Protecting the Shield: Why ESPN Can't be Trusted to Cover the NFL (Truthout)

This excerpt is from an article published at Truthout.

Protecting the Shield: Why ESPN Can't Be Trusted to Cover the NFL
Sunday, 27 September 2015                       
By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis


The National Football League (NFL) is not merely a sports league that helps entertain the US public. While football is just a game, the NFL is a major institutional power that uses billions of tax dollars to subsidize its owners, tries to weaken unions in courts and is potentially complicit in an increasingly disturbing mental health crisis among its workforce. In light of this, the league warrants close scrutiny and investigation from the media.

The organization that should be the most important watchdog of the league is ESPN, which as the largest sports media company in the world has the resources and reach to truly serve as a check on the league's power. Unfortunately, ESPN is too compromised to be trusted in this role. Its NFL broadcasts are worth billions, and an examination of its coverage shows that ESPN's priorities are not investigating the league, but protecting it.

In early September, Judge Richard Berman nullified the NFL's four-game suspension of famed quarterback Tom Brady. The suspension, affirmed by the league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, was for Brady's alleged role in the "Deflategate" scandal - arguably one of the most ridiculous cases in the history of US jurisprudence.

The judge ruled against the NFL on September 3 for not giving Brady a fair hearing in his appeal, and for punishing him for a rule that doesn't exist: alleged "general awareness" of an alleged equipment violation (deflating air out of a football). In two brutal hearings in open court (August 12 and August 19), Berman ripped the NFL's lack of due process and its "independent" report, aimed at rubber-stamping Goodell's "own brand of industrial justice," as Berman called it.

Read the rest at Truthout

Smear Campaigns Fuel Shutdowns of Occupations Across Country

Originally posted at Truthout

Tuesday 15 November 2011

by: Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis

An Occupy Wall Street protester is detained following an attempt to re-enter Zuccotti Park, in New York on November 15, 2011. Hundreds of police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators early Tuesday in an operation to clear the nearly two-month-old camp. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times)

City officials in Burlington, Vermont, recently used the suicide of a 35-year-old man as an excuse to deceptively close down the occupation. In New York City, just this morning, police threatened arrest to anyone who did not clear Zuccotti Park - the birthplace of the Occupy movement. Across the nation the media, right-wing critics and city officials are wrongly blaming Occupy for seemingly any crime or incident that occurs anywhere in their respective cities in an especially sinister smear campaign that aims to discredit and ultimately try to destroy the movement. Other occupations are in jeopardy of being shut down by the police. Organizers and supporters must act bravely and quickly to save - and expand - this movement as we head into the dead of winter.

A new and vicious smear campaign against the Occupy movement is in full swing. The narrative of this campaign is to portray the movement as a hotbed for violent crime and danger. This false narrative, if it sticks, could prompt more city and town officials across the country to shut down occupations, as the City of New York has attempted to do just this morning, and weaken the movement. This cannot be tolerated.

The full picture of the smear campaign became evident to me when I received a message on a social networking site from a right-wing relative of mine. His message linked to a right-wing smear site [3] that, citing the suicide of a 35-year-old homeless man in Vermont among other things, painted the occupations as one of "sexual assault, violence, vandalism, anti-Semitism, extortion, perversion and lawlessness."

My relative and many of his right-wing comrades, it seems, really believe that the Occupy movement is in favor of murder, violence, rape and drug dealing. This is rather astounding, but it is also the reality of how far beneath contempt the opponents of Occupy are willing to go to kill this movement. The mention of "sexual assaults" is especially slimy, given that it was a protester from Occupy Wall Street [4] who was the victim, not the perpetrator, of an alleged rape and her fellow protesters assisted her with medical and legal help and reported the alleged rapist to authorities.

It is fascinating - as well as scary - to see the way attacks on Occupy have evolved since it first started in late September. Originally, the media coverage and the right-wing attacksattempted to portray the protesters [5] as aimless, lazy, hippie freeloaders, who were fornicating and defecating on the streets, while banging on drums and rambling about nonsense. This caricature did not work, as the support and diversity that make up the movement and its supporters were just too obviously different from the cartoonish portrayal the movement's critics tried to paint. As Bill Maher rightly said on his HBO show "Real Time," "Occupy is not the counterculture. It is the culture [6]."

Take back the media by making a tax-deductible donation to Truthout this week. Click here to support news free of corporate influence. [7]

But, now, this new and far more sinister smear campaign is well underway. The corporate media, right-wing critics and city and town officials are trying to blame the protests for virtually any and all crime that has occurred on or near the encampments. The headlines in the media outlets - which are owned by corporations [8] that make up the 1 percent in most instances - continue to amplify these narratives and push for the closing of the occupations. The vast majority of these crimes and incidents have nothing to do with the Occupy movement; in fact, many of them speak more about the major social and economic injustices the protesters are trying to end. But that has not stopped city officials from trying to use these instances to stop the occupations. The occupation in Burlington, Vermont, has already been shut down. Occupy Oakland has been shut down twice. Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the movement, is being cleared out by police as I write this [9]. And if the false narratives continue, other occupations - and the strength of the movement - could be in jeopardy.

This is now a crucial moment for the Occupy movement. How organizers and supporters proceed in the next few days may well shape the health and survival of the movement heading through the winter and into the spring. It is absolutely essential that Occupy organizers and supporters (including independent media) work aggressively to: 1) counter the false narrative that tries to, absurdly, link the movement to street violence, rapes and drugs deals, in order to discredit the movement; 2) better explain the relationship between the homeless and the Occupy movement, as the media has portrayed the relationship between organizers and the homeless as vitriolic and divisive, while understating the spirit of acceptance and cooperation between activists and the homeless - themselves products of our unjust economic system; and 3) most importantly, the movement must continue tomaintain the occupations, even in the face of crackdowns from city officials and police. This movement is the single most exciting development in decades for the prospects for creating a more just society. It must continue.

Read the rest here.

The End of the Bill Keller Era

Available in the newest issue (Aug 2011) of Extra.

When Bill Keller announced that he would soon be stepping down as the New York Times’ top editor, he was hailed as the man “who rebuilt the confidence of the New York Times newsroom after the Jayson Blair scandal” (Forbes, 6/2/11). Rem Rieder of American Journalism Review (3–4/11) wrote that Keller “righted the ship” and “deserves major credit for steering our most important news organization in an immensely challenging time, for the most part avoiding the icebergs.” Hendrik Hertzberg (New Yorker, 6/3/11) commended his tenure: “The quality and quantity of Times journalism remain unsurpassed on Planet Earth.”

Despite all the praise, Keller’s record of major editorial decisions during his eight-year reign—especially on matters of national security, foreign policy and domestic surveillance—is littered with journalistic disappointments that warrant criticism rather than praise.

Underlying many of these critical decisions is a remarkable deference to state power, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration: his suppression of information about the National Security Agency’s illegal wiretapping program, his refusal to use the word “torture” when the U.S. engaged in it, and his closeness to the government regarding the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy project.

In a speech given at FAIR’s 25th anniversary ceremony (4/28/11), Glenn Greenwald highlighted Keller’s relationship with the government when he described the editor’s handling of the release of documents fromWikiLeaks:

What [Keller] is most proud of is that…the New York Times, before it publishes any of these [controversial or classified] documents, goes to the government and says, “These are the things that we wish to publish,” and then listens to the government say, “Don’t publish this and don’t publish that,” and in general the New York Times complies.... He’s so proud of the fact that he’s gotten government approval for what it is that he’s doing; it’s the proof that he’s doing the right thing.

Read the rest here.

Al-Jazeera, as endorsed by Hillary Clinton (The Guardian)

With its Arab Spring coverage, al-Jazeera won new fans. Isn't it time to end the channel's virtual blackout on US cable networks?

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

Al-Jazeera's esteem in the United States has reached unprecedented heights in the aftermath of its coverage of the revolutionary uprising in Egypt, which clearly displayed how embarrassingly inadequate US cable news outlets are by comparison. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was compelled recently to concede that al-Jazeera English (AJE) provides "real news" coverage and actual on-the-ground journalism, unlike its American counterparts, which, she said, rely too heavily on cheap punditry.

Despite the US's unique position of power and influence, cable providers in America do not offer a single world news channel. Not even CNN International, the grownup sister channel of CNN, is available in the US; American audiences are forced to endure the entertainment-centric, domestic version of the channel – as Clinton described it, "a million commercials … and arguments between talking heads."

Al-Jazeera's impressive coverage of the uprising in Egypt has reopened a debate over whether cable providers should offer AJE as an option for US viewers. The channel is pressing the issue as never before, devoting a page on its site to encourage Americans to "Demand al-Jazeera", and using Twitter and Facebook to build a national movement for cable companies to offer the channel. With recent reports that Comcast is in negotiations with the Qatar-based network, now is the time for the effective blackout of al-Jazeera English in the US to end.

Read the rest, here.

Media Don't Bite the Ruling That Feeds Them

Originally published by Extra!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Citizens United fills airwaves—and corporate coffers

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

The 2010 midterm elections were the first since the Supreme Court's 5-4 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited corporate funding of political broadcasts in elections. As was widely predicted at the time, spending hit unprecedented highs this election cycle, including record sums on television ads. In the words of the Associated Press (10/29/10), Citizens essentially constituted a “stimulus package” for broadcast and cable media corporations, which saw major increases in revenue, thus benefiting from the ever-deepening relationship between money and politics.

In fact, media corporations raked in a record $3 billion this mid-term election cycle, not only breaking the previous mid-term spending record of $2.4 billion in 2006, but also surpassing the $2.7 billion spent in the 2008 presidential election cycle (AP, 10/29/10). Much of this windfall can be attributed directly to the Citizens decision, according to a report from the media tracking group SNL Kagan, which described the 2010 election climate as “a political ad revenue treasure trove for broadcasters" (Hill, 9/22/10).

CBS, according to AP (11/4/10), “pounced on an advertising revival in the broadcast media to produce a 53 percent increase in its third-quarter net income"; other media companies likewise “reported robust ad gains.” Media giant Time Warner--owner of cable channels like CNN, TNT and TBS--saw profits rise by more than one-third in the quarter, in part due to a 23 percent increase in ad revenue (CNET, 11/4/10).

Local stations likewise have their snouts in the trough. Political ads are expected to account for 11 percent of the total revenue for local broadcasters this year, up from 7 percent in 2006 (AP, 10/29/10). In Boston, where a 30-second election spot costs about $25,000, demand for ads was so high that local channels were actually turning them down. “There are not enough commercial breaks and too many advertisers. It’s been absolutely crazy,” said Andy Hoffman, a sales manager for Channel 5 in Boston (Boston Globe, 10/30/10).

Media companies not only benefit from ads, but also now have the ability to donate as much money as they want to politicians' campaigns. This new leverage will enable media corporations to fight for issues that impact their bottom line, such as relaxing telecommunications regulations and fighting against net neutrality to ensure them a competitive advantage over smaller, independent news sites.

Read the rest, here.

Media Distortions Legitimize Honduras Regime

Originally published at Truthout. Also published at Z Magazine.

Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009, that were deemed illegitimate by most of the international community and resulted in the presidency of Porfirio Lobo, a conservative politician and agricultural landowner. [I] The election occurred just months after the illegal coup overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya and, as a result of a significant boycott, only included candidates who supported the coup. [II]

At the time of the elections, the US mainstream media had an atrocious record of reporting on the coup itself, as well as on the elections that followed, helping to legitimize a startling attack on Honduran democracy. [III]Despite the illegal nature of the coup and numerous accounts of human rights abuses against supporters of Manuel Zelaya - including violence against protesters, mass arrests and crackdowns on press freedom - the US media portrayed the events in a way that painted Zelaya as a villainous follower of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and legitimized those who ousted him, in part by ignoring their many crimes and abuses. [IV]

Unfortunately, in the year that has followed these two troubling events, little has changed: the Lobo regime has continued the human rights abuses that have plagued the country for more than a year, while the media has downplayed, distorted or ignored the crimes of his regime.

Read the rest, here.

NACLA: The U.S. Media and the Crisis in Ecuador

Originally published at NACLA.org

(Note: a slightly modified version was published in the Nov/Dec print edition of Nacla Report on the Americas, in the Media Accuracy in Latin America (MALA) section. That version is available in print, and here (PDF).)

When Rudolfo Muñoz, a reporter working in Ecuador for CNN, resigned from the cable news channel in the immediate aftermath of the September 30 political crisis, not a single noteworthy U.S. news outlet—including CNN—bothered to report on his departure. Fittingly, Muñoz cited the media’s failure to report important information as his primary reason for quitting his job, telling the Latin American media outlet TeleSur that he quit the job because CNN had a “distinct slant” on the deadly police uprising in Ecuador and “acted as if nothing happened” despite “proof that [police forces] tried to kill the president.”

"That same night on Sept. 30 I determined that it was no longer in my interest to continue doing that sort of work,” he said.

While it is still unclear whether the violent events of September 30 constituted an attempted coup, as President Rafael Correa claimed, Muñoz’s critique raises questions about how the crisis was covered in the U.S. mainstream media.

The crisis in Ecuador came less than 18 months after the Honduran military successfully overthrew its democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. If Ecuador’s police uprising was indeed a failed attempt at overthrowing the government, it would mark the fourth coup attempt on left-leaning Latin America leaders in less than a decade — since 2002. The three earlier coup attempts took place in Venzuela, Haiti, and Honduras. The uprising in Ecuador, if it constituted a coup, was the fourth.

Given the long history of U.S. intervention in the region, the crisis in Ecuador should warrant serious examination from the U.S. media. However, not only were relevant historic angles ignored, but, as Muñoz observed, several important events of that day were not seriously covered. The most prominent mainstream media outlets either ignored the incident, or treated it as if it occurred in a vacuum—offering no context about the long history of U.S. involvement in coup attempts in the Americas.

Read the rest, here.

Media Continue Bank Bailout Advocacy

Originally published at Extra!, the magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

For corporate media, the verdict is already in: The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the unpopular program that redistributed some $700 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds upwards, to the very financial institutions that contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is an unabashed success.

It is hardly stunning that corporate media would react favorably to one of the biggest boons for big corporations in U.S. history. When the bailout initially failed to make it through Congress in 2008 due to House opposition, journalists quickly accepted and reinforced the narrative that the unpopular legislation--which gave unprecedented power to the Treasury Department with virtually no mechanism for oversight or review--needed to be passed so urgently that a serious national debate was not even possible (Extra!, 1/09).

"In the Congress of the United States, the insane are now running the asylum," wrote Dana Milbank in the Washington Post (9/30/08). The Post editorial page produced three editorials in three days (9/30/08=10/2/08) in support of the policy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/1/08) claimed, "We have House members, many of whom I suspect can't balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don't understand, swamped them with phone calls."

As Dean Baker and Kris Warner of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted (Extra!, 1/09), despite claims echoed throughout the media that the bill was too urgent to even be subject to reasonable scrutiny, the Treasury Department "took no action for 10 days after the bill had been passed."

Now that the program is coming to an end, media--with a few notable exceptions like Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times (4/18/10)--are claiming the corporate bailout they so fervently supported has been a monumental success. Two primary claims have been pervasive: that TARP was a good idea that’s “working,” and that it was a “great deal for taxpayers” (Washington Post, 4/1/10). Progressive critiques challenging the official narrative have been almost entirely ignored by the corporate press, despite the fact that such challenges have appeared throughout alternative media (Pew Research Center, 4/28/10; FireDogLake, 7/15/10).

In the words of the Post editorial board (7/5/10), even though "pretty much everyone hated" the "$700 billion bailout fund," it has "arguably saved the U.S. economy.... Any member of Congress who supported TARP, Republican or Democrat, took a sensible risk that has been vindicated by the program's result."

Similarly, Reuters (8/19/10) reported that TARP's success would "dilute the previously potent political attack that lawmakers who voted for the bailout were rewarding Wall Street greed while putting taxpayers at risk." Former George W. Bush administration official James K. Glassman declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (8/26/10), "It has to be said that the TARP and the other financial rescues were necessary and efficient."

Prominent progressive critics contend TARP is a program that is doomed to failure. Even if it succeeds in temporarily rescuing the financial sector, the failure to enact broad systemic changes only increases the risk of future, more expensive bailouts. Dean Baker, for instance, suggested (CEPR, 7/5/10) that the "financial Armageddon" averted by TARP

>>>would have meant the demise of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and most of the other Wall Street titans, but probably would not have led to a qualitatively worse economic situation for the rest of us than what we actually saw. In fact, there would have been a great benefit from this financial Armageddon in that it would let the market wipe out the fast-dealing, high-flying Wall Street gang in a single blow.

This would eliminate the culture of synthetic CDOs and naked credit default swaps that provide ever more sophisticated and expensive ways to gamble. It would also eliminate many of the huge multi-million dollar paychecks that the Wall Street boys take home every year (or week). In other words, this is not obviously a bad story.<<<

Financial blogger Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, 6/23/10) likewise criticized the Obama administration’s choice to “patch the system up with duct tape and baling wire, and if it looks even remotely operational, tout it as tremendous success,” rather than enacting serious reform. The choice, she continued, reflects the administration’s "decision to reconstitute, as much as possible, the banking industry that had just driven itself and the global economy off the cliff” and “to cast its lot with an unreformed banking industry."

Yet these important ideas were rarely presented to the American people by the corporate-owned press, thus limiting their impact and damaging citizens’ ability to come to informed conclusions. "I have almost never had my criticisms of the TARP in the media," said Baker in an e-mail to Extra!.

Indeed, media adhered to their time-honored practice of framing the debate between centrist Democrats and far-right conservatives (Extra!, 9=10/04)--in this case, restricting the “debate” to pro-TARP voices on one side and militant free-market absolutists on the other, who oppose the program as a violation of laissez-faire principles. That was the form the debate took on Fox Business Channel (12/22/09), TARP supporter Lawrence Ausubel, economics professor at University of Maryland, faced off against Cody Willard, a right-wing libertarian critic.

A New York Times article (7/1/10) looking back on TARP included critiques of the plan from conservatives like Sen. Richard Shelby (“blatant accounting fraud”) and Rep. Spencer Bachus (“a ridiculous scheme”), but ignored progressive critics in Congress, such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The claim that the taxpayers are being fully reimbursed by beneficiaries of TARP is likewise being vigorously advanced by the corporate press. The New York Times has been ebullient regarding the program's outcome for some time now (8/30/09): "Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation’s biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid.... So far, that experiment [TARP] is more than paying off."

More recently, the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin asked (4/12/10), "What if, after all that panting over Washington’s bailout of the financial system, we learned that it actually worked?" He continued:

>>>Some officials [are] suggesting that if the economic recovery continues apace, the bailout program could eventually turn from red to black. That may seem far-fetched to anyone who remembers the dire predictions about banks like Citigroup, but the numbers tell a different story. The government’s $45 billion investment in Citigroup alone is on track to make a profit of nearly $11 billion, plus $8 billion or so in interest and other fees. People inside the administration no longer refer to Citigroup as the "Death Star"; now it is a "profit center.”<<<

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/5/10) wondered whether the assertion that TARP did not cost the taxpayers anything is “based on ungodly stupidity or is just plain dishonest”:

>>>The TARP money was a form of insurance. The vast majority of insurance policies are never paid off, but that does not mean they have no value. The point here is that the banks were on the edge of going bankrupt. The government, through the TARP and the Fed, gave the banks the loans and the guarantees that assured the markets that the banks would survive.... This is all a gift from the taxpayers to some of the richest people in the country.<<<

In a rare instance where a progressive critic was quoted by the mainstream press on the issue--albeit buried in an otherwise upbeat TARP story by Sorkin (New York Times, 4/13/10)--Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz said widespread efforts to glorify TARP's success are "disingenuous and a real attempt to distract people," as they don't factor in lost interest on the money spent. "Did we get back anything commensurate with the risk?... Clearly the answer is no," he said. Sorkin dismissively reminded readers that Stiglitz "has made a career of seeing every glass as half-empty."

Even Elizabeth Warren, who has been featured in the news as a potential leader for the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, has been largely ignored by the press when she reported on TARP’s flaws. As the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the use of TARP funds, she issued a strong critique of TARP's impact on small banks in the panel's July report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 7/14/10), saying TARP "served Wall Street much better than anyone else." Neither the Post nor the Times published a single article citing Warren's findings. The panel’s May report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 5/12/10), also quite critical of aspects of TARP, was mostly ignored as well, getting only two small mentions in the Post (5/19/10, 8/4/10).

When TARP was pushed through with no sizable programs attached to help the average American (Economic Policy Institute, 9/29/08), the priority for policy makers became clear. As Baker observed in CounterPunch (6/2/10), the same people who praise TARP are now saying we must “act aggressively now to reduce the budget deficit” and “accept large cuts in Social Security and other important programs.”

"Why on earth," Baker asks, "should anyone trust what the bankers' economist accomplices are telling us?"

Media Manipulates the "End" of the War in Iraq

Originally published at Truthout.


Just as the media lied to help us get into a war, they are now lying us out of one.

In the introduction to season five of HBO's critically acclaimed series, "The Wire," Det. Bunk Moreland and fellow murder investigators laughed as they duped a hapless, young street gangster into confessing to a murder by pretending a copy machine was a polygraph test. "The bigger the lie, the more they believe," he said.

The statement reflects the political dialogue in this country perfectly over the last month, ever since Barack Obama touted the troop drawdown in Iraq in an August 2 speech in Atlanta and leading up to tonight's Oval Address celebrating the "end of combat operations in Iraq." The president, the DC establishment and the media have been perpetuating a lie on a massive scale: the war in Iraq is now over, they claim.

But this is patently misleading, as Andrew Bacevich, of Boston University noted in a recent essay. "For the rest of us to pretend that this unnecessary and ill-advised war has ended would only add one more lie to a pile that is already too large," Bacevich said, noting that internal strife between sects, an increasingly defiant Kurdistan and recent attacks in Baghdad, prove that the war in Iraq is by no means over.

Sadly, it is not merely the president and others who have a political motive for perpetuating the myth that the United States has ended out national nightmare in Iraq. More troubling has been the performance of the mainstream media, which, in print and on television, have been witting pawns in this massive deception, reporting on the war as if it were truly over, celebrating this historical moment and ignoring crucial details, as they mislead the American public about the nature of the US role in Iraq. The woeful media performance is just the latest of what has been an especially regrettable eight years of media coverage of Iraq

Read the rest here.

The Flotilla Story U.S. Media Won’t Report: Ignoring evidence that counters Israeli claims

Originally published in Extra!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

At a June 10 press conference (Cultures of Resistance, 6/10/10), passengers from the Mavi Marmara released new footage of the Israel Defense Forces’ deadly May 31 raid on the ship, which killed nine activists attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of the Israeli blockade. Days earlier, another video was released allegedly showing the IDF beating and then executing a U.S. citizen, although the identity of the passenger in the video has not been confirmed (Informed Comment, 6/10/10; Tikun, 6/10/10).

Obviously, two videos alone could not possibly tell the whole story of what happened that night, but they did offer some of the only images of the tragic event that had not been hand-picked for release by Israel, which confiscated virtually all of the photo and video footage taken on the ship and released only heavily edited snippets (Lede, 6/2/10). This new footage offered revealing glimpses into the bloody raid on the ship that countered the narrative Israel had been successfully spinning in the U.S. (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/1/10).

In addition to possibly showing the execution of a U.S. citizen by the IDF, the footage included images of the IDF shooting either rubber-coated steel bullets or live ammunition from a helicopter, seemingly before commandos boarded (Democracy Now, 6/10/10), and firing indiscriminately at crowds (Ali Abunimah, 6/13/10). Separate photos from Turkish papers and survivors’ testimony also revealed that flotilla passengers were treating injured IDF soldiers (Democracy Now!, 6/10/10; Ali Abunimah, 6/6/10), contradicting Israeli claims that soldiers had been taken hostage, as well as its insistence that the passengers of this "hate boat," as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it (Reuters, 6/2/10), were not humanitarian activists but violent extremists.

While independent media (Democracy Now, 6/10/10) and the foreign press (Guardian, 6/11/2010) covered the new evidence, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today all failed to even mention it in their newspapers--although Times blogger Robert Mackey did post the footage (Lede, 6/11/10), arguing that it gave "a better sense of the timeline of the raid," and making the video's absence in the Paper of the Record's print edition all the more troublesome.

The U.S. corporate press similarly ignored other important evidence that contradicted Israeli claims. This included detailed testimonies of the activists and journalists onboard the vessel, as well as GPS coordinates showing the flotilla accelerating and turning away from Gaza and deeper into international waters at the time of the attack (Ali Abunimah, 6/7/10). This blackout of evidence continues the long-held practice in the U.S. media of ignoring stories that reflect poorly on Israel and other U.S. allies (Extra!, 1/10).

After the attack, U.S. media wasted no time enabling Israel's aggressive public relations campaign (Extra!, 7/10). TV outlets uncritically replayed dubious video clips that were heavily edited, out of context and lacking timestamps (e.g., Hardball, 6/1/10). These clips showed passengers fighting off commandos with kitchen knives and whatever else they could find, but did not show the moments preceding the raid, leaving crucial questions unanswered. Despite there being no way to know the whole story, publications such as the Washington Post (6/6/10) offered no caution in reporting that "Israeli commandos were violently beaten by passengers as they boarded the Mavi Marmara," and then "opened fire in self-defense, killing nine activists."

Many Israeli claims reported unflinchingly by the U.S. media quickly turned out to be egregious lies or distortions. For instance, as journalist Max Blumenthal noted (Max Blumenthal, 6/22/10), a press release Israel issued claiming that associates of Al-Qaeda were on the boat would later be "corrected" by the IDF when it was unable to provide any evidence. The Washington Post editorial page, (6/1/10) which suggested that the activists--"a motley collection that included European sympathizers with the Palestinian cause, Israeli Arab leaders and Turkish Islamic activists"--had "ties to Hamas and Al-Qaeda," failed to issue its own correction.

Israel also released an audio tape it claimed to be of passengers on the Mavi Marmara making antisemitic slurs ("go back to Auschwitz") and warning the IDF to "remember 9/11." The tapes contradicted others the IDF itself released earlier depicting the same exchange between the Israeli navy and the activists on the flotilla that did not contain the bizarre comments (Max Blumenthal, 6/4/10).

Israel soon admitted that these tapes were doctored, though it said they were merely condensed for length, and released a longer version that still contained the slurs (Max Blumenthal, 6/22/10). However, this subsequent release was also problematic. On the new version, the IDF is again heard calling a different boat in the flotilla, the Defne Y, not the Mavi Marmara. Similarly, Huwaida Arraf, the activist who is heard responding to the IDF, saying, "we have permission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter," was not on the Mavi Marmara, but the Challenger One, another flotilla boat (Ma'an, 6/5/10). But the U.S. media again failed to report on this manipulation, and some outlets (e.g., Washington Post, 6/5/10) reported on the audio clips without hinting that there were doubts about their authenticity.

The op-ed pages were also predictably one-sided. The New York Times, for example, published an op-ed by Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren (6/03/10), who alleged the activists were "religious extremists" committing an "assault, cloaked in peace," and claimed, without a shred of evidence, that the activists had made propaganda videos before the assault showing "passengers 'injured' by Israeli forces" (Max Blumenthal, 6/26/10). The Times, it seems, did not bother to ask for copy of this alleged video before publishing such an extraordinary claim.

Given the large amount of time and space devoted to excusing and justifying Israeli actions, the lack of attention provided to the activists’ stories and evidence has given the public an incomplete and one-sided portrayal of events.

"Sadly, the U.S. press just decided to pretend we really don't exist,” said Iara Lee, the activist that smuggled out the hour-long video of the scene, in an interview with Extra!. “The media there is very controlled and almost all of the coverage [about the videos] came from the foreign press and the independent media."

Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.