“The story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people,” President Bush said at a news conference Wednesday, hours after 37 American troops died in Iraq. “I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life.”

How long will the U.S. news media continue to indulge that sort of pious talk from the White House without challenge? The evidence is overwhelming that the president and his policy team are quite willing to devalue — in fact, destroy — life when it gets in their way. And if they “weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life,” the grief is rigorously selective.

The day Bush can “weep and mourn” when anti-occupation fighters “lose their life” in Iraq will be the day he transcends his oily fundamentalism. But no such day is on the presidential calendar…

Read the full full column.

The latest polls show that most Americans are critical of the war in Iraq. But the option of swiftly withdrawing all U.S. troops from that country gets little media attention.

So far this year, many news outlets have lapsed into conjecture on what George W. Bush has in mind for the Iraq war. At the end of a recent lengthy editorial, the New York Times noted that “there’s speculation about whether President Bush intends to use the arrival of a new elected government [in Baghdad] as an occasion to declare victory and begin pulling out American troops.”

Right now, that kind of speculation amounts to a smokescreen for a war-crazed administration. Its evident intention is for large numbers of U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for a long time.

Predictably, as Seymour Hersh reports in the Jan. 24 edition of the New Yorker…

Read the full column.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

Read the full column from 1995.

A system glorifies its winners. The mass media and the rest of corporate America are enthralled with professionals scaling career ladders to new heights. Meanwhile, the people hanging onto bottom rungs are scarcely blips on screens.

Far from the media spotlights are countless lives beset with financial scarcity, often in tandem with chronic illness, monotony, adversity and despair. The same institutions and attitudes that lavish outsized respect on high achievers (the wealthier the better) are apt to convey ongoing disrespect for low achievers…

While reviews across the country are almost unanimous with praise for Sean Penn’s superb acting in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” their reactions to the overall film have ranged from acclaim to indifference. The discomfort of some reviewers seems to be intertwined with wariness about the movie’s great empathy for someone who can’t win…

Read the full column.

 The new year has scarcely begun, but Americans watching television have already heard a lot about God.

When Larry King interviewed George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton the other night, CNN presented ample split-screen evidence that the Lord transcends political parties and backgrounds. The former presidents — blue-blooded Yankee and hardscrabble Arkansan — spoke eloquently about faith. By now, perhaps no subject has achieved more agreement in the USA’s news media. Faith in God is a televised no-brainer.

“My faith is never shaken by a personal tragedy,” said ex-President Bush, “or even a tragedy of this enormity.” Clinton said: “It reminds us that we’re not in control, that our faith is constantly tested by circumstances, but it should be deepened when we see the courageous response people are having, and the determination to endure.” Both men praised the incumbent in the White House, presumptively a God-loving guy.

Read the full column.

At a pair of British daily newspapers — the Independent and the Guardian — plus the Observer on Sunday, journalists are far more willing than their U.S. counterparts to repeatedly take on powerful interests. Tough questions get pursued at length and in depth. News coverage is often factually devastating. And commentaries don’t mince words.

A recent essay in the Independent contended that Prime Minister Tony Blair “has, in short, proved himself a scoundrel and a hypocrite again and again and again.” The column, by Matthew Norman, continued: “How he has survived at all is something for tomorrow’s political historians to explain, but one thing is clear: without a press that has erred, if anything, towards over-indulging him, he’d have got clean away with the lot of it.”

In other words, overall, media outlets in Britain haven’t challenged Blair enough — but if they’d challenged him less, then the situation would be even worse and Blair would have a freer hand. There’s a lot of alarmed commentary about the ostensibly left-leaning Blair government’s drift into authoritarian rule. Under such circumstances, in any country (nowhere more than in the USA), vigorous journalism is essential to prevent further erosion of civil liberties and other fundamental rights…

Read the full column.

The last few days of every year bring a heightened sense of time passing, never to return. “Not always so,” the end of a calendar reminds us.

When Time recently invited readers to pick up their mobile phones and participate in a “wireless poll,” the question was: “Who’s your pick for Person of the Year?” The magazine offered three choices in addition to George W. Bush. Those options — Kofi Annan, Martha Stewart and the Boston Red Sox — were certainly eclectic enough, typifying the grab-bag qualities of mass media. If there was any kind of common thread to the list (other than fame), I couldn’t grasp it.

In fact, every day the array of mass-media fixations is a very big swirl of disconnects. The news terrain provides us with cornucopias of incongruities. We can be kept busy thinking about anything from the latest car-bombings in Iraq to Julia Roberts’ twins. Often, media outlets seem to be weapons of mass distraction, trained on our brains…

Read the full column.