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.