MediaBloodhound

Op-Ed Column: It's Time for Chris Matthews to Play Hardball Every Day

When MSNBC's Chris Matthews unmasked right-wing radio host Kevin James for mindlessly pushing White House and GOP "appeasement" talking points, Matthews also revealed the journalist he could be.

And that's what is endlessly frustrating about the longtime Hardball host.

First, Matthews deserves credit for his evisceration of James, who appeared on Hardball last Thursday with nothing more than the word "appeasement" in his shallow arsenal. James not only conflated "appeasement" with merely talking to our enemies - as President Bush, John McCain, the GOP and their minions keep doing - but attempted to trot out Bush's absurd and offensive comparison of Barack Obama to Neville Chamberlain while having not the slightest clue as to who Chamberlain was or what he did to appease Hitler. In fact, it was pretty clear James didn't even know what the word appeasement means.

But it says much about what's been lacking in our mainstream media, especially during the George W. Bush years, that James expected to drop by Matthews' show so ill-prepared. Yet James shouldn't bear the full brunt of responsibility here. The truth is, these kind of specious talking points - from this ludicrous claim of appeasement, to impugning one's patriotism over flag pins and other jingoistic nonsense, to equating calls to bring home our troops with "cutting and running" - have been the provenance of our mainstream news programs and televised debates for years now. (To be fair, Matthews acknowledges some of this while talking the next day with Countdown guest host Rachel Maddow.)

Consequently, Matthews - though warranted by James' ham-handed and fatuous talking points and stunning vacuity - did, on some level, ambush his guest. Don't get me wrong: Matthews was right to call him out. My point is that James had good reason to believe Matthews would be more tolerant of his bogus argument. James probably expected the Hardball host to listen to him and, at most, take the position of a relatively painless devil's advocate for a moment before handing it off to another guest, one on the other side of the political fence (in this case Air America Radio president Mark Green) to reply to James' assertions. Then the segment would end, a new issue to bandy about with other guests would begin and all would be forgotten.

Thus, James' belief he'd sail through his appearance didn't stem from ignorance, which he amply displayed while attempting to brand Obama an appeaser. Rather, his expectation, thoroughly justified, was based on the parade of mendacious right-wing shills who've come before Matthews over the last seven years. An endless procession of willfully misleading talking heads and Bush administration officials who used Matthews and MSNBC's airtime - as they have all the other networks and their programs - and who, almost invariably, left wholly unscathed, untouched by the scrutiny of truly probing questions or the kind of unrelenting follow-ups to which Matthews responsibly subjected James.

James had every reason to think he could repeat the words "appeaser" and "appeasement," like an infant content to utter a new phrase over and over again, with little more than a pat on the head by Matthews.

And that's the underlying issue here: shouldn't we be just as troubled, or even more troubled, by James' confidence he'd receive a free pass than by the fact that he was pushing such propaganda? Doesn't the overwhelming attention to this one incident also underscore its uncommon occurrence?

Op-Ed Column: Networks Win Pennsylvania in Landslide!

Have you ever been dreaming, entertaining whatever loopy narrative your unconscious mind is unleashing, and then suddenly you recognize it's only a dream and you wake up?

Well, during MSNBC's election coverage last night, in between all the manufactured melodrama of the network's ensemble cast, Chris Matthews seemed to experience such a moment when, as if delivering an on-stage soliloquy sans the dimming lights, he said:

"But I really do think it’s a strange time because we’re all watching to see who won, but as Nora pointed out, 4 out of 5, or so, of the Hillary voters today believe she’s still in the running. That this is still up in the air and I think that was probably a mistake of the media. I think in the effort of the media, to try to keep this game going, we’ve created the delusion that somehow this race is still open. I don’t think it is open. I think if you look at the numbers Barack has to really blow it in the weeks ahead to lose."

Credible political analysts, such as #1 MSNBC number cruncher and political director Chuck Todd, have been quietly noting this for weeks. Of course, Todd's checks are also cut by the same network with a huge stake in stoking the "delusion" that this race is still neck and neck. (Just as this unreality benefits all the networks and the mainstream media at large.) So these waking moments supplied by Todd - conveniently, the most soft-spoken figure on network news - are fleeting. Rare glimpses of light before we're plunged back into the ratings-generating, Iago-like gaming of Tim Russert, Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan and, yes, Chris Matthews.

Todd reminded us again of this reality last night. Only now, Clinton's chances, ironically, are bleaker than they were before her Pennsylvania victory. Breaking down the numbers, Todd noted that "the pledged delegate count is basically over" and "it now appears like it's going to be impossible for Obama to lose his lead." And it's clear why Todd hedges ever so slightly, softening this dash of sobriety with the words "basically" and "appears": MSNBC desires thousands of miles more out of this nearly broken-down vehicle.

Today on Morning Joe, Matthews, along with Joe Scarborough and the rest of the panel, hailed Clinton's victory and, like Groundhog Day, picked up their ever-extended Thrilla in Manila narrative where they left off. To give him mild credit, Matthews did provide a seconds-long allusion to the reality of Chuck Todd's stark numbers, before he leaped back into the chorus and saddled up for another day at the horse track.

So if you're rooting for Clinton and you're still flush from this latest victory, or your candidate is Obama and you're still licking your wounds, remember this: the biggest winner last night was once again the networks and their ratings, with John McCain and the GOP right behind them.

Buckle up, Democrats, and proceed with caution. Right now, more than any one entity, the indiscriminate knife twisters in the mainstream media have the strongest hand on the wheel and they are driving this nomination process toward a cliff. Keep playing this game of chicken, keep operating within their craven frame of a never-ending steel-cage death match, and the only viable candidate standing - viable as in capable of winning in November - might soon be John McCain.

To corporate media chiefs, along with their friends in the GOP and their advertising sponsor pals in the defense, energy and pharmaceutical industries, this ongoing cutthroat nomination process and its very possible outcome (say hello to President McCain!) would be a tremendous win-win. And a classic demonstration of the Democratic Party's uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Especially when you consider President Bush just received the highest job disapproval rating in Gallup Poll's history (69%) and over 80% of Americans think this country's on the wrong track.

Of course, the more tattered the Democratic nominee is by the end, the closer the presidential race - and thus the higher the ratings - will be in the fall.

Make no mistake, the networks are also looking ahead to November. And their Lord of the Flies mentality has them salivating.

Op-Ed Column: The Facts, Keith Olbermann and Rabid Hillary Shills

Leading into the Texas and Ohio primaries, The New York Times reported that "the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton is unleashing what one Clinton aide called a 'kitchen sink' fusillade against Obama." Meanwhile, the Clinton camp was busy working the refs: leveraging a Saturday Night Live sketch that ridiculed the media for alleged favoritism of Sen. Obama, Hillary Clinton cried foul as she and her campaign were simultaneously in the process of heaving said sink.

Clinton and her inner circle fueled the worst kind of xenophobia: "No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know," Clinton told 60 Minute's Steve Kroft, when asked if she thought Obama was a Muslim. And while the source of The Drudge Report's well-timed photo of Obama in traditional Somali garb (flaming those Muslim rumors) officially remains unconfirmed, the Clinton camp's history of leaking information to Drudge has been documented. To this day, the campaign has never issued a flat, unequivocal denial that the photo was sent by one of its members. (Mission accomplished: a December 2007 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 8% of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim; a new WSJ/NBC poll reveals that the number of Americans who believe this falsehood has risen to 13%.) Concurrently, as the media failed to effectively challenge Clinton on her refusal to release her tax forms, it featured story after story on Clinton's unrelated and obfuscating counter-punch to any inquire into her tax records: Obama's connection to indicted businessman Antoin Rezko, about which after extensive digging by every major media outlet, not one has confirmed any legal wrongdoing on the part of Sen. Obama. (Welcome to Obama's Whitewater.)

The strategy worked like a charm. The Clinton camp is nothing if not schooled in such politics. With a cowed media focusing lopsided scrutiny on Obama days before the March 4 primary, Clinton's camp landed one shot below the belt after another. Effective and politically shrewd? Sure. Cheap, cynical and sleazy? You bet.

Since the March 4 primaries alone, Clinton press secretary Howard Wolfson has absurdly compared Obama to Ken Starr; Sen. Clinton has done Sen. McCain's bidding, breaking an unofficial rule among same-party candidates by asserting she and Sen. McCain have crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold" while Obama has not; and, of course, this past week one of Clinton's chief fundraisers, Geraldine Ferraro, said, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," then claimed reverse racism when people objected to her racist or, at bare minimum, intentionally racially divisive and factually ignorant comments. And if anyone thinks Ferraro's statements weren't tactical salvos - part of Hillary's "Archie Bunker strategy for PA," to quote my consistently straight-shooting friend, Will Bunch - then they're not paying attention or are willfully ignorant of her campaign's modus operandi.

The worst you can say for the Obama camp during the same period is that then foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, jet-lagged and upset right after the results in Ohio and having witnessed firsthand how Clinton won the state, called her a "monster" during an interview, screwing up by then attempting to keep the comment off the record without having stated that request beforehand. She resigned immediately, publicly and profusely apologizing to Sen. Clinton. Moreover, the media failed to address what drove Power's comment: Clinton's self-evident willingness to do anything to win in Ohio, but also, taking into account Power's expertise on foreign policy and human rights, quite likely her knowledge of Clinton's egregious record on war and innocent civilian lives as well.

Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton initially offered only a tepid and - make no mistake about it - calculated response, saying she "did not agree" with Ferraro's comment and found it "regrettable." Clinton later finally denounced Ferraro's statements in clearer terms: "I rejected what she said and I certainly do repudiate it." But where did she happen to utter this delayed reaction? Before a gathering of black newspaper publishers at the National Newspapers Association meeting. Just another example of Clinton's track record of the most cynical political expediency. Moreover, when Ferraro's comments first made news, Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams had the Orwellian chutzpah to insinuate that it was somehow Obama who was playing the race card in this instance. But this tactic shouldn't have surprised anyone because it's exactly what Williams had done during the Drudge/Obama-in-African-garb photo flap.

Op-Ed Column: NYT Dangerously Downplays Bush's Anti-Torture Veto

When historians look back and try to understand how the George W. Bush administration managed to trample the Constitution and transgress the Geneva Conventions with near impunity, our mainstream media will stand out as one of the primary culprits.

Case in point: Sunday's New York Times report on President Bush's veto of a bill that sought to prohibit the CIA from using torture techniques such as waterboarding. Here's the lede:

President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

There you have it. According to The Times, Bush's legacy of gutting and subverting our Constitution in a patently authoritarian, fascistic manner is defined as merely "fighting for strong executive powers." Such reporting is as absurd as summing up a man's inclination to beat his wife as an act that depicts a strong male role in marriage. During the Bush years, this kind of intellectually dishonest, apologetic journalism has done grave damage to our country and the rest of the world. The smattering of begrudging mea culpas aside, such reportorial distillations in our mainstream media, in which reality is jettisoned for unmitigated transcription of White House talking points, has not, as conventional wisdom keeps telling us, subsided much, if at all, since the earliest drumbeats to invade Iraq. (Ask yourself as well, for example, how a study released nearly six months ago that an estimated 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion of Iraq received virtually no coverage; the Los Angeles Times was the only major US newspaper to report on it; US network news completely ignored the study.)

This particular Times article (which only gets worse) underscores the disingenuous depths to which our paper of record is willing to sink. President Bush vetoes a bill intended to stop the CIA from using torture techniques, including waterboarding - which dates back to the Spanish Inquisition, was a favorite practice of the Gestapo, and for which the US tried and hanged Japanese soldiers after WWII - and The Times boils down the entire veto to politics and a factually inaccurate, Bush-approved narrative of his legacy.

This is a disgraceful piece of reporting, as damaging, or more damaging because of The Times' stature and influence on the rest of the media, than any yellow journalism disseminated by Fox News and its minions. If The Times is portraying Bush's despotic desire to continue torturing as nothing more than an effort to retain "strong executive powers," then it sets the bar lower for not only the rest of the media but especially those outlets, like a Fox News, that portray the Bush administration and its actions in a positive light no matter what the situation.

The Times article, written by Steven Lee Myers, continues with a veritable lexicon of Bush-era, media-transcribed talking points, disingenuous frames and deficient-by-omission details:

Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the agency from using interrogation methods like waterboarding, a technique in which restrained prisoners are threatened with drowning and that has been the subject of intense criticism at home and abroad. Many such techniques are prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies.

First, waterboarding is not an interrogation technique but an historically known torture technique. Second, as Malcolm Nance, a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) who applied waterboarding to US soldiers to prepare them in the case of capture, has attested to time and again, an individual administered waterboarding is in the process of drowning. It is not "simulated drowning" as it has so often been described in the media. Nor are they being "threatened with drowning," as The Times misleadingly states here. To paraphrase Nance, one is either drowning or has drowned; there is no in between. During waterboarding, water fills your lungs and you can't breathe. You're drowning. Nothing is being simulated.

Moreover, techniques like waterboarding are not only prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies but also by international law, as stated in the Geneva Conventions. Additionally, a US president's executive decision to carry out torture is also a breach of our Constitution, on which President Bush swore to uphold upon taking office. So how does The Times justify omitting that Bush's past torture, his veto to continue torturing and any future torture directed by him are all explicit acts in direct violation of these two guiding statutes of US domestic and international law? This isn't a question of point of view; it is a question of reporting the facts or omitting them, of giving the public sufficient substantive details to assess what's actually at issue or obfuscating them.

The veto deepens his battle with increasingly assertive Democrats in Congress over issues at the heart of his legacy. As his presidency winds down, he has made it clear he does not intend to bend in this or other confrontations on issues from the war in Iraq to contempt charges against his chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, and former counsel, Harriet E. Miers.

Mr. Bush announced the veto in the usual format of his weekly radio address, which is distributed to stations across the country each Saturday. He unflinchingly defended an interrogation program that has prompted critics to accuse him not only of authorizing torture previously but also of refusing to ban it in the future. "Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," he said.

Op-Ed Column: The AP Tried to Go to Rehab, Then It Said No, No, No: Or How AP’s Vow to Increase Coverage of Britney Reveals Its True Nature

The drought of news on Britney Spears, an obscure and underreported pop star, has finally reached a merciful end.

Last week, Gawker obtained a same-day internal memorandum, written by Frank Baker, Associated Press Los Angeles Assistant Bureau Chief, in which he announces, “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.”

Of course, since the AP feeds every major news outlet in our country, this means more Britney Spears coverage for all of us. Already demonstrating its dedication to this reportorial call-to-arms, on the day of Baker’s memo alone, the AP covered not only how Ms. Spears had missed her scheduled custody hearing, but, even more pressing, how she lost her car. And just yesterday comes news the AP, two steps ahead of the Grim Reaper, has already prepared Ms. Spears’ obituary. (“Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” be damned. The AP has opted for the more industrious Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared.")

The rest of Baker’s memo went to say, “That doesn’t mean every rumor makes it on the wire. But it does mean that we want to pay attention to what others are reporting and seek to confirm those stories that WE feel warrant the wire. And when we determine that we’ll write something, we must expedite it. Thanks.”

It’s heartening to know that Baker and the AP won’t send “every rumor” over the wire. Such integrity-driven lines in the sand are surely the last barrier between professional journalism and the fetid, bottom-feeding, brain-dead fare of less serious news outlets.

Kudos, Mr. Baker!

And while the AP and Baker have taken some heat for this move, it’s only fair to point out the AP’s valiant, cold turkey effort to break its addiction to reporting on Paris Hilton, a forgotten weeklong struggle that began on Feb. 19, 2007, at the end of which the newswire king - conjuring images of night sweats and hallucinations of giant babies crawling on ceilings - reported, “We didn’t cover her weekend birthday bash in Las Vegas.” In its battle with the demons of newsworthiness, the AP also noted, “During ‘blackout week,’ the AP didn’t mention Hilton’s second birthday party at a Beverly Hills restaurant, at which a drunken friend reportedly was ejected by security after insulting Paula Abdul and Courtney Love. And editors asked our Puerto Rico bureau not to write about her visit there to hawk her fragrance.”

Imagine the journalistic restraint marshaled here. A second Paris birthday party. A drunk friend sent home. Abdul. Courtney Love. And a new Paris perfume. Still, the AP, like a monk getting a lap dance from Angelina Jolie, wavered not. And certainly it’s this kind of iron will that makes Frank Baker’s current promise not to report on every rumor about Britney something we can put in the bank.

Though, in the end, the monkey on the AP’s back was an unrelenting, pitiless temptress. While the weeklong moratorium was an admirable goal, Paris Hilton, an infinite source of news that impacts all of our lives, proved too strong. Before the week’s end, the AP admitted, “However, her name did slip into copy unintentionally three times, as background: in stories about Britney Spears, Nicole Richie, and even in the lead of a story about Democrats in Las Vegas.”

Nevertheless, this historic journalistic effort – worthy of the industry’s highest accolades - must never be forgotten. For if quitting cigarettes is, as the medical community has noted for years, as difficult as kicking heroin, then the AP’s addiction to Paris and Britney and the infinite pool of talentless, vapid Americans famous for being famous can only be compared to, say, a speedball of cocaine and heroin, or, possibly, the largest hunk of journalistic crack ever smoked in the western hemisphere.

So before throwing stones at the AP’s dedication to broader Britney coverage, maybe it’s time to look at some of our country’s other long-celebrated but comfortable-in-their-own-skin addicts - Keith Richards, Greta Van Susteren, Dean Martin, Larry King, William Burroughs, Nancy Grace, John Bottom, Geraldo Rivera, Jonah Goldberg, Cheech and Chong, Maureen Dowd, Timothy Leary, Bill O'Reilly – and commend the AP for finally embracing William Shakespeare's sage words: “To thine own self be true.”

Op-Ed Column: Advocating for a Revolution in News

advocacy journalism: journalism that advocates a cause or expresses a viewpoint (Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary)

Another year. Another annual Doctors Without Borders "Top Ten Underreported Humanitarian Stories."

Coverage of such stories by alternative media sources and independent journalists is often labeled "advocacy journalism” by the mainstream media. But if mainstream outlets were doing their job, it might just be called "news."

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is often identified as an advocacy journalist. But Goodman's reaction to this categorization crystallizes how the term is used to marginalize stories – as well as the journalists and outlets who report them - that don't support the prevailing views of corporate-owned media or the state. Says Goodman, "I am accused of advocacy journalism. If that is true, then the mainstream media is my model."

In other words, why should reporting on uncomfortable, underreported, fact-based stories be framed as advocacy journalism while mainstream reporters and their outlets regularly produce news stories that advocate the worldview of media-owned conglomerations, their corporate sponsors and their friends in government.

The run-up to the war in Iraq, of course, served as a prime example of this advocacy journalism. As Goodman has shrewdly questioned, “If we had a state-run media, how would it be any different?" Indeed, our mainstream media advocated daily for the Bush administration's view: pre-emptive war with Iraq was justified on the flimsiest of evidence, against a country that never attacked us.

As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote in his revealing (and, in alternative media circles, now infamous) 2004 op-ed “Red Flags and Regrets”:

“In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it -- arranging for reporters to be embedded with military units, purchasing chemical and biological weapons gear and setting up forward command posts in Kuwait that mirrored those of the U.S. military."

Their craven acquiescence to the war's inevitability and their equally disgraceful exuberant embrace of the TV generals’ war-gaming, epitomizes a kind of advocacy journalism, steeped in bias and oblivious to facts, that has no place in journalism at all. Moreover, because it purports to be “serious news” - the official word from the most trusted outlets – it’s all the more damaging. And, in the end, all the more damnable.

In his article “Corporate Media and Advocacy Journalism,” Norman Solomon, a media critic well-versed on this issue, says, “We’re encouraged to see high-quality journalism as dispassionate, so that professionals do their jobs without advocating. But passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy. It’s advocacy of the most convincing sort -- by example.”

Nevertheless, in typical Orwellian fashion, it’s this type of “journalism,” one pushing a point of view regardless of the facts, of which the media elites accuse skilled (not to mention brave and principled) journalists like Goodman.

But if a journalist is advocating for the facts - for the relevant and accurate application of historical context, for logic and science over fear and jingoism, for vetting assertions of the government and big business and holding them accountable when they break the law - is that not advocacy for what should be the guiding journalistic principles in any democratic society?

How did it ever come to pass that this is the marginalized version of journalism in our country, while the version presented by Fox News and other more subtle (to varying degrees) yet also complicit members of the media class - from “respected” circles such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, NPR, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC – is not considered advocacy journalism for the elite corporate-imperialistic interests of those who fund it?

As fake news journalist Stephen Colbert said in an interview in 2005, "When Dick Cheney says, 'I never said that,' and then we play the tape, why did we do it? Why wasn't it done broadly? Because he wasn't speaking about something inconsequential. It wasn't like we were playing gotcha journalism over some quibble. It was over weapons of mass destruction. That's not advocacy journalism. That's objectivity in its most raw form."

Conversely, the journalists in our mainstream media who advocated omitting, altering, ignoring or inventing “facts” in their efforts to champion the Bush White House's war, as well as the shredding of our Constitution and civil liberties, presented not even a form of advocacy journalism that might be subjective yet fact-based (i.e. potentially viable), but rather corporate-and-state-sponsored propaganda. Nearly 100 percent unadulterated.

Meanwhile, with all-consuming, ever-intrusive, pathological obsession, mainstream media outlets bombard us daily with coverage of the pop or movie star du jour’s rise and fall, the latest missing Caucasian female or newest serial killer on the scene. Go ahead and try to tune out every news item about Britney & Co. These days, in order to avoid glimpsing or overhearing tidbits of this bottom-feeding sludge called “news,” U.S. citizens would have to almost completely disengage with society at large. It is our daily muck. And like it or not, it still takes up space by omission in our national consciousness. 

For every story of Britney and Co.’s latest escapade, millions of human beings truly deserving of news coverage are abandoned in the darkness, destroyed by tyranny and neglect. Alone. Starving. Tortured. Raped. Murdered. Displaced. Silenced.

Of course, daily coverage of Britney and Co. serves as a masterfully distracting counterpart – aka “weapons of mass distraction” - to the hawkish, corporate-slanted news. In the process of squeezing time that might otherwise be used to disseminate substantive information, this daily muck dulls critical faculties and squelches empathy, isolating us not only from our own citizens and fellow human beings around the globe, but from reality itself.

Let’s be blunt here: it is a preemptive attack against natural human impulses to reverse injustice and to block the hand of a bully before it strikes another innocent victim. The very opposite approach of the journalistic credo to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”

In Amy Goodman’s interview with Doctors Without Borders-USA executive director Nicolas de Torrente, she noted, “You’re talking about some of the worst crises in the world. And according to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the online media tracking journal, the Tyndall Report, the countries in context that you highlight at Medecins Sans Frontieres [Doctors Without Borders] account for just eighteen minutes of coverage from January to November 2007 on the three major nightly newscasts.”

That’s roughly 1.6 minutes a month.

Keep in mind this occurred during the same year that after Anna Nicole Smith died, as Jon Stewart (yes, another fake newsman) pointed out on The Daily Show, “The media unleashed a full-scale coverage orgy, with CNN at one point going 90 minutes without a commercial, making the death of Anna Nicole Smith a more significant news event than a State of the Union address and slightly less than 9/11.”

So when the next war comes down the pike, events will once again move with an inexorable sweep. Too many of our citizens simply don’t have the tools to assess the situation: to cut through propaganda, read between the lines, ask necessary questions, contact their representatives, and stand up for their rights and the rights of people abroad. Too many of our citizens no longer understand what it means to be a citizen. And while, of course, free will (a concept often manipulated in defense of our national media’s diseased fare) does exist, free will is inarguably dependent upon the quality of knowledge one receives and is capable of comprehending. 

For the relatively ghettoized segment of our society that does stay abreast of domestic and world events, that actively fights to circumvent or break through the onslaught of received corporate-imperialistic wisdom and numbing relentless banality, the brake lines, nevertheless - as was the case with Iraq - have often already been cut. Or as Bob Dylan once said, "The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles." (Maybe we can avoid war with Iran; though new opportunities await.)

So, at that point, the best we can hope for is the smoothest of crashes, the least bloody and tragic of aftermaths.

Make no mistake about it: American citizens, and the rest of the world often more so, suffer as a direct consequence of the mainstream media’s complicit hand in this entrenched pathological cycle. The assertion that our news outlets wouldn’t have been able to stop the administration from going to war even if they had asked the right questions - another excuse used to defend the status quo of the media elite - is akin to a drug pusher saying of his client’s OD, “Well, you know, if it wasn’t me he got the stuff from, it would’ve been someone else.”

Certainly we, and the rest of the world, deserve better than a drug pusher mentality from our national news outlets. And if the stories on the Doctors Without Borders list constitute “advocacy journalism,” then maybe nothing better illustrates how crucial a need there is to advocate for a revolution in the quality of our news. 

Editor’s Note: I would be remiss not to direct you once again to read about each story in the Doctors Without Borders report. And feel free to contact the editors and owners of our big media outlets to demand they do a better job in 2008.

(Cross-posted at Larisa Alexandrovna's at-Largely.)

Op-Ed Column: Was Brokaw Also a Victim of His Own Professionalism?

(updated below)

"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." -- Milan Kundera

Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, the former reigning kings of broadcast network news (along with the majority of their big media cohorts in cable and print) all contributed to the transaction that sold the war in Iraq. Their pre-invasion newscasts devoted, to only nominally varying degrees, overwhelming airtime not to questioning the grounds for invasion, but to how the U.S. military would execute the task.

While this is well documented by now, revisionist spin remains strong among some of those who are most responsible.

Peter Jennings, arguably the least hawkish of the Big Three anchors during the lead-up to the war, passed away from lung cancer in August 2005. Dan Rather has shown contrition for his role in the pre-war drumbeating; in Bill Moyers' documentary "Buying the War," for example, Rather conceded, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war. There were exceptions. There were some people, who, I think, did a better job than others. But overall and in the main there's no question that we didn't do a good job."

Yet Tom Brokaw, as evidenced in his appearance on CNN's Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz this past Sunday, holds a decidedly unrepentant view:

KURTZ: In terms of the coverage [of the Vietnam War], do you see certain parallels here to Iraq? Most people would say, and I would agree, the media did a pretty poor job during the run-up to the Iraq War in terms of the way that President Bush was selling it, and now, of course, the coverage in recent years has been more critical.

BROKAW: Yes. The one thing I would disagree with you about, a lot of what happened on the run-up was unknowable. People did believe he had weapons of mass destruction. People who were critical of the war and the idea of going to war did in fact think that he had weapons of mass destruction, which was one of the bases for...

Kurtz actually affords Brokaw three chances to accept a modicum of accountability, but to no avail. Here's chance number two:

KURTZ: But shouldn't journalists have been more skeptical toward the line the administration was selling, even if they couldn't disprove it and given it more...

BROKAW: I think on the execution...

(CROSSTALK)

BROKAW: I think on the war plan they should have been a lot more skeptical.

Yes, the war plan. Still, to this day, it's about the war plan. The same myopically deficient focus that helped to sell the invasion of a country that never attacked us.

And the kicker:

KURTZ: And given more space, more air time to opposition voices? There was a feeling...

(CROSSTALK)

BROKAW: Yes, but remember -- you have to remember, the opposition voices were not that many in this town, for example, in Washington. There just weren't that many. We put Brent Scowcroft on "Nightly News." I did a two-way with him. And I was one of the few places where he would go where he would do that. We did have Senator Bob Byrd on the air and Ted Kennedy on the air, but it passed by a pretty considerable margin.

KURTZ: Oh, within the Democratic Party there weren't that many anti-war voices.

BROKAW: Yes, that's right.

Brokaw's statement reveals not only a failure of journalistic execution, but a troubling dysfunction at the core of mainstream news during the Bush years, which (sorry, Howie) largely continues to this day: a near wholesale abdication of the media's role as the fourth estate, the last line of defense in our nation's checks and balances.

Of course, legions of other credible voices - from award-winning investigative journalists to members of our own intelligence agencies to current and former weapons inspectors to historians familiar with the region - questioned the pre-war WMD charges, the White House's rationale for war, and also realized any invasion of Iraq, especially with intent to occupy, would be a disaster regardless of the "war plan."

It's just that, yes, those voices weren't coming from the Democratic leadership. That's a fact, but not an excuse.

Nor were those other voices welcome on NBC Nightly News, of which Brokaw was the managing editor as well as anchor. And in that role, surely he was instrumental in who appeared on his broadcast, no matter how much the corporate brass may have been meddling in such decisions. Moreover, if that had been the case, it's incumbent upon Brokaw to inform American citizens now. Something Dan Rather, his competitor for over two decades, is in the process of doing.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (as noted here recently) proffered a similar self-serving and inept defense back in 2004: "In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own."

Regardless of quality work that Tom Brokaw may have contributed to over the years, toeing the company line will not suffice if he hopes to repair some of the damage to his credibility burned in the memories of millions who witnessed his pre-invasion coverage.

He had a choice then, and he has a choice now.

UPDATE: Brilliant supplementary reading on this subject:

Glenn Greenwald's "Bad Stenographers":

The bulk of our establishment journalists aren't merely stenographers. They're bad stenographers. [...] For that reason, when establishment journalists are called "stenographers," the real insult is to professional stenographers, who are scrupulous about recording what everyone says with equal weight. But our media class gives enormous weight to government sources and, correspondingly, GOP operatives.

Jon Swift's satire "Journalism 101":

1. Journalists must be completely objective. This is the most important rule of journalism. Objectivity means not having any opinion or feelings whatsoever no matter what the circumstances. This rule was best expressed in a line I recently quoted from Washington Post columnist David Broder, the dean of American journalism, about his response [sic] President Kennedy's assassination: "As an ordinary man, I wanted leave the scene, hide somewhere, and weep," Broder said. "But I managed to calm myself and to report the event in the most objective way." As I explained in my earlier piece, "Broder refused to take sides after the President was killed. Was he for the assassination or against it? It was impossible to tell from his reporting. No matter what his personal feelings might have been, as a reporter he had to be objective when it came to whether killing Kennedy was a good thing or a bad thing."

2. There are two sides to every story and a journalist must give both sides equal weight even if he or she knows one side is completely false. Weighing one side against the other violates a journalist's objectivity. (See Rule No. 1.)

Op-Ed Column: Keith Olbermann, Network News' New Standard Bearer

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, as a consequence of his searing special comments, has long been compared to Edward R. Murrow. And for good reason.

But on Monday night he did something even Murrow may have been hard-pressed to do (though Murrow never covered such a rogue administration): accuse the sitting President of the United States of high crimes and suggest his rightful place in history might be in a jail cell:

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution.

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Keep in mind, this is not an op-ed in the New York Times, or something Olbermann wrote for The Nation, or said on Democracy Now! Nor did Olbermann deliver these words, à la his MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews, during an off-air speaking engagement, opportunistically timed to regain credibility in the service of selling a new book. Thus, no pose or marketing pitch, nor, for that matter, a fair weather opinion now that the political tides have turned.

No, Olbermann spoke directly to his viewers, who've rightly come to trust him as one of the few mainstream TV journalists to earn such trust during the Bush years. And contrary to the right-wing talking point, Olbermann tells the truth not because he's liberal or bashing Bush is popular or it's a boon to his ratings, but because, however antiquated an idea today, that's what journalists are supposed to do. Rather, the popularity of his show and his ever-rising ratings climb are a consequence of the public's hunger for this truth and its growing revulsion for the propaganda that all too often passes as news.

And though his "special comment" presents an opinion, as opposed to his straight news coverage and goofy "Oddball" segments earlier in the program, it is an opinion based in fact, often underscoring the need to preserve the Constitution, international law, civil liberties and common decency.

As Olbermann states in the opening words of Monday's special comment, "It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush."

Once again, while most of Olbermann's colleagues in the mainstream media covered the nomination process of Judge Michael Mukasey as if it were merely a partisan battle of wills and a chance to host the inconceivable debate of whether waterboarding is torture - or even worse, whether torture is acceptable - Olbermann told the truth.

Mukasey's refusal to denounce waterboarding and label it torture comes down to one thing: immunity for war crimes members of the Bush administration have already committed and, presumably, continue to commit with regards to their "interrogation techniques." Techniques that also include other forms of torture, such as stress positions and sleep deprivation.

We forget today, and many younger Americans may not even realize, that there was a time when TV news anchors were the most trusted people in America. Murrow was one. Cronkite another. Others followed, but Murrow and Cronkite were most worthy of that trust, unlike the majority of their news descendants who progressively traded their journalistic integrity for job security and multi-million-dollar contracts. Who, little by little, allowed TV news to devolve into something worse than pure entertainment of the kind Paddy Chayefsky predicted in Network. At least that would've been more honest.

Instead, they enabled and supported a "fair and balanced" news environment in which lies and liars were increasingly given equal or more weight than were facts and honest men and women, in which rampant disinformation or feckless omissions of fact eventually became the standard.

Olbermann alone will not reverse this course. But he deserves our gratitude for trying.

(Editor's Note: You can read or watch Keith Olbermann's special comment in full here.)

Op-Ed Column: Open Letter to WashPo Columnist David Ignatius

Dear Mr. Ignatius,

I have a question about this statement from your Oct. 28 Washington Post op-ed "Walking Into Iran's Trap": "Bush administration officials, for all their bellicose rhetoric, still hope that diplomatic pressure -- backed by ever-tighter economic sanctions -- will persuade Iran to compromise."

Is this conclusion based on anything other than assurances from Bush administration officials? Multi-sourced reports on this topic from three of our country’s most revered award-winning investigative journalists - Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry and James Bamford - have concluded just the opposite. Are you saying they and all of their sources are wrong? Not to mention several other reports, including those from McClatchy and The Guardian? Even your own paper has reported the contrary (Peter Baker, Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks, April 2006):

"The Bush team is looking at the viability of airstrikes simply because many think airstrikes are the only real option ahead," said Kurt Campbell, a former Pentagon policy official.

[…]

U.S. officials continue to pursue the diplomatic course but privately seem increasingly skeptical that it will succeed.

[…]

[Retired Air Force Col. Sam] Gardiner [who led war games with Iran as a target] concluded that a military attack would not work, but said he believes the United States seems to be moving inexorably toward it. "The Bush administration is very close to being left with only the military option," he said.

In the Oct. 8 op-ed “‘A Way Out’ for Iran,” you similarly claim, “If you read the liberal blogosphere, and even the stately New Yorker magazine, you get the impression that the Bush administration is itching to drop a bomb on Iran. But talking with senior administration officials this week, I hear a different line.”

Though, of course, much evidence refuting your assertion, some of which is cited above, comes not merely from Mr. Hersh of The New Yorker and the liberal blogosphere (and just for the record, no evidence I’ve provided here is sourced from the liberal blogosphere). Rather, it comes from experienced investigative journalists, intelligence and foreign policy experts, and military insiders - from sources both inside and outside the Bush administration. For you to claim otherwise is either careless, naïve or intellectually dishonest.

So, for instance, are you telling us Cheney and his inner circle – run roughshod by über-hawk Chief of Staff David Addington (aka Cheney’s Cheney) – sincerely hope that diplomatic pressure will work? Or is that why you refer to "Bush administration officials" in your Oct. 28 column, rather than, say, "the White House" or "the Bush administration"? Since "officials" is plural, is it safe to assume, then, that at least two people working for the Bush administration want diplomacy to work? And wouldn’t relaying the rough percentage of administration officials who support diplomacy, in addition to their rank, be a much greater indicator of the administration’s genuine diplomatic efforts (that is to say, if any truly exists)?

In failing to provide such critical information while framing this point as you do, I’m sure you can see how readers might be misled by your statement, believing instead that the Bush administration on the whole - or at least the majority of its members - honestly hopes diplomacy will work and military action can be avoided. Or are you actually asserting that Bush administration officials, including the President and Vice President and their inner circles, are unified in their desire for diplomacy's success with regards to Iran?

I'm also sure you recall how widely the mainstream media reported that the Bush White House was doing everything it could diplomatically to avoid war with Iraq - in essence, often parroting administration talking points. Tragically, as we’re all aware, that turned out to be false. And young American men and women and the Iraqi people are suffering the consequences. If key members of the Bush administration (i.e. the highest levels of its leadership) are pushing for military action against Iran, can you see how your frame might then be dangerously misleading? And how it might be used once again by the Bush White House to, in the end, help wage war?

After all, as with Iraq, an appearance of exhausting diplomatic action is prerequisite to an attack.

In your op-ed “Red Flags and Regrets” (April 27, 2004), in which you assess media coverage leading up to the Iraq invasion, you wrote:

In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it -- arranging for reporters to be embedded with military units, purchasing chemical and biological weapons gear and setting up forward command posts in Kuwait that mirrored those of the U.S. military.

In this illuminating statement (though not in the manner you intended), you seem to confuse professionalism with toadyism and journalistic rules with unethical corporate conformity. “Journalistic rules meant we shouldn’t create a debate on our own” is utterly antithetical to the tenets of sound journalism - to holding our elected leaders accountable, proactively seeking the truth and cutting through spin, and informing the public to the best of your ability.

If great journalists of the past and present followed your interpretation of “journalistic rules,” the world would be a much darker place.

Edward R. Murrow wouldn’t have stood up to and taken down Senator Joseph McCarthy. Walter Cronkite, with a Democratic president in office and Republicans overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in Vietnam, might not have declared the war “unwinnable” on national network news. And the names “Woodward and Bernstein” would conjure images of a law firm instead of the investigative reporters who cracked Watergate (in your own paper, incidentally). We still might be clueless to the My Lai massacre and its cover-up revealed by Seymour Hersh, the Iran-Contra scandal broken by Robert Parry and Brian Barger, or, more recently, George W. Bush’s unconstitutional use of presidential signing statements (Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe) or the administration-sanctioned extraordinary rendition program (Dana Priest, your current Washington Post colleague).

Such an interpretation of journalistic standards, as stated in your April 2004 op-ed, might well be acceptable by the Soviet-era Pravda - or, say, in Iran today - but not by any self-respecting news outlet in a democracy.

And not in an America that wishes to preserve its liberty.

Op-Ed Column: Was Romney's Osama-Obama Comment a Mistake?

"Actually, just look at what Osam -- Barack Obama -- said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq." --Mitt Romney, campaigning in South Carolina on Monday

In answer to the question posed in the headline, I don't know. No one does right now, except Mitt Romney and those in his inner circle.

But here are some relevant things we do know:

• Romney, as a member of the far right-wing of his party (aside from Ron Paul, is any Republican presidential candidate not these days?), will surely employ Rovian tactics honed over the last seven years. Feigning confusion to equate a Democratic presidential candidate with the most high-profile terrorist on earth - praying on people's fears, ignorance and bigotry - is right out of Rove's old playbook.

• The strategy of linking Obama to Osama is a longtime talking point of right-wing mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh.

• Romney has embraced, and has been embraced by, Ann Coulter, who, apart from a laundry list of inane, vile and irresponsible remarks (which includes joking around - ha-ha - about poisoning an insufficiently extreme Supreme Court justice to remove him from the bench) commonly likens liberals and Democratic candidates to terrorists, or portrays them as traitors if they don't fall in lock step behind the neocons' culture of death, deception and disenfranchisement.

• In a campaign swing through South Carolina this past July, Romney was photographed with a supporter holding a sign that read "No to Obama Osama and Chelsea's Moma [sic]." In a separate photo, Romney himself is holding this sign. At the time, Romney campaign spokesman Kevin Madden said it was merely "an alliterative play on words," adding, "I don't think it was equating or comparing anyone."

It's also worth examining the precise construction of his alleged blunder on Monday: "Actually, just look at what Osam -- Barack Obama -- said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq." It's certainly a curious order in which this "confusion" occurs. Had Romney begun by saying, "Just look at what Obam -- Osama bin Laden said just yesterday," it would be somewhat more believable it was said in error. But the order is extremely awkward, demanding a rather difficult verbal contortion: Romney utters the first two syllables of Osama's first name, then verbally pivots to deliver the Illinois senator's full name, which starts not with the similar sounding "Obama" but rather with "Barack." There's absolutely nothing natural about this transition: "Osam -- Barack..."

Rather, it sounds like Romney may have intended to slip Obama's name in there, a premeditated talking point, but muffed it. Thus, "Osam -- Barack" instead of, say, "Osam -- Obama" or "Obam -- Osama." What's worse, even more of a stretch of imagination, is that Romney, ostensibly failing to grasp his first mistake, then repeats "Barack Obama" instead of Osama bin Laden in his following sentence.

Curious, indeed.

All the same, can I conclude Romney's remarks were definitely deliberate? No. But, given the necessary context, it would be illogical, naive or intellectually dishonest not to consider the very real possibility.

Yet that's exactly what the mainstream press does. Romney gets a free pass. The incident, wholly devoid of context (no mention even of that Obama-Osama sign incident back in July), is recounted unquestioningly as an honest mistake.

The Associated Press (in a story printed in the Washington Post) calls it a "mix-up" and "a slip of the tongue." In fact, the AP used the word fed to it by Romney campaign spokesman Kevin Madden, who said, "He misspoke. He was referring to the audiotape of Osama bin Laden and misspoke. It was just a mix-up." The New York Times, via The Caucus blog, referred to it as a "gaffe," hypothesized that "Mitt Romney might have still been a bit bleary-eyed this morning when he twice confused Senator Barack Obama with Osama bin Laden when referring to the latter’s new recorded message," and even offered a cheeky "Oops" to further frame the proceedings.

In other words, the mainstream press reports this as if Romney's tactics, his record, his allies, his attack dogs and the game plan of the Republican Party - in this case, pertaining to Barack Obama - have no possible bearing whatsoever. So little, in fact, this angle of the story is ignored outright.

Meanwhile, the bottom line is, Romney either meant to link Obama with Osama, or he was incredibly - almost unfathomably - sloppy to have so mangled his speech.

That's a far cry from "Oops."