FAIR

With a longer-than-usual election season and a meltdown in the financial markets, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was certainly no shortage of news to explain and media messages to unspin. We can't cover it all in one half-hour program, of course, but we can bring together some of the notable critics, activists and journalists that joined CounterSpin in 2008 to talk about the way the corporate media covered—or in some cases ignored—the big stories of the year.

This week on CounterSpin: December 2008 marks not just the conclusion of another calendar year, but the end of eight years of the George W. Bush administration—an era notable for, among other things, particular predations on civil liberties, the free flow of information and the public's right to know. Other administrations have been wary of the press corps, to be sure. But it was the Bush White House whose first attorney general instructed federal agencies to drag their feet on FOIA requests; whose Defense Department orchestrated the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein—supposedly by joyous Iraqis—as part of a disinformation campaign on the war. Who pressured EPA officials to "clean up" public statements on air quality at Ground Zero after September 11, 2001. Whatever one thinks of the incoming administration, it's fair to say the departing one has left a very high hole to dig out of a number of fronts.

This week on CounterSpin: When the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report finding former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high officials responsible for abusive treatment of detainees in Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistan--with few exceptions, the media played the story down, preferring, for instance, righteous anger over embroiled Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. We'll discuss the Senate report with the Center for Constitutional Rights' Michael Ratner, whose book, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld, was published in September.

President-elect Barack Obama chose Chicago schools superintendent Arne Duncan as his nominee for Education secretary after an almost entirely one-sided media discussion that portrayed the most progressive candidate in the running for the post--Stanford educational researcher Linda Darling-Hammond--as an unacceptable pick.

The New York Times failed spectacularly in its coverage of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, helping lead the country into war and only much later (5/26/04) publishing a half-hearted mea culpa. As the near-apology acknowledged, the paper’s failure resulted in large part from its lack of skepticism regarding its sources, most notably exiled Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi.

This week on CounterSpin: The Tribune Company that owns the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times along with much else declared bankruptcy this week, just a year after new owner Sam Zell took over, with his notable lack of background or interest in newspapers. It sounds like workers will wind up with the short end of the stick but what does it mean in the bigger picture? Are capitalists losing interest in media and if so, what do we think about that? We'll talk with media scholar and author Bob McChesney about that story.

Corporate media are cheering what they suggest are signs that President-elect Barack Obama will break his campaign promise and defy both U.S. and Iraqi public opinion to keep combat troops in Iraq for longer than his 16-month withdrawal timetable.

This week on CounterSpin: For years veterans claiming to suffer from Gulf War Syndrome were derided as cranky and hysterical by the department of defense and even by some journalists. Will that change now that a definitive report says the Gulf War illnesses are real, incurable, and caused by toxic materials used by the U.S. military during the 1991 Gulf War? We'll talk to Paul Sullivan, a veteran and the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

In a December 1 interview with ABC anchor Charles Gibson, George W. Bush gave a grossly erroneous history of the run-up to the Iraq War--a false version of events that Gibson failed to challenge and the Washington Post glossed over the following day.

This week on CounterSpin: Bailing out the Big Three. GM, Ford and Chrysler are on the brink of total failure, we're told. In a season of corporate bailouts of all sorts, this one is meeting more resistance—in part because union autoworkers, we're told, are making too much money. Mark Brenner of Labor Notes will join us to talk about it.

Corporate media are largely cheering Barack Obama's early appointment of Clinton-era centrists. Many of these nominees have a distinct record of support for the corporate-friendly NAFTA trade pact, gutting public assistance programs under the guise of welfare "reform," and pushing various deregulatory policies in the financial sector (including the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act). Yet, to hear the media tell it, Obama's centrist nominees inhabit an ideology-free political zone.

Since FAIR sent out an action alert (10/27/08) about the Washington Post's weekly chart, "Iraq War Casualties," the newspaper has ceased using the misleading term "maximum count" to refer to an Iraqi civilian death toll figure 2 to 10 times lower than the casualty figures reached by household surveys (Washington Post, 11/1/08, 11/8/08, 11/15/08). FAIR appreciates the change.

This week on CounterSpin: The victory of Proposition 8 in California has, at least for the moment, put the brakes on gay marriage in that state. The post-election recriminations are flying, but the main story we're hearing is that black voters turned out in droves—to support Barack Obama, and to defeat gay marriage rights. Is that narrative correct? We'll ask journalist Kai Wright.

This week on CounterSpin: As the Congo sinks again into crisis, U.S. journalism is again largely portraying the conflict as peculiar to the Congo, a story explained by the country's and its neighbors' endless, intractable ethnic struggles. We'll be joined by Maurice Carney, the executive director of Friends of the Congo, who says international corporations and western consumers like you are as key to the conflict as are local African factors.

Fox News Channel senior vice president John Moody took issue with FAIR's action alert, "Fox News Nailbiter! Conservative Channel Pushed Notion of a Tightening Election." But Moody's claims--and his suggestion that FAIR "retract your article and provide an appropriate apology"--are based on a peculiar argument.

In the 1990 Polish elections a whispering campaign suggesting that Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Roman Catholic, was a “secret Jew” attracted widespread attention in the U.S. press, as did a nearly identical rumor about the leading challenger in Poland’s 1995 election. In no uncertain terms, U.S. news reports called the rumors “ugly examples” (Washington Post, 12/31/90) of the “increasingly visible expressions of anti-Semitism” (New York Times, 1/21/91), the most notable such “anti-Semitic acts” in Poland (Washington Post, 7/8/95).

A remarkable thing happened at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) nominations in February 2007: The normally highbrow and tolerant group nominated for best book in the field of criticism a work widely viewed as denigrating an entire religion.

Immediately after Barack Obama was pronounced the victor in the 2008 presidential election, corporate media began to tell him how he ought to govern--in most cases, urging him to hew toward the center. To support their argument, many journalists pointed to President Bill Clinton's first term to find lessons in centrism for Obama. But are media getting the history wrong?

This week on CounterSpin: Media are naturally enough busy trying to draw meaning from the results of the 2008 election that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. One emerging line is notable: That the victory of the African American Democrat either doesn't change or actually confirms that the United States is a "center-right" nation politically. Same goes for Congress, where we're told Democrats won by acting like Republicans. It's unclear if this narrative is going to take hold; meanwhile we'll get a different view from Bernie Horn, from the Campaign for America's Future.