w salvo of bright spinning lies about the Iraq war.

“In an interview with reporters traveling with him on an Air Force cargo plane to Baghdad,” the Associated Press reported Thursday morning, Donald Rumsfeld “hinted that a preliminary decision had been made to go below the 138,000 baseline” of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Throughout 2006, until Election Day in early November, this kind of story will be a frequent media refrain as the Bush regime does whatever it can to prevent a loss of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

Read the full column.

More than a dozen years ago, I joined with Jeff Cohen (founder of the media watch group FAIR) to establish the P.U.-litzer Prizes. Ever since then, the annual awards have given recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year.

It is regrettable that only a few journalists can win a P.U.-litzer. In 2005, a large volume of strong competitors made the selection process very difficult.

And now, the fourteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest media performances of 2005…

Read about the winners.

No buzzards were gliding overhead, but several helicopters circled, under black sky tinged blue. On the shore of a stunning bay at a placid moment, the state prepared to kill.

Outside the gates of San Quentin, people gathered to protest the impending execution of Stanley Tookie Williams. Hundreds became thousands as the midnight hour approached. Rage and calming prayers were in the air.

The operative God of the night was a governor. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption,” Arnold Schwarzenegger had declared. Hours later, a new killing would be sanitized by law and euphemism…

Read the full column.

With public support for the Iraq war at low ebb, the White House is more eager than ever to conflate Iraq’s insurgency with terrorism. But last week, just after President Bush gave yet another speech repeatedly depicting the U.S. war effort in Iraq as a battle against terrorists, Rep. John Murtha debunked the claim. His refutation deserved much more news coverage than it got.

“You heard the president talk today about terrorism,” Murtha told reporters at a Dec. 7 news conference. “Every other word was ‘terrorism.’” Speaking as a lawmaker in close touch with the Pentagon’s top military leaders, he went on to confront the core of the administration’s current argument for keeping American soldiers in Iraq.

“Let’s talk about terrorism versus insurgency in Iraq itself,” Murtha said. “We think that foreign fighters are about 7 percent — might be a little bit more, a little bit less. Very small proportion of the people that are involved in the insurgency are terrorists or how I would interpret them as terrorists.”

Murtha threw cold water on the storyline that presents U.S. troops as defenders of Iraqis. He cited a recent poll, commissioned by Britain’s Ministry of Defense, indicating that four-fifths of Iraqis now want the American and British forces out of their country. “When I said we can’t win a military victory, it’s because the Iraqis have turned against us,” Murtha said.

Contrary to what countless pundits still contend, Murtha sees the U.S. presence in Iraq as a boon, not an impediment, to terrorism…

Read the full column.

Christmas came 11 days early for Donald Rumsfeld two years ago when the news broke that American forces had pulled Saddam Hussein from a spidery hole. During interviews about the capture, on CBS and ABC, the Pentagon’s top man was upbeat. And he didn’t have to deal with a question that Lesley Stahl or Peter Jennings could have logically chosen to ask: “Secretary Rumsfeld, you met with Saddam almost exactly 20 years ago and shook his hand. What kind of guy was he?”

Now, Saddam Hussein has gone on trial, but such questions remain unasked by mainstream U.S. journalists. Rumsfeld met with Hussein in Baghdad on behalf of the Reagan administration, opening up strong diplomatic and military ties that lasted through six more years of Saddam’s murderous brutality…

Read the full column.

The U.S. government is waging an air war in Iraq. “In recent
months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased,”
Seymour Hersh reported in the Dec. 5 edition of The New Yorker. “Most
of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly
Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border.”

Hersh added: “As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged
in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.”

Here’s a big reason why: Major U.S. news outlets are dodging the
extent of the Pentagon’s bombardment from the air, an
avoidance all the more egregious because any drawdown of U.S. troop
levels in Iraq is very likely to be accompanied by a step-up of
the air war.

Read the full column.

Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’”

Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell’s mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to recast the public record: 1) Wilkerson should have spoken up years ago. 2) His current statements, for the most part, are foggy. 3) The criticisms seem to stem largely from tactical critiques and image concerns rather than moral objections. 4) Powell is still too much of a cagey opportunist to speak out himself.

Appearing on the BBC’s “Today” program (the interview is at 0635)…

Read the full column.

Bob Woodward
probably hoped that the long holiday weekend would break the momentum
of an uproar that suddenly confronted him
midway through November. But three days after Thanksgiving, on NBC’s
“Meet the Press,” a question about the famed Washington Post
reporter provoked anything but the customary adulation.

“I
think none of us can really understand Bob’s silence for two years
about his own role in the case,” longtime Post journalist
David Broder told viewers. “He’s explained it by saying he did not want
to become involved and did not want to face a subpoena, but
he left his editor, our editor, blind-sided for two years and he went
out and talked disparagingly about the significance of the
investigation without disclosing his role in it. Those are hard things
to reconcile.”

An
icon of the media establishment, Broder is accustomed to making excuses
for deceptive machinations by the White House and
other centers of power in Washington. His televised rebuke of Woodward
on Nov. 27 does not augur well for current efforts to salvage
Woodward’s reputation as a trustworthy journalist.

The
Woodward saga is a story of a reporter who, as half of the Post duo
that broke open Watergate, challenged powerful insiders
— and then, as years went by, became one of them. He used confidential
sources to expose wrongdoing at the top levels of the U.S.
government
— and then, gradually, became cozy with high-placed sources who
effectively used him…

Read the full column.

The huge gap between Tehran and Washington has
widened in recent months. Top officials of Iran and the United States
are not even within shouting distance. The styles of rhetoric differ,
but the messages in both directions are filled with hostility.When
Thanksgiving arrives, the media coverage is mostly predictable. Feature
stories tell of turkeys and food drives for the needy. We hear about
why some people, famous and unknown, say they feel thankful. And, of
course, holiday advertising campaigns launch via TV, radio and print
outlets.

Like our own responses to Thanksgiving, the repeated media messages are
apt to be contradictory. Answers to basic questions run the gamut: How
much time and money should we spend on the holiday dinner compared to
helping the less fortunate? Is this really the time to count our
blessings – or yield to ads that tell us how satisfied we’ll be after
buying the latest brand-new products and services?

Under the surface, some familiar media themes are at cross purposes
this time of year. Holiday celebrations that speak to the need for
compassion and spiritual connection are frequently marked by efforts
and expenditures that point in opposite directions. Within the media
echo chambers, a lot of the wallpaper is the color of money…

Read the full column.

This week began with the New York Times noting that “all of Washington is consumed with debate over the direction of the war in Iraq.” The debate — long overdue — is a serious blow to the war makers in Washington, but the U.S. war effort will go on for years more unless the antiwar movement gains sufficient momentum to stop it.

A cliche goes that war is too important to be left to the generals. But a more relevant assessment is that peace is too vital to be left to pundits and members of Congress — people who have overwhelmingly dismissed the option of swiftly withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

Last Thursday, a high-profile military booster in Congress suddenly shattered the conventional wisdom that immediate withdrawal is unthinkable. “The American public is way ahead of us,” Rep. John Murtha said in a statement concluding with capitalized words that shook the nation’s capitalized political elites: “Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.”

Murtha’s statement has broken a spell. But the white magic of the USA’s militarism remains a massive obstacle to bringing home the U.S. troops who should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place.

There has been no outbreak of conscience in editorial offices or on Capitol Hill…

Read the full column.