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SINCE THE NEW TIMES has taken over the Village Voice, 17 staffers have left, having either resigned or been fired. According to the NY Observer, "Much of the front of the book is being overhauled. Mr. Ridgeway's column has been killed, and so has Mr. Schanberg's Press Clips column and Toni Schlesinger's Shelter column, which provided quirky interactions with apartment and loft dwellers. The film-review budget has been cut by two-thirds, according to a source, and some film reviews are now being contributed by freelance writers from other New Times papers. According to Voice staffers, New Times has also dismissed The Voice's three-person fact-checking department and laid off two of the five copy editors. Last month, Mr. Lacey killed interim editor Ward Harkavy's blog, the Bush Beat. The end-page essay has been discontinued."

New executive editor Michael Lacey - in the manner of many narcissistic climbers of his generation - seems to be using arrogance as a substitute for talent. Not only does this prove painful for those in the vicinity, it's not a particularly good way of doing business for not only does it annoy the writers, it annoys those who like to read them. There are better ways of increasing circulation than chasing away what you've got.

LAST DAYS OF THE VILLAGE VOICE

AMY GOODMAN: Sydney Schanberg, you attended a meeting in early February with [Village Voice executive editor] Michael Lacey and the whole Village Voice staff. What happened?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: What happened was very sad. Mr. Lacey came in and very quickly told the staff that he was disappointed and appalled by the fact that the front of the book was all commentary and that he wanted hard news. He said if he wanted to read a daily or regular critiques of the Bush administration, he would read the New York Times, and that's not what he wanted in the Village Voice. He was insulting to the staff. He figuratively or in effect called them stenographers. He said they had to stop being stenographers. When I objected to that, because that was so insulting, and I said that you can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers. . .

And I said it was unfair, and he said, 'So, I'm unfair.' And then he added, he said, 'Look, I don't care what rouses you, even if it's getting pissed off at me.' And I said, 'I'm not pissed off at you. I don't even know you.' And he really had this huge one-ton or two-ton chip on his shoulder. And I think he walked into the room thinking that the people in the room didn't welcome him and didn't like him and, you know, and hated him. And he was totally insecure. And he gave the impression that he didn't understand the Voice and he didn't understand New York, and he didn't want to. He didn't like it, even though he was born here, I understand. I mean, he was born in Brooklyn.

And he said a lot of other things. He told the staff that they better prepare themselves to say goodbye to some of their friends. He picked a fight with Nat Hentoff, which was disgusting.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the mentioning of other media in the Village Voice?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Oh, he said, when he picked that fight with Nat, he was referring specifically to a story in which Nat had led off one of his pieces praising an ABC television investigative report. And Lacey said that was unforgivable and that wasn't good journalism, and that he in the future never wanted to see ever again a story in the Voice that referred to work done by another publication or media organization, which is kind of astounding. . .

AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined on the telephone by Tim Redmond. He is the executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Tim, why is this a story that you feel is a national story? We're talking to you from New York.

TIM REDMOND: . . . What the folks from New Times, now known as Village Voice Media, want to do, they want to buy up alternative papers all around the country and make them all the same. You know, I don't think anyone should own 17 alternative papers. And I particularly don't think a company run by people who despise activism, who are not activists and don't think of themselves journalistically as activists, who don't endorse candidates, who don't take stands on issues, who haven't even come out against the war, should be taking over the Village Voice. It's really sad. . .

ALL THE FREELANCERS FIT TO PRINT: NY TIMES INSTITUTES INTENSE SCRUTINY OF WRITER'S PERSONAL LIVES

[One interesting thing about this is that few of the great writers of the past few hundred years would have survived such a test. But then, it doesn't really matter anymore, does it?]

To the Newsroom:

Nearly three years ago, the Siegal Committee recommended that The Times learn more about its stringers and freelancers, to ensure that their ethical standards and credentials are equal to those of our regular staff. It has taken some time to develop electronic tools to put this recommendation into practice, but we are now ready to do so.

Effective on Monday, April 10, all of our freelance writers will be asked to fill out a questionnaire about their affiliations, work history, financial and personal connections and any past instances when questions were raised about the accuracy or originality of their work.

The questionnaire, which each freelancer will submit via the special Web site we have established for the new freelance assignment and payment system, will be reviewed by senior editors in the department for which the freelancer works. On the basis of the information submitted, the editors will determine what future assignments are appropriate for the stringer or freelancer.

Just as we have required signed contracts in recent years as a prerequisite for freelance work, we will now also require submission of the questionnaire. And just as we have required editors to verify that a freelancer has signed a contract before assigning work to that freelancer, we will also require editors to verify that the freelancer has been vetted. Both checks can be made using the new freelancer assignment and payment system.

This policy applies to freelance writers only, not to illustrators or photographers. In departments that are not yet using the new freelance payment system, the vetting requirement will go into effect when the new system is adopted.

Your desk administrators have been given detailed information about how the vetting system works. Please check with them for instructions. If you have any questions about this policy, please e-mail Al Siegal, Craig Whitney or Nancy Sharkey. For technical help with the system, please e-mail James Wilkerson in News Technology.

thanks, Al Siegal and Craig Whitney

http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=11308

VILLAGE VOICE DUMPS LEADING ALTERNATIVE JOURNALIST

SAM SMITH In an effort to make Manhattan as interesting as Phoenix, the new owners of the Village Voice have dumped Jim Ridgeway, one of America's leading journalists. The move has stirred considerable anger among Voice staffers, a score of whom signed a letter that stated, "In light of this distinguished track record, the decision last week by the Voice's new ownership to terminate Ridgeway is shameful. It also sends a terrible message as to the sort of coverage that the new ownership portends. We call on Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and Chairman and CEO Jim Larkin to reverse his discharge."

The letter was signed by signed by Tom Robbins, J. Hoberman, Lynn Yaeger, Nat Hentoff, Jarrett Murphy, Ed Park, Chuck Eddy, Robert Christgau, Nina Lalli, Elizabeth Zimmer, Dennis Lim, Tricia Romano, Aina Hunter, Corina Zappia, Jennifer Gonnerman, Jorge Morales, Wayne Barrett, Michael Musto, and Darren Reidy."

The letter also said: "For 30 years, James Ridgeway has, in his person, his politics, and his writing, defined what makes the Voice a special publication.

"From Three Mile Island to 9-11, Ridgeway has provided some of the nation's most incisive and insightful coverage of government misfeasance and malfeasance. He was one of the first journalists in America to spotlight the threat posed by a resurgent racist and neo-Nazi movement, an issue he hammered away at in the pages of the Voice years before anyone ever heard of Ruby Ridge or Timothy McVeigh. His reports on escalating environmental abuses exposed corporate law-breakers and bureaucratic indifference.

"Ridgeway's writings on conflicts from Bosnia to Baghdad to Haiti have always provided the otherwise unreported flip-side of the world according to the mainstream media, in short reporting that jibes precisely with the exact mission of the Voice. Over the past few years, Ridgeway expanded onto the Web, filing regular nuggets of breaking news, and even posting video reports on the 2004 elections."

According to Wikipedia, "Seventeen alternative weeklies around the United States are owned by the Voice's parent company New Times Media. In 2005, the Phoenix alternative weekly chain purchased a majority stake in Village Voice Media. The move grew out of the anti-trust conviction of New Times Media and Village Voice Media; they had secretly agreed not to compete against each other. Now, with all the papers under one roof, they can control competition among their subsidiaries legally."

The takeover, which had the charm and logic of Enron buying out an electric cooperative, is effectively ending an alternative media era that began when a few publications like the Voice paved the way for a new journalism that would eventually, in the late 1960s, have a voice in some 400 underground newspapers across the country.

By the 1980s, however, these papers were being replaced by a faux alternative press far more interested in style, food and entertainment than in politics or social change. As your editor wrote at the time, one got the impression from reading these newspapers that, when the revolution came, the guerillas would come down the mountains in designer jackets on Head skis and listening to Sony Walkmen. Jack Shafer, then editor of Washington's City Paper, explained it this way: "Look, Sam, we're not an alternative news medium; we're an alternative advertising medium."

Despite ownership changes, including a bout with Rupert Murdock, the Voice held its own until the New Times crowd moved in.

It's a loss for me, too, as Ridgeway not only was a contributor to this journal over the decades, but a friend, an inspiration, and, in recent years, had his office on the same floor. We are about the last two alternative journalists of the 1960s in the capital still keeping practicing the trade. He deserved far better than to be bounced by such a bad imitation of the craft to which he still lent so much honor.

WIKIPEDIA - James Ridgeway is a prominent American investigative journalist. . . Ridgeway began his career as a contributor to The New Republic, Ramparts, and the Wall Street Journal. Later, he was co-founder and editor of the political newsletters Hard Times and The Elements.

Ridgeway became nationally known when he revealed in The New Republic that General Motors' had hired private detectives to tail consumer advocate Ralph Nader in an attempt to dig up information that might discredit him (Nader was behind litigation which challenged the safety of the Corvair). Ridgeway's revelations of the company's snooping and dirty tricks prompted a Senate subcommittee led by Senator Ribicoff to summon James Roche, president of GM, to explain his company's harassment -- and apologize. The incident catapulted auto safety into the public spotlight and helped send Nader's book, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) to the top of the bestseller lists.

Ridgeway is the author of fifteen books, including The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis, The Politics of Ecology, and, more recently, The Haiti Files: Decoding the Crisis, Yugoslavia's Ethnic Nightmare (a collection co-edited with Jasminka Udovicki), A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys (with Jeffrey St. Clair), and Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, the Rise of a New White Culture. He also wrote the text for Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry, with photographs by Sylvia Plachy. Ridgeway co-directed the companion film Blood in the Face, as well as Feed, a documentary on the 1992 presidential campaign. His articles have also appeared in New York Review of Books, Parade, Harper's, The Nation, The Economist, The New York Times Magazine, and other magazines and newspapers.

http://www.answers.com/topic/james-ridgeway

JIM RIDGEWAY
mailoto:ridgew@yahoo.com

MARCH 2006

THE MEDIA'S WAR ON LABOR

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT and least covered aspects of media bias is the dislike of labor by the corporate press. From public radio's board room-sucking Marketplace to the lack of labor beat reporters on the staffs of newspapers and the networks, and from labor stories being ignored or buried on the business pages to a consistent pro-business bias in stories involving workers, it is hard to find a greater example of the fraud of media "objectivity."

In keeping with our tradition of quantifying what you can't reform, we are launching a business bias rating service on major labor stories. Our standard is simple: how many paragraphs do you have to read before you find out labor's side of the story?

Since we obviously can't analyze every story, we hope readers will provide us with particularly admirable or egregious examples.

The get started, here are the number of paragraphs you had to go through to get the union's side of the story in the matter of the Delphi buyouts:

NEW YORK TIMES: 26
DETROIT NEWS: 22
WASHINGTON POST: 11 in the news section, 27 in the business section

EMENDATION

Our story about the media's war on labor origianlly referred to NPR's Marketplace. We meant to say public radio's Marketplace. Marketplace is actually the product of PRI not NPR as Corey Flintoff reminded us:

"I have to take exception to your assertion that NPR is anti-labor. 'Marketplace' is not an NPR program. It's produced by our competitor, Public Radio International. NPR has a full-time labor correspondent, Frank Langfitt, and if you look into some of his stories in the NPR archive www.npr.org, you'll find he's doing excellent, straight-ahead reporting on labor issues from workplace safety to pension benefits and the decline of unions."

We apologize for the misplaced aspersion. As we have pointed out in the past, however, it is significant that public radio features such a business-centered program without any similar show serving American workers. Even though they may not contribute as much to the annual fund drives, there are more of them.

We have also received an e-mail from Steve Greenhouse, 'labor and workplace reporter' for the NY Times: "I would strongly defend my colleague Micki Maynard as being a scrupulous, balanced reporter who is every bit as fair to labor as she is to business. Indeed, Micki has a reputation for being tough on business and on G.M.-- and on some labor unions. Her coverage of Northwest Airlines and the labor dispute there was a model of toughness and fairness. Counting which paragraph goes where is a cute idea, but it misses the point. The important thing is to look at the overall fairness of a piece, not to count which paragraph goes where. Besides, articles that are extremely unfair to labor might do well under your test because they contain some labor response up high before the rest of the article goes on to bash labor."

Greenhouse's comments were inspired by our count of the number of paragraphs it took several papers - including the NY Times - to report the reaction of labor reaction to the planned buyouts of Delphi workers by GM.

Our graf counter is simply an application of one of the principles we laid out a decade ago in our plan for a new newspaper called USA Tomorrow: "Opposition to any policy will be reported on the same page as the main headline and not on the jump page as is now commonly the case. In fact, jump pages will be eliminated where possible and no story will jump more than two pages. Editors know that few readers turn to the jump page, which is why they bury so much good stuff there. "

Greenhouse's praise of Maynard may be justified but it does not in any way answer the problem of the story in question. Nor does it explain why so many stories are written in a similar fashion. Why do so many papers bury so much good stuff in that journalistic dumpster known as the jump page?

One reason, in the case of labor coverage, is the bias of newspapers themselves. Beginning with the successful defeat of the Washington Post pressmen in 1975, newspapers have become ever more hostile towards their own unions. This idiosyncratic involvement in the story being reported is seldom mentioned in the press.

But another problem is the unnoticed cultural slant of reporters themselves who, in an increasingly socially and economically divided America, have increasingly become among the winners in the split. No conspiracy, no intentional bias is necessary, simply using office talk and class presumptions is enough.

Thus we doubt that Micheline Maynard is even aware of how much more concern she displayed in her article for the fate of GM than for the fate of its workers. GM is "staggering under the weight of $10.6 billion in losses," and "still has much more to do in its effort to rebuild itself as a smaller, more competitive automaker after losing ground for two decades in the United States against the growing strength and sophistication of Asian and European rivals."

Then there is the problem for G.M.'s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, "whose future is now in serious doubt. He must deliver even broader cost cuts to save both G.M. and his own job. Already, he is under growing pressure from the company's largest individual shareholder, Kirk Kerkorian, whose representative has joined the board."

And, of course, the ubiquitous foreign competition: "Beyond the buyouts, analysts said, G.M. must take further steps to become more competitive or risk being pushed aside by strong rivals like Toyota, which could unseat G.M. to become the world's biggest auto company as soon as sometime this year."

The ever present 'Industry analysts' also have "raised fears that G.M. could be forced into its own bankruptcy filing as a result of a flood of bad news at the company." And " Analysts also said they were not convinced that the plan had gone far enough to push G.M. and Delphi over the hump."

But there are also workers who are staggering, who might be forced into bankruptcy, for whom the plan might not have gone far enough to push them over the hump, who need to take further steps to become more competitive or risk being pushed aside when they look for a new job, who still have much to do to rebuild themselves as smaller, more competitive former auto parts makers, and are losing ground against the growing strength and sophistication of outsourcing. But they never seem to get the same level of concern in these stories.

Finally, the fact that our graf counter elicited a negative reaction from a labor reporter is itself noteworthy. Another response might have been to take the piece to the editor and say, "See, we've got to treat labor better." And maybe even thank us for giving a little nudge to the undernourished and noble cause of labor reporting.

[It may be assumed by some that your editor's views are related to his being a member of Local 1981 of the United Auto Workers Union - also known as the National Writers Union. This is probably not the case since he has been strongly pro labor since he was about nine years old, when his father gave him a record of union songs including one that went, "After 30 years as a worker, they say 'My boy, the job you did was swell.' And off you pack with an ache in your back and a pin for your lapel."]

USA TOMORROW
http://prorev.com/usat.htm

WHAT THE MEDIA TOLD YOU ABOUT IRAQ

[Compiled by FAIR]

"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?" (Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)

"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it." (CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention." (NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)

"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints." (Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/27/03)

"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington." (Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)

"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back." (Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)

"We're all neo-cons now." (MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war." (Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)

"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking." - Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation.

"The war winds down, politics heats up.... Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific." (PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)

"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits." (MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)

"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys." (CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)

"Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today." (MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

"If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a president fresh from a war victory?" (CNN's Judy Woodruff, 5/5/03)

"I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks." (MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)

"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right." (New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on." (Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate-- cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)

"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?" (Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 1/29/03)

"It won't take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there's no question that it will." (Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, 2/10/03)

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2842

NEWS BROADCASTERS SHILLING FOR ADVERTISERS BIG TIME

GAIL SCHILLER, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER - "There are more local news stations that are incorporating brands into news in innovative, cutting-edge ways," said Aaron Gordon, president of entertainment marketing firm Set Resources Inc. "The line, which has always been black and white in terms of what's news and what's commercials, is now being blurred." Media agency Initiative said it has been working on integrating advertising content into local news on behalf of several of its clients.

A number of local stations, including Young Broadcasting's indie KRON-TV San Francisco and Univision O&O KMEX-TV Los Angeles, confirmed that they have integrated advertisers into their newscasts and are actively seeking out product-integration deals. Meredith Broadcasting's Fox affiliate KPTV-TV Portland, Ore., launched a new lifestyle show in January called "More Good Day Oregon" as an extension of its morning news program "Good Day Oregon" that airs weekly segments designed to serve as vehicles for brand integration. . .

"We're all trying to find ways of integrating commercial messages into content that satisfy the audience and advertisers without hurting our product," KRON president and general manager Mark Antonitis said. . .

"We are already seeing an erosion of the 'editorial wall' in network newsrooms, particularly for morning news and newsmagazines," said Jim Johnston, partner at the law firm Davis & Gilbert, which represents both media agencies and entertainment clients.

"I think you'll find that this type of activity will continue to take place, and other forms of product integration will find their way into news divisions as well," he said. "The news organizations will continue to seek a balance between editorial independence and advertiser interests, but you will likely see a lot more boundary-pushing in the future.". . .

Just last month, "Good Morning America" broadcast segments of the show live from a Norwegian Cruise Line ship as part of a weeklong series called "Girls' Week Out." According to "GMA" spokeswoman Bridgette Maney, Norwegian Cruise Lines did not pay integration fees for the segments, hosted by correspondent Mike Barz and co-anchor Diane Sawyer, but did foot the bill for airfare, room and board to send nearly 300 women -- contest winners and their girlfriends -- on a cruise to Honduras, Jamaica and the Grand Cayman Islands. Most of the segments broadcast from the ship focused on the women who won the cruise by writing in to say why they deserved time away with their girlfriends, she said. . .

According to RTNDA's ethics guidelines, "news reporting and decision-making should be free of inappropriate commercial influences" and "should not show favoritism to advertisers," and "news organizations should protect the integrity of coverage against any potential conflict of interest.". . .

[A] KRON integration that aired this month, Tourism Australia -- the government body responsible for international and domestic tourism marketing for Australia -- paid KRON to run a weeklong series featuring stories about the country in its morning news program. In addition to an integration fee, Tourism Australia bought traditional spots in the KRON newscasts, paid all expenses for a five-member news crew to travel to Australia and sponsored trips to Australia for two winners of an e-mail contest promoted on-air. . .

Since premiering Jan. 9, "More Good Day Oregon" already has integrated a major local shopping center for a segment on last-minute gifts for Valentine's Day and a local spa for a two-part series featuring the spa's services and a makeover giveaway won by a viewer. In both cases, the advertisers' involvement was disclosed in the end credits.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002197781

THE I'M FAR TOO CLEVER FOR ETHICS DEPARTMENT

ONE OF THE more dismal back streets of journalism is the one inhabited by columnists and bloggers who try, albeit futilely, to demonstrate their hipness by patronizing those who raise ethical issues. A case in point is in a media gab blog called Fishbowl DC, which began a post:

"It falls to Gene Robinson this year to write the obligatory self-flagellating column about the impropriety of the administration and the press getting together for all these "fun" press dinners. Today, he has some questions about this weekend's Gridiron dinner. . .

Robinson is quoted as saying, "We reporters are always pointing out to officials that as far as conflict of interest is concerned, appearance is as important as reality. That's why I left the Gridiron dinner with that vague unease: I wondered what it looked like to people who weren't in that ballroom. The day after the dinner, reporters went back to trying to pry information out of this ultra-secretive administration. But I wondered what people in Seattle or New Orleans or Cleveland would think if they saw the journalistic elite at such jocular ease with the officials whose feet they hold to the fire. "Houston, do we have an appearance problem?"

Fishbowl's response: "The answer, of course, is yes. The answer has always been yes, but that's unlikely to change anything. After all, Saturday night was the 121st Gridiron dinner, meaning that the appearance problem was existed roughly since the Gilded Age of Grover Cleveland. Good luck with your crusade, Gene."

Fishbowl's reaction to Washington Post columnist Robinson is noteworthy because the blog spends a good deal of time sucking up to the Washington press corps and at least assumes its cynicism will be shared by many of its readers.

And in fact, the number of Washington journalists bothered much by the thought of partying with your sources at the Gridiron is pitifully small. It is interesting that the two Post columnists who have been most willing to consider morality as well as the politics of public action have been black; the other was the recently retired Bill Raspberry. Even when you didn't agree with Raspberry it was nice to find someone on the op ed page who felt that conscience was as important to protect as, say, globalization or capitalism. Robinson has that same quality, one that in better times would be honored rather than dismissed as futile grumbling of a priggish spoilsport.

As for the Gridiron, from Rome to the rise of Nazi Germany come tales of parties the participants thought were exceptionally cool but history would come to regard as metaphors for the collapse of their culture.

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/teapot_tempests/default.asp

NUMBER OF NEWSPAPER REPORTERS DECLINING

HOWARD KURTZ, WASHINGTON POST - In the Philadelphia area the number of newspaper reporters has fallen from 500 to 220 in the last quarter-century. Most of the local television stations have cut back on traditional news coverage. Five AM radio stations used to cover news; now there are two.

These figures are drawn from a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. . . By the project's count, the industry has lost more than 3,500 newsroom professionals since 2000, a drop of 7 percent. . . . The papers have plenty of company. Circulation declined last year at the big three newsmagazines. Network evening news ratings dropped 6 percent and morning show ratings 4 percent. The number of network correspondents is one-third lower than it was in the mid-1980s.

The median prime-time audience for cable news was up 4 percent last year, driven mostly by growth at Fox News. . . Early-evening news ratings for local TV were down 13 percent, the project says. And 60 percent of the local TV newscasts studied by the group -- once traffic, weather and sports are excluded -- consisted of crime and accident stories.

FEBRUARY 2006

HOW SUNDAY TALK SHOWS RIG THE DEBATE

It's even worse than this report from Media Matters suggests, since MM is a Democratic Party oriented group. Those to the left of the Democrats are rarely seen on Sunday talk shows.

NBC RATINGS COMPLAINT ABOUT 'WEST WING' DOESN'T HOLD UP: SUNDAY SHOW HAD 82% OF NETWORK ICON WILLIAMS' WEEKNIGHT AUDIENCE

Illustrating both the cynicism of television networks and the failure of TV critics to blow the whistle on them, recent ratings data show that "West Wing," recently dumped by NBC after being sent to the Sunday ghetto, had 82% of the audience of its prime time icon, Brian Williams' weeknight news show. Williams has 9.8 milion viewers; "West Wing" had 8 million, the same as CBS Evening News

CNN SUPPORTS PENTAGON TORTURERS

CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT BARBARD STARR - Let's start by reminding everybody that under U.S. military law and practice, the only photographs that can be taken are official photographs for documentation purposes about the status of prisoners when they are in military detention. That's it. Anything else is not acceptable. And of course, that is what the Abu Ghraib prison scandal is all about. . .

As we look at a couple of the photographs, let's remind people that why these are so inappropriate. Under U.S. military law and practice and procedure, you simply cannot take photographs - as we're going to show you some of them right now. You cannot take photographs of people in detention, in humiliating positions, positions that are abusive in any way, shape or form. The only pictures that are ever allowed of people in U.S. military detention would be pictures for documentation purposes. And, clearly, these pictures are not that. . .

But the Pentagon certainly is not happy that these pictures, these additional pictures, which had not been distributed publicly in the past, Pentagon not happy that they are out. And the reason is, the Pentagon had filed a lawsuit trying to prevent their publication in the United States out of concern, they say, that it would spark violence in the Arab world to see these photographs and it would put U.S. military forces at risk.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jscahill.php?articleid=8553

HACKS' FAVORITE SUBJECT: THEMSELVES

DUNCAN SPENCER, THE HILL - The death-by-negligence of New York Times editor David Rosenbaum [is] a perfect example of the ugly layers of Washington society, and particularly the structure of the high court of the new dukes and duchesses of that society, news reporters. Can one imagine the same case (elderly man clobbered and robbed of his wallet and cards by two thugs) happening in Wards 7 or 8, where the victim would almost surely have been black? The case would never have gotten beyond The Washington Post's "Metro Briefs" and would have ended there.

But several layers of our unexamined and uncriticized social gradation separated Rosenbaum from the Ward 7 and 8 man. Rosenbaum was white. He was sober. He was walking in a Far Northwest neighborhood considered safe (i.e., almost all white). And he was a news reporter. Not only a news reporter but associated with the country's only national daily, the Times.

It was this combination of social factors that triggered a deluge from the press corps (or better, the Press Court) to include high indignation from such luminaries as Maureen Dowd, John Tierney (both NYT), Marc Fisher and Cokie Roberts, to mention only the best known of the indignant. . .

The memorial service on the 13th was little less than a press royal occasion, homage being paid not only by those who knew the decedent but by those who wanted to be known as having known him, as well as by those most public senators, Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)

Eulogist NYT bureau chief Philip Taubman called the crime "unfathomable, unthinkable, unspeakable." Of course he was referring only to one (his own) social layer - in another part of town . . . such a crime would not only be fathomable, thinkable and speakable but an all-too-frequent experience. But the victim almost certainly would not have been a New York Times reporter. . .

This town's media elite regard themselves as eminently important and amusing, while the public, ever yearning for a new example of that financial, social magic called celebrity, has eagerly embraced regular news columns on the media, the press reporting on itself. Regularly scheduled media columns ensure that stories are not written to report news but are written under the oldest whip in our business - finding something to fill that hole. What's easier than another column about news royalty?. . .

As the press ascends to the level of social godhead, perhaps each scribbler should reread at least once a week Janet Malcolm's shocking confession: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Too strong? Then read Washington Examiner writer Karen DeWitt: "I became a reporter like many in my generation, because I wanted to shine a light on wrongs and stand up for the little guy against the powerful." The Press Court is now the powerful. It stands up not for the little guy but for its own.

http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Features/Hillscape/020106.html

JANUARY 2006

NPR'S NEW VOICE, NEW YORK TIMES' NEW COLUMNIST. . . AND THE PEOPLE HE LIKES

WE recently cited a Norman Solomon piece in which he discusses Ted Koppel's fawning affection for international thug Henry Kissinger: ""Henry Kissinger is, plain and simply, the best secretary of state we have had in 20, maybe 30 years -- certainly one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century. . . I'm proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger. He is an extraordinary man. This country has lost a lot by not having him in a position of influence and authority."

Such thoughts probably helped Koppel get his new gigs with Nominally Public Radio and the NY Times. What even these outlets may not know, however, is that another of Koppel's fetishes is Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. Reader RDR points out that Ledeen's PR firm cites Koppel as describing their client as "a Renaissance man. . . in the tradition of Machiavelli."

In fact, Koppel may have conflated his Italian malicious machinators whose names start with the letter M, as the following suggests.

JOHN LAUGHLAND, AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, 2003 - Ledeen's conviction that the Right is as revolutionary as the Left derives from his youthful interest in Italian fascism. In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a man he greatly admires. It caused a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen later made clear that he relished the ire of the left-wing establishment precisely because "De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement." What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself argued this very point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972. That work starts with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the support of fascism by millions of Europeans "solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists." "It seems more plausible," Ledeen argued, "to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people." For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and practitioner, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism was "the Revolution of the 20th century."

Ledeen supports de Felice's distinction between "fascism-movement" and "fascism-regime." Mussolini's regime, he says, was "authoritarian and reactionary"; by contrast, within "fascism-movement," there were many who were animated by "a desire to renew." These people wanted "something more revolutionary: the old ruling class had to be swept away so that newer, more dynamic elements-capable of effecting fundamental changes-could come to power." Like his claim that the common ground between Nazism and Italian fascism was "exceedingly minimal"-Ledeen writes, "The fact of the Axis Pact should not be permitted to become the overriding consideration in this analysis"-Ledeen's careful distinction between fascist "regime" and "movement" makes him a clear apologist for the latter. "While 'fascism-movement' was overcome and eventually suppressed by 'fascism-regime,'" he explains, "fascism nevertheless constituted a political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country." Indeed, Ledeen criticizes Mussolini precisely for not being revolutionary enough. "He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism." Ledeen therefore concurs with the fascist intellectual, Camillo Pellizi, who argues-in a book Ledeen calls "a moving and fundamental work"-that Mussolini's was "a failed revolution." Pellizzi had hoped that "the new era was to be the era of youthful genius and creativity": for him, Ledeen says, the fascist state was "a generator of energy and creativity." The purest ideologues of fascism, in other words, wanted something very similar to that which Ledeen himself wants now, namely a "worldwide mass movement" enabling the peoples of the world, "liberated" by American militarism, to participate in the "greatest experiment in human freedom." Ledeen wrote in 1996, "The people yearn for the real thing-revolution.". . .

As Ledeen shows, the Italian fascists expressed their desire "to tear down the old order" (his words from 2002) in terms that are curiously anticipatory of a famous statement in 2003 by the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. In 1932, Asvero Gravelli also divided Europe into "old" and "new" when he wrote, in Towards the Fascist International, "Either old Europe or young Europe. Fascism is the gravedigger of old Europe. Now the forces of the Fascist International are rising." It all sounds rather prophetic.

http://www.amconmag.com/06_30_03/feature.html

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON TAKES ON TIM RUSSERT

LLOYD GROVE, NY POST - Celebrity blogger Arianna Huffington regularly attacks "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert as a Washington insider who gets chummy with the powerful. Usually there's no response. But now Huffington has really gotten under Russert's skin - to the point of drawing blood. Yesterday the entire NBC News publicity machine went ballistic on the impresario of Huffingtonpost.com, whose Web site is eight months old.

"The last time we heard from Ms. Huffington, she was hiring private eyes to investigate reporters," NBC News flack Barbara Levin E-mailed me yesterday, resurrecting an old charge that Huffington has repeatedly denied, including personally to Russert in 1996.

(Full disclosure: I've been friendly with Huffington for years, and Russert has barely spoken to me since I profiled him 17 years ago in The Washington Post.)

Tempers at NBC flared this week when Huffington skewered Russert's ethics for using his prestigious Sunday morning policy-and-politics program to hype his 19-year-old son Luke's sports-talk radio show - on which the Boston College sophomore will be paired with frequent "Meet the Press" panelist James Carville. . .

Huffington - along with her close friend, Slate magazine blogger Mickey Kaus - also derided Russert's scheduled keynote speaking gig next week at a journalistic ethics conference at Ripon (Wis.) College. She wondered if Russert will receive his standard $50,000-$60,000 fee along with first-class airfare for two - although, she wrote yesterday, "according to [Russert's lecture agent] ... private planes are strongly preferred.". . .

Huffington scoffed: "Inviting Tim Russert to keynote a conference on journalistic ethics is like having Jack Abramoff keynote a conference on lobbying reform."

To support the private-eye allegation, Levin faxed me a passage from Republican political consultant Ed Rollins' memoir, "Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms," in which he claims Huffington sicced a detective on Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth - Russert's wife - during her then-husband Michael Huffington's 1994 California Senate campaign. "Everything Rollins is saying is a fabrication," Huffington told me, "and I have said that many, many times."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/386287p-327783c.html

HUFFINGTON POST - Instead of dealing with the charges head on, the media giant and its Washington bureau chief Tim Russert have astonishingly decided to get down and dirty, dredging up and faxing to at least one reporter a 12-year-old false claim that I hired a private detective to snoop on Russert's wife Maureen Orth while she was preparing a hit piece on me for Vanity Fair in 1994.

I've denied this ludicrous charge, put forward without a shred of evidence many times before -- including directly to Russert during the '96 GOP convention in San Diego. But that's not the point. The point is that instead of addressing the issue of his failure to come clean with his audience on a host of ethical questions, Russert has turned the NBC publicity machine into a vehicle for sleaze and rumor-mongering. . .

Russert refuses to come clean with his audience about his role in Plamegate. He is a participant. He was interviewed under oath by Fitzgerald. But he continued to report on Plamegate as if he were a disinterested observer rather than a major player. And he still refuses to come clean and explain why he fought to keep from testifying in front of the Plamegate grand jury about his fateful chat with Scooter Libby -- even after Libby signed a waiver allowing him to do so.

Plamegate is the perfect segue to another unanswered question. How can someone with these ethical issues go and speak on ethics in the media, as Russert is about to do at Ripon College in Wisconsin next Thursday? And why is NBC refusing to disclose what his speaking fee is?

Russert's latest ethical lapse is his unseemly use of Meet the Press to promote James Carville's new XM radio sports show while refusing to come clean about the fact that Carville's co-host is Russert's college-age son, Luke.

NPR HIRES KISSINGER GROUPIE KOPPEL

NORMAN SOLOMON, ALTERNET - No doubt many people are glad that Ted Koppel will become a regular voice on National Public Radio. . . NPR announced that Koppel will do several commentaries per month on "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered." The Associated Press reported that "he also will serve as an analyst during breaking news and special events."

There's some grim irony in the statement issued by NPR's senior vice president for programming: "Ted and NPR are a natural fit, with curiosity about the world and commitment to getting to the heart of the story. The role of news analyst has been a tradition on NPR newsmagazines and there is no one better qualified to uphold and grow that tradition than Ted."

But "the heart of the story" about U.S. foreign policy has often involved deceptions from Washington. And since Koppel became a prominent journalist, he has been a fervent booster of one of the most prodigious and murderous deceivers in U.S. history.

"Henry Kissinger is, plain and simply, the best secretary of state we have had in 20, maybe 30 years -- certainly one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century," Koppel said in an interview. Koppel added: "I'm proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger. He is an extraordinary man. This country has lost a lot by not having him in a position of influence and authority."

Koppel was heaping praise on someone who served as a key architect of foreign policy throughout the Nixon presidency. Kissinger -- whose record as an inveterate liar was thoroughly documented in Seymour Hersh's 1983 book "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House" -- orchestrated bloody foreign-policy deceptions from Southeast Asia to Chile to East Timor.

Kissinger was the smart guy behind the horrendous bombing strategy that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as he held the diplomatic stage. Kissinger was the smart guy who colluded with Gen. Augusto Pinochet for the September 1973 coup and subsequent years of torture and murder in Chile. And Kissinger was the smart guy who, in his continuing role as secretary of state after Gerald Ford became president, gave Washington's blessing for Indonesian troops to invade and occupy East Timor -- with mass-murderous results.

Kissinger was a frequent guest on "Nightline," so reverentially treated by Ted Koppel that in the summer of 1989 the host turned the moderating role over to the extraordinary man so he could direct the panel discussion himself. A few years later, in April 1992, Koppel was telling viewers: "If you want a clear foreign-policy vision, someone who will take you beyond the conventional wisdom of the moment, it's hard to do any better than Henry Kissinger."

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/30896/

NY TIMES IGNORED GORE SPEECH

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, COUNTERPUNCH - Former vice president Al Gore gave what I believe to be the most important political speech in my lifetime, and the New York Times, "the newspaper of record," did not report it. Not even excerpts. For the New York Times, it was a nonevent that a former vice president and presidential candidate, denied the presidency by one vote of the Supreme Court, challenged the Bush administration for its illegalities, rending of the Constitution and disrespect for the separation of powers. So much for "the liberal press" that right-wingers rant about. If a "liberal press" exists, the New York Times is certainly no longer a member.

The Washington Post had a short report on Gore's address at Constitution Hall, but the newspaper, if that is what it is, managed to water down the seriousness and urgency of the message that Gore brought to the country with sneers.

Gore's address is the first sign of leadership from the Democratic party in six years. This alone makes it a major news event. But not even his own party took notice. According to reports, only one Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein (CA) was in the audience. One would have thought the entire Democratic congressional delegation would have turned out in support of Gore's challenge to Bush's extraordinary claims of power. . . Gore challenged the American people to step up to the task of defending the Constitution, a task abandoned by the media, the law schools, and the Democratic and Republican parties. If we fail, darkness will close around us.

http://www.counterpunch.com/roberts01182006.html

DECEMBER 2005

NY TIMES CONCEALED PRESIDENT'S WRONGDOING FOR A YEAR

PAUL FARHI WASHINGTON POST STAFF - The New York Times' revelation yesterday that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct domestic eavesdropping raised eyebrows in political and media circles, for both its stunning disclosures and the circumstances of its publication. In an unusual note, the Times said in its story that it held off publishing the 3,600-word article for a year after the newspaper's representatives met with White House officials. It said the White House had asked the paper not to publish the story at all, "arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny." The Times said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting." The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.

NOMINALLY PUBLIC RADIO: BROOKINGS IS AS FAR LEFT AS WE HAVE TO GO

JEFFREY A. DVORKIN, official audience placator for Nominally Public Radio, has revealed what that network thinks left and right consists of. Here's the quote:

||| NPR often calls on think tanks for comments. But NPR does not lean on the so-called conservative think tanks as many in the audience seem to think. Here's the tally sheet for the number of times think tank experts were interviewed to date on NPR in 2005:

American Enterprise - 59
Brookings Institute - 102
Cato Institute - 29
Center for Strategic and Intl. Studies - 39
Heritage Foundation - 20
Hoover Institute - 69
Lexington Institute - 9
Manhattan Institute - 53

There are of course, other think tanks, but these seem to be the ones whose experts are heard most often on NPR. Brookings and CSIS are seen by many in Washington, D.C., as being center to center-left. The others in the above list tend to lean to the right. So NPR has interviewed more think tankers on the right than on the left. The score to date: Right 239, Left 141. |||

To call Brookings and CSIS leftist think tanks is either a total lie or remarkably stupid. As John Stanton wrote of CSIS and its ilk in Counterpunch:

"The frightful Department of Homeland Security currently promoted by the Bush Regime and its disciples, and recent converts, has its genesis in defense and security study 'think tanks' in Washington, DC. These groups wield enormous influence on local, state and national policy and arguably constitute the real shadow government of the United States. Eliminate the US Congress, Presidency and Supreme Court, and the three branches of government could just as well be the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security and the Center for Security Policy.

"These defense and security nonprofits--far removed from any public accountability--serve as a carving knife used by the most callous of interests in and out of government to slice away at the public good. Whether it's to pocket some hard cash for missile defense, get a piece of the Homeland Security action, fix a troublesome regulation that penalizes government contractors for providing poor working conditions, rid the world of that pesky rule that cuts into executive compensation, or promote an outdated weapons system, the nonprofits stand ready to undertake these actions not only because it makes 'good business sense' but because their operatives take a patriotic view of the 'bottom line.'

"Defense and security nonprofit organizations house former elite US civilian and military officials---always a short step away from return to government service and available for consulting fees--many whose worldview closely approximates those of the character General Jack Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's famed classic Dr. Strangelove."

But Dvorkin's stunningly misleading calculation reveals exactly how establishment Washington thinks about the political spectrum and one of the ways in which the media enables America's move to the far right.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5053335

THE MONEY BEHIND THE THINK TANKS THAT THE MEDIA DOESN'T TELL YOU ABOUT

MORTON MINTZ, NIEMAN REPORTS - Imagine being Exxon Mobil's CEO, and you have a problem. Independent scientists overwhelmingly agree that consumption of your company's products produces gases that cause average global temperatures to rise. Your goal is to discredit the scientists. But if news reports say that Exxon Mobil is doing the discrediting, it will be recognized as an obvious party with an interest and regarded skeptically. The solution: fund think tanks that will faithfully express the views of the world's largest oil company as their own. Exxon Mobil's hand will be well hidden; indeed, the company will be a source so anonymous that news organizations will not even call it one. The solution has roots going back nearly 30 years, as documented by Chris Mooney in a superb investigative report on the huge "disinformation campaign" waged by antiregulatory think tanks against the scientific consensus about the causes of global warming. Mooney explains in the May/June issue of Mother Jones magazine how in a 1977 Wall Street Journal op ed "the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol memorably counseled that 'corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested,' but should serve as a means 'to shape or reshape the climate of public opinion.'"

The success of a propaganda campaign such as Exxon Mobil's depends heavily, of course, on the cooperation - or complicity- of news organizations. Specifically, they must treat the think tanks as if they are independent, neutral, scientifically qualified, even scholarly. Unfortunately, too many news organizations have obliged too often. More bluntly, they have - knowingly and willfully - misled their readers, viewers and listeners time after time, year after year. And to the benefit not just of Exxon Mobil, but also to the satisfaction of other funders of antiregulatory think tanks, such as tobacco companies, pharmaceutical houses, motor-vehicle manufacturers, and foundations funded by corporations and right-wing ideologues.

No matter where think tanks are on the political spectrum, news organizations are duty-bound to signal clearly when funding sources may bias them. Take the Democratic Leadership Council. In December, The Nation reported that "multinationals like Philip Morris, Texaco, Enron and Merck . . . have all, at one point or another, slathered the DLC with cash. Those resources have been used to push a nakedly corporate agenda under the guise of 'centrism' while allowing the DLC to parrot GOP criticism of populist Democrats as far-left extremists." Mainstream news consumers, too, need consistent alerts to such factual connections. My primary case in point is the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute. Between 2000 and 2003, Mooney disclosed, CEI "received a whopping $1,380,000 from Exxon Mobil." Yet CEI is only one of "some 40 Exxon Mobil-funded organizations" - including journalism and race-based and religious groups - "that either have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change or have maintained affiliations with a small group of 'skeptic' scientists who continue to do so."

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/05-2NRsummer/17-19V59N2.pdf

C-SPAN SPINS TO THE RIGHT

STEVE RENDALL, EXTRA - To test C-SPAN's claims of fairness, Extra studied Washington Journal's guest list, tabulating all 663 guests that appeared on the show in the six-month period from November 1, 2004 to April 30, 2005. Guests were classified by gender, ethnicity, party affiliation (if any) and occupation. The study also looked at the think tanks most prominently represented on the show.

Despite C-SPAN's stated goals, Extra's study found Washington Journal skewing rightward, favoring Republican and right-of-center interview subjects by considerable margins over Democratic and left-of-center guests. The study also found that women, people of color and public interest viewpoints were substantially underrepresented.

Overall, people of European ancestry made up 85 percent of Washington Journal's guest list. . . People of African and Asian heritage accounted for 4 percent each, while those of Middle Eastern and Latin American descent represented 3 percent each. No Native Americans were identifiable on the guest list.

On gender, Washington Journal was even more imbalanced when compared to the general population, with a guest list that was 80 percent male.

Republicans accounted for 65 percent of Washington Journal's partisan guests, while Democrats made up 34 percent. No representative of a third party appeared during the study period.

Despite its declaration of balance, the Washington Journal hosted journalists from right-leaning opinion magazines more often than it did those from the left. For instance, the conservative Weekly Standard furnished three guests, as did the like-minded National Review (including National Review Online). Only two guests from the liberal American Prospect were invited on the Journal, and only one guest from the left-leaning Nation.

When opinion journalists from all outlets were included, the right-leaning bias was nearly as strong: 32 right-of-center journalists appeared, vs. 19 left-of-center reporters.

Given this pattern, it's not surprising that right-of-center and centrist think-tanks dominated Washington Journal's 75 think-tank guest slots during the study period. The conservative American Enterprise Institute and the centrist Carnegie Endowment for International Peace were the best-represented think tanks, providing 10 guests each. The centrist Brookings Institution had seven guests, followed by the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, two conservative groups whose experts each appeared five times. Among left-leaning think tanks, only the Center for International Policy provided as many as two guests.

While corporate representatives made up a small group of Washington Journal guests (4 percent), the number of guests who might have provided a balance to corporate views were even less. Union representatives, environmentalists and consumer rights groups accounted for just six guest appearances, or 1 percent of the total.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2764

NOVEMBER 2005

THE BOOK ON BOB WOOWARD

[In a 1996 review, retrieved by Greg Anrig Jr, Joan Didion describes Bob Woodward's reporting as marked by "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."]

JOAN DIDION, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, 1996 - Washington, as rendered by Mr. Woodward, is by definition basically solid, a diorama of decent intentions in which wise if misunderstood and occasionally misled stewards will reliably prevail. Its military chiefs will be pictured, as Colin Powell was in The Commanders, thinking on the eve of war exclusively of their troops, the "kids," the "teenagers": a human story. The clerks of its Supreme Court will be pictured, as the clerks of the Burger court were in The Brethren, offering astute guidance as their justices negotiate the shoals of ideological error: a human story. The more available members of its foreign diplomatic corps will be pictured, as Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan was in The Commanders and in Veil, gaining access to the councils of power not just because they have the oil but because of their "backslapping irreverence," their "directness," their exemplification of "the new breed of ambassador--activist, charming, profane": yet another human story. Its opposing leaders will be pictured, as President Clinton and Senator Dole are in The Choice, finding common ground on the importance of mothers: the ultimate human story. That this crude personalization works to narrow the focus, to circumscribe the range of possible discussion or speculation, is, for the people who find it useful to talk to Mr. Woodward, its point.

What they have in Mr. Woodward is a widely trusted reporter, even an American icon, who can be relied upon to present a Washington in which problematic or questionable matters will be definitively resolved by the discovery, or by the demonstration that there has been no discovery, of "the smoking gun," "the evidence." Should such narrowly-defined "evidence" be found, he can then be relied upon to demonstrate, "fairly," that the only fingerprints on the smoking gun are those of the one bad apple in the barrel, the single rogue agent in the tapestry of decent intentions.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/11/16/141416/18

FIVE PUNDITS WHO HELPED US GET INTO IRAQ

ROMENESKO - Five pundits who should be held responsible for Iraq debacle Broward-Palm Beach New Times Bob Norman lists them:

Thomas Friedman: "He's like a mouse on a sinking ship, running from nook to nook as the water comes to flood his excuses."

Jim Hoagland: "This is sort of the Post's version of Judith Miller, only he gets more leeway because he's an op-ed columnist. . . Hoagland, to his great detriment, forged a too-close, 30-year friendship with Ahmad Chalabi. It obviously skewed the man's logic."

Kingsley Guy: "I put Guy's name here only because he runs the Sun-Sentinel's editorial page, where numerous unsigned and unintelligible commentaries have appeared regarding Iraq."

Nicholas Kristof: "Here's my advice to Mr. Kristof: Stop trying to fly with the hawks. They're smarter and meaner than you are. If you're a dove, be a damned dove."

Jeffrey Goldberg: "I think Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott got it right when he described Goldberg's prose as 'neocon propaganda and scaremongering disseminated under the guise of reporting.'"

http://www.newtimesbpb.com/Issues/2005-12-01/news/norman.html

BEFORE THE INTERNET. . .

We pulled ashore; and as soon as we reached the house, I, as might be supposed, proceeded directly to opening my bundle, and found a reasonable supply of duck, flannel shirts, shoes, etc., and, what was still more valuable, a packet of eleven letters. These I sat up nearly all the night to read, and put them carefully away, to be read and re-read again and again at my leisure. Then came a half a dozen newspapers, the last of which gave notice of Thanksgiving, and of the clearance of "ship Alert, Edward H. Faucon, master, for Callao and California, by Bryant, Sturgis & Co." No one has ever been on distant voyages, and after a long absence received a newspaper from home, who cannot understand the delight that they give one. I read every part of them - the houses to let; things lost or stolen; auction sales, and all. Nothing carries you so entirely to a place, and makes you feel so perfectly at home, as a newspaper. The very name of "Boston Daily Advertiser" sounded hospitably upon the ear. - Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast

LEADING MEDIA CRITIC HELPS BUSH BURY AL JAZEERA BOMBING STORY

MEDIA CHANNEL - Howard Kurtz, America's official media critic, devoted about 20 seconds to the story reported in England about the threat to bomb Al Jazeera. Here's the trivialization as performed by Kurtz and former CBS correspondent turned CNN correspondent Bruce Morton on CNN's Reliable Sources program:

KURTZ: Bruce, this British tabloid report in "The Mirror" relying on one unnamed source that said that the Bush -- that President Bush considered bombing Al-Jazeera's offices but Tony Blair talked him out of it. The White House says us that ludicrous.

Should CNN and lots of newspapers and other news organizes have reported that?

MORTON: I don't know that there is any evidence of that. "The Mirror" -- the British tabloids are famous -- and "The Mirror," to be fair, is not known for reliability. It ain't "The New York Times." You know.

KURTZ: Yet just about everybody picked it up, with the White House denials, of course.

MORTON: I think we could have laid off that probably.

KURTZ: All right.

http://www.mediachannel.org

[The problem with Kurtz's dismissal of the supposedly nonexistent story is that British government has charged two, apparenlty in connection with releasing it.]

CBC, CANADA - Two British men have been charged with leaking a top secret government document to a backbench MP, but no one, not even their lawyers, is being allowed to see what is in the document. Civil servant David Keogh, 49, and former legislative researcher Leo O'Connor, 42, appeared in court on Tuesday to face charges under the Official Secrets Act. . . Many people in Britain know, or think they know, what the secret document is. They believe it's a British government memo on a conversation between U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in April 2004. It is suspected that the document led to a front-page scoop in a London tabloid accusing Bush of apparently raising the possibility of bombing the headquarters in Qatar of Al-Jazeera, the Arabic all-news network. According to the report Blair talked him out of it. . .

The government retaliated with a threat to prosecute under the Official Secrets Act if anything further was published. "The government is very keen to keep this memo under wraps, they don't want to see it published," said Maguire.

http://www.cbc.ca/storyview/MSN/world/national/2005/11/29/aljazeera051129.html

JUAN COLE, SALON - The report kicked off a furor in Europe and the Middle East. It was, predictably, virtually ignored by the American press. It would be premature to claim that the Mirror's report, based on anonymous sources and a document that has not been made public, proves that Bush intended to bomb Al-Jazeera. But the frightening truth is that it is only too possible that the Mirror's report is accurate. Bush and his inner circle, in particular Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had long demonized the channel as "vicious," "inexcusably biased" and abetting terrorists. Considering the administration's no-holds-barred approach to the "war on terror," the closed circle of ideologues that surround Bush, and his own messianic certainty about his divine mission to rid the world of "evil," the idea that he seriously considered bombing what he perceived as a nest of terrorist sympathizers simply cannot be ruled out. Add in the fact that the U.S. military had previously bombed Al-Jazeera's Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq, offices (the U.S. pleaded ignorance in the Kabul case, and claimed the Baghdad bombing was a mistake), and the case becomes stronger still. . .

Ironically, Rumsfeld himself had telegraphed the strategy during an interview in 2001 on . . . Al-Jazeera. On Oct. 16, 2001, Rumsfeld talked to the channel's Washington anchor Hafez Mirazi (who once worked for the Voice of America but left in disgust at the level of censorship he faced there). Although most such interviews are archived at the Department of Defense, this one appears to be absent. Mirazi showed it again on Monday, and it contained a segment in which Rumsfeld defended the targeting of radio stations that supported the Taliban. He made it clear right then that he believed in total war, and made no distinction between civilian and military targets. The radio stations, he said, were part of the Taliban war effort. In fact, Al-Jazeera bears no resemblance to the pro-Taliban radio stations that Rumsfeld defended attacking. . .

Al-Jazeera was founded in the 1990s by disgruntled Arab journalists, many of whom had worked for the BBC Arabic service, though a few came from the Voice of America. The station was a breath of fresh air in the stultified world of Arab news broadcasting, where news producers' idea of an exciting segment is a stationary camera on two Arab leaders sitting ceremonially on a Louis XIV sofa while martial music plays for several minutes. In contrast, Al-Jazeera anchors host live debates that often turn heated, and do not hesitate to ask sharp questions.

Despite the false stereotypes that circulate in the United States among pundits and politicians who have never watched the station, most of Al-Jazeera's programming is not Muslim fundamentalist in orientation. The rhetoric is that of Arab nationalism, and the reporters are only interested in fundamentalism to the extent that it is anti-imperialist in tone. This slant gives many of the programs the musty, antiquated feel of an old Gamal Abdul Nasser speech from the 1960s. In the Arab world, clothes speak to politics. The male anchors and reporters usually sport business suits, and the mostly unveiled women might as well be on the runway of a European fashion show. . .

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/11/30/al_jazeera/

CBS NEWS - Prime Minister Tony Blair said Monday that he had received no information suggesting the United States planned to bomb the al Jazeera television network. . . Lawmaker Adam Price asked Blair in a written parliamentary question made public Monday "what information you received on action that the United States administration proposed to take against the al Jazeera television channel." Blair replied with a one-word answer: "None."

EDWARD M. GOMEZ, SF CHRONICLE - After the British tabloid the Mirror reported this news, gleaned from a leaked top-secret British-government memo, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, warned that anyone who dared to publish the actual contents of the document would be prosecuted under the provisions of the country's long-standing Official Secrets Act. . .

The British weekly the Observer reported: "Government officials suggested Bush's comments were nothing more than a joke...[and] the White House described the allegations as 'unfathomable,' although, according to those who have seen the memo, 'there is no question Bush was serious.' ... [O]ne indisputable fact, though, is that part of the memo -- 10 lines to be precise -- concerns a conversation between Bush and Blair regarding Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite-television station that the U.S. accuses of being a mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda."

After all, "most gallingly" for the Bush administration, Al-Jazeera's "reporters have told a story that Washington either disagrees with or would rather remain untold: that the kind of war America is prosecuting in Iraq is messy and heavy-handed; that civilians are too often the victims, and that the insurgents are not shadowy, sinister figures but ordinary men with more support than politicians would like to acknowledge."

Worth keeping in mind, too, is that, at the time of Bush and Blair's April 2004 meeting, Bush's war making in Iraq wasn't going well and Al-Jazeera was dutifully reporting the bad news that "the Americans were fighting in Falluja against Sunnis backed by foreign fighters linked to the Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," and that "[m]ore than 600 Iraqi civilians were reported to have been killed in the offensive." (Times)

In a radio interview, Lord Goldsmith tried to play down his threat to invoke the Official Secrets Act against anyone who dared to publish the contents of the memo about the April 2004 Bush-Blair powwow. "I wasn't seeking to gag newspapers; what I said to newspapers was you need to take legal advice," Goldsmith told a radio interviewer who accused him "of trying to silence the media for political expediency." . . .

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, a member of Parliament and the publisher of the British magazine the Spectator, wrote in a commentary in the Telegraph: "If someone passes me the document [the leaked government memo] within the next few days, I will be very happy to publish it in The Spectator and risk a jail sentence. The public need to judge for themselves. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we suppress the truth, we forget what we are fighting for, and in an important respect we become as sick and as bad as our enemies."

Or as the headline of a news story about the leaked memo in the Observer put it, referring to Bush's urge to drop bombs: "Why is the world's most powerful man so worried about a TV station?"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/11/29/worldviews.DTL

QUESTIONS THE PROJECT ON EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM WON'T TOUCH

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW: So we'll try to fill the gap. . . .

1. You're an objective Iraqi journalist during the Saddam regime. Under what circumstances, if any, would you stop writing about Saddam with the respect journalists typically accord their government's officials and start writing about him as a criminal and a dictator?

2. You're an objective German journalist during the Hitler regime. Under what circumstances, if any, would you stop writing about Hitler with the implicit respect journalists typically accord their government's officials and start writing about him as a criminal and a dictator?

3. You're an objective American journalist during the Bush regime. Under what circumstances, if any, would you stop writing about Bush with the implicit respect journalists typically accord their government's officials and start writing about him as a criminal and a dictator?

AMERICA'S MEDIA DISINTERESTED IN BUSH PLOT TO BOMB AL JAZEERA

DANNY SCHECHTER MEDIA CHANNEL - Why aren't [media] companies speaking out when other media organizations like Al Jazeera are threatened and attacked? What are they doing to demand independent inquiries into the killings of journalists and media staff? The toll in Iraq now stands at 93, and the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad says the US military poses a bigger threat to newsgathering than the insurgents. . . And where is the ongoing investigation of the recently leaked information about President Bush's alleged desire to bomb Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar? Al Jazeera offices had been attacked before in Afghanistan and Baghdad. One of their journalists has been killed and others jailed. Their staff and some media groups have protested but many media outlets are not following up or expressing outrage. Al Jazeera staffers now have a blog called "Don't bomb Us." One staffer Yousef Al-Shouly writes: "My mother (78 years old) used to tell me before going to work "my son take care", but yesterday she asked me "is it true that they want to bomb your TV station? Don't go to work." . . .

http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/2054
http://dontbomb.blogspot.com/

OCTOBER 2005

NEW TIMES GOBBLES UP THE VILLAGE VOICE

SAM SMITH - When the faux-hip "alternative weeklies" began replacing the underground newspapers of the 1960s and 70s, I wrote that they gave the impression that when the revolution started, the guerillas would come down the mountains on Head skis listening to their Walkmen. Jack Shafer, who was editor of Washington's City Paper before he indentured himself to the laeger corporate media, told me once that CP wasn't a news medium but an advertising medium. By co-opting the concept of "alternative," and eliminating any more radical competitors, these papers did the right a huge service, helping to keep youthful protest at bay while the robber barons took over the land. The Village Voice, victim of the latest takeover, was the role model for a real alternative and for all of us who followed in its wake.

EDITOR & PUBLISHER - When the news broke confirming the New Times/Village Voice merger -- pending Justice Department approval -- many in the alternative press held forth with strong opinions on the deal. The (Seattle) Stranger's Dan Savage bats down the theory, raised in a New York Times article, that the purchase by the New Times may spell trouble for the "anti-establishment" Voice and its siblings. Savage pointed out that the Village Voice's various owners have at one point or another included the following: investment bankers Goldman Sachs, Weisspeck & Greer, and Canadian Imperial; pet-food magnate and billionaire investor Leonard Stern; and the piece de resistance, "right wing whack-job" Rupert Murdoch. "With its purchase by New Times, the VVM chain will be owned by a smaller, more anti-establishment corporation than it has been in years," Savage concluded.

Not so fast, says San Francisco Bay Guardian Editor and Publisher Bruce Brugmann, whose paper first reported on negotiations between the two companies back in May. "This new corporate behemoth is a force in the alternative industry that is larger than any in the mainstream," Brugmann told The Arizona Republic's Judy Nichols, whose article noted that Brugmann has a lawsuit pending against the New Times over predatory pricing in the San Francisco market.

"Alternative to what, Motherfucker?" asks Mick Farren of Los Angeles City Beat, who sends a warning flare that New Times could water-down Village Voice content. "New Times has demonstrated the kind of arrogance that would cause it to gut what editorial integrity the venerable Voice and the advertising-fat L.A. Weekly have left and force them to conform to the formula that failed before," Farren writes.

FIFTY YEARS OF THE VILLAGE VOICE

NAT HENTOFF - I arrived at The Village Voice in 1958 in urgent need of a wide-ranging forum because for years I had been typed by editors as only knowing about jazz. No pay was offered me then, but I was promised that I could write about anything I wanted to. Soon I was immersed in a "newspaper culture" I'd never experienced before. Many of the "assignments" were self-propelled, and the writing had to be in your own voice if you could find it. (This came to be known later as "personal journalism.") Jack Newfield, who first became known through The Village Voice , used to say that co-founder and first editor in chief Dan Wolf "orchestrated the obsessions of his writers." We were indeed a passionately opinionated motley lot. Dan Wolf prided himself on not hiring anyone with experience as a professional journalist. He wanted writers who hadn't been conditioned to the rules and restraints of the conventional press.

There was no party line at the Voice. Dan Wolf hardly ever wrote an editorial. And members of the staff continually differed with one another, not only in the small confines of the office but continually in its pages.

For one of many examples, in 1968, when Albert Shanker, head of the United Federation of Teachers, closed down the entire school system in a fierce dispute with the black leadership of the Ocean Hillâ€“Brownsville school district, there was constant warfare in our pages among the regular writers - and from many contributors on both sides. . .

I was invited to speak at Harvard to the Nieman fellows, highly regarded professional journalists chosen to spend a year in Cambridge, where they could take any courses they wanted. During my talk, a professor auditing the session said to me in exasperation: "What I can't stand about the Voice is that I have no idea of what its editorial policy is. There's no clean line." . . .

Furthermore, back then there was no line between "objective" reporting and being part of the story you were writing about. That was especially true during the Vietnam War, when some of us were active participants in marches, teach-ins, and even civil disobedience. I was in a crowd trying to obstruct an induction center.

One morning, I got a call from a young reporter, one of our best, Don McNeill, who was covering an anti-war demonstration at Grand Central Terminal that the police tried to break up by force, including smashing heads. Our reporter, who had been clubbed, said hurriedly to me on the phone, "Should I put in the story that I've got blood on my shirt, or is that putting myself too much into the story?"

"That's your lead," I told him. I doubt that anyone on the New York Times news desk ever got such a call from a reporter in the field. . .

Not long ago, I saw Rupert Murdoch at a book party for Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News at its New York studios. I reminded Murdoch that I'd once worked for him. He groaned and said, without missing a beat, "Oh, the Voice, the bane of my existence!"

During his regime here, the Voice was, to my knowledge, the only one of his properties that openly and directly criticized him from time to time. At one point, he was so furious at one of our columnists, Alexander Cockburn, that he called the then editor in chief, David Schneiderman, and ordered him to fire Cockburn. Schneiderman did not. Murdoch called him again and threatened, "If you don't fire him, I'll sell the Voice to someone worse than I am!" Schneiderman took the chance.

That was, and is, the spirit of the Voice. And that's why I've stayed here all these years.

JANE JACOBS, 1957 - The best you can say for redevelopment is that, in certain cases, it is the lesser evil. As practiced in New York, it is very painful. It causes catastrophic dislocation and hardship to tens of thousands of citizens. There is growing evidence that it shoots up juvenile-delinquency figures and spreads or intensifies slums in the areas taking the dislocation impact. It destroys, more surely than floods or tornados, immense numbers of small businesses. It is expensive to the taxpayers, federal and local. It is not fulfilling the hope that it would boost the city's tax returns. Quite the contrary.

Furthermore, the results of all this expense and travail look dull and are dull. The great virtue of the city, the thing that helps make up for all its disadvantages, is that it is interesting. It isn't easy to make a chunk of New York boring, but redevelopment does it.

On the other hand here is the Village - an area of the city with the power to attract and hold a real cross-section of the population, including a lot of middle-income families. An area with demonstrated potential for extending and upgrading its fringes. An area that pays more in taxes than it gets back in services. An area that grows theaters all by itself . . . Wouldn't you think the city fathers would want to understand what makes our area successful and learn from it? Or failing such creative curiosity that they would at least cherish it?

MICHAEL HARRINGTON, 1958 - The cherished dogma that renting to Negroes will panic whites and send property values plunging down received a sharp blow from Villagers last week. Whitney North Seymour, Jr., local Republican candidate for the Assembly, broke the story that Edmond Martin, Village realtor, had placed a sign in his office saying that he would not show apartments to Negroes because of his opposition to the Sharkey-Brown-Isaacs law. Within three days 30 of Mr. Martin's tenants signed a statement of fundamental opposition to his stand . . . "As tenants of Edmond Martin, we wish to state that we are opposed to such flouting of the law and to the principle of placing supposed property rights over human rights. Our sense of dignity is not injured by living in the same building with our fellow-men of whatever race, creed, or color, for we welcome that. On the contrary, our sense of dignity is outraged by being forced to live in discriminatory housing."

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the tenant response was its wide support. In the short period that the statement was circulating, some 38 tenants were asked to sign. Only eight turned it down, and of these, only one said that it was because he was actually against Negroes moving in (the others were against signing on principle, or else indifferent).

ALLEN GINSBERG, 1958 - It's all gibberish, everything that has been said. There's not many competent explainers. I'm speaking of the Beat Generation, which after all is quite an Angelic Idea. As to what non-writers, journalists, etc., have made of it, as usual - well, it's their bad poetry not Kerouac's.

Be that as it may, "The Subterraneans" (1953) and "The Dharma Bums" (1958) are sketchy evidence of the prose pilgrimage he's made. The virtue of "The Subterraneans" was that it was, at last, published, completely his own prose, no changes . . .

Jack is very concerned with the rhythm of his sentences, he enjoys that like he enjoys jazz, Bach, Buddhism, or the rhythm in Shakespeare, apropos of whom he oft remarks: "Genius is funny." The combinations of words and the rhythmic variations make masters laugh together (much as the two dopey sages giggling over a Chinese parchment - a picture in the Freer Gallery). All this ties in with the half-century-old struggle for the development of an American prosody to match our own speech and thinking rhythm.

ERIC BLACK, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE - Newspaper readership is down. Fewer young people are picking them up, and the average age of a newspaper reader is now 55, according to a Carnegie Corporation study. Many papers have been losing circulation at alarming rates across all age groups. . . On an average weekday, about 55 million newspapers are sold nationally, down from 63 million in 1985, according to Editor and Publisher magazine.

The decline could be called gradual. But it looks worse if you take into account the failure of newspaper circulation to keep up with population growth. Total daily newspaper circulation as a percentage of all U.S. households ("penetration") has been falling sharply since its all-time high of 123 percent in 1950 to its current 51 percent.

SEPTEMBER 2005

NOMINALLY PUBLIC RADIO: ALL ESTABLISHMENT ALL THE TIME

JEFFREY DVORKIN, NPR OMBUDSMAN - In 1997, only 5 percent of the reports on NPR came from reporters who were based at the member stations. Over the next few years, that rose to 25 percent due to a deliberate collaborative effort of NPR and member station reporters.

But recently, that number has declined again. In the period from Aug. 30, 2004 to Aug. 30, 2005, NPR aired a total of 18,486 reports on the newsmagazine programs. That figure includes all of the news programs but excludes reports heard on NPR hourly newscasts. Only 960 -- or 5.19 percent - of all reports came from member-station reporters over the past year. And that means NPR-station collaboration is back where it was eight years ago. . .

One more issue from last week: the media watchdog group, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), criticized NPR about a report that aired on Morning Edition on Sept. 15. The report, by NPR's Corey Flintoff, referred to an anti-terrorism resolution being debated at the United Nations in light of last summer's bombings in London. The report went on to say that:
"Some extremist groups say those bombings were a response to the U.S. and British military presence in Iraq." Hundred of listeners and supporters of FAIR wrote to object to the phrase "extremist groups" to describe those who oppose the war in Iraq.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4865936

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