Media Views

Media Views was FAIR's annotated newswire - a forum for featuring interesting media criticism, media news and reporting that we thought merited comment.

The Media Views format is now retired. FAIR will continue to post analysis and critique, information on breaking stories, news updates, criticism, commentary and more on the FAIR Blog. Click here to join in the conversation.

Our past collection of Media Views will remain as an archived resource on this website.

FAIR blog: Who Decides "Who Won"? (9/30/08) by Jim Naureckas

The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg had a follow-up piece on Friday's debate headlined "The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won." The story described the McCain and Obama camps' attempts at "influencing the public perception of who won an encounter that produced no clear winner or loser."

Except--is it really true that the debate produced no clear winner? The initial polls pointed to Obama as a winner; CNN's poll released Friday night found that 51 percent of respondents thought Obama had done a better job, vs. 38 percent for McCain. CBS's Friday night poll of undecided voters had 40 percent calling Obama the winner, 22 percent saying McCain. Clearly, "winning" a presidential debate means improving your chances of getting elected, so polls of the public would appear to offer the best evidence of who "won."

Rutenberg alludes to these polls, yet dismisses them: "Mr. Obama appeared to have an edge in the various snap polls taken the night of the debate, though these are notoriously unreliable," Rutenberg wrote in the second half of the 18th paragraph--his only mention of polling data.

It's not clear how the polls immediately after a debate are "unreliable" gauges of who the public thought won that debate; while polling has its limitations, surely it's more accurate than pundits' speculations about who the electorate would think the winner would be. A less time-pressed USA Today/Gallup poll taken the day after the debate, and probably not available to Rutenberg before his deadline, confirmed the results of the "flash" polls: 39 percent said Obama won vs. 28 percent for McCain; among those who actually watched the debate, it was 46 percent Obama vs. 34 percent McCain.

But for Rutenberg, the public's own response seems to be rather beside the point; his story is about "campaigns go[ing] full-bore to convince the news media, and ultimately the public, that their candidate won," since it's "a common belief in presidential politics" that "many viewers base their judgment not necessarily on debate performance but on what they read and see in the days afterward."

In other words, it's the media's job to tell the public whom they thought won the debate.

FAIR blog: The Washington Post's World of Hawks (9/30/08) by Jim Naureckas

The Washington Post (9/28/08) gathered reactions from "foreign policy analysts and others" to last Friday's debate on international policy, and what's striking is how hawkish the Post's circle of foreign policy experts is.

The lineup included Henry A. Kissinger--inevitably--and a bunch of hawks from right-wing think tanks and/or the Bush administration: Danielle Pletka of AEI, Michael Rubin of AEI and Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Patrick Clawson of WINEP (who co-wrote a book with Rubin) and David Makovsky of WINEP. Michael O'Hanlon works at the centrist Brookings but is a famous Iraq hawk.

Those who aren't obvious hawks mostly have Republican connections: Michael J. Green of CSIS worked for G.W. Bush's NSC, Karen Donfried of the German Marshall Fund was an aide to Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Soderberg used to work for Bill Clinton and now advises Michael Bloomberg. Ronald D. Asmus was a former Clinton aide but is best known for his advocacy of NATO expansion. For a change of pace, they've got David M. Walker of the Peter G. Petersen Foundation, who's a deficit hawk.

The only bona fide dove on the list would seem to be Russia specialist Stephen P. Cohen of Princeton. You'd think the disasters of the Bush years would create interest in new ideas on international policy--but at the Washington Post, a debate between alumni of Bush's Pentagon and State Department really is considered balanced.

Real News: The Media and Iran (9/29/08) by Norman Solomon

FAIR associate Solomon tells Real News viewers of lessons to be drawn from corporate U.S. media’s non-coverage of what was big news overseas during the run up to war on Iraq—U.S. spies used the U.N. arms inspection process to identify future bombing targets and track Saddam Hussein's movements:

There's a lag-time where if journalism is in fact the first draft of history, then the reliance on official sources is so routine that it’s only in retrospect that we get these kind-of sort-of apologies or mea culpas or acknowledgments that the coverage should have been better, less attuned to official sources, much more independent, rigorous and tough-minded. The real responsibility is to function independently, to have a multiplicity of sources, to dig for information, to search for truth—to flip over every rock that can be flipped over as soon as possible.

But what we get in contravention of that principle is the extreme reliance on official sources. Here we are in Washington, D.C., where the press corps is mostly following itself to breathlessly report the range of opinion that exists along Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Congress, with the State Department, Pentagon and corporate think tanks and so forth thrown in.

Solomon calls this the opposite of "the fruition of journalism—we have sort of an abrogation of journalism."

Beat the Press: The Post Invents Numbers in Its Quest to Cut Social Security (9/28/08) by Dean Baker

Continuing to prove himself as tenacious as the Washington Post is doctrinaire, economist Baker provides another example of how the "Post editorial board occasionally just makes up numbers to advance its arguments":

Today it told readers that "the [budget] crunch actually begins...in 2011, when Social Security's cash flow turns negative."... This is not true; the Social Security Trustees' report projects that income from designated Social Security taxes (not counting interest on its government bonds) is projected to exceed benefits until 2017. The Post just pulled 2011 out of the air to try to scare readers.

Of course, the year when benefits first exceeds tax revenue makes no difference for either SS or the overall budget anyhow. Under the law, SS is financed by a designated tax. The surplus over the last quarter century has been used to acquire more than $2.4 trillion in government bonds. According to the SS trustees, the bonds held by the trust fund will be sufficient to keep the program fully solvent until 2042. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the program will be fully solvent until 2049. Both dates are far enough out that reasonable people need not panic, we have dealt with far more imminent SS shortfalls.

Proclaiming that "we have a healthcare problem, not a budget problem,” Baker notes again that "if we just had a healthcare system that was as efficient as the healthcare system in Canada, Germany, England, France or any other wealthy country, we would not have to make any other fundamental changes to the 'tax structure or entitlement programs.'" But then Baker knows all too well that "the Post obviously has an agenda to cut SS and Medicare and they are willing to mislead their readers to advance this agenda."

Consortium News: Debate Evades Dark Realities (9/27/08) by Robert Parry

Veteran reporter Parry muses that "perhaps it's unrealistic to expect a U.S. presidential debate to deal substantively—and honestly—with wrongful actions by the American government":

In a healthy democracy, moderator Jim Lehrer might have been expected to ask Obama and McCain whether President Bush should be shipped off to The Hague for a trial as a war criminal or whether he should be put before American courts to face serious criminal charges, such as violation of anti-torture statutes.

There might be a question, too, about hypocrisy: How can Obama and McCain so righteously condemn Russia for its alleged aggression against Georgia (after Georgia attacked the pro-Russian province of South Ossetia) when the United States has asserted its right not only to invade Iraq… but to attack Yugoslavia when it was throttling a separatist movement in Kosovo?

Arguing that corporate media "timidity has contributed to the frequency, brutality and criminality of U.S. military actions," Parry finds it "hard to explain the Iraq War, for instance, without observing that Bush and his neoconservative advisers were confident they could roll both Congress and the Washington press corps."

Los Angeles Times: McCain Resurrects an Old Stunt (9/26/08) by Matt Welch

Media reporter Welch calls it "no wonder John McCain 'suspended' his presidential campaign Wednesday to focus in a bipartisan manner on a grave national crisis," considering how the same move during NATO's 1999 bombing of Kosovo has been called "a masterful political stroke":

Overnight, McCain became the go-to guest on cable news shows, rallying the bipartisan cause for military intervention... saying he'd rather lose an election than lose a war.... The Washington Post's Mary McGrory wrote at the time... "[McCain] is getting yards of publicity for a non-event." With all that free media—including separate appearances in a single day on Fox News, CNN, PBS, CNBC and MSNBC—the Arizona senator's poll numbers shot up from the statistically insignificant to the respectable double digits. McCain enthusiast David Brooks, writing in these pages in February 2000, identified Kosovo as the metaphorical jumper cables on the Straight Talk Express.

Tapped: Goldilocks Racism (9/26/08) by Adam Serwer

To illustrate what he deems corporate media's "arbitrary and often contradictory standards set for Barack Obama as a black candidate," Serwer quotes a New York Times "Political Memo" that complains the candidate "is sometimes out of sync with the visceral anger of Americans who are losing their jobs and homes" because "his tone and volume, body language, facial expressions and words convey a certain distance from the ache that many voters feel." After noting that "this analysis is contradicted by all available polling information," Serwer asserts that "race is the very reason this article was written":

This is an example of journalism reinforcing the very trends it purports to examine. It's what can be called "Goldilocks Racism"—the idea that black people are always too hot or too cold and only white people can be just right. If Obama were showing a great deal of populist anger on the stump, we would be treated to reams of analysis about how he is "too hot," regardless of what the polls said.

We've been down this road before. In the beginning of the campaign, Obama was too professorial. Later, there was too much high-flying rhetoric. Is he too smart? Is he a lightweight? Too black? Not black enough?... This isn't a problem with Obama; this is a problem with us.

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: Endorsing a Different Standard (4/08) by Isabel Macdonald

In These Times: Hospital Flacks Spread Fake News (9/18/08) by Emily Udell

Reporters of integrity quitting their jobs over what amount to unidentified ads in local news has prompted journalist groups to condemn "broadcast outlets using video news releases that are produced by pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers to look like news reports." Udell has more on the matter:

"We don't really know how big of a problem it is—and that's part of the problem," says Andy Schotz, chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee. "It blends into news coverage in a way that people don't even know the source of the news they’re getting." Eight broadcast reports by the Cleveland Clinic News Service—the PR arm of an Ohio healthcare provider—aired virtually unedited on 26 stations, according to an analysis published last year in the Columbia Journalism Review. Of those 26 stations, 23 were owned by Fox.

Udell notes the really devious nature of the segments: "these video news releases are often inserted seamlessly into reports produced by a station's reporters."

Listen to FAIR's weekly radio program CounterSpin: Diane Farsetta on RTNDA and Video News Releases (10/27/06)

Government Technology: Media Mergers Threaten Community News (9/24/08) by Sascha Meinrath

Community journalist Meinrath's fiscal snapshot of corporate media behemoths provides evidence that, as he writes, "the U.S. federal government's media ownership policies have tremendous impact on the community media that has traditionally played an important role in fostering community awareness and involvement":

The past 20 years have seen an unprecedented number of media mergers among TV, radio, film, publishing and online holdings. An oligopoly has emerged in which six massive corporations control enormous numbers of media outlets. In 2006, combined revenues from these companies were greater than many countries' economies—even individually, the economic might is daunting.

On the bright side, Meinrath reminds us that "media conglomeration isn't a left-right political issue," and quotes Ben Scott of Free Press saying "it unites a wide variety of organizations concerned about the impact of concentrated media on the diversity of opinion a democracy requires."

CJR.org: The Press and Phil Gramm (9/24/08) by Elinore Longobardi

A play-by-play commentary on coverage of McCain adviser Phil Gramm and the U.S. financial crisis:

The alternative press has led the way on the story of Phil Gramm and the policy roots of the financial crisis, beating the mainstream business and other media rather badly about the face and neck.... So, let's accentuate the positive and offer an Audit Credit to Mother Jones for more excellent reporting on the ever-widening ripples from the deregulation of the American financial system.... James K. Galbraith examines the bubble effects of this deregulation, looking beyond the obvious one in housing, already burst, to the other ones in energy and food. As his colleague David Corn did last summer, Galbraith lays considerable responsibility for financial deregulation at the feet of former Sen. Phil Gramm.

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: James Galbraith on Financial Turmoil (9/19/08)

Slate: McCain Bites the Press (9/23/08) by Jack Shafer

In a piece mostly about the the John McCain campaign's new war on media, press critic Shafer writes that,

while I don't believe that the [New York] Times is pulling for Barack Obama, and I'd never judge an entire publication by one story, [McCain adviser] Steve Schmidt is right about the more general point he raises: The press corps does adore Barack Obama. They like his story. They like writing about him. They like the way he gives speeches. They like the way he makes them feel. And they don't mind cutting him slack whenever he acts like a regular politician—which he is.

As far as journalists' personal feelings are concerned, this may be true enough, what with MSNBC's Chris Matthews confessing to a "thrill going up my leg" during Obama's speeches. But what is the evidence for this translating into journalists "cutting him slack" in their reporting and commentary? This is a campaign, after all, where the views of Obama's former preacher became a major issue, unlike the odd opinions of McCain's religious backers; where Obama declining to accept a public financing system that would have put given him a severe financial disadvantage was decried, while McCain's reneging on a signed promise to rely on public financing in the primaries was given a pass; where the candidate who did not have trouble remembering how many houses he owns was the one who is accused of elitism. If this is love, Obama might be better off if he and the media were just friends.

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: The Myth of Pro-Obama Media Bias: Little Evidence for Self-Proclaimed 'Lovefest' (9–10/08) by John K. Wilson

Beat the Press: Post Editorials Jump to Front Page (9/23/08) by Dean Baker

Catching a front-page Post complaint "that the presidential candidates have not adjusted their tax and spending plans to accommodate the new fiscal realities implied by the bailouts," Baker points out that

the article calls for them to advocate spending cuts and/or tax increases. While this reflects the Post's editorial position, it is not clear that it reflects the fiscal and economic reality. At this point, neither the Post or anyone else knows how much a bailout will cost. It is possible that it will be structured so that most of the burden will be placed on the banks. The Post also doesn't know how severe the current recession will be. There are few economists who would advocate cutting spending or raising taxes in the middle of a serious recession. In short, this article is reflecting the editorial perspective of the Post, not economic or fiscal necessities.

OpEd News: The Fourth Power and the Rise of Yellow Journalism (9/17/08) by John Little

A history of news media explains how the growing phenomenon "needed to be brought under control of... rulers lest they find themselves on the wrong end," so "most countries simply took over all media coverage of events," since "the easiest way to ensure that the media reports what you want is to feed them the stories they put in their newspapers and journals." That the United States did things differently serves to underline the depths of corporate journalists' betrayal:

In the U.S., the concept of a completely free and independent media was something that had been written into the Constitution itself.... We purposefully kept the hands of politicians out of the media. The idea was, keep journalistic reporting free and independent, and the masses will have the greatest chance of getting the correct information and using it accordingly. What our forefathers didn't realize was that by keeping the press completely unregulated in its reporting, we could fall into a capitalistic trap of sensationalistic reporting for the sole purpose of selling more newspapers and earning a bigger paycheck at the end of the day. We had allowed ourselves to become the first victim of Yellow Journalism.

Washington Post: Economic Fears Give Obama Clear Lead Over McCain in Poll (9/24/08) by Dan Balz & Jon Cohen

Aside from finding a 9-point lead for Barack Obama, the big news here is the sinking support for Sarah Palin. But Balz and Cohen report it this way:

The survey also found that the strong initial public reaction to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, has cooled somewhat. Overall, her unfavorable rating has gone up by 10 points in the past two weeks, from 28 percent to 38 percent.

She remains broadly popular—52 percent of voters view her positively—but there have been some notable declines. Over the past two weeks, the percentage of independents with favorable views of Palin dropped from 60 percent to 48 percent. Among independent women, the decline was particularly sharp, going from 65 percent to 43 percent. Her favorable rating among whites... with college degrees... dropped nearly 20 percentage points.

Broadly popular at 52 percent favorability? By that measure every major candidate in the race—Obama, McCain and Biden—is "broadly popular"; Obama and McCain are both quite a bit more popular (61 percent and 59 percent positive, respectively), while Joe Biden has the same positive rating as Palin with lower negatives (32 percent). But media persist in thinking of Palin as the popular one, since that's the impression she made when they first met her.

Huffington Post: Better Than Lipstick on a Pig (9/24/08) by Timothy Karr

The Free Press' Karr brings attention a creative remedy for the dismal journalistic performance expected in the imminent debates:

We have devised a "Citizens Media Scorecard" that will allow thousands of debate watchers to "score" the performance of the media moderators during the final four presidential and vice presidential debates. These real-time ratings will be analyzed by esteemed media researcher Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report and immediately fed back to hundreds of political and media reporters as soon as the debates are finished—allowing the public to weigh in before the media spin cycle gets out of control.

Associated Press: Muslim Rights Group Asks FEC for 'Obsession' Probe (9/24/08)

In the fallout from Saturday's appearance of Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, the Council for American-Islamic Relations

has asked the FEC to investigate the DVD distribution, which targeted about 28 million households mostly in battleground election states. The DVDs—which critics call anti-Muslim propaganda—were inserted this month into more than 70 newspapers and paid for by the Clarion Fund, a non-profit group founded in 2006. The fund's focus is "the most urgent threat of radical Islam." It has declined to identify board members or its funding.

CAIR charges that the distribution of Obsession is an illegal attempt to influence the presidential election, but a spokesperson for the Endowment for Middle East Truth, another non-profit group that worked with Clarion, said that "targeting swing states was designed to attract media attention, but is not meant to influence the election result." That's tough to figure--the distribution would get media attention, presumably because it looks like it might have an impact on the election, but it wouldn't actually be trying to have an impact on the election?

Austin American-Statesman: Presidential Debates Could Seal the Deal for Voters (9/23/08) by Diane Holloway

An article on the importance of the upcoming debates quotes scheduled moderator Jim Lehrer promising not to ask tough questions of the candidates:

"The important thing for me to keep in mind is this is not about me or my questions," Lehrer said. "My job is to facilitate the debate, not to hammer away like I might do in an interview. The millions of people watching want to see these people on the same stage at the same time. They want to see how they handle the issues and how they handle themselves."

No doubt the candidates will be relieved to learn that they will be spared the "hammer" that Lehrer usually wields.

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: Dubious Debates: How Media Moderators Lowered the Level of Election '08 (7–8/08) by Jacqueline Bacon

Miller–McCune: Innocent Until Reported Guilty (9/23/08) by Steve Weinberg

Former head of Investigative Reporters and Editors Weinberg provides an example of his contention that "'enabler' might serve as the best word to describe many journalists assigned to cover the justice system'":

I like to think that after police arrested Ellen Reasonover for murder in St. Louis County, an intelligent, persistent journalist looking at the evidence before trial would have published an article showing that the state's case was built on nothing more than the questionable testimony of two jailhouse snitches and that the snitch testimony contravened common sense. That story might not have halted an injustice. Then again, maybe it would have.

Weinberg's verdict: "They should all know the warning signs of wrongful prosecution by now, yet their coverage (and absence of coverage) suggests little learning from experience."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: Enabling False Convictions: Exoneration Coverage Overlooks Media Role (11–12/07) by Jon Whiten

Fox News: Imbalance on Campaign Ads (9/24/08)

Fox News' Greta Van Susteren blurred fact and fiction when commenting on a series of McCain and Obama campaign ads on the financial crisis. Van Susteren turned to Politico's David Mark to make sense of the McCain campaign's ad linking Obama to our current economic woes:

VAN SUSTEREN: Is that Franklin Raines ad by the McCain campaign, which is directed at Senator Obama, is that fair? Are these facts that are supported-are these facts?

MARK: Well, they are facts. Franklin Raines was head of Fannie Mae. He does have kind of a tenuous tie to Barack Obama. That might be a little bit off base. But, then again, Barack Obama has run plenty of ads linking John McCain to Phil Gramm, Carly Fiorina, George W. Bush, and other figures.

VAN SUSTEREN: It's unbelievable, though, these two campaigns. I don't know what to believe. I see everyone getting dragged through the mud. And every time someone says anything that remotely might be misinterpreted, everyone assumes the worst.

The similarities between the ads are not so striking, actually. McCain put out an ad linking Obama to disgraced former Fannie Mae CEO Raines, calling him a campaign advisor--which, it turns out, he's not. Obama linked McCain to his two actual top economic advisers--Fiorina and Gramm--and to Bush, the leader of his party and someone he's repeatedly embraced over the past several years when the political moment suits him, as when he remarked in April of this year, "No one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have" (Think Progress, 4/2/08).

Daily News: What Their Plans Mean to You (9/21/08)

Another example of corporate media having a peculiar view of who "you" are when it comes to taxes: The New York tabloid's graphic on the major candidate's tax plans uses as examples families making $35,000, $75,000, $150,000, $200,000, $500,000 and $2 million--in other words, families making more, roughly speaking, than 39 percent, 74 percent, 94 percent, 97 percent, 99.5 percent and 99.9 percent of U.S. households. Picking such skewed examples gives predictably skewed results--four out of six of the Daily News' families do better under McCain's plan, for example, whereas the Tax Policy Center calculates that 81 percent of families would get a tax cut under Obama's plan, vs. only 56 percent for McCain's.

[1] 2 3 4 5 6 Next>>
[Last Page]

Home | Contact Us | Support Us | RSS | Privacy Policy | Copyright Policy

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Site designed by the May First Technology Collective