Last night (10/4/11) CNN host Erin Burnett noted that her  fact check of the Occupy Wall Street protests had drawn some criticism. But she still doesn't seem to get it.  "Well, our story got noted documentarian Michael Moore, who watched the show last night," she reported before playing a video response from Moore:

I just don't understand that piece, you know, that new show. These companies, these banks, Goldman Sachs up here, they took billions and billions of dollars of citizens' money, and they ask us to pay for their crime and we're supposed to be OK because some of them have paid some of it back with interest. I mean, it just boggles the mind.

Burnett then replayed the exchange highlighted in FAIR's Action Alert--where Burnett tells a protester that the TARP bailout funds were paid back (hence, there is apparently no reason to be protesting on Wall Street).

As we noted--as did Moore--this misses the point of the protests,  and doesn't even understand the criticism of the TARP bailouts in the first place.  But Burnett still thinks she's done some kind of service:

As I said last night, Dan was an earnest person and he wanted facts. And the best we can do all is have accurate information and then have serious conversations.... So, Michael Moore, come on, please, come OutFront.

Journalists like Burnett make choices about which guests to have on their show. If she were actually interested in hearing from an advocate for the Occupy Wall Street protests, or from an economic or policy expert who could talk about TARP bailouts or economic inequality, these people are not hard to find--they've been showing up on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann's Current show and so on. One such critic--Harold Meyerson--wrote a column in the Washington Post that was particularly informative. Erin Burnett chose instead to have a former speechwriter for Rudolph Giuliani on to dismiss the protests, and then attempted to do so herself.

She can plead with Michael Moore to appear on her show, or she can actually address the criticism of her report. That's the way to have an actual serious conversation.

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!

Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC (9/19/11):

Or, if you prefer reading:

But last week when Wolf Blitzer and CNN had that debate, the CNN/Tea Party Express debate, and Wolf sat there and called them his partners--I just thought, this was amazing, because would you ever see the CNN nurses union debate or the CNN teachers union debate? Because I think there are a few more teachers and nurses in this country than there are members of the Tea Party.

But we'll never see that in the mainstream media. And liberal organizations which have many more members just don't get the attention. A thousand people arrested in front of the White House a couple of weeks ago on the tar sands environmental issue -- hardly any coverage of this.

Can you imagine if 1,000 Tea Party members had been arrested in front of the White House? It would be at the top of every news story.

People are down on Wall Street right now, holding a sit-in and a camp- in down there--virtually no news about this protest.

This goes on with liberals and the left all of the time, and it gets ignored. And, fortunately, there are shows like yours and others who aren't ignoring it. It doesn't mean it isn't happening, and it will continue to happen.

One recently released WikiLeaks cable stated that Cuban officials had banned Michael Moore's healthcare documentary Sicko. Critics of Moore's work pounced, delighted that a film that spent time pointing out that Cuba's national system has some merits would be banned in that country.

The problem is that... well, it wasn't. Which is something that anyone could have known if they'd done a moment of factchecking. Like Michael Moore did (though, to be fair, he probably knew this stuff without having to check):

Sounds convincing, eh?! There's only one problem--Sicko had just been playing in Cuban theaters. Then the entire nation of Cuba was shown the film on national television on April 25, 2008! The Cubans embraced the film so much so it became one of those rare American movies that received a theatrical distribution in Cuba. I personally ensured that a 35mm print got to the Film Institute in Havana. Screenings of Sicko were set up in towns all across the country.

Moore slammed the Guardian's story (headlined, "WikiLeaks: Cuba Banned Sicko for Depicting 'Mythical' Healthcare System"). Other outlets were also guilty of taking the cable at face value. It shows--once again--that a lot of journalists have a strange relationship with these WikiLeaks cables. They don't like what WikiLeaks does, and they're pretty sure there's nothing explosive or newsworthy hidden in the cables. Unless, of course, there's something they find politically useful. Then it should be treated as a Top Secret Fact--no checking necessary.

With all the talk of the Iraq War winding down (never mind the ongoing violence, the U.S. troops still fighting, or the continuing U.S. casualties), filmmaker Michael Moore makes an important point about how the war started--specifically, that it happened not despite but because of the way the "liberal media" behaved:

But most importantly, they made this war (and its public support) happen because Bush & Co. had brilliantly conned the New York Times into running a bunch of phony front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had all these "weapons of mass destruction." The administration gleefully fed this false information not to Fox News or the Washington Times. They gave it to America's leading liberal newspaper. They must have had a laugh riot each morning when they'd pick up the New York Times and read the nearly word-for-word scenarios and talking points that they had concocted in the vice president's office.

I blame the New York Times more for this war than Bush. I expected Bush and Cheney to try and get away with what they did. But the Times--and the rest of the press--was supposed to STOP them by doing their job: Be a relentless watchdog of government and business--and then inform the public so we can take action.

Instead, the New York Times gave the Bush administration the cover they needed. They could--and did--say, "Hey, look, even the Times says Saddam has WMD!"

Indeed, as Moore makes clear, right-wing media weren't  the only ones backing the Bush White House--MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for his anti-war views, while the ranks of media war boosters included Times editor Howell Raines, Times columnists Bill Keller and Nicholas Kristof (who attacked Moore for opposing the war), and New Yorker editor David Remnick.  Few media reputations suffered as a result of supporting the Iraq War. The few who opposed it, on the  hand, paid the price.

Appearing on the O'Reilly Factor (3/25/10) to discuss being named by Joy Behar as one of the media figures the View panelist (3/22/10) says are inspiring hate among Tea Party activists ("There is a difference between free speech and hate speech, and we've been listening to it from Beck and Limbaugh now. And these people are all juiced up by these two. That's what's happening"), Glenn Beck attempted to demonstrate his tolerance for his political foes in the following exchange:

BECK: Have you or I ever said Michael Moore shouldn't be allowed to make a movie?

O'REILLY: No.

BECK: Michael Moore shouldn't be allowed to speak? Michael Moore shouldn't have his own TV show? Never.

O'REILLY: Never. Never.

BECK: Never. Because we believe in freedom of speech. George Washington called it the battlefield of ideas.

O'REILLY: Right.

While it may be true to say that Beck has never expressed a wish to see Michael Moore censored, precisely, he has expressed a desire to kill Moore with his bare hands:

I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out--is this wrong?

Reasonable people might see this as a desire for an extreme form of censorship--and hateful to boot.

UPDATE: O'Reilly too has fantasized about assaulting Moore--in a non-censorious way, of course.  See FAIR Blog, 10/6/09.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (12/6/09) thinks there's something wrong with left-wing critics of Barack Obama. As his lead put it:

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.

 Milbank starts with Michael Moore, who wrote an open letter urging Obama not to escalate the Afghanistan war. This makes no sense to Milbank, since Obama never said he'd withdraw troops. Well, yes. I suspect many of Obama's critics--maybe even Michael Moore--are aware of that.  Moore also supports single-payer healthcare, and wishes Obama would too. Does that mean that continuing that advocacy with Obama in the White House is a waste of time? Or is the idea that no one should ever advocate for any political cause that upsets the power structure?

Maybe that'd be OK with Dana Milbank. As he put it,  Obama is an "incrementalist....  His Afghanistan policy, likewise, is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy." Opposing that policy, then, is ideological and anti-pragmatic.

Milbank closes with this:

You'd think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they're using words such as "O'Bomber" to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy "puts into question his whole leadership."

Moveon's petition is not  "against the policy"--their petition, if anything, supports it, since it only calls on Congress "to push the Obama administration to outline firm benchmarks and a binding timeline."

Code Pink is against the war; the fact that they're still against is a sign of their consistency.  Milbank might see the process by which Obama decided to escalate the war "thoughtful," but if resulting policy is one you oppose, you continue to oppose it. 

Arianna Huffington, likewise, is saying she opposes Obama's decision, based on a variety of factors. Milbank's point, at face value, is that these people should have all been clear-eyed about Obama's position. That's obviously true--and some of them were. But one gets the sense that his real point is that those to the left of Obama should just leave him alone.

Michael Moore says he won't appear on Glenn Beck's or Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show to promote his new film Capitalism: A Love Story because there's too much hate speech on those shows. Last night, O'Reilly strengthened Moore's argument in a segment in which he discussed Michael Moore's body language with regular guest Tonya Reimer:

O'REILLY: Right. Would it be wrong if I slapped him?

REIMAN: We'll have to let him judge that.

O'REILLY: You just want....

REIMAN: Not a big fan, are we?

O'REILLY: You know, it's an interesting question. I admire his entrepreneurship. I admire his creativity. But there's just something about him, you know.

Add to this that Glenn Beck once fantasized about killing Moore with his bare hands (not to mention seeing Dennis Kucinich burned alive), and you have a network whose two leading hosts have expressed a desire to physically attack Moore for expressing beliefs with which they disapprove.

Naturally, O'Reilly whined during the same segment that Moore refused to appear on his show:  "I might remind everybody Michael Moore would not come on the program. Even though he's got a dopey belief to publicize, he's too afraid." Maybe with good reason.

Former PR agent Wendell Potter's stories of how he helped the health insurance's industry's campaign "to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko" calls to mind just how successful that campaign was. Corporate media coverage of the debate raised by the film's expose of the for-profit insurance system went out of its way to demonize Moore. USA Today ran an editorial tied to the film against a single-payer healthcare plan, which was paired with an "Opposing View" from an insurance executive that denounced single-payer even more harshly. CBS News' Jeff Greenfield distinguished himself with his (inaccurate) claim that the U.S. doesn't have public funding for healthcare because "Americans are just different." And reviewing CNN's report on Sicko can only make one relieved that Sanjay Gupta turned down the job of surgeon general.

If you'd like to see an end to this kind of insurance industry PR masquerading as journalism, you can sign FAIR's petition calling for the inclusion of the single-payer option in coverage of the healthcare reform debate.

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib wrote a piece today (5/20/09--subscription required) that offers California as a model for understanding the difficulties in overhauling the healthcare system:

California's experience, in fact, represented a kind of trial run for the healthcare overhaul the president and Congress are about to attempt on the national level, offering useful lessons as well as warning signs about the potholes ahead.

Well, yes and no. Seib writes that the "California example showed the importance of securing at least some bipartisan support, the need to reassure those who have insurance as well as those who don't, and the imperative of showing the public that healthcare costs can be tamed." But there's another layer to this story, one that Seib mostly avoids: the support for a single-payer system in the state.

Seib writes that "California's effort was launched by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in early 2007." That would leave out the nine years of single-payer legislative action prior to that year; in fact, in 2006 the single-payer bill SB 840 passed the state legislature, only to be vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It was reintroduced the following year, and thanks to a massive organizing effort (aided by Michael Moore's film SiCKO) it once again passed the state legislature--and was once again vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It has been reintroduced this year.

Different lessons can be drawn from this experience, of course. But in Seib's version of California history, we get only a glancing mention of this: "Some liberals pushed a government-run health plan." The corporate media (along with various politicians) are determined to keep single-payer "off the table" in the current national debate; Seib seenms to want to erase it from the past, too.

Stating that "a lot of funny things can happen when the media translate science for the public," science writer Chris Mooney (Nation, 3/6/09) looks over more evidence that the U.S. public got really lucky when CNN's Sanjay Gupta was not made Obama's surgeon general. Mooney's list of Gupta "approaching medical coverage through 'one the one hand, on the other hand' equivocation, the selling of medical entertainment, following the pack or simply getting it wrong" clearly illustrates "what always made Gupta's nomination worrisome":

Consider a few of Gupta's journalistic missteps. In late December 2002--a slow news week after Christmas--an outfit named Clonaid, run by a member of a UFO-obsessed group called the Raelians, decided to hold a press conference announcing the first cloning of a human being. The media responded like a herd and ran off a cliff. Many outlets, including CNN, covered the group's press conference live, even though numerous scientists and bioethicists could have told them the claim wasn't credible. Yet there was Gupta, breathlessly interviewing Clonaid's "clinical science director" about "the possibility, a big possibility, that a human clone was actually born." Gupta and CNN contributed heavily to a media scare with little foundation; to this day, we've never seen proof of the existence of baby "Eve."

And of course Mooney features Gupta's infamous "'reality check' on Michael Moore's 2007 film SiCKO"; see the FAIR Action Alert: "CNN vs. SiCKO" (7/11/07).

Over on Media Matters' County Fair blog (3/12/09), Jamison Foser asks, "Is there any major-newspaper reporter who is more consistently wrong than Andrew Malcolm?" The latest gaffe by the Laura Bush flak-turned-L.A. Times writer comes in response to filmmaker Michael Moore's explaining what he sees as the difference between Democratic framing of Rush Limbaugh as the GOP's real leader and Republicans' similar claim about Moore and the Democratic Party:

But some commentators (Richard Wolffe of Newsweek, Chuck Todd of NBC News, etc.) have likened this to "what Republicans tried to do to the Democrats with Michael Moore." Perhaps. But there is one central difference: What I have believed in, and what I have stood for in these past eight years--an end to the war, establishing universal healthcare, closing Guantánamo and banning torture, making the rich pay more taxes and aggressively going after the corporate chiefs on Wall Street--these are all things which the majority of Americans believe in too.

Malcolm's LATimes.com piece, attempting to summarize this passage, said:

Moore lists numerous ways that Republican strategists went after him in past years--books, ads, funny photos and how he was booed off the Oscar stage even in liberal Hollywood for his early opposition to the Iraq War, Guantánamo, torture and other things. Did that help Democratic Senator Kerry not get elected in 2004? "Perhaps," Moore admits.

Foser points out that

if you read what Moore wrote, you'll notice that Malcolm is simply not telling the truth. Moore's "perhaps" was not an admission that Republican attacks on him helped to defeat John Kerry; not even close. Moore said "perhaps" there is some similarity between what Democrats are currently doing and what Republicans tried to do to him; he is not saying Republicans were successful. Malcolm simply made that up, and ripped Moore's comment out of context in order to hide the fabrication.

Actually, Foser's citation of the quote's actual context shows that, "In fact, Moore said the GOP's attacks on him backfired."

Glenn Beck has been telling a personal story illustrating what he says is a particularly intense level of hatred on the left.

According to the newly signed Fox News host, he was verbally assaulted by a truck driver while standing in line at a Wendy's restaurant at a truck stop. Writing on his blog, Beck says the truck driver called him a "racist bigot," blaming the talk show host and conservatives "for everything." Wrote Beck, "The hatred was palpable." As his security detail stood between him and his assailant, Beck says the truck driver ended his rant by threatening to run him over.

It was ugly stuff, and Beck was shocked by the level of hate: "I wanted to say, I think you have me mistaken for someone else, but I knew he knew who I was and he just hated me for who I was…. Wow. Is this who we've become? Is this who we've become?"

Concluding his appeal to civility, Beck explained that he wouldn't treat his enemies the way the truck driver treated him: "I could stand in line with Michael Moore and I wouldn't say that to him. I would say some things to Michael Moore, but it wouldn't be that. Is this who we've become? I believe there is a cauldron of hatred on both sides, but the left is quite frightening."

Beck might not say such things to Moore in person, but he has expressed a desire to murder Moore to his nationally syndicated radio audience (Glenn Beck Program, 5/18/05):

I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out--is this wrong?

And Beck wasn't exactly the picture of civility two years earlier when he told his listeners that he prayed nightly for anti-war presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich to be consumed by fire (Glenn Beck Program, 3/16/03): "Every night I get down on my knees and pray that Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames."

Beck repeated his Wendy's story on Fox's On the Record (11/17/08)--only in this version, Beck said Fox News was among the targets of the truck driver's vitriol. As he explained to host Greta Van Susteren, the story illustrated that "the left is just unbelievably out of control right now."

Whatever the truth is about Beck's truck driver story, his own record of hatred, including a prediction that in 10 years time "Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West," is not merely a matter of angry words spouted in a fast food shop, but a matter of nationally broadcast hatred.