Part II in Raw Story series:

Caroline Hunter’s confirmation to the Election Assistance Commission in February 2007 came near the end of the agency’s controversial handling of two internally contentious commissioned studies — one on voter fraud and the other on voter identification laws. Pressure to fill the four-member bipartisan commission was high: the election season was heating up.

Emails released to Congress about the two studies, reviewed by Raw Story, reveal that Hunter’s selection was not only well-timed but also succeeded in installing an ideologically partisan insider on the commission.

Hunter’s confirmation by unanimous consent in the Senate occurred without a hearing or even a roll call vote. Her lack of election administration experience escaped scrutiny, as did her activities at the Republican National Committee and her subsequent stints at the Department of Homeland Security and in a Bush White House staff position as deputy director at the Office of Public Liaison. The latter office reported directly to Karl Rove.

Read the rest…

My latest investigative article for Raw Story:

Judge found sworn testimony ‘belied’ the facts

Caroline Hunter, a Bush-appointed Federal Election Commissioner who remains in office, provided misleading statements under oath in an effort to conceal Republican National Committee involvement in vote suppression activities during the 2004 presidential election, a Raw Story investigation has found.

Legal experts say Hunter’s submission of misleading statements under oath is a serious ethical and professional breach which could warrant a bar review and potential disbarment. At the time, Hunter was serving as deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee.

Read the rest…

“It’s unclear whether the Court was being naive or disingenuous.” – Paul S. Ryan, an attorney and expert in federal election law at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., on the Supreme Court’s touting of disclosure provisions during its decision last month in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

My latest article for Raw Story:

The Supreme Court’s seismic January ruling that corporations are free to spend unlimited amounts of their profits to advertise for or against candidates may have been the latest shakeup of campaign finance – but gaping holes already allow corporations to spend enormous sums without leaving a paper trail, a Raw Story investigation has found.

Campaign finance experts confirmed that though disclosure rules remained intact in the new Supreme Court decision, there are effective methods to circumvent them.

READ THE REST…

Still think this health insurance bill wouldn’t be a massive gift to the insurance companies? Then you should definitely read this Raw Story write-up of my nearly hour-long interview with former Cigna executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter, in which he details all the ways insurers can game the proposed health insurance legislation:

Wendell Potter, a twenty-year veteran of the insurance industry and former vice president of communications for Cigna, warns that current healthcare legislation does nothing to prevent the insurance industry from continuing its ongoing practice of increasingly shifting healthcare costs to consumers.

A form of bait-and-switch, such practices often set up individuals, families and small businesses for inadequate or unaffordable access and a continued looming threat of financial ruin. The overlooked element, Potter says, is that insurance companies will be able to claim they are reducing premiums by forcing more Americans to pay higher deductibles and offering less coverage.

READ THE FULL STORY

In case you’re wondering, that’s a whole lot of cash. My latest for Raw Story:

While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats’ massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found. [...]

Gary Jacobson, a campaign finance expert and political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, says the healthcare industry saw the writing on the wall and sought to “protect their interests.”

READ THE FULL STORY

Read it and weep:

Over 6,600 uninsured veterans will die by 2013: estimate

A Raw Story analysis, based on a recent Harvard Medical School study, estimates that 135,000 American citizens and over 6,600 US veterans will die due to a lack of health insurance before current proposed healthcare reform measures would take effect.

One hundred and thirty-five thousand US lives far exceeds the total number of Americans who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the attacks of 9/11 combined. The lives of over 6,600 US veterans is more — by over 1,300 — than the total number of US soldiers who have thus far died in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-author of the Harvard Medical School study, called Raw Story’s estimates “quite reasonable.”

Read the rest… (great insights from experts throughout, including a veterans’ advocate who discusses the correlation between lack of proper healthcare and the military’s suicide epidemic)

My latest in Raw Story’s investigative series:

The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.

Last May, the Inspector General’s office rescinded and repudiated a prior internal investigation’s report on the retired military analyst program, which had been issued by the Bush administration, because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” Yet in recent interviews with Raw Story, Pentagon officials who took part in the program were still defending it by referencing this invalidated report.

READ THE REST…

(In case you missed any prior articles, here are Part I, Part II and Part III)

Latest breaking news in Raw Story’s investigative series (read Part I and Part II):

Pentagon officials won’t confirm Bush propaganda program ended

The covert Bush administration program that used retired military analysts to generate favorable wartime news coverage may not have been terminated, Raw Story has found.

In interviews, Pentagon officials in charge of the press and community relations offices — which worked in partnership on the military analyst program — equivocated on the subject of whether the program has ended.

Last May, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General issued a memorandum rescinding a Bush administration investigative report on the retired military analyst program because it “did not meet accepted quality standards for an Inspector General work product.” The now-retracted report had exonerated officials of using propaganda and referred to the program as just “one of many outreach groups.”

READ THE REST

My latest for Raw Story:

Figure in Bush propaganda operation remains Pentagon spokesman

A months-long review of documents and interviews with Pentagon personnel has revealed that the Bush Administration’s military analyst program — aimed at selling the Iraq war to the American people — operated through a secretive collaboration between the Defense Department’s press and community relations offices.

Raw Story has also uncovered evidence that directly ties the activities undertaken in the military analyst program to an official US military document’s definition of psychological operations — propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign audiences.

READ THE REST…

Cronkite Called War “Illegal from the Start,” Slammed Network Silence and Would’ve Spoken Out Again from Anchor Desk

Walter Cronkite believed his “proudest” moment as a journalist occurred when he told the nation that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, despite rosy rhetoric from the Johnson White House and Defense Department. Following his death last week, various network news tributes replayed footage of Cronkite’s influential ’68 on-air editorial. Yet scrubbed from the memorializing were similar instances of Cronkite’s journalistic candor regarding Iraq, such as his 2006 call for withdrawal from a war he went on to describe as “illegal from the start,” initiated on “false pretenses” and a “terrible disaster” serving “no purpose” that has “probably made us less safe.”

But the most revealing omission from these tributes — especially in context to the pageant of eulogies extolling Cronkite’s journalistic integrity — may be his response to a reporter’s question during a 2006 news conference. Full story »

It might be more difficult for Republicans to bash President Obama for being “timid” in his comments about the Iranian government’s violence against protesters if the U.S. media didn’t consistently censor US-Iranian history.

Take CNN’s recent Iran timeline, titled “A brief look at Iran’s history.”

According to the timeline, which begins in 1979, Iran has “been at odds with the West and some of its neighbors” since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It refers to the Shah as having been “pro-Western.” Yet in the mother of all omissions, CNN leaves out how the US government was directly involved in bringing the Shah to power in a 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Full story »

My article published yesterday in Columbia Journalism Review:

Former CNN correspondent-turned-PR consultant Gene Randall’s video “report” for oil giant Chevron might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism. But the Randall-Chevron production raises not only ethical questions, but also the question of whether a surge of newly pink-slipped reporters might go, as one media critic put it, “over to the dark side” and how that might further muddy the line between news and corporate advocacy.

As detailed in a recent New York Times article, when Chevron, America’s third largest corporation, heard that 60 Minutes was preparing a report about the $27 billion lawsuit filed against it for allegedly contaminating the Ecuador region of the Amazon rain forest, Chevron hired former TV newsman Randall to craft a video from the corporation’s perspective, which was posted on YouTube and Chevron’s Web site three weeks before the 60 Minutes report aired on May 3.

Read the rest of the article HERE. (The piece includes expert opinion by author and media critic Norman Solomon, Poynter Institute media ethicist Kelly McBride and FAIR senior analyst Steve Rendall. Don’t miss the particularly devastating quote by Solomon in which he calls out PBS NewsHour’s toxic relationship with Chevron.)

In an interview with the Al Jazeera news network today, legendary talk show host Larry King revealed he’s already writing a sequel to his new autobiography “My Remarkable Journey.” King said the follow-up autobiography, with the working title “If You’re Not Nauseous Yet, You Will Be,” will disclose many juicy anecdotes and surprises he couldn’t fit into his current book.

King, who’s been making the rounds to promote “My Remarkable Journey,” provided Al Jazeera with the following teasers that readers can expect to find in “If You’re Not Nauseous Yet, You Will Be”:

Geraldo Foiled Three-Way with Zahn

In 1999, over dinner at Katz’s Deli, Paula Zahn invited King and Geraldo Rivera back to her apartment for a ménage à trois, but King and Rivera’s bitter disagreement over which of them should pick up the check caused Zahn to rescind her offer and storm out.

“That really would’ve been something,” King said wistfully. “Paula Zahn, you know? Wow. The body on her. Thanks for the cock block, Geraldo.”

King added, “I hope the free pastrami was worth it, you schmuck.” Full story »

Greg Mitchell, award-winning author and editor of the news industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher, brings four decades of journalism experience to his incisive media analyses in his E&P column “Pressing Issues” and on The Huffington Post. He was on the ground covering the bloody 1968 Democratic National Convention and, in the 1970s, became the senior editor of the legendary rock/political magazine Crawdaddy, where he helped write and publish the first magazine article about Bruce Springsteen. Full story »

(updated below: updates I-II)

Clark Hoyt’s New York Times public editor column on Sunday, “Telling the Brutal Truth,” brings the ongoing “debate” over whether waterboarding is torture to brave new heights of absurdity.

Hoyt opens the column:

A LINGUISTIC [all caps are Hoyt's] shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Reading this, you might think, “Finally, in its news pages, the Times is going to call waterboarding what it is and what it always has been since its first recorded use during the Spanish Inquisition — torture. Plain and simple.” Yet you would be gravely disappointed.

For Hoyt then writes:

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal.” (On the editorial page, they long ago added up to “torture.”) Full story »

(updated below)

During a recent segment on CNN’s AC 360, journalist and professor Mark Danner torpedoed CNN senior political analyst David Gergen’s attempt to minimize new revelations of Bush administration CIA torture tactics released by the Obama administration.

Host Anderson Cooper and Danner first discussed the CIA torture memos, which included techniques such as waterboarding (as much as 183 times on one detainee in the same month), sleep deprivation for up to eleven straight days, and placement in a “confinement box” in which “stinging insects” were tossed to terrorize but not cause “death or severe pain.”

Then Gergen opined:

GERGEN: At the same time, he [President Obama] made a very, very calibrated decision; we’re not going to prosecute those people in the CIA who undertook this. And I think he showed some respect for the argument that Mr. Hayden and Mr. Mukasey made today in The Wall Street Journal.

That, in fact, there may have been some benefit to the United States from these interrogation techniques. And very importantly, when we sort of take this broad brush and sort of paint this as sort of villainous, that, in fact, the number of people who were interrogated with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited. Full story »

Washington Post and CNN media critic Howard Kurtz dedicated an entire segment of this past Sunday’s Reliable Sources to a gratuitous pie fight between two players involved in Nadya “Octomom” Suleman’s never-ending nationally televised freak show. But a little over a month ago, Kurtz decried the media’s exploitation of the octuplet mother for ratings and for doing so under the false pretense that concern for her babies’well-being drove their 24/7 coverage.

What a difference a few weeks make. Full story »

Part of the reason I’ve been off the radar here for so long — my latest investigative report for Raw Story:

Federal agencies were involved in the decision to raid the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Nevada last October, just weeks before Election Day, the offices of Nevada’s Secretary of State and Attorney General say.

The allegations raise questions of whether politics played a part in the raid and calls into question assertions by the US Attorney’s office that they were uninvolved. Federal guidelines instruct agencies investigating election fraud to avoid action that might impact the elective process.

Bob Walsh, a spokesman for Nevada’s Secretary of State, and Edie Cartwright, a spokeswoman for Nevada’s Attorney General, said that not only were the Nevada US Attorney’s Office and the FBI involved in investigating Nevada ACORN on allegations of voter registration fraud but that all four agencies jointly made the decision to conduct the raid. Both the investigation and the raid were conducted as part of the joint federal-state Election Integrity Task Force announced last July, the spokespersons said. Full story »

In a primer on how to conduct an interview relying almost solely on Republican talking points, PBS
NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff discussed the new budget plan with White House Budget Director Peter Orszag on Wednesday night.

Woodruff’s first question isn’t necessarily a Republican talking point, but it might as well be.

JUDY WOODRUFF: $3.66 trillion, is that a number you can actually grasp?

Seriously, members of the mainstream media need to stop acting like they suddenly have the vapors over big government spending. The Republicans weren’t the only ones to preside over the most reckless spending in our government’s history over the last eight years, on a war of choice and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in an environment of profligate deregulation and zero investment in infrastructure and our citizens’ future. Mainstream news outlets and their anchors and talking heads watched it all unfold while expressing little or no concern at the time.

Woodruff’s second question is like a GOP talking-point smorgasbord. Full story »

If you’re Chris Matthews and you’re attempting to regain a reputation for being “fair and balanced” after famously exhibiting excitement about Barack Obama and his presidential campaign, what do you do? How about facilitating a discussion about Obama’s proposed stimulus plan with two lawmakers from the same party, the Republican Party?

That’s precisely what Matthews did during a segment on his January 27 edition of Hardball, inviting only Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) and Representative Mike Pence, the House Republican Conference Chair, to discuss the plan.