Atrios makes some good points yesterday about our media. Glenn Beck, has a show on Headline News nightly where he makes up stuff left and right (click through to Atrios’s post for the Media Matters links). There is no liberal equivalent on the air anywhere.

Fox News has ideological blowhards like O’Reilly and Hannity on all night every day. There is no liberal equivalent on the air anywhere.

CNN has Lou Dobbs who uses faux populist rhetoric to fan right wing (and factually false) talking points on everything from NAFTA to immigration. There is no liberal equivalent on the air.

Consider this a mini-rant. This isn’t about ideology so much as it is about partisan hackery. While I think that it would be nice to have liberals on, the more important thing is that we have honest journalists demanding accountability. And the fact of the matter is that the so-called-liberals like Olbermann are only considered “liberal” because they oppose the administration’s power grabs and are critical of their policies when experts find them useless.

There is no Democratic fluffer squad out there that is the equivalent of Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc. I’d rather not have a fluffer squad for either side, but if we’re going to have one for Republicans, it would be nice if we had a few for Democrats, too.

And, the irony is that when you look at the ratings for the cable news channels, the only show that competes with Fox in the key demo night after night is Keith Olbermann’s Countdown which is arguably center-left. Rachel Maddow is the closest thing to an actual liberal on the air regularly, but she doesn’t have her own show.

She needs one. Beyond her ideology, she’s actually good. Anyone that can stand up to Pat Buchanan ranting at them would be a good host, and she did it without being O’Reilly rude:

(BTW, when I was looking for that clip, I found out that MSNBC doesn’t have that segment online on their own streaming site… they have the clip before, the clip after, but not this one. Another argument why having clip sites like Red Lasso around… trusting the media to do this themselves is not in the public interest.)

Of course, Atrios puts it best:

I know this complaint gets a bit old. I’ve been making it for 6 years now. But it’d be nice if the liberal media contained an actual liberal.

Besides, if the media actually reported on stories, you might hear more stories about high level corruption in the Bush administration, something which ought to be a bigger story than the Clinton/Lewinsky BS, but hardly gets the on air, wall-to-wall coverage that it deserves. These guys repeatedly violated the law, adding Soviet-style party loyalty checks to hiring practices. This is grossly un-American and illegal and yet… you’d barely hear about it on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC (except for Olbermann’s show).

Makes me want to yell at the TV sometimes…

Most of you probably know this, so consider this a friendly reminder. When you see a direct quote from someone that includes ellipses in the middle somewhere (or splits the quote in another way), be cautious and turn up the dial on your BS meter. Otherwise, you could get fooled by reporters who create this surprising quote:

Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

out of the more humble, more expected, and far less controversial:

It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.

I’ve seen variations of criticism of this particular story around various blogs today, but the bottom line is that the ellipses obscured the pretty clear statement that he was being humble, not arrogant. Matt Yglesias puts it clearest, so I’ve cribbed from him.

Besides, quite frankly, he’s right. This isn’t about Barack Obama the man but about the vision he’s put forward of a better America. It is all about America.

Update: oops, clarified a bit in the first paragraph.

If you haven’t read the blockbuster Times story I linked to earlier, you should go do that now. It’s long, took me several breaks today to finish it, but the detail of the information the Times found removes any doubt that there were clear conflicts of interest for these military analysts.

So, with this story now, we have two threads that I’ve been mulling over (and others have been writing about now). First, I’m just wondering at what point do we start calling this stuff propaganda? By any definition, this is what we’ve been handed. Combined with Armstrong Williams and the other columnists that were paid off by the government to write favorable columns, it’s pretty clear that this is considered standard operating procedure for this administration, regardless of the importance of the issue.

Secondly, I think we’re sitting at a point where online media MUST get stronger and more popular. The conflicts of interest for these analysts isn’t the only one for these companies. GE owns NBC and makes money off of the military spending. Large companies like Disney and Viacom own NBC and depend on favorable legislation and tax breaks in order to run things like DisneyWorld or get language inserted into trade agreements and treaties.

In all of these cases, the news operations are puny compared to the rest of the revenue the other businesses generate. Responsible CEOs have no choice but to prioritize.

Anyway, I don’t really have a point. This story by the NY Times has just added some clarity to the overall picture. There’s no incentive for our current major news organizations to be objective, and in a market-driven news operation, I’m not sure I understand what alternatives can exist.

TPM points to this massive article in tomorrow’s NY Times detailing how the military analysts you see on TV have worked, often very closely, with the Pentagon to make sure their message got out there.

If this happened in another country, we’d be calling it propaganda. In our’s, we’ll all just shrug and forget about it. Pisses me off. All I know is that these retired generals have hurt the country by doing what they did and not disclosing it.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

There’s more. Go read.

Hilarious because it’s true:

The press is lazy.

(via Atrios)

Talking to a reporter, the waitress at the center of the absurd Hillary/no tip story had this to say:

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Ah, but Ms. Esterday, those elite pundits and journalists aren’t affected by these trifles as you and I are.

If that doesn’t sum up what’s so very wrong about our political journalism today, I don’t know what is. Everything is gossip!

(via Balloon Juice, though I’ve since seen this on many blogs)