The battle over the filibuster is now one of the country’s biggest political news stories. The Bush administration seems determined to change Senate rules so a simple majority of senators, instead of three-fifths, can cut off debate and force a vote on the president’s judicial nominees. Both sides claim to be arguing for procedural principles.

But a Senate filibuster is not inherently good or bad. Throughout U.S. history, the meaning of the filibuster has always been a matter of political context. The merits have everything to do with what kind of nation people want…

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Years from now, when historians look back at agenda-building for a missile attack on Iran, they should closely examine a story that took up the USA’s most coveted space for media spin — the upper right corner of the New York Times front page — on the first day of May 2005.

Under the headline “Threats Shadow New Conference on Nuclear Arms,” the lead article in the Sunday edition set a tone that was to echo in U.S. media during the next several days. The review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty “was meant to offer hope of closing huge loopholes in the treaty, which the United States says Iran and North Korea have exploited to pursue nuclear weapons,” the Times reported. “Instead, the session appears deadlocked even before it begins, according to senior American officials and diplomats.”

But the Times could have led off by pointing out that “huge loopholes in the treaty” have been exploited by the United States and a few other countries to maintain their nuclear-arms dominance. And, instead of resorting to fuzzy euphemisms, the story could have clearly reported that the U.S., Japanese and French governments are so committed to the commercial nuclear power industry that they still insist on promoting it — and further boosting nuclear arms proliferation in the process..

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American news outlets provided extensive — and mostly laudatory — coverage of Marla Ruzicka after she died in Baghdad on April 16. The humanitarian aid worker’s undaunted spirit and boundless dedication had endeared her to a wide array of people as she strived to gain acknowledgment and compensation for civilians harmed by the war in Iraq.

Ruzicka was determined to help Iraqi victims and their loved ones. "Their tragedies," she said, "are our responsibilities." Her funeral, at a church in her hometown of Lakeport, Calif., was a moving occasion as friends and co-workers paid tribute to a woman whose moral energies led her to take great risks and accomplish so much in a life of 28 years…

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Forty years ago, on the morning of April 26, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke with a top State Department official about fast-moving events in the Dominican Republic. A popular rebellion was on the verge of toppling a military junta and restoring the country’s democratically elected president, Juan Bosch, to power.

“This Bosch is no good,” Mr. Johnson said. “He’s no good at all,” replied Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann, who added: “If we don’t get a decent government in there, Mr. President, we get another Bosch. It’s just going to be another sinkhole.”

Two days after that phone conversation, thousands of U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Santo Domingo. By then, the White House spin machinery was in high gear. When the president went on television to declare that the military action was necessary to rescue U.S. citizens, he didn’t mention that nearly all of them had already been evacuated before the Marines arrived…

Read the complete op-ed from the Baltimore Sun.

The papacy of Benedict XVI confronts journalists with a key question: How much critical scrutiny is appropriate when a religious leader gains enormous power?

So far, most American media outlets seem to be walking on eggshells to avoid tough coverage of the new pope. Caution is in the air, and some of it is valid. Anti-Catholic bigotry has a long and ugly history in the United States. News organizations should stay away from disparaging the Catholic faith, which certainly deserves as much respect as any other religion…

Soon after the 2000 election, an astute analyst of far-right religious movements, Frederick Clarkson, wrote that “both the evangelical and Catholic Right are developing and promoting a long-term, fundamental approach to the practice of faith that links political involvement with faith itself. In this case, the Catholic Church is building on its own history and also benefiting from the Christian Right’s recent efforts to create wider space for public expressions of religiosity in civil discourse.” Clarkson added…

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The recent decision by General Motors to pull its advertising from the Los Angeles Times has not gone over very well.

“Blame the press,” Daily Variety scoffed in mid-April, after several days of publicity about the automaker’s move. “That’s the latest coping mechanism for General Motors, whose slumping share price and falling profits have generated a wave of negative media coverage. … GM isn’t the first Fortune 500 company to retaliate against a newspaper’s editorial coverage by taking a punch at its ad division. But most companies understand the tactic just doesn’t work; it only generates more bad coverage.”

In the Motor City, the Detroit News business writer Daniel Howes told readers that the monetary slap at the L.A. Times exposes “GM’s thinning corporate skin.” Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam had this to say: “On the one hand, the decision, which may affect up to $20 million in ad spending, sends a powerful message to the Times. On the other hand, it sends a powerful message to the country about the idiots who are running GM.”

Drawing more attention to GM’s financial woes, the ad-yanking gambit is likely to backfire. But news outlets are far from immune to advertiser pressure…

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I was glad to open the New York Times last Monday and see the headline: “In Steinbeck’s Birthplace, a Fight to Keep the Libraries Open.” After visiting Salinas, Calif., over the weekend, I was eager to find out whether the disturbing and uplifting events there would gain any significant national coverage.

It was a close call. Other than the medium-length Times article, accompanied by a photo of an 8-year-old girl standing next to an endangered library, the media coverage was sparse. And the Times piece — while doing a good job of focusing on the danger that all three public libraries in Salinas might close by midyear — bypassed the connections that many participants in a 24-hour “read-in” had made between lavish spending on war overseas and a funding crisis for libraries at home…

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Also, see Save Salinas Libraries!

The first quarter of 2005 brought significant media dividends for the Bush-Cheney limited liability corporation.

Stakeholders received windfalls as mainstream news outlets deferred to consolidation of power from the November election.

A rollout of new “democracy” branding — kicked off by the State of the Union product relaunch — yielded at least temporary gains in psychological market share. For instance, repackaging of images in the Middle East implemented makeovers for several client governments. Actual democratic threats, inimical to Bush-Cheney LLC interests, remain low.

Our major domestic financial goal, the privatization of Social Security, is out of reach for the next several quarters. However, in view of the magnitude of potential profits, this massive effort will continue.

More problematic, in retrospect, was the March expenditure of political capital in the Schiavo gambit. Returns on media investment, as gauged by opinion poll data, have been disappointing. However, base earnings are likely to accrue to beneficial levels due to high volume from fundamentalist buy-ins.

Some media damage is inevitable, like the March 30 New York Times op-ed by John Danforth claiming that the Republican Party “has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.” But such refined GOP sensibilities are not a big part of our base…

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Journalists often refer to the Bush administration’s foreign policy as “unilateral” and “preemptive.” Liberal pundits like to complain that a “go-it-alone” approach has isolated the United States from former allies. But the standard American media lexicon has steered clear of a word that would be an apt description of the Bush world view.

Paranoid.

Early symptoms met with tremendous media applause in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Skepticism from reporters and dissent from pundits were sparse while President Bush quickly declared that governments were either on the side of the USA or “the terrorists.” Since then, the paranoiac scope of the administration’s articulated outlook has broadened while media acceptance has normalized it — to the point that a remarkable new document from the Pentagon is raising few media eyebrows.

Released on March 18 with a definitive title — “The National Defense Strategy of the United States of America” — the document spells out how the Bush administration sees the world…

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