Mark Weisbrot had a good column in the London Guardian (10/23/09) about the highly circumscribed "debate" over the Afghanistan War (FAIR Action Alert, 8/25/09). He breaks down the lineup of a recent Meet the Press (10/11/09):

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former Army general and drug czar (under President Clinton) turned defense industry lobbyist. In a news article on McCaffrey entitled "One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex," the New York Times reported that McCaffrey had "earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." McCaffrey has appeared on NBC more than 1,000 times since 9/11/2001.

Retired Gen. Richard Meyers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Bush (2002-05). He is currently on the Board of Directors of Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of the largest military contractors in the world, and also of United Technologies Corporation, another large military contractor.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, Republican from South Carolina, a pro-war spokesperson who is one of the most regular guests on the Sunday talkshows.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, was apparently intended to represent the "other side" of the debate. Here is what he said: "Clearly we should keep the number of forces that we have.  No one's talking about removing forces."

"No one," in the above sentence refers to the American people, whom Levin understandably sees as nobody in the eyes of the U.S. media and political leaders. According to the latest (September 24) NYT/CBS News poll, 32 percent of those polled wanted U.S. troops out of Afghanistan within one year or right now. That was the largest group. Another 24 percent wants the troops "removed within one to two years." For comparison, the leadership of the Taliban is willing to grant foreign troops 18 months to get out of their country.

In other words, a majority of 56 percent of Americans wants U.S. troops out of Afghanistan about as soon as is practically feasible or even sooner. Yet Meet the Press--a mainstream network news talkshow since 1947--does not see fit to find one person to represent that point of view. The other major TV and radio talkshows that the right also labels "liberal" in the United States make similar choices almost every day.

When asked whether the U.S. should set a timeline for withdrawal, Levin answered "no."

This phenomenon of the non-debate is not confined to broadcast journalism; see recent FAIR Blog posts on fake Afghanistan debates in Time magazine (10/2/09), USA Today (9/17/09) and the Washington Post (9/01/09, 8/17/09).

A bit of NBC Nightly News last night, from reporter Mike Viqueria:

But now Mr. Obama faces more friendly fire. After a key committee passed a plan to pay for reform with a tax on high-cost policies, major unions, normally Obama allies, took out full-page newspaper ads complaining that the tax will hit labor hardest and vowing that, without changes, they say, "We will oppose it." And late last night opposition from a more familiar foe, Sarah Palin posting on her Facebook page and echoing insurance industry claims that the latest plan will mean higher premiums, writing, "Unintended consequences always result from top-down big government plans." After being blindsided by insurance industry attacks, the president hit back.

If you were a reporter trying to determine whose views on healthcare to include in the few seconds of time allotted for your story, would you really include a Facebook posting from the former governor of Alaska? Single-payer activists have to get arrested to try and make the news, but Sarah Palin just needs to type.

The New York Times reported (10/15/09) that rocker Jon Bon Jovi has arranged an unusual deal to become an "artist in residency" on NBC, appearing across the network's various shows to promote an upcoming album. The deal is all the more striking because it includes a segment on NBC Nightly News--part of the show's "Making a Difference" series--to promote Bon Jovi's philanthropic pursuits.

The idea apparently originated with Bon Jovi, who took it to NBC.  The financial arrangements behind the deal don't appear to be available, but the network already seems devoted to the idea: "NBC indicated that it intended to make the artist in residence concept a regular feature of programs on its broadcast and cable channels."

When NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel recently returned from Afghanistan, he told MSNBC's Morning Joe, "I honestly think it's probably time to start leaving the country." Engel added, "I really don't see how this is going to end in anything but tears."

Engel's comments caused Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (10/12/09) to raise an eyebrow at a reporter stating an opinion: "That sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter," wrote Kurtz.

But we had to wonder if what really attracted Kurtz's scrutiny was Engel's stating of an opinion, or the opinion itself?

After all, for years FAIR has documented the phenomenon of journalists stating opinions in support of hawkish U.S. policies with virtual impunity--even when their views were catastrophically in error.

And so we wondered if Kurtz would even have commented if a network news reporter had suggested that the U.S. needed to escalate its military efforts in Afghanistan. We needn't have wondered.

Lara Logan, who holds the same position at CBS News as Engel does at NBC--chief foreign affairs correspondent--may be a more vehement cheerleader for escalation than Engel is for withdrawal. In a recent interview with Bob Orr on CBS News' Political Hotsheet, Logan expressed a disturbing devotion to  Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and chief proponent of escalating the war there: "I don't understand why no one will listen to the man you put your faith in and said he is the guy who is going to do this for us...."

Since Logan too "sounds awfully opinionated for a working reporter," we wonder how it is she escaped Kurtz's scrutiny?

For us, it isn't so much that journalists have and express opinions--the public is better served when we know what reporters are thinking--but we are troubled when  disapproval and despair over the lost standards of journalistic objectivity are trotted out only for reporters whose opinions are at odds with official views.

So we are glad to know of Logan's hero worship, even if it is at odds with the worthwhile  journalistic ethic that says reporters should hold the feet of the powerful to the fire--not massage them.
Corrected version: The original version of this post gave Stanley McChrystal's first name incorrectly.

One of the items enumerated in Glenn Greenwald's round-up of "Various Matters" for Salon (9/4/09, ad-viewing required) addresses how NBC's "Chuck Todd this week noted the series of petty scandals the right has been manufacturing and remarked: 'The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days'"--which viewpoint Greenwald calls out as really

reflective of one of the more irritating media syndromes: their tendency to talk about media coverage as though they have nothing to do with it and can't exert any influence over it; media coverage is just something that happens to them. During my interview with Todd a couple of months ago, he said:

Now you're getting--this has always been something that I've been--not to go off on a sidebar here--but I've been waiting for somebody, during the campaign, to ask both candidates. Because both of them, in the general elections, and frankly even during the primary with then Senator Clinton, all said that the Bush administration tried too hard to expand executive powers. And then you would say, which executive powers are you willing to give up? And none of them would actually say which executive powers, because once you're president you don't want to give up any of your powers.

He was "waiting for somebody" to ask the presidential candidates which executives powers they would relinquish. It's as though someone forgot to tell him he works at NBC News. It's very common for media stars to lament how the media covers petty stories or otherwise distorts them--as though someone is forcing them to do it and they have no agency.

Explaining that "if the right is better at 'creating media firestorms,' that's due to what 'the media does," Greenwald goes on to ask, "does anyone ever wonder why the right would be better at that if we had a Liberal Media?"

Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill (The Nation, Democracy Now!) appeared on HBO's Real Time With Bill  Maher alongside NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.  Because Jeremy isn't the type to let such an opportunity to go to waste, he used some of his time to castigate the corporate media for failing to question the White House about the reliance on private contracting firms like Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he also brought up Todd's opinion that investigating Bush-era abuses would be a distraction.

Scahill shared with Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald what happened off camera:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me, "That was a cheap shot." I said, "What are you talking about?" and he said, "You know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "That's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

You can see part of their exchange on the show here. If Scahill repeating what Todd said is "sullying" his reputation, then didn't Todd really sully himself?

Asking his readers to "remember" that, on NBC, Chuck Todd "is billed as a reporter covering the White House, not a pundit expressing opinions," Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/15/09, ad-viewing required) examines a Todd appearance on the MSNBC show Morning Joe "discussing reports that [U.S. Attorney General] Eric Holder is likely to appoint a prosecutor to investigate Bush torture crimes. Needless to say, everyone agreed without question that investigations were a ridiculous distraction from what really matters and would be terribly unfair":

In response to virtually every media criticism (at least the few they acknowledge), establishment journalists will insist that their role is to be steadfastly neutral. They simply report on the debates, not take sides or express opinions about them. Taking one side or the other is not their role. Only partisan ideologues do that.

Yet here is Chuck Todd--who covers the White House for NBC News--explicitly arguing against investigations, and adopting the Bush/right-wing mentality to do so. Investigations are a distraction from what matters. It's extremely unfair to hold lawyers accountable when they authorize criminal conduct. It's "dangerous" for one administration to investigate the prior one where that prior administration had its DOJ lawyers authorize what was being done.

Wouldn't the standard claim of establishment journalists maintain that Chuck Todd shouldn't have (or at least not express) opinions on these topics? Yet here he is--as so many establishment journalists routinely do--explicitly advocating against investigations of Bush-era crimes. Even more notably, the arguments in favor of such investigations merit no mention whatsoever.

Reasonably asking, "Would anyone listening to this discussion even have the slightest idea what the arguments are in favor of investigating and prosecuting?," Greenwald can only conclude that "the notion that these establishment journalists don't choose sides and are mere honest brokers of debates is, rather obviously, transparent fiction."

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9–10/08).

"Co-director of Press Pass TV, a youth organization in Boston," Cara Lisa Powers (Women In Media & News, 3/31/09) is telling how, having "shot a story at the home of a community member who had a scare Friday night when shots were fired outside his children’s bedroom," her group "sent the story to local media outlets with a press release to get our solution-oriented message as far as it would go." Gaining some pick-up in local media, Powers points out that, "all we asked was that any other news outlets that used the story let us know":

So we were surprised last night when we saw the story on the Channel 7 11 O'Clock News. Unlike Open Media Boston and the Dorchester Reporter, who were excited to promote the wonderful work of Boston youth, WHDH sent out their own crew to interview the same people that we had already spoken to, capture similar b-roll, and add a few formulaic sensationalist twists.

Part of the mission here at Press Pass TV is to use the news as a source of empowerment, community-building and to inspire people to action. We were happy to feature Darrin Howell, Cassie Grice and their neighbors in their dialogue about solutions to keep their children and their neighborhood safe. The story featured here on Channel 7 does none of those things, and instead perpetuates a lot of the hopelessness and fear we see young people already feeling about their communities.

Saying that Press Pass TV is "not only... disappointed that NBC would chase a story already covered by youth without giving them any credit for breaking it," the organization's member "are also saddened by their portrayal of our community." Compare for yourself the striking difference between community oriented reporting and a corporate outlet's take on the same story.

Want to know if "the media did a great job" covering Barack Obama's second major presidential press conference? Jason Linkins says (Huffington Post, 3/25/09) you can "just ask the media! Because they'll tell you!"

But "at the same time, the media is also quick to point out that the press conference was 'totally boring!'" Among those bemoaning what Linkins deems "certainly a strange coincidence" is NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd, who thought that "more than anything else, Obama's news conference last night resembled a campaign TV ad," and asked, "how many times did we hear Obama mention his budget's top priorities: education, energy, healthcare, reducing the deficit?" Linkins' reply:

Indeed, HOW MANY TIMES DID OBAMA TALK ABOUT THE BUDGET? Jesus, it was almost as if he kept getting questions about the budget. In fact, it was ALMOST AS IF Jennifer Loven, Jake Tapper, Ed Henry, Chip Reid and Chuck Todd himself asked a bunch of questions about spending and budgets! Was it like a "campaign TV ad"? Hmmm. I wonder if that's because Obama spent a lot of time, on the campaign trail, patiently explaining his budget priorities, amid approximately a million billion questions about "HOW WILL YOU PAY FOR THESE THINGS?"

Yes. It's the repetition of perennial questions--questions whose answers, offered long ago, were so satisfying to voters that they voted in accordance with their satisfaction--that BORED, thunderously.

Linkins' "look at the breakdown" of questions put to Obama yields "a pattern" in which "'traditional' media outlets brought the repetitive, dull, blunt force trauma, and the smaller, less-called-upon outfits provided the evening's flavor," with questions on such interesting and important topics as violence in Mexico, homelessness and stem cell research.

Women In Media & News guest blogger Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser's examination (3/12/09) of the "media firestorm" that "erupted... when Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets" shows that in initial "stories playing on the well-worn 'wow factor'"--like "the AP's piece, posted on Fox News' website, [that] bore a cutesy headline: '8 Is Definitely Enough'"--"basic information was missing: the mother’s name, the doctor's name, and the specific medical treatment undergone," and "without that information, any medical ethics concerns remained wholly hypothetical." But then it

turns out, eight wasn't enough. The story's focus morphed from medical oddity, to larger ethics questions, to gawking at a woman deemed crazy for having 15 children (octuplets along with six previous kids). Media buzz about Nadya Suleman began building, and quickly....

Suleman's first interview to Dateline NBC's Ann Curry in early February was a hot property--even the interview itself became big news....

During the interview--which was rehashed in the media obsessively--Curry probed: "People feel, you know, this woman is being completely irresponsible and selfish to bring these children in the world without a clear source of income and enough help to raise them. The world outside is saying, 'What are you doing?'" A divorced mother who says all 14 came from a known sperm donor, Suleman insisted essentially that she loved all of her children and could, once she completes her education, provide for them.

From broadcast TV to newspapers to tabloid magazines, from blogs such as Jezebel to MSNBC’s Scoop, every aspect of Suleman’s life seemed fair game for the media microscope: her motivations, her mental stability (or instability).

Buttenwieser writes that the result of this "massive media rubbernecking" was that "substantive questions about medical ethics, parental responsibility and even how the media covers such outliers have been pushed aside for breathy comment" in which "profit-hungry media simply sensationalized Suleman's story for ratings-generating, tabloid-selling buzz."

David Gregory sticking up for bank stockholders on Meet the Press (2/22/09):

There's a larger point here, which is, first of all, the more...the shares of...these banks gets talked down...the closer you get to wiping out the shareholder completely. And it's, it's not clear to me that everybody understands that the investor in this country, who is not just a fat cat, the investor is us.... It is the taxpayer, it's the teacher, it's someone who's invested in a 401(k). The investors on the sidelines, scared to death about taking any risk. And unless that changes, this economy really can't turn around.

Matthew Yglesias writes today (2/23/09) on the oddity of Gregory making a distinction between fat cats and people like himself. I can't find a published estimate of Gregory's salary, but his NBC colleague Chris Matthews reportedly makes $5 million a year (Washington Post, 1/8/09), as did his Meet the Press predecessor Tim Russert (Washington Post, 5/23/04), so Gregory's salary is probably in that neighborhood, give or take a few million. This is a hundred times the median family income in the U.S.--not counting Gregory's spouse's income; she used to be a vice president at Fannie Mae, making an estimated $3 million a year.

On Gregory's actual point: Only about a third of stocks are owned in the U.S. by the wealthiest 1 percent, so it's true that not all stockholders are actually "fat cats."  But almost 90 percent of stocks are owned by the top 20 percent of households, so when you're talking about policies that benefit stockholders, you're talking about benefiting a distinct minority.

According to a report in the New York Times (2/11/09), NBC is launching a new series to track down and expose war criminals. The network's plan has attracted some criticism from U.S. officials and human rights experts, who are concerned that the network's journalists might be publicizing false accusations against the suspects they're "confronting" on the air. (The show sounds eerily similar to the network's To Catch a Predator series, which purported to bust sexual predators.)

The first suspect is apparently Leopold Munyakazi, a visiting professor at a Maryland college who has been accused by Rwandan authorities of participating in the 1994 genocide in that country; a Human Rights Watch official is quoted in the article saying that the case against Munyakazi is actually somewhat murky.

If NBC is actually interesting in exposing war crimes, though, there might be an easier way to do this. Couldn't they just invite Henry Kissinger to appear on Meet the Press, and then "surprise" him?

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).

Tom Brokaw, the interim host of NBC's Meet the Press, and NBC analyst Chuck Todd expressed bafflement on last Sunday's Meet the Press (10/26/08) at how Latinos had "turned on the Republican Party" and their "friend" John McCain:

TODD: I mean, this, this Hispanic--one of the things we--underreported story of the cycle is how Hispanics have just turned on the Republican Party, hurting John McCain. Frankly....

BROKAW: Who is a friend of theirs.

TODD: Who is a friend of theirs.

BROKAW: Right.

TODD: You know, this is a Shakespearean--you know, the S...

BROKAW:  Right.

It's hard to know exactly where Todd was going in identifying this as "Shakespearean"--perhaps he was likening Latinos turning on and "hurting" their "friend" McCain to the famous scene of betrayal in Julius Caesar, in which the Roman leader's friend Marcus Brutus collaborates in Caesar's assassination?

The analogy suggests that, even as the GOP presidential campaign sputters, McCain is now facing treachery from the very people who were his allies.

Et tu Jose and Maria?

Where would Latinos be if they didn't have pundits like Todd and Brokaw to let them who their friends are!

Back in the real world, where issues have an impact on how people vote--it would appear that the pundits may have the story completely backwards. A new report from the Center for American Progress suggests that Latinos actually stand to lose out economically under McCain's economic policies.

But then, pundits have rarely been known to let actual issues get in the way of their horserace storyline.