all this hoopla, that it is U.S. military officials and the president who have regularly threatened that "no options" are "off the table" in dealing with Iran. That is code for using nuclear weapons--and Barack Obama's latest repetition of that apocalyptic threat got a standing ovation from Congress.

It is hard to argue honestly that the real escalation  is coming from the Iranian side. But that's what propaganda is for.

NBC Nightly News (10/7/11) marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan War on October 7 with a segment that linked the war to the Occupy Wall Street protests. As anchor Brian Williams put it in the introduction:

Tonight protesters remain in the streets of a dozen U.S. cities, angry over what's happened to their lives and our country; and a big part of that, over these last 10 years, the two wars we've been fighting, starting 10 years ago today. This is the anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, longer now than World War II and the Civil War combined.

That's pretty unusual. The report that followed was not.  Quoted in Jim Miklaszewski's report: Retired general Karl Eikenberry, retired general David Barno and retired general Barry McCaffrey (who some might recall for his role as part of Pentagon propaganda effort to feed talking points to TV pundits; he's also on the board of military companies that profit from government contracts).

Not to worry--also quoted in the piece was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is not retired. Getting current and former military officials into a story counts is a kind of balance, right?

The New York Times had a headline on Saturday that read, "Imagining a Christie Campaign for President."

That seems appropriate--if we're talking about how it's the corporate media doing the imagining.

On ABC's This Week (10/2/11), Jonathan Karl announced that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's speech at the Reagan Library "was  the most electrifying event of the campaign so far."

That speech was treated like a big event on the NBC Nightly News (9/28/11), with anchor Brian Williams saying up front that Christie is  "the man whose every word is being watched and listened to so very carefully." Reporter Chuck Todd--you know, the voice of the voiceless--explains that there is a "twist" in the presidential race:  "Chris Christie opened the door a crack to running for president."

What does that mean? Apparently he didn't say he's not running:

It's what New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie did not say at the Reagan Library Tuesday night that froze the Republican presidential race in place. He didn't say no.

In the NBC segment, Christie tells people to go check out a Politico story--which is a compilation of all the times he's said he's not running for president. Which kind of sounds like he doesn't think he's running for president, right?

And if that doesn't convince you, surely this will:

TODD: But when an audience member pleaded with him:

Offscreen Voice #2: I mean this with all my heart. We can't wait another four years to 2016. We need you. Your country needs you to run for president.

TODD: Christie stopped joking and left an opening.

Gov. CHRISTIE: I thank you for what you're saying and I take it in and I'm listening to every word of it and feeling it, too.

TODD: Everything about Christie's speech screamed national campaign.

Everything except, you know, the part where he says he's running for president.

There's been plenty written about how reporters skew reality by treating "both sides" as equally intransigent or inflexible when it comes to the budget deficit battle.

Another example, from the L.A. Times today (8/2/11):

For Republicans, it was preventing any tax increase to upper-income families.

For Democrats, it was ensuring no cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and a handful of other programs that aid the elderly and the poor.

And for Obama, it was getting a deal that would end the threat of an economy-shaking default until after the 2012 presidential election.

None of the key players was willing to go all out to actually solve the nation's long-term financial problems. As a result, the deal doesn't.

The implication of course, is that opposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare is in some way comparable to opposing any tax increases anywhere under any circumstances. This glosses over the fact that the Bush tax cuts played a large role in creating the current deficit problem. And it evades the fact that it is certainly possible to fix the budget problem without cutting Social Security and Medicare. It is much more difficult to imagine how to do the same without raising revenues.

But the real lesson we must be taught over and over again is that both sides are to blame for not fixing the nation's problems.

Or consider this exchange from the July 31 NBC Nightly News:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Andrea, you've seen them come and seen them go. This has hardly been a profile in courage. Have you ever seen anything like this?

ANDREA MITCHELL: I actually never have. We've had crises before, political crises. We've had in our lifetime 9/11, Katrina, other national emergencies, tragedies. And in one case or another, in all of those cases one branch of government at least, if one failed, the other would step in. In this case, all branches of government, our entire government seems to be dysfunctional. And it's even questioning in people's minds the checks and balances that was the genius of the framers because now it's stalemate, it's gridlock.

It's hard to know what to make of this. On one level, you sense that Beltway fixtures like Andrea Mitchell have so much invested in the status quo that they cannot fathom how or why the system cannot produce even the appearance of 'bipartisan compromise' they find so important to a functioning democracy. That's the crisis.

More concretely, one has to wonder what she thinks should have been done differently by one of the branches of government. The White House backed a "compromise" that gave Republicans much of what they wanted. They balked and demanded more--which they got. If she means that the Republicans were unusually resistant to compromise, she should just say that--and not blame it on "checks and balances."

There was some Congressional debate over extending certain parts of the Patriot Act last week-- this Institute for Public Accuracy release is a helpful guide to some of the criticisms of the Act.

But don't let anyone tell you there wasn't much coverage of this. On Friday, NBC Nightly News skipped reporting on what was at stake and went right for what really matters:

May 27, 2011 Friday

BRIAN WILLIAMS, anchor:

Back in D.C., a four-year extension of the revised Patriot Act passed by Congress was signed into law minutes before midnight last night. You would be correct to ask, with the president overseas, how exactly did he sign the bill in Washington. Well, by machine, the so-called autopen used by about the last dozen U.S. presidents. They sign their name initially by hand onto a template, then the machine recreates it countless number of times exactly, and in this case the signature had the force of law.

Civil liberties? No thanks--I just want to know about the President's magic pen.

An important story is happening right now that's not getting a whole lot of media attention. A military court is investigating claims that members of a U.S. Army Stryker unit randomly killed Afghan civilians. Some of the soldiers say they were pressured by a commanding officer into participating in the crimes. There are also reports that soldiers took photos of the dead Afghans, along with body parts. One of earliest accounts I'd read of the story appeared in the British media (Guardian, 9/9/10).

The basic outline of the story was recounted in a New York Times story on September 27. But the headline of the piece in some editions (it's still here) was striking:  "Drug Use Cited in Unit Tied to Civilian Deaths."

That is a reference to the brief mention near the bottom of the piece from one lawyer who suggested there was widespread drug use in the unit. That would hardly seem like the most important revelation in the article.

Or consider how NBC Nightly News covered the same story on September 28, courtesy of anchor Brian Williams:

An interrogation video is providing chilling details about how a group of American soldiers allegedly murdered Afghan civilians, and what we're learning is from the soldiers themselves. It's all part of a case that could have an impact on the war in Afghanistan and perhaps put American troops at greater risk of retaliation.

Is it really necessary to justify coverage of the random murder of Afghan civilians by pointing to the hypothetical deaths of U.S. soldiers in response?

Dateline NBC (8/22/10) did a special look back at Hurricane Katrina last weekend in anticipation of the disaster's five-year anniversary. Watching the collage of 2005 footage and Brian Williams' present-day commentary, I was struck by his characterization of the violence:

You know, I've been around a lot of guns and a lot of dead bodies, and a lot of people shooting at people to make dead bodies. But you put them all together and you put it in the United States of America and boy, it gets your attention. You can't shake that....

It was clear already there weren't going to be enough cops. Everywhere we went, every satellite shot, every camera shot, we were at the height of the violence and the looting and the--all the reports of gunplay downtown. Well, who's bathed in the only lights in town? It was us.

The sweltering heat in New Orleans. The more we learn about what this hurricane did, the worse it gets. We had to ask Federal Protection Service guys with automatic weapons to just form a ring and watch our backs while we were doing Dateline NBC one night. We made a decision the French Quarter was no longer safe. Things were getting too dicey and we pulled out to the suburb of Metairie, Louisiana.... I'll be candid. We heard CNN pulled out. That had some influence on our decision. We had no weapons. We don't work that way. That has to separate us as journalists. But it wasn't safe. So here we are driving through town in our rental cars.

State troopers had to cover us by aiming at the men in the street just to tell them, "Don't think of doing a smash and grab and killing this guy for the car." There was no government. There was no semblance. There was no organization. There was no New Orleans for a few days there.

In the days after the levees broke, corporate media outlets were abuzz with stories of looting, rampant murder, snipers shooting at doctors and rescue helicopters, even the raping of babies at the Superdome (stories backed by the local police chief and mayor). But a month later, the New Orleans Times-Picayune revealed (8/26/05) that "most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened"--no babies raped, no snipers, and only four confirmed murders in the entire week following the hurricane, a pretty typical week for New Orleans. (The New York Times four days later (8/29/05) reported six or seven confirmed homicides.) And while "looting" did occur, much of it was for survival in a city where no help--no food, no water--arrived for days.

Unmentioned by Williams was the documented police and white vigilante violence in which at least 11 civilians and possibly many more were shot in the days following the hurricane. Investigative journalist A.C. Thompson, who has done much of the digging on that story, reported yesterday that in the aftermath of Katrina, "an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters."

No doubt the media-stoked hysteria over rampant violence fed into the atmosphere of fear and anarchy that made such policies and shootings possible. Rather than rehash that hysteria, media should be apologizing for the part they played in it.

Somewhat surprisingly, Dateline also replayed this clip from Williams in 2005:

The politics of all this are very simple. If we come out of this crisis and in the next couple of years don't have a national conversation on the following issues: race, class, petroleum, the environment, then we, the news media, will have failed by not keeping people's feet to the fire.

So what's the verdict?

Now, about that national conversation I said we should have about all those issues of race and class and poverty and petroleum, whatever happened with that? Well, in the five years since Katrina, America did elect its first African-American president, but our economy remains crippled. And the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico put petroleum front and center again as an issue that needs our attention. There is one thing, a great thing that happened in New Orleans, a city that's always been inhabited by both saints and sinners: The Saints won, the Super Bowl, that is, putting New Orleans on top after a long struggle after a bad storm.

Huh? So then the media didn't fail, since Obama was elected president and they've covered the biggest environmental disaster in recent U.S. history? Or they kind of failed because we're in a recession? None of that seems to have a lot to do with media keeping anyone's feet to the fire.

During an August 18 segment about the Iraq War, anchor Brian Williams said (emphasis added):

Let's bring into this conversation retired US Army Colonel Jack Jacobs. He's a decorated combat veteran, a recipient of the Medal of Honor and, of course, an NBC News military analyst.

Well, at this point, people like me always ask people like you, what have we learned. Critics of this war are always going to look at it as an elective. They're always going to say those 9/11 pilots weren't Iraqis. And they're always going to say we never found the weapons of mass destruction. So as an analyst--a civilian now, but a veteran military man, what do you think we've learned?

Williams is right about one thing -- people  like him do  always seem to prefer to pose questions to retired military officials. During the run-up to the Iraq War, for instance, NBC was running this advertisement touting their coverage:

Showdown Iraq, and only NBC News has the experts. General Norman Schwarzkopf, allied commander during the Gulf War. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, he was the most decorated four-star general in the Army. General Wayne Downing, former special operations commander and White House adviser. Ambassador Richard Butler and former U.N. weapons Inspector David Kay: Nobody has seen Iraq like they have. The experts. The best information from America's most watched news organization, NBC News.

 Whether those experts provided the "best information" can speak for itself.  Back to the present: If Williams really wanted to know what critics of the war think about the war, why didn't he just ask one?

Brian Williams introduced a report on NBC Nightly News (4/21/10) with this declaration: "Public schools from coast to coast in this country are looking at tens of thousands of layoffs, a lot of them teachers, because the money is not there." Correspondent Ron Allen went on to report:

In Springfield, Illinois, thousands of teachers turned out to try to save their jobs and programs; music, art and sports activities all being threatened with elimination. Many school districts are hoping for federal stimulus help, but in the meantime are locked into longer teacher contracts and higher salaries for tenured teachers. Some experts predict that American education must adjust to a new reality.

This was followed by a quote from Michael Petrilli (who is identified as representing the Thomas Fordham Institute, which is not identified as a conservative education group): "Not only do our schools have to go on a diet, they need to adapt to a whole new way of life because I--this money is gone, and it's not coming back anytime soon."

Concludes Allen: "A crucial test now facing the nation, how to educate more than 50 million public school students with less."

"Less"--that's the key message here, that teachers, parents and children need to accept that "the money is not there" and "adapt to a whole new way of life"--one in which teachers get paid less and children get less education. Only, if the "money is gone," where did it go?

Here are some facts from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis: Between 1971, when I was entering my school-age years, and 2009, the U.S. per capita GDP doubled, from roughly $21,000 to $42,000 a year (in constant dollars).  Since 1984, a couple of years after I graduated from high school, it's risen by 50 percent--from about $28,000.  Just since 1996, the nation's income per person has increased by something like 20 percent.

Assuming that educating our children is at least as important as our other national priorities, we ought to be able to fund education twice as well as we did 40 years ago, and half again as well as we did 25 years ago.  Why is it, instead, that NBC is telling us that schools are going to have to get by with less? Because while the country as a whole has a lot more money, most of it has gone to making the rich richer--and they have no intention of getting by with less.

The night before Obama's big healthcare summit, NBC Nightly News offered some advice. "There's a place where policymakers could look for some tips on how an affordable, well-run system operates," anchor Brian Williams told viewers. "It is already running here in the U.S."

Correspondent Robert Bazell explained: "Many experts agree that whatever happens in the health reform debate, a good model is Kaiser Permanente." Bazell went on to describe how Kaiser's salaried doctors "have no incentive to order unnecessary tests or office visits." He also pointed to cost savings from use of electronic medical records.

"To be sure, patients sometimes complain about Kaiser," Bazell concluded, "but it gets decent ratings in consumer surveys and tends to be one of the less expensive options when people get to chose health plans."

As NBC itself has documented (Dateline, 6/17/07), one of those complaints is patient-dumping; in 2007 Kaiser accepted a settlement after prosecutors charged it with sending a mentally ill homeless woman away from its emergency room in a cab. The woman was caught on camera being dumped by the cab on Skid Row, where she wandered in her hospital gown and slippers until a shelter worker found her. The shelter soon learned she was suffering from high blood pressure, anemia and pneumonia, and she had to be readmitted to a hospital.

The video aired many times on television and was featured prominently in Michael Moore's documentary Sicko--which also pointed out that it was Kaiser that helped convince Nixon HMO's were a good idea. Edgar Kaiser, son of Kaiser Permanente's founder, lobbied Nixon aide John Erlichman in 1971 for the HMO Act, who then successfully lobbied Nixon:

Ehrlichman: "Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can ... the reason he can do it .... I had Edgar Kaiser come in...talk to me about this, and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make."

President Nixon: "Fine." [Unclear]

Ehrlichman: [Unclear] "… and the incentives run the right way."

President Nixon: “Not bad.”

Kaiser's also the place the L.A. Times found (5/17/02) "awarded financial bonuses to call center clerks who spent the least amount of time on the phone with each patient and limited the number of doctors' appointments." And the Sacramento Bee recently reported (2/15/09) on lawsuits against Kaiser for "[trying] to bully outside doctors into transferring patients before it is safe, threatening to withhold payment otherwise" and for its "special, doctor-to-doctor call operation that has become a target of legal actions alleging malpractice and failure to pay claims."

All in all, sounds like a great model. Thanks for the suggestion, NBC!

For another healthcare model that you won't likely find NBC News personnel endorsing, see the new FAIR study, "Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare" (3/6/09).