Media Criticism

If you want a clear illustration of why the mainstream media sucks, take a look at Project Censored’s top 25 stories that were undercovered by the MSM over the past year. When you look at these stories and then realize how little - if any - coverage these stories have received in the MSM, you can’t help but fear for the future.

Fortunately, independent journalists like Jason Leopold of Truthout.org are still on the case. Leopold attended Project Censored’s media accountability conference to speak about his story “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team,” which came in at #2 on the top 25. Why this hasn’t received major coverage from the New York Times and Washington Post continues to boggle the mind…

All 25 issues are disturbing to say the least, but #14 is the one that really sticks out to me - #14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US. KBR is of course a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s pals at Halliburton. Last January, KBR was awarded a $385 million contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build these detention centers around America. Even if these detention centers are only for rounding up future suspected immigrant terrorists, the concept is disturbing. But one can’t help but wonder what level of civil unrest the Bush regime foresees to make the construction of these facilities necessary. It conjures images from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The Running Man,” a vision of a totalitarian future America with a crashed economy. And how ironic that Arnold would be overseeing such facilities in California instead of being the super heroic figure trying to bust the system.

The concept of such detention centers isn’t new. I recall reading about how a number of such facilities were already being set up back in the ’90s, in Jim Keith’s “Black Helicopters Over America.” Some may be inclined to discard Keith’s work as “conspiracy theory,” but when you read this story about KBR building these facilities, well it sure is food for thought…

In honor of Saturday’s big game between Ohio State and Michigan, which attracted massive national media attention, here’s a brief look at coverage of the outcome. There’s general agreement that the Buckeyes thrilling 42-39 win was an instant classic but now there is great debate over whether Michigan deserves to stay ranked #2 and get another shot at the Bucks on a so-called neutral field in the national championship game in Arizona on January 8, or whether another team such as USC or Florida deserves a shot at the #1 Buckeyes.

Bomani Jones of Espn.com does an excellent job of summing up the arguments for and against a rematch in his article, “Ohio State vs Mich-Again?”

I won’t pretend to be an objective observer. As someone who bleeds scarlet and gray, I feel that the Buckeyes conquered the Wolverines and shouldn’t have to do it again. I respect the Wolverines too much to want to give them another shot.

Although, if it comes to it, I’d still like our chances with Troy Smith and Jim Tressel. Plus, there’s something else that I have yet to see mentioned in any of the many articles about a possible rematch. Due to the fact that Ohio State has the best fans in the land, there is no such thing as a neutral field for a bowl game involving the Buckeyes.

Ohio State fans travel in such large numbers that there will be a predominance of scarlet and gray in the stands regardless of who the Buckeyes play. When they played the University of Miami, FL for the 2002 championship at the Fiesta Bowl, the crowd was at least 75 percent for the Buckeyes. Ohio State fans were able to do the O-H-I-O cheer around the stadium’s 4 sides just like at home games in Columbus. So the Bucks will still have the edge, although Troy Smith is of course the primary reason for that.

There’s also some great analysis from College Football News’ Matt Zemek. He really sums it up when he writes:

At various points along the way, then, Jim Tressel made the kinds of game-management decisions and play-calling selections that vastly increased his team’s chances of winning.

The other major masterstroke from the best Buckeye brain in the land came with roughly six minutes left in the second quarter. A few minutes after Lloyd Carr and Michigan punted on a 4th and 1 from their own 49 in a game OSU led by seven (14-7), Tressel faced a 2nd and 1 from the Wolverine 38. If this was not a fast-break game and more of a Woody-Bo brawl, a power run for a chain-moving two-yard gain would have been in order. But since this was a track meet, Tressel used the down-and-distance situation to press his advantage and convert a kill shot. He had Smith throw a bomb to Ted Ginn for a quick-strike touchdown and a 21-7 advantage. This was the kind of executive decision making that enabled Ohio State to outpace Michigan all day long. While the final spread was just three points, the Buckeyes were never seriously in danger of losing. Michigan fought hard, but only to keep the game within a one-score margin. The difference on the field was Troy Smith, but the No. 1 team in the United States also had a difference-making coach. Without Jim Tressel’s impressive combination of insight, feel and boldness, the Buckeyes would not have been able to light up Ron English’s defense they way they did.

Ohioans were privy to one of the most clear cut and dramatic showdowns in the recent election, where Democrat Sherrod Brown was vying to swipe Republican Mike DeWine’s U.S. Senate seat. Brown scored a decisive victory, 56 to 44 percent. With Ohio being a perennial bellwhether state, Robert Borosage writes at the Huffington Post that this was the signature race of the 2006 election. Too bad the mainstream media hasn’t owned up to that.

The Signature 2006 Race: Sherrod Brown over Mike DeWine in Ohio Senate Race

Brown’s victory shows Democrats that a hard-hitting economic populist campaign can carry an unapologetic anti-war social liberal to victory over a tough conservative assault on terror and taxes, liberalism and national security. Brown’s victory came in a state suffering from the loss of manufacturing jobs where the economy was the most important issue, although the campaigns probably contributed to that. But the 2006 election took place when the Bush economy was about at its best - having mortgaged the store at home and abroad. With the bust of the housing bubble starting to set in, 2008 is quite likely to take place in an economy suffering from stagnation, if not worse. Progressives should take a good look at Brown’s race. As conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times summarized: “Ohio is crucial to winning the presidency. If Brown wins this year, he’ll be the model for Democrats nationally.

And if you missed The Simpsons this past Sunday, you missed some great satiric commentary on the U.S. Army’s lack of ethics in recruiting. Alternet has a clip though - it’s about 3 minutes and well worth watching, even if you’re not a regular Simpsons fan.

There’s an oft stated notion that the media has a liberal bias. That notion has been seriously challenged since 2001, but it keeps popping up. Mediamatters.org has a couple interesting related stories:

Wash. Post ombudsman Howell misrepresented former Post reporter Edsall’s conclusions on media bias

Summary: In her column, Deborah Howell misrepresented Thomas Edsall’s views on the purported liberalism of most journalists. Although Edsall asserted, as Howell reported, that “most journalists he knew were liberal” during a radio appearance, he explained in a subsequent online chat that, while many of its members are indeed liberal, the press at large is “inclined to lean over backwards not to offend critics from the right” and that the right wing’s “campaign against the media … has turned the press into an unwilling, and often unknowing, ally of the right.”

I’d be inclined to agree with the latter… They’ve got another interesting story about the difference between Time magazine’s post-midterm cover in ‘94 vs ‘06:

A tale of two covers: Time’s ‘94 postelection cover touted “G.O.P. Stampede,” ‘06 cover asserts “the center is the new place to be”

Greg Sargent of the American Prospect calls Time out:

But guess what? The story inside doesn’t say anything like that. Though the story’s byline — Joe Klein — would lead one to expect that conclusion, the story simply doesn’t interpret the elections as a win for the center in any way.

Rather, Klein posits that the outcome was a victory for “realists” in the Democratic Party, and actually notes that the “realism” of Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel led them to in some cases pick progressive candidates like Sherrod Brown, one of the many candidates that proponents of the “center-is-ascendent” story line conveniently omit from their analyses…

Liberal bias? Just the opposite…

So Donald Rumsfeld has finally stepped down as Secretary of Defense and Bush has nominated former CIA chief Robert Gates to succeed him. The Washington Post gushes in praise:

Robert Gates Lauded As Breaker of Barriers
Military Leaders Describe Bipartisan Appeal
By Ann Scott Tyson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 9, 2006; Page A24

There’s only two paragraphs in the two page article that offer any opposing view. Halfway down page two:

But Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House intelligence panel, called the Gates nomination “deeply troubling.”

Holt, a retired intelligence officer and a nuclear physicist, said that while at the CIA’s helm, “Gates developed a reputation for pressuring analysts and managers to shape analytical conclusions to fit administration positions.” Holt said Gates’s confirmation hearing “should be thorough and probing.”

The independent media offers much more in-depth coverage on this. At Truthout.org, we have:

Gates Has History of Manipulating Intelligence
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Wednesday 08 November 2006

Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas’s good ol’ boy network. He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein with American-made weapons in the country’s war against Iran in the 1980s.

This is the guy that is going implement change in Iraq policy? Doesn’t seem likely. Yet the Washington Post article is 90 percent praise. Alternet.org goes further in the analysis:

Bush Replaces Rumsfeld with… Another Rumsfeld
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted November 8, 2006.

Because who but another “Rummy” would stay the course in Iraq with the Bush administration?

The New York Times also serves Kool Aid indicating Gates as much different from Rumsfeld: “Soft-spoken but tough-minded, Mr. Gates, 63, is in many ways the antithesis of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the brash leader he would replace.” See:
Robert Gates, a Cautious Player From a Past Bush Team
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: November 9, 2006

The NY Times and WaPost are supposedly the best papers in America, models of “objective” reporting. Who’s kidding who here?

I quoted a UK Guardian article yesterday that said:

If the Democrats fail to take either chamber of Congress in the current disgruntled climate, the president will avoid a constitutional battle, but it would undoubtedly spark questioning of America’s credentials as an effective representative democracy.

“There is no precedent in American history in these conditions for the party of government not to get a shellacking [a pounding],�? argued Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. “It would raise questions over the capacity for democratic accountability of the American system.�?

I think this may explain how the Democrats were able to overcome suspicions about vulnerabilities in electronic voting. So many polls in so many states had Democrats ahead, it appears it was too much of a tide for vote hacking/stealing to overcome. Such tactics may have raised more troubling questions than they ultimately would be worth… but this does not mean that our electoral system isn’t still compromised.

The Dems took the House by a wide margin and now just need to overcome a recount in Virginia to take control of the Senate too, and that could still get messy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation advises that concerned citizens should lobby Congress to reform e-voting:

On Election Day 2006, many Virginians were among the millions of voters nationwide who cast their votes on electronic machines that lack paper trails. Voters thus could not verify that their votes were accurately recorded, and election officials will not be able to conduct a full and thorough recount.

That’s bad enough, and with the close margin in Virginia’s Senate race and the U.S. Senate at stake, it is especially tragic for the entire country, regardless of whom is ultimately declared the winner.

HR 550 would include the requirement of a paper audit trail for all electronic voting machines, random audits, and public availability of all code used in elections. These are critical changes necessary to ensure democratic processes for 2008 and beyond. It will be interesting to keep an eye on how much coverage the networks will devote to e-voting problems during the coverage of the Virginia recount. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if we hear anything about HR 550.

Wolf Blitzer and CNN did a good job of keeping tabs on everything, but I frequently flipped over to MSNBC where the team of Keith Olbermann and Chris Mathews were just as informative and more entertaining. I’m frankly surprised that Oblermann is still employed by MSNBC. NBC refused to air ads for the Dixie Chicks documentary, alleging that the ads were disparaging toward President Bush - yet Olbermann has been an outspoken critic of Bush for some time.

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard offers some good analysis of the election at CBS in an article entitled “Here Lies the GOP.”

Meanwhile, MediaMatters.org rightfully questions how the Washington Post can declare in their lead election article that we have “a nation that leans slightly right of center.” This is typical spin by the WaPost.

Arianna Huffington also rebuts the notion that the election was a mandate for the Democratic Party to run to the middle.

At any rate, the Democratic gains should make for an interesting 2007…

The UK’s Guardian has a good one - Day of reckoning that could shape US politics for years

There’s an interesting graph at the end:

“There is no precedent in American history in these conditions for the party of government not to get a shellacking [a pounding],” argued Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution. “It would raise questions over the capacity for democratic accountability of the American system.”

No precedent. That will make for some interesting spin if the Dems don’t take the House. I just voted on a Diebold machine here in Kent, Ohio and have little faith that my votes were necessarily accurately recorded. This story from ABC News gets into why:

Who’s Counting: Hacking Diebold Voting Machines - November 7, 2006

In a paper last month, “Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,” (available at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/) Princeton computer professor Edward W. Felten and two graduate students Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman discussed a common Diebold machine. They showed that anyone who gets access to the machine and its memory card for literally a minute or two could easily install the group’s invisible vote-stealing software on the machine. (Poll workers and others have unsupervised access for much longer periods.) Changing all logs, counters, and associated records to reflect the bogus vote count that it generates, the software installed by the infected memory card (similar to a floppy disk) would be undetectable. In fact, the software would delete itself at the end of Election Day.

I give ABC credit for running this story today, but they should have been sounding alarms before now. If the mainstream media were truly responsible about their watchdog duty, they would be running bold headlines about how private corporations with ties to the Republican Party own and operate 80 percent of the voting machines that will be used across America today.

Another bad sign for the Dems is that I was able to walk right in to my polling place today (just off campus from Kent State University) and vote with no waiting. Two years ago, I had to wait in line for two hours… not the turnout Dems need here in Ohio where a close election probably won’t cut it for U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown. He needs to win by at least 5 points to prevent a potential theft…

For my money, the best investigative reporter on the planet is Greg Palast… and he has bad news for those who are hoping the Democrats will take control of Congress tomorrow:

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We’ve found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here’s how they’ll do it, in three easy steps:

HOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION
by Greg Palast
for The Guardian (UK)
Monday November 6, 2006

The independent media is once again scooping the mainstream dailies on what the nation is likely to encounter tomorrow. Here in the bellwether swing state of Ohio, papers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Columbus Dispatch - both of whom are owned by publishers who favored Bush in 2004 - only hint at the electoral problems that are likely to pop up tomorrow.

But Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now has an interesting interview from last week about the potential boondoggle. She interviews a number of electoral activists, including Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis of the Columbus Free Press about the matter - Vote Suppression in 2006: Rule Changes Threaten to Disenfranchise Hundreds of Thousands of Eligible Voters

These vote suppression tactics are the dirty little secret that the mainstream media would seemingly prefer not to dig too deep into. Witness this comment by Wasserman:

The voting machines on which 80%, as you’ve said, of the ballots in this country are cast or counted are all controlled by Republicans. Diebold is a Republican corporation. ES&S, of course, has Chuck Hagel as a principal, a senator from Nebraska, where he’s been elected twice on machines that he owns.

This confusion, entered in with the voting machines and of the electronic poll books, is very, very deliberate, and the Republicans are already talking about polls that the public doesn’t know about. Those polls are linked to their ability to manipulate and to steal elections. The 2004 election was stolen here in Ohio, and we’re afraid it’s about to happen again in 2006, and we’re not sure that the public is really prepared to deal with tracking this down.

The public is most certainly not prepared to deal with tracking this down. I would expect major controversy tomorrow either way. But since the Republicans do control 80% of the voting machines, I am very skeptical of the Dems’ chances. Alternet has a good article by a sociology professor from Sony Brook State University on what to watch for tomorrow - The Couch Potato’s Guide to Election Night

There’s just six days until the much ballyhooed midterm elections, and instead of focusing on issues, the media is once again focused on partisan bickering thanks to John Kerry’s comments yesterday.

CBS news’ Brian Montopoli gets a commendation today for questioning the quantity of coverage that the Kerry flap is getting.

Mark Sandalow of the San Francisco Chronicle also gets kudos for questioning the media firestorm.

He writes:
Why is a seemingly meaningless war of words between an unpopular president and an unpopular former Democratic presidential candidate dominating political news six days before what is shaping up as a historic congressional election?

The media will not miss a brawl. And why not? Americans may not be engaged in politics, but you don’t see Jerry Springer canceling his show. We cover it because we assume you’ll consume it.

I can’t help but wonder if John Kerry knew exactly what he was doing yesterday. As has been well documented, Kerry is a “Skull and Bones” brother of President Bush. It has been reported in the past that the oath of this ultra-elite and ultra-secretive Yale club goes above and beyond any other.

Recent polls have indicated that the Dems are ahead in enough races to take back the House and maybe even the Senate. And then with just a week to go, Kerry comes blundering in with fodder for the Republican attack machine. Now instead of being forced to defend their positions, the Republicans get to go back on the attack and try to paint Kerry as the face of the Democratic Party. As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass writes, “Kerry hands GOP a Halloween treat.”

The timing is incredibly suspicious. I questioned Kerry’s allegiance after he threw in the towel so quickly on challenging the 2004 vote count in Ohio. This seems like more evidence that Skull and Bones brotherhood is thicker than water… but of course the mainstream media hasn’t and probably won’t go there because that would delve into the nebulous world of conspiracy theory, something the MSM will rarely approach.

Just something to think about…