It's been out for a while, but still cannot be mentioned enough. Project Censored, a media research and analysis group based at California's Sonoma State University has released the 25 Most Important Stories that are completely ignored by the mainstream media. They are:

#1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
# 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
# 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
# 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
# 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
# 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
# 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
# 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
# 9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
# 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
# 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
# 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
# 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
# 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
# 15 Worldwide Slavery
# 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
# 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
# 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
# 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
# 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
# 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
# 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
# 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
# 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
# 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

My local Air America station (San Francisco's Green960) is working with Project Censored to cover these stories in a continuing series. You can listen to their coverage of the #25 story on Spitzer now, and check back for updates of other stories.

On Friday's Hardball, Chris Matthews interviewed his daughter, Caroline, as one of the student members of the group Concerned Youth of America, and just didn't bother mentioning the familial relationship. Apparently his daughter had asked not to be identified as such and, rather than interview another member of the group and thus preserve his journalistic integrity (heh), Matthews went right ahead anyways.

It's such a small-beer breach of what passes for journalistic ethics nowadays as to go almost un-noticed, although in the halcyon days of journalism it would probably have gotten him fired or at least earned the censure of his peers. It simply doesn't compare, though, with the likes of Andrea Mitchell reporting on the bank bailout plan - and blaming Obama for its failure - while married to Alan Greenspan and not making full disclosure of that fact before every report.

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    Charges are being dropped against over two dozen journalists, including Amy Goodman and her two producers, arrested during the crackdown on protests at the Republican convention in St. Paul. Goodman's charge of "obstructing the legal process" has been dropped, as have felony riot charges against her colleagues Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Other dropped charges are mainly for "unlawful assembly".

The city's mayor had a truly gag-worthy Orwellian statement on the subject:

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said Friday that the city attorney's office recommended against prosecuting reporters for the misdemeanor charge.

"This decision reflects the values we have in St. Paul to protect and promote our First Amendment rights to freedom of the press," Coleman said in a statement.

He added, "At the scene, the police did their duty in protecting public safety. In this decision, we are serving the public's interest to maintain the integrity of our democracy, system of justice and freedom of the press."

One has to wonder if this was the plan all along, and the real intention was simply to inhibit reporting of abuses against protestors. Or maybe they're hoping that with the reporters out of court, the media won't be so interested in covering the 800 or so other arrests. With over forty journalists arrested, there should surely be at least some investigation of police officers involved for trumping up charges too:

Upon learning of the news, Democracy Now! Host, Amy Goodman said, “It’s good that these false charges have finally been dropped, but we never should have been arrested to begin with. These violent and unlawful arrests disrupted our work and had a chilling effect on the reporting of dissent. Freedom of the press is also about the public’s right to know what is happening on their streets. There needs to be a full investigation of law enforcement activities during the convention.”

But I'll bet that won't happen.

Oh noes! Fournier gets Malkinized!

So let me get this straight, an unapologetic racist who openly tittered about creating fake credentials to cause chaos at the Democratic Convention in Denver thinks that mean little progressive bloggers aren't playing fair with Fournier?  What a WATB.

Doesn't that then mean that he thinks that Malkin's tactics are wrong? Let's remind him of that next time she pulls it, shall we?

  Portrait of the candidates as a pile of words

This is pretty cool. The Boston Globe put together a visual composite of the most-used words on John McCain and Barack Obama's respective campaign websites. It should come as no surprise that John McCain's message is overwhelmingly about Obama and overwhelmingly negative. Seriously, just compare the top 4 words on each; it tells you all you need to know about this election.

Sean at 538.com offers some analysis on the desperation of McCain's media strategy.

This week US Marines censored an award winning photojournalist – continuing the efforts to make certain we do not see the real results of our actions in Iraq. Zoriah was embedded with a Marine unit documenting the reasons so many soldiers are suffering from PTSD. He was only a block away when another Marine unit was caught up in a suicide bombing in Anbar province:

My hands still shake and my heart pounds despite my fatigue. A combination of depression, fear, and adrenaline makes my thoughts race with the realization that a simple decision was the only thing that seperated me from a body count that grows daily. I look at the images I took on the 26th of June, and realize they do nothing to capture the emotion of being an eyewitness to the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda suicide attack in Karmah/Garma... the smell... the sound of screams and crying.

Zoriah and his unit arrived on the scene shortly after the bombing and he witnessed and photographed the aftermath – including the corpses of 3 US Marines. His photos met all standards set by the agreement embeds sign with the military but he was told to remove the images from his blog. He refused – and he is now being sent out of Iraq.

I truly labored with the decision to post these images and I still do. But in my heart of hearts I know that people need to see and feel the reality of this horrible situation. How can things change if all that comes out of Iraq are sanitized, white-washed images of war designed for mainstream media outlets who focus on making money, not on the quality and truth in what they report?

To the families of the Marines, the interpreters, the Iraqi police, and the civilians killed in the attack: you have my deepest condolences. These men were attending a city council meeting and working together to better their community. Something terrible happened to them when they were in the midst of doing a good thing.

Zoriah’s photographs are graphic – but this is the reality we have created with our war and occupation of the people of Iraq. If we do not see even this small glimpse of the reality of Iraq, how can we, as citizens, understand the actions our government is taking in our names? As he wrote immediately after the bombing:

I want you to observe and comprehend what others live through on a daily basis -- to see what the Iraqi civilians and foreign soldiers see. I want people who follow my photography to understand that although I am able to bring images of war to the world in a form of art, what actually goes on here is horror. My message is not that war yields great photography. My message is: War yields human misery and suffering.

Photo credit © Zoriah/www.zoriah.com : blog use permitted

We sure can use the help. There are many issues to talk to Howard Dean about since it was the first time he went on FOX in almost two years, but Chris was really interested in trying to protect John McCain from the DNC's political ads and of course, Rev. Wright. It's fine to raise the issues, but he used most of his time on those two subjects alone. Well, I can look forward now to the same due diligence from FOX News Sunday and Chris Wallace to make sure the RNC ads are vetted by him as well. And I agree with Nicole's points too...

Wouldn’t it have been better if Dean when he decided to go ahead and appear on FOX had been tougher and said something to the effect of “the Republicans have done such a poor job of managing this country that their party is falling apart, and we wanted to go to the one network that we know caters to conservatives and try to get some truth on this network, so that the voters understand that conservative politics–such as FOX News advocates constantly–are not in their best interest. So I’ll give FOX a chance to show that ‘fair and balanced’ is more than a catchy phrase to fool their viewers.”?

Heck, Chris Wallace should fact check Freedom Watch's ads while he's at it. as Bluegal wrote: Speaking of which, Freedom’s Watch got their 3rd deceptive ad pulled from the air yesterday in MS-01. This is the second one pulled this week.

And FOX, CNN and MSNBC have aprroved the DNC ad.

And Congratulations to Don Cazayoux too!

I'm amazed no one has thought of this before. Micah Fitch has created Helen Thomas Deserves Some Flowers to thank the only White House Press Corps member not afraid to ask the tough questions and confront the White House about torture.

In fact, along with all the plaudits that she deserves, I think that she also deserves a "Letter to the Editor" from all of us to our local papers asking WHY is she the ONLY journalist asking the question.  Please consider it, for there is no better way to show your support. 

Last week Bill Moyers sat down with Leila Fadel while she was stateside to receive a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. In this interview she bluntly lays bare all the spin on Iraq and Iran in a way that is all too rare these days.

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I can't say enough good things about this brave woman, but I would echo all of what Spencer and Matthew have written about her and then some. McClatchy, one of the few sane voices on Iraq since before the invasion (when they were still known as Knight-Ridder) continues to impress.

Watch the full interview on Moyers' PBS website, and you can check out Leila Fadel's McClatchy blog, Baghdad Observer and her team's Inside Iraq.

Transcript after the jump.

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Contessa Brewer: On the campaign trail in Raleigh North Carolina yesterday Obama made an unfortunate gesture. [...] Some think it looks like a flip off.

There really is no excuse for anything posing as a news network to claim that 'the blogs are buzzing about this one" and promote it so when any cursory search on the internets would have found numerous examples of just how specious a charge it was -- like the video shot from the side here. As John Cole put it: "Notice something problematic? Like a few extra fingers? What a total joke."

As Media Matters notes, this is a story that made the rounds on sites like RedState and FoxNews.com but had already been thoroughly debunked before Contessa gave new life to the ridiculous lie. Speaking of offensive fingers, did I just miss the time any of the major news networks gave any attention at all to the only presidential candidate I can ever recall that actually gave anyone the finger with the video rolling?

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Hannity's laughing at you, George, for making him the only clear winner of last Wednesday's debate.

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Hannity: The liberal blogs are losing their minds today in part because I suggested the question to George Stephanopoulos Tues afternoon on my radio show.

While we've had plenty of criticism for MSNBC's and CNN's debate coverage this season, nothing they did came anywhere near to what ABC pulled last Wednesday and Stephanopoulos' on-air dumpster diving for gotcha questions on Hannity's radio show will likely go down as one of the dumbest moves by a debate moderator ever. We've come to expect smear jobs like this from the likes of Hannity, and the Dems have rightly refused to attend any debate on the GOP/Fox News Channel because of it, but now we have ABC News's Chief Washington Correspondent and former Democratic presidential political adviser openly seeking their advice and unapologetically emulating them.

How is it that Stephanopoulos, of all people, thought this was a good move? Josh Marshall offers this depressingly valid observation:

I was mulling over the ABC debate this morning and the moderators' claim that knocking Obama with a more or less uninterrupted stream of Swift Boat gotchas was justified by focusing the debate on 'electability'. And it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant. ...

Thankfully, there are still more than a handful of journalists who aren't GOP pawns who together have penned a letter slamming ABC for its debate debacle.

image at Tales of the Freewayblogger.

The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has issued their annual "Muzzle" awards, including a lifetime achievement award to the Federal Communications Commission.

Daily Progress.com:

...the Federal Communications Commission, will receive a “Lifetime Muzzle” for decades of what the Jefferson Center considers to be inconsistent regulation of “indecency” on the nation’s airwaves, which has led to a “profound chilling effect” on broadcasters.
For example, more than 150 TV stations declined to air the World War II film “Saving Private Ryan” out of fear that the FCC would levy heavy fines for the movie’s violent imagery and battlefield swear words. Though the FCC did not hit any stations with fines in that case, it did condemn an “NYPD Blue” episode about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that featured swear words. A call to the FCC for comment was not returned.

Glenn Greenwald caught this video by John McCain's daughter Meghan over the BBQ hosted by the McCains at their Sedona ranch with a bunch of the media types that are supposed to be covering him for the public:

"The guys from The Politico brought her (Cindy McCain) flowers, and I thought that was the most adorable thing ever!"

And the wingnuts will still claim that it's a "librul" media. But this has gone beyond ridiculous...how can we expect an adversarial relationship from the media -- and like it or not, that's their job...the politicos don't want to give out anything but the most positive news, it's the job of journalists to dig out everything else--if they're going over to the candidate's home and bringing them flowers?

Glenn appeared on the local live show on San Francisco's Air America station yesterday to discuss the role of media and how they're failing us miserably. Download | play

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks spoke to Newsweek Senior Editor Michael Hirsh about what it says about Newsweek when in light of revelations of Karl Rove's misdeeds, he continues to be employed by Newsweek.

Cenk Uygur: Michael, let me ask one follow-up question to that, which is, you know, if we don't have an indictment on Rove on this, but there's clear evidence outside the court of law...you know this Republican operative says, "look he asked me to take these pictures, and I was basically a spy there. And then I grew a guilty conscience when they actually...I was on a conference call where they said 'lets go get em for political reasons," and then they did and this guy is spending seven years in jail. Would Newsweek evaluate that outside of a situation where he gets indicted and go, 'maybe we don't want to do business with this guy?"

Michael Hirsh: You know, I would hope so Cenk, but that's kind of above my pay grade. I think there are a lot of people, journalists in Washington, who question the hiring of Rove. We're not happy about it. I mean, some people say he's actually turned out to be a half decent columnist for the Right. But, yeah...I mean I certainly would hope that we would re-evaluate that on the basis of this. But, you know, I think everyone would have to independently, we would have to independently look into these charges that 60 Minutes raised.

The question must be asked: what is Newsweek waiting for?

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Stephen Colbert takes the New York Times to task for their article suggesting an improper relationship between John McCain and lobbyist Vickie Iseman and looks to FOXNews for examples of "good bad journalism" that the NY Times may want to at least emulate. Or, of course, they could resort to limericks:

There once was a man named McCain

Who had the whole White House to gain,

But he was quite a hobbyist

Of boning his lobbyists,

So much for his ’08 campaign.