CNN is terrible. A God-awful, wall-to-wall, epic mess. And now, they have, in their hands, the clearest sign yet of how bad things have actually gotten. This past April, CNN posted its lowest ratings in 10 years. The New York Times’ Brian Stelter recently noted the slim upside, writing, “people tune in to CNN, the same way they hurry to a hospital when they think they are having a heart attack.” But what news channel does CNN have to tune in to, to learn the gory details of its own longrunning, sad disaster? Good news: we are that news channel.

CNN, of course, has a proud legacy to fall back on, as it is the entity that kicked off the tradition of 24 hour cable news channels in the first place, and its coverage of the first Gulf War demonstrated that it had minted real newsgathering mettle. CNN founder Ted Turner, in a meta-theatrical appearance on Piers Morgan’s show last night, noted that he “wanted CNN to be the New York Times for the news business.” Instead, the network has fallen lower in esteem than the New York Mets, who people actually still watch, on the teevee.

Cue the handwringing! How did this happen, and what’s to be done next? Well, if you listen to the people who run CNN, you will learn that they think April’s ratings low “isn’t much of a problem,” and what needs to happen now is that management needs “to come up with a plan to restore momentum.”

Full Story Here: CNN Is Terrible. Here’s Why..

Once a promising young magazine writer, the bow-tied Daily Caller pundit has come to epitomize right-wing hackdom

In many ways Tucker Carlson’s a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following. Glenn Beck started as a no-account shock jock and is now a no-account Internet show host. Breitbart at least went from Drudge lackey to successful right-wing media mogul. Carlson, though, began his career in the most respectable fashion possible and has spent the ensuing decades gradually lowering himself into the gutter. His story illustrates why we can’t have a responsible or at least slightly less hysterical conservative media.

The Daily Caller, the site he launched with a promise to offer a new model for conservative journalism, is primarily a catalog of sleazy traffic-baiting aggregated Web garbage (“Top 10: Most beautiful ‘most beautiful’ women [SLIDESHOW]“), ancient relics of online commentary with nowhere else left to publish (Ann Coulter, Mickey Kaus), and overblown scandal-mongering headlines that promise much more than they can deliver. In other words it is like a mean-spirited parody of a conservative version of the pre-AOL Huffington Post, with a healthy dose, recently, of attention-grabbing race baiting. This is not the sort of thing Carlson used to be known for.

Full Story Here: Tucker Carlson’s downward spiral – Salon.com.

The PEJ study, which examined coverage from the period between Jan 2 and April 15, found that “Obama’s negative coverage exceeded positive coverage in 14 or 15 weeks studied, while positive coverage outweighed negative coverage for Romney in six of the 15 weeks and was fairly evenly divided in four more.”

While former House Speaker Newt Gingrich often railed against the “elite media” and former Sen. Rick Santorum famously called out a New York Times reporter, Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, generally steered clear of media bashing. But as he pivots to the general election, Romney has begun taking jabs likely to play well with the Republican faithful.

Full Story Here: Mitt Romney Alleges Media Bias, As Study Finds He Receives More Positive Coverage Than Obama.

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how the media giants who own your local commercial television and radio stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at an FCC proposal that would shed a light on who’s buying our elections. The proposed new rule would make it easier to find out who’s bankrolling political attack ads by posting the information online.

The stations already have the data and are required by law to make it public to anyone who asks. But you can get only it by going to the station and asking for the actual paper documents – what’s known as “the public file.” Stations don’t want to put it online because — you guessed it — that would make it too easy for you to find out who’s putting up the cash for all those ads polluting your hometown airwaves.

If approved, the new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available on line immediately. Other stations would have a two-year grace period.

In the meantime, the mighty giants of broadcasting have been fighting back. A number of senators serving the industry have spoken up against the proposal and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) — led by their top lobbyist and president, the frozen food millionaire and former Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith – have been meeting with commissioners urging them to scuttle its proposal or at least water it down until it means nothing.

Full Story Here: I’m Big Bird and I Don’t Approve This Message | Common Dreams.

But now many of the country’s biggest media companies, which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations, are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.

The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism — NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and dozens of local TV news outlets — are lobbying against a Federal Communications Commission measure that would require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Internet.

Full Story Here: Meet the Media Companies Lobbying Against Transparency – ProPublica.

FAIR’s magazine, Extra! tracked the breakdown of guests featured in one-on-one interviews and roundtable discussions on the four main Sunday morning talk shows, ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’s “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday” from June 2011 to March 2012. The results skewed heavily Republican, white and male, with only token representation by blacks and Latinos, and virtually no appearances by guests outside of one of the two national political parties.

Extra! points to November 6 of 2011 as typical of the ideological breakdown of the Sunday shows. CBS’s Bob Schieffer welcomed “a cross section of Republicans” to discuss the issues facing the primary that week. On ABC’s “This Week,” lone liberal Arianna Huffington was featured alongside conservatives Matthew Dowd, George Will and Niall Ferguson. “Meet the Press” featured Republican operative Alex Castellanos with Wall Street Journal conservative scribe Kimberly Strassel alongside a pair of middle-of-the-road Beltway journalists.

Full Story Here: Study: GOP guests dominate Sunday morning talk shows | The Raw Story.

After Current TV fired Keith Olbermann last week, the combative host vowed he’d sue his (most recent) former network. Olbermann and his lawyers filed suit in California yesterday, and their allegations make for quite the read. Olbermann’s complaints with his former employer range from the social to the technical. Here are the ten most serious—and funniest—charges Olbermann makes against Current TV and its executives in the order they appear in the lawsuit:

1. Current co-founder Joel Hyatt was kind of socially awkward: A thread running through Olbermann’s lawsuit is that Current tried to distance him from his representation, sometimes to disadvantage him in negotiations. But in this case, Olbermann makes a more personal allegation, that “Hyatt also attempted to isolate Olbermann from his professional representatives in an awkward attempt to form a close personal friendship with his new star.”

Full Story Here: Tell Me What You Really Think: The Ten Best Revelations of Keith Olbermann’s Lawsuit Against Current TV | ThinkProgress.

These days, there’s one political point on which one can usually get consensus: Mainstream journalists are failing. In common parlance, most everyone “hates the media.” But there is little agreement on why journalism might be inadequate to the task of engaging the public in a democratic society. More than ever, it’s important to understand the forces that constrain good journalism.

In “Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era,” editors Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks look back to the press criticism of the Progressive Era for help in that project. In the material they’ve collected and analyzed, we can see how the problems of a corporate-commercial media system go back more than a century.

Full Story Here: The Corporate Media Crisis: Everything Old Is New Again.

Over the years we’ve been reporting on how power is monopolized by the powerful. How corporate lobbyists, for example, far outnumber members of Congress. And how the politicians are so eager to do the bidding of donors that they allow those lobbyists to dictate the law of the land and make a farce of democracy. What we have is much closer to plutocracy, where the massive concentration of wealth at the top is protects and perpetuates itself by controlling the ends and means of politics. This is why so many of us despair over fixing what’s wrong: we elect representatives to change things, and once in office they wind up serving the deep-pocketed donors who put up the money to keep change from happening at all.

Here’s the latest case in point. The airwaves belong to all of us, right? They’re part of “the commons” that in theory no private interest should be able to buy or control. Nonetheless, government long ago allowed television and radio stations to use the airwaves for commercial purposes, and the advertising revenues have made those companies fabulously rich. But part of the deal was that in return for the privilege of reaping a fortune they would respect the public interest in a variety of ways, including covering the local news important to our communities. If they didn’t, they would be denied their license to use the airwaves at all.

Full Story Here: Let’s Stop Big Media’s (B)AD Behavior | Common Dreams.

 by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship :-:

Neither of us is old enough to have been fooled by the Trojan Horse (see Wikipedia). But we each have been working in public television decades enough to remember the days when distribution was handled by physically transporting bulky 2-inch videotapes from station to station — “bicycled” was the word — and much of the broadcast day and night was devoted to blackboard lectures, string quartets and lessons in Japanese brush painting: The old educational television versions of reality TV.

Yet it also was a time of innovation and creativity. As the system evolved we saw bold experiments like PBL — the Public Broadcasting Laboratory and Al Perlmutter’s The Great American Dream Machine, each a predecessor to the commercial TV magazine shows 60 Minutes and 20/20.  The TV Lab, jointly run by David Loxton at WNET in New York and Fred Barzyk at WGBH in Boston, nurtured and encouraged the first generation of video artists — Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and William Wegman among others — and the early documentary work of such video pioneers as Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno of the Downtown Community Television Center, Alan and Susan Raymond, and the wild and woolly, guerrilla camera crews of TVTV.

Full Story Here: To PBS, with (Tough) Love | Common Dreams.

The existence of the memo was first reported over the weekend by Radio-info.com, an industry newsletter. Radio-info did not publish the full list of companies. The memo was posted website of the Traffic Directors Guild of America, an association of professionals who distribute paid advertisements to radio stations. It was quickly deleted but ThinkProgress obtained a copy from a Google snapshot of the site taken on March 9.

Previously, ThinkProgress has reported that 50 companies requested their advertising be pulled from the Rush Limbaugh show following his sexist attacks on Sandra Fluke. The publication of the memo adds an additional 91 companies to the list of companies that have dropped Limbaugh:

Full Story Here: EXCLUSIVE: 141 Companies Drop Advertising From Rush Limbaugh.

When it comes to advertisers avoiding controversial shows, it’s not just Rush From today’s TRI Newsletter: Premiere Networks is circulating a list of 98 advertisers who want to avoid “environments likely to stir negative sentiments.” The list includes carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm) and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway). As you’ll see in the note below, those “environments” go beyond the Rush Limbaugh show

“To all Traffic Managers: The information below applies to your Premiere Radio Networks commercial inventory…They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).’

This helps explain why, on Rush Limbaugh’s flagship station WABC, almost of the commercial breaks were filled with unpaid pubic service announcements. You can check out the list of the 50 advertisers who were known to have dropped Limbaugh before this report here.

Full Story Here: BREAKING: 98 Major Advertisers Dump Rush Limbaugh, Other Right-Wing Hosts | ThinkProgress.

Ninety-eight major advertisers—including Ford and Geico—will no longer air spots on Premiere Networks’ ‘offensive’ programs. Insiders say the loss will rock right-wing talk radio.

Full Story Here: Rush Limbaugh Scandal Proves Contagious for Talk-Radio Advertisers – The Daily Beast.

Martin Bashir tore into Representative Joe Walsh on Tuesday, condemning the congressman for his failure to pay over $100,000 in back child support in a live interview.

The MSNBC host was interviewing Walsh in the lead-up to President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Bashir suggested that Walsh had been “somewhat disrespectful” for his refusal to attend Obama’s jobs speech in September, and quizzed him on his support on Newt Gingrich’s plan for zero tax on capital gains.

Then, Bashir abruptly shone the light on a sore subject for the congressman. “One of the things you’ve repeatedly said is that you will not place another dollar on the backs of your children,” Bashir said. “Haven’t you already done that by inadequately paying child support that you owe to your wife and children?”

Full Story Here: Martin Bashir Tears Into Rep. Joe Walsh For Owing Back Child Support (VIDEO).

So, the Israelis have suddenly become aware of the social problems provoked by the rise of state-coddled authoritarian fundamentalists in their midst?

Funny, my friends and contacts from Israel have been talking obsessively about the problem for over 15 years, with many of them predicting quite openly during all of this period that, if left unchecked, the rise of the haredim will eventually lead to the destruction of any remaining semblance of democracy within their society.

Full Story Here: More Intellectual Dishonesty at the New York Times | Common Dreams.

In an article attributed to Steven Erlanger on January 4 (“Europe Takes Bold Step Toward a Ban on Iranian Oil “), this paragraph appeared:

The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign. [my emphasis]

The claim that there is “a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective” is a lie.

Full Story Here: Judy Miller Alert! The New York Times is Lying About Iran’s Nuclear Program | Common Dreams.

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday in Houston. He was 62. The legendary writer was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010.

His death was announced by Vanity Fair.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England in 1949. His father, Ernest, a commander in the British Royal Navy, and his mother, Yvonne, a bookkeeper, scrimped and saved so that he could attend the independent Leys School in Cambridge, and later Balliol College, Oxford. They were determined that he would receive a top-notch education and join the upper class, The Guardian reported.

During his time at university, Hitchens studied philosophy, politics and economics, but the more he learned, the angrier he became. Hitchens’ disgust with racism and opposition to the Vietnam War led him to the political left. He would eventually join the International Socialists, a faction of the anti-Stalinist left, and participate in political protests against the war.

Full Story Here: Christopher Hitchens Dead: Legendary Writer Dies At 62.

Rachel Maddow and Frank Rich discussed what they called the most important part of the Republican race for president on Maddow’s Thursday show: the so-called “Murdoch primary.”

Maddow began by noting the power that Rupert Murdoch wields through his media outlets — beginning in Britain, where evidence of the blunt force of his newspapers is everywhere, and continuing in America through Fox News and papers like the Wall Street Journal.

Fox News, she said, had adopted the canny strategy of telling its viewers “not to trust anybody else” and to “deride and essentially wage war on all other media sources.” She also echoed the feelings of many others by saying that Murdoch and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes are as much active participants in Republican politics as they are observers of them — and that they are more than willing to use the influence of their network to shape electoral outcomes.

Full Story Here: Rachel Maddow, Frank Rich Dissect Fox News, ‘Murdoch Primary’ (VIDEO).

There was another big story — the brazen dishonesty of former frontrunner Mitt Romney — that received a lot less attention from the media. Instead of obsessing over whether an element of humanity might disqualify Gingrich with some Iowa voters, the media would be better served focusing on whether out-and-out lying should disqualify Romney with all voters.

The lie is found in Romney’s first television ad, run last week in New Hampshire. The ad shows President Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” What the ad doesn’t tell you is that this was from 2008 — and that Obama was quoting an aide to John McCain at the time. Here is the full Obama quote: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’” (The full speech can be found here.)

Full Story Here: Arianna Huffington: Mitt Romney Brazenly Lies and the Media Lets Him Slide.

We can’t make this stuff up. It kind of says it all…

Full Story Here: And Some Wonder Why Americans Are So Dumbed Down? | Common Dreams.

Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don’t watch any news, according to a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

The poll surveyed New Jersey residents about the uprisings in Egypt and the Middle East, and where they get their news sources. The study, which controlled for demographic factors like education and partisanship, found that “people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government” and “6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government” compared to those who watch no news.

Overall, 53% of all respondents knew that Egyptians successfully overthrew Hosni Mubarak and 48% knew that Syrians have yet to overthrow their government.

Full Story Here: Fox News Viewers Know Less Than People Who Don’t Watch Any News: Study.

Olbermann has been a devoted supporter of the Occupy movement, so it was not surprising that he took issue with Bloomberg’s decision to clear the encampment in Lower Manhattan, arresting hundreds in the process. He went further, though, placing Bloomberg in a long line of people whose “limitless stupidity,” as he put it, had only served to hand victories to protest movements. He included on this list Joseph McCarthy, former Chicago mayor Richard Daley and former Alabama governor George Wallace, and he compared the raids to the violence against civil rights protesters in Selma in 1965 and to the Kent State and Jackson State massacres. None of those officials, he said, “ever understood that suppression…always creates the opposite of the effects desired.”

But Olbermann wasn’t finished. He went on to call Bloomberg a “cliché,” an “archetype,” a “cartoon” and a “putz,” and labelled him the “most irreplaceable man” to the Occupy protesters. The mayor’s raid, he said, had taken a movement that was “beginning to grow a little stale” and made it relevant again. “No such a living and breathing embodiment of all that is wrong and all that is stupid in the establishment of this country could be ordered up from fiction,” he said.

Full Story Here: Keith Olbermann Condemns Michael Bloomberg, Occupy Wall Street Raid (VIDEO).

In this column, he says the media is having difficulty figuring out how to cover Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots.

What are the themes? How should The New York Times cover this movement that resembles no other in memory?

Certainly, media organizations are intrinsically better able to cover snapshot moments like official actions and pronouncements than movements or complex and subtly if rapidly evolving situations—like climate change, or Occupy.

Full Story Here: Corporate Media Stumped on How to Cover the Occupy Movement | Truthout.

Another day, another Fox News attempt to smear the Occupy Wall Street movement. This time they’ve resurrected their favorite bogeyman, ACORN.

Another day, another Fox News attempt to smear the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Fox News has been feverishly trying to dampen the viral growth of OWS ever since the movement sprouted in a park in Lower Manhattan about a month ago. Fox’s overt hostility is in sharp contrast to the love affair they had with the Tea Party. Now Fox is slandering decent and passionate protesters as communists, whining about class war, comparing them to hippies, accusing them of violence, and associating them with Nazis. All of these attacks have collapsed from the weight of their own dishonesty, and support continues to grow for the movement. But does that stop Fox News?

Of course not. Their determination to crush this populist uprising is fueled by a cabal of bitter elitists with deep pockets. Rupert Murdoch’s pals on Wall Street have no intention of sitting still while they are asked to be accountable for their chicanery. So yesterday Fox’s Megyn Kelly featured a story based on an article at FoxNews.com with a provocative headline: EXCLUSIVE: Ex-ACORN Operatives Behind the Scene of “Occupy” Protests.

Full Story Here: How the Bitter Elitists at Fox News Keep Trying — And Failing — to Dampen Support for Occupy Wall Street | Media | AlterNet.

“I mean he’s intellectually ridiculous,” said writer and TV host Touré. “The real problem is that he’s hijacking the process for his brand …to sell some books, to maybe get a job on Fox.”

As sharp as their criticism was of Cain’s lack of erudition, their criticism of his supporters was greater.

Full Story Here: Maher: GOP debates are ‘the roach motel’ of the Republican primaries | The Raw Story.

“(Fox) are currently asking our customers to pay 40 percent more for the exact same Fox channels that they already receive and that is simply unfair and unwarranted,” DirecTV said in a statement.

Fox said in a statement that the company had proposed to keep the Fox Networks on DirecTV for the same price and on the same terms while an agreement is worked out.

Full Story Here: DirecTV may pull plug on Fox shows | The Raw Story.

Part of the reason economic policymakers have failed to properly address the poor economy is because the nation’s news media has not properly covered the unemployment crisis. For example, at the beginning of August, when Washington, DC was debating the debt ceiling crisis, the national debt dominated the airwaves. While it was appropriate for the media then to be covering the deficit due to the debt ceiling debate at the time, there was a stunning lack of coverage of the jobs crisis. A ThinkProgress review of the media coverage of the last week of July found that the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and “unemployed” was only mentioned 75 times:

Full Story Here: CHART: Thanks To The 99 Percent Movement, Media Finally Covering Jobs Crisis And Marginalizing Deficit Hysteria | ThinkProgress.

Pew found that Mr. Obama was the subject of negative assessments nearly four times as often as he was the subject of positive assessments. It found he received “positive” coverage nine percent of the time, “neutral” coverage 57 percent of the time and “negative” coverage 34 percent of the time.

The study, which was conducted using a combination of “traditional media research methods [and] computer algorithms to track the level and tone of coverage,” cuts against the widespread conservative claim that the “liberal media” aides Mr. Obama and other Democrats while attacking Republicans.

Full Story Here: Study finds harsh media coverage for Obama – Political Hotsheet – CBS News.

One of the top executives at the European branch of the Wall Street Journal, the flagship newspaper at Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation, has resigned amid a growing scandal that has called into question the paper’s journalistic ethics and jeopardized its reputation. Adding to the scandals News Corp. is already facing in Europe — alleged phone hacking, bribing of public officials — and a potential criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, the Guardian reported today that Andrew Langhoff, the European director of Dow Jones and Co. (the subsidiary of News Corp. that owns the Journal), oversaw a massive scam that artificially inflated the circulation numbers in Europe in order to avoid losing investors, readers, and advertisers.

The scam was organized in London and focused on the paper’s European edition, and even when top executives in New York were alerted, they failed to do anything about it, the Guardian reports:

The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the Journal’s true circulation.

Full Story Here: Wall Street Journal Executive Resigns Over Yet Another News Corp. Scandal | ThinkProgress.

Shareholder service advises ousting Rupert Murdoch, two sons and 10 other directors from NewsCorp board

The shareholder-led campaign for an overhaul of Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corporation is gathering momentum, with a call from the advisers Institutional Shareholder Services for 13 of the company’s 15 directors to be voted off the board.

ISS, whose 1,700 clients include pension funds, trade union funds and asset managers in the United States and around the world, issued a condemnation of the media conglomerate’s executive and independent directors on Monday.

It said the phone hacking scandal had “laid bare a striking lack of stewardship and failure of independence by a board whose inability to set a strong tone-at-the-top about unethical business practices has now resulted in enormous costs – financial, legal, regulatory, reputational and opportunity – for the shareholders the board ostensibly serves.”

Full Story Here: Campaign grows to oust Murdoch | Media | The Guardian.

“The don’t really have a coherent message,” Maher noted, with P.J. O’Rourke laughing beside him through an Occupy Wall Street bashing session about how useless their bongo drums are and how they don’t have bathrooms (that latter complaint from panelist Nicolle Wallace, who noted that it was “the logistics of the protest that bother me”). Maher, on his end, was just dismayed at the lack of marketing ability– “the Teabaggers named themselves after a gay sex act,” he joked, “but at least that was catchy.”

Full Story Here: Bill Maher Occupy Wall Street | Alan Grayson Video | Mediaite.

Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Full Story Here: Bill Maher – The Word For Republicans These Days Is… – YouTube.

O’Donnell, who had first banned Walsh from his show in July, noted Thursday that a Cook County judge had ruled against the congressman after he didn’t even bother to show up for his child support hearing this week.

“Congressman Walsh’s spokesman tried to pretend to us that the Congressman just had to be in Washington yesterday, for all the important work of a freshman congressman who is not taken seriously by anyone on Capitol Hill,” O’Donnell explained. “The Congressman’s only official act yesterday to vote. And he was called upon to do that only once. The Republican bill passed the house 232 to 186. Everyone knew ahead of time that Congressman Walsh’s vote wasn’t going to matter.”

Full Story Here: Lawrence O’Donnell extends ban on deadbeat dad Joe Walsh | Raw Replay.

A series of right-wing-initiated violent actions in the U.S., including bombings, plans for bombings, and assassinations, have not gotten the attention they deserve.

It was a little over a month ago that the Norwegian Islamophobic Christian fundamentalist Anders Behring Breivik, wreaked havoc in Norway, killing 77 and injuring many more, and more than seven months since a bomb planted along the route of a march honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was discovered.

After the initial flurry of reportage, analysis, commentary and punditry, for all intents and purposes the Breivik story has disappeared into the ether that is the American mainstream media.

Maybe it is thus because it happened in far off Norway, maybe it is because our attention span is disastrously truncated, maybe it is because – like in so many of these cases — he has been too easily dismissed as a madman acting alone.

Perhaps, too, the connective tissue between Breivik and homegrown Islamophobes is too hot to handle.

Interrupting the ‘March of Time’

Full Story Here: Why Are the Corporate Media In Denial About the Right-Wing Terrorist Threat? | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet.

Keith Olbermann excoriated President Obama on his Friday show for halting the impending toughening of environmental regulations against smog.

The announcement from the White House that it would keep widely criticized 2006 regulations in place until at least 2013 did not sit well with Olbermann. In the voiceover introduction to his show, he thundered, “what the hell is going on in the White House?”

Olbermann said that Obama had given a huge gift to polluters and corporations, and had delivered an equally large “whack across the knees” to his base.

“It seems, in short, to reduce his campaign logic to ‘what are you going to do, vote for Rick Perry?’” Olbermann said. He noted that Obama’s EPA administrator had called the 2006 standards “not legally defensible,” and scoffed at the president’s stated excuse for not updating them — that, since the standards were going to be reviewed in 2013, he did not want to ask states and businesses to undergo two rounds of tinkering with their environmental policies.

Full Story Here: Olbermann Excoriates Obama’s Reversal On Smog Regulation (VIDEO).

Olbermann noted that while Bush refers to 9/11 as a “monumental” and “significant” event but he never uses word like “tragic” or “sad.” Moulitsas suggested that the reason Bush did not describe the attacks as “tragic” is because he and his party did not view the attack as a tragedy but rather as an opportunity to install a more authoritarian regime inside the government.

The Bush interview and the release of Dick Cheney’s memoir were strategically timed to come out around the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks next month.

Full Story Here: National Geographic Trashes Its Brand with Bush ‘Infomercial’ on 9/11.

Journalist Bill Moyers retired from weekly TV a year ago but now says he plans to return.

He said Monday he’ll be back in January with an hourlong interview show called Moyers & Company.

He says the new weekly show will not be carried by PBS, the home for much of his past programming. It will be distributed to public TV stations by American Public Television.

He recently hosted PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal. That concluded in April 2010.

The 77-year-old Moyers said his upcoming show will feature interviews with diverse voices and the goal of contributing “to the conversation of democracy.”

Moyers once worked in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. He was also a commentator for CBS News and NBC News.

Full Story Here: Bill Moyers returning to weekly TV in January – USATODAY.com.

OPS; Great news for America. Great news for Democracy

Now in its fourth year, “The Thom Hartmann Show” ranked eighth on a talk-radio publication list, making him the most influential progressive voice on radio.

Thom Hartmann now hosts one of the most successful talk-shows — of any political stripe — in the United States.

For the fourth consecutive year, his internationally syndicated “The Thom Hartmann Show” is on the “Heavy Hundred” list in Talkers, a talk-radio industry publication. This year, though, it ranked eighth, which makes Hartmann the most influential progressive voice on the radio, ahead of such personalities as Stephanie Miller, Neal Boortz and Ed Schultz, who is now host of an MSNBC show.

No surprise, since Hartmann reaches close to three million listeners each week on radio alone. A TV version of his radio show reaches another 55 million homes worldwide. Not bad for a show that started at the Hartmanns’ dining room table in Montpelier, Vermont.

“We launched the show because we thought it was possible,” Hartmann told “Fair Game” recently, crediting his wife, Louise Hartmann, for the program’s success. The couple co-owns the show, which is a rarity in talk radio these days. Big-time talkers such as Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are hired guns for syndicated radio networks such as Premiere and Clear Channel. They don’t have to sell ads, or worry about the day-to-day finances; their sole job is to attract listeners.

Full Story Here: Is Thom Hartmann the Progressive Answer to Conservative Dominance of Talk-Radio? | | AlterNet.

Now, two summers later, when it’s the liberals who are showing up at Republican House members’ town halls, not a single clip from one of these outbursts has been shown on either of the two legitimate cable news networks or treated as a top story by a news magazine or major newspaper.

But that doesn’t mean the outbursts are not happening. The Hill newspaper reports on several of these incidents, none of which has made it into the national news:

Full Story Here: ‘Liberal Media’ Ignoring Liberal Outrage at Republican Congressional Town Halls.

With a lull in ratings since November, Rush Limbaugh had a 3.0 share of listeners for his radio time slot, which is a 33% slide from October and from last April, reports Crain’s Business.

Meanwhile, The Sean Hannity Show was reported to be down 28% from its peak numbers in the fall.

Interestingly, numbers for Don Imus’ Imus in the Morning were said to be up year over year.

Full Story Here: Rush Limbaugh’s Ratings Have Fallen 30% In The Last Six Months.

OPS: Reichwing anti-American and anti-democracy insanity seems to be dying

Every four years, just as a presidential campaign kicks up, legions of media types who make their living outside the right-wing echo chamber emerge as a militia of Margaret Meads, descending on flyover country, trying to make sense of that exotic phenomenon, the religious right. In the end, those who actually get it are few.

From the attitudes shown by media toward the religious right, you’d never know that more than one-quarter of the U.S. population identify as evangelicals, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and among white self-identified evangelicals, 62 percent told Pew in 2006 that they believe the Bible to be the literal word of God.

These, by and large, are the people who determine the outcome of the Republican presidential primary, thanks to the early stacking of states heavily populated by evangelicals, and the propensity of most evangelicals to align with the Republican Party. And yet, we who cover these races often know very little about the voters whose person-on-the-street interviews they’re recording, except to know that these people are very different from us in their view of the world. So as everyday doctrines come to light in one or another campaign incident, the media either find themselves aghast at the implications, or simply choose to ignore them.

Full Story Here: Why the Mainstream Media Are Clueless About the Religious Right | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet.

That’s what happened on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday (8/8/11), when Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) was interviewed by Steve Inskeep about, among other things, the entitlement burden.

Read what happened–or listen to the excerpt below:

INSKEEP: Congressman, if I can, we’ve just got a few seconds. You have mentioned defense spending. You’ve mentioned tax increases. Those are two areas of disagreement. The biggest part of the federal budget is entitlements…

FRANK: No, wrong. I’m sorry. The Defense budget is bigger than Medicare, and Social Security is, in fact, self-financing, still is.

INSKEEP: Let’s stipulate for this conversation: a very, very, very, very, very big part of the budget is entitlements. Democrats are seen as resisting cuts. Is your side–in a couple of seconds–going to appoint people to the special committee who are ready to make a deal?

Full Story Here: FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » Barney Frank Questions the Questions at NPR.

Have you seen, anywhere, in any media, or even heard reported or repeated on NPR, the following sentence?

“We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.”

It’s right there on Page 4 of the official Standard & Poor’s “Research Update” — the actual report on what they did and why — published on August 5th as the explanation for why they believe Congress — and even the Gang of Twelve — will be unable to actually deal with the US debt crisis. Perhaps it’s just lazy — the bullet points at the beginning of the report don’t mention the Republicans or taxes, but instead just say, for example (part of one of six quick bullet-points):

“[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges”

Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Article: S&P Blames Republicans, MSM Fails to Report It.

“We are becoming the agents of perspective,” he said. “This generation is burning the mass media to the ground.”

Assange continued: “We are reclaiming our rights to world history. We are ripping open secret archives from Washington to Cairo. We don’t know yet exactly where we are. But we can see where we are going. The change in perspective that has happened over the last year is what this generation is going to use to find our lighthouse.”

“And when we get there, we’ll turn the fucking spotlight on.”

Watch this video, uploaded to YouTube July 28, 2011.

Full Story Here: Assange speaks about ‘burning mass media to the ground’ | Raw Replay.

Cenk Uygur escaped this week with his soul and his scalp from MSNBC. One way of celebrating may be to take a sledge hammer to your television. Just a thought.

I so wanted to dig into an angry blog about MSNBC, its false-left propagandizing of the Trojan Horse for oligarchs, Obama, its demonizing of only half of the Congressional rabid rat bastard criminal political class in Washington, and its attempt to neuter Cenk of his search for and assertion of truth to power.

But, alas, I had totally stopped watching MSNBC when Rachel Maddow so heartbreakingly jumped the shark a serious while ago by becoming head cheerleader, part time sycophant, for Obama.

Full Story Here: Cenk Uygur Says No Thank You to Insider Cronyism and MSNBC’s ‘Manufacture of Consent’ | Corrente.

Perhaps the most dangerous monopoly there is…is a media monopoly. Today – the UK is finding that lesson out the hard way. And it’s a lesson we here in America need to take note of – because we’re headed down the same road. Let’s start with Italy though – a place where the power of a media monopoly is on display for the entire world to see with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi started out as a cruise boat lounge singer and small-time hustler. But then he bought a newspaper, then a small television station – and then a radio station – then another TV station – then a newspaper – then another radio station – then another TV station – then another newspaper – then a radio network – then a TV network – and suddenly Berlusconi ended up owning about 95 percent of the media seen in Italy. And with control of the information in Italy – Berlusconi jumped into politics and wouldn’t you know it – he ended up being the Prime Minister of Italy. And despite the fact that Berlusconi has since been accused of everything from tax fraud – to false accounting – to corruption – to bribery – to perjury – to mafia collusion – to aiding terrorist organization – and most recently to participating in sex parties with underage prostitutes – Berlusconi is still in power as Prime Minister. He’s the one of the most corrupt politicians in the world – and has overseen Italy’s freedom of the press downgraded from “free” like the rest of Europe and the developed world – to only “partly-free.” Italy is only one of two nations in the Western world that doesn’t have a free press.

But Berlusconi is still in power…why? Because he owns the media. And the main difference between Silvio Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch – is Murdoch isn’t interested in being a politician.

Full Story Here: ‪Thom Hartmann: The Cancer of Infotainment & Murdoch Pseudo-news‬‏ – YouTube.

“The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced. ‘CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,’ Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff” – BBC, April 9, 2009

Earlier this week, the truly intrepid investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill published in The Nation one of the most significant political exposés of the year.  Entitled “the CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia,” the article documented that the CIA uses and effectively controls a secret prison in Mogadishu, where foreign nationals who are rendered off the streets of their countries (at the direction of the U.S.) are taken (along with Somali nationals) to be imprisoned with no due process and interrogated (by U.S. agents).  Although Somali government agents technically operate the facility, that is an obvious ruse: ”US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners” and are “there full-time,” Scahill reported.  On Democracy Now on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it has no knowledge of this secret prison.

This arrangement, as Scahill told me yesterday, is consistent with standard Obama administration practice: ”they continue even the most controversial Bush terrorism policies by having some other government technically operate it so they can keep their fingerprints off it.”  Indeed, the administration has even resorted to this playbook by using “torture by proxy” — as we saw when the Kuwait government, with at least the complicity if not direction of the U.S., detained and beat American teenager Gulet Mohamed during interrogation sessions.  Just yesterday, a federal judge “reacted skeptically” to the Obama DOJ’s demands for dismissal of a lawsuit (on secrecy grounds) brought by an American citizen imprisoned for four months in Africa, where “U.S. officials threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm unless he confessed to ties with al-Qaida in Somalia.”

Full Story Here: How the U.S. government uses its media servants to attack real journalism – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

Trotta was playfully quoting Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi and Ezra Klein, but she didn’t refute the fact that Palin and Bachmann have each had their share of flubs, between Palin’s Revere gaffe and Bachmann’s insistence that John Quincy Adams is a founding father, among others.

Watch the clip below, originally aired July 2, 2011, embedded via Miediaite.

Video at link below:

Full Story Here: Fox commentator: Bachmann and Palin took history at ‘Fleabag U’ | Raw Replay.

It’s about to be broken by the king of bombast, the progressive’s primary provocateur, the Left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, the Public Enemy No. 1 of Fox News, now scolding from a new venue:

Keith Olbermann returns to the air at 6 p.m. Monday locally on Current TV.

He can be expected to uncork five months’ of bottled up commentary and articulate-to-the-point-of-poetic trash talk. Prepare for big noise on a little network.

Full Story Here: Ostrow: Keith Olbermann returns with a new show on Current TV – The Denver Post.

 

Still not sure where to find Keith?

All dressed up for Monday and not sure which channel to dial up? Our new Channel Finder makes it easy. Click below and enter your zip code to find Current TV in your area.  

LEARN MORE

Bill Maher – New Rules – 6/17 » Politics Plus.

There have been rumors of House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) having affairs for years, according to the Current host.

“You know what’s next, right?” Olbermann asked Fallon. “Something with John Boehner. Boehner. B-O-E-H-N-E-R. You know what his nickname is? Is — is ‘boner.’ He answers to that.”

“All sorts of rumors about him too,” the liberal host continued. “Oh, yes. For a long time.”

“It was sort of a perfect storm,” Olbermann said of the Weiner scandal. “Democrats don’t support their own in these situations. Republicans love to be on the right side of a scandal like this, because it doesn’t happen that often. And you get the media, and particularly the political media, most of whom are morons. So you give them something that they can actually understand — a penis.”

After Olbermann had digressed to observe that there were also “all sorts of rumors about” Speaker of the House John Boehner, Fallon brought the conversation back to Weiner. “I’ve got a nine o’clock show that I’m probably going to hire somebody for,” Olbermann responded thoughtfully. “Eliot Spitzer’s doing okay on CNN,” he added, referring to the former governor of New York who was forced to resign after a prostitution scandal.

Full Story Here: Olbermann hints he could hire Weiner for Current TV | Raw Replay.

The just-released Arbitron report reveals that a lot less people are listening to right-wing talk radio.

With a lull in ratings since November, Rush Limbaugh had a 3.0 share of listeners for his radio time slot, which is a 33% slide from October and from last April, reports Crain’s Business.

Meanwhile, The Sean Hannity Show was reported to be down 28% from its peak numbers in the fall.

Full Story Here: Rush Limbaugh’s Ratings Have Fallen 30% In The Last Six Months.

This narrowing of the permissible debate by the MSM is a subject Bill Moyers addressed in an interview on the Tavis Smily show.

Full Story Here: Daily Kos: Bill Moyers rips TV for limiting range of views presented to the “ruling ideology”.

To understand how so many average Americans can be duped into embracing right-wing positions that go against their own interests, you must look at how Fox News (and right-wing media outlets) use faux populism and phony outrage as propaganda techniques, a topic explored by Danny Schechter in this guest essay

By Danny Schechter

May 13, 2011

Grrrrrrrr. You can almost hear the growling in the background as the masters of attack politics go into action, virtually every hour on the hour, on the Fox News Channel.

The issues they focus on are carefully selected by top executives and then broken down into highly politicized message points. Their dominant emotion is annoyance as expressed in sarcasm and scowling; contempt is the underlying attitude.

In the Fox view, the other side is usually not just wrong but plain stupid, almost unbelievable in its softheaded naiveté and distance from reality.

A “what do you expect” question invariably tops off the argument which always ends with the Fox host a winner and the Democrat or social critic a loser on every level.

Full Story Here: How Fox News Outfoxes Americans | Consortiumnews.

Keith Olbermann defended Michael Moore’s comments about the killing of Osama bin Laden–and criticized former MSNBC colleague Ed Schultz–in an online “Special Comment” posted to Olbermann’s website on Thursday.

Moore has received a boatload of criticism for his comments on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” about bin Laden’s death. He said that the killing showed that “we’ve lost something of our soul here in this country…something that separates us from other parts, other countries where we say everybody has their day in court.”

One of Moore’s critics was MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, who earlier this week devoted a segment to the filmmaker’s comments, and said, “the intellectual liberal hand-wringing needs to stop in this country.”

Full Story Here: Keith Olbermann Defends Michael Moore, Calls Out Ed Schultz (VIDEO).

Watch the video, from MSNBC, below:

Full Story Here: Lawrence O’Donnell and Condi Rice at loggerheads in testy interview | Raw Replay.

Len Hart,

The U.S. right wing will not be happy until every American is reduced to a mere ‘consuming’ machine, a unit, into which is fed the most absurd lies, the most outrageous right-wing rewrites of history, the most transparent pre-texts for war, aggression, oil theft, ongoing deprivations of civil liberties. As wealth is transferred upward to what is now a ruling elite of just one percent of the entire population, we are expected to concede our last redoubt: ‘our’ media!

Krasnow: “The spectrum is there whether it is used or not; only when it is enhanced by the use of broadcasters and others does it have any value at all to the public.”

–Former FCC Counsel Erwin Krasnow Calls For End To ‘Public Ownership Of Airwaves’ Standard

The latest outrage is the more recent reprise of the right wing’s ongoing attack on what had been the people’s airwaves, the people’s media, the people’s right to know and its implicit corollary: the people’s right to be told the truth!

Full Story Here: The Existentialist Cowboy: The Right Wing Renews its Ongoing War on a Fair and Free Media.

The U.S. right wing will not be happy until every American is reduced to a mere ‘consuming’ machine, a unit, into which is fed the most absurd lies, the most outrageous right-wing rewrites of history, the most transparent pre-texts for war, aggression, oil theft, ongoing deprivations of civil liberties. As wealth is transferred upward to what is now a ruling elite of just one percent of the entire population, we are expected to concede our last redoubt: ‘our’ media!

Krasnow: “The spectrum is there whether it is used or not; only when it is enhanced by the use of broadcasters and others does it have any value at all to the public.”

–Former FCC Counsel Erwin Krasnow Calls For End To ‘Public Ownership Of Airwaves’ Standard

The latest outrage is the more recent reprise of the right wing’s ongoing attack on what had been the people’s airwaves, the people’s media, the people’s right to know and its implicit corollary: the people’s right to be told the truth!

Full Story Here: The Existentialist Cowboy: The Right Wing Renews its Ongoing War on a Fair and Free Media.

After revealing his “long form” birth certificate Wednesday, President Obama scolded the news media for letting this non-issue become a national obsession.

But if President Obama really wants to restore reporting to its rightful role, he needs to act on commitments he made immediately after his inauguration. As I wrote in September 2009 for The BRAD BLOG:

Shortly after Barack Obama was sworn in as President last January, as Brad Friedman reported at the time, the new White House website “Technology” page signaled a hopeful change, and a call to re-examine the oversight of our public airwaves:

Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership: Encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media, promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints, and clarify the public interest obligations of broadcasters who occupy the nation’s spectrum.

Okay, let me connect some dots here.

Full Story Here: The BRAD BLOG : President Obama, Don’t Just Scold the Media, Fix the Media!.

This year’s comedian headliner, “Saturday Night Live’s” Seth Meyers, was charged with the task of poking fun at the President and Washington politics. Each year, the President uses the occasion to show a more humorous side as well, making fun of himself and the people who cover him.

Full Story Here: 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner | C-SPAN.

Keith Olbermann finally announced what his new Current TV show will be called, and when it will air.

The new name? “Countdown With Keith Olbermann.”

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Olbermann joked in a video announcement posted to his “Fok News Channel” site on Tuesday morning.

Previously, Olbermann would only say that the show would air in “late spring.” In the video, he at last gave a specific date: Monday, June 20, at 8 PM Eastern.

Olbermann’s show has been in the works since he abruptly left MSNBC in January.

WATCH:

Full Story Here: Olbermann’s Current TV Show Called ‘Countdown,’ Launches June 20 (VIDEO).

Len Hart,

The FAIRNESS DOCTRINE was attacked and trashed –not surprisingly –during the Reagan administration. It was trashed, reviled and dismantled not because it failed or did not work but because it worked splendidly and did precisely what it was intended to do. It was targeted because it was another ‘liberal’, progressive, Democratic success that always makes the American right wing look bad, exposes them as the lying frauds that they are. The Fairness Doctrine was subverted because it daily laid bare the lies and claptrap which have –unfettered –all but destroyed the nation.

The right wing stooge which made this ‘revolution’ possible was Ronald Reagan whose assault on the rights of the American people made him a hero among the politically challenged and untruthful.

With the subversion, decline and rescinsion of the Fairness Doctrine, ‘free speech’ effectively ceased to exist in the U.S. Free speech does not exist when only one wing, one party, one elite cabal dictates what is said on the electronic mass media i.e, radio, television, cable. Free speech does not exist for those who cannot be heard because they have been deliberately silenced, shut up, deprived the right of access that had been guaranteed them. It was the GOP/right wing assault on the Fairness Doctrine effectively that shut you up though the Communications Act of 1934 had recognized –by law –that it is the people who OWN the air waves. Apres Reagan, a dwindling number of huge corporations themselves ever bigger, ever richer claimed ownership of YOUR ‘airwaves’. In less PC times, we would call this theft.

Full Story Here: The Existentialist Cowboy: Why the Fairness Doctrine Must be Restored.

Stewart spent four segments (embedded below) “telling the truth while wearing glasses” and “f*cking your ears with the truth” while theorizing on reasons for Beck’s departure (the world is ending, Jesus is coming, etc.).

Sit back and Stewart’s genius eulogy for Beck’s hysteria. This footage originally aired on Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart on April 7, 2011.

>video at link<

Full Story Here: Jon Stewart’s epic Glenn Beck parody will ‘f*ck your ears with the truth’ | Raw Replay.

In July 1999 Vice President Al Gore paddled down the Connecticut River in New Hampshire to spread what then–Rolling Stone reporter Eric Boehlert termed “his green theme of protecting the environment” while posing for the obvious photo-op. His hopes for making this message heard, however, went over the side when Bill Sammon, a reporter for the then-Moonie-owned Washington Times, wrote that local authorities had granted Gore a special favor when they released nearly 4 billion gallons of water from a nearby dam, at a cost of $7 million, in order to (literally) float Gore’s boat. As Boehlert noted in his masterful forensic audit of the story, Sammon’s point was clear: “In a clumsy abuse of power, Al Gore, a supposed friend of the environment, gladly wasted precious natural resources to stage-manage a political event.”

The rest of the press corps swallowed and regurgitated Sammon’s item, all but unmasticated. Newsweek dubbed it the “photo op from hell,” and CNN covered the “wave of criticism after floodgates are opened on a New Hampshire river to keep Al Gore afloat.” The New York Times report mocked the “mishap,” and the Washington Post chuckled with its readers about “Gore’s Four Billion Gallons for a Photo Op.”

Alas, it was almost all fiction. Nobody connected to the Gore campaign ever requested the release of the water. (The Secret Service did.) The correct figure for the amount of water released was 500 million gallons, or one-eighth of the amount roundly reported. The local utility company that operates the dam was already dumping millions of gallons into the parched Connecticut River every day, but for Gore’s trip this routine exercise was moved up a few hours. The alleged $7 million cost was also made up. The water in question made its way through hydroelectric turbines that generated power to be sold by the utility companies.

When Boehlert contacted Sammon, he waved off the question of accuracy entirely, because, he said, the story successfully made “a point about Gore’s political reflexes, [which are] to spin furiously and resort to deception.”

Full Story Here: Fox: The Liars’ Network | The Nation.

The federal government is on the verge of shutting down as Republican and Democratic Party negotiators have failed to reach a compromise on a bill to continue to fund the government. Progressives are resisting deeper cuts to programs Main Street Americans rely on, like Pell Grants and Head Start, yet Tea Party Republicans continue to demand more cuts.

This morning, Fox News hosted Rep. Allen West (R-FL) to talk about the cuts that the Tea Party wants. In order to frame the discussion as supporting West’s position, which is anti-compromise, the right-wing network cited a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that it claimed showed that most Americans do not want the Republicans to compromise. Host Martha MacCallum claimed the poll showed that “56 percent of Americans say that [Republicans] should stick to their positions.” Watch it:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Fox News Misreports Poll Numbers To Claim That Most Americans Don’t Want GOP To Compromise On Budget.

Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) appeared on Fox Business Network yesterday and criticized the industry’s subsidies, asking why we they need billions of dollars a year from taxpayers. Host Eric Bolling attacked Garamendi for his criticism, saying that oil companies are paying the most taxes in the world and that their profit margins aren’t very high:

GARAMENDI: The wealthiest industry in the entire world, the oil industry … They’re going to see extraordinary profits yet about 12 billion dollars a year is used to subsidize the oil industry.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » As Exxon Pays Zero Taxes, Fox Host Defends Big Oil Subsides By Claiming It Pays The Most Taxes.

Fox News and Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck’s production company, are proud to announce that they will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News’ digital properties. Glenn intends to transition off of his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year. [...]

Glenn Beck said: “I truly believe that America owes a lot to Roger Ailes and Fox News. I cannot repay Roger for the lessons I’ve learned and will continue to learn from him and I look forward to starting this new phase of our partnership.”

The statement did not indicate an end date for the show.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Why Beck Is Out At Fox: Poor Ratings And Paranoid Rants.

The Sixties’ scrappy alternative newspapers were the oxygen that kept the era’s movements going.

History books rarely speak as trenchantly to contemporary issues as John McMillian’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University, February). As the cascading revolts in the Muslim world demonstrate, communication systems matter.

Communication is the oxygen of social movements, but scholars have rarely focused attention on the organs of social protest. In the 19th century, the labor and radical movements all had their own press, as did various ethnic communities, and each was vital to its cause. The medium has changed (from small magazines, to cheaply printed local community newspapers to Twitter), but the message is the same: Social movements need organic forms of communication because without it, they die.

Smoking Typewriters chronicles the pioneers of what today we call “independent media.” McMillian meticulously mines the rich archive of the alternative press to reveal these newspapers as products of their era, tied to activist communities as well as powerful personalities, and linked through ideology and more than a little hustle and business moxie. During the Sixties (the author refers to the era as the Sixties, and the decade as the ’60s) such newspapers became the lifeblood of the movement, connecting both isolated pockets of resistance and individuals to larger communities and happenings in Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor and New York. They told the world what was going on.

Full Story Here: Digging the Underground Press — In These Times.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, in an announcement this week on its Web site (the release has since been changed to remove references to Mr. Moyers), said its board had voted to give Mr. Moyers’ production company a $2 million, 29-month grant for the show.

Susan King, the foundation’s vice president of external relations, said the program was conceived as a venue for bipartisan debate of major issues of the day, like education reform and immigration. She cautioned, however, that even though the grant has been approved by the board, it is not yet final.

Full Story Here: Bill Moyers Eyes a Possible Return to PBS – NYTimes.com.

OPS: Some damned good news

A radio chain that dropped Glenn Beck from five of its stations since January did so, in part, because the show’s content was hurting ratings, the company’s president said Monday.

“He bounces around pretty radically, I think he confuses people, they’re not sure where he is coming from,” said Rick Buckley, president of Buckley Radio of Greenwich, Conn., who spoke with Media Matters. “It can change day to day, hour to hour. Consistency is, I think, the path to success in broadcasting, in radio for sure, whether it be music or talk. Glenn is sort of all over the park from time to time.”

Buckley spoke just days after his company announced it would pull Beck’s show from four stations in Connecticut. – WDRC-AM, WWCO-AM, WSNG-AM, and WMMW-AM. Those stations simulcast programming and will no longer air Beck’s morning show, replacing it with two local personalities.

Full Story Here: Glenn Beck Dropped By Radio Station Because His Bizarre Religious Rants Hurt Ratings | Media | AlterNet.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Like Jake LaMotta and his brother Joey in the bloody boxing classic Raging Bull, we are gluttons for punishment. So here we are again, third week in a row, defending NPR against the bare-knuckled assault of its critics.

Our earlier pieces (here and here) on the funding threat to NPR have generated plenty of punches, both pro and con. And although most of the comments were welcome, and encouraged further thinking about the value of public media in a democratic society, a few reminded us of the words of the poet and scholar James Merrick: ”So high at last the contest rose/From words they almost came to blows!”

Full Story Here: NPR Is Not Left Wing Opposite of Right Wing Media Machine | Common Dreams.

Full Story Here: FOK News Channel | Friends of Keith Olbermann.

But on the Situation Room tonight, a visibly frustrated CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson, who was on the CNN team that visited the compound, called the report untruthful and “outrageous.” Moreover, Robertson acccused Fox of “lies and deceit” for claiming none of their staffers went on the same trip when one in fact did:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » CNN Foreign Corespondent Calls Out Fox News: ‘Outrageous’ ‘Lies And Deceit’.

Beck promoted the special on his Fox News show yesterday as well, encouraging viewers to visit GlennBeck.com to see “a conversation with four experts that I had the other night on what is coming in the next 12 months. It is a conversation that America must have. And not one that I expected, actually, to have when we started. It’s amazing.”

He was right — it was amazing. In the course of the video, Beck and CNN’s Dana Loesch expressed a baffling sympathy for anarchism. Loesch said, “I’m two steps above anarchy conservatism, just as it was intended by the Founding Fathers. I mean, really, that’s really what we’re supposed to be.” In response, Beck said, “[W]hen you say we’re two steps — you’re two steps above an anarchist — and I think I am, too. I mean, I’m really closer to Washington than any president, even Reagan. They really were organized, controlled anarchists.”

Full Story Here: “Two Steps Above An Anarchist”: Beck’s Webcast Is A Barrage Of Fringe Views | Media Matters for America.

The tumultuous managerial shakeup at National Public Radio headquarters for trivial verbal miscues once again has highlighted the ludicrous corporatist right-wing charge that public radio and public TV are replete with left-leaning or leftist programming.

Ludicrous, that is, unless this criticism’s yardstick is the propaganda regularly exuded by the extreme right-wing Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These “capitalists” use the public’s airwaves free-of-charge to make big money.

The truth is that the frightened executives at public TV and radio have long been more hospitable to interviews with right of center or extreme right-wing and corporatist talking heads than liberal or progressive guests.

PBS’s Charlie Rose has had war-loving William Kristol on thirty one times, Henry Kissinger fifty five times, Richard Perle ten times, the global corporatist cheerleader, Tom Friedman seventy times. Compare that guest list with Rose’s interviews of widely published left of center guests—Noam Chomsky two times, William Grieder two times, Jim Hightower two times, Charlie Peters two times, Lewis Lapham three times, Bob Herbert six times, Paul Krugman twenty one times, Victor Navasky one time, Mark Green five times and Sy Hersh, once a frequent guest, has not been on since January 2005.

Full Story Here: Our Right-Leaning Public Media | Common Dreams.

Responding to a report that NPR was closer to accepting a $5 million donation from a phony Muslim group than previously acknowledged, NPR released e-mails to TPM backing up their claim that they had refused the money.

In their initial statement after hidden camera footage of their executives lunching with the fake foundation, NPR said that “The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.” The Daily Caller reported Thursday evening on emails in which NPR executives said they were “awaiting a draft agreement” from their legal counsel on the donation, raising the question of how far down the line negotiations had proceeded.

NPR spokeswoman Anna Christopher told TPM via e-mail that the agreement “never got beyond the internal drafting stage – and was never sent. Period.” To back up her claim, Christopher provided TPM with four pages pages of emails in which CEO Vivan Schiller, who resigned Wednesday, and her staff discuss a potential donation from MEAC, the fake Muslim group created by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas to infiltrate NPR.

Full Story Here: NPR Emails Show CEO Refusing Donation from Phony O’Keefe Group | TPMMuckraker.

The eulogies for Washington Post columnist David Broder and the chaos surrounding National Public Radio have coincided as an unintended commentary on what went wrong with the U.S. news media.

For different reasons, Broder, who died Wednesday at the age of 81, and NPR, which is scrambling to save its federal funding, came to reflect the timidity of American mainstream journalism, unwilling or unable to challenge the corruption of the status quo.

Broder personified the cult of centrism, a faith in “The System” that ignored how hollowed out its institutions had become, at least in terms of any moral or democratic values.

NPR, with its endless attempts to mollify conservatives, demonstrated how slippery the slope can be when a price tag is put on journalism. As NPR slides ever downward in its frantic attempts to appease the Republican House majority — most recently with a cascade of resignations — it’s hard not to conclude that the radio network may not be worth saving.

Full Story Here: How the US Press Corps Lost Its Way.

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Fox News Airs Random Protest Video To Make Wisconsin Demonstrations Appear Violent.

I don’t watch cable news, or actually any kind of TV news. But I gather that there’s a virtual blackout on the huge demonstrations in Wisconsin, except on Fox, which portrays them as thuggish and violent.

Full Story Here: That Iraq Feeling – NYTimes.com.

WAYNE BARRETT wants to say nice things about people. He wants to, but he finds it so hard.

“We haven’t had bad mayors,” ventured Mr. Barrett, the muck-raking investigative reporter who has made a career of hounding New York City’s chief executives. “They’ve all done some really good things,” he added, “though you probably wouldn’t know it to read my copy.”

To review: “Bloomberg’s first term was, I think, the best I’ve ever covered, but since then he’s treading water. I think the job bores him.

“I was very enamored of Rudy Giuliani when he was U.S. attorney, but as mayor, he poisoned the atmosphere, and he doesn’t get better over time.”

Full Story Here: For Wayne Barrett, the Digging for Dirt Hasn’t Stopped – NYTimes.com.

This morning, during a debate about the situation in Wisconsin and collective bargaining rights in general, the Fox News show Fox & Friends referenced the USA Today/Gallup poll. With incredible brazenness, the Fox hosts actually reversed the results of the poll in order to claim that two-thirds of Americans supported Wisconsin-style laws rather than opposed them.

During the discussion, Fox host Brian Kilmeade asked pro-labor guest Robert Zimmerman if President Obama was taking a “big risk” by opposing Walker’s law. Zimmerman responded by saying that Obama was speaking “for the mainstream of our country, and the mainstream of Republican governors who are not siding with Governor Walker.” Kilmeade responded by saying, “I think Gallup, a relatively mainstream poll, has a differing view. And here’s the question that was posed. Do you favor or disfavor of taking away collective bargaining when it comes to salaries for government workers. 66 percent in favor, 33 percent opposed, 9 percent up in the air.” Watch it:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » Fox Reverses Results Of Gallup Poll To Claim Americans Oppose Union Collective Bargaining Rights.

OPS: If you’re watching Fox, you are being lied to – every day

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » After Progressive Pressure, Sunday Show Will Feature Labor Leader.

We were gonna have Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, and thought this would be the week we could kinda get back to covering what’s going on in Washington. But, we added last night Sen. John McCain from the Foreign Relations Committee. We’ll be spending a lot of time in the square there in Cairo if things continue to go as they are.

The Face the Nation website indicates Harry Reid will not be appearing and that McCain is the only elected official on the show. Listen here:

Full Story Here: ThinkProgress » CBS’ Bob Schieffer Drops Harry Reid In Favor Of John McCain To Discuss Egypt.

This $315 million buyout by AOL, along with [Arianna Huffington's] $4 million annual salary, was built on the backs of hard-working writers who never saw a dime for their labor. We call on Ms. Huffington to live up to the ideals she so earnestly professes and share her profits with the people responsible for the Huffington Post’s success.

Huffington sent an email to all HuffPost bloggers, past and present, in which she explained how the new AOL-HuffPost model will boost traffic, but will still not compensate writers.

Full Story Here: Huffington Post Bloggers Looking For Compensation – FishbowlNY.

Editor’s Note: For decades now, the American Right has pushed the myth that the national U.S. news media is “liberal,” even though the owners are mostly wealthy corporations run by rich executives who generally favor Republicans over Democrats. And that was true even in the days before Fox News and right-wing-dominated talk radio.

Even the limited inroads of liberalism in media have been under pressure in recent days with MSNBC’s ouster of liberal icon Keith Olbermann and AOL’s purchase of HuffingtonPost (raising new questions about Arianna Huffington’s ideological sojourns). However, in this essay, Lisa Pease contrasts what today’s media is versus what a “liberal media” might look like:

I’m surprised that otherwise intelligent people continue to believe the myth that the media is “liberal.” I think it’s worth discussing what a liberal media would look like if we had one, so we can better understand that we don’t have one.

Let’s imagine a fictional cable network called LNN – the Liberal News Network. What might the morning news on such a channel be?

The show might lead with pictures of starving children all over the world, so that while you sat down to breakfast, you’d be reminded of just how lucky you were to have been born in the U.S., and how others are still very much in need.

Full Story Here: What a ‘Liberal Media’ Might Look Like.

U.S. progressive media has had a tough few weeks. First, Keith Olbermann, the pioneer for liberal programming during MSNBC’s evening hours, was sent packing. Then, Arianna Huffington allowed AOL to subsume her Huffington Post into AOL’s right-of-center content for the price tag of $315 million.

Leftist bloggers who had provided free content to Huffington Post, enabling it to become a valuable property, found themselves quite literally sold out, with Huffington pocketing $18 million while making clear that she won’t battle for the liberal banner inside AOL.

Huffington joined with her new boss, AOL Chairman Tim Armstrong, to declare that their focus will be on how many eyeballs can be drawn to AOL, not in pushing progressive causes.

“Arianna has the same interest we do, which is serving consumers’ needs and going beyond the just straight political needs of people,” Armstrong said.

For her part, Huffington noted that her Web site was already shedding its political identity, providing more celebrity news and scandal stories, including a new section devoted to divorces. While about half of the traffic was on politics a couple of years ago, she said, that is now down to about 15 percent with only one of two dozen “sections” centered on politics.

via Hard Lessons from the HuffPost Sale.

OPS: Fat Bastard falls on his face – SPLAT!   LOL

For the third time in about a week, Jon Stewart has dedicated a “Daily Show” segment to dealing with angry, Nazi-related rhetoric used in media and politics. But what seems to bother him more than nonsensical Hitler comparisons is Fox News pundits’ inability to see their own Nazi references as inappropriate.

After Stewart called out Steve Cohen’s use of a Goebbels reference to describe GOP behavior, Megyn Kelly of Fox News said there is no Nazi rhetoric used on Fox News. But Stewart proved with a slew of clips that Fox was being hypocritical.

In one of those clips, Bill O’Reilly made a mind-boggling comparison between HuffPost and Hitler. Seeing it on “The Daily Show” didn’t sit well with the Fox News host, who said on his next show that the clip was edited in a way took it out of context. Stewart responded:

Full Story Here: Jon Stewart Hits Back At Bill O’Reilly For Defending Nazi Rhetoric On Fox News (VIDEO).

On Monday night’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart chose to forgo a big segment on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC departure (unlike like his counterpart Stephen Colbert) and instead picked up where he left off last week, with an expose on Nazi name-calling in Congress and the media.

Last week, Stewart had some strong words for Rep. Steve Cohen, who likened the Republican party’s views on government-owned health care to Nazi lies. To his surprise, Stewart’s comments were echoed all over Fox News, with everyone — including Karl Rove — saying Cohen should be ashamed of himself.

“If that guy is telling you you should feel shame, that’s like Charlie Sheen showing up at your intervention to tell you to take it down a notch.”

Full Story Here: Jon Stewart Calls Out Fox News’ Nazi Hypocrisy (VIDEO).

Well Comcast isn’t about to commit suicide after its takeover of NBC Universal, and that is why progressive programming will disappear from MSNBC.

It will not likely happen immediately – although Olbermann, the most successful of the liberal shows, was the first shoe to drop.

How will Maddow and the rest vanish?

Maybe through a format change for the entire station announced a year down the line or so – or earlier. Maybe through program “balance” requirements that will force Maddow and the others to resign. Maybe through a conversion of MSNBC to a Spanish station that would add to the growth of Telemundo, another part of the NBC Universal acquisition.

Full Story Here: Why GOP Juggernaut Big Media Comcast Will Cancel Progressive Programming on MSNBC | BuzzFlash.org.

Not only did five potential Republican candidates get regular paychecks from the network last year, but they also got something even more valuable: airtime

Liberal watchdog group Media Matters found that the five received about $55 million in free advertising over the course of more than 85 hours of appearances in 2010.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee appeared for almost 48 hours. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had nearly 14 hours of appearances.

Full Story Here: Report: Fox News gave GOP presidential candidates $55 million in free advertising | Raw Story.

It was Keith Olbermann’s decision to leave his high-profile perch at MSNBC, TheWrap has learned. The outspoken host abruptly announced his departure on Friday evening, sending shock waves through the cable news world.

But the sudden departure has a history, and the timing does not rule out a preemptive MSNBC move. The gadfly commentator first told the network last April that he wanted to leave and began negotiating his exit then, according to an individual with knowledge of the situation.

Olbermann abandoned the notion of leaving at that time but revived his plans in recent weeks with new representation from the talent agency ICM.

With two years left on his $7 million a year contract, Olbermann was seeking a full exit package but he really has his eye on creating his own media empire in the style of Huffington Post, according to the individual. That way, Olbermann would control his own brand and, in his view, potentially earn far more as an owner.

Full Story Here: Did Keith Olbermann Bolt MSNBC to Create Media Empire? | TheWrap.com.

Keith Olbermann and MSNBC abruptly announced Friday night that “Countdown” has ended, effective immediately.

Olbermann broke the news to his viewers during his show’s final sign-off (full video below). He said that he had been “told” that Friday’s show would be his last. MSNBC issued a statement with the news following Friday’s episode.The statement read:

MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC’s success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.

According to the New York Times, the host came to an agreement with NBC management late this week to step down. Clearly, though, that was a tightly-kept secret within MSNBC. The announcement was so unexpected that the network was still running ads featuring Olbermann an hour after he announced he was leaving.

Full Story Here: Final Countdown: Keith Olbermann And MSNBC Announce They Are Parting Ways (VIDEO).

A poll gauging public trust in TV news has found that PBS is the most trusted name in news, while trust in Fox News has dropped significantly.

According to a survey from Public Policy Polling, “a year ago a plurality of Americans said they trusted Fox News. Now a plurality of them don’t.

Full Story Here: Trust in Fox News plummets: poll | Raw Story.