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Extra!: Soundbites (11/1/12)
CounterSpin: Vijay Prashad on Iran, Jeff Ballinger on Apple (2/3/12)
Action Alert: ABC's Iran Propaganda : Alarmist reporting on 'terrorist' threat (2/2/12)
CounterSpin: Michael Hastings on 'The Operators,' Laura Flanders on Gingrich and racism (1/27/12)
| Other Recent Additions

Barack Obama
Elections
Economy
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Whistling Past the Wreckage of Civil Liberties
Watchdogs slept through a decade of rollback (September 2011)
FROM THE ARCHIVES
We Feel Your Pain
Media Tell Workers to Learn to Live With Layoffs (May/June 1996)
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Media Tell Obama--Don't Be a Lefty Like Clinton
Rewriting the '94 election to find a centrist moral (11/7/08)
The 2010 midterms are looking like a rerun of 1994--an election year steeped in media mythology.
| Recent Posts:
- Posted by Peter Hart on 02/03/12 at 10:50 amThe conventional understanding you get from the media is that Israel is worried that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a serious threat to the country's existence.
Is that really what's happening, though? Another interpretation is that Iran might want nuclear weapons not to launch any such an attack but to prevent an attack on its country--nuclear deterrence, in other words. (Of course, it's important to note that there is currently no evidence that Iran is pursuing a weapons program.)
I was struck when I heard Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman bring up some of these ideas on NPR's Talk of the Nation on January 30. Bergman is no outsider critic of Israeli policy; when he appeared recently on the NewsHour (1/12/12) and was asked about the assassination of Iranian scientists, his answer was: "I don't know. And even if I knew, I would tell you that I don't know."
Here's what he said on NPR, appearing to talk about his New York Times magazine piece on Israel and Iran:
NEAL CONAN: Chris, thanks very much for the call. Israel itself possesses, what, 300 nuclear weapons we believe, maybe more? Why does not deterrence work? Israel, of course, would retaliate if Iran were to use a nuclear weapon.
BERGMAN: I would assume that--oh, I know that most of Israel's leaders do not believe that Iran is going to use nuclear weapons against Israel. The problem is not the nuclear threat. [...] Read more»
- Posted by Peter Hart on 02/02/12 at 1:36 pmIf you've read FAIR's latest alert on ABC's Iran propaganda, let ABC know how you feel. And please post your letters/comments in the thread below. Read more»
- Posted by Jim Naureckas on 02/02/12 at 12:25 pmNew 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. [...] Read more»
- Posted by Peter Hart on 02/02/12 at 11:52 amNew York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer (2/2/12) accurately reports how Republicans want to frame the disputed over the Keystone XL pipeline. But she does almost nothing to challenge that framing.
Under the headline, "For GOP, Pipeline Is Central to Agenda," Steinhauer explains:
Republicans are framing Keystone as an urgent jobs and energy project at a time of high unemployment and creeping gasoline prices, and trying to portray Mr. Obama as giving in to hard-left environmentalists in an election year at the expense of addressing both.
Instead of challenging that narrative, the Times bolstered it, alluding to what Republican presidential candidates are saying about Keystone and quoting from Keystone-supporting Democrats. [...] Read more»
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