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Obama the Snob?: Hanging the ‘elitist’ label on another Democratic candidate
By Peter Hart

CounterSpin
Helena Cobban on Russia/Georgia conflict, Iyanna Jones on black radio's 'Disappearing Voices' (8/15/08-8/21/08)

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Georgia/Russia Conflict Forced Into Cold War Frame
8/14/08

U.S. corporate media frequently evoked the Cold War as a key to understanding the conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. This was certainly true of the media themselves, which generally placed black hats or white hats on the actors involved depending on whether they were allied with Moscow or Washington.



Election Watch 2008
Election Watch 2008: FAIR unspins campaign coverage


TomDispatch: Double Standards in the Global War on Terror (8/18/08) by Tom Engelhardt
Noting more glaring inconsistencies in corporate reportage of homegrown vs foreign-sourced "terror":
According to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with "anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post.... From those attacks would emerge an American world of hysteria involving orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox vaccinations, and finally a war....

And yet, by the end of 2001, it had become clear that, despite the accompanying letters, the anthrax in those envelopes was from a domestically produced strain.... At that point, the anthrax killings essentially vanished… Poof!... No less quickly did those attacks drop from the front pages—in fact, simply from the pages—of the nation's newspapers and off TV screens.


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Beat the Press: Washington Post Misleads Readers to Push for Lower Corporate Tax Rates (8/17/08) by Dean Baker
Well aware that, as he puts it, "the Washington Post editorial page has no qualms about making up data to further its agenda," Baker still is compelled to correct its August 17 assertion that "U.S. companies operating abroad already labor under a bigger tax burden than most foreign competitors":
That's not what the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says. Data from the OECD show that in the average member country corporate taxes are equal to about 3.5 percent of GDP. In the United States, corporate taxes have generally been between and 1.5 percent and 2.5 percent of GDP over the last two decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office (Table F-4).

It's no surprise these facts find no home in Post commentaries—the paper's editors being so aware that, in Baker's words, "the preferred policy is further reductions in corporate income taxes."

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News Corpse: John McCain and T. Boone Pickens Share a Racist Joke (8/15/08) by Mark Howard
The presidential candidate's dubious sense of humor is on display again when laughing along with billionaire Pickens' "joke" that the two "won’t have to worry about" new projections that white people will be a U.S. minority by 2042. Howard describes how
the candidate and the audience chuckled at what the press described as a joke aimed at their advanced age. But that was not a joke about their age. It was an admission that they believe that such a demographic shift is something to “worry” about. They are saying that those of us who will be alive 34 years from now, and are white, should be worried. They are implying that they may be better off dead then to live in an America with a non-white majority. What exactly are they afraid of? No one in the press corps bothered to ask.

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Washington Post: New Books Aim To Unweave the Obama Narrative (8/14/08) by Eli Saslow
As another former Swift Boater makes the news, the Post has a somewhat critical review of his new anti-Barack Obama book. It's good that Saslow declares near the top that "parts of the book have also been disproved by the mainstream media," but should an admitted bigot really merit this front-page treatment from the U.S. capital's daily paper?

See Media Matters: Who Is Jerome Corsi, Co-Author of Swift Boat Vets Attack Book? (8/6/04) by Duncan B. Black:

  • Corsi on Islam: "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion"...
  • Corsi on Muslims: "RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters—it all goes together"
  • Corsi on "John F*ing Commie Kerry": "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"
  • Corsi on Senator "FAT HOG" Clinton: "Anybody ask why HELLary couldn't keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?"

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NPR Check: Militant Radio (8/11/08) by Mytwords
Listening to National Public Radio for the entirety of a day, mytwords notices how in the morning, newsreader Jackie Northam "simply read out a U.S. military statement regarding the killing of several dozen human beings in Afghanistan," in which the military claimed 25 militants killed and 8 civilians "being held hostage." Worse yet, "by afternoon Craig Wyndam had dropped any reference to the dubious source and was presenting the propaganda if it were established fact." Mytwords' response:
I'm not saying that the information is definitely untrue. It might be true, but—given the record of our high flying wedding crashers—it might well be a flat-out lie. Simply rebroadcasting the U.S./NATO version of events is sloppy at best, criminal at worst. NPR could simply tell us briefly what the U.S./NATO version is and then state, "At the current time we have no way of verifying the claims." Or God forbid, they could unembed Jackie Northam who is covering U.S. special forces and their "ambitious training project expected to pay dividends" and send her off to investigate the scene, interview witnesses and report on the findings.

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Huffington Post: Members of the Media Live "the Good Life" in Bridgehampton (8/18/08) by Danny Shea
Given all the media brouhaha over Obama’s “elitist” references to arugula, it is worth casting a look at the social network that members of the media themselves run in.

Huffington Post has posted a series of photos by PatrickMcMullan.com's Neil Rasmus depicting the on-air talent from all three cable news networks at a cocktail party in the Hamptons, aptly called "A Taste of the Good Life, With BEST LIFE." Among those captured on camera at the "Good Life" party was the host of MSNBC's Verdict With Dan Abrams, which aired several segments on the allegations of Obama's elitism (4/15/08; 7/9/08). (Fox News' Geraldo Rivera, CNN's Alina Cho, and ABC News' Gigi Stone were also in attendance).

To his credit, Abrams was quite critical of the media myth that Obama's was an "elitist." Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of a certain Fox News host who was at the forefront of the campaign to smear Obama for being out of step with ordinary Americans...even as he himself garnered 8.5 million for the sale of his 16-room Long Island mansion (Newsday.com, 5/6/08)....

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