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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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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