Think Progress' Matt Corley (8/19/09) has the depressing, if predictable, news that recent polling shows "'all the misinformation out there' about health care reform proposals in Congress is taking root with many Americans."

Corley is discouraged to see that, "for instance, 45 percent believe the false claim that legislation includes 'death panels' while 55 percent believe the false claim that coverage will be extended to illegal immigrants"--and an MSNBC passage says that, in particular,

self-identified viewers of Fox News are disproportionately misinformed":

In our poll, 72 percent of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly....

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, Fox News regularly distorts the truth about health care reform.

In fact, just "last week, Media Matters found that over a two day period opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters by a 6-to-1 margin on Fox." Hear a strong corrective to all this deceit on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Health Care Reform" (8/14/09).

WashingtonMonthly.com blogger Steve Benen (Political Animal, 8/12/09) has words for corporate pundits lambasting Barack Obama's "Attention to Detail" as "going "into the weeds":

A few weeks ago, MSNBC's First Read had an item questioning whether President Obama "knows too much" about healthcare policy. The piece complained that the president is willing to offer Americans details about reform....

The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman raised a similar concern today, arguing that Obama cares too much about policy details....

This, apparently, is criticism, not praise. The president who inherited a devastating economic crisis is interested in U6 numbers--a measure that includes the unemployed, those who are working part-time but want full-time employment, and those who've simply given up--and this, we're told, is somehow evidence of excessive interest in detail.

Benen thinks that too-skeptical-for-the-Washington Post Dan Froomkin "has this just right" when writing that "there are all sorts of legitimate reasons to be concerned about Obama's approach to governing" but "intellectual curiosity is one thing journalists in particular should celebrate, not sneer at."

In Benen's closing thoughts he really "can't help but wonder if" reporters might simply "prefer a more superficial president because they have a more superficial perspective?"

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).

Amanda Terkel of Think Progress (6/18/09) has posted video and transcript of an MSNBC segment in which Joe Scarborough asked CNBC's Jim Cramer about "a stunning poll the New York Times has this morning suggesting that Americans are more concerned about deficits than stimulus":

Cramer claimed that Americans aren't buying into healthcare reform right now because "it just means tax increases, and there's got to be someone who pays for it." According to Cramer, the solution that "everybody" wants is for Obama to "go away": "But until we get the economy moving again, I think everybody wishes that Obama would just kind of go away for a little bit."

If Cramer looked closer at the poll, it also shows that 57 percent of the American public approve of what Obama is doing on the economy overall. Of course, Cramer is someone who claimed that Obama's policies have resulted in “the most, greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president” and is known for his irresponsible financial cheerleading (e.g., “Bear Stearns is not in trouble“).

Terkel has to wonder if, in actuality, "maybe it's not Obama who Americans want to 'just kind of go away for a little bit.'”

The website Gawker (6/9/09) caught Newsweek making some sneaky changes in an online article--changes that were ordered by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, and which just happened to favor the host of a show that Meacham appears on regularly.

On the afternoon of Friday, June 5, Newsweek's website put up an interview with Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of MSNBC's Morning Joe program.  The introduction pointed out that Scarborough had once been the defense attorney for an anti-abortion terrorist who murdered a doctor, and noted that the host had been criticized for giving insufficient attention to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, which occurred less than a week before the interview appeared.

By Friday night, though, the introduction to the interview had been completely rewritten.  Gone was any reference in the lead to abortion shootings, replaced instead by rather bland observations about "the rise of partisan media outlets" and "how conservatives lost their way."  What happened?  Jon Meacham happened, that's what. The Newsweek editor, a frequent guest on Morning Joe, told Gawker he was contacted about the interview by "a member of Scarborough's team," and after looking at the item he decided that "it was better to include that material in the flow of the interview."

Journalists don't usually think it's "better" to make the lead of a story less newsworthy by taking out references to current events.  But then newsworthiness might not be the first thing you think of when you're editing a story about your friend--especially a friend who routinely gives you valuable national TV exposure.  Which is why the better thing to do would have been for Meacham to tell the member of Scarborough's team that he couldn't second-guess the Web editor's decision-making.

MSNBC's Morning Joe program seems to have turned its conspicuous consumption of Starbucks drinks into a paid commercial for the coffee chain, according to this morning's New York Times (6/1/09). As Brian Stelter put it, Joe Scarborough "sips Frappuccinos on camera so often that some viewers have wondered whether it is a form of product placement, paid for by the coffee company. Starting Monday, it will be."

The deal is worth over $10 million, and will include "Starbucks graphics and mentions during each hour of the 6 to 9 a.m. program." The show might even broadcast from Starbucks locations from time to time.

Conflict of interest? MSNBC president Phil Griffins says no way:

Mr. Griffin said Morning Joe would continue to cover Starbucks as a news item if warranted. "They understand that we have standards," he said.

Standards indeed.

It is quite telling that, even considering how in Ed Schultz's May 7 MSNBC interview of Physician for a National Health Program Margaret Flowers and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, he "slaps a gratuitous insult on the heroines of Code Pink" and "says he's against protesting and "getting arrested" as a rule but thinks it's OK if doctors in suits and 'educated professional people' do it" and even "pretends to believe (or actually believes) that President Obama favors considering the possibility of creating single-payer healthcare," activist and author David Swanson (OpEd News, 5/7/09) "can't recall a better corporate news video segment in at least the past decade":

The heart of this story is the gaping chasm between majority opinion and the corporate agenda of the United States Senate....

Ed goes after the health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the HMOs. He plays video of activist Kevin Zeese speaking up at the recent Senate Finance Committee hearing and being arrested. He explains perfectly what single-payer healthcare is. (I recommend this flyer.) And he denounces the anti-democratic exclusion of single-payer advocates by committee chairman Max Baucus.

And then Ed brings on Margaret Flowers, who absolutely nails every question he asks, and he asks the right questions. Flowers lists the polls showing that over 60 percent of Americans and 60 percent of physicians want single-payer.

Schultz's choice to air Flowers telling viewers "that the next Senate hearing is on March 12 and that advocates are asking for at least one supporter of single-payer to be included," has Swanson exclaiming that "that sort of mention of an upcoming event and very nearly inclusion of exactly what people can do to improve their country is rare indeed on our televisions."

During coverage of the Obama administration's 100-day mark, MSNBC had war reporter Richard Engel and anchor Tamron Hall interview MSNBC analyst Barry McCaffrey, who CJR.org's Clint Hendler (4/29/09) calls "the retired army general whose many conflicts of interest have been analyzed by David Barstow's now-Pulitzer Prize winning reporting for the New York Times." When asked by Engel about attempts to "draw away the Taliban's source of funding by cutting down the opium crop or burning it or whatever," McCaffrey was emphatic: "I think we’ve got to take it on. But, you know, the lead agent can't be U.S. combat troops. It's got to be Afghans chopping down opium poppy." Hendler thinks he knows the source of McCaffrey's enthusiasm, even if the MSNBCers don't (or at least aren't saying):

Neither Hall, Engel nor McCaffrey made mention of DynCorp, a major military contractor that's doing exactly that--training Afghans to eradicate poppies.

Nor did they mention that McCaffrey sits on DynCorp's board, which according to federal contracting records, garnered contracts in 2008 and 2009 worth over $323 million dollars with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, including its work in Afghanistan.

Read more on media treatment of Barry McCaffrey and his Pentagon brethren in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Network News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits" (6/08) by Isabel Macdonald.

Noting that, "for the last decade or so, Washington has indulged Pat Buchanan as a sort of crazy political uncle" by having "agreed to forget about his long track record of racially questionable commentary and writing," TPM Muckraker's Zachary Roth and Justin Elliott (4/24/09) have caught a column "for the far-right web magazine, Human Events," that doesn't quite jibe with the image portrayed on Buchanan's "frequent MSNBC appearances, where he plays a mostly well-mannered, if hardline, conservative."

The commentary in question asserts that "family-and-faith, God-and-country" America "does not comprehend how the president could sit in Trinidad and listen to the scrub stock of the hemisphere trash our country--and say nothing." Taking a closer look at the "scrub stock" descriptor in that sentence, Roth and Elliott find a definition no less offensive in its connotations for being so archaic:

There's no record of it appearing in the New York Times since 1943. (Hey, no one ever called Buchanan hip!) Until then, it was almost exclusively used to refer to an inferior breed of farm animal, usually cattle or horses, as when the paper reported in 1907: "Financial Disturbance Forces Cattlemen to Sell 'Scrub' Stock to Hold Prime Grades."...

In other words, "scrub stock" essentially means an inferior breed.

It's worse than that, though. There's evidence that theorists of racial and genetic superiority--an area of pseudo-scientific "scholarship" that was in vogue even among mainstream intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century--explicitly extended the use of the phrase beyond animals and into humans. In short, the phrase has been used by both eugenicists and racial segregationists to argue for the superiority of the white race.

See FAIR's regrettably still-relevant article: "In His Own Words: The History Book on Patrick Buchanan" (10/3/99) by Jeff Cohen

Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (4/8/09) asks if maybe it's "Already Too Late for the Truth" in cable news coverage of U.S. military spending, considering that directly "after Defense Secretary Robert Gates unveiled his recommendations for restructuring military spending--and boosting the Pentagon budget by $21 billion (4 percent)--the response was immediate: The Obama administration is trying to cut defense in a time of war. It wasn't true. It didn't matter."

Quoting a former defense secretary telling MSNBC viewers a "clearly false" tale of "deep cuts in military spending," Benen notes that anchor Contessa Brewer had asked him "to address the administration's proposed 'cuts'--not 'what some are calling "cuts,"' just matter-of-fact 'cuts,' as if this were plainly true." The fact that it was the former official himself who "eventually noted, 'By the way, it's not a cut. It's a 4 percent increase,' gives Benen

the sense the train has the left the station, and it's not coming back. News outlets--including real ones, not Fox News--have already accepted the bogus notion that Gates' plan cuts defense spending. Republican lawmakers aren't just repeating the false claim, they're practically apoplectic about it. The political world has apparently skipped right over the "some critics of the administration charge...." and gone right to accepting false GOP talking points as fact without debate.

Benen is left feeling that "our political discourse can be awfully frustrating sometimes"--especially when "reported" so awfully as this. Listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Miriam Pemberton on Military Budget" (4/17/09).

With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting--and MSNBC mostly mocking-- the right-wing "tea party" demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn't be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn't just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events.

As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington Post today:

Some Fox News hosts have been pushing the tea party protests slated for hundreds of cities today, almost to the point that they seem to be the ringmasters of the event.  "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!" Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney said the other day.

But there's another side to this saga. Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.

The New York Times has run zero stories. (The only mention was Times columnist Paul Krugman taking a brief swipe at the parties.) The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4. The Chicago Tribune ran a 300-word story and an item on postal workers mistaking tea for a hazardous substance. The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today. The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party, nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday (followed by a piece by me on the coverage). MSNBC's coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the "teabagging" until Chris Matthews held a more serious debate on Monday.

I must say I'm struck by this new standard for coverage of citizen activism--papers should cover small protests, some of which haven't happened? Was this the standard for, say, anti-war protests in 2002 and early 2003?

The pressure to treat these events seriously seems to be having some effect. Moments ago CNN had a long introduction to its live report from the Boston tea party, explaining that the protests have spread across the country, stoked by plain old citizen passion. The correspondent on the scene in Boston then explained that there were perhaps a few dozen attendees on hand. I guess Howard Kurtz will be pleased.

By way of suggesting that corporate media should make even more aggressive efforts to tie President-elect Barack Obama to a politician who called him a "motherfucker" for refusing to try to bribe him, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer remarks:

I know that there are journalists who are taking a lot of heat for not being aggressive and tough with Obama.

Noting that she has heard similar claims several times from MSNBC's talking heads, digby (Hullabaloo, 12/17/08) asks the obvious question:

Taking heat from whom?

I expected that after the election the press would come under pressure exactly like this. It's a classic "work the refs" move. But the press is openly using it as an excuse for their own behavior, which is new and changed the rules, it seems to me. While they are haranguing Obama for failing to answer questions, they seem to think it's fine not to reveal who is pressuring reporters to harangue him. Maybe they need to take some questions themselves.

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).

New York Times TV reporter Jim Rutenberg (11/2/08) tries to make a case that Fox News and MSNBC are (in Tom Rosenstiel's words) "reverse images of each other." Here are the actual quotes used by Rutenberg to demonstrate this supposed parallelism--first, Ann Coulter on Fox (10/30/08):

I feel like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, "Oh, well, I didn’t know."

And then Chris Matthews on MSNBC (10/29/08), addressing those who wouldn't vote for Obama because he's black:

He's been a good father, a good citizen, he's paid attention to his country.... Give the guy a break and think about voting for him.

Again, these are the quotes Rutenberg picks to show how similar the coverage on Fox and MSNBC is--one arguing that you shouldn't vote against a candidate based on his race, and the other comparing that candidate to a genocidal dictator.

The affliction that causes national political commentators to project their own perceptions onto the public-- let's call it Pundit Projection Syndrome--is affecting David Gregory's ability to come to grips with the fact that the public just wasn't as into John McCain's and Sarah Palin's debate performances as he was. Last night on his MSNBC show, Race for the White House With David Gregory (10/6/08), the anchor demonstrated his confusion in a discussion with liberal-leaning pundit Laurence O'Donnell:

GREGORY: Yes. Lawrence, let me show you another number here, which pertains to the debates in particular. Which ticket is doing better in these debates, Obama/Biden 50 percent, McCain/Palin 29 percent. What surprises me about that is that I think both of these debates have highlighted pretty strong performances by both McCain and Palin. You can argue who won on points, certainly. But in both of those debates, they were strong performances. This polling doesn't bear that out at all.

Luckily, O'Donnell was able to talk Gregory down by injecting some needed reality:

There's no polling that bears that out, David. The polling we had that night from CBS and from CNN all indicated that Biden had a very big win, like giant margins over Sarah Palin, and that Obama, to all of our surprise, had a very significant win over McCain on the foreign policy debate, which was supposed to be the McCain winning debate issue.