MediaBloodhound

Op-Ed Column: Tributes Censor Cronkite's Anti-Iraq War Stance

Cronkite Called War "Illegal from the Start," Slammed Network Silence and Would've Spoken Out Again from Anchor Desk

Walter Cronkite believed his "proudest" moment as a journalist occurred when he told the nation that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, despite rosy rhetoric from the Johnson White House and Defense Department. Following his death last week, various network news tributes replayed footage of Cronkite's influential '68 on-air editorial. Yet scrubbed from the memorializing were similar instances of Cronkite's journalistic candor regarding Iraq, such as his 2006 call for withdrawal from a war he went on to describe as "illegal from the start," initiated on "false pretenses" and a "terrible disaster" serving "no purpose" that has "probably made us less safe."

But the most revealing omission from these tributes -- especially in context to the pageant of eulogies extolling Cronkite's journalistic integrity -- may be his response to a reporter's question during a 2006 news conference.

As reported in The Independent UK at the time:

When a reporter asked [Cronkite] whether, given the chance, he would offer similar advice on Iraq [as he had on Vietnam], he did not even wait until the end of the question. "Yes," he said flatly. "It's my belief that we should get out now."

For Cronkite, the question was simple, his answer emphatic. No need to chew it over, to seek a mealy-mouthed moderate reaction to address the Bush administration's unprecedented extremism, brutality and lawlessness. Doing so would mean that he was operating within their narrative, not his.

It was at this same conference that Cronkite said, "The editorializing that I did on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and I think helped speed the end of that war, that was—that I'm proudest of."

Six weeks later, when asked if his words about the Iraq War would have the same effect as his statement to the nation on Vietnam, he demurred, "Well, I think it's a little late for that now." But then he added, "I would like to think it would be helpful in getting us out of there. Anybody who can put another match to that fire, to get us out would be, I think, welcome."

But he certainly wasn't holding his breath for any of his network news heirs to strike another match.

As The Nation journalist John Nichols reported last Friday:

As the war in Iraq went horribly awry, I asked Cronkite whether a network anchorman would dare speak out in the same way that he had?

"I think it could happen, yes. I don't think it's likely to happen," he said with an audible sigh. "I think the three networks are still hewing pretty much to that theory. They don't even do analysis anymore, which I think is a shame. They don't even do background. They just seem to do headlines, and the less important it seems the more likely they are to get on the air."

Nichols also asked Cronkite if he thought he would have spoken out against the Iraq War if he were still an anchorman. Cronkite's reply is not only, once again, unequivocal but a desperately needed correction to the warped view of journalistic principles that permeate today's network newsrooms, a sane and responsible recalibration of the meaning of "fair and balanced."

"Yes, yes I do. I think that right now it would be critical to do so," he told me a few months after the invasion in 2003. "I think that right now we are in one of the most dangerous periods in our existence. Not since the Civil War has the state of our democracy been so doubtful. Our foreign policy has taken a very strange turn. And I do think I would try to say something about that."

Nichols reported as well that Cronkite was concerned "that broadcast news -- his medium -- had grown too deferrent [sic] to power, too stenographic, too consolidated."

In his post "Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did," Salon's Glenn Greenwald rightly criticizes the procession of network news stars who praised Cronkite's career but have failed to adhere to Cronkite's journalistic standards and to reflect on the consequential glaring shortcomings of their own performance or that of their colleagues.

Underscoring the widespread abdication of traditional, democratic journalistic principles from network news coverage, Greenwald juxtaposes Cronkite's on-air Vietnam moment with a quote by Meet the Press moderator and former Bush 43 White House correspondent David Gregory's 2008 statement deflecting criticism:

"The Vietcong did not win by a knockout [in the Tet Offensive], but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. . . . We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . .

"For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . . To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past" -- Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, February 27, 1968.

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that [in the run-up to the Iraq War] . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role" -- David Gregory, MSNBC, May 28, 2008.

If reporting facts, providing substantive context and telling us when our elected officials are lying is not Gregory and his colleagues' role, then I respectfully suggest another title: public relations officer (PRO). The acronym seems fitting as well.

Incidentally, Cronkite also cautioned America about invading Iraq from the beginning. Another Iraq War-related casualty in the recreation of Uncle Walter's journey.

Just as the war was under way, Cronkite spoke at a Drew University forum, where, as reported in the Daily Record, he said "he feared the war would not go smoothly, ripped the 'arrogance' of Bush and his administration and wondered whether the new U.S. doctrine of 'pre-emptive war' might lead to unintended, dire consequences."

And that's the way it was.

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Editor's Note: Some additional must-read news and views on Cronkite:

Chad at BuzzFlash informs me that Cronkite's "speaking out for democracy when he could have played it safe" after retirement is what earned him a BuzzFlash Wings of Justice Award.

Reese Erlich reveals Cronkite's "prescient" views on the then pending Iraq War in "Opinions Walter Cronkite Never Aired" at Truthdig (h/t Jon at Common Dreams), in which Erlich cites excerpts from an unpublished interview he did with Cronkite in 2002.

Norman Solomon punctures the myth that Cronkite was always "a courageous truth-teller" in his article "Beyond the Hype: Cronkite and the Vietnam War."

Op-Ed Column: CNN's Iran Timeline Omits US-Backed '53 Coup

It might be more difficult for Republicans to bash President Obama for being "timid" in his comments about the Iranian government's violence against protesters if the U.S. media didn't consistently censor US-Iranian history.

Take CNN's recent Iran timeline, titled "A brief look at Iran's history."

According to the timeline, which begins in 1979, Iran has "been at odds with the West and some of its neighbors" since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It refers to the Shah as having been "pro-Western." Yet in the mother of all omissions, CNN leaves out how the US government was directly involved in bringing the Shah to power in a 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

As a June 4 Agence France-Presse article details:

The CIA, with British backing, masterminded the coup after Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry, run until then in by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhand methods to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests. 

You might remember Obama owning up to this bit of history during his recent trip to the Middle East, in a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government." Reality and honesty as olive branch. Something that would be anathema to the Bush administration and most Republicans holding office today.

The Agence France-Presse article also notes that it was "the first time a serving US president has publicly admitted American involvement in the coup."

So when Obama points out that he's been cautious to avoid saying something the Iranian government could use to try and convince the Iranian people that America is somehow driving these protests, our president knows from which he speaks. And when Obama says that he also doesn't want to steal the spotlight, so to speak, from the voice of the Iranian people leading these protests, our president, once again, knows from which he speaks.

Moreover, as opposed to George W. Bush -- who boasted that "democracy is on the march" but, in reality, whose words and foreign policy helped to solidify the power of extremists and tyrants the world over, proliferate terrorism, and lead to death and destruction on a genocidal scale -- Obama's caution in speaking about the events in Iran is not timid but prudent in light of America's past meddling.

CNN's woefully inadequate timeline obfuscates the truth of America's involvement in Iranian history, involvement that directly impacts the Iranian peoples' past and present. It's this kind of selective reporting on Iran that paves the way for the historically tone-deaf criticisms of Obama we've been hearing from Republicans.

The timeline also reinforces the critically misleading notion that far too many Americans believe: US-Iranian hostilities began in 1979.

Op-Ed Column: AP Trivializes Iraqi Death Toll, Amplifies Censorship

(updated below)

From the aftermath of the 2003 "shock and awe" bombing campaign all the way through Thanksgiving Day 2008, major US news outlets have nearly uniformly blacked out or downplayed reports of the Iraqi death toll. But a recent Associated Press article reveals the depths to which these outlets are still willing to delve to censor this information.

In the November 27 article "Iraqi Parliament OKs US Troops for 3 More Years," by Christopher Torchia and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP editors approved the following characterization of Iraqi deaths suffered since the US invasion:

The war has claimed more than 4,200 American lives and killed a far greater, untold number of Iraqis, consumed huge reserves of money and resources and eroded the global stature of the United States, even among its closest allies.

How's that for a statistically rigorous accounting?

With the exactitude of a third-grader's book report cribbed from a novel's dust jacket copy, the AP -- America's #1 wire news service -- blankets US news outlets with a quantification of Iraqi casualties that would've made Stalin proud.

Seriously, it's 2008. Everybody knows the emperor has no clothes and no clue. Barack Obama is the President-elect. Reality, thankfully (however tentatively), is in vogue. Yet America's "most respected news sources" are still treating the Iraqi death toll as if we're living in a pre-neoconned world.

As MediaBloodhound reported last April, when Opinion Research Business (ORB), a well-regarded non-partisan British polling agency that has conducted studies for the BBC and the British Conservative Party, released its January 2008 follow-up report estimating over 1 million Iraqi deaths since the US invasion -- which both reconfirmed its September 2007 estimate as well as supported prior findings of the 2006 John Hopkins study published in the British medical journal Lancet (650,000 deaths) -- a LexisNexis search showed no US mainstream news outlet carried the story.

MediaBloodhound also pointed out at the time that, writing in FAIR's newsletter Extra!, Patrick McElwee cited an "Associated Press poll in February (2/24/07) that asked Americans how many Iraqis have died received a median response of less than 10,000."

The November 27 AP article in question, which glibly and mindlessly quantifies Iraqi deaths since the invasion as merely a "far greater, untold number" in comparison to Americans killed in the war, reflects how AP's February 2007 poll respondents could be so clueless.

Even Iraq Body Count's estimates, proven to undercount for a few reasons (for one, they only attempt to account for "noncombatants"), were tens of thousands of casualties higher than the median estimate provided by respondents in the 2007 AP poll. Today, the Iraq Body Count estimates around 100,000 Iraqi deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) published its estimate of Iraqi dead last January, though its count only covered the time from the beginning of the war through June 2006. Its findings then, which wouldn't account for nearly two and a half years of the war since? The WHO estimated between 104,000 and 223,000 deaths, with a median of 151,000.

Whenever citing the Iraqi death toll since the 2003 invasion, the AP, and any news outlet wishing to be seen as credible, should at the very least either a provide a range of estimates from viable sources (e.g., 200,000 to over 1 million) or a median estimate (e.g. roughly 600,000).

As McElwee stated nearly a year ago, "If Americans are to make informed judgments not only about the invasion of Iraq and whether the occupation should continue, but also about future wars our government may wish to start, then we need to have good information about the war's impact on Iraqis."

Major US news outlets, with their number #1 wire service now leading the way in censoring the Iraqi death toll, continue to report on this subject, the rare times it surfaces in articles, as though it's still 2003. It was wrong then. Today, it should at least be grounds for editors to be reprimanded or lose their jobs and for immediate corrections to be printed.

It's 2008. Enough is enough. Give us the damn facts and get out of the way.

UPDATE: Today's New York Times article "More Iraqi Dead Last Month, But Fewer Than Last Year," by Alissa J. Rubin, keeps up this grand tradition of censoring the Iraqi death toll in a report about the Iraqi death toll. Here's the lede:

The numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths and improvised explosive devices increased in November, although there were still fewer of each than in September, according to statistics from the Interior Ministry.

The number of civilian deaths last month was 148, compared with 118 in October and 156 in September.

The number of I.E.D.’s was 108, compared with 79 in October and 113 in September. Most measures of violence remain much lower than last fall.

As far as numbers go, that's all our paper of record provides. No range of estimates on the number of Iraqi dead. No median calculation derived from that range. Not even a reference to the overall Iraqi lives lost since the US invasion. AP's "far greater, untold number" may be woefully deficient yet Times editors managed to ignore the topic altogether, as though counting Iraqi deaths is only possible in monthly increments, microcosmic snapshots that conveniently keep the genocidal numbers out of sight and out of mind.

Op-Ed Column: It's 9/11! Bring On the Death Porn!

Another year, another opportunity for the GOP to use 9/11 to pump fear into our populace while "honoring our dead."

As a New Yorker, while that day and weeks and months that followed will always be with me, I'd long grown numb from the Bush administration's and Republicans Party's branding of 9/11 for their own despotic aims: an America in which democracy has been gagged, waterboarded and renditioned to a dank faraway cell for its own protection, while our "heroic" protectors of freedom fight against a noun -- terror -- and something that's been around since the dawn of time -- terrorists.

For a brief moment, however, during the Republican National Convention's "9/11 tribute" film, I was viscerally reminded of the lengths to which our current leadership will go to terrorize their own citizens into handing over their liberties for another four years. I watched the towers fall again, that deceptively blue sky, the dust and smoke and people running for their lives. An impeccably edited piece of GOP death porn.

If Barack Obama's campaign can be summed up in two words -- hope and "Enough!" -- then two words can also encapsulate John McCain's -- fear and "Boo!"

Under this cynical and fascist canard, the Bush administration and their traitorous partners in Congress, including both former and some current Democratic members, have driven our ideals, our hopes, our economy, our environment, our soldiers and many fellow citizens of the world into the ground. Literally.

Hopefully the act of this seven-year-old hijacking of our country begins and ends with today's anniversary. Or, at the very least, with the final day of George W. Bush's immeasurably lethal and nightmarish presidency.

I won't watch the ceremonies today. I cannot sit and listen to Bush and John McCain pretend to care about my fellow New Yorkers who lost their lives on 9/11 or my fellow Americans who lost their liberty right after that. Instead, I'll honor their memories by spending the day working on an investigative piece that seeks something that also died on that ironically clear day in September: truth.

To all the families and friends who lost loved ones seven years ago today, you're in my thoughts and prayers for a brighter future.

Op-Ed Column: Something Else to Learn from Tim Russert's Death

Whatever issues people had with Tim Russert's political coverage during the George W. Bush years (and I and many others outside the Beltway intelligentsia had many), I don't wish to raise them now. First, I'd like to extend my condolences to Tim Russert's family and friends. After watching the extensive and ongoing memorializing at MSNBC and NBC, it is clear that, despite what anybody thought of Russert as a journalist, he obviously had an incredibly positive impact on those closest to him - as a loving husband, father and son, as well as a supportive, good-natured and inspiring friend and colleague.

After days of eulogies on MSNBC and NBC and the subsequent response by some who feel the near 24/7 memorializing for Russert was overblown, I'm neither going to defend nor criticize the coverage. I'll only say that I'm not sure how one dictates how others should mourn a loved one. On the other hand, it also seems natural that an overwhelming public display of mourning, such as what Russert received, might be viewed as excessive by those who were not close to him and/or who thought his overall contribution to society and the world at large was less than spectacular.

I'd prefer to offer a different perspective entirely, one that impacts all of us no matter how we received news of his death and what we thought of its coverage.

As I watched the outpouring of love and admiration for Tim Russert and the genuine sorrow over his sudden and shocking passing, I was reminded of lines from a column titled "In Honor of My Mother and the Power of Love," which Norman Solomon wrote in January after he lost his mother, Miriam A. Solomon:

My mother did not die young (she was 86), but since then I’ve felt awful waves of sadness. And sometimes I think of people who are mourning loved ones of all ages, due to distinctly unnatural causes. The people dying in Iraq as a consequence of the U.S. war effort. The children in so many countries who lose their lives to the ravages of poverty. The health-care system in the United States that — in the absence of full medical coverage for everyone as a human right — means avoidable death and suffering on a large scale.

In mediaspeak and political discourse, the human toll of corporate domination and the warfare state is routinely abstract. But the results — in true human terms — add rage and more grief on top of grief.

It is a reality reflexively neglected in our mainstream media, and this neglect certainly desensitizes our citizens to the daily suffering of others, whether they live across town or in a different state, but especially if they live in another country, particularly one under military attack by the United States or its allies, or one suffering disproportionately due to unjust global economic policies or brutal human rights atrocities.

The corporate media, of course, is the prime enabler of this willful disregard, often overtly and subliminally inspiring its citizenry to not only believe ignorance is bliss but that "our way of life" - which, ironically, excludes millions of our own citizens - justifies the arbitrary humiliation, poverty, suffering and death of those who happen to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, whether drowning in New Orleans, freezing to death on a street corner, or, as soldier or civilian, being emancipated from life by freedom's march in Iraq.

Still, if Solomon had said only that, if he had merely taken his personal mourning and applied it on a macro level to underscore the suffering and loss of those at home and abroad at the hands of "corporate domination and the warfare state," his words might have remained too abstract for many Americans who have long been conditioned to accept "collateral damage" with little or no knowledge - or who have no desire to gain such terribly depressing knowledge - of actual human devastation.

Instead, Solomon brought it back home in an effort, to paraphrase Franz Kafka, to use his essay as "the ax for the frozen sea within us." Solomon continued:

Our own mourning should help us understand and strive to prevent the unspeakable pain of others. And whatever love we have for one person, we should try to apply to the world.

Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert F. Kennedy circa 1968 could've written those words. Undoubtedly, such human beings, including Norman's mother, inspired them - everyone who has come before us who pushed the human race to not only understand that strength can be shown through peace, compassion and justice but that often blind aggression actually reveals weakness, ignorance and cowardice.

In the closing lines of his column, Solomon wrote:

After my mother died, I learned about a poem that she wrote long ago — apparently soon after her father passed away [who, like Tim Russert, also died too young and was beloved by his family and friends]. The poem is titled “Bereavement.” Here is how it ends:

More than cherished memories are left
Behind; they leave us — us
To know our duties and our powers
And to carry on without much fuss.

In the crushing grief of the moment, we think of how
vital and good our
loved ones were,
and vow to be worthy of them.

I say let those who loved Tim Russert mourn him anyway they see fit. But an additional tribute to his loss would be to remain ever aware of how one person's life can positively impact so many others and to actively see the media cover America and the world with this reality in mind, where every human life is afforded dignity and where no one's suffering or death is coolly rationalized.

Where we all acknowledge and remain conscious of the fact that each of our loved ones leave us - us.

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.”