The national media watch group
The controversy over the attacks at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, is a great test of the right's tired claim that the corporate media have a liberal bias. If that were true, then this "scandal" would exist almost entirely on Fox News Channel and conservative talk radio.
Time magazine has a profile this week of Senate Republican buddies John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and one passage really stands out–not for what it reveals about them, really, but about the media. Michael Crowley writes: Graham and McCain have been friends for more than a decade, a partnership born of their shared passion for national security (McCain was a Navy pilot, Graham is still an Air Force Reserve lawyer), a willingness to poke their party's base in the eye and an uncanny knack for attracting the media's attention. More surprising and quotable than bland party leaders like Mitch McConnell [...]
The notion, coming from CBS reporter Anna Werner, that come January 1 an average family will be stuck with a bill for $3,500 is misleading–a deception in some sense borrowed from the faulty "cliff" analogy in the first place.
Not every politician gets a warm and fuzzy retirement profile in the New York Times. But not every politician is Joe Lieberman. Jennifer Steinhauer's piece (11/27/12) is a tribute mostly to Lieberman's close bond with Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The "Three Amigos" traveled the world together, advocating for one hawkish foreign policy idea after another: Their hawkish world views often placed them at odds with their respective parties, but together they secured a place at the center of every major foreign policy debate. That's mostly true of Lieberman, but it's hard to figure how McCain and Graham much [...]
Part of the 2011 Congressional debt reduction deal called for automatic cuts to social spending and military budgets over the next 10 years. The idea was that a deal to avoid these cuts would be struck, because Republicans wouldn't want to cut the Pentagon, and Democrats would try to protect safety net programs. That didn't happen, so these so-called "sequestration" cuts are prompting some alarm bells in the corporate media–ringing loudly at the mere thought of cutting the military budget. The New York Times (6/4/12) sounded the alarm today in a piece by Jonathan Weisman that framed things like this: [...]
Quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham's statement at a May 13 Senate hearing that "one of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work," Robert Parry (Consortium News, 5/16/09) explains that this is "implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition's brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the 15th to 17th centuries," and posits that "in a normal world, one might have expected national outrage over a prominent U.S. senator speaking favorably of the Spanish Inquisition, which pioneered innovations in torture… including the water torture now known as waterboarding": Beyond the inhumanity of [...]
