An Associated Press dispatch from a Thai fishing village summed up the media spin a few days ago: “Former President Bill Clinton’s voice trembled with emotion as he and George H.W. Bush put aside their once-bitter political rivalry…”

Ever since his initial checked-out responses to the catastrophic tsunami two months ago drew worldwide derision, the current president has largely relied on two predecessors to do the image-repair chores. In effect, an ad hoc PR outfit — Bush, Bush & Clinton — has the three partners laboring to make themselves look good as compassionate great nephews of Uncle Sam. But there are deeper messages and functions here than mere image-polishing.

When an American president wants to make war, he doesn’t rely on private contributions. The U.S. warfare in Iraq has already cost taxpayers more than $150 billion, not counting the regular Pentagon budget that is now well over a billion dollars per day.

The global-scale PR work of Bush, Bush & Clinton underscores the idea that the era of big government is over — for humanitarian efforts, anyway…

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When I think of newspaper journalists who became authors and had enormous impacts on media criticism in the United States, two names come to mind.

One is George Seldes. As a young man, he covered the First World War and then reported on historic events in Europe for the Chicago Tribune from
1919 until 1928. Seldes quit the paper and went on to blaze a trail as an independent journalist — ready, able and eager to challenge media business-as-usual. Naturally, he earned hostility from the kind of media magnates he skewered in "Lords of the Press." The renowned historian Charles A. Beard called that 1938 book “a grand job.”

Forty-five years later, another emigre from newsrooms wrote a book that turned out to have profound effects on critical thinking about media. When "The Media Monopoly" first appeared in 1983, the media establishment and many of its employees shrugged; if they paid any attention, it was usually
just long enough to dismiss Ben Bagdikian‘s warning about consolidation of media ownership as alarmist…

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Since the 1950s, many young Americans have first encountered critiques of mass media in the pages of Mad. With its intricate cartoons and satirical sendups, the monthly magazine gained a reputation for skewering politicians, advertisers, TV shows and a variety of print outlets.

One of Mad’s recurrent shticks has involved making fun of gaps between words and meaning — an especially welcome form of humor because mainstream news so often amplifies the words of public figures with scarcely a hint of irony, much less deprecation. Notwithstanding the zany image of Alfred E. Neuman, the magazine’s grinning icon of absurdity has overseen plenty of sobering antidotes to the phony self-importance of major media.

One-third of the way through February, looking at a few of the day’s
top news stories, I tried to imagine the properly Mad way to annotate them…

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Curiosity may occasionally kill a cat. But lack of curiosity is apt to terminate journalism with extreme prejudice.

"We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out," President Bush said in his State of the Union address. "We are in Iraq to achieve a result: A country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors and able to defend itself."

President Johnson said the same thing about the escalating war in Vietnam. His rhetoric was typical on Jan. 12, 1966: "We fight for the principle of self determination — that the people of South Vietnam should be able to choose their own course, choose it in free elections without violence, without terror, and without fear."

Anyone who keeps an eye on mainstream news is up to speed on the latest presidential spin. But the reporters who tell us what the president wants us to hear should go beyond stenography to note historic echoes and point out basic contradictions…

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"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…

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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…

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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…

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