One of the main assumptions of the final weeks of coverage of the congressional debate over healthcare reform was that the public was opposed to the White House plan. But some polling analysis shows that this wasn't the case. Barry Sussman noted this at the Nieman Watchdog on March 5. A McClatchy/Ipsos poll from late February told the usual tale: 41 percent supported the plan, 47 opposed. Sussman wrote:

But the pollsters went a step further, asking those opposed--509 people in all--if they were against the proposals because they "don't go far enough to reform healthcare" or because they go too far. Thirty-seven percent said it was because the proposals don't go far enough.

So a good number of those who answered in the negative were actually saying that they thought the White House was too timid. A subsequent CNN poll asked the same type of follow-up question, and found a similar result--as noted by the blogger Digby (3/24/10), Wolf Blitzer explained it to his CNN colleague Rick Sanchez like this:

Well, you know, when people are asked, we did that poll, CNN Opinion Research Poll, that said, "You like this healthcare bill, or not like it"; we just assumed, a lot of us, that the people who said they didn't like it didn't like it because it was too much interference, or too much taxes or whatever.

But if you take a closer look at people who didn't like it, about 12 percent of those people who said they didn't like it they didn't like it because they didn't think it went far enough. They wanted a single-payer option, they wanted the so-called public option, they didn't like not from the right, they didn't like it because it wasn't left or liberal enough.

That's how you got 50 percent of the American people who said, "we don't like this plan." But only about 40 or 38 percent were the ones who said it was too much government interference.

If reporters had understood and/0r explained this earlier, we could have had a very different debate. Then again, a corporate media that dismissed single-payer and derided the public option as out of the mainstream would be unlikely to do much better.

FAIR has a new Action Alert out on CNN's newest political commentator: Red State's Erick Erickson. For some indication of why this is perhaps the creepiest move by a cable network since MSNBC hired Michael Savage--and for an email address to communicate your feelings--click here.  Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or comments on the alert, in the comments thread here.

From CNN's American Morning (2/1/10), an interview by anchor Kiran Chetry with White House OMB director Peter Orszag:

CHETRY: You also talk about letting taxes expire for families that make over $250,000. Some would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class.

ORSZAG: Well, I guess it's not the parts of the country where I've been.

Households that make $250,000 or more a year make up 1.5 percent of the U.S. public.

CNN's Lou Dobbs (11/9/09) on the Fort Hood shootings:

I think we should point out, too, for the first time in my memory in eight years, we have seen quickly CAIR step up on the day of the shootings, the largest representative of the Islamic faith step up, and condemn the shootings instantly.

CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations--a group that has, by its own count, issued dozens of statements condemning terrorist acts over the years, and coordinated an anti-terrorism fatwa endorsed by 340 U.S. Muslim organizations. As CAIR put it:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has a clear record of consistently and persistently condemning terrorism. Yet American Muslim groups like CAIR get repeatedly asked the question why have Muslims not spoken out against terrorism? The fact is they have, but who is listening?

Not Lou Dobbs, apparently.

Afghan activist and politician Malalai Joya has been in the U.S. to discuss her book A Woman Among Warlords. As noted by Eric Garris at Antiwar.com, Joya's was treated very differently by CNN than by CNN International. Specifically, Joya's mention of the military occupation of her country seemed to offend CNN host Heidi Collins (10/28/09):

Again, "occupation" would certainly be your word. A lot of people would take great issue with you calling the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in your country an" occupation."

It's not clear to whom Collins is referring when she speaks of people who would take "great issue" with Joya's characterization. As Juan Cole put it, "that the U.S. and NATO are militarily occupying Afghanistan is recognized by the U.N. Security Council and is a simple fact of international law."

Or ask the International Committee of the Red Cross:

Once a situation exists which factually amounts to an occupation the law of occupation applies--whether or not the occupation is considered lawful.

Therefore, for the applicability of the law of occupation, it makes no difference whether an occupation has received Security Council approval, what its aim is, or indeed whether it is called an "invasion", "liberation", "administration" or "occupation." As the law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian considerations, it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application.

CNN host Lou Dobbs presented some big news on--wait for it--immigration last night (10/22/09):

New evidence that the American public wants action on the illegal immigration crisis in this country. A new CNN poll finds the vast majority of the American public wants illegal immigration stopped and most want illegal immigrants now in the country to leave--Lisa Sylvester with our report.

The CNN poll is odd; the main question is, "Would you like to see the number of illegal immigrants currently in this country increased, decreased, or remain the same?" 73 percent chose "decreased." They asked a follow-up to find out if people want the numbers decreased "a little," "a lot" or if they'd like to seem all of them removed immediately. Thirty-seven percent of the total sample chose the latter option; if that's what Dobbs meant by "most" people, that's just inaccurate reporting of his own network's poll.

Dobbs' reporter Lisa Sylvester uses the poll to make a bigger political point:

SYLVESTER: But Mark Krikorian with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher immigration law, says if anything, these polling numbers show that comprehensive immigration reform is going to be a tough sell.

MARK KRIKORIAN: Clearly, it's not happening any time soon and these poll results really just underline that reality.

SYLVESTER: But President Obama still is insisting and committed to signing a comprehensive immigration bill.

The idea that responses to this poll reveal people's feelings towards "reform" is a giant leap, since the CNN poll does not seem to have asked about that. Other polls have, though, like an April 9 ABC/Washington Post survey:

Would you support or oppose a program giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and meet other requirements?

Support: 61 percent

Oppose: 31 percent

A CBS/New York Times poll (4/22-26/09) gave three options for dealing with undocumented immigrants:

Stay, Apply for Citizenship: 44 percent

Stay as Guest Workers: 21 percent

Leave: 30 percent

Since all three groups could describe themselves as wanting to see illegal immigration "decreased," there's no reason to believe that CNN's poll tells us much of anything about the immigration debate. It does, however, give Lou Dobbs something to talk about.

Eighteen-year-old Caster Semenya, a runner from South Africa, just blew away the competition in the women's 800-meter world championship race. But the news reports yesterday weren't about that--they were about whether she's "really" a woman or not. And supposedly serious outlets like the AP and CNN are sinking to tabloid levels of coverage on the issue.

The AP video of the controversy, posted on the L.A. Times website, kicks off: "Quick! Man--or woman?" The piece includes slow pans over Semenya's body, more tabloidy commentary ("She--and yes, SHE claims to be a woman"), and the offering of her voice as some sort of evidence that she's not what she claims to be. It's what you'd sadly expect to find on E! or some other tabloid show--not the AP, or the L.A. Times' website, for that matter.

CNN's Jack Cafferty's response to the news was: "Story creeps me out. It's weird. Do you think she's a man or a woman?" His colleague Campbell Brown teased the "bizarre story" and promised viewers "a whole lot more on this very strange case coming up a little bit later tonight." CNN's Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill called it "fascinating," "amazing" and "wild."

During her full story on the subject, Brown acknowledged one of the problems with the scrutiny: "I mean, this is a young woman, a young girl. It's a pretty cruel thing for this girl to have to go through emotionally, psychologically presuming it's not a scam." Yes indeed, scrutinizing someone's body and gender presentation (as well as your accomplishments) on television and calling it bizarre and creepy is pretty cruel, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, that sort of coverage of people with different gender presentations is not unusual--and awareness of that cruelty didn't stop Brown from feeding into it.

Since "on his Wednesday radio show, [Lou] Dobbs as much as announced that CNN president Jon Klein" is forcing him into "focusing on a nonpartisan objective reality that it is our job to cover"--with Dobbs "admitting, 'I resisted this idea initially'"--author and journalist Leslie Savan (TheNation.com, 8/12/09) has noticed some "kind of French" behavior from the usually "government-out-of-my-face bloviator," in the form of "a month-long, nation-a-night series to 'learn from other countries' healthcare plans'":

But as Lou has proved again and again, he can't help but resist. On radio the very next day, he slammed Obama for compiling "an enemies' list" (not true), and harrumphed mightily: "I'm moving from being an independent, sir, to being absolutely opposed to your, any policy you could conceive of!" As if he hadn't moved into outright opposition long ago.

So, as soon as Lou had completed all that extra homework--writing 100 times on the blackboard, "I will push opinion aside. I will push opinion aside"--he finally gets to bust out and mix it up with his guests. Only then do the familiar snide comments, appalled facial expressions, and twisted facts spill into a headlong attack on each and every aspect of Obama's healthcare plan--even the aspects resembling those he had just more or less commended in Europe.

That is, Dobbs can read all sorts of fair and balanced words from a script, but he is willfully deaf to their meaning.

"Anything that doesn't fit his worldview," Savan says, "he doesn't hear, it doesn't compute, and he goes blank."

Former PR agent Wendell Potter's stories of how he helped the health insurance's industry's campaign "to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko" calls to mind just how successful that campaign was. Corporate media coverage of the debate raised by the film's expose of the for-profit insurance system went out of its way to demonize Moore. USA Today ran an editorial tied to the film against a single-payer healthcare plan, which was paired with an "Opposing View" from an insurance executive that denounced single-payer even more harshly. CBS News' Jeff Greenfield distinguished himself with his (inaccurate) claim that the U.S. doesn't have public funding for healthcare because "Americans are just different." And reviewing CNN's report on Sicko can only make one relieved that Sanjay Gupta turned down the job of surgeon general.

If you'd like to see an end to this kind of insurance industry PR masquerading as journalism, you can sign FAIR's petition calling for the inclusion of the single-payer option in coverage of the healthcare reform debate.

Ishmael Reed's contextualization (CounterPunch, 6/29/09) of the epic demonization of Michael Jackson within historical U.S. media racism also takes a swipe at CNN's Black in America program, "an exercise meant to boost ratings by making whites feel good by making blacks look bad, the marketing strategy of the mass media since the 1830s":

In preparing for a sequel to the first Black in America, which boosted the networks ratings (the O. J. trial saved CNN!), CNN rolled out the usual stereotypes about black Americans. Unmarried black mothers were exhibited, without mentioning that births to unmarried black women have plunged since 1976 more than that of any other ethnic group. Then we got some footage that implied that blacks as a group were homophobes even though Charles Blow, a statistician for the New York Times, recently published a chart showing that gays have the least to fear from blacks. Recently, the media perpetrated a hoax that blacks were responsible for the passage of Proposition 8, the California proposition that banned gay marriage. An academic study refuted this claim, but that didn't deter the New York Times from hiring Benjamin Schwarz to explain black homophobia. Schwarz is the writer who wrote in the Los Angeles Times that blacks who were victims of lynchings in the south were probably guilty.

In the last Black in America, Soledad O'Brien, CNN's designated tough love agent against the brothers and sisters, scolded a black man for not attending his daughter's birthday party. The aim of this scene was meant to humiliate black men as neglectful fathers. Ms. O'Brien won’t be permitted by her employees to mention that 75 percent of white children will live at one time or another in a single-parent household and that the governor of South Carolina's not showing up for Father's Day isn't just a lone aberration in "White America."

On that note, Reed wonders, "How would CNN promote a White in America?" Would they feature "the thousands of meth addicts who have abandoned their children? The California rural and suburban white women who do more dope than Latino and black youth?" And if not, "Why not? Can’t get State Farm, Ford and McDonald's to sponsor such a program? All of these companies are sponsoring Black in America"--"the aim of which," Reed reminds us, "is to cast collective blame on blacks for the country's social problems. For ratings."

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.

Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz (5/3/09) seemed startled when the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza argued that "just because Bush or some previous president didn't garner as much coverage as Michelle and Barack Obama did doesn't tell you anything about press bias one way or another."

"Are you kidding?" Kurtz exclaimed.

He didn't express any similar surprise when CNN in-house conservative Amy Holmes came up with this "little-known fact":

The Washington Times reported this last week.... Actually, at this point in his presidency, Barack Obama is the fourth least popular of the past five presidents. You wouldn't know that from the press coverage, and you wouldn't know that George Bush...at this point in his presidency, in 2001, after having had the recount, not even winning the popular vote, in fact had higher Gallup approvals than Barack Obama does right now.

Well, no, you wouldn't know those things, because they aren't true. At the 100-day mark, Gallup found a job approval rating for Obama of 65 percent--three percentage points higher than the 62 percent that George W. Bush had at the same point in his first term. Gallup's polling found that Obama had a higher 100th-day approval rating than Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon as well. Of the last seven presidents, only Ronald Reagan, at 68 percent, had a higher job-approval rating--and Reagan, as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert pointed out (4/29/09), had just survived an assassination attempt in March 2001.

So how could the Washington Times have gotten it so wrong? A commenter on Media Matters' website traced this right-wing talking point back to a blog post by Judith Apter Klinghoffer on the History News Network (3/24/09). Klinghoffer declared that "Obama's Poll Numbers Trail Those of W."--a conclusion she reached by comparing Bush's job-approval rating to a number she calculated by combining the ratings of "excellent" and "good" received by Obama when people were asked what kind of job they thought he was doing.

Needless to say, you can't directly compare the answers to two different polling questions--particularly not when you can compare the results of the same question being asked. But the apples-to-oranges comparison produced results that were appealing to the right, so you soon saw James Pinkerton citing this bogus finding on Fox News Channel (4/25/09): "Judith Klinghoffer, writing for the History News Network, made the point that Obama ranked seventh out of the last nine presidents in Gallup poll opinion ratings. So seventh out of nine is not so good." Three days later, the Washington Times was making the same argument--and then it ends up on the not-so-well-named Reliable Sources.

Kurtz did take issue, sort of, with Holmes' claim, which ran counter to a wealth of polling data on Obama's approval ratings: "Although his numbers, we have to say, are pretty good." But when Holmes retorted: "They're pretty good, but comparatively. You're asking comparatively, how does the press treat these politicians different, and they do," Kurtz conceded: "OK. Fair enough."

Actually, that doesn't seem very fair at all.

The Daily Howler's Bob Somerby has a look (4/27/09) at how Newsweek bigshot Fareed Zakaria "pandered and fawned in dragging out yesterday's panel" on his CNN show

Zakaria: As I was thinking about the smartest people I could gather to talk about the first stage of Barack Obama’s presidency, I thought of that wonderful quotation from Oscar Wilde: "Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."

So today, I'll be talking with a panel of geniuses. Each of them has books and accomplishments too numerous to mention. I'll talk about a few. The others will be on the screen.

With a set up like that you must be on the edge of your seat, right? Well here's the full roster of Zakaria's "panel of geniuses": Jon Meacham, Walter Isaacson and Peggy Noonan. Click on each of those names for a look at the real nature of their intellects. And click here to read of Zakaria's--Extra!: "Fareed Zakaria, Spokesperson for the Global Elite: Newsweek Pundit Presents Pro-Corporate Views as the Poor’s Perspective" (7-8/08) by Roger Bybee.

Brad Jacobson has a new Media Bloodhound post (4/21/09) lauding CNN anchor Anderson Cooper for his "refreshing" refusal of "a generic phony Devil's advocate stance" when scholar Mark Danner "torpedoed" CNN analyst David Gergen's claim that

the number of people who were interrogated [by U.S. personnel] with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited. It was, of the thousands of people who were captured, it was about some 30 or 35 whom these techniques were used.

Instead, Cooper "actually set up Danner's response to Gergen's allegations with...facts and context":

Cooper: Do we know how many people died in U.S. custody? I've read reports of more than 100 or about 100 or maybe about a quarter of those were being investigated as actual homicides....

Danner: I think the rough figure is slightly more than 100 and 30, 29 or 30 were actually investigated as homicides.

But Jacobson also tells how this positivity actually illustrates the lacking state of corporate reportage overall:

This was not your normal CNN news program segment during which two guests spout differing opinions and the host plays the "fair and balanced" referee.

Cooper's approach in this circumstance, his effort to ferret out the facts from his guests and put those facts in context--however absurd it is that this should be unique--is unique for a CNN program, just as it still is for far too much of broadcast and cable network news shows.

Listen to the recent edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Mark Danner on Torture" (4/10/09)