Big Media's Bias For Torture: Study Shows Torture Advocates Outnumbered Critics 2-to-1 In Big Media

Dick Cheney defends torture on Meet the Press (12/14/14)

By Fair
A new FAIR study finds that torture defenders outnumbered critics of torture by nearly 2 to 1 in TV news coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee report released on December 9.

FAIR surveyed the guests of nine news programs for the week of December 7 to December 14, when discussion of the torture report’s findings was most prominent. The programs included the Sunday talk shows (NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face the Nation, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union) along with four weekday news shows (MSNBC's Hardball, Fox's Special Report, the first hour of CNN's Situation Room and the PBS NewsHour).

Of the 104 guests discussing the topic on these shows, 53 expressed a discernible opinion either for or against the use of torture. Thirty-five of those who took a position, or 66 percent, were supportive of torture. This included a few individuals who claimed to be against "torture," but defended interrogation methods such as waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques” that are recognized as torture under US and international law.

Only 18 guests (34 percent) articulated clear opposition to the CIA's torture practices--about half as many as spoke up in defense of torture.

Journalists--mostly news correspondents brought on to discuss the report's release--made up 64 of the 104 total guests; few of these expressed an overt opinion on torture. Thirty-five former and current government officials--including nine CIA officers, seven of whom defended the torture program--were the bulk of the remaining guests.

Many of these former government officials were involved in authorizing or implementing the CIA’s torture program, including George W. Bush (State of the Union, 12/7/14), Vice President Dick Cheney (Special Report, 12/10/14; Meet the Press, 12/14/14), Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (Situation Room, 12/10/14), White House adviser Karl Rove (Fox News Sunday, 12/14/14), CIA Director Michael Hayden (Face the Nation, 12/7/14; This Week 12/14), CIA Deputy Director Jose Rodriguez (Fox News Sunday, 12/14/14) and CIA spokesperson Bill Harlow (NewsHour, 12/10/14; Situation Room, 12/11/14).

Guantanamo prosecutor David Iglesias also appeared on the NewsHour (12/10/14); of the eight former government officials who had a connection to the torture program, he was the only one to express opposition to it.

While those who ordered, justified and carried out torture were well-represented in the debate over the report, advocates for the victims of torture were seldom heard from. Joseph Margulies (Hardball, 12/9/14) and Meg Satterthwaite (This Week, 12/14/14), two lawyers representing victims of CIA torture, were the exceptions. Representatives of human rights groups and experts on international law were notable for their absence.

Among partisan guests--politicians and campaign officials--Republicans outnumbered Democrats 19 to 7. Sixteen of the Republicans defended torture, while three spoke against it--including Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), who opposed releasing the report or prosecuting torturers, but indicated that as a member of the Intelligence Committee he would block the CIA from conducting similar interrogations. Of the seven Democratic appearances, four spoke against torture, while three voiced no clear opinion.

Guests were coded by occupation, partisan affiliation and their expressed opinion on torture. Sources whose soundbites appeared in short taped segments were not counted as guests.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Who Rules Public TV?: Corporate Sector Overwhelmingly Dominates Public TV Governing Boards — Surprised?

Typical public TV board members.

By Aldo Guerrero
The corporate and financial sectors have an overwhelming presence on the governing boards of major public television stations, a new FAIR study finds.

The study looked at the occupations of the current trustees of WNET (New York City/Newark), WGBH (Boston), WETA (Washington, DC), WTTW (Chicago) and KCET (Los Angeles).

Out of these boards’ 182 total members, 152—or 84 percent—have corporate backgrounds, including 138 who are executives at elite businesses. Another 14 members appear to be on the board because of their families’ corporate-derived wealth, often with a primary affiliation as an officer of a family charitable foundation.

Many board members are affiliated with major corporations like Boeing, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. Seventy-five board members, nearly half of all those with corporate ties, are financial industry executives. Another 24 are corporate lawyers.

Public TV board members without corporate ties were few and far between. Of these, nine are categorized as academics, while six are affiliated with nonprofit groups (not counting family grant-making foundations). There are three former government officials, two non-corporate lawyers, two journalists, one religious educator and a former principal of a magnet school. Six board members are station insiders.

WNET, WGBH and WETA are considered to be the “big three” PBS affiliates, producing a large share of programming for PBS nationally. WTTW and KCET were included because they serve two of the largest US metropolitan areas. Four of these stations are affiliated with PBS; KCET disaffiliated in 2010, but remains a prominent regional public television station.

The boards range in size from WTTW’s 63 members to KCET’s 20. WTTW and WNET have the most corporate representation on their boards, each at 92 percent. KCET’s board is 80 percent corporate-affiliated, while DC’s WETA is at 73 percent. Corporate-tied board members were least common at WGBH, where they still made up two-thirds of the board.

One hundred sixteen members (64 percent) are male. It was not possible to do a breakdown of board members’ ethnicities.

Last year, the issue of corporate influence over public television was thrust into the spotlight when the film Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream was broadcast by PBS affiliate WNET (New Yorker, 5/27/13; FAIR Blog, 5/21/13). The film examined the concentration of wealth and power in the United States by looking at the super-rich residents of 740 Park Avenue—who included then-WNET board member and major station donor David Koch, a billionaire industrialist well known for his donations to right-wing causes.

High-powered executives like David Koch overwhelmingly dominate the boards of
trustees at public TV stations.

WNET president Neil Shapiro was said to be “concerned” about a film critical of one of his biggest funders. WNET ended up not receiving a large donation from Koch—potentially in the seven-figure range—because Park Avenue was broadcast, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported.

PBS then preemptively pulled the plug on Citizen Koch, another film that examined the Koch family’s political influence—apparently practicing self-censorship in an attempt to placate a wealthy donor. Koch would eventually resign from the WNET board of trustees. Since then, a campaign has been launched demanding that Koch also resign from the board of Boston’s WGBH, where he is still a trustee.

Public television stations depend on underwriting from the corporate sector, which is undoubtedly why executives and their families so dominate public TV’s boards. Over the years, FAIR has found public TV displaying bias and favoritism towards corporations (Press Release, 10/19/10; Action Alert, 4/23/12).

Some individuals within public TV acknowledge the problem of such influence. In a leaked farewell address, former PBS producer Sam Topperoff (Gawker, 5/24/10) was scathing about the state of New York public television, including WNET:

I see our general programming for the wider public as elitist and offensive in the extreme.... But, of course, when stations run on very rich people’s and corporate money, how could it be otherwise? And when the corporation is directed by those very clever and very ambitious fellows whose careers will float them to good places no matter what, what else could we reasonably expect?

Controlling the board means wielding ultimate power over the direction and character of a public television station. Boards have the power to elect top executives (presidents, CEOs, CFOs, etc.), manage the station’s finances and, of course, oversee the programming that their stations produce.

To join a public television board, an individual must be elected by existing board members. What sort of people are these business-dominated boards likely to select? They will likely perpetuate the corporate culture, rendering the “public” in Public Broadcasting Service an ironic anachronism.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

PBS Uses Advertising to Retaliate Against Critical Coverage — Angry Over Exposure As Mouthpiece for Elite

Harper's on PBS: "The only special-interest group the network
clearly favors is the aging upper class."

By Peter Hart
In the October issue of Harper's Magazine (10/14–subscription required), Eugenia Williamson takes a long look at the history of PBS, with a particular focus on how far the public broadcaster has strayed from its intended mission. What was supposed to be a forum for the underrepresented has long been just another outlet for elite, establishment-oriented views: "Today, the only special-interest group the network clearly favors is the aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics."

The piece has a great quote from PBS mainstay Bill Moyers:

Night after night…the realities of life for the vast majority of Americans rarely show up on public television—neither in its public-affairs programming nor its primetime fare. There has been one documentary all year on the flailing middle class and the forgotten poor. Our Washington coverage, by design or not, serves up "news" the way the butler serves tea on Downton Abbey, so as not to disturb the master class. Even my friends at WETA, our flagship station in Washington, passed up the award-winning documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth to air instead another episode of Antiques Roadshow and a program about the British royal family. And PBS has commissioned a series for next year, using US taxpayer funds, on the "great homes" of Great Britain. Not on homelessness in America. Unbelievable!

It's a story that is familiar to FAIR's readers; as Harper's notes, we've been documenting this for over two decades.

The headline alone–"PBS Self-Destructs: And What It Means for Viewers Like You"–was surely going to rankle people at PBS. And it did; as reported in Current (9/18/14), PBS distributed talking points for station managers who might be asked about the article. They aren't intended to rebut anything in Williamson's piece; it is mostly a compilation of awards and ratings data to show that PBS is actually doing a wonderful job.

But that wasn't the only reaction PBS had to the Harper's article. As Keith Kelly of the New York Post reported (9/25/14), PBS will be pulling ads from the magazine that criticized them:

While there was an ad for the latest Burns saga The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, PBS has pulled ads from the November and December issues. The ads were supposed to hype the box set CD editions of the documentary.

This is well beyond ironic. Public broadcasting was set up in part because of an understanding that advertising exerts pressure on media outlets. Outlets like PBS would be thankfully freed from such entanglements. And now their response to critical coverage is to use their own advertising to signal their disapproval.

If PBS was looking for some gesture that would further confirm the point of Willamson's piece, they found it.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Gaza, Cease-Fires and Stenography: Big Media Almost Always Pushes Israel's Version of Events

By Peter Hart
An announced cease-fire in Gaza on August 1 broke down almost immediately, with claims that Hamas militants–including one with a suicide vest–had attacked Israeli troops and had kidnapped a soldier. But almost every aspect of the story was questionable, if not false.


According to some early reports, Hamas broke the cease-fire with an attack on Israeli troops who, under the terms of the agreement, were allowed to continue military operations in Gaza.

As the New York Times reported it (8/1/14):

 Palestinian militants sprang from the ground and confronted Israeli soldiers Friday morning, as they have repeatedly in recent days. This time, Israeli officials said, one exploded a suicide belt while another unleashed machine-gun fire. This time, two Israeli soldiers were killed and the militants apparently escaped with a third.

And in the Washington Post (8/1/14):

 Suddenly, Palestinian militants emerged from a shaft. They included a suicide bomber, who detonated his explosive device. In the chaos, two Israeli soldiers were killed. The militants grabbed 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, and pushed him back through the tunnel, according to the Israeli account.

Within minutes, the war was back.

CNN anchor John Berman (8/1/14) announced, "The Middle East cease-fire in tatters, an Israeli soldier now in the hands of Hamas." Elsewhere on CNN (8/1/14), Carol Costello reported, "The U.S. has condemned the kidnapping and the fact Hamas broke a cease-fire agreement to do it."

She went on to pose this question to Yousef Munayyer of the Palestine Center: "Yousef, Israel is incensed by the fact Hamas violated the ceasefire in order to kidnap this soldier. Do you condemn those tactics?"

Munayyer explained to the CNN journalist that government claims should not be treated as facts:"We do not know what happened here. We have an Israeli claim and we have a claim from Hamas…. So let's be careful about assigning the blame and determining what the facts are before they are clear." Undeterred, Costello repeated her question: "Well, let me ask you it this way, the capture of this soldier, the possible capture of this soldier was sure to escalate things within Gaza. Many, many people are dying so why use that tactic?"

On the PBS NewsHour (8/1/14), anchor Judy Woodruff asked: "Why wouldn't Hamas take responsibility for this, which is what they have done in the past?" Correspondent Margaret Warner called it "the huge mystery," guessing that it could have been the work of a "dissident faction" or that Hamas leadership wasn't clear about the details of the operation.

In that first Times story, the paper declared that "Hamas's account was confused." But it appears that it was closer to reality. The solder in question, Hadar Goldin, was not captured. Israeli officials would eventually admit that he had been killed (New York Times, 8/2/14). And there was apparently no suicide bomber either.

Very early on, as Max Blumenthal and Allison Deger reported for AlterNet (8/1/14), the claims about what had happened should have been reported skeptically:

 The Israeli Army news desk was unable to provide AlterNet with a clear narrative or substantial evidence regarding the incident in question. Moreover, accounts published in Arabic by Hamas’s military wing along with details provided by the PLO indicate that the killing of two soldiers and disappearance of another actually occurred before the cease-fire went into effect.

In this account, the clashes took place before the cease-fire. Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada has a similar post (8/2/14) that provides some evidence challenging Israel’s claim that Hamas broke the cease-fire.

What is clear is that many outlets ran with the Israeli version of events, which was more or less endorsed by US officials. And the end result was more suffering in Gaza; The Israel attacks in Rafah, according to Haaretz (8/4/14), were especially intense:

 The Israel Defense Forces executed in full its "Hannibal procedure," a protocol that calls for the massive use of force in an effort to rescue a captured soldier, even at risk to his life. As a result of the heavy fire in the Rafah area, dozens of innocent civilians were killed.

A senior General Staff officer said Sunday that "a great deal of fire was used in the area, and targets were attacked" in order to isolate it.

According to Palestinian reports, more than 130 Palestinians were killed in this onslaught, with some of the bodies located only in the days after it happened. Palestinians also accused the IDF of attacking vehicles en route to the Rafah hospital, including several ambulances.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

'Objectivity' About Mid East on PBS: 'Expert' Speaks for Both Sides — Advocates 'Excessive Force' Against One Side

Anthony Cordesman, advocate of "excessive force" for Palestinians.

By Aldo Guerrero

PBS NewsHour (7/12/14) wanted to "put the latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in a broader context," so it invited Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to consider possible policy options for "both sides."

The problem is that Cordesman is on the record as advocating the option of brutality against Palestinian civilians. Back in 2000, Cordesman authored a CSIS report–condemned at the time by an Amnesty International spokesperson–that recommended "excessive force" to control Palestinians and ensure the implementation of a potential peace agreement (Extra!, 1/01).

In this report, Cordesman grimly elaborated what  "excessive force" consists of:

Effective counter-terrorism relies on interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture, arrests and detentions that are "arbitrary" by the standards of civil law, break-ins and intelligence operations that violate the normal rights of privacy, levels of violence in making arrests that are unacceptable in civil cases, and measures that involve the innocent (or at least not provably guilty) in arrests and penalties.

Cordesman hasn't changed much since his 2000 CSIS report, based on his PBS appearance. He had a wide range of recommendations for the Israeli side–all involving military force–while claiming that Hamas' options were "very limited."

As an option for Israel, Cordesman suggested that Israel could simply continue their current airstrike campaign against Gaza, because they have the power and capability to do so. He also suggested a "ground offensive," saying that Israel could "try to take control of populated areas, which would mean a lot more fighting but give them direct control over the government, the structure inside Gaza." He noted that it would take a "considerable amount of time" to control the population.

Toward the end of the NewsHour segment, Cordesman acknowledged that "every round of fighting does more damage to the Palestinians in Gaza." But, he said, "the problem with stopping is they [Israel] probably have not really intimidated Hamas to make it stop for a long period of time." This encouragement of "damage" to the Gaza population for the purposes of "intimidat[ing] Hamas" is exactly what you should expect when you bring on advocate of  "excessive force" against Palestinians and "methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture."

Aldo Guerrero is a FAIR intern.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

It's Torture–but Let's Not Call It That: Covering Up for White American Global Terrorism

The CIA didn't create waterboarding. That goulish torture technique stems already back to the medieval era
and perhaps even earlier. (Photo by Bernt Rostad)

By Peter Hart
The Washington Post (3/31/14) got a big scoop on the massive Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the CIA's Bush-era torture program. But they wouldn't call it.

Under the headline "CIA Misled on Interrogation Program, Senate Report Says," reporters Greg Miller, Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima explain that the still-classified, 6,000-plus page report finds that the CIA misled lawmakers and the public about the effectiveness of torture.

But the piece doesn't call it torture. Readers learn about a "brutal interrogation program," "harsh techniques," "excruciating interrogation methods," "brutal measures," "harsh interrogation techniques," "coercive techniques," "previously undisclosed cases of abuse," "harsh treatment" and "enhanced interrogation techniques."

The descriptions were at times quite vivid. Readers learn of the treatment of one prisoner:

CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall.

But they still won't call that "torture." The only time that word was used was in reference to critics: "methods that Obama and others later labeled torture."

It's important to understand that, as many critics have pointed out, that these kinds of tactics would be labeled as torture if they were happening in another country (Extra!, 6/08). The media's role in endorsing and excusing torture has been an issue as long as the US torture program has been public (Extra!, 6/04). The press has done its part to justify torture, even pushing the false idea that torture was key to finding Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (FAIR Media Advisory, 5/4/11).

So while it's not new that some media outlets are still hesitant to call torture "torture," it's still revealing–and probably not an accident. Post reporter Miller appeared on the PBS Newshour (4/1/14) to talk about his piece. Host Judy Woodruff referred to "harsh techniques," and Miller explained that there was

very little evidence that these enhanced techniques, as they're called–we're referring to water-boarding, sleep deprivation, things like that–delivered any significant intelligence in the aftermath of 9/11.

What reporters call torture is important–even when they're reporting illuminating and very useful information about the scope of the program.

The Post isn't done covering the issue; today (4/2/14), columnist David Ignatius makes it sound like the Senate report is shocking–it "includes gruesome new details about interrogation practices in the first year after September 11, 2001, before the CIA's program was formally established with the misplaced approval of President George W. Bush's Justice Department."

Ignatius uses the "T-word," and suggests that some of the details "will shock the conscience in the same way that the Abu Ghraib and waterboarding revelations did."

He also writes: "The heart of the dispute isn't whether torture is immoral–nobody would argue that question today–but whether it was ever effective."

Of course, there are still people who would argue that torture is, in some cases, perfectly moral. Like his Post colleague Charles Krauthammer, who wrote this a few years ago (5/15/09):

Our jurisprudence has the "reasonable man" standard. A jury is asked to consider what a reasonable person would do under certain urgent circumstances.

On the morality of waterboarding and other "torture," Pelosi and other senior and expert members of Congress represented their colleagues, and indeed the entire American people, in rendering the reasonable person verdict. What did they do? They gave tacit approval. In fact, according to Goss, they offered encouragement. Given the circumstances, they clearly deemed the interrogations warranted.

Perhaps Ignatius thinks Krauthammer has changed his mind. I suspect not.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

“Journalists” Follow Obama on Ukraine: The Corporate Media are a Key Component of the U.S. Imperial Machine

America's Corporate Media: "Speak no evil, See no evil, Hear no evil" (Photo by Rose
Davies)

The corporate media are a key component of the U.S. imperial machine. Although styling themselves as watchdogs, they are in fact the dogs of war, whose mission is to hide Washington’s aggressions behind a fog of lies. War “crimes are committed with impunity in part because presidents get a helping hand from their corporate media partners.


By Margaret Kimberley
Prominent journalists in the United States may as well be on the White House payroll. They are consistent cheerleaders for whoever occupies the oval office and the corporate corner office. They make no attempt to hide their allegiance to power and their lack of interest in informing the public.

The rotten state of affairs becomes all too obvious whenever a president threatens action against another country. Reporters act more like press agents and spring into action shielding and protecting the aggressors. They make it clear to those few who gain access that questions, criticisms or anything else that smacks of independent thought will not to be tolerated. The American decision to use Ukraine as a means of attacking Russian influence is the latest effort to prop up the empire, and the corporate media obligingly show their approval.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour was so eager to fly the American foreign policy flag that she pointedly took a colleague to task on air when he was guilty of nothing more than doing his job. Wolf Blitzer is a corporate media stalwart himself so he and everyone watching was surprised when Amanpour jumped down his throat when he quoted a Russian official.

" ‘You heard Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the U.N. Security Council, saying earlier today that at fault for all of this are what he called fascists and anti-Semites in Ukraine right now ...’

‘You know, you've got to be really careful by putting that across as a fact,’ Amanpour said.

‘That's what Vitaly Churkin said,’ Blitzer replied.

‘He may have done," Amanpour said. ‘Are you telling me, are you saying that the entire pro-European ...’

‘Of course not,’ Blitzer defended, explaining that he was presenting what Churkin had said.

‘Right, and we have to be very careful,’ Amanpour cautioned.

Blitzer tried to interject, offering to play Churkin's comments again.

‘I heard it,’ Amanpour said. ‘We just as a network have to be really careful not to lump the entire pro-European Ukrainians into, which some may well be, nationalistic and extremist groups.’

‘We're not, I'm not,’ Blitzer insisted.”

“They make no attempt to hide their allegiance to power.”

Amanpour had lots of company at other networks. Gwen Ifill of PBS Newshour also stuck to the White House script with her guest, professor Stephen F. Cohen. Cohen informed viewers that American presidents going back to Bill Clinton have been playing a very dangerous game in their attempt to pry Ukraine from the Russian orbit.

Ifill was contemptuous of Cohen throughout and stuck to the Putin is evil meme. Her questions lacked even a pretense of a thoughtful search for facts. Nonsense such as “What is Putin’s endgame here?” was all she could muster. 

Read More

PBS Airing 'Documentary' Series Attacking Public Employee Pensions - Doesn't Reveal Series Is Funded By Anti-Pension Billionaire

Adapted from Photo by USAG-Humphreys

By David Sirota
On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “The Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation.   It has been presented as objective news on  major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.

However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “The Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering.

The Wolf of Sesame Street
In recent years, Arnold has been using massive contributions to politicians, Super PACs, ballot initiative efforts, think tanks and local front groups to finance a nationwide political campaign aimed at slashing public employees’ retirement benefits. His foundation which backs his efforts employs top Republican political operatives, including the former chief of staff to GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey (TX).

Continue Reading...