When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent at last weekend's Summit of the Americas, the corporate media appeared to be caught off guard.

In its initial report, CNN (Newsroom, 4/18/09) appeared to be completely unaware of Galeano's classic 1971 treatise on the history of European and U.S. imperialism in Latin America, failing to correct Obama's initial mistaken belief that the book was penned by Chavez himself.

Both CNN (CNN Newsroom, 4/18/09) and AP (4/19/09) contrasted the immediate surge in the book's sales on Amazon with its previous "obscurity":

It's gone from obscurity to bestseller overnight. In just hours, it zoomed to No. 14 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, and on Friday, it was ranked number 60,280, making its way to the top of the list very fast.--CNN, 4/18/09

The publicity about the gift of the Galeano book helped propel it from relative obscurity to No. 13 on the Amazon.com list of bestsellers by Saturday night.--AP, 4/19/09

The book may not have ranked highly a month ago on Amazon, but it can hardly be described as "obscure." A classic Latin American history text that was banned by several military dictatorships, with its author "forced into exile as the book grew in popularity," according to the New Yorker, the book boasts more than 50 Spanish editions, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. As demonstrated by Chavez's choice, it still has currency with Latin American political leaders.

With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting--and MSNBC mostly mocking-- the right-wing "tea party" demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn't be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn't just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events.

As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington Post today:

Some Fox News hosts have been pushing the tea party protests slated for hundreds of cities today, almost to the point that they seem to be the ringmasters of the event.  "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!" Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney said the other day.

But there's another side to this saga. Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.

The New York Times has run zero stories. (The only mention was Times columnist Paul Krugman taking a brief swipe at the parties.) The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4. The Chicago Tribune ran a 300-word story and an item on postal workers mistaking tea for a hazardous substance. The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today. The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party, nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday (followed by a piece by me on the coverage). MSNBC's coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the "teabagging" until Chris Matthews held a more serious debate on Monday.

I must say I'm struck by this new standard for coverage of citizen activism--papers should cover small protests, some of which haven't happened? Was this the standard for, say, anti-war protests in 2002 and early 2003?

The pressure to treat these events seriously seems to be having some effect. Moments ago CNN had a long introduction to its live report from the Boston tea party, explaining that the protests have spread across the country, stoked by plain old citizen passion. The correspondent on the scene in Boston then explained that there were perhaps a few dozen attendees on hand. I guess Howard Kurtz will be pleased.

Quoting Washington Post/CNN media "critic" Howard Kurtz slamming Headline News for "talking about this constantly on cable for more than a week" and "feasting on this terrible situation," Brad Jacobson (Media Bloodhound, 3/30/09) also cites Kurtz railing against media obsession with octuplet mother Nadya Suleman on CNN: "The media were demonizing her....all the while capitalizing on America's latest soap opera."

But, lo and behold, a "Crossfire-like vapid shouting match" couldn't be resisted:

Kurtz dedicated an entire segment of this past Sunday's Reliable Sources to a gratuitous pie fight between two players involved in Nadya "Octomom" Suleman's never-ending nationally televised freak show. But a little over a month ago, Kurtz decried the media's exploitation of the octuplet mother for ratings and for doing so under the false pretense that concern for her babies' well-being drove their 24/7 coverage.

While seeing evidence that "Kurtz seems to signal that he's in on the joke," as Jacobson sees it, "the problem is, he's not just in on the joke, he's part of the joke of which he's supposed to be critiquing." Picking from among "scores of worthy topics [that] were open for a substantive media discussion," Jacobson writes that Kurtz instead

might have covered the fact that, according to LexisNexis, not one broadcast or cable network news program--including CNN--reported last week's revelations that Bush administration prosecutors tried to pressure former Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, after years of being brutally tortured and having never been charged with a crime, to sign a statement saying he was never tortured and that he committed terrorist acts he didn't commit in return for his release.

Even though "it's no Octomom," Jacobson says this is "merely the kind of story that, consciously or not, affects every single American when millions of them are deprived of its coverage."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has an explanation (3/23/09, ad-viewing required) for why he thinks that Howard Kurtz's belief that the image of corporate reporters as "just a bunch of cozy Washington insiders" is not "that big a deal"--because "there's such a built-in adversarial relationship between the press and the pols"--constitutes "an extremely funny joke today, showing why he is the 'media critic' for both the Washington Post and CNN":

That is some very penetrating media criticism there. The media and political leaders are at each other's throats so viciously, they have such sharply conflicting interests, that it's a wonder they can even be in the same room together without physical confrontation. For instance, it was the same Howie Kurtz who, in 2004, wrote this about what happened at his own newspaper:

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

Kurtz's own paper also reported Tim Russert's policy of refusing to report anything said by government officials unless explicitly authorized by them to do so.

Buttressing his condemnation with many more examples of such "adversarial" reportage, Greenwald also updates his post with grim video footage of "the ugly weekend riot that nearly erupted as a result of the intractable media/politician animosity" on display at presidential candidate John McCain's barbecue for his "base."

Read the recent FAIR Media Advisory: "The Short, Happy Iraq War of Howard Kurtz" (3/20/09).

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok has the latest (HateWatch, 3/19/09) on CNN's "Lou Dobbs, the insult-spewing Latino-basher":

Dobbs, of course, is known for regularly pushing defamatory falsehoods about undocumented immigrants--they fill one third of American prison and jail cells, they're part of a secret Mexican plan to "reconquer" the American Southwest, they are largely responsible for a spate of 7,000 recent leprosy cases.... Even when Dobbs isn't hosting his own show, his fill-in hosts spew such racist propaganda as the lie about subprime housing loans going to 5 million "illegal aliens."

But Dobbs may have outdone himself on March 10, when he launched into a furious tirade against President Barack Obama, who earlier that day gave a major speech on education reform from the Hispanic Chamber's Washington, D.C., offices.

"I don't know what’s happened to this White House, but the wheels appear to have come completely off here over the last several days," Dobbs fulminated. "Making a decision to talk about a national initiative on education from the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which is effectively an organization that is interested in the export of American capital and production to Mexico and Mexico's export of drugs and illegal aliens to the United States. This is crazy stuff."

Potok agrees at least with the "crazy" part, considering that the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in fact "is well known as a relatively conservative, pro-business organization that represents the interests of more than 2.5 million Hispanic-owned businesses." Dobbs' smear was so egregious that "the man who has in the past utterly refused to retract false allegations, actually offered up a 'correction.'" But, while "it wasn't known if that was prompted by his CNN overlords, the angry demands for a retraction from the Hispanic Chamber, or his own guilty conscience," Potok is "betting it wasn't the latter."

Think Progress editor Ali Frick (3/18/09) has posted video of CNN's celebrity xenophobe descending into the Rosie O'Donnell realm of racist ridicule of Asian language:

Yesterday on his radio show, anti-immigrant crusader Lou Dobbs attacked St. Patrick's Day as a needless "ethnic holiday." "How about an American day," he proposed. He also wondered whether other groups, like Jews or Asians, had "ethnic holidays," but he couldn't think of any:

"Is there a Jewish ethnic holiday? Is there one? No. Okay. … How about an Asian ethnic holiday? Is there one? You know, St. Jing-Tao-Wow?"

Trying to look beyond this appallingly belligerent ignorance, Frick thinks for a second that "maybe Dobbs' is right: What about an American day? Besides Independence Day, Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Veterans Day and Memorial Day, there's barely a chance to celebrate America at all."

On this morning's Fox & Friends, the hosts were having a laugh about Mauricio Funes, the new president of El Salvador. Funes won as the candidate of the FMLN, the political party of the former guerrilla group--and he was once a freelancer for CNN. Ergo, Fox could make jokes about CNN's "communist" ties.

One of the hosts (a substitute) tried to show that this was actually no laughing matter, since the FMLN "allegedly has ties to strongman Cesar Chavez." It takes the other hosts a little while to figure out that he means Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez--not the labor organizer regular host Steve Doocy refers to as "the lettuce guy."

Sigh.

Watch:

Stating that "a lot of funny things can happen when the media translate science for the public," science writer Chris Mooney (Nation, 3/6/09) looks over more evidence that the U.S. public got really lucky when CNN's Sanjay Gupta was not made Obama's surgeon general. Mooney's list of Gupta "approaching medical coverage through 'one the one hand, on the other hand' equivocation, the selling of medical entertainment, following the pack or simply getting it wrong" clearly illustrates "what always made Gupta's nomination worrisome":

Consider a few of Gupta's journalistic missteps. In late December 2002--a slow news week after Christmas--an outfit named Clonaid, run by a member of a UFO-obsessed group called the Raelians, decided to hold a press conference announcing the first cloning of a human being. The media responded like a herd and ran off a cliff. Many outlets, including CNN, covered the group's press conference live, even though numerous scientists and bioethicists could have told them the claim wasn't credible. Yet there was Gupta, breathlessly interviewing Clonaid's "clinical science director" about "the possibility, a big possibility, that a human clone was actually born." Gupta and CNN contributed heavily to a media scare with little foundation; to this day, we've never seen proof of the existence of baby "Eve."

And of course Mooney features Gupta's infamous "'reality check' on Michael Moore's 2007 film SiCKO"; see the FAIR Action Alert: "CNN vs. SiCKO" (7/11/07).

Los Angeles Times reporter Mike Dorning has some important information (3/6/09) absent from coverage of Dr. Sanjay Gupta's recent surgeon general candidacy--"For several years, Gupta has been co-anchor of a CNN-produced healthcare show distributed monthly via flat-screen TVs provided free to doctor's offices":

The show is sponsored by healthcare, consumer and pharmaceutical companies that want to get their message directly to patients, according to the website of AccentHealth, a privately held company that distributes the programs and sells them to advertisers.

Dr. Quentin Young--who heads Physicians for a National Health Program, a group that advocates for single-payer, Canadian-style national health insurance and other changes in the present system--and other critics cited occasions when Gupta favorably mentioned sponsors' brand-name drugs.

"His record is not a good one here," Young said.

While Dorning gives space to such unsupported CNN platitudes as "Gupta's on-air comments had always been under the editorial control of CNN and unrelated to any advertising contracts" and "Dr. Gupta has no relationship with the advertisers of the program--monetarily, editorially or otherwise," regular FAIR readers have known of Gupta's untrustworthiness for years; for more critique of CNN's medical coverage, see our current Action Alert: "CNN: Single-Payer Is So '90s: Medical Reporter Warns Against 'Government-Run Health System'" (3/12/09)

Claiming that "you don't hear" about the single-payer healthcare plan "as much as you used to," CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen says that "more people are on the same page" about healthcare reform than they were in 1993. A new FAIR Action Alert debunks these and other assertions by Cohen that have the effect of pushing the idea of universal government-financed health insurance to the margins of the healthcare debate.

You can post copies of your letters to Cohen in the comments section below. Please remember that letters that maintain a civil tone are most effective.

For a change of pace from his incessant immigrant bashing, CNN's Lou Dobbs recently exclaimed over "unusual storms" and snow in Las Vegas, Southern California and Arizona's mountains. This "unbelievable" evidence has Dobbs wondering: "So what are those folks talking about global warming?"

Posting at Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog (12/19/08), Steve Benen describes how, "to 'discuss' the subject, Dobbs invited CNN meteorologist Chad Myers and Heartland Institute science director Jay Lehr onto the show":

Not surprisingly, Lehr told Dobbs what he wanted to hear, starting with an anecdote about Lehr's sky diving hobby.

LEHR: I have jumped out of a plane in Ohio every month for 31 years, and I track the weather constantly to find out if I can make it out of a plane. And I can tell you, the weather the last ten years hasn't been significantly different than the ten years before that or the ten years before that. It has been -- it is always changes what the weather is about. And to say that it has to do with global warming is really more of a joke than anything else. Why people are so alarmed about it, I have no clue.

DOBBS: You know, that's fascinating.

Before ending the segment, Lehr added that the sun, "not man," warms the planet, and that "right now," we're "going in to cooling rather than warming."

Let's quickly highlight reality here. First, it's not the sun. Second, snowfall on one day in one part of the country does not reflect "climate." Third, an anecdote about sky-diving experimentation is not indicative of climate science. Fourth, though Dobbs apparently forgot to mention it, the Heartland Institute is a conservative think tank subsidized by ExxonMobil, not an independent scientific organization, and Jay Lehr's background is in "groundwater hydrology," not climate science.

Oh, and fifth, this is not "fascinating."

Benen notes that "the bizarre commentary from CNN's Chad Myers wasn't much better. He argued that it's 'arrogant' to think that humans can affect the climate ('Mother nature is so big,' he said) and that people who accept global warming are only looking at 'a hundred years worth of data, not millions of years that the world has been around.'"

Benen wonders, "Why is this man a CNN meteorologist?"  But the sad fact is that a lot of TV weather people think their experience predicting local snowfalls makes them more expert on climate change than actual climate scientists, and often peddle similar nonsense on the air.

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "In Denial on Climate Change: Leading Pundits Reject Science on Global Warming" (5-6/07) by Peter Hart

This news comes from an AFL-CIO blog (via Adam Serwer at TAPPED):

This report likely won’t be on CNN's Headline News, but after five years, former workers at CNN have finally gained justice. In a decision made public today, an administrative law judge ordered the network to rehire 110 workers who were fired because they were union members. CNN also was ordered to recognize the workers' unions, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians-CWA (NABET-CWA) locals 31 and 11.

Judge Arthur Amchan found that CNN violated the rights of more than 250 employees at the network’s bureaus in Washington, D.C., and New York City when it ended its subcontract with Team Video Services (TVS), whose employees were represented by NABET-CWA. He also ruled that CNN discriminated against TVS employees who wanted to continue working at CNN's bureaus to avoid having to recognize and bargain with the union.