Research / Think Tanks

David Swanson (AfterDowningStreet.org): Why We're Planning to Prosecute Cheney and Bush

FAIR Media Views - Fre, 09/05/2008 - 8:59pm
Impeachment activist Swanson uses a corporate media hypocrisy to illustrate his point:In a December 31, 2007, editorial, the New York Times faulted the current president and vice president of the United States for kidnapping innocent people, denying justice to prisoners, torturing, murdering, circumventing U.S. and international law, spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment and basing their actions on "imperial fantasies." If the editorial had been about Bush and Cheney robbing a liquor store or killing a small number of people or robbing a small amount of money or torturing a single child, then the writers at the New York Times would have demanded immediate prosecution and incarceration. Can you guess what they actually demanded? They demanded that we sit back and hope the next president and vice president will be better. Well, what if they are? The next guy who walked into the liquor store or played with the child would be better too. But how does that fact deter future crimes?

Timothy Karr (Huffington Post): St. Paul in the Hot Seat Over Journalist Arrests

FAIR Media Views - Fre, 09/05/2008 - 8:18pm
The refusal of Mayor Chris Coleman of RNC host city St.Paul, Minn., to address media reform activist Karr's "repeated calls and e-mails" does little to assuage Karr's concerns "that journalists were specifically targeted by authorities" there:On Thursday, the final night of the convention, it appears that authorities ratcheted up their attacks on both protesters and credentialed journalists, lobbing tear gas and percussion grenades into crowds and arresting student journalists, local TV photographers, Associated Press reporters, and two MyFox journalists, among others. Other journalists have also been pepper-sprayed, and reporters with I-Witness were held at gunpoint during a "pre-emptive" raid aimed at disrupting protesters last weekend.

Karr relates how concerned people and non-incarcerated journalists delivered "60,000 letters"—which "were collected in less than 72 hours"—to St. Paul's City Hall, where fellow activist Nancy Doyle Brown explained how, "tragically, there are stories that the world needed to hear this week that will never be told" because "reporters working on them were sitting in the back of squad cars, were stripped of their cameras, or were face down on the pavement with their hands cuffed behind their backs."

Dean Baker (Beat the Press): AP Praises McCain Speech That Misrepresents Obama Health Care Plan

FAIR Media Views - Fre, 09/05/2008 - 7:45pm
Catching a positive review of John McCain's nomination acceptance speech in which Baker says the Associated Press "politely managed to ignore the fact that Senator McCain found it necessary to completely misrepresent Senator Obama's healthcare proposal": Senator McCain claimed that Obama's proposal would force people into a health care plan run by government bureaucrats. This is not true. Senator Obama's plan would give people the option of buying into a publicly run Medicare-type plan, but this would only be an option.... McCain also misrepresented his plan on taxes for ordinary people. He claimed that he would not raise taxes, but his healthcare plan would raise taxes for tens of millions of middle income workers.

Noting that, "as a rule, AP is not hesitant to criticize presidential acceptance speeches," Baker gives us the headline over their report on Obama's Democratic nomination acceptance speech: "Obama Spares Details: Keeps Up Attacks." Their headline on the McCain acceptance speech?: "McCain Makes Bipartisan Pitch as Leader for All."

River Cities' Reader: The Thing That Would Not Die

FAIR Media Views - Fre, 09/05/2008 - 7:20pm
A weekly Iowa paper asks the perennial question in its subheadline: "With Media Saturation, Why Does the Fairness Doctrine Keep Returning?" After a careful history of policy, the Reader tells us that "according to a recent survey, nearly half of Americans support the idea as a government mandate." We also get the unfortunate political reality:It's unlikely the Fairness Doctrine will be resurrected any time soon. The House resoundingly, preemptively blocked it last year, and both John McCain and Barack Obama oppose it. And while the FCC could theoretically impose it on its own, it would run into staunch political resistance in Congress.

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost It, and Why We Need It Back (1–2/05) by Steve Rendall

Weekly Radio Spin: Unprotected Whistleblowing

PR Watch - Fre, 09/05/2008 - 3:39pm

Listen to this week's edition of the "Weekly Radio Spin," the Center for Media and Democracy's audio report on the stories behind the news. This week, we look at the demise of whistleblower protections, Lipitor's new pitch man, and how to look like you're military without actually enlisting. In "Six Degrees of Spin and Fakin'," we look at the Ogilvy and Mather advertising firm. The Weekly Radio Spin is freely available for personal and broadcast use. Podcasters can subscribe to the XML feed on www.prwatch.org/audio or via iTunes. If you air the Weekly Radio Spin on your radio station, please email us at editor@prwatch.org to let us know. Thanks!


Wolf Blitzer (CNN Election Center): Transcript for September 4

FAIR Media Views - Tor, 09/04/2008 - 8:39pm
Reporter John King tells Cable News Network viewers why he thinks media should not "say the right is running the Republican campaign":We didn't say, during the Democratic convention, the teachers' unions and the SEIU and the AFL-CIO—are they running the Obama campaign?

This is a classic example of false balance at work. The idea that the Democratic National Convention was run by the teachers union and big labor is absurd; the Democrats' education platform endorsed merit pay, which teachers unions oppose, and the convention was markedly subdued on the trade issue. But to King, clearly, accuracy takes a back seat to "balance."

Mark Weisbrot & Nichole Szembrot (Center for Economic and Policy Research): Oil Drilling in Environmentally Sensitive Areas: The Role of the Media

FAIR Media Views - Tor, 09/04/2008 - 8:08pm

CEPR co-director Weisbrot's research shows that, out of 267 TV news stories that mentioned the offshore drilling proposal, only one report cited the Energy Information Agency's finding that this would take 20 years to have an insignificant effect on gas prices:Broadcasts almost completely ignored data, and conclusions, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s EIA. The EIA finds that the benefits from such drilling would be too small to have a significant effect on the price of oil. There is no legitimate reason for this omission in the media. Just as economic reporting regularly uses data (unemployment, inflation, GDP, trade) from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, or Bureau of Labor Statistics, reporting on energy relies on data from the EIA.

Citing polls in which over half of those surveyed call environmental protections a "major cause of the recent increase in gasoline prices," Weisbrot very reasonably posits that "omission of the relevant data from this recent reporting may have contributed to the widespread public misunderstanding."

James Rainey (Los Angeles Times): Blurring of Journalism Lines in Palin Story Hurts Public

FAIR Media Views - Tor, 09/04/2008 - 7:51pm
Lamenting the political influence of sensationalist newsstand magazines which "have readership that newspapers could only pray for. (People is a juggernaut with a circulation of 3.8 million)," Rainey displays the results of real campaign reporting on how "a group of Republican women led by Carly Fiorina faced down a room full of reporters at the convention center here and demanded that the Palin 'smears' stop":Former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift, in particular, railed about the unfairness of it all. I thought maybe I had missed something, so I followed Swift into the hallway. I asked her to name the legitimate news outlet that had smeared McCain's running mate. Swift looked crestfallen.

"Well, the Daily Kos," she finally offered, citing the blog where political lefties go to post their rants. "How about one big mainstream news organization?" I prodded. "There must be one that has smeared Gov. Palin." Swift seemed confused. She looked toward an aide. Surrounded by a scrum of reporters, she lowered her head and moved away.

See FAIR's new Media Advisory: Maverick No Matter What: McCain's VP Pick Just Reinforces Media Storyline (9/3/08)

Daniel Denvir (Glocal Circus): Bizarre AP Article on Ecuador

FAIR Media Views - Tor, 09/04/2008 - 7:24pm
Independent journalist Denvir knocks down an Associated Press article he found to be "uncritically repeating Colombian government slander against Ecuador"—looking at the AP claim that a captured "laptop detailed close ties between the [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] rebels and several prominent Ecuadorean leftists. They also indicate President Rafael Correa's 2006 campaign received $100,000 from the FARC":It is journalistically irresponsible to report these documents as conclusively proving ties between the FARC and Correa. There has been a large debate over the meaning and origin of these documents—check out two letters (here and here) by U.S. academics criticizing Colombia's charges of FARC ties, the INTERPOL investigation and surrounding media coverage—also check out these articles that I wrote, 1 and 2). Further, INTERPOL did not even certify that the documents were authentic—they only verified that the documents were not tampered with by Colombia—even though they certified that they had been. (I know, it sounds weird, read the analysis.)

Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: Forrest Hylton on FARC Laptops (5/23/08)

Dean Baker (Beat the Press): What Long-Running Economic Recovery Did Bush Not Get Credit For?

FAIR Media Views - Tor, 09/04/2008 - 6:48pm
Catching the New York Times "making up stories about the economy again" with reporter Peter Baker's a assertion that, "for years, [George W. Bush] got no credit for a long-running economic recovery, in part because of popular anger over Iraq":The economy was losing jobs from shortly after President Bush took office in January of 2001 until August of 2003. It then created jobs for just over four years and then began shedding jobs in January of 2008. How does this compares to an expansion that lasted for more than eight years under Clinton? This period of job expansion was far weaker than the stretch of almost eight years in the '80s also. In fact, it was a relatively short period of employment growth compared to other post-war expansions and it was also quite weak, with the pace of job growth relatively modest over most of the period.

Dean Baker's conclusion: "So Bush had a short and relatively weak period of job growth. What exactly was he supposed to get credit for?"

See also FAIR's Action Alert: NYT Falls for White House Spin on Economy: No One 'Envies' Bush GDP Record (1/28/08)

Absolving Your Sins and CYA: Corporations Embrace Voluntary Codes of Conduct

PR Watch - Tor, 09/04/2008 - 3:08pm

"We do not want children to smoke,” British American Tobacco (BAT) declares on its website. But the company that describes itself as the “world’s most international tobacco group” routinely violates its own voluntary international marketing and advertising standards, according to a July 1, 2008 BBC-TV This World investigation. BAT was caught in Malawi, Mauritius and Nigeria using marketing tactics that are well-known to appeal to youth: advertising and selling single cigarettes, and sponsoring non-age-restricted, product-branded musical entertainment. (See also "Playing with Children's Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi.")

When a company adopts and prominently touts its voluntary behavior codes, only to end up violating them, people start asking questions: What are the real reasons for these codes? Are they just for public relations (PR) purposes? To, as they say, ‘cover your a*s’ (CYA)? How did they arise? What, if any, value do they have?


read more

Sorry, Whistleblowers, You're on Your Own

PR Watch - Tor, 09/04/2008 - 11:58am

The U.S. Labor Department has only "ruled in favor of [corporate] whistleblowers 17 times out of 1,273 complaints filed since 2002," and has dismissed 841 cases. Many of the dismissals were based "on the technicality that workers at corporate subsidiaries aren't covered" by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The Act, passed after the Enron and Worldcom scandals, contained the first federal protections for corporate whistleblowers. Senator Patrick Leahy, who helped draft the Act, says it covers workers in corporate subsidiaries. "Otherwise," he explained, "a company that wants to do something shady, could just do it in their subsidiary." The Labor Department disagrees. One of the whistleblower cases it dismissed involves communications giant WPP. A former staffer at WPP's ad firm Ogilvy & Mather claims he was fired "in retaliation for his cooperation with a federal criminal investigation into his employer's billing practices." Two former Ogilvy executives received prison sentences for overbilling the U.S. government, but the staffer's whistleblower complaint was dismissed. Even though WPP describes its firms as "centrally integrated," the Labor Department ruled that Ogilvy is a subsidiary not covered by Sarbanes-Oxley.


Dean Baker (Beat the Press): The Role of Patents in Corrupting the Drug Development Process

FAIR Media Views - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 9:29pm

Providing some crucial background entirely missing from a New York Times article on what Baker calls "the Food and Drug Administration's drug approval process which often allows drugs on the market before there is direct evidence of their effectiveness":It would have been worth noting how government patent monopolies distort this process. Drug companies are anxious to gain patent rents and therefore will aggressively lobby the FDA to approve their drug, whether or not their has been sufficient testing. By contrast, in cases where there are already a number of drugs to treat a specific health condition, like those discussed in this article, it would be socially beneficial to require long and extensive testing, since there is little reason to believe that a new drug will offer substantial addition benefits.

The article quotes an industry representative as complaining that such a requirement would be expensive and discourage the development of new drugs. Of course that is precisely the desired outcome. We would rather see drug companies pursue cures for health conditions where current treatments are inadequate than try to develop copycat drugs. This point should have been discussed explicitly in the article.

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: NYT Pushing Drug Company Line (2/07) by Janine Jackson

Steve Benen (Political Animal): A Meaningless Distraction

FAIR Media Views - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 9:29pm

In more news from corporate media's Inverse-Priorityville, stories about a presidential candidate's lies about policy are of little interest—whereas stories about the personal lives of the candidate's children are considered to be of major importance:Sarah Palin apparently lied about abusing her powers as governor, firing a capable Public Safety Commissioner without cause. Campaign reporters find that mildly interesting, but during a lengthy interview between John McCain and Chris Wallace yesterday, the subject didn't even come up. But now that John McCain's running mate's teenage daughter is having a baby, now reporters are... demanding answers....

The McCain campaign, as part of its pushback, had an anonymous aide tell Reuters that the Obama campaign has been behind the rumor mongering on Palin's family life, and for reasons that defy comprehension, Reuters ran the allegation without support or evidence. This afternoon, Obama hosted a press conference in which he hoped to talk about the federal response to Hurricane Gustav. Following the McCain campaign's sleazy tactics today, reporters had other issues on their minds....

As for the McCain's campaign's assertion that the Obama team played a role in going after Palin's family, Obama didn't even let the reporter finish asking the question: "I am offended by that statement.... "We don't go after people's families. We don't get them involved in the politics. It's not appropriate and it's not relevant."

Benen ends with the hope that campaign reporters "can find something else interesting tomorrow."

Michael Powell (New York Times): Witnesses to Dream Speech See a New Hope

FAIR Media Views - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 9:27pm

Presidential campaign correspondent Powell tries to give respect to civil rights activists who planned to watch "the first black major-party presidential nominee in the nation’s history give his acceptance speech":These veterans of the March on Washington are the living connective tissue to the America of 1963, when the police in some cities and towns still beat blacks with truncheons.

Yeah, thank goodness that never happens anymore....

Plenty of schools left behind

Economic Policy Institute - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 5:15pm
As the kids head back to school, a new analysis shows that school buildings are less ready to receive them than in the past. Get the fact at a glance in this week's Economic Snapshot.

Obama speech hits major EPI themes on the need for economic change

Economic Policy Institute - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 5:15pm
As he accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday night, Sen. Barack Obama forcefully outlined the failures of trickle-down economics and the need to return to an approach of shared responsibility and prosperity. His analysis echoed the work of EPI economists, who have long been tracking the negative outcomes of the on-your-own philosophy -- including growing income inequality, stagnant wages, and heightened risks for workers -- and proposing policy solutions.

State of Working America 2008/2009

Economic Policy Institute - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 5:15pm
Released in time for Labor Day, the advanced edition of EPI's authoritative volume The State of Working America 2008/2009 is now available. Described as the "most comprehensive independent analysis of the U.S. labor market" by the Financial Times, the 11th edition shows that the business cycle that started in 2001 will be one for the record books. For the first time on record, middle-class families are at the end of a recovery without ever having regained the ground they lost during the previous recession. Gross domestic product and historically high productivity growth should have raised paychecks up and down the income ladder, but instead the benefits of that growth have bypassed most of the people who made it possible and went to the top-most sliver. Prepared biennially since 1988, The State of Working America scrutinizes family incomes, jobs, wages, unemployment, wealth, poverty, and health care coverage, describing the economy's effect on our nation's standard of living. Visit the State of Working America Web site now and in coming months to read the executive summary, introduction, select chapters, press releases, and other related material, as well as to order your copy of the advanced and final edition (to be released by ILR/Cornell University Press in January 2009).

Not the same as it ever was

Economic Policy Institute - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 5:15pm
New data allows for a clear comparison of how median income for working-age families in the 2000s stacks up to the last economic cycle. Get the facts at a glance in this week's Snapshot.

New poverty, income, and health coverage analysis

Economic Policy Institute - Ons, 09/03/2008 - 5:15pm
The U.S. Census Bureau's annual release of poverty, income, and health coverage held some good news for Americans, but drilling down below the surface reveals a continuing erosion of the economy for working people. Although median household income increased slightly and the poverty rate was essentially unchanged from 2006 to 2007, incomes for working families (as opposed to retirees) actually dropped. The drop was especially significant when compared to median income in 2000, which is a better comparison because--like 2007--it was the final year of a cycle of economic growth. Given current conditions, income levels will surely decline further in 2008. The biggest surprise of the release came in the area of health care coverage. The number of uninsured dropped slightly in 2007, but the decline was due to an increase in government-sponsored coverage for children. Meanwhile, the rate of employer-based insurance coverage continued its seven-year decline.