When former FAIR staffer Sam Husseini found out that Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa'ud would be speaking at the National Press Club, he thought it might be a good chance to ask a tough question. The National Press Club apparently didn't like that idea.

Husseini writes:

Before the end of the day, I'd received a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club "due to your conduct at a news conference." The letter, signed by the executive director of the Club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting "boisterous and unseemly conduct or language."

Want to know what the National Press Club thinks is unseemly conduct? Watch for yourself:

For the record, the National Press Club has been taken other actions distinctly at odds with a free and aggressive press. In 2001, Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman wrote about how the Press Club seemed to want to protect Henry Kissinger from critical questions. The moderator explained that if questions about war crimes were asked, it "would take so much time to explain all of the context."

In 2005, Mokhiber attempted to go to a U.S. News & World Report event at the Press Club celebrating "America's Best Leaders." The sponsor? Oil giant BP.

Mokhiber was blocked from entering the event--which, for the record, was being held in the First Amendment Lounge. Why? Probably because Mokihber had attended another U.S. News event at the Press Club earlier that month that was sponsored by tobacco giant Altria. That time Mokhiber asked a question:

Senator Hagel said transparency is critical. What's the deal exactly between U.S. News & World Report and Altria? What are the details of the sponsorship? Members of the social responsibility community refuse to invest in tobacco companies. Did you find it a little odd that a panel on corporate responsibility is being sponsored by a tobacco company?

You can see why the Press Club might not want to have these people in the room. They ask the wrong kinds of questions.

On the Daily Show on June 1, Bill Moyers talked about the types of outsider guests he preferred to interview on his TV show.

As he put it at one point: "The worst hour that I ever put on, was many years ago, with Henry Kissinger....  I vowed after that never to do an hour with any official. None."

Interviewing guests who challenge or question the conventional wisdom or the status quo is exactly what we should be seeing on public television. Two nights before the Moyers interview (5/30/11), Charlie Rose offered a reminder that we've got a long way to go.

He interviewed, for a whole hour, this guy:

A good friend of FAIR happened to catch this segment on MSNBC.

Turns out it was a false alarm; the noted Peace Prize winner was a guest, talking about another war criminal.

From Meet the Press (3/27/11):

GREGORY: I'll start with you, Ted Koppel. You spent time, in your early days as a correspondent, with Henry Kissinger.

KOPPEL: I did.

GREGORY: Who knew something about the big ideas for the world.  Is this administration getting the big ideas right in the--in the tumult of the Middle East?

Who knows what those "big ideas" might be. But if you want to make Ted Koppel feel comfortable, it's good to praise Henry Kissinger-- as we noted recently:

Koppel once boasted of Kissinger: "Henry Kissinger is, plain and simply, the best secretary of state we have had in 20, maybe 30 years.... I'm proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger. He is an extraordinary man. This country has lost a lot by not having him in a position of influence and authority."

For another view of the value of Kissinger and his "big ideas," see my article from Extra! Update: "Questions for Kissinger Go Unasked: Journalists Show 'Sensitivity' to War-Crime Suspect's Feelings" (8/01).

There have been some interesting, informative TV coverage of Egypt.

And then there was last night's Charlie Rose (2/3/11), with special guests Tom Friedman and Henry Kissinger.

With Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Washington, you got some of what you might expect in right wing  media outlets--Rush Limbaugh doing a fake Chinese accent, and Bill O'Reilly opening his Fox show last night with crack about a Chinese dinner that wasn't take out.

Meanwhile, on public television's Charlie Rose Show, the hour was spent with... Henry Kissinger. I had to go back to the Extra! archives to remember the Kissinger/China connection, which includes most notably his defense of the Chinese crackdown on Tienanmen Square. From Extra!, 10-11/89:

In recent months, Kissinger has used his high media profile in a spirited defense of China. In a Washington Post/L.A. Times column ("The Caricature of Deng as a Tyrant Is Unfair," 8/1/89), Kissinger argued against sanctions: "China remains too important for America's national security to risk the relationship on the emotions of the moment." He asserted: "No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators."

Kissinger's defense of China and other repressive governments has sometimes raised eyebrows. What it has not raised is tough questions from TV interviewers about Kissinger's business ties to these same governments. In a column alluding to FAIR's study that found Kissinger to be Nightline's most frequent guest, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen (8/29/89) sounded an urgent appeal: "Will someone please ask Henry Kissinger the 'C' question?" The "C" stands for conflict of interest.

When he's not pontificating in the media about foreign affairs, he's engaging in foreign financial affairs through his secretive consulting firm Kissinger & Associates. The firm, representing some 30 multinational companies--including American Express, H.J. Heinz, ITT and Lockheed--earns profits by "opening doors" for investors in China, Latin America and elsewhere (New York Times, 4/30/89).

A Wall Street Journal article by John Fialka ("Mr. Kissinger Has Opinions on China--and Business Ties," 9/15/89) reported that Kissinger also heads China Ventures, a company engaged in joint ventures with China's state bank. As its brochure explains, China Ventures invests only in projects that "enjoy the unquestioned support of the People's Republic of China." The Journal article was unusual in exploring the private business interests behind U.S. foreign policy, not the media's strong suit--even when, as in Kissinger's case, they are rolled into one person.

Did Charlie Rose want to interview someone on China with skin in the game? That would be a strange standard for public television.

Yesterday (11/22/10) Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote a column headlined "Obama's foreign policy needs an update," where he worried that the White House suffers from a "lack of grand strategy - or strategists. Its top foreign-policy makers are a former senator, a Washington lawyer and a former Senate staffer. There is no Henry Kissinger, no Zbigniew Brzezinski, no Condoleezza Rice; no foreign policy scholar."

The irony inherit in complaining that Obama's foreign policy is too old-fashioned and in need of some of the old Kissinger magic should be obvious enough. Less clear is why anyone would single out Condoleezza Rice like this; was the Bush administration's foreign policy uniquely strategic?

But the calls for Obama to get himself a Kissinger seem to be a regular feature of the Post's op-ed page.

--David Ignatius (7/8/10):

The two modern American masters of Machiavellian diplomacy, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both practiced their art at times comparable to this one -- with the country suffering from reversals in war and loss of confidence in its political leadership.

So it's an interesting thought exercise to imagine how a national security adviser with the secretive, back-channel style of a Kissinger or Brzezinski would play America's diplomatic hand now. Mind you, I'm not suggesting what policies these two would actually recommend today but, instead, what a more creative diplomatic approach might produce in a time of difficulty.

When I say "creative," what I partly mean is devious. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski did not always state publicly what they were doing in private.

Ignatius did acknowledge that "Not all of Kissinger's machinations were successful." Well that's one way to put it. He added:

But if ever there were a moment when a battle-fatigued United States needs a wily strategist to explore options, this is it. Just who could play this role among the administration's current cast of characters isn't obvious, and that's a problem President Obama should address.

And then here's David Ignatius again, a mere nine months earlier (10/8/09):

I have been looking for a "doctrine" because, frankly, strategic thinking has been this administration's weak spot. A pragmatic president has surrounded himself with pragmatic advisers -- a retired Marine general as national security adviser, a former senator as secretary of state, a career intelligence officer as secretary of defense. None are grand strategists on the model of Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski.

It's probably better for American political leaders that we forget the U.S. bombing of Cambodia.  "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves," was how Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it in 1970 (NY Times, 5/27/04), reflecting Richard Nixon's concern that the large-scale aerial bombing wasn't doing enough damage.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton released Air Force records on the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan wrote (Walrus, 10/06):

The still-incomplete database (it has several "dark" periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.

Estimates of Cambodian casualties as a result of the U.S. bombing vary; in 1975, the Washington Post (4/24/75) estimated 450,000 dead and wounded.

So now the current secretary of state visited the country that the United States so ruthlessly bombed in the not-so-distant past. According to the report of the visit in the New York Times (11/2/10), Hillary Clinton expressed support for justice for the victims--that is, the victims of the horrific violence perpetrated by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which rose to power in the wake of the U.S. assault on the country.  As the Times put it:

Mrs. Clinton repeated an argument that has been used by proponents of the trials, saying that "a country that is able to confront its past is a country that can overcome it."

Clinton's attitude stands in contrast to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who readers are told believes the country should "dig a hole and bury the past." Clinton also said: "Countries that are held prisoner to their past can never break those chains and build the kind of future that their children deserve.... Although I am well aware the work of the tribunal is painful, it is necessary to ensure a lasting peace."

It is a remarkable testimony to the strength of our propaganda system that the Newspaper of Record can run a story like this with a straight face, with a top U.S. official urging accountability for atrocities in a country where the U.S. government committed so many. Those atrocities, apparently, have long ago been given the Hun Sen treatment.

And bonus irony: A few weeks ago Clinton introduced Kissinger before his address at a State Department conference on the U.S. war on Indochina (AlterNet, 9/28/10). Presumably she was equally concerned with the need to hold Kissinger accountable for his crimes, and is seeking a tribunal that will do the "painful" work necessary to build a future our children deserve.

Veteran corporate journalists tend to dismiss the Internet age for delivering news with a point of view. In the good old days, you received a broad array of information from a broad array of guests. But nowadays you only read or watch things that conform to your political point of view.

It's not clear that this is even true, but it's pretty unconvincing coming from the likes of former Nightline host Ted Koppel (via TVNewser, 4/13/10).

In response to a question from anchor Katty Kay about a new Pew Research survey--in which 64 percent of broadcast news executives believe the biz is heading in the wrong direction--Koppel said: "I think it's even worse. I think it's a disaster."

"I think we're living through the--I hope--the final stages of what I like to call the age of entitlement.... We now feel entitled not to have the news that we need but the news that we want. We want to listen to news that comes from those who already sympathize with our particular point of view. We don't want the facts any more."

FAIR's landmark study of Nightline found a striking bias towards elite, right-leaning guests: The four most frequent guests were Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Elliott Abrams and Jerry Falwell. Guests were overwhelmingly white and male; few represented public interest groups or were critics of U.S. policy.

(Koppel once boasted of Kissinger: "Henry Kissinger is, plain and simply, the best secretary of state we have had in 20, maybe 30 years.... I'm proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger. He is an extraordinary man. This country has lost a lot by not having him in a position of influence and authority.")

In a seven-week stretch in early 1995, Koppel spent almost half his airtime discussing the O.J. Simpson trial. During the turbulent protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, Koppel's program chose to skip the news entirely.

Koppel should, of course, feel free to lecture about the decline of journalism and the problems inherent in having multiple sources of information coming from different perspectives available in the world. But it's worth remembering that, back in the good old days, Koppel wasn't doing much to bring a broad public debate to the national airwaves... unless you're a big fan of Henry Kissinger.

According to a report in the New York Times (2/11/09), NBC is launching a new series to track down and expose war criminals. The network's plan has attracted some criticism from U.S. officials and human rights experts, who are concerned that the network's journalists might be publicizing false accusations against the suspects they're "confronting" on the air. (The show sounds eerily similar to the network's To Catch a Predator series, which purported to bust sexual predators.)

The first suspect is apparently Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting professor at a Maryland college who has been accused by Rwandan authorities of participating in the 1994 genocide in that country; a Human Rights Watch official is quoted in the article saying that the case against Munyakazi is actually somewhat murky.

If NBC is actually interesting in exposing war crimes, though, there might be an easier way to do this. Couldn't they just invite Henry Kissinger to appear on Meet the Press, and then "surprise" him?

Time magazine tells us about Obama's chief economic adviser:

His controversial comments about women's aptitude for math and science were a reminder that he operates best when he is working behind the scenes.

Oh, so that was the lesson. I had been under the misapprehension that the lesson had something to do with Larry Summers' sexism.

Time also writes that of Obama's incoming economic team,

Summers is the one to watch. He is expected to do for the economy what strong-minded and ambitious National Security Advisers like Henry Kissinger have done for foreign policy: plan it, set it and control it.

To be clear, it would seem that Time magazine means this as a compliment--to Summers' apparent talents, and to Kissinger's legacy.

The Washington Post (9/28/08) gathered reactions from "foreign policy analysts and others" to last Friday's debate on international policy, and what's striking is how hawkish the Post's circle of foreign policy experts is. The lineup included Henry A. Kissinger--inevitably--and a bunch of hawks from right-wing think tanks and/or the Bush administration: Danielle Pletka of AEI, Michael Rubin of AEI and Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Patrick Clawson of WINEP (who co-wrote a book with Rubin) and David Makovsky of WINEP. Michael O'Hanlon works at the centrist Brookings but is a famous Iraq hawk.

Those who aren't obvious hawks mostly have Republican connections: Michael J. Green of CSIS worked for G.W. Bush's NSC, Karen Donfried of the German Marshall Fund was an aide to Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Soderberg used to work for Bill Clinton and now advises Michael Bloomberg. Ronald D. Asmus was a former Clinton aide but is best known for his advocacy of NATO expansion. For a change of pace, they've got David M. Walker of the Peter G. Petersen Foundation, who's a deficit hawk.

The only bona fide dove on the list would seem to be Russia specialist Stephen P. Cohen of Princeton. You'd think the disasters of the Bush years would create interest in new ideas on international policy--but at the Washington Post, a debate between alumni of Bush's Pentagon and State Department really is considered balanced.

Update: I mixed up my Stephen Cohens--the Russia expert is Stephen F. Cohen. The Post's Stephen Cohen is an expert on Pakistan who used to work for the Reagan State Department. So virtually everyone in the Post's rolodex of foreign policy experts is either a hawk or has Republican ties.