Liz Trotta, a Fox News contributor and former Washington Times editor, drew attention this week (2/12/12) when she suggested that women serving in the U.S. military should expect to be sexually assaulted by their male counterparts:

But while all of this is going on, just a few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta commented on a new Pentagon report on sexual abuse in the military. I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64 percent increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact, the whole airing of this issue has never been done by Congress, it's strictly been a question of pressure from the feminists.

And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims' advocates, sexual response coordinators.... So you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.

So feminists are hogging too many resources for military women who are allegedly raped too much. Trotta doesn't say what would be an acceptable level of rape.

In the Fox News universe of cranky, right-wing pundits, it's not easy to stand out for your extremism, but Trotta seems to manage. In addition to her unconventional views about rape in the military, Trotta has joked about assassinating Barack Obama "if we could" (Fox News, 3/23/08). She has also described Fox competitor MSNBC as "close to being a communist channel" and excoriated that cable network for suspending  Pat Buchanan, whom she said was being victimized by the hard left and "mercilessly assailed by the homosexual lobby" and others (Fox News, 1/14/12). Trotta condemned MSNBC for suspending Buchanan over his book Suicide of a Superpower in which he argues, among other things,  that the U.S. has become "a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic stew of a nation that has no successful precedent in the history of the world." Trotta offered an extended defense of what she called the  "essence of the book" as mostly factual.

As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen recounted in his book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in the Corporate Media, while appearing on an episode of Fox News Watch (1/5/02) with Trotta, she cheered the burning of Harry Potter books by a right-wing pastor in New Mexico: "We're talking about the press getting hysterical over some, you know, two-bit book burning. Let them burn!"

In another episode on Fox News Watch, Cohen recalled when Trotta tried to link convicted "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski to the left. Though Kaczynski lived as a recluse in the wilds of Montana and wrote a rambling "manifesto" attacking technology, the left and environmentalists, Trotta attempted to link the Unabomber to environmentalists and the left: "Mainstream media attempted to divorce Kaczynski's background and milieu from what he became." Cohen's on-air response to Trotta: "He lived as a hermit since the 1970s. For 25 years the guy lived in a shack, and you're talking about his milieu?”

But Trotta is still at it. Last October (Fox News, 10/8/11), she attempted to link Occupy Wall Street protestors to Kaczynski, comparing the activists' rhetoric to "the ravings of what sounds like the Unabomber."

At least she didn’t try to link them to sexual assault counselors.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who's been called the "bard of the 1 percent" for his writings in defense of the economic elite, is at it again--telling people not to worry about the concentration of wealth at the very top of the income scale. Brooks writes in his January 31 column that the claim that "America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources" is a "distraction." Brooks argues:

The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

Brooks' claim, then, is that inequality is really a matter of the top one-fifth, not the 1 percent. Well, that's not what the Congressional Budget Office (10/11) says.

It's true that what you might call the upper middle class has done better than the middle class and poor over the past three decades or so--their income has grown by 65 percent, vs. 40 percent for the middle class and only 18 percent for the poor. But over the same time period, the income of the richest 1 percent has soared--by 275 percent. That's close to quadrupling.

So while the share of income claimed by the upper middle class has stayed about the same since 1979, the poor and middle class have gotten substantially less while the piece of the pie taken by the 1 percent has more than doubled in size. As it turns out, the real driver of inequality and unfairness--is the financial elite who hog society resources.

Score one for Occupy Wall Street--zero for David Brooks.

The Winter Garden is one of New York City's largest and most beautiful indoor public spaces. Graced by giant palm trees that would look impressive on Sunset Boulevard and a vast skylight that provides year-round balmy sunlight, this crossroads of Manhattan's Battery Park City became a symbol of Downtown's rebirth when it was reconstructed after being devastated in the September 11 attacks.

Yet this crucial community gathering space--which provides a much-needed public square that's hospitable throughout the year--is actually privately owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a multinational real-estate developer that owns the World Financial Center that the Winter Garden is a part of, and has received some recent media attention as the owner of Liberty Plaza, the initial site of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. (Brookfield in recent years has rebranded Liberty Plaza as Zuccotti Park, after the chair of Brookfield's board, former New York City Planning Commission chair John Zuccotti. Incidentally, another of Brookfield's directors, Diana Taylor, also serves as girlfriend to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.)

The Winter Garden is not a favor that Brookfield is doing for the citizens of New York City out of the goodness of its corporate heart, any more than Liberty Plaza is; such amenities, as they're called, are promised by developers to the city in exchange for various exceptions and relaxations of zoning and other rules that make the developers' projects more profitable.

So as paradoxical as it sounds, these privately owned public spaces truly do belong to the public; their corporate managers have invited us in in exchange for official concessions, and they can't revoke that invitation on a whim--or because they object to community members using that space to express political viewpoints, as people are wont to do in a public square.

But that's exactly what the city of New York, presumably acting on behalf of Brookfield, did on December 12, when it arrested 17 people who were either participating in or reporting on an Occupy Wall Street protest--directed against Brookfield as the landowner of Liberty Plaza and thus the beneficiary of New York City's eviction of OWS from the park. One of those arrested was FAIR intern John Knefel, a writer, comedian and co-producer (with his sister Molly) of an Internet radio show called Radio Dispatch.

The arrestees were charged with criminal trespass and in some cases with resisting arrest, but the actual offense was attempt to engage in political life--in attempting to persuade others, or in conveying via journalism those attempts to persuade--in what the police (at the orders of Bloomberg and/or Brookfield) had arbitrarily determined to be a politics-free zone. They would be held for some 37 hours before being taken before a judge to be arraigned and released.

In an article for Salon (12/13/11), Molly Knefel described what happened when people tried to exercise First Amendment rights in the Winter Garden:

The protesters--maybe 100 or so--had gathered in the center of the floor and were dancing and chanting, "Occupy Brookfield!"  A long line of police began to form in the periphery, and John and the other media people dispersed to take pictures.  As the police formed an outer circle to surround the large group, the crowd began to disperse.  Many of the protesters headed up the marble staircase away from the cops, and a small group bolted up a nearby escalator.

That was when everything escalated completely out of control.  The escalator was stopped.  Suddenly, the outer circle of cops was swarming in and violently pushing people away.  John had been standing near the crowd, taking video.  I was about 20 feet from him, and when I looked back in his direction, I saw his blue hood on the ground.  I ran toward him and slid to the ground, leaning in between people's knees to take pictures.  John was face down on the ground being handcuffed, his glasses flung across the floor and people screaming, "Stop, stop, he didn’t do anything!"

A cop pulled me up by my shoulders and told me to step back.  I said, "He's my brother."  Several cops pushed me away as I asked, "What is he being arrested for?  He was taking pictures."  A cop said, "He didn’t produce an official press pass, so that means he was resisting arrest."

On Twitter,  (12/13/11), Molly noted: "There were no instructions that I heard. They only told us to 'get out' after the violent arrests started." Which is patently unfair, but in a way more honest than going through the rigamarole about announcing that protesters and journalists are operating in a space where the First Amendment is suspended--the NYPD prefers the term "frozen zone." If the government is going to drive people out of public spaces for engaging in the most crucial forms of public participation, there's really no need to create the impression that the citizenry have any choice in the matter.

USA Today's Rick Hampson has a piece today (12/7/11) on Occupy Wall Street's Occupy Our Homes actions, which include efforts to move families into vacant housing. This coverage is a good sign if you think there is still something happening with this movement after the evictions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

But why does the article include commentary from right-wing scam artist Andrew Breitbart? The paper reports:

Conservative online publisher and commentator Andrew Breitbart said the movement's new focus demonstrates that Occupy Wall Street is not "an authentic grassroots movement" but a political maneuver backed by organized labor and remnants of the ACORN community-organizing group aimed at boosting President Obama's re-election campaign.

"This is AstroTurf" rather than grassroots, he said. "This isn't about helping little old ladies.… This is about fomenting civil unrest, fomenting class warfare."

Breitbart's work is totally unreliable. He's been sounding the ACORN/SEIU alarms about Occupy Wall Street almost from the beginning--just like (at least) one Fox News host. The point is to try and link the movement to an array of progressive institutions and, apparently, the Obama campaign. It's nonsensical paranoia. Is he included for the sake of "balance"?

New York Times media reporter David Carr has written some interest pieces on Occupy Wall Street. His piece today tries to work out where things go from here, but one comment in the piece about how Occupy Wall Street compares with protests of the past caught my attention:

There were citizens screaming invective about the rich while being confronted by the police in riot gear, the kind of spontaneous uprising we have not seen in almost half a century.

Huh. This is used to explain why the mainstream media found OWS so newsworthy.

But I remember things like this happening, way back in 1999-2000.

When the authorities are going out of their way to keep your journalistic colleagues from witnessing what they're up to, yet they reach out to give a ringside seat--what does that say about your reporting?

That's the question raised by a blog post by Yves Smith (Naked Captialism, 11/16/11) that makes the case that the NYPD offered special access to journalists from the New York Times, tipping them off ahead of time to the force's secret mobilization at South Street Seaport prior to the pre-dawn November 15 raid.

This New York Times photograph appears to be taken under the FDR Drive, which is on the opposite side of the Financial District from Liberty Plaza, so unless the photographer just happened to be in the right place at the right middle-of-the-night time, it would seem likely that the paper did get an official tip off.

So if you were excluding virtually all journalists from your suppression of a political protest, how would you choose who you let see it? Well, the news article that Smith cites, along with the photography, as suggestive of before-the-fact access was co-written by Joseph Goldstein--whose work we looked at in a FAIR Blog post (9/28/11) called "Did the NYT Coverage of Occupy Wall Street Just Get WORSE?"

Journalists often pride themselves on "access"--even though, more often than not, it's exclusion that's the true badge of honor.

One more thing about free speech hero Michael Bloomberg's shutdown of Occupy Wall Street.

During the early morning raid on the Occupy Wall Street camp journalists were blocked from covering much of what was happening. Josh Stearns from Free Press has a rundown--as he points out, "By dawn, 10 journalists, including reporters from NPR, the Associated Press and the New York Daily News, had been arrested."

There was a good local TV news segment about the media clampdown, courtesy of the New York NBC affiliate. It's rare to see an image like this on your TV screen (click the image to watch the report):

All right, which newspaper posed this question about the Occupy protests today:

Is this an occupation or an infestation?

Has to be the New York Post, right? Nope--they wouldn't include a question mark.

That's the Washington Post, which went on to report that "recent news updates from Occupy protests read like a crime blotter."

And that Post's Eli Saslow and Colum Lynch explain that they're not the only ones who feel this way:

In the wake of so much controversy, the Occupy movement--which began as a populist uprising to represent all but the wealthiest 1 percent--has begun to lose some of its mainstream support. A Washington Post poll early this month showed that only 18 percent of responders "strongly supported" the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If you want to show a decline in support for the movement--or anything else--then you'd have to show that this number was down from a previous poll. But the Post doesn't appear to have ever asked a question before about whether people "strongly support" Occupy Wall Street. The Post's poll actually finds that 44 percent of Americans support Occupy Wall Street (when you combine those who  "strongly support" with "somewhat support" the movement).  One poll (not conducted by the Post) showed 36 percent support a few weeks ago--which was an increase from an earlier survey. And an AP poll conducted about a month ago registered 37 support.

Of course, news coverage that talks about the movement as a criminal "infestation" might change some minds.

The New York Times, writing about Bloomberg's crackdown on Occupy Wall Street, said this:

For the mayor, a champion of the First Amendment....

I am not sure what is required to deserve the title of "champion," but was it a different Michael Bloomberg who was mayor during the 2004 Republican convention, which saw mass arrests, preventive detention and surveillance/infiltration of protest groups?

What's next--Bloomberg the Fourth Amendment champion?

Yesterday the New York Post--Rupert Murdoch's down-market tabloid, for those who are blessed to live beyond its circulation area--ran this front-page editorial demanding that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg shut down the Occupy Wall Street encampment to reclaim the city's "dignity":

Uhh.... that message would be coming from the paper that ran this dignified cover, waaay back in August:

And don't forget the Post's Iraq War weasels covers:

And why not this, while we're at it?

And let's not forget the paper's stellar work during the Anthony Weiner scandal: "Weiner Exposed," " Hide the Weiner," "Weiner: I'll Stick It Out" and "Obama Beats Weiner."

Today's Post cover, for the record:

Mr. Mayor, please return a sense of dignity to the proud city the New York Post calls home. At least until the next time the Phillies are coming to town.

On his Friday night show, Bill O'Reilly took his viewers to a magical place--one where the right-wing Koch brothers have no connection to the Tea Party movement, while Occupy Wall Street is a secret project directed and financed by the likes of Moveon.org, SEIU and  George Soros.

At the top of his broadcast, O'Reilly wondered if we are now in "phase two of the campaign to undermine America"--this would apparently be the phase where activists protest against police brutality, with an assist from "the radical MoveOn organization, which is funding some of the occupiers."

As he explained his conspiracy theory:

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is not a spontaneous protest against economic inequality. It is a well-thought-out campaign to bring down the infrastructure of this country, to turn us into a Western European-type entitlement state.

That's what George Soros, MoveOn, the SEIU and many far-left journalists want. And they are using the protests to that end.

Moments later, O'Reilly was "interviewing" Fox News contributor Leslie Marshall, who mentioned the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers. That left O'Reilly visibly upset:

O'REILLY: OK, well, you can believe anything you want, you're an American, but you made a statement that the Koch brothers were tied into the Tea Party financially. Can you prove that?

MARSHALL: Well, the Koch Brothers (INAUDIBLE) such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

O'REILLY: Can you prove it. Wait. Wait, wait, wait, Leslie.

MARSHALL: Yes.

O'REILLY: Leslie, you're a Fox News contributor. You have a responsibility. Can you prove the Koch brothers are tied into the Tea Party financially? Can you?

MARSHALL: With a check in hand, no.

O'REILLY: OK. Thank you.

While it's certainly the responsibility of a guest to be able to document such facts, it's rather unlikely that O'Reilly would have accepted any such facts anyway.

Do the Koch brothers have anything to do with the Tea Party? Well, yes. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation was founded by Charles Koch, and has served to train Tea Party activists. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker (8/30/10):

Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement's inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a website offering supporters "Tea Party Talking Points." The Arizona branch urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged members to sign up for "Taxpayer Tea Party Registration" and provided directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion. The North Carolina branch recently launched a "Tea Party Finder" website, advertised as "a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina."

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to "educate," fund and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.

Or as one source rather colorfully put it:

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party: "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud--and they're our candidates!"

And Dick Armey's FreedomWorks group, which has very publicly helped organize Tea Party activists, is the product of a merger between Empower America and Citizens for a Sound Economy--the latter heavily backed by the Koch brothers.

So other than founding and funding the groups that have been key organizers and trainers of the Tea Party movement, the Kochs have little to do with it.

Don't tell that to Bill O'Reilly, though. He can only connect certain dots:

This isn't a spontaneous demonstration against crony capitalism. If it were, they would be in front of the White House. This is organized by the unions backed up by George Soros and the MoveOn people.

The links between those groups and OWS prompted the other guest, Caroline Heldman,  to turn the tables on O'Reilly:

HELDMAN: Bill, do you have evidence to back up those links? Do you have evidence?

O'REILLY: Yes, absolutely, we have reporters down there all the time and the reporters ask people who they are, where they are going. The spontaneous people are back to their jobs; 85 percent of them, Dr. Heldman, have jobs. You can't stay off the job for a month. I can back what I say up.

Now THAT is evidence--Fox-style.

With the bad news we've been talking about on the public broadcasting front, it's worth pointing out a bright spot: On Monday (10/24/11), Charlie Rose featured a discussion of Occupy Wall Street with Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman.

Goodman made an important point about media coverage of the protests:

CHARLIE ROSE: Does it have anything in common with the Tea Party?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's interesting you ask that. When the people gathered on September 16 and 17--what, 2000 people--hardly any coverage they got. If it was 2000 Tea Party activists who gathered on Wall Street, I would dare said there would have been 2,000 reporters there, if not more.

Watch the segment on the Charlie Rose website. And you can leave a comment there--as others already have--noting that it's refreshing to see these voices on a show that doesn't usually feature such guests.

Last night by many reports the police crackdown on the Occupy Oakland encampment was severe: Tear gas and flash-bang grenades were used to disperse a crowd trying to retake the park.

Reading about the events in the nation's capital, though, and you got a different impression. The Washington Post--no stranger to minimizing the Occupy protests--ran a short AP dispatch under the headline "Protesters Wearing Out Their Welcome Nationwide."

As if that weren't dismissive enough, take a look at the photo the Post ran:

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/11), tipped off by at least one of his Post colleagues, decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza to see the festival of anti-Semitism firsthand. Lo and behold, he found none:

Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry--not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to google the phrase "Zionists control Wall St."  Google "nut case" instead.

Before you send your note of thanks to Cohen, wait until he gets to his real point:

This right-wing attempt to discredit both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party's hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible. It's made possible, however, because no one this side of the Moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it marches off to some location to highlight what we all know--that Wall Street guys are rich--and their slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.

Cohen goes on to call Occupy Wall Street "a destination for the aimless...a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." It is also

a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans...an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including--by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation--the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

For good measure, Cohen makes the argument that the right-wing smears of OWS are derived from the left:

The imputation of anti-Semitism, however, adds gravitas to this lighthearted event. The smear is in deadly earnest, a reminder that the devious tactics of the Old Left have been adopted by the New Right. (No accident, maybe, that the practitioners are the descendants of lefties.)

Well, he was on the right track with that first paragraph.

There's an old joke about how the pundit spectrum in corporate media debates goes from GE all the way to GM. On Sunday's Meet the Press, viewers got a chance to see that joke come to life.

On the panel was conservative former GE CEO Jack Welch, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell. The left end of the spectrum must have been former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr., best known for his time leading the center-right Democratic Leadership Council. Nowadays Ford is a TV pundit (the "liberal" who advises Democrats to move further right) and works as a managing director at Morgan Stanley--a move from his previous gig at Bank of America.

As for the actual debate, Welch praised Herman Cain's tax plan, called for more domestic oil drilling and complained about the White House's anti-business regulatory policies. Ford, as the TV liberal, pointed out that the administration thankfully did not pursue progressive policy goals like card check, and that the White House deserves credit for reining in some EPA regulation. Ford also included a slam of Occupy Wall Street:

We Democrats can't criticize Republicans for catering to the Tea Party and not say to our Democratic Party you got to look beyond Occupy and be willing to do what's in the best interest of the country.

Given his current job, this is not surprising--though NBC viewers may have wanted to know that the "liberal" in the debate has been working for several banks. Or maybe David Brooks was the liberal here...