Having on its debut dethroned Glenn Beck from Amazon's bestseller rankings to become "the No. 1 nonfiction book in all categories," David Swanson's Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union title looks to "how we can reform the systemic weaknesses in our representative government that deny us healthcare and many other things we want."

One main "corrupting influence" named by Swanson (Prosperity Agenda, 9/2/09) is

corporate media, which had always whited out single-payer and eagerly aired lies and distortions about the public option, moving the center of the debate somewhere to the right of that proposal. This is not--I repeat, not--because the right-wingers are smarter or wittier or more disciplined. It is primarily because the corporate media shares their agenda, no matter how sloppily or inarticulately they present it. The media companies share board members with the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, not to mention selling them advertisements. There is no more common excuse for hesitancy from progressive congressmembers than "But the media would attack me."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates: The Corporate Ties Between Insurers and Media Companies" (8/09) by Kate Murphy.

Seeing all the press attention given to pitbull-fighter and NFL star Michael Vick's return to football, David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 8/19/09) can't help but think that Vick

should have tortured humans instead of dogs. Then we would have been told to overlook it for the sake of moving forward. Better yet, he should have killed humans rather than only torturing them. Then we would have been told next to nothing about it at all. It might have been reported, but it wouldn't have become a hot topic, an echo-chambered story to be dismissed only after a great deal of hand-wringing. It certainly would not have interfered with watching football games.

For those of his readers who may be "severely satire-impaired," Swanson explains that "No, I don't support harming dogs. No, I don't really want people tortured," but instead is simply "concerned" over how U.S. media "worry about our souls because of mass-torture, whereas mass-murder doesn't seem to gain the same coverage in our corporatized communications system."

"Of course I want torture prosecuted," Swanson writes, "but torture is a symptom. The illness is aggressive war."

David Swanson (OpEd News, 7/22/09) has "another name for 'what's called a single-payer system'"--namely: "healthcare as a human right, not a commodity to be purchased. Many humans have this right. They just aren't Americans."

Of Barack Obama's July 22 news conference "mention of single-payer in passing, as something that would be better than anything else, but something that mysteriously lies out of reach," Swanson notes that the same view "is typical of the very few mentions of single-payer healthcare in the U.S. corporate media":

I just did some searches in the Lexis Nexis databases of major U.S. and world publications, news wire services, and TV and Radio broadcast transcripts. Searching for "healthcare" in July 2009 found over 1,000 documents, the maximum number that Lexis Nexis will display. In fact, searching just the past two days found over 1,000 documents. Another search confirmed that this is "Michael Jackson" level coverage. And another search confirmed that virtually none of these documents mentioned single-payer at all, much less told anyone what it was. A search for documents later than July 1 containing single-payer OR "single payer" turned up only 197 documents.

Americans have consistently told pollsters for decades that they want single-payer. But America's government refuses to provide it, and therefore America's state media refuses to discuss it. Of the 197 records of the media mentioning single-payer in July, almost half were congressional records or press releases or otherwise not media reports at all.

Still "others were articles in medical trade publications," and "even so, those articles tended to mention single-payer very briefly and dismiss it." Read the recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Media Quarantine of Single-Payer Continues: Fifteen Years Later, Public Health Insurance Still Taboo" (6/09) by Julie Hollar & Isabel Macdonald.

Having recently "published a report on 1,200 photos of U.S. torture that I have examined but the public at large has not seen," activist David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 7/21/09) now relates how he

talked about the photos on a few progressive radio shows. I received calls from some advocacy groups that have been trying for years to get hold of these photos. But I received not one single inquiry from the corporate media. Even most good blogs ignored this story, despite a handful of prominent blogs promoting it. This started me thinking and fantasizing: What would the world look like if we had major media outlets that were worth more than a warm bucket of spit?

Imagine if the media monopolies were busted, a diversity of private outlets were free to compete, and public media were developed, including free substantive air time for election campaigns. Imagine media outlets with democratic accountability. Imagine media outlets that judged a story important if the majority of the public said so, and not if those in power said so.

The majority of the public favors single-payer healthcare. Corporate media outlets are crammed with endless, often pointless, stories about healthcare that never mention single-payer.

"Our existing media outlets (whose lead blogs follow more than bloggers admit to themselves) decide what's important based on the preferences of a small number of powerful people," says Swanson--"and the fact that these preferences almost always differ wildly from majority opinion does not lead to any rethinking of the acceptability of this approach in a democratic republic."

For further imaginings on the potential of a non-corporate U.S. press, read the latest issue of the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Future of Journalism" (7/09)

Addressing Bush-era Department of Justice investigations, David Swanson (6/26/09) is asking OpEd News readers the provocative question, "Did you know the United States has in recent years prosecuted hundreds of people for political reasons?"

This is a crime, or rather a crime wave, that has thus far been addressed primarily by ignoring it. You can read a lot about it from bloggers like Larisa Alexandrovna or Scott Horton. But you won't hear the president mention it on TV.

In an attempt to convince the corporate media that this issue ranked right up there with governors' sex lives and celebrities' deaths, a group of notable speakers, judges, attorneys, victims and witnesses gathered and spoke on Friday morning at the National Press Club.

Swanson's piece includes the text from "what I blogged from the event" and tells us that "you can watch the whole forum on C-SPAN. You won't find it anywhere else."

Activist David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org, 6/24/09) has some problems with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's and Congressmember Tom Perriello's recent visit "generating a story and big color photo on page 1 of the Charlottesville Daily Progress" under the headline "In UVa Visit, Democrats Call Deficit Reckless":

The newspaper reported on Congressman Perriello warning that he could not vote for healthcare without a way to pay for it. There was no mention of the fact that the previous week, the day before Hoyer introduced his bill to fight deficits, both of these gentlemen had voted to spend another $97 billion on wars and to loan $100 billion to European bankers through the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Nobody in Washington had even hinted at where any of that money would come from, and apparently Hoyer and Perriello didn't care.

The article did include a quote from a Republican blaming Democrats for deficits. But that's doubly bad reporting. Republicans have pushed deficits up far more than Democrats, and just getting a haphazard (and inaccurate) quote from "the other side" misses the relevant context of the war supplemental vote. Here's the patently false quote from Congressman Eric Cantor: "We've amassed more debt over the last five months than this country has amassed in the last 200 years."

Swanson sees another example of this kind of overwhelmingly uncritical coverage in the same day's visit by "two top environmental officials from the White House": "Oddly, there was no particular news to announce at the press conference. Predictably, all the media outlets were there to trumpet the story anyway." Listen to Swanson on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "David Swanson on 'Benchmarks'" (5/18/07).

It is quite telling that, even considering how in Ed Schultz's May 7 MSNBC interview of Physician for a National Health Program Margaret Flowers and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, he "slaps a gratuitous insult on the heroines of Code Pink" and "says he's against protesting and "getting arrested" as a rule but thinks it's OK if doctors in suits and 'educated professional people' do it" and even "pretends to believe (or actually believes) that President Obama favors considering the possibility of creating single-payer healthcare," activist and author David Swanson (OpEd News, 5/7/09) "can't recall a better corporate news video segment in at least the past decade":

The heart of this story is the gaping chasm between majority opinion and the corporate agenda of the United States Senate....

Ed goes after the health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the HMOs. He plays video of activist Kevin Zeese speaking up at the recent Senate Finance Committee hearing and being arrested. He explains perfectly what single-payer healthcare is. (I recommend this flyer.) And he denounces the anti-democratic exclusion of single-payer advocates by committee chairman Max Baucus.

And then Ed brings on Margaret Flowers, who absolutely nails every question he asks, and he asks the right questions. Flowers lists the polls showing that over 60 percent of Americans and 60 percent of physicians want single-payer.

Schultz's choice to air Flowers telling viewers "that the next Senate hearing is on March 12 and that advocates are asking for at least one supporter of single-payer to be included," has Swanson exclaiming that "that sort of mention of an upcoming event and very nearly inclusion of exactly what people can do to improve their country is rare indeed on our televisions."

David Swanson has noted (Consortium News, 4/23/09) that, as "much of elite U.S. punditry is backing away from torture," the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby is bucking that trend with an April 22 column in which "he both opposes torture under all circumstances and excuses it given the current circumstances." Jacoby's main justification for U.S. torture tactics are "the successes with which they have been credited"--such as "the foiling of Al-Qaeda's planned 'Second Wave'--a 9/11-like plot to crash a hijacked airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper." Swanson gives the lie to this zombie resurrected from the graveyard of Bush administration propaganda:

In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush claimed: "We stopped an Al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast."

However, an October 8, 2005, Los Angeles Times story, headlined "Scope of Plots Bush Says Were Foiled Is Questioned," cited "several counter-terrorism officials" as saying that "the plot never progressed past the planning stages.... 'To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,' said one senior FBI official.... At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities."

On February 10, 2006, the L.A. Times quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism," who said that "the Library Tower plot was one of many Al-Qaeda operations that had not gone much past the conceptual stage. … The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that those familiar with the plot feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan that that of the president."

Swanson further writes what at this this late date should be common knowledge to all political columnists: "Bush and his supporters have claimed other similar successes that have all turned out to be fictional. Most are more off-base than this one." See FAIR's contemporaneous Media Advisory: "'Terror Plot' Reporting Lacks Skepticism: Networks Treat White House Allegations As Fact" (2/13/06)

David Swanson comments (OpEd News, 10/27/08) on Rep. Barney Frank "having just blurted out the obvious but taboo fact that the U.S. military budget must be cut":

When a Congress member steps forward and courageously articulates a forbidden truth that is absolutely necessary for our survival and well-being (and by "our" I mean our species, not just our nation), he must be praised....

Frank has already been attacked by the only presidential candidate who, during each of the three debates, suggested cutting military spending: John McCain. Rather than pointing out this flip-flop, the corporate media can be expected to pile on Frank with accusations of endangering us all (which is the polite way of saying threatening the profits of some of the same corporations that control our communications system).

Though declaring "I haven't been a fan of Congressman [Barney] Frank," Swanson still thinks "we need to call the media and Congress in support of Frank's proposal or an even saner one. Frank needs to know that we have his back."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: The Military-Industrial-Media Complex (7-8/05) by Norman Solomon