FAIR's annotated newswire
The weekly magazine supplement's political profiler tells us how Rush Limbaugh loves French things, has a life-size oil portrait of himself in the main staircase of his house and so on. Chafets is clearly impressed, writing that "That day, and every day, [Limbaugh] produced 10,000 words of fluent, often clever political talk."). When the Times scribe finally gets down to the specifics of Limbaugh's enormous new $400 million, eight-year contract, he reports that the radio star's show commands "five minutes of every hour of airtime, which it can then sell to advertisers" beyond the normal "18 to 20 minutes each hour for advertising"—then Chafets casually drops this bomb:

And that, folks, is why Rush Limbaugh is worth $400 million.

Correspondent Zeleny reports on recent back and forth between presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain:

It's like there was some unspoken agreement to campaign for president without criticizing your opponent. Corporate media always want to have it both ways—they love the backbiting and the trumped-up "controversies" like this story, but then they must also pretend to hate "negative" campaigning.

The Washington Monthly blogger posts on a new George Washington University study of the ideological identification of media audiences—the interesting thing is that audiences for all the major TV outlets skew strongly to the left, with the exception of Fox News. One way of looking at this is to say that the right is underserved—but if that were the case, wouldn't the audience for Fox be about as big as that of all other TV outlets (including broadcast) put together? Another way to look at this is that TV is a complete market failure—the left-leaning audience would presumably like left-leaning news, and you can flip through any random issue of FAIR's magazine Extra! to see that TV fails to provide it.

While going a bit overboard with his claim that it's a media "myth that the presidential race is somehow close," Hogarth does valuable work in getting at some of the problems with the Washington Post's "Flag City" story—in which a reporter went to a tiny, very Republican town and, lo and behold, found that many voters there don’t like Obama. Why it matters is hard to figure out—you could do a similar piece showing that people in, say, San Francisco don't much care for John McCain. But it feeds the idea that Obama has more to prove to certain voters, whose opinions matter more for some reason.

Former FAIR intern Volsky points out that Gen. Wesley Clark's perfectly reasonable comment that "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president" is "an argument that has been made by McCain himself":

See the newest FAIR Media Advisory: Press Distorts Clark's Comments (7/2/08)

A campaign segment discussing nasty anti-Barack Obama videos treats them as equivalent to Robert Greenwald's anti-John McCain videos--without making the crucial distinction that Greenwald's videos are not based on offensive lies. After saying that "lies, falsehoods and myths have...spread virally" through YouTube-style videos, Ifill says that "both campaigns are fighting back"; after noting some independent websites "debunking Obama rumors," she reports that "Obama is not the only viral victim," then cuts to a clip from one of Greenwald's videos juxtaposing Rev. Rod Parsley's anti-Islamic bigotry with McCain's praise for the televangelist. How this fits into Ifill's context of "lies, falsehoods and myths," the PBS host never explains.

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