Hours after Coretta Scott King died, President Bush led off the State of the Union address by praising her as “a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream.” For good measure, at the end of his speech, Bush reverently invoked the name of her martyred husband, Martin Luther King Jr.

The president is one of countless politicians who zealously oppose most of what King struggled for — at the same time that they laud his name with syrupy words. It wouldn’t be shrewd to openly acknowledge the basic disagreements. Instead, Bush and his allies offer up platitudes while pretending that King’s work ended with the fight against racial segregation.

Now that Dr. King’s widow is no longer alive, the smarmy process will be even easier: Just praise him as a beloved civil rights leader, as though the last few years of his life — filled with struggles for economic justice and peace — didn’t exist. Ignore King’s profound challenge to the kind of budget priorities and militarism holding sway today.

On Tuesday night, the president was eager to seem like a fervent admirer of Martin Luther King. But the next day, in the same House chamber where Bush spoke, his administration pushed through a vicious budget measure that will slash $39 billion in spending — mostly for student loans and Medicaid for the poor — over the next five years.

Nearly 38 years ago, Dr. King was killed in Memphis while leading the Poor People’s Campaign for an economic bill of rights. He’d been accusing Congress of “hostility to the poor.” The federal government, King pointed out, was appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity” — but “poverty funds with miserliness.”

Read the full column.

With great fanfare the other day, Oprah Winfrey asked James Frey a question that mainstream journalists refuse to ask George W. Bush: “Why would you lie?”

Many pundits and news outlets have chortled at the televised unmasking of Frey as a liar. The reverberations have spanned from schlock media to highbrow outlets. On Friday, the PBS “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” devoted an entire segment to what happened. The New York Times supplemented its page-one coverage with an editorial that concluded “Ms. Winfrey gave the audience, including us, what it was hoping for: a demand to hear the truth.”

A key reality of the National Security Agency spying story is: President Bush lied. But routinely missing from media coverage is a demand to hear the truth.

Read the full column.

Ever since the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA operative in July 2003, prominent Democrats have denounced that leak — often with some kind of rhetoric about the sanctity of classified information. But reverence for keeping such information secret is dangerous. And so is the claim that sometimes the government should put journalists in jail to ferret out leakers.

With the vice president’s former top aide Lewis Libby under indictment and Karl Rove still in the special counsel’s sights, the Bush administration is eager to go on the offensive about classified leaks. Loyal Republicans now claim higher moral ground as they decry the leak of classified information about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying that surfaced on the New York Times front page in mid-December.

“Thank goodness the Justice Department is investigating to find out who has been endangering our national security by leaking this information so that our enemies now have a greater sense of what our techniques are in going after terrorists,” the GOP’s Sen. Mitch McConnell said on national television as this year began. He was on message with a bogus assertion.

Whoever spilled the beans about the NSA’s domestic spying did not endanger U.S. national security any more than Daniel Ellsberg did when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press 35 years ago. In both cases, the leaks endangered official mendacity and served the interests of democratic accountability.

Read the full column.

Legalized killing requires official justifications. The execution of Clarence Ray Allen early Tuesday morning was no exception.

A prosecutor explained that “he masterminded the murders of three innocent young people and conspired to attack the heart of our criminal justice system.” And California’s governor was stern when he denied a clemency request for the 76-year-old prisoner.

“The passage of time does not excuse Allen from the jury’s punishment,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said. Allen had been convicted of enlisting a fellow prisoner to kill witnesses against him in 1980.

On Monday, according to unnamed “officials” cited in a San Francisco Chronicle account, the condemned man “ordered a final meal of buffalo steak, Kentucky Fried Chicken, sugar-free pecan pie, sugar-free black walnut ice cream and whole milk.”

Allen “was blind and mostly deaf, suffered from diabetes and had a nearly fatal heart attack in September only to be revived and returned to death row,” the Associated Press recounted. His last breath would be determined by the state’s timetable…

Read the full column.

No doubt many people are glad that Ted Koppel will become a regular voice on National Public Radio. He recently ended 25 years with ABC’s “Nightline” show amid profuse media accolades. But what kind of journalist goes out of his way to voice fervent admiration for Henry Kissinger?

Days ago, NPR announced that Koppel will do several commentaries per month on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” The Associated Press reported that “he also will serve as an analyst during breaking news and special events.”

There’s some grim irony in the statement issued by NPR’s senior vice president for programming: “Ted and NPR are a natural fit, with curiosity about the world and commitment to getting to the heart of the story. The role of news analyst has been a tradition on NPR newsmagazines and there is no one better qualified to uphold and grow that tradition than Ted.”

But “the heart of the story” about U.S. foreign policy has often involved deceptions from Washington. And since Koppel became a prominent journalist, he has been a fervent booster of one of the most prodigious and murderous deceivers in U.S. history…

Read the full column.

The picture was perfect. It provided a moving portrait, an image that journalists called “iconic.” It was true to the moment. Yet the photograph was deceiving in a way that media images often are — showing us what’s more apparent than real.

One day, during the second week of November 2004, millions of Americans saw the photo. Blake Miller’s face was grimy, but his eyes were clearly visible. He seemed resolute, unflappable. Wisps of smoke appeared to be rising from the long cigarette that dangled from his lips.

At the time, Marines were fighting their way into Fallujah, and American news outlets went gaga for the picture. At age 20, Miller suddenly became a famous archetype.

The day after the photo was snapped, “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather told viewers: “The picture. Did you see it? The best war photograph of recent years is in many newspapers today, front page in some. Taken by Luis Sinco of the Los Angeles Times, it is this close-up of a U.S. Marine on the front lines of Fallujah. He is tired, dirty and bloodied, dragging on that cigarette, eyes narrowed and alert. Not with the thousand-yard stare of a dazed infantryman so familiar to all who have seen combat firsthand, up close. No. This is a warrior with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger.”

And the news anchor urged Americans to take the photo to heart…

On the third day of 2006, when the man in the iconic photo returned to the CBS airwaves on “The Early Show,” this time the mood was more somber…

Read the full column.

Another story on Blake Miller

With Ariel Sharon out of the picture, Benjamin Netanyahu has a better chance to become prime minister of Israel.

He’s media savvy. He knows how to spin on American television. And he’s very dangerous.

Netanyahu spent a lot of his early years in the United States. Later, during the 1980s, he worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and then became Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. By the time he moved up to deputy foreign minister in 1988, he was a star on U.S. networks.

The guy is smooth — fluent in American idioms, telegenic to many eyes — and good at lying on camera…

Read the full column.

In a constructive spirit, here are some resolutions for America’s big media outlets in 2006.

Daily newspaper editors:

Just about every paper has a business section, where the focus is on CEOs, company managers, profit reports and big-time investors. But a lot more readers are working people — and a daily labor section would be a welcome addition to the newsprint mix…

Read the full column.

Journalists should be in the business of providing timely information to the public. But some — notably at the top rungs of the profession — have become players in the power games of the nation’s capital. And more than a few seem glad to imitate the officeholders who want to decide what the public shouldn’t know.

When the New York Times’ front page broke the story of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying, the newspaper’s editors had good reason to feel proud. Or so it seemed. But there was a troubling backstory: The Times had kept the scoop under wraps for a long time…

Read the full column.

Despite all the news accounts and punditry since the New York Times published its Dec. 16 bombshell about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying, the media coverage has made virtually no mention of the fact that the Bush administration used the NSA to spy on U.N. diplomats in New York before the invasion of Iraq.

That spying had nothing to do with protecting the United States from a terrorist attack. The entire purpose of the NSA surveillance was to help the White House gain leverage, by whatever means possible, for a resolution in the U.N. Security Council to green light an invasion. When that surveillance was exposed nearly three years ago, the mainstream U.S. media winked at Bush’s illegal use of the NSA for his Iraq invasion agenda…

Read the full column.