The P.U.-litzer Prizes were established a dozen years ago to provide special recognition for truly smelly media performances. As usual, I’ve conferred with Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group FAIR, to sift through the large volume of entries.

And now, the thirteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest
media performances of 2004:

MANDATE MANIA — Too many winners to name

It became a media mantra. Two days after the election, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Bush can claim a solid mandate of 51 percent of the vote.” Cox columnist Tom Teepen referred to Bush’s vote margin as an “unquestionable mandate.” Right-wing pundit Bill Kristol argued that Bush’s “mandate” went beyond the 49-states-to-one landslides of Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984. Reality check: This was the narrowest win for an incumbent president since 1916. As Greg Mitchell wrote in Editor & Publisher: “Where I come from, 51 percent is considered a bare majority, not a comfortable margin. If only 51 percent of my family or my editorial staff think I am doing a good job, I might look to moderate my behavior, not repeat or enlarge it.”

Read the full list.and past P.U.-litzer Prize columns .

The usual notion of big news is the unusual. Journalists are taught to look for “man bites dog” stories — the events that raise eyebrows and make us think, “Wow!”

News of the ordinary also makes the cut in media outlets, of course, but it’s not what sizzles, and it’s not apt to get onto front pages or prime-time broadcasts.

A simple rejoinder to the media status quo is that what we really need are more “dog bites man” and “dog bites woman” stories. For every spectacular event, there are many others — just as terrible or just as wonderful — that barely register on the media Richter scale because they’re happening all the time. What’s earthshaking in people’s lives is often barely visible to the hype-hungry media eye.

But journalism has the challenge of simultaneously tracking what’s usual and unusual. One complication is that important ongoing realities may occasionally receive a lot of attention as a result of media whim. A certain social ill might suddenly get a burst of national publicity because editors at the New York Times decided to make it a page-one news feature…

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Early in the coldest season, optimists think of the day after solstice. It’s predictable: the hemisphere will start tilting toward more light and warmth. But in the politics of human societies, there’s no reliable way to tell how long a bone-rattling chill will last — or how far it might go. A government’s harsher policies could provoke kinetic revulsion and progressive resurgence. Or the dominant political atmosphere might have an overall effect of strengthening and perpetuating itself.

By now, the 2004 electorate has been spliced and diced to the culinary standard of American punditry. Countless journalists have joined with other analysts to explain what it all really means. But the news media still don’t tell us much about underlying aspects of mood that can’t be broken out with poll numbers. Wooden questions yield data about stiff answers. Fact-based reporters may not offer much more human truth than a fact-based phone book…

Read the full column.

Top officials in Washington are now promoting jitters about Iran’s nuclear activities, while media outlets amplify the message. A confrontation with Tehran is on the second-term Bush agenda. So, we’re encouraged to obliquely think about the unthinkable.

But no one can get very far trying to comprehend the enormity of nuclear weapons. They’ve shadowed human consciousness for six decades. From the outset, deception has been key…

Read the full column.

Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Radiation (Delacorte Press, 1982), a book by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, is online in html and as a PDF (scroll to the bottom of the page).

When misleading buzzwords become part of the media landscape, they slant news coverage and skew public perceptions. That’s the story with the phrase “Iraqi forces” — now in routine use by U.S. media outlets, including the country’s most influential newspapers.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have been leading the way in news stories that apply the indigenous “Iraqi forces” label to Iraqi fighters who are pro-U.S.-occupation … but not to Iraqi fighters who are anti-U.S.-occupation…

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Right-wing trumpets are making a horrific racket across a ravaged political landscape. For now, hope is barely audible. Progressives seem like fledglings without feathers, weakly tapping from inside thick shells. Four more years sound like hell.

Words from Bertolt Brecht resonate: “… A smooth forehead betokens / A hard heart. He who laughs / Has not yet heard / The terrible tidings.”

Grief, fear, despair, rage — only the emotionally deadened would have none of it. Bush’s victory is a huge defeat for humanity. The consequences will be extremely grim.

Ideological fanatics have extended their control over the Executive Branch while increasing their domination of Congress. The “leaders” who lied the country into war are plunging ahead with escalating carnage in Iraq. Soon they’ll take action to make the Supreme Court more authoritarian — threatening abortion rights, freedom of speech, basic legal protections for defendants and other civil liberties. A theocratic stench is in the air…

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The day before the election, I visited Albuquerque and Las Vegas. Up close, I saw hundreds of people involved in vigorous get-out-the-vote efforts. Most were young; they seemed very idealistic. These Americans had an opportunity to make a difference, and — brought together by labor unions and such groups as the MoveOn PAC — they took it.

Watching the election returns scarcely 24 hours later, I kept an eye on the results from New Mexico and Nevada. The vote tallies were close in both states because of such activism; otherwise, the Bush-Cheney ticket would have won easily.

On Wednesday, as the pundits kept chattering on television, I thought about how far removed the TV studios and newsrooms tend to be from the active idealism of the grassroots. All over this country, literally millions of people cherish the belief that what they choose to do can make a difference. A big difference….

Read the full column.