Philadelphia Weekly intern and Prometheus Radio Project volunteer Alyssa Figueroa has produced an excellent document of local media activists taking on global news coverage in her video showing how "nearly 100 people marched to the Philadelphia Inquirer's office demanding the paper publish more factual pieces about the coup in Honduras."

PW tells us (7/30/09) that

the marchers believed that the Inquirer's coverage of the coup has been dishonest and irresponsible, especially citing former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum's op-ed, which they thought to be not based in facts.

Participants marched from the Central Library to the Inquirer's office after attending an event at the library on community media and Latin America.

Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist and assistant professor at American University, was one of the event’s speakers. She spoke about how media coverage doesn't supply its audience with the truth, and yet citizens continue to rise up and fight for accuracy.

Pine, who "has lived in Honduras for several years and has written a book and essays on the country, also mentioned that she had written an op-ed for the Inquirer and it was rejected without a reason."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup" (7/3/09).

Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed columnist Harold Jackson (5/20/09) writes that most of those who have criticized his paper for hiring of pro-torture lawyer John Yoo as his colleague "have their facts wrong."
After making a gratuitous swipe at bloggers ("who never let the facts get in the way when they're trying to whip people into a frenzy to boost website hits"), Jackson gets down to specifics: "To set the record straight, no one tried to hide Yoo's becoming a regular columnist," he declares. If that's the case, why isn't Yoo listed on the Inquirer's website along with its other regular columnists?

That seems to be the one specific fact that the critics got "wrong," actually. The rest of the column is a defense of the Inquirer's judgment in hiring Yoo to "counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left," and to "make sure our pages present alternative points of view."

It's kind of funny, the line about countering criticism--the whole point of the column is that the paper's gotten a lot of criticism about hiring Yoo, but the response to that criticism is not to hire someone representing the critics' point of view, but to tell them to stop reading blogs.

In point of fact, the Inquirer's columnists do not all represent the left. In addition to Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who got 16 percent of the Philadelphia vote in his last election, the lineup also features Kevin Ferris, who writes his own defenses of torture and condemns Barack Obama's "Dangerous Naivete in Foreign Policy." And Michael Smerconish, a more moderate conservative who has filled in as a substitute host for Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough.

There's five other columnists listed by the paper, all with backgrounds in corporate journalism. Some of them are mildly liberal; none of them are likely to be mistaken for I.F. Stone. Certainly none of them are prominent figures in progressive politics, a left-wing counterpart to Santorum.

And who would be the left-wing counterpart to Yoo, exactly? Bill Ayers? That's unfair to Ayers, whose actions, however reckless, didn't end up killing anybody.

This is the trouble with treating Yoo as someone who merely "provide[s] the catalyst for intelligent discourse": Torture is illegal under U.S. law and a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And, despite the indignation Jackson seems to feel over the "very pleasant" Yoo being called a "war criminal" by emailers, it's classified as, yes, a war crime by international law.

When influential institutions treat those responsible for such things as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than "thoughtful conversation."