In a Smirking Chimp piece (5/29/09) averring that "Everyone Should See Torturing Democracy"--the delayed documentary that "recounts how the Bush White House and the Pentagon decided to make coercive detention and abusive interrogation the official U.S. policy" and "also credits the brave few who stood up to those in power"--PBS' Bill Moyers spells out the larger consequences of the fact that "in all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all":

Smothering the reality of torture in euphemism of course has a political value, enabling its defenders to diminish the horror and possible illegality. It also gives partisans the opening they need to divert our attention by turning the future of the prison at Guantánamo Bay into a "wedge issue," as noted on the front page of Sunday's New York Times.

According to the Times, "Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles."

Moyers gives us the upshot: "No political party would dare make torture a cornerstone of its rejuvenation if people really understood what it is. And lest we forget, we're not just talking about waterboarding, itself a trivializing euphemism for drowning." See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Water Torture to ‘Waterboarding’: Media Rehabilitate Torture as Aquatic Sport" (5–6/08) by Isabel Macdonald; "Torturing Language: Definitions, Defenses and Dirty Work" (7-8/05) by Jacqueline Bacon.

Claiming that he doesn't "know at this point whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a good choice for Supreme Court justice or a bad one," critic Dave Lindorff (ThisCantBeHappening.net, 5/28/09) does note that she "is a lousy judge for writers and other creative people" for ruling "that the [New York] Times and periodical publishers could reprint, without any additional compensation, any freelance works they contracted." Then Lindorff proceeds to get to the real problem at the core of so much of the media criticism directed toward Sotomayor:

But the elite--the white male editors and TV commentators, the white male politicians, and the white male public--don't see their own decisions as rooted in their white male expereience. They see their experience as being "normal" and "unbiased." It is, to them, only others who are not "normal" like them who are biased, or or who are carrying some kind of chip on their shoulders.

See some particularly egregious examples recently critiqued on FAIR Blog by activism director Peter Hart and editor Jim Naureckas.

Looking at "people of a certain age" for whom "getting a letter published in the Times has always been a very, very big deal," David Margolick (Nation , 5/27/09) tells the tale of two lifelong friends and constant New York Times letter submitters--one with a "Babe Ruth"-like record of getting his views into print, and the other, who was always "striking out." Want to know "what explained their very different fates?" Margolick tells us, "it wasn't politics":

[George] Avakian couldn't contain his anger, and as anyone who reads the Times well knows, on the letters page no one ever gets too worked up about anything. Friends to whom he would sometimes send drafts forever urged him to tone things down. But try as he might--which, truth be told, wasn't very hard--catharsis always won out over pragmatism. It started at the very outset of the Bush II era. "How many words have been written about the mess in Florida? 4 million, 400 million? 4 billion?" he wrote during the fiasco following the presidential election of 2000. "There are only four words which properly sum up the whole situation. They are: The fix is in.'" Of course, it got spiked.

And "in another letter, from July 2007, he called Bush 'the most flagrant liar in the history of the American Presidency.' Ditto." But that one stood little chance from the start, considering the Times attitude toward such candid language about George W. Bush specifically. See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "'You Can't Just Say the President Is Lying': The Limits of Honesty in the Mainstream Press" (1–2/05)

Posting to the Columbia Journalism Review's Behind the News blog, Megan Garber (5/26/09) catches New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt espousing "a peculiar brand of institutional defensiveness" in his May 23 column:

One that plays itself out via divisiveness--and via, in particular, a false dichotomy that aggrandizes Times reporters and dismisses those who are not. In particular, those nagging, nattering bloggers. (Outsiders! Pouncers! Rougher-uppers!) And he does so right in his lede: There are those "within" the Times, "trying to protect the paper's integrity"…and then there are those "outside" it, "ready to pounce on transgressions by Times journalists."

Garber contention that "such thinking represents all too well the protective, entitled, wagon-circling attitude that so many people resent about the Times--and about mainstream journalism more generally"--even comes after choosing to "leave aside the fact that Hoyt's column vastly underplays the transgressions in question within it":

MoDowd’s, in particular. (After a quick, he-said/she-said summary of the scandal, Hoyt declares: "I do not think Dowd plagiarized, but I also do not think what she did was right.... If the words are not hers, she must give credit." And then he moves on.)

For the record, even Dowd herself admits having lifted lines wholesale from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall.

This Associated Press story ("Debate Over Who Sotomayor Is a Sensitive One," 5/29/09) sure is confused. Luckily reporter Sharon Thiemer makes at least that much clear from the very start:

There are two sides to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: a Latina from a blue-collar family and a wealthy member of America's power elite.

The White House portrays Sotomayor as a living image of the American dream, though its telling of the rags-to-riches story emphasizes the rags, a more politically appealing narrative, and plays down the riches.

Yes, somehow the White House picked her despite the fact that she is no longer poor--and still pretended that she was the "living image of the American dream," which as we all know is to remain poor one's entire life.

That's not the end of it.  The AP also writes:

On ethnicity, Sotomayor herself has recognized--and contributed to--the dichotomy. She proudly highlights her Puerto Rican roots but hasn't always liked it when others have.

The evidence:

Yet years ago, during a recruiting dinner in law school at Yale, Sotomayor objected when a law firm partner asked whether she would have been admitted to the school if she weren't Puerto Rican, and whether law firms did a disservice by hiring minority students the firms know are unqualified and will ultimately be fired.

So she's proud of being Puerto Rican and she takes offense at the notion that she couldn't have gotten into Yale if she weren't? What a "dichotomy." The AP goes on to note that Sotomayor "won a formal apology from the firm."

We do learn, as well, that her brother is a doctor "whose practice doesn't accept Medicaid or Medicare-- programs for the poor and elderly--according to its website." Great--now her sibling isn't poor anymore, either?

According to today's New York Times (5/29/09), there's a scandal brewing in the Japanese media. Apparently in its coverage of a current political scandal, the Japanese press has "reported at face value a stream of anonymous allegations, some of them thinly veiled leaks from within the investigation."

The Times goes on to note that "big news organizations here have long been accused of being too cozy with centers of power"; the end result is "bland reporting that adheres to the official line. " For their part, journalists "say government officials sometimes try to force them to toe the line with threats of losing access to information. "

Bland reporting that toes the government line and relies on leaks that are not properly vetted. It sounds terrible over there.

The New York Times' front-page piece today (5/29/09) on Sonia Sotomayor's work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund is a good example of what is meant by "framing"--and a bad example of how it can distort a story.

The bulk of the story describes various cases that the group took on while Sotomayor was involved with it, which is interesting enough.  But making a case for the importance of the story (justifying its inclusion on Page 1?), writers Raymond Hernandez and David W. Chen write:

Ms. Sotomayor's involvement with the defense fund has so far received scant attention. But her critics, including some Republican senators who will vote on her nomination, have questioned whether she has let her ethnicity, life experiences and public advocacy creep into her decisions as a judge. It seems inevitable, then, that her tenure with the defense fund will be scrutinized during her confirmation hearings.

Now, if you take a look at Sotomayor's actual judicial record, one thing that leaps out is that she frequently comes down in rulings against the side that she would presumably sympathize with politically--for the "global gag rule", a racist cop and tobacco companies, for instance, and against a disabled black woman and African-American air travellers.  Either Sotomayor does have the ability to put aside her personal opinions when making a judgment, in other words, or she's a good deal more right-wing than most people believe.

But the lengthy article never allows anyone to make the case that Sotomayor does not, in fact, "let her ethnicity...creep into her decisions as a judge." Instead, after describing her involvement with the PRLDEF, Hernandez and Chen describe a single judicial case that Sotomayor ruled on--Ricci, in which she was one of three appeals court judges that upheld a ruling against a white firefighter's discrimination claim--and then concludes by quoting a right-wing judicial activist:

Mr. Levey said that the employment discrimination case filed by the defense fund on behalf of Hispanic police officers raised questions about Judge Sotomayor’s credibility in the New Haven case. "It adds to the conviction that this was not accidental, and that she had a very specific agenda here."

In short, the New York Times frames its look at Sotomayor's involvement in Puerto Rican legal affairs as a question of whether such involvement will make her a bad judge, and it allows no one to offer the case to the contrary.  Is that accidental--or does the Times have a very specific agenda here?

Dubbing National Public Radio "The Counterinsurgency Channel," blogger Mytwords (NPR Check, 5/28/09) takes issue with a May 27 All Things Considered report "meant to promote an aspect of U.S. counterinsurgency in Afghanistan--the training of Afghan police as part of Task Force Phoenix (what dumb ass names these operations anyway?)":

The report opens with some great editorializing from Michele Norris:

If American policy is ever to be successful in Afghanistan, it will be because of people like Army Major Jim Contreras; he's the top American police trainer in Helmand province in Southern Afghanistan. Afghan police are key to fighting insurgents: They know the neighborhoods, the people, who is an insurgent and who is not.

In spite of the likely failure of the U.S. "mission" in Afghanistan--and the dismal (and lucrative) history of the U.S. training program for Afghan police forces, Norris assures us that this will be the "key to fighting insurgents." It's striking, too, how apropos of nothing, Norris confidently asserts that they know "who is an insurgent and who is not"?

Aside from the dubious concept that more militancy will somehow bring peace to Afghanistan, NPR is in regrettably large company when faithfully believing U.S. force's claims to the insurgent identities of their victims--nor is it alone among big media when providing "nothing in the report to indicate how disastrous the new Bushama/Obamush War in Af-Pak will be."

Making clear on Salon (5/28/09, ad-viewing required) that his "writing about this issue from the start has not been based on my view that [Judge Sonia] Sotomayor is the best choice" for the U.S. Supreme Court, Glenn Greenwald states that his "interest has been due to the fact that the smears against her were both totally unrecognizable, driven by very ugly sentiments and enabled by reckless 'reporting' methods." To wit:

The same right-wing extremists who drove the country into the ground continue to attack Sonia Sotomayor with blatant and ugly stereotypes. She's one of those judges selected "for their readiness to discard the rule of law whenever emotion moves them," claims the highly credible legal scholar Karl Rove today in the Wall St. Journal. According to Rove--whose profound respect for the rule of law is legendary--she makes decisions based on her emotional "concern for the downtrodden, the powerless and the voiceless" rather than legal considerations. Because of her background, ethnicity and gender, hordes of people who know nothing about her and haven't bothered to examine what she's actually done as a judge instantaneously believe this caricature.

Meanwhile, Greenwald notes, corporate "media keeps repeating these accusations without, as usual, any critical scrutiny."

Blogging (Beat the Press, 5/26/09) about how the "New York Times Cooks the Books on Europe's Auto Industry," economist Dean Baker catches the paper "touting the layoffs in the U.S. auto industry as a virtue"--since "it notes that auto industry employment in Europe is remaining steady at around 2.3 million, while it is falling to close to 700,000 in the U.S.":

The article and accompanying chart imply that Europe is delaying an inevitable adjustment. The case is far from clear, in spite of the NYT's best effort to make the case. The chart shows that Europe produces about 18 million cars a year, while North America produces around 12 million. Those noting the asterisk will see that one-third of the cars in North America are produced in Canada or Mexico, meaning that only about 8 million cars are produced in the U.S. This adjustment makes the gap in employment look less extreme.

Furthermore, the U.S. imports a large portion of the parts for the cars that are produced here. Much of the employment in the auto sector is in parts production. Without knowing the balance of trade in car parts, there is no easy way to know how Europe's auto employment relative to its output compares to the U.S.

But such pesky realism has never gotten in the way of the neocon idealism U.S. media routinely try to push upon sometimes recalcitrant Europe; see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Europe Says No--to Pundits’ Advice: 'Painful Reforms' Find Few Takers" by Seth Ackerman (9–10/05)

Noticing that "many of the headlines greeting North Korea's nuclear blast yesterday carried the phrase 'as big as the Hiroshima bomb' or words to that effect," media writer and Hiroshima in America co-author Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 5/26/09) says "that's not the only reference point that Hiroshima should evoke":

Simply stated: The fact that the U.S. first developed, and then used--twice--the WMD to end all WMDs against heavily populated cities, killing a quarter of a million civilians (and very few soldiers), has severely compromised our arguments against others building the weapon ever since.

Americans may not like to hear that but it happens to be true....

I'm not saying that there is nothing scary about North Korea or Iran (or anyone else) getting the bomb. I'm just pointing out that it is almost impossible for us to work our will on this abroad given our long track record. Yet how we are viewed usually is not reflected at all in comments by American pundits and politicos.

To Mitchell, "that's the true meaning of the 'Hiroshima' you see in the headlines." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Greg Mitchell on Hiroshima" (8/5/05)

Charlie Savage did some good reporting on the Bush signing statements, but  his front-page story in today's New York Times on reproductive rights groups' reaction to Sotomayor is way off course. His lead explains that abortion rights advocates are worried about Sotomayor, because "when she has written opinions that touched tangentially on abortion disputes, she has reached outcomes in some cases that were favorable to abortion opponents."

OK, so what are those opinions? Here's what he names: She ruled in favor of the Bush administration's reinstatement of the global gag rule; she ruled that anti-abortion protesters could take police to court for allegedly using excessive force to break up one of their demonstrations; and she's ruled in a few cases in favor of Chinese refugees seeking asylum because of China's forced abortion policies.

Now, who's uneasy about these? I've looked around, and the only one cited by any reproductive rights groups I've seen is the first--it was a case brought by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (now the Center for Reproductive Rights)--though I've also seen other reproductive rights advocates say it was a narrow ruling based pretty clearly on precedent and not something that would threaten Roe. The second one I haven't seen mentioned --it would seem to be about abusive police conduct rather than reproductive rights, anyway, so it's not really clear why it should be included here.

But the third category is just absurd. Those are pro-reproductive rights rulings that no reproductive rights group I've heard of is protesting (and it would be frankly bizarre and troubling if they were). He even quotes an anti-choice activist saying basically as much, though in a much more pejorative way: "even 'the most radical feminist' would object to forcing women to abort wanted pregnancies."

So why were those seemingly unrelated cases included in the piece? It seems Savage got most of the material for this article--an article about reproductive rights groups' reactions to Sotomayor, remember--from a religious anti-choice group's website. And as far as one can tell from reading the article, the only people he actually spoke to were two anti-choice advocates. That's a mighty odd way to write about reproductive rights backers' feelings on the subject. Since part of the way the anti-choice movement works to chip away support of reproductive rights is to falsely frame advocates as "pro-abortion," Savage plays right into their hands, making that association for them on the front page of the New York Times.

It does seem that some reproductive rights groups are concerned about Sotomayor's position on Roe v. Wade, since that hasn't been spelled out yet. If you're going to write about that, here's a much more logical (and responsible) way to do it--talking to reproductive rights groups in order to frame your story about what their concerns are, rather than using their opponents' talking points to conjure up false arguments.

Politico's Mike Allen writes (5/27/09)

The media's left-of-center bias is rarely more apparent than during court fights. The coverage running up to the pick was slanted heavily toward the notion of how "pragmatic" Obama's legal views are and how unlikely he was to pick a liberal.

So coverage of Supreme Court fights is one of the best illustrations of corporate media's supposed lean to the left? Only three of the current justices had what could be described as a "fight" over their confirmation: Clarence Thomas (confirmed by a vote of 52-48), John Roberts (78-22) and Samuel Alito (58-42); all the others were confirmed with less than 10 percent of the Senate voting against them.

Despite the allegations of sexual harassment that were leveled against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, media coverage at the time depicted him as highly credible in his denials (Extra!, Special Issue 1992), and generally treated the question of whom to believe as impossible to answer.

Roberts got intensely favorable coverage from corporate media, to the point where Newsweek was denouncing as "conspiracy theories"  accurate characterizations of Roberts' record (FAIR Action Alert, 8/2/05). When the pro-choice group NARAL pointed out that Roberts had filed a brief in support of an abortion clinic blockader who had previously been convicted of bombing, this was widely denounced in the media as out of bounds (Extra!, 11-12/05); can anyone seriously imagine establishment pundits chiding right-wing activists for bringing up legal work Sonia Sotomayor had done on behalf of bombmakers?

With Alito as well, corporate media tended to treat his unflappable demeanor as more important than his legal views, giving him generally high marks for his confirmation performance (CounterSpin, 1/20/06).

The only Supreme Court nominee to be voted down by the Senate in modern times was Robert Bork. That was in 1987, when FAIR was just getting started, so we don't have any contemporaneous analysis of the coverage of that fight--but corporate media have subsequently created an entirely inaccurate mythology about Bork's unfair treatment (FAIR Media Advisory, 7/21/05; Extra! Update, 4/99).

Allen says that it's during such episodes that corporate media's left-leaning bias is most apparent. What's actually apparent is that charges of left-wing media bias never need to be accompanied by actual evidence.

Observing that Latinobarómetro's 2008 report on Latin American public opinion again "went entirely unreported in almost all of the world's major media outlets," with "only small snippets selectively analyzed by writers at the Economist, Christian Science Monitor and Washington Times," Latin American history major Kevin Young's ZNet analysis of the survey (5/27/09) gives some probable reasons:

Washington's contempt for the Chávez and Morales governments is readily apparent given frequent Bush administration denunciations and threats directed at the two leaders, U.S. support for violent opposition groups and coup attempts in Venezuela and Bolivia, and its ongoing and well-documented (though still highly secretive) channeling of funds to opposition groups in the two countries. Conversely, the governments of countries like Colombia and Mexico draw frequent praise from U.S. government leaders and media analysts and also receive large sums of U.S. taxpayers' money in the form of military and/or economic aid. Colombia ($657 million) and Mexico ($579 million) top all Latin American countries in total.

That U.S. media consistently praises official U.S. friends and condemns official enemies goes hand-in-glove with their refusal to acknowledge polling that directly contradicts their justifications for U.S. Latin American policy. Young lists Latinobarómetro results showing "Hugo Chávez's Venezuela is the third 'freest' country among the 18 surveyed," while "the three large countries whose governments remain closely aligned with the United States--Colombia, Mexico and Peru--rank well below Venezuela in every category" polled, such as "Democracy [in my country] guarantees the freedom to participate in politics," "Democracy guarantees freedom of expression, always and in all parts [of the country]" and "The most effective way to change things is by voting to elect those who defend my position."

See the recent issue of FAIR magazine Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia’s Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela’s" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall

Recapping at TPM Café (5/27/09) how the U.S. "press bent over backward to paint both Bushes as moderate, sensible, nice guy Republicans," Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell writes that "a hard-right [George W.] Bush, whether real or media-created, would have never beaten Gore--not that this one did either." Reminding us that "the New York Times, for example, had been very tough on [President Bill] Clinton on its editorial page," Mitchell says that "once in office, a long honeymoon between press and president ensued," and "just as Bush's approval ratings tanked and criticism was about to spread, 9/11 came along to torment the country, but save Bush." Mitchell then brings us into the present with shrewd insight into a hypothetical:

No one in the media criticized Bush for months, let alone suggested that maybe he had let down the country and invited a terrorist attack, or at least failed to prevent it. (Imagine that happening in the future if the country is attacked again under Obama--watch Fox and Friends howl.) Some have suggested that the New York Times, and others long accused of exhibiting liberal bias, went overboard on backing Bush after 9/11, given a rare chance to wave the flag and promote a war (Afghanistan) without shame for once and bolster their flagging image as super-patriots.

Of course, the problem was: They didn't stop there, and most went along like sheep in the run-up to the Iraq War.

"In fact," Mitchell notes, the date of his piece "marks the fifth anniversary of the day the Times belatedly admitted its failures on Iraq (while refusing to name or punish reporters and editors). It wasn't just a failure on WMD, it was a failure to recognize Bush and his crowd for what they were, individually and collectively."