Smell Something Rotten? 2010 P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize the worst of U.S. journalism

[Octafish]

The Professional Liar, a work by susan m hinckley of Small Works in Wool


Awards worthy of Corporate McPravda:

Smell Something Rotten?

2010 P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize the worst of U.S. journalism

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
12/30/10
Media Advisory

At the end of every year FAIR rounds up some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance. This year brought no shortage of contenders; indeed, the hardest part of the P.U.-litzers is narrowing down the list.

Readers who think we missed one can share their nominations at the FAIR Blog (fair.org/blog).

And without further ado....


--Prosecute the Messenger Award: Diane Sawyer (ABC News)

On October 22, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer introduced a report on WikiLeaks' exposure of thousands of classified documents from the Iraq War. ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz summarized the contents of the WikiLeaks files: "Deadly U.S. helicopter assaults on insurgents trying to surrender.... The Iraqi civilian death toll far higher than the U.S. has acknowledged.... Graphic detail about torture of detainees by the Iraqi military." After Raddatz's report, Sawyer offered this followup: "I know there's a lot of outrage about this again tonight, Martha. But tell me, anything more about prosecuting the WikiLeaks group?"


--New Excuses for Bombing Iran Award: David Broder (Washington Post)

In his October 31 column, the Washington Post's David Broder offered one way for Barack Obama to demonstrate leadership after the midterms--a war with Iran. He wrote:

With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.


Broder is "not suggesting" inciting a war with Iran. He was merely saying it would bring the country together, fix the economy and make Obama one of the greatest presidents of all time.


--The Quarter-Million-Dollar Middle Award: Kiran Chetry (CNN)

CNN anchor Kiran Chetry (American Morning, 2/1/10) interviewing White House budget director Peter Orszag: "You also talk about letting taxes expire for families that make over $250,000. Some would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class." Back in reality, more than 98 percent of U.S. households make less than $250,000.


--Disappearing Palestinians Award: New York Times

On the New York Times op-ed page (8/27/10), Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution gave one reason to be hopeful about peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: "First, violence is down considerably in the region." What he meant was that Israeli deaths were down. Completely unmentioned were the roughly 1,500 Palestinians that have been killed since the Israeli assault on Gaza in December 2008--the vast majority of whom were minors or noncombatant adults, according to the Israel human rights group B'Tselem. This oversight wasn't just confined to the op-ed page: a Week in Review article by Ethan Bronner (11/21/10) reported "that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has been largely drained of deadly violence in the past few years." Hundreds of dead Palestinians are what is meant by "drained of violence."


--Balancing Tolerance with Hate Award: Washington Post's On Faith Blog

On National Coming Out Day (10/11/10), the Washington Post's On Faith blog decided it would be a good time to hear from raging homophobe Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Perkins penned a column attacking "homosexual activist groups" under the headline "Christian Compassion Requires the Truth About Harms of Homosexuality." Why on Earth does anyone need to hear Perkins' claptrap? The Post explained on Twitter (10/12/10) that it was a matter of journalistic balance: "We're working to cover both sides. Earlier, we hosted Dan Savage of It Gets Better in a live chat." For the record, "It Gets Better" is Savage's campaign to combat suicides among queer youth. Who knew that was a point of view that needed balancing?


--New Low in Wartime Propaganda Award: Time magazine

In the wake of a release of damning WikiLeaks documents about the state of the Afghan War, Time magazine's August 9 cover sought to turn the debate over the war around. The photo was of an Afghan woman's maimed face, headlined "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan." The implication couldn't be clearer: The Taliban will commit similar atrocities without the presence of U.S. forces. The fact that this particularly atrocity--whose connection to the Taliban has been questioned--happened with U.S. troops staying in Afghanistan complicates Time's argument. Time's Rick Stengel defended the cover story by explaining that "bad things do happen to people, and it is part of our job to confront and explain them.... I would rather confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than ignore it. I would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan." We're still waiting for a Time cover that confronts readers with the bad things that happen to Afghans--including women and children--who are hit with U.S. bombs.


--Walk It Back Award: New York Times

On November 29, the New York Times published an explosive piece based on the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables. "Iran Fortifies Its Missiles With the Aid of North Korea" was the headline, and the piece stated that Iran now possesses powerful missiles with "the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe." The Times declined to publish the cable that made this case "at the request of the Obama administration," but the cable was on the WikiLeaks website--and provided ample grounds to be skeptical about the Times' definitive conclusion. (It's not clear, it turns out, that the kind of missile Iran supposedly bought from North Korea even exists.) After critiques were published by FAIR and others, the Times published a follow-up (12/3/10), "Wider Window Into Iran's Missile Capabilities Offers a Murkier View." The piece suggested that "a review of a dozen other State Department cables" and interviews "with American government officials offer a murkier picture of Iran's missile capabilities." But that "murky view" should have been obvious from the start. The Times' first account was taken as fact in countless media outlets; their quiet follow up wasn't a correction, but it should have been.


--Nonexistent Union–Bashing Award: Rush Limbaugh

After 29 workers died at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, talkshow host Rush Limbaugh (4/9/10) fingered the culprit: the miners' union. "Where was the union?" he asked. "The union is generally holding these companies up demanding all kinds of safety. Why were these miners continuing to work in what apparently was an unsafe atmosphere?" As it turned out, the mine, owned by notorious union-buster Massey Energy, didn't have a union. Alerted to his inaccuracy, Limbaugh (4/15/10) doubled down, saying that 85 union coal miners won a decision against Massey and were re-hired. "So there were union workers there, and so the United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety.... You people, it's been 21 years. At some point you are going to learn: If you go up against me on a challenge of fact, you are going to be wrong. It’s just that simple." What's even simpler? Disproving him: Those workers he's talking about are from an entirely different mine owned by Massey--which has appealed the ruling, so even those workers aren’t back on the job yet (AFL-CIO Blog, 4/16/10).


--Pay Cuts for Everyone (Except Me!) Award: Steven Pearlstein (Washington Post)

Under the headline "Wage Cuts Hurt, but They May Be the Only Way to Get Americans Back to Work" (10/13/10), Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein argued that "structural adjustments"--that is, lower pay--"are necessary if the U.S. economy is to find a new equilibrium." But he made clear that a 20 percent pay cut isn't for everyone--it's not for people like him, for example:

I'm sure many of you are reading this and thinking that if anyone is forced to take a pay cut to rebalance the economy, surely it ought to be overpaid investment bankers, corporate executives and newspaper columnists. That's how things would work in a socialist paradise, but not in market economies, which are much better at producing efficiency than fairness.

While it's hard to see investment bankers, whose industry survives because of a massive government bailout, as paragons of free-market efficiency, his inclusion of newspaper columnists is even less convincing: It's clearly inefficient for the Post to pay Pearlstein when people would write columns of a similar caliber for a lot, lot less.


--Adventures in Overstatement Award: Juan Williams (Fox News Channel)

It's unsurprising that Juan Williams would have hard feelings about NPR's decision to fire him after comments he made on Fox News Channel about being nervous seeing people in airports wearing "Muslim garb." But it still took plenty of nerve for Williams to write this (FoxNews.com, 10/21/10):

Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR commentator who died earlier this year, used to talk about the initial shock of finding himself on President Nixon's enemies list. I can only imagine Dan's revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for 10 years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines than Nixon ever displayed.

Had he been alive to respond, Schorr may have pointed out that in the most infamous case, Nixon had CIA agents trailing reporter Jack Anderson, plotting ways they might kill him.


--Obama Move to the Right Award: Matt Bai (New York Times)

In a crowded field of move-to-the-right pundits, Bai proved remarkably insistent that the White House's troubles could be fixed by furthering drifting to the right. On December 1, Bai explained that since Obama "isn't willing to break publicly with liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool of the left." This analysis somehow overlooks the scrapping of the public option in the healthcare debate, the massive escalation of the Afghan War, and so on. And this would be the same White House whose chief of staff referred to progressives as "fucking retarded," whose press secretary denounced the "professional left" and whose senior adviser said that such critics are "insane." Not mention the fact that the vice president told the left to "stop whining" and the president himself urged them to "wake up." But, yes, when will they break publicly from the left?


--Fact Checking is Someone Else's Job Award: David Gregory (NBC)

ABC's This Week interim host Jake Tapper decided to let the factchecking website PolitiFact evaluate statements made on the program. When asked if he would consider a similar arrangement for Meet the Press, NBC's David Gregory declined (Washington Post, 4/12/10):

An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."



--Am-I-Reading-The-Onion Headline Writing Award: Washington Post

For its April 26 story, "Amid Outrage Over Civilian Deaths in Pakistan, CIA Turns to Smaller Missiles."

Honorable mention goes to the New York Times, whose November 11 story explained the U.S. plan to remain in Afghanistan for at least three years longer than advertised. The headline: "U.S. Plan Offers Path to Ending Afghan Combat."


--Immigration Misinformation Award: Bill O'Reilly (Fox News Channel)

During the debate over Arizona's harsh immigration law SB 1070, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly made a case in support of Arizona's crackdown: More immigrations equal more crime. According to O'Reilly, Phoenix's crime problem is "out of control" (5/3/10); in the state overall, the crime problem is "through the roof" (5/4/10, 5/13/10, 5/14/10), it is "overwhelming" (5/6/10). One problem: There was no crime wave in Arizona or Phoenix, where authorities were reporting that crime was actually down--which research suggests is typical in areas with higher immigrant populations (FAIR Action Alert, 5/17/10). After FAIR noted O'Reilly's errors, he actually stopped making them. But he soon found new ways to justify his anti-immigrant stance, like arguing that crime is indeed down along the border--because immigrants have stopped coming into the country (FAIR Blog, 6/21/10).


--Ask the Bosses Award: Fareed Zakaria (CNN)

Given the dismal state of the U.S. economy, the idea that Fareed Zakaria would present an October 30 primetime CNN special called Restoring the American Dream made perfect sense. But then Zakaria got around to explaining his guestlist: "Many complain we don't hear enough from businessmen." And that presumably was Zakaria's rationale for a discussion of what's best for U.S. workers restricted to four CEOs. Now CNN's viewers know what the bosses are thinking about the state of the American dream; hopefully workers were taking notes.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4217

Gosh! What a year for professional lying. As a result, We the People continue the lurch further rightward into the nightmare of Rush Limbaugh's vision of hell. It's not too bad America's press corpse continues to miss the story, it's a tragedy.

[Joanne98]

1. The media is a joke. They're completely WORTHLESS! They should be broken up.

[Octafish]

9. Control what people think.

Control what people do.

ABC (and the CIA) and the Rise of Rush Limbaugh

[bluestateguy]

2. Georgetown Cocktail Party media

The American people have a right to know WHAT is going on at these super secret pow wows.

[hootinholler]

7. Cocktail party politics is so 1970's baby

Prayer groups are where it's happening these days.

-Hoot

[Octafish]

10. That's the very reason for the Bill of Rights and, especially, the First Amendment

First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Exactly what you said, bluestateguy: For a Democratic Republic to work, We the People need to know. Period.

[tsuki]

3. The Ministry of Truthiness. nt

[Octafish]

12. I like how today's press openly toadies to power.

And I'll never forget how a real journalist behaves: Stephen Colbert stood up to Power and the Press Corpse, like no one else did during Bush's time as the front-monkey for tyranny.

[Arkana]

4. Fareed Zakaria? Really?

That bothers me--he's one of the most intelligent-sounding people I've ever heard in terms of Middle-Eastern foreign policy.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. For CNN he's the best but

I think the money and power has corrupted him over the years.

CNN still sucks big time.

Nominated thread BTW.

[Octafish]

13. Newsweek International editor's ''Capitalist Manifesto'' -- A desperate attempt at reassurance

Here's the antidote to the Zakabubble:

Newsweek International editor's "Capitalist Manifesto"

A desperate attempt at reassurance

By Nick Beams
World Socialist Web Site
4 July 2009

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, has written an essay entitled “The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed is Good (To a point)”, which is intended to express relief that the panic engendered by the global financial crisis is easing, and to offer reassurances that, for all its faults, capitalism is still “the most productive economic engine we have yet invented.”

The problem with this claim that all is, again, for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is that far from the crisis having ended, it is only just beginning to unfold.

Zakaria begins by drawing comfort from the fact that the financial crises of the past 20 years were all overcome, leading to further economic growth. The stock market crash of 1987 defied predictions of a return to the Great Depression and “turned out to be a blip on the way to an even bigger, longer boom.” The 1997 Asian financial crisis did not lead to a global slump. Instead, the Asian economies “rebounded within two years”. The collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, described by then US Treasury secretary Robert Rubin as “the worst financial crisis in 50 years”, did not result in the end of hedge funds. Rather they have “massively expanded” since then.

How were these earlier crises overcome? As Zakaria notes, US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan always advanced the same solution: cut interest rates and provide easy money, creating a series of asset bubbles.

When the subprime crisis developed in 2007, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke followed the same procedure. However, on this occasion, interest rate cuts failed to alleviate the crisis. The Fed initiated its injections of liquidity in August 2007, but the situation only worsened. The investment bank Bear Stearns went under in March 2008, followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September and, by the end of 2008, notwithstanding massive injections of liquidity, all five Wall Street investment banks had either collapsed or been forced to restructure. The global financial system was on the brink of a meltdown.

This alone demonstrates that, far from the happy scenario painted by Zakaria—this crisis is just like the others since 1987—the collapse that began in 2007 marked a qualitative turn in an ongoing process.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/zaka-j04.shtml

My buddy loaned me a boxed CD-set of his "History of the United States." It was a total load of garbage.

[Ichingcarpenter]

16. Like I said..... Money$$$$$$$$

I noticed his fall and who he sucks up to.

He's still decent for CNN but I need salt.

His political leanings to me are apparent but his interviews are decent.

[JackRiddler]

23. Zakaria made his bones on the Iraq invasion bandwagon in 2003.

Any "journalist" who was, disqualifies themselves. Or can you find his apology for me? (Maybe, for all I know.)

[CanSocDem]

6. Great compilation...

In the deluge, we sometimes miss the gems.


.

[Octafish]

17. Zbigniew Libera

The guy was imprisoned for using humor to fight the commies in Poland.



Thanks, CanSocDem. Lots of ground between aspens.

[Old and In the Way]

8. And some people wonder why this country is in such a mess.

This didn't start just this decade...it's been happening since the 70's. The biggest threat to an informed democracy is a media who serves the interests of the rich and powerful. Once these same interests control the internet, full spectrum domination will be complete.

[Octafish]

19. Philip Zelikow

Old news to Never Old and In the Way, but surprising to all who believe what they read in the paper, hear on the radio or see on the tee vee:

What JFK Really Said

The author checked the Cuban-missile-crisis transcript in The Kennedy Tapes against the recorded words. He discovered "errors that undermine its reliability for historians, teachers, and general readers

by Sheldon M. Stern
The Atlantic

MY twenty-three years as the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, in Boston, were punctuated by intensive work on sound recordings. I conducted scores of taped oral-history interviews and verified the accuracy of the transcripts, edited President John F. Kennedy's recorded telephone conversations, and, in 1981-1982, evaluated tapes made during the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962, as the library prepared for their declassification. The work was fascinating and exhilarating, but the poor technical quality of the tapes frequently required that I listen to the same words dozens of times, sometimes to no avail. It was, notwithstanding, a historian's ultimate fantasy -- a chance to be a fly on the wall during one of the most dangerous moments in history, and to know, within the technical limits of the recordings, exactly what happened. I spent just over a year on the tapes, and in 1983 I received an award for "careful and perceptive editing and proofreading of the JFK tapes" from the archivist of the United States. From 1983 to 1997 the library declassified twenty-two hours of tapes, and I continued to review them before each declassification.

Imagine my surprise when, in the summer of 1997, I learned that Harvard University Press was about to publish The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow -- complete transcripts of all twenty-two hours. Months of lead time are required to prepare a book for the printer, so I was astonished that the editors could have completed this task less than a year after the majority of the tapes were released to the public.

The editors explained that they had commissioned a team of professional court reporters to prepare a set of "draft transcripts" from the Kennedy Library tapes. Audio experts, using NONOISE, a "technically advanced noise-reduction system," had then produced an improved set of tapes, subsequently checked by the court reporters to be sure that nothing had been lost. However, May and Zelikow stressed their own responsibility for the final product.

The two of us then worked with the tapes and the court reporters' drafts to produce the transcripts printed here. The laboriousness of this process would be hard to exaggerate. Each of us listened over and over to every sentence in the recordings. Even after a dozen replays at varying speeds, significant passages remained only partly comprehensible.... Notwithstanding the high professionalism of the court reporters, we had to amend and rewrite almost all their texts. For several especially difficult sessions, we prepared transcriptions ourselves from scratch. In a final stage, we asked some veterans of the Kennedy administration to review the tapes and our transcripts in order to clear up as many as possible of the remaining puzzles. The reader has here the best text we can produce, but it is certainly not perfect. We hope that some, perhaps many, will go to the original tapes. If they find an error or make out something we could not, we will enter the corrections in subsequent editions or printings of this volume.

An unforgettable moment in these unique historical records concerns JFK's apprehension that military action in Cuba might touch off the ultimate nightmare of nuclear war, which he grimly describes at a meeting on October 18 as "the final failure." Brian McGrory, of The Boston Globe, who listened to this tape with me in 1994, after it was declassified, used those words in the lead of his article on the newly released tapes. But when I checked the transcript recently, I was unable to find "the final failure." Certain that the editors must be right, since they had technically cleaner tapes, I listened again; there is no question that Kennedy says "the final failure." The editors, however, have transcribed it as "the prime failure."

CONTINUED...

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/05/stern.htm

Professional story teller and Condescenda's man Friday, Philip Zelikow really knows his history, in the Winston Smith sense of the word. Making up the conventional wisdom is an art and science, as you know Always never Old and In the Way.

[molly77]

22. Think I've seen Fareed Zacharia and Diane Sawyer's

names on the list of those who are member's of the Council on Foreign Relations...as well as quite a few "News anchors" etc. Now why in the world would they be members if not to spread an agenda? And you never see a true progressive's name on that list. Yet the halls of congress are full of those in that respected body.

[Enthusiast]

29. You are correct, sir. nt

[malaise]

11. What a great post - brilliant work

Love you Octafish - Happy New Year - keep on exposing the Presstitutes. :toast:

[EFerrari]

14. Speechless.

And that doesn't happen very often.

My new response to all presstitutes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-lrE2JcO44

[sabrina 1]

15. I give them credit for 'narrowing' the list.

The state of the MSM in this country is abysmal. Sometimes I try to imagine how different things would be if we had a real free press and a few good investigative journalists. Or at least a few who would question things every once in a while.

Great list though and I don't know who I would choose as the winner. I tend to ignore the O'Reilly contingency since I never expect anything but lies and distortions from them, so I'd probably choose one of those who are regarded as 'credible' in this society. Even then, it's hard to choose. They do compete with each other for 'worst journalism of the year award'.

[Octafish]

20. Lies Of Our Times STOPPED the Liars...for a while...

The muckraking magazine "Lies Of Our Times" took the liars at The New York Times and Corporate McPravda to task -- back in the late 80s and early 90s.

Here's an online archive truth seekers will appreciate: Lies Of Our Times. The issues are in PDF form. If you get a moment, you might want to download for personal records and distributed far and wide.

Back when they were on the newsstand, Newsweek and TIME went out of their way to slam 'em. Within four years, they'd succeeded. History shows who was telling the truth.

[G_j]

18. bravo

K&R!

[mwooldri]

21. They missed out the "Lifetime Achievement Award". My vote: Fox News Channel.

[bertman]

24. Another Grand Slam!!! Great work, Octafish. Rec. nt

[Stinky The Clown]

25. For nearly a decade I have been saying our biggest single issue is the worse than worthless media.

Right wing radio and talk/opinion (shout!) television is civic poison.

[Enthusiast]

26. K&R. Way to go, Octafish!

We smell something rotten, alright.

"Iran is the greatest threat to the world"


The GOP, with the help of Democrats and the Obama Administration, will save us from Iran. We will attack them! War is peace!

[Hannah Bell]

27. how could they choose? such a wealth of candidates.

fox appears to have been unduly slighted, however. the whole network is psyops.

[AnneD]

28. Time Mag Rag...

had the founder of Face Book on the cover as the Man of the Year. This was despite the fact that the public voted for Julian Assange. I think that totally explains Media in Amerika. We are a desert for real news and it is becoming 'in yo face book' apparent. The public cannot make informed decisions with faulty information. But then again, that is what the PTB want.

Say, did you see that game last night?

[Loge23]

30. "...and that's the way it is"

Just yesterday, before I hit the remote, I saw Gregory (who really has to be one of the top contenders for the PU) interviewing well-known lunatic, Michelle Bachman, as if she was a reasonable political voice. Also, fellow newly-elected lunatic from my fine state, Allen West, is being presented as a sort of spokesperson for the incoming House - so we shouldn't be too surprised by these outrageous examples.
What a mixed, shook-up world (apologies to the late great Willy DeVille)!

Terrific post, Octafish!

[Overseas]

31. Sad K&R. -- PU is right !! //nt

[seafan]

32. This is a very important thread. Thanks, Octafish.

Smell Something Rotten? 2010 P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize the worst of U.S. journalism



And, from this week, more examples of how low "mainstream media" have fallen:


Our media are a joke.


Presstitutes.


Salon: The War Room Hack Thirty




David Gregory, you da man, dude.



Disgusting, blow-dried, self-absorbed, greedy slackers, the whole lot of them.


Keep on calling them out, Octafish.


And a happy new year to you and yours.