I checked out a post from the Web-based publication Capital (9/28/11) about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest because CJR (9/29/11) told me it was a "smart post" that "crunched the numbers" and showed "how there really is no media blackout." I have to say I would have thought CJR would have higher standards when it came to crunching media numbers.

Capital's Joe Pompeo states his thesis early on:

The idea that there is a media blackout has gained appeal on the left with support from Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, who said on the September 21 edition of his primetime show on Current TV: "The majority of the media is ignoring the public uprising."

In fact, an (admittedly unscientific) survey of news organizations suggests the protest, despite lacking any clear goal or purpose (that's by design), has been making headlines since it began on September 17.

OK, so Pompeo is trying to show that Olbermann was wrong when he said on September 21 that "the majority of the media" was ignoring the protest. (Michael Moore made a similar statement on the Rachel Maddow Show on September 19.) He does this by doing Nexis and Google searches that include a full week of additional coverage:

A Nexis query for "Occupy Wall Street" yielded 428 results as of press time [i.e, September 28], including 248 items that appeared on blogs, 71 in newspapers, 63 on the wires, 31 in "Web-based publications," 18 as news transcripts, nine as "aggregate news sources," one in the industry trade press and one in a legal news publication. Google News has indexed more than 2,000 articles between September 17 and today.

That is "admittedly unscientific"--not to mention patently unfair.

How much coverage had Occupy Wall Street actually gotten when Olbermann made his claim? Well, Nexis gives me 17 articles from September 16 through September 21 in the "Newspaper Stories, Combined Articles" database with the words "Occupy Wall Street" in them.  Of these, 10 are from overseas papers--from Britain, Australia, Canada, China and Pakistan. Another four are from the St. Joseph News Press, a Missouri paper that reprints tiny items from CNN's wire service. So when Olbermann made his comment, there had been three actual U.S. newspaper stories during five days of demonstrations in the heart of the nation's media capital--the New York Daily News (9/17/11),  Newark Star Ledger (9/18/11) and New York Newsday (9/19/11)--that are at least in-depth enough to mention the name of the event. That's a grand total of 1,047 words.

That Newsday piece, by the way, was headlined "Protests Close Wall Street Second Day." Nothing to see here--move along!

On Tuesday FAIR documented that Fox host Bill O'Reilly called for the prosecution of media outlets that published Sarah Palin's hacked emails in 2008-- which might mean, if he were at all consistent, that O'Reilly wants to see his boss Rupert Murdoch do some hard time over the far more serious News Corp. hacking scandal.

FAIR's research showed up on Keith Olbermann's Countdown program on Current last night-- where O'Reilly was named The Worst Person in the World. Watch it (starts at around the 2:15 mark):

MSNBC host Ed Schultz has been suspended without pay for a week for calling right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut" on his radio show. Schultz apologized on MSNBC last night, calling his words "terribly vile."

This is not a new thing at MSNBC.  In 2006, Keith Olbermann did a bit about Paris Hilton being assaulted--joking that she has "had worse things happen to her face."  The on-screen graphic was "A Slut and Battery." In 2009 he called right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

Keith Olbermann popped up on the David Letterman show and gave one reason--perhaps one big reason--why he left MSNBC. As transcribed by MediaBistro's TVNewser (where you can also watch the video):

At some point in the last few years that I have been doing the news in the way that I do, it has occurred to me that the best place to continue doing the news in that way would be to do it at a place that is just in the news business and nothing else. It doesn't also own an amusement park in Orlando, it doesn't have outdoor advertising, or beet plantations in the Azores.

I agree with Keith Olbermann (11/15/10) about the dubious value of "objectivity" as a journalistic value; he makes a telling point about how journalistic icons like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow are most honored for the moments when they reached conclusions and asserted values.

And I think he's right that the U.S. media establishment's failure to see through the lies that sold the Iraq War is a singular failure of our journalistic system--one that does indeed suggest that we need an entirely different system that better serves our democracy.

Olbermann's MSNBC forerunner, Phil Donahue, was fired in the run up to the war not because he wasn't neutral enough, after all, but because he would hamper the network's ability to be "waving the flag" like its competitors (All Your TV, 2/25/03). What NBC and its corporate parent GE were looking for was not objectivity but the right kind of bias.

Which is to say, Olbermann is right that it's necessary to have journalists who express values and draw conclusions--but not sufficient.  We also need to talk about which values our corporate-dominated media system is likely to tolerate, and which conclusions are allowed to be drawn.

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann's indefinite suspension for violating network policies regarding political donations lasted all of  two work days. On his Wednesday show (11/10/10), Olbermann brought up the point that FAIR made in our alert--the difficulty of squaring such a policy with MSNBC parent General Electric's political giving and multi-million dollar lobbying.

Olbermann was joined by Nation blogger Greg Mitchell and Howard Kurtz of CNN/Daily Beast. Olbermann asked Kurtz:

Howard, how far up the tree does it go?  If you and I and Greg can't donate, can our bosses donate?  Can our bosses' boss donate?  Can Rupert Murdoch donate?  Because surely, no matter what you might think of what I did, he must have more influence on what appears on TV news than I do.  And if it's not Rupert, what about the chairman of GE or of Comcast?

Kurtz replied:

Once you get up to the corporate level, where they're not meddling with newsroom decisions, whether it's Time Warner, General Electric, News Corp, then corporations are going to give money.  They lobby.  They have corporate interests.

That left Olbermann to say:

OLBERMANN: Greg, to your experience, is there a part of a company--another part of a company that puts on a news broadcast or publishes a newspaper that isn't involved, to some degree?  Do you know any chairman of the ultimate authorities who don't get involved in news decisions in some large sense, at least?

MITCHELL: You could probably talk about that better than I could, but, again, in the real world, the owners of companies have an interest.

Indeed. The temporary squelching of the Olbermann/Bill O'Reilly feud last year was reportedly arranged at the corporate level, between GE and NewsCorp executives.

And  during an interview with Al Franken (10/25/05), Olbermann once explained how political pressure from inside the news division worked:

You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president's office here and told, "Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?"

And a recent New York magazine article recounted the fight inside MSNBC over Phil Donahue's program, which was seen by some as too critical of the drive to war with Iraq. MSNBC heavyweights like Chris Matthews seemed to know that going to the bosses was how to change what was on the air:

Donahue's problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews was a rising force at the network, with a reported salary of $5 million. He cultivated former GE CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of NBC CEO Bob Wright. (The two summered together on Nantucket.) Matthews saw himself as MSNBC's biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue's show. In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.

That piece also quotes NBC CEO Robert Wright saying that MSNBC's post-9/11 strategy was to try and outfox Fox News: "We have to be more conservative than they are."

--On Democracy Now! (11/8/10):

While Keith Olbermann's donations became front-page news, little attention has been paid to the massive amount of political spending by MSNBC's parent company General Electric, one of the nation's largest military contractors. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting reports GE made over $2 million in political contributions in the 2010 election cycle. The top recipient was Republican Senate candidate Rob Portman from Ohio. The company has also spent $32 million on lobbying this year and contributed over $1 million to campaign against a California ballot initiative aimed at eliminating tax loopholes for major corporations.

--George Curry, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer (11/3/10)  about the state of public broadcasting and NPR's decision to fire Juan Williams:

When NPR fired Williams, conservatives--who have campaigned for years to eliminate the network's federal subsidies--charged that it was violating Williams' First Amendment rights. Williams agreed in a column on Fox's website, saying: "To say the least, this is a chilling assault on free speech."

No it isn't. Juan Williams, a frequent critic of federal entitlements, is not entitled to a job at NPR or anywhere else. And NPR has done nothing to curtail his freedom of speech. Its executives have decided they no longer want his services, as is their right. It's a question of fee speech, not free speech.

I worked for a year as a commentator for a show Ed Gordon hosted on NPR. When my contract was not renewed, I did not assert that NPR had violated my First Amendment rights. There is nothing unconstitutional about not renewing a contract.

More important than NPR's firing Juan Williams for the wrong reason is its failure to fulfill its original mission. The watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting noted that the network "has consistently shown a tilt toward elite guests and sources--government officials, corporate representatives and journalists from commercial media."

FAIR observed, "If the pressure from the right is to be effectively countered, it's not enough to say, 'Don't Defund NPR.' What is needed is a call for public broadcasting to fulfill its mission" with "independent, provocative programming that features voices ignored or marginalized by the commercial media."

By definition, Juan Williams wouldn't fit that description.

MSNBC has suspended host Keith Olbermann for making political contributions--even though GE/NBC executives and fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has made similar donations. If you'd like to urge MSNBC to follow a consistent standard, see FAIR's Action Alert (11/5/10). And please post copies of your messages, and/or comments on the alert, to the comments thread here.

Former TV Newser Brian Stelter's article (New York Times, 8/7/09) about MSNBC and Fox News having "resumed their long-running feud this week after the New York Times reported that their parent companies, General Electric and the News Corporation, had struck a deal to stop each other's televised personal attacks" states that "the deal extends beyond the prime-time hour that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O'Reilly occupy," reporting that "employees of daytime programs on MSNBC were specifically told by executives not to mention Fox hosts in segments critical of conservative media figures, according to two staff members."

While GE's official line is that, "while both companies agreed that the tone should be more civil, no one at GE told anyone at NBC News or MSNBC how to report the news," Stelter quotes unnamed Fox employees who "said they were told in June and July not to flagrantly criticize General Electric." Stelter gives more room to Fox management denials--"We've never suppressed any stories about NBC or GE"--before getting to "some watchdog groups" pointing out how

the months-long cease-fire challenged the claims that the two media companies did not interfere in their on-air content.

The advocacy group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting asked its supporters on Friday to contact GE, urging it to renounce the agreement with Fox.

Jeff Cohen, the founder of the group, said the deal between the two networks’ parent companies was a reason to be wary of corporate-owned TV news.

"It should remind news consumers of who calls the tune and pays the bills--and that TV reporters and even loud-mouthed commentators have corporate bosses whose interests are often not about unbridled journalism," Mr. Cohen said.

Salon editor Joan Walsh weighs in too, about how "it appeared that 'the owners of two large news organizations colluded to make sure their audience got less, not more, information, and to promote their business interests, not the public interest.'"

Read FAIR's new Action Alert: "Did GE Stifle Keith Olbermann?: Fox and MSNBC's Gentlemen's Agreement" (8/7/09).

Quoting Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter's strong words on the Keith Olbermann show about how "it's important, historically, to look at the context of" the "effort in these OLC memos to try to dress [torture] up as something else," Hullabaloo blogger digby takes issue (4/24/09) with his statement that "Dick Cheney stands almost alone" in still publicly defending the memos:

Yes, Dick Cheney is forlorn and all alone. Many of the people who advocated taking the gloves off are leaving him out there hanging today. And one of them is Jonathan Alter.

See, he forgot to mention--and Keith apparently didn't know--that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 this torture talk didn't come out of nowhere or even from the dark recesses of Cheney's evil mind. Jonathan Alter himself was one of the people who brought it up almost instantly: "Time to Think About Torture" By Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, November 5, 2001.

Clearly, the Pentagon wasn't alone in advocating torture from the moment 9/11 happened. It was being advocated in the pages of major newsmagazines by so-called liberal columnists who are now commenting on what "Cheney did" as if they weren't even in the country at the time.

Read FAIR's review of such craven commentators at the time Extra!: "Pro-Pain Pundits: Torture Advocates Defy U.S., International Law" (1-2/02) by Steve Rendall

A recent New York Times article (11/29/08) offers fresh documentation of conflicts of interest involving one of TV's most famous retired generals, Barry McCaffrey, who continues to be employed as an NBC military analyst even as he rakes in profits from military contractors. The story of how McCaffrey and at least 74 other retired generals were receiving briefings through a secret Pentagon propaganda program was broken by the New York Times back in April (4/20/08); however, it received scarcely a mention on the TV news outlets that employed these Pentagon pundits.

One exception was Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MNSBC (4/21/08). However, for Olbermann, McCaffrey's short-lived stint as a skeptic of Pentagon tactics seemed to be a bigger story than the fact that McCaffrey had been participating in a Pentagon propaganda program and had a financial stake in selling war equipment. Olbermann stated:

Buying the news-gate. First Armstrong Williams and video news releases and Jeff Gannon. Now the New York Times report yesterday that so many of the supposedly ex-military figures you were seeing on this network and CBS and ABC, CNN and Fox, in '03 and '04 and '05 still had business relationships with the Pentagon and were still being wined and dined by DOD brass.

The headline here is not that the administration was trying to corrupt the free press. It's, A, how courageous were the likes of Barry McCaffrey, Monty Meigs and Jack Jacobs when they came on here and said, this is crack--the Pentagon misled everybody?

Indeed, McCaffrey had for a time strayed from his Pentagon talking points. However, as the recent New York Times article documents, he was quickly cut off from access to the Pentagon's secret briefings as punishment, and rapidly reversed course:

Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.

"There is a time when you have to punt," said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey’s friend, not as his spokesman.

Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his "great respect" for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert.

Moreover, the Times noted that

For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. "I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq," he told Mr. Williams that June.

Even McCaffrey's own people seem to agree that his role as a TV analyst was inherently compromised, according to the Times:

Mr. Weiner, the general's longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients "to get your mission achieved in the media." General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.

McCaffrey's latter allegiance to the Bush administration line was something Olbermann conveniently seemed to forget.

However, MSNBC's noted liberal host did caution, the day after the New York Times exposed the Pentagon pundits program, that such journalistic improprieties might be ongoing--at least at one cable network: "What makes anybody think this still isn't going on at Fox?" he demanded.

As it turns out, McCaffrey has in recent months been cropping up as an "analyst" much closer to home. And not just on NBC (where he’s appeared seven separate times, offering his expertise everything from the Afghanistan War to the Iraq War to the Colombian hostage rescue to the "drug war" in Mexico); he's also appeared twice on MSNBC--including on the show of Olbermann's fellow liberal MSNBC host, Rachel Maddow (9/9/08).

But then that should come as no surprise. After all, it was on MSNBC that McCaffrey delivered his hallmark line: "Thank God for the Abrams Tank...and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle!" As a FAIR Action Alert pointed out, at the time of that statement,

unbeknownst to viewers, McCaffrey was sitting on the board of a company called IDT, which received multi-million dollar contracts related to both of those pieces of military hardware.

Also since the Times’ broke the pentagon pundits story, CNN has run a story featuring McCaffrey as an expert (Situation Room, 8/4/08), as has PBS (NewsHour, 6/30/08).