Under the charming headline "Eliminate the Parasites," Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (9/12/09) advances another brilliant scheme to save corporate media from the menace of Google.

Lyons likes the idea put forward by billionaire Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban:

Cuban's advice: declare war on the "aggregator" Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators--sites like Drudge Report, Newser and countless others--don't create much original material. They mostly just synopsize stuff from mainstream newspapers and magazines, and provide a link to the original....

He says the media companies should kill off these parasites by using a little piece of software that blocks incoming links from aggregators. If the aggregators can't link to other people's stories, they die. With a few lines of code, the old-media guys could snuff them out.

Great idea--except that aggregator sites don't actually have to link to the original articles--they could just synopsize the news they find and leave searching for the original article as an exercise for the reader.  As Cuban himself notes, "very few readers actually click through to the original story," so they can't be the main attraction of the aggregators. Apparently, people go to them because they are a quick way to learn the news of the day--and they're going to keep being that, unless you make it a crime to tell people what the news is. I don't think we want to do that.

The links are mainly there as a courtesy to the content-producer, and they ought to appreciate that courtesy, because more important than the traffic that such links generate directly (though this can be quite attractive, as evidenced by outlets' relentless pursuit of Drudge links) is the fact that they boost your search-engine visibility, particularly on Google. If you stopped people from linking to you, you'd be basically invisible online. And this would be good for corporate media how?

Rather than coming up with a scheme for how to get back at Google, Huffington Post or whomever, corporate media would be better off thinking about why people use aggregator sites. When people are looking for a roundup of all the news in the world, why don't they turn to a newspaper?  And when they do click on your sites, why doesn't that make you more money? Corporate media is, after all, the business of selling audiences to advertisers--if they can't do that as well as Google does, then they just aren't very good at their jobs.

Eva Paterson (Huffington Post, 8/28/09),  president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, has a response to Glenn Beck's assertion that "I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts" after having been "smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show."

Being "the person who first hired Van Jones," Paterson finds herself "in a unique position to know the truth." And falling squarely in the fabulously unsurprising category is that "the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts":

For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots....

This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week after the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police...stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people--including all the legal monitors.

The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).

So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march--for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated--is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.

Paterson reminds you that "you don't have to take my word for it," since "arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record." And of course, FAIR followers know all too well that "Beck is at best relying on Internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings."

Read a recent article from FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

I give Peter Osnos credit for not being as nutty as Richard Posner or as self-pitying as Dana Milbank; his piece from CJR on "What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?" (7-8/09) is the most reasonable version I've seen of the news industry's case against the search engine company. Still, I can't help but think that he's missing the point in a fundamental way.

One of Osnos' key examples of the unfairness of Google involves Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com, and a story it ran (2/7/09) on pitcher Alex Rodriguez testing positive for steroids. Osnos relates SI.com's grievance: Though it broke the story, other websites got as much or more traffic from it:

Most galling was that the Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.

From a journalist's perspective, this is patently unfair: SI.com got the scoop, and ought to get the reward. But is that the right perspective to look at what Google does?  Journalists are not, after all, in the business of creating information; they're in the business of conveying information.  Sports Illustrated's reporters did not create Rodriguez's failing steroid test results; Major League Baseball did that. People with access to the test information passed it on to SI, and SI put it up on the Web.

But that's not where the process of information transmission stops. People can't check every website that might break a news story of interest to them every day, so they rely on news gathering institutions to bring information together for them--that's what newspapers do, that's what AP does, and, yes, that's what Huffington Post does too.

Osnos attributes the Google results to the fact that "Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines." And it may well be that the folks at HuffPo are better at that stuff than SI is--though you'd think with the $84 billion entity of Time Warner behind them, the sports mag could afford to figure it out.

More important for HuffPo's search results, however, is the fact that people who use the Web have gotten used to looking for breaking news there, and so when they link to a story they find interesting they link to it there. Google's methodology, looking for links as a surrogate for how people use the Web, finds more of them going to Huffington Post than to SI.com--and that's why HuffPo came out on top.

Osnos says that "human help" needs to be incorporated into Google's algorithm--given that the search engine last year announced that it had indexed more than 1 trillion urls, this suggestion would seem to be rather impractical. But it's not clear that the human-free algorithm is making the wrong choice by directing Web surfers to the sites people most often go to when looking for information.

Arianna Huffington's latest column (Huffington Post, 7/13/09) presents a compelling portrayal of the power of new democratic media--versus the self-preserving corporate model of news gathering--in the Chinese government response to major riots last week: "It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest." But here's the rub: "At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area":

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media--and offered traditional reporters a front-row seat.

China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bussed-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.

The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.

As Huffington reminds us, "the truth is, you don't have to 'be there' to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."

Driving home the point that "the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing," Huffington then excerpts one of the most damaging journalistic examples of this in our time:

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the New York Times in April 2003.

Noting how "the president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now," FAIR associate Norman Solomon is letting Huffington Post readers know (7/9/09) "that's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually":

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

Solomon warns that "'escalation' isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States":

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad--nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper--nothing too abrupt or jarring....

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

While "Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set" and "sounded an open-ended note: 'There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan,'" Solomon writes that the announcement "was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place."

Solomon foresees that "war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come 'piecemeal'--'with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.'" For a look "beyond how many more troops and when to send them"--the only major questions about Afghanistan regularly given venue in corporate media--listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ann Jones on Afghanistan" (1/23/09).

Considering how, "in recent months, news aggregators like the Huffington Post have received heated criticism from some who believe they’re stealing valuable traffic and ad revenue from newspapers," with even "appeals court Judge Richard Posner recently wr[iting] a widely-linked post arguing that copyright law should be changed in order to bar linking to websites and paraphrasing their content," media blogger Simon Owens (Bloggasm.com, 7/6/09) has conducted an experiment to evaluate the premise of corporate media management "that news aggregators simply repackage news so there’s little incentive to click on the actual link":

So how much traffic does a large news aggregator like Huffington Post bring? I’ve been linked several times within Huffington Post, but typically on its users blogs, which only send a few hundred readers at most. But on early Friday I was fortunate enough to be featured prominently on Huffington Post’s front page with a banner headline linking to one of my articles.

How much traffic did this link bring? Lots. For the first three hours I received approximately 4,000 unique visitors an hour to just that one article. Traffic for the rest of the day remained strong, not once dipping below 2,000 uniques an hour as the link began traveling down the front page. By midnight that night, Huffington Post had sent approximately 30,000 unique visitors to that one article.

But though the first day’s worth of traffic was the heaviest, the Huffington Post continued to send me strong traffic for two more days as the link moved down on its main page but remained prominent on its highly-trafficked Politics page.

"All together," Owens tells us, he "received a grand total of 37,739 unique visitors from a prominent link on the Huffington Post over a three day period," while days later "still seeing relatively strong traffic from there"--which all sounds like decidedly good news for linked-to big media outlets, doesn't it?

Writing that "it takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation," FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Huffington Post, 6/8/09) tells us that,

when last Sunday's edition of the Washington Post printed the routine headline "Iraq War Deaths," the newspaper meant American deaths--to Washington's ultra-savvy, the deaths that really count. The only numbers and names under the headline were American.

Ask for whom the bell tolls. That's the implicit message--from top journalists and politicians alike.

A few weeks ago, some prominent U.S. news stories did emerge about Pentagon air strikes that killed perhaps a hundred Afghan civilians. But much of the emphasis was that such deaths could undermine the U.S. war effort. The most powerful media lenses do not correct the myopia when Uncle Sam's vision is impaired by solipsism and narcissism.

With plenty of experience chronicling such matters, Solomon foresees "plenty more media invisibility and erasure ahead for Afghan people as the Pentagon ramps up its war effort in their country." Read the current edition of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Treating Civilian Deaths as a 'Sore Point': The PR War in Afghanistan and Pakistan" (6/09) by Peter Hart.

Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post, 5/25/09) is offering, as "a particularly egregious example" of corporate media as "enabler of the transformation of real reform into D.C. 'reform,'" a May 23 L.A. Times editorial she thinks "might as well have been written by industry lobbyists (the way many 'reform' bills are)." After her initial reaction to the subhead, "Stung by the excesses of the financial services industry, Congress is striking back"--"Actually, it wasn't Congress that was 'stung' by those 'excesses'--it was the entire world. And why is regulation of out-of-control markets 'striking back'?"--Huffington warns us that "it gets worse":

"Rather than trusting market forces, Democrats in Congress and the administration argue that unbridled capitalism has victimized consumers."

Who wrote this, the "tea party" organizers? Glenn Beck? Since when do things like setting ground rules and demanding transparency mean you no longer believe in "market forces"?

Apparently, according to the L.A. Times, the call for reform is now a "backlash" in which "Democratic majorities in Congress" are going to "clip the financial industry's wings." And this is bad because reform means "raising costs and limiting the freedom of savvy investors and borrowers."

Really? I wonder just how many of those "savvy investors" made money in, say, 2008, when they were blissfully free of all the wing-clipping regulations the L.A. Times is so afraid of? Not many--and that's because all investors, savvy and non-savvy alike, are victimized when the entire financial system is destabilized. In fact, I believe I've heard something about the crisis affecting the L.A. Times, too.

Noting that "the closer we get to actual reform, the more hysterical the debate surrounding it becomes," Huffington tells how "mainstream media's habit of internalizing bad faith arguments in the name of 'balance' becomes more pronounced; and the public interest loses out to the interests of the established financial/political class."

Blogging on "Greta Van Susteren's defensive response" to reports "saying that one of the reasons that Sarah Palin has been caught up in a 'series of public relations gaffes' is because she is 'taking advice from Greta and her husband,'" major GOP booster John Coale, the Huffington Post's Geoffrey Dunn (3/29/09) thinks the Fox News host "Doth Protest Too Much":

Let me give Van Susteren her due. This is a serious charge of direct professional misconduct, and there should have been more than a throwaway line from an unnamed source to back it up. The allegation begs further questioning.

But what Van Susteren does acknowledge in her "brief" on the subject is equally troubling:

1. She acknowledges that her husband, John Coale, has been advising Palin, that they are in weekly contact, and that he played a central role in the formation of her national political action committee, SarahPAC--all while she has been covering Palin for Fox News.
2. She acknowledges that her husband met Palin through Van Susteren's media contacts with the governor. In short, he used his wife's journalistic access to Palin to gain his own political access.

At least one thing is obvious to Dunn: "There are some serious journalistic conflicts of interest taking place here, and Van Susteren is either being duplicitous or disingenuous to characterize them as 'silly.'"

Immigrant rights advocate and independent journalist Roberto Lovato is worried (Huffington Post, 2/26/09) that Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Department Detective Aaron Douglas "deals with the world's media more than most" when flacking for Joe Arpaio--"America's Toughest Sheriff"--"Though he is a local official, his is often the first voice heard by many of the foreign correspondents covering immigration in the United States":

The proliferation of stories in international media and in global forums about the Guantánamo-like problems in the country's immigrant detention system--death, abuse and neglect at the hands of detention facility guards; prolonged and indefinite detention of immigrants (including children and families) denied habeas corpus and other fundamental rights; filthy, overcrowded and extremely unhealthy facilities; denial of basic health services--are again tarnishing the U.S. image abroad, according to several experts....

For her part, Alison Parker, deputy director of the U.S. program of Human Rights Watch, fears a global government "race to the bottom" around immigrant detention policies.

In Parker's view, Sheriff Arpaio's abuses "increase the risk that this will give the green light to other governments to be just as abusive or more abusive as the United States." But how do these fears translate in the United States' own media? Well, Fox for one appears unconcerned, or even thrilled, having made the racist sheriff a reality TV star with his own series: Smile ... You're Under Arrest!.

Regular Huffington Post media critic Marty Kaplan finds something especially "discomfiting" (Jewish Journal, 2/16/09) about recent stimulus bill coverage and "what it says about the role that the media have carved out for themselves in American public life":

If the job of the press were to help the public understand what's really important, and to distinguish propaganda from facts, then Republican attempts to sink the bill by defining it as liberal pork would have gone nowhere. The endangered mouse that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was allegedly earmarking billions to protect; the Las Vegas supertrain that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was claimed to have snuck in; the rationing of health care that former New York Lieut. Gov. Betsy McCaughey accused Tom Daschle of hiding in the bill: None of these and other colorful lies would have gained any traction if truth value were a prerequisite for airtime. Instead, unfortunately, the more outrageous the allegation, the more irresistible it was to the media.

When reporting is reconceived as stenography, there's no place in news for news judgment. The Republicans know this. If we trash it, they will come--that's the GOP's formula for gaming the Beltway press corps. With a handful of honorable exceptions, television journalists are particularly helpless in the face of phony charges. Instead of sorting things through, they just serve them up, to be repeated in the right-wing echo chamber on cable, talk radio and the internet. The closest the mainstream media come to helping citizens distinguish what's believable from what's baloney is the weaselly formulation, "Some say... but others say...." If citizens want to separate what's true from what's spin, well, you're on your own, pal.

Writing that "of course that didn't happen just yesterday," Kaplan traces this attitude to back when "news became a profit center within entertainment conglomerates": "To aggregate audiences and to sell their eyeballs to advertisers, it's not necessary, and it's awfully expensive, to take pains to figure out what's accurate. It's much better television, and it costs nothing at all, to hand a bullhorn to a propagandist. Nothing, that is, to the networks--just not nothing to democracy."

Listen to the recent FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Lori Wallach on Buy America Brouhaha" (2/13/09)