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.

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.