Little has changed in Gaza

US "mainstream" media is happily using Iran in order to avoid giving Israel's continuing behavior much coverage.

The raft of condemnations by Western governments of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s taunts of flotilla volunteers whom the Israeli military illegally kidnapped from international waters was attended by a good deal of hypocrisy, since the US government despises them as well, and few European governments support them.

What much of the reporting ignores, however, is how necessary the aid flotilla still is, since the Israelis have gone back to blockading key foodstuffs, medicine and fuel, and continue to shell and bomb people in Gaza. In other words, the genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz crisis. - Informed Comment

A ceasefire is supposed to mean no more shooting

But corporate media has been desperate for a reason, no matter how spurious, to heap praise on Trump.

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel Violates Ceasefire”—or maybe “So Much for ‘Peace’ in Gaza.”

No such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media—not that there weren’t some pretty spectacular violations to choose from. - FAIR

Corporate media's flagrant right-wing propaganda on the economy

This could in part be an indicator of how nervous the greedheads are getting, about the GOP's, and even corporate Dems', electoral prospects in coming cycles. With crap like this their mouthpieces are basically sacrificing any chance of gaining younger, more knowledgeable audiences for the long haul.

If you were a casual consumer of the news over the last couple years, you may not have heard much about these success stories. You may, in fact, think that everything has suddenly gone wrong all at once.

And it would be hard to blame you. In the wake of a historically progressive response to an economic downturn, corporate media have been intently focused on the negative...

In this environment, any discussion of Biden’s poor approval ratings on economic policy has to include consideration of the media’s role in manufacturing those ratings. In the wake of the Covid recession, in May 2020, Trump’s disapproval on this measure hit 51%. Biden’s most recent rating is a full 16 points worse, at 67% disapproval. This despite a much stronger economy than in May of 2020—the unemployment rate, for one, is nearly 10 percentage points lower now.

If we want to understand how progressive policy is undermined by a media owned by the wealthy, the experience of the last several years offers a case study. In the wake of robust government intervention in 2020 and 2021 that cut inequality and boosted incomes, especially for those at the bottom, inflation-mania has taken over in the media. - FAIR

Corporate media misrepresented the facts on crime

To say the very least. Of course "if it bleeds it leads" has always been central to news outlets. But recently it's taken on undeniable elements of a deliberate effort to influence voter behavior, on behalf of the Party of Trump. This is the most comprehensive, yet relatively concise, thing I've seen online regarding corporate media's appalling behavior, here.

Fearmongering about crime in Democratic states and cities was certainly central to the Republican Party’s midterm elections strategy, although at this point it is hard to say how effective it was...

What is certain is that the Republican obsession with crime received major attention in the media, and the subject was not always handled with the proper context, often tipping the balance to the conservative partisan narrative...

Of course, the realities of crime data never stopped Republicans from painting Democrats as soft on crime, or blaming crime spikes—real or imaginary—on Democratic policies. In 2022, rather than combating such distortions, various media helped to amplify a simplistic depiction, becoming de facto propaganda arms for the Republican campaigns. - FAIR

Current reality in the Palestinian West Bank

As is noted, people aren't getting much reality on this, from U.S. corporate "news" media.

The Palestinian West Bank, which is militarily occupied by Israel and which is being steadily colonized by Israeli squatters on Palestinian-owned land, is a seething cauldron. Some sort of gag rule appears to deter American television “news” from covering these dramatic events, which are pregnant with sinister implications for American security. Veteran newsman Tom Fenton once argued that the poor coverage on television news of international events actually forms a security threat to the United States, a republic that depends for its smooth functioning on an informed public.

Far right Israeli politicians such as Binyamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett, the two most recent ex-prime ministers, have assiduously cultivated equally far right squatters in the Palestinian West Bank, giving them carte blanche to arm themselves and to terrorize Palestinian townspeople.

When you encourage fascism, you should not be surprised when you get the equivalent of Mussolini’s black shirts, or Trump’s Oath Keepers. - Informed Comment

Most parents still like, even love, their kids' public schools

In spite of the deformers' "best" efforts, and those of deformer allies in corporate media.

Right-wingers' real beef with public schools, though they themselves don't even realize it, is that they're doing too good a job compared to what wingnuts want. A large majority of contemporary public school graduates just plain know better than to be right-wing conservatives. And they especially know better than to be Trumpers.

Who would have imagined that after the past two tumultuous years, when so much was written and said about how the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had convinced American parents that public schools were “failing” institutions, that as the 2022-2023 school year begins, “Americans’ ratings of their community’s public schools reached a new high dating back 48 years.” That’s the stunning finding in the highly respected annual survey conducted by PDK.

The finding aligns with a history of survey results showing parents are generally pleased with the public schools their children attend. Even during the height of the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021, Gallup reported that parent satisfaction with local schools declined only slightly, and “more than seven in 10 parents” still expressed satisfaction.

Puzzling over this phenomenon, Chalkbeat national reporter Matt Barnum judged the widespread assumption of parent dissatisfaction with local public schools to be one among a number of “common, fear-inducing claims about the state of American schooling [that] are inaccurate or unproven.” He concluded, “It’s not entirely clear what’s going on.”

In an attempt to explain what’s going on, education historian Jack Schneider noted that while most parents rate the schools their own children attend highly, with 70 percent assigning their schools a grade of A or B, a similar percentage grade schools in general C or D.

In considering what might be causing this “perception gap,” Schnider argued, “One obvious factor is the rise of a national politics of education.” - LA Progressive

Most Americans support real climate action, and most Americans don't know that

I found this surprising, myself. Not that people underestimate the support, given that corporate media propaganda is still ultimately most people's source, to the extent that they're paying much attention at all. But at how wide the margin is.

It can be hard to guess what others are thinking. Especially when it comes to climate change.

People imagine that a minority of Americans want action, when it’s actually an overwhelming majority, according to a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications. When asked to estimate public support for measures such as a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, most respondents put the number between 37 and 43 percent. In fact, polling suggests that the real number is almost double that, ranging from 66 to 80 percent.

Across all demographics, people underestimated support for these policies. Democrats guessed slightly higher percentages than Republicans, but were still way off. “Nobody had accurate estimates, on average,” said Gregg Sparkman, a co-author of the study and a professor of psychology at Boston College. “We were shocked at just how ubiquitous this picture was.” - Grist

Israeli assassination of journalist gets the standard U.S. corporate media treatment

Most U.S. Jews don't support Israeli extremism. You'd never know that based on the behavior of our corporate "journalism."

Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known and much-loved Al Jazeera reporter who covered Palestine for two decades, was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper May 11 while documenting an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank...

The context of escalating Israeli attacks on freedom of the press and on journalists in the Occupied Territories did not enter the frame of most US news coverage. Instead, many used a back-and-forth blame frame for reporting the murder of a veteran war correspondent who knew well how to negotiate crossfire in the field of battle. This was acknowledged by Ali Samoudi, who said from his hospital bed, if there had been crossfire, they wouldn’t have been there.

Amidst the debunking of the Israeli messaging, by late Wednesday some news outlets, including NBC (5/11/22), noted that Israel “appeared to step back from that claim” that Abu Akleh may have been killed by Palestinian gunmen.

Yet most big media would continue to include Israeli messaging in their reporting, while failing to disclose any of the factchecking done on the Israeli video. They “balanced” on-the-ground testimony with Israeli statements, keeping the propaganda story alive. - FAIR

The real "crime wave" is in Trumper-run red states

This is actually no secret. But corporate "news" media is awfully close-mouthed about it.

A new study again confirms it: Republican-led states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones. While your Tucker Carlson-watching uncle may be utterly convinced that Portland, Oregon, has been burned to the ground, or regaling his email lists with any number of tales he heard directly from Donald Trump's inflamed appendix, the truth of the matter is that the states with high violent crime rates tend to be led by conservative Republican politicians.

So then, which causes which? That's not clear, but the Yahoo! News writeup of the study provides a nice, terse summary of what we know does predict violent crime rates. They "are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance," which not coincidentally describes much of the deep-conservative South. It may be that fear of violent crime makes Americans more conservative; certainly, anyone with a passing familiarity with Fox News knows that America's top conservative news source got that way with hosts that scream in bug-eyed terror over all the ways that you, personally, are in imminent danger of being murdered by immigrants, or bilingual people, or the Socialisms, or anyone who thinks American police are straight-up murdering too many of the people they come in contact with these days...

But the reality remains: If you want to reduce violent crime, you fix up the schools to raise education levels, you institute programs to lift people out of poverty, and you provide government assistance to make sure people are at least getting food and a roof over their heads. Since all of these are things that Republicanism is absolutely bug-eyed dead-set against in any form, in any venue, we're hardly going out on a limb by saying A leads to B leads to C. - Daily Kos

Whiny twits in corporate "news" media

I for one will never, ever forgive corporate media, starting with the New York Times, for what they did to help put Trump in the White House. That they deserve to be regarded as the ultimate judges of what's acceptable and/or desirable, in the wake of that and so much else, is beyond farcical.

And what follows in the (New York) Times piece is the true chilling effect, a line that seems innocuous but really isn’t: “Free speech is predicated on mutual respect.” Is it? Where is this doctrine of Kumbaya (written) into constitutional theory? The American ideal of free speech is predicated on the idea that the government should not control printing presses, dictate what can be said out loud or limit how we peaceably assemble.

Lately, many free speech advocates wonder to what degree corporations, rather than government, are limiting discourse by virtue of the fact that only a few companies—Facebook, Twitter and Google—dominate the Internet. There is no legal argument that we all have to respect and like each other; we simply acknowledge that powerful institutions are not supposed to limit each other’s expression.

This editorial, with its appeal to niceties and decorum, flips this concept on its head, saying that discourse isn’t under threat by state and corporate power but by the fact the 99 Percent—students, readers, regular people—are getting too loud in a media ecosystem that is much more open and democratic than it was for previous generations...

What the Times editorial is saying is that protecting the right of writers and academics to say unpopular things requires self-censorship for those who don’t have the privilege of being employed in the intellectual class. A columnist says something transphobic? Don’t you dare tweet about it. A television host engages in some casual racism? Better not put it in your blog, or else you’re contributing to the hostile environment of shaming that leads to self-censorship. Self-censorship by other people, that is, whose right to express themselves is presumably more important than yours.

The Times editorial is less about free speech than it is a protest against a shift in the power balance, anger at a world in which journalists have more exposure to the readership class, and to the reader’s anger as well. - FAIR

About that "crime surge"

This article is from a California-based blog. I'm passing it along because it also very much applies in Minnesota. Especially the parts about corporate "news" media and Party of Trump politicians.

Unfortunately, the reporting about crime is generally distorted, too. The FBI's published crime stats do not include “white collar” crime like wage theft and violations of the Clean Water Act. Despite recent protests from the Chamber of Commerce about pursuit of corporate criminals, "white-collar crime likely costs the American economy between $300 and $800 billion per year, while street crimes like burglary and theft cost around $16 billion."

...How bad is U.S. incarceration? With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. is the world’s "champion" incarcerator, jailing 25% of the world's inmates--more in absolute or per-capita numbers than any other nation. The demographically-identical Canadians cage one-seventh as many people, per capita.

So is Canadian crime greater than in the U.S.? No, it's about the same. - It's Simpler Than It Looks

Calling out crap polling

Or more to the point, the misuse of it. There certainly is a lot of that out there.

Admitting that their polls may not be the best measure of public opinion, and in some cases may in fact be seriously flawed, would undermine the credibility, not just of the generic ballot measure or Biden’s approval rating, but of all the other questions in the poll as well.

In short, there is a financial/corporate incentive for media poll reports not to tell the whole truth about the state of public opinion. As far as the news organization is concerned, regardless of what other polls show, public opinion is what their new poll says it is.

This is, of course, a reason not to put too much weight on any single report about an outlets’ polling results. - FAIR

For what it's worth, I provided my own take on the overall state of contemporary political polling, in the U.S., here.

A different take on contemporary political journalism

Different from mine, that is. I typically explain corporate media's failures in terms of their need to stay afloat financially, along with the owners' political agendas. This points out some other plausible factors.

But we also would do well to think about why that might be the case. What’s driving the media’s current failures?

Many critics point the finger at traditional journalistic norms, and with good reason: Some of the problems are baked into the professional values and habits of U.S. journalism. Newsroom ethnographers as far back as the 1970s observed that journalists wrote with two aims in mind: to avoid being accused of political bias and to impress other journalists. Both tendencies persist today. Skittishness about being seen as biased resulted in the both-sidesism that too often characterized coverage of Trump. Meanwhile, coverage of the Build Back Better bill exemplified journalism’s insular tendencies, providing a play-by-play of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s objections rather than explaining the legislation’s actual content and its implications for Americans.

Looking at journalists’ professional values and habits of mind can help explain why the news so often falls short of what democracy needs. But it is not enough. We also need to remember that journalism is a job, and journalists are workers. In their book on creative labor, cultural sociologists David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker argue that “bad work”—that is, work that is boring, insecure, isolating, excessive, or poorly compensated—is more likely to produce poor-quality cultural products. Unsurprisingly, the opposite is true of “good work”—work that is fairly compensated, secure, autonomous, and interesting. If we want to understand why journalists are creating so much news that is of so little civic value, we need to look closely at the conditions under which they labor. - The American Prospect

Even for corporate "news," the hypocrisy on Afghanistan is a nadir

I know that I'm far from the only one who saw this coming, during the corporate media hysterics over the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces.

As the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan in August, US TV news interest in the plight of the country’s citizens spiked, often focusing on “the horror awaiting women and girls” (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21) to argue against withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21).

Four months later, as those same citizens have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis due in no small part to US sanctions, where is the outrage?

...Since November 1, well into the worsening crisis, FAIR identified only 37 TV news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC that mentioned “humanitarian” in the same sentence as Afghanistan. That’s 37 segments in seven weeks.

For perspective, as the US withdrew in August, journalists from those shows mentioned “women’s rights” in the same sentence as Afghanistan more often—42 times—in just seven days. Today, as those women and girls face starvation, the deeply concerned TV reporters are virtually nowhere to be seen. - FAIR

The real roots of the Ukraine problem

This article steps back and analyzes the big picture, like it or not. Which is not what corporate media does.

More importantly, the media fail to mention U.S. responsibility for the current tempest, which can be attributed to the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that unwisely expanded NATO, bringing Russia’s immediate neighbors and even former Soviet republics into an alliance that now has 30 members. NATO expansion is the major irritant in Russian-American relations and the leading cause of what appears to be the start of a new Cold War. Gorbachev’s willingness to accept German reunification without security guarantees explains the Russian vilification of Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze to this day. U.S. wholesale exploitation of Russian weakness in the 1990s explains Putin’s adamant insistence on calling a halt to the Western advance.

The United States has taken additional gratuitous steps on Russia’s doorstep over the past two decades. The administrations of Bush and Obama deployed an advanced surface-to-air missile system in Poland and Romania, arguing that it was needed to counter a possible Iranian missile attack in Eastern Europe. Such nonsense! The U.S. and British navies continue to deploy naval combatants in the Black Sea that threaten to enter Russian territorial waters. Various NATO members in East Europe and the Baltics are requesting additional Western military systems as well as a permanent U.S. military presence. The presence of Germany military forces in the Baltics is a particular affront to Russia’s legitimate concerns about its safety and sovereignty.

President Joe Biden appears no wiser than his four predecessors. - CounterPunch

Massive corporate media "crime wave" misinformation

Yeah, Third Way is a bunch of "centrists," that is, Conservadem corporate tools. But the facts and analysis in this report are clearly valid.

Our findings are as follows:

- Contrary to the media narrative, overall crime decreased in 2020 compared to 2019.

- A spike in homicides in 2020 is unique to homicides and is an outlier when compared to all other crimes.

- There appears to be no difference in crime trends between Republican-led and Democrat-led states.

- There appears to be no difference in crime trends between states that enacted police reforms and those that did not. - Third Way

What's the current deal with lab-grown meat?

To be clear, this long, comprehensive article leans toward "billion-dollar boondoggle." And it makes a compelling case, if you ask me.

Who’s right? Is cultured meat our best hope to save the climate, a billion-dollar boondoggle, or something in between? Will it ever make sense to produce food the way we currently make our drugs?

The stakes couldn’t be higher. In August, the United Nations released a nearly 4,000-page report amounting to what it called a “code red for humanity”: Unless the world’s nations make a vast, coordinated effort to stop burning fossil fuels and razing forests, we’ll find ourselves locked into an even more dire, unforgiving future than the one we’re facing now. At a time when bold environmental solutions are needed, we can only afford to direct public and private investment toward solutions that actually work. But without looking more closely at the fundamentals—something media has largely declined to do—we can’t know whether cultured meat is our salvation or an expensive distraction. - The Counter

A superlative takedown of the contemptible pro-war cowards in corporate media

My take is that this won’t have a lasting political impact. But I’m noting that I could be wrong, and that the last time corporate “news” media behaved this despicably, pandering to the most misinformed and gullible segment of the population, Trump ended up in the White House.

Mainstream coverage of Kabul’s fall and its aftermath has been anything but circumspect. Attempts to weigh the benefits of America’s withdrawal (e.g., the humanitarian gains inherent to the cessation of 20 years of civil war) against its costs have been rare; attempts to judge Biden’s execution of that withdrawal against rigorous counterfactuals have been rarer still. Instead, ostensibly neutral correspondents and anchors have (1) openly editorialized against the White House’s policy; (2) assigned Biden near-total responsibility for the final collapse of the proto-failed state his predecessors had established; and then (3) reported on the potential political costs of Biden’s actions, as though they were not actively imposing those costs through their own speculations about just “how politically damaging” the president’s failures of “competence” and “empathy” would prove to be...

One can critically report on concrete failings in the Biden administration’s withdrawal plans. But one cannot presume Biden’s responsibility for every negative consequence that follows from ending a misbegotten war and deserve the title journalist. By privileging the victims of American military withdrawal over those of American military engagement — while presuming the U.S. president’s capacity to decisively shape events in foreign lands — the media has rendered itself objectively pro-war. In allowing personal attachments to dictate its humanitarian concerns, mainstream reporters have concentrated moral outrage on an injustice that the U.S. can’t resolve without resort to violence (the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan), while enabling mass indifference to a much larger injustice that the U.S. can drastically mitigate without killing anyone (the global shortfall of COVID-19 vaccines). - New York Magazine

Afghanistan withdrawal shows U.S. corporate "news" media at its worst

OK, not its absolute, all-time worst; that goes to all it did to put Trump in the White House. And the lasting effects of this “journalistic” debacle will be few, if any, because in a week most people will care about as much about Afghanistan as they did a week ago. But it’s still atrocious.

Treating the Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan’s capitol over the weekend as a shocking event in the wake of U.S. troops withdrawing from the war-torn country, the press eagerly jumped into the blame game. In the process, they diligently did the GOP’s bidding by omitting key context in its rush to pin the blame for a 20-year, extraordinarily complex and heartbreaking military and foreign policy failure on a single man who took office just seven months ago...

In truth, the Republican policy is to leave U.S. troops there forever and spend untold billions in the process. Yet the only Republican perspective journalists focused on in recent days was that Republicans were very mad at Biden. (Yes, many of them were stalwart supporters of the Iraq War and stood by Bush’s botched handling of the war for years.)

When Biden announced earlier this year that all U.S. troops were coming home from Afghanistan, 70 percent of Americans supported the move, including 56 percent support from Republicans.

Would those polling results be different today, given the collapse of Kabul and the Taliban’s newfound control of Afghanistan? It’s possible. But after the U.S. fought a losing war there for two decades, my guess is that most Americans will not swing their positions and urgently demand that U.S. forces return to mountainous fighting.- Crooks and Liars

It's no surprise that corporate "news" is back to the same old

I question, myself, to what real extent they could ever be said to have moved away from it.

After January 6, we noted (FAIR.org, 1/18/21) that many in corporate media finally found the courage to cast aside their commitment to false equivalence. Presumably shocked by what they had witnessed, reporters began using words like “sedition” and “incitement” without having to put them in the mouth of a source who could then be balanced by an opposing view. News outlets directly stated that Donald Trump “set in motion” (New York Times, 1/6/21) or was responsible for “inciting” (CNN.com, 1/12/21) the deadly attack on democracy.

Yet we also noted that Trump’s lack of support at the time from within the establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, made that honesty easier for reporters—some of whom nevertheless couldn’t shake their old habits as a debate began over whether Trump should be impeached yet again for inciting the insurrection.

Six months later, Trump has solidified his grip on the right, and elite journalists have largely returned to their perfunctory both-sides reporting. - FAIR