Elizabeth Jensen has a preview (New York Times, 1/8/12) of the new Bill Moyers program coming to public television stations later this month--a show that is not being distributed by PBS. Why not? She reports:

Mr. Moyers said he was unsure why PBS, where he has spent most of his career since 1971, declined the show for its main schedule. Some public television executives, who would not publicly comment on a sensitive issue, said they believed that PBS did not want to realign itself with Mr. Moyers, a longtime target of some conservatives, as it was fighting to keep its federal financing.

Perhaps PBS might consider a new, more accurate slogan: Not Offending Conservatives When We're Fighting for Funding, Which is Always.

In the piece, Moyers seems happy with the situation, saying that  "we don't have to worry about somebody at PBS losing sleep over the fact that David Stockman says the Republicans have lost their minds on taxes."

And Jensen adds:

His return comes as public television executives are debating their path: More Downton Abbey, or local and national news? So far, public affairs programming is losing. PBS canceled Now when Bill Moyers Journal ended; the replacement show Need to Know was recently trimmed from one hour to 30 minutes.

Yet, Mr. Moyers noted, PBS announced an additional version of Antiques Roadshow just a few weeks after the Census Bureau released figures showing the number of people living in poverty had risen to more than 46 million.

"I love Antiques Roadshow," he added. "But it is just symbolic of how we’re not connected viscerally to the state of the American people right now."

Real estate developer and media mogul Mort Zuckerman has picked Colin Myler to be the new top editor for his New York tabloid, the Daily News. That's a surprising choice on at least a couple of accounts.

One is that Myler's last job was at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, which was shut down while he was boss due to the scandal over News reporters hacking into people's voicemail for scoops. True, the phone hacking seems to have happened before Myler got there--but he seems to have been brought in by Murdoch not so much to clean up as to cover up, to judge by his acknowledged deception (Guardian, 12/15/11):

Giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry into press standards, Myler was challenged over a letter he wrote to the PCC in August 2009--a month after the Guardian first wrote that phone hacking was widespread at the News of the World (NoW).

Jay, counsel for the inquiry, told Myler his reply to the PCC was "disingenuous" given that he had seen the so-called "for Neville" email a year earlier, which revealed that hacking at the NoW went wider than a single "rogue reporter" and prompted a £700,000 payment to football boss Gordon Taylor.

Responding to Robert Jay QC, Myler said: "I had no reason not to give them a full and frank answer. For that I apologize."

But Myler's involvement in scandals hasn't all been after the fact. Before being sent to the News, he worked at Murdoch's New York Post when that paper's scabrous ethics came under scrutiny. Here's Rolling Stones' summary (8/3/11):

The newspaper was rocked by a scandal in which a star Page Six reporter allegedly attempted to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle for "protection" from the gossip sheet, telling him, "It's a little like the Mafia."

Burkle secretly recorded Page Six reporter Jared Stern offering to go easy on him in the gossip sheet in exchange for a hefty payoff. "We know how to destroy people," Stern reportedly threatened. "It's what we do." To shield himself from character assassination, Stern allegedly suggested, Burkle could make a one-time payment of $100,000, followed by monthly installments of $10,000.

News Corp. axed Stern, dismissing him as a rogue reporter and calling his behavior "highly aberrational." But according to a 2007 affidavit by a fellow Post veteran, the alleged shakedown was an integral part of the company's culture. "The spineless hypocrites in senior management at the New York Post and News Corp. have always used 'expendable' employees as scapegoats for the misdeeds of its senior executives," Post reporter Ian Spiegelman testified. Spiegelman revealed that Page Six's top editor Richard Johnson and two others had accepted cash from a restaurateur whose business had received a positive mention the day before. Johnson also allegedly accepted a $50,000 all-expenses-paid bachelor party to Mexico from Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, whom the Post subsequently hyped as "the next Hugh Hefner." Spiegelman further charged that Col Allan, the Post's top editor, received free lap dances at the strip club Scores in return for favorable coverage by the paper.

Myler, as the Post's managing editor, was Johnson's superior when all this going on; it was Myler who handled Burkle's complaints when the billionaire wrote to the paper to complain about the shakedown (New York Times, 4/7/06).

Tom McGeveran of Capital (7/8/11) last year wrote up some more Myler-related scandals, including his resignation as editor of the Daily Mail in 2001 after his paper's interview in a soccer-related assault case led to a mistrial,  another mistrial that stemmed from the Post' s singling out a juror in a corporate corruption prosecution, and his defense of News of the World "investigations" that involved prostitutes tape-recording  orgies and the like.

It's been suggested that part of the appeal of hiring Myler for Zuckerman is that neither of them like Rupert Murdoch. That's true of plenty of people; it's not a good enough reason to put someone in charge of your newspaper.

FAIR's latest Action Alert (1/6/12) urges activists to contact the New York Times about its repeated assertions, contrary to the available evidence, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Feel free to leave copies of your messages to the Times in the comments thread here, along with any thoughts on the alert.

The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses--that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime--are basically correct.

As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12):

The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers' editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington's red-versus-blue fetish from news content--as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa's small contest.

Just one example of the absurdity:  At least one of Rick Santorum's final campaign stops was so mobbed by reporters that some of actual residents of Iowa he was supposed to be talking to couldn't squeeze into the meetings, as noted by the Washington Post:

The evidence of Santorum's recent surge was obvious: The overwhelming crush of media members at the Polk City stop included reporters from Italy and Australia. Dozens of voters--who two weeks ago probably could have had the candidate to themselves--were pressed out of the restaurant and stood in the cold.

"I'm actually from Polk City," one said to another as he was unable to squeeze his way inside. "Yeah, we don't count," the other responded.

Of the storylines that have emerged so far, one is that Mitt Romney has yet to dominate the competition. This has been present in the campaign coverage for months, and continued in the papers this morning.  Susan Page in USA Today wrote:

By favoring a conservative, a moderate and a libertarian in nearly equal doses, visitors to the state's 1,774 precincts did little to clear up what has been a topsy-turvy contest to choose President Obama's opponent next fall.

In the New York Times, Jeff Zeleny writes that "Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum." And Zeleny added later,  "The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House."

Also in the Times, courtesy of Jim Rutenberg:

But more than anything else, the Iowa caucuses cast in electoral stone what has played out in the squishy world of polls and punditry for the last 12 months: The deep ideological divisions among Republicans continue to complicate their ability to focus wholly on defeating President Obama, and to impede Mr. Romney's efforts to overcome the internal strains and win the consent if not the heart of the party.

There is no reason in the world that voters in any state in the country should line up behind any single candidate. The fact that the voters in a particular party are split between different candidates who represent different factions of their party is a sign that people have different views about who they think should lead the country. Which is, after all, a good thing.

The alternative would be to deprive voters everywhere else a chance to have a say about who their party's nominee will be. There's a curious sort of tension at work. On the one hand, you get a sense that reporters want the primary season to continue for months, if only for the sake of giving them something to cover. On the other hand, they spend an awful lot of time puzzling over why Mitt Romney can't manage to wrap up the Republican nomination after one state has voted.

Sean Hannity got his start in radio on UC Santa Barbara's KCSB in the late 1980s, where he got in trouble for promoting homophobia and disinformation about HIV and AIDS. I wrote about this in a 2003 Extra! profile of the then-Fox News show Hannity & Colmes:

After airing for less than a year, Hannity's weekly show was canceled in 1989, when KCSB management charged him with "discriminating against gays and lesbians" after airing two shows featuring the book The AIDS Coverup: The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS (Independent, 6/22/89). Written by homophobic Christian-right activist Gene Antonio, the book crankily argued that AIDS could be spread by casual contact, including coughs, sneezes and mosquito bites. Antonio charged that the government, medical establishment and media covered up these truths in the service of "the homosexual movement."

When Antonio appeared by phone on one of the shows, Hannity and his guest repeatedly slurred gay men. At one point, according to the UCSB campus newspaper the Daily Nexus (5/25/89), Hannity declared: "Anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. It's very dangerous if we start accepting lower and lower forms of behavior as the normal." According to the campus paper, Antonio responded by calling gay men "a subculture of people engaged in deviant, twisted acts."

When a fellow KCSB broadcaster called the show to challenge the host and his guest, Hannity pointed out that the caller, a lesbian, had a child through artificial insemination, and Antonio dubbed the child a "turkey-baster baby." When the caller took issue with that "disgusting" remark, Hannity followed up with "I feel sorry for your child" (Independent, 6/22/89; KCSB, 4/4/89).

This information as indicated was gleaned from local Santa Barbara and UCSB print media. At the time, I was unable to get audio of Hannity's KCSB shows, a situation now remedied by KCSB programmers Elizabeth Robinson and Richard Flacks, who have packaged two of the original Hannity shows in a station archival retrospective, "50 Years of People-Powered Radio."

What Hannity said on the air more than 20 years ago would perhaps not be overly relevant today but for the fact that he has always denied being homophobic...and his homophobia continues: For instance, reacting to the 2009 Academy Awards broadcast featuring a montage of romantic film kisses (not exactly a new feature of cinema), Hannity paraphrased his wife in protesting the inclusion of same-sex kisses in the montage (Hannity, 2/23/09): "They keep showing the scenes of men kissing. And I'm thinking, do we have to expose our children to more and more sex, more and more violence, you know, more and more controversy?"

The new issue of  Time magazine promises on its cover "Essential Info for the Year Ahead." One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome.

The report--written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a "hot military trend" this way:

Today's generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. In short, more drones that can tightly target terrorists, deliver larger payloads and are some of the best spies the U.S. has ever produced, even if they occasionally get captured in Iran or crash on landing at secret bases.

And also, you know, kill innocent civilians.

There's no time to dwell on that, because there are too many good things to say about our remote-control war. "Drones had a big year in 2011," Thompson writes, and 2012 will be even bigger. As Time readers learn, "Unlike humans, these weapons don't need sleep."

And best of all, apparently, the military aren't the only ones doing the killing:

America's arsenal has become so small and lethal, you don't need the U.S. Army--or any military service at all, in fact--to field and wield them. The CIA, which used to be limited to derringers and exploding cigars, is now not very secretly flying drones. With little public acknowledgment and minimal congressional oversight, these clandestine warriors have killed some 2,000 people identified as terrorists lurking in shadows around the globe since 9/11.

The British Bureau of Investigative Journalism's investigation of the CIA drone program in Pakistan (8/10/11) stressed less of the gee-whiz and more the real-life consequences of the attacks. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 390 to 780-- including almost 200 children. U.S. officials, for the record, were once making absurd claims that no innocents were killed.

As for the apparent enthusiasm for waging a war where "you don't need the U.S. Army" at all--that is precisely one of the criticisms of the drone program; some legal experts argue that non-military personnel are not legal combatants, and therefore killing every one of those 2,000 "people identified as terrorists" was a war crime. Others point out that employing drones outside an active combat zone could also violate international law. But none of that is "Essential Info" for 2012.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel has a column in the Washington Post today (1/3/12) outlining the three important election issues to watch--and one of them is about how the press covers the process:

Third, the media's obsession with false equivalence: How the election is covered will almost certainly have a measurable impact on its outcome.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman describes what he's witnessing as "post-truth politics," in which right-leaning candidates can feel free to say whatever they want without being held accountable by the press. There may be instances in which a candidate is called out for saying something outright misleading; but, as Krugman notes, "if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be 'balanced.'" For too many journalists, calling out a Republican for lying requires criticizing a Democrat too, making for a media age where false equivalence--what Eric Alterman has called the mainstream media's "deepest ideological commitment"--is confused, again and again, with objectivity.

That reminded me of a piece I read two days before in the Washington Post (1/1/12), where reporter David Nakamura discussed Barack Obama's looming decision on the Keystone tar sands pipeline, one of "several potential political landmines littering his playing field":

Republicans successfully added a provision to the two-month payroll tax cut extension mandating that Obama make a politically sensitive decision on the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline by the end of February. He had hoped to delay a decision on the project--which Republicans have said will create jobs but environmentalists have said would harm natural resources--until after a federal environmental review is completed in 2013.

As is the convention, both sides are represented here. But does this make much sense? The problem with Republicans claims about job creation is that they are, according to many experts, wildly inflated. That would be important to note in a piece discussing the "political landmines" here.

The flipside, we're told, is that "environmentalists" think the project might "harm natural resources." That could mean anything--pollution from a spill, perhaps. Or it might be a reference to the greater threat from climate change. So the "natural resource" would be the planet Earth.  "Balanced" journalism treats inflated jobs claims and the fate of the planet equally.

Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson reports today (1/3/12)that Republican candidate Ron Paul really says some weird things out on the campaign trail. His appearances start out normal...

And then, for the next 45 minutes or so, he outlines a view of the world so bleak it would make Chicken Little sound like an optimist.

Now, to be fair, some of what he says is more than a little troubling. Massive federal budget cuts could cause some people to suffer, he explains, but "they should have to suffer."

The piece closes on this note:

There is one radical change Paul likes: the Internet.

"Fortunately we're able to get some information out, and a lot of what we've done in our campaign makes use of the Internet," Paul said at a rally in Des Moines.

As might be expected, however, Paul anticipates a problem or two on that front as well.

"But also," he went on to say, "there's an attack on the Internet now."

The article ends there, as if this idea is self-evidently absurd.  I mean, really, what on Earth is this guy talking about....

George Will's January 1 column in the Washington Post was a laundry list of familiar criticisms of progressives and Democrats--they worry too much about climate change, for instance.

Another non-problem, in Will's world, is student loan debt:

Political logic suggests that this year Obama will try to rekindle the love of young voters with some forgiveness of student debts. But one-third of students do not borrow to pay college tuition. The average debt for those who do borrow to attend a four-year public institution is $22,000, and the average difference between the per-year earnings of college graduates and those with only a high school diploma is . . . $22,000.

I guess one lesson is that 2/3 of college students should either get themselves full scholarships or wealthier parents. But in the event that this isn't possible, never fear--you'll make enough money in a hurry to pay off your debt.

The more important question might be how this level of debt has changed over time. According to this item from the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog (8/15/11), "There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25 percent from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008."

And as the Project on Student Debt reports, the average debt load doubled from 1996 to 2008:

On December 25, New York Times reporter David Barstow filed this update on the scandal that he broke back in 2008:

A Pentagon public relations program that sought to transform high-profile military analysts into "surrogates" and "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration complied with Defense Department regulations and directives, the Pentagon's inspector general has concluded after a two-year investigation.

Those who don't recall Barstow's original story can catch up by reading this FAIR action alert (4/22/08):

According to the Times, the Pentagon recruited over 75 retired generals to act as "message force multipliers" in support of the Iraq War, receiving special Pentagon briefings and talking points that the analysts would often parrot on national television "even when they suspected the information was false or inflated." The Times even noted that at one 2003 briefing the military pundits were told that "We don't have any hard evidence" about Iraq's illicit weapons--a shocking admission the analysts decided not to share with the public.

The idea that the Pentagon has exonerated itself (again) isn't all that notable.

Among the many serious problems with the Pentagon's PR efforts was the idea that corporate media outlets would be so enthusiastic to put "experts" on the air who were basically acting in concert with the military.  To that end, one anecdote in Barstow's new report is worth singling out:

Wesley K. Clark, a retired four-star Army general who worked as a military analyst for CNN, told investigators he took it as a sign that the Pentagon "was displeased" with his commentary when CNN officials told him he would no longer be invited to special briefings for military analysts. General Clark told investigators that CNN officials made him feel as if he was less valued as a commentator because "he wasn't trusted by the Pentagon." At one point, he said, a CNN official told him that the White House had asked CNN to "release you from your contract as a commentator."

So CNN didn't want an on-air analyst of the Iraq War who was too critical of the Pentagon? That would be astonishing--or, at least, it ought to be. As the FAIR alert noted, one former CNN executive spoke openly about vetting their war pundits with the Pentagon:

The Times likened the program to "other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism," but that would seem to discount the fact that the media have for decades demonstrated a preference for featuring retired military officials in their war coverage, with little if any serious efforts to offer balancing perspectives. The run-up to the Iraq invasion was no different. As former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan explained (4/20/03): "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, 'Here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war,' and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."

If Clark is telling the truth, it would seem that it was also "important" for CNN to drop an analyst if the Pentagon gave him a thumbs-down.