Asking his readers to "remember" that, on NBC, Chuck Todd "is billed as a reporter covering the White House, not a pundit expressing opinions," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/15/09, ad-viewing required) examines a Todd appearance on the MSNBC show Morning Joe "discussing reports that [U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Bush torture crimes. Needless to say, everyone agreed without question that investigations were a ridiculous distraction from what really matters and would be terribly unfair":

In response to virtually every media criticism (at least the few they acknowledge), establishment journalists will insist that their role is to be steadfastly neutral. They simply report on the debates, not take sides or express opinions about them. Taking one side or the other is not their role. Only partisan ideologues do that.

Yet here is Chuck Todd--who covers the White House for NBC News--explicitly arguing against investigations, and adopting the Bush/right-wing mentality to do so. Investigations are a distraction from what matters. It's extremely unfair to hold lawyers accountable when they authorize criminal conduct. It's "dangerous" for one administration to investigate the prior one where that prior administration had its DOJ lawyers authorize what was being done.

Wouldn't the standard claim of establishment journalists maintain that Chuck Todd shouldn't have (or at least not express) opinions on these topics? Yet here he is--as so many establishment journalists routinely do--explicitly advocating against investigations of Bush-era crimes. Even more notably, the arguments in favor of such investigations merit no mention whatsoever.

Reasonably asking, "Would anyone listening to this discussion even have the slightest idea what the arguments are in favor of investigating and prosecuting?," Greenwald can only conclude that "the notion that these establishment journalists don't choose sides and are mere honest brokers of debates is, rather obviously, transparent fiction."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9–10/08).

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (7/9/09) has posted a reminder that "back in March Phillip Swagel, who'd been assistant treasury secretary under Hank Paulson, wrote a long article about the TARP bailout called 'The Financial Crisis: An Inside View.'"

Thinking that maybe "it would be news if Swagel had stated that Paulson, Bernanke and Bush's attempts to foment panic to pass the bailout have 'surely' contributed to the current recession," Schwarz lays out some quotes showing that actually "he did": "The way in which the TARP was proposed and eventually enacted surely must have contributed to the lockup in spending," and "they could plainly see that the U.S. political system appeared insufficient to the task of a considered response to the crisis. Surely these circumstances contributed to the economic downturn."

To Schwarz, "this was obvious at the time. Back on September 26, I (among many, many others) asked: 'How have things turned out before when the president, Treasury secretary, Federal Reserve chairman and a leading presidential contender all scream in public constantly about how we're on the verge of a giant financial meltdown?'":

In any case, there are no references to Swagel's statement anywhere online except in the original document.

Likewise, Swagel suggests the mid-September financial situation might have been dealt with without an immediate appropriations bill by Congress: "A counterfactual to consider is that the Treasury and Fed could have acted incrementally, with backstops and a flood of liquidity focused on money markets and commercial paper—but not the TARP."

That too has been mentioned nowhere online. Oh well.

All of which earns Schwarz' scathing headline declaring the corporate media silence "Another Triumph for American Journalism." Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Going All Out for Bank Bailout: Media Paint Crisis as Too 'Urgent' for Skepticism" (1/09) by Dean Baker & Kris Warner.

As Barack Obama and his pliant media pundits are "talking up the achievements of the six-year occupation," Consortium News' Robert Parry (7/1/09) is writing of the "public celebrations by Iraqis marking the American pullout from Iraq's cities." Parry's look back the last six years' reality clearly recalls how, "relying on false intelligence and laughable legal theories, Bush justified launching what the New York Times may call an 'unnecessary war' but what was in reality a 'war of aggression'"--constituting, Parry reminds us, "what the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II deemed 'the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole'":

While those crimes were underway, major U.S. media outlets avoided stating the obvious because any recognition that Bush waged "a war of aggression" would force other conclusions, such as the need to subject him, his senior advisers and some foreign allies (i.e., Tony Blair) to a war crimes tribunal.

The big news organizations also didn't want to admit their own complicity in this crime, since almost everyone in American journalism who wanted to keep a comfortable seat at the Establishment's table either endorsed the enterprise or kept quiet.

So even today--more than five months after Bush left office--it's still much easier to dismiss what happened as "unnecessary," to cite the pre-war "intelligence failures," and to criticize Bush primarily for his tactical misjudgments in planning an effective occupation--not committing enough troops and not having a detailed enough post-invasion plan.

Parry well knows that "accusing him of criminality is much trickier," since, "after all, in the view of the mainstream news media, war crimes are something that 'rogue states' commit, petty tyrants from Rwanda or Yugoslavia who can then be dragged off to The Hague and put on trial." Alas, "Such humiliations are not for the former 'Leader of the Free World' and his subordinates."

Check out the overriding corporate media reaction to even the most tepid congressional gestures toward accountability for members of the George W. Bush government in FAIR's Action Alert: "CNN Scoffs at White House Critics: Anchor With Bush Ties Dismisses Abuse-of-Power Hearings as 'Stagecraft'" (7/31/08).

In Dan Froomkin's last column for the Washington Post (6/26/09), he promises to "continue doing accountability journalism"--as good as any self-description to distinguish his work from his typical Post colleague's obsequiousness--and tries "hard to summarize the past five-and-a-half years" in which "George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes":

In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve.... How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

Read of some other journalists worth mentioning in this regard in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Wrong on Iraq? Not Everyone: Four in the Mainstream Media Who Got It Right" (3–4/06) by Steve Rendall.

Looking at "people of a certain age" for whom "getting a letter published in the Times has always been a very, very big deal," David Margolick (Nation , 5/27/09) tells the tale of two lifelong friends and constant New York Times letter submitters--one with a "Babe Ruth"-like record of getting his views into print, and the other, who was always "striking out." Want to know "what explained their very different fates?" Margolick tells us, "it wasn't politics":

[George] Avakian couldn't contain his anger, and as anyone who reads the Times well knows, on the letters page no one ever gets too worked up about anything. Friends to whom he would sometimes send drafts forever urged him to tone things down. But try as he might--which, truth be told, wasn't very hard--catharsis always won out over pragmatism. It started at the very outset of the Bush II era. "How many words have been written about the mess in Florida? 4 million, 400 million? 4 billion?" he wrote during the fiasco following the presidential election of 2000. "There are only four words which properly sum up the whole situation. They are: The fix is in.'" Of course, it got spiked.

And "in another letter, from July 2007, he called Bush 'the most flagrant liar in the history of the American Presidency.' Ditto." But that one stood little chance from the start, considering the Times attitude toward such candid language about George W. Bush specifically. See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "'You Can't Just Say the President Is Lying': The Limits of Honesty in the Mainstream Press" (1–2/05)

Recapping at TPM Café (5/27/09) how the U.S. "press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans," Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell writes that "a hard-right [George W.] Bush, whether real or media-created, would have never beaten Gore--not that this one did either." Reminding us that "the New York Times, for example, had been very tough on [President Bill] Clinton on its editorial page," Mitchell says that "once in office, a long honeymoon between press and president ensued," and "just as Bush's approval ratings tanked and criticism was about to spread, 9/11 came along to torment the country, but save Bush." Mitchell then brings us into the present with shrewd insight into a hypothetical:

No one in the media criticized Bush for months, let alone suggested that maybe he had let down the country and invited a terrorist attack, or at least failed to prevent it. (Imagine that happening in the future if the country is attacked again under Obama--watch Fox and Friends howl.) Some have suggested that the New York Times, and others long accused of exhibiting liberal bias, went overboard on backing Bush after 9/11, given a rare chance to wave the flag and promote a war (Afghanistan) without shame for once and bolster their flagging image as super-patriots.

Of course, the problem was: They didn't stop there, and most went along like sheep in the run-up to the Iraq War.

"In fact," Mitchell notes, the date of his piece "marks the fifth anniversary of the day the Times belatedly admitted its failures on Iraq (while refusing to name or punish reporters and editors). It wasn't just a failure on WMD, it was a failure to recognize Bush and his crowd for what they were, individually and collectively."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/19/09, ad-viewing required) "gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism":

Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country's institutions--particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media--acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it. And they still do.

Nothing has produced as much media praise for Obama as his embrace of what [the New Republic's Jack] Goldsmith calls the "essential elements" of "the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy." That's because--contrary to the ceremonial displays of regret and denouncements of Bush--the dominant media view is this: the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism was right; those policies are "centrist"; Obama is acting commendably by embracing them; most of the country wants those policies; and only the far left opposes the Bush/Cheney approach.

Anyone who doubts that should consider this most extraordinary paragraph from Associated Press' Liz Sidoti:

Increasingly, President Barack Obama and Democrats who run Congress are being pulled between the competing interests of party liberals and the rest of the country on Bush-era wartime matters of torture, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Beyond quoting Sidoti having "described Obama's embrace of Bush's policies as 'governing from the center,'" Greenwald goes on to note that "her AP colleague Tom Raum said virtually the same thing today":

Internationally, Obama reversed course and is seeking to block the court-ordered release of detainee-abuse photos, revived military trials for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and is markedly increasing the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan....

Still, even though Obama may be irritating liberal purists on both national security and domestic policy, he has no real choice but to move toward the middle.

Greenwald quips that "apparently, Bush/Cheney terrorism policies are Centrist. Who knew?"

Media critic blogger Mark Howard (News Corpse, 5/16/09) has a problem with the voluble media controversy over "the fact that Obama’s pro-choice position is in conflict with [Notre Dame] University's Catholic principles"--namely, "neither the Catholic protesters nor the media ever threw similar tantrums when George W. Bush delivered the commencement speech in 2001, after receiving his honorary degree":

Every good Catholic knows that the church is strictly opposed to capital punishment. Since Bush set records for carrying out death sentences when he was governor of Texas, you would think that the same guardians of virtue that are protesting Obama, who has never personally signed an abortion certificate, would have been out in force for a man who presided over 152 executions. But there was nary a peep. There were no bishops signing petitions opposing Bush's appearance. There were no protests on campus. There were no students refusing to participate in graduation ceremonies. And there were no cameras from national news networks circling like buzzards.

If these Catholic Crusaders are truly interested in demonstrating their piety without prejudice, they should immediately call for Notre Dame to revoke Bush's honorary degree. If the press is honestly endeavoring to be objective, they should pose this question to the protesters.

Making clear that he doesn't "fault the pro-life movement's efforts to advance their beliefs through protest and civil disobedience," Howard maintains his own right to "fault the media for the inflated sense of importance they bestow on such a tiny assemblage of adversaries. Polls show overwhelming support for the president's visit to Notre Dame."

The Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama's desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn't going to work:

The administration's strategy--to open up a constructive dialogue with Venezuela and avoid being cast as Mr. Chavez's Yanqui foil--is reasonable; it is also the same strategy as was tried, unsuccessfully, by the previous two administrations.

It's hard to imagine that anyone believes that the Bush administration's Venezuela policy amounted to "constructive dialogue." The Bush administration--at the very least--seemed to approve of the April 2002 coup that briefly removed Chavez from power. And Bush policy after that disaster was hardly more "constructive."

Even more curious is the Post's suggestion that President Bill Clinton had similar trouble with Chavez. That sounds implausible; Chavez was elected in 1998 and took office the following year--leaving very little time for Clinton's generous attempts at dialogue to be rebuffed by Chavez. Chavez, for his part, told Post co-owner Lally Weymouth that he "entertained the best of relations with the Clinton administration." (See Extra!, 11-12/06.)

But when it's Hugo Chavez they're talking about, apparently, for the Post editorial page the facts don't matter.

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)

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (4/18/09) samples the response to Mike Allen of Politico's quote of "a former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush" calling the publishing of U.S. torture memos "damaging because these are techniques that work":

This, from Andrew Sullivan, is a representative example of the reaction:

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?

But things get really interesting when, in Allen's "attempt to explain his behavior," he wound up "revealing the devouring black hole of corruption at the heart of Washington 'journalism'":

While I was writing the piece, a very well-known former Bush administration official e-mailed some caustic criticism of Obama’s decision to release the memos. I asked the former official to be quoted by name, but this person refused, e-mailing: "Please use only on background." I wasn’t surprised....

I figured that readers could decide whether the former Bush official’s comments sounded defensive or vindictive. And Politico readers aren’t so delicate that we have to deceptively pretend there's no other side to a major issue.

Schwarz explains that what Allen is "accidentally telling us here" is "that the Bush official initiated the contact, and without Allen agreeing to any conditions. In other words--even if Allen believes there's some value to printing unsubstantiated, blatantly self-serving assertions--he had absolutely no obligation to ask permission to quote the official, by name or otherwise. But since he's a well-trained little lad, he did anyway."

A Washington Post piece this weekend by Scott Wilson (3/14/09) centered around this "gotcha":

In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."

It hasn't taken long for the recriminations to return--or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome "inheritance" of its predecessor.

Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems "inherited" from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against.

The vapidity of this observation has been noted by, among others, Steve Benen of Political Animal (3/14/09):

The problem, if I'm reading the article right, isn't that the president is saying anything untrue. Rather, we're dealing with a dynamic in which one president hands off a catastrophe -- several catastrophes, actually -- to a successor, and the successor isn't supposed to talk about it.

It's worth looking at Wilson's logic as to why Obama shouldn't be pointing out that he inherited an economic disaster--even though he did. Wilson wrote:

Upon entering the White House in 2001, Bush pinned the lackluster economy on his predecessor, using the "Clinton recession" to successfully argue in favor of tax cuts that won some Democratic support. But for Obama, who built his candidacy on a promise to rise above Washington's divisive partisan traditions--winning over many independent voters and moderate Republicans in the process--blaming his predecessor holds special risks.

He will need support beyond his Democratic base as he begins lobbying for his $3.6 trillion budget, which proposes sweeping changes in health care, the energy sector and the public education system. The president did not receive a single House Republican vote for his stimulus plan, prompting some in his administration to view his bipartisan outreach efforts as having little hope of success.

And Republicans have seemed only more emboldened in their rhetoric. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), for example, recently called the borrowing needed to fund the president's economic recovery plans "generational theft."

So when George W. Bush blamed Bill Clinton for his economic situation, that successfully gained him Democratic support for his policies. But for Obama, blaming his predecessor has "special risks"...because he needs Republican support for his policies. If you can't see why criticizing the previous president should gain support for Bush but cost Obama support, then I'm afraid you don't have what it takes to be a big-league Washington journalist.

I suppose you could read Wilson as saying that the special risks come because Obama promised to rise above Washington's divisive partisan traditions--just like Bush did. Remember "I'm a uniter, not a divider?" Or maybe it was the fact that Obama won a majority of the popular vote--i.e., he won over "many independent voters and moderate Republicans"--that puts his presidency at "special risk."

Update: Steve Benen's first name corrected.

This column by Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl has received some well-deserved criticism, largely for its peculiar claim that reforming the U.S. healthcare system is a lot like invading Iraq.  What jumped out at me was this supposed parallel between George W. Bush and Barack Obama: After September 11, Diehl wrote, "The president failed to ask a willing nation for sacrifice." Likewise, in explaining his stimulus program, Obama said, "You will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime. In fact, the recovery plan provides a tax cut . . . and these checks are on the way."

It's true that if your nation launches a war, that's going to take resources, and that means that people are going to have to sacrifice. But reversing an economic downturn isn't about taking stuff away from people; it's about encouraging them to spend money so that people who are unemployed can be put back to work. The implication that Obama should have told people he was raising their taxes in order to combat the recession is sheer neo-Hooverism.

Consortium News' Robert Parry (3/5/09) uses New York Times do-gooder Nicholas Kristof as an example of blatant corporate media hypocrisy:

Kristof--like many of his American colleagues--is applauding the International Criminal Court's arrest order against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for his role in the Darfur conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives....

By all accounts, Kristof is a well-meaning journalist who travels to dangerous parts of the world, like Darfur, to report on human rights crimes. However, he also could be a case study of what's wrong with American journalism.

While Kristof writes movingly about atrocities that can be blamed on Third World despots like Bashir, he won't hold U.S. officials to the same standards.

Most notably, Kristof doesn't call for prosecuting former President George W. Bush for war crimes, despite hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of Bush’s illegal invasion of their country. Many Iraqi children also don't have hands--or legs or homes or parents.

Kristof is far from alone though--as Parry notes: "No one in a position of power in American journalism is demanding that former President Bush join President Bashir in the dock at The Hague." In fact, even the most modest attempts at accountability invariably are met by big media jeers; see the FAIR Action Alert: "CNN Scoffs at White House Critics: Anchor With Bush Ties Dismisses Abuse-of-Power Hearings as 'Stagecraft'" (7/31/08)

I don't know whether George W. Bush will issue a slew of pardons in his last weekend in the White House, but I would expect such pardons to receive less scrutiny than those issued by his predecessor.  And if he attempts to pardon those who committed crimes on his behalf, you can count on large sectors of the media to welcome that self-exculpating behavior as a way of letting bygones be bygones.