If Matti Friedman tore off the veil from the AP’s modus operandi in covering the Arab-Israel conflict, then apparently, Sharyl Attkisson has done it for CBS’s modus operandi when it came to the White House over the past two decades. Apparently, Attkisson’s book is an update on Bernie Goldberg’s chronicling of a media militating for Obama with their coverage (A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, 2009).

It’s still not out, but the following article by Kyle Smith offers some extensive examples of partisan corruption of the mainstream news media that we in Israel know intimately. Below I draw some (of many) parallels, in order to highlight the way the mainstream news media’s Augean Stables of encrusted bad practices has become a transnational phenomenon.

(H/T Amos Ben-Harav)

Sharyl Attkisson is an unreasonable woman. Important people have told her so. When the longtime CBS reporter asked for details about reinforcements sent to the Benghazi compound during the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack, White House national security spokesman Tommy Vietor replied, “I give up, Sharyl . . . I’ll work with more reasonable folks that follow up, I guess.” Modal Trigger Another White House flack, Eric Schultz, didn’t like being pressed for answers about the Fast and Furious scandal in which American agents directed guns into the arms of Mexican drug lords. “Goddammit, Sharyl!” he screamed at her. “The Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable. You’re the only one who’s not reasonable!”

It’s natural for any stakeholder (political, corporate, personal) to want to protect itself from revelations that embarrass it. Anybody who can (i.e., has power), threatens with loss of access, hence access journalism. Nobody who can does not favor favorable journalists, and punish with exclusion (at the least) those who tend to reveal unpleasant information. The question is, how far will they go? How does the naturally self-protective agent respond to the failure of access journalism to control the situation?

The role of the journalists in a democracy is to fight against this disadvantage for reporters who need access, to resist the kinds of pressures that powerful and influential people can exercise. The remark by White House deputy press secretary Eric Shultz, enumerates some of the more prominent of the submissive journals: Wapo, LATimes, the Grey Lady. They all play nice (reasonable).

Sharyl, on the other hand, is doing her job as a professional journalist with a code. Her kind of journalist was once the pride of the profession. She has, however, become “unreasonable.” “Reasonable” here means someone who knows that, in order to stay in the game (that of access journalism, not real journalism), they will submit their work to a self-imposed censure.

For those trying to understand the Middle East conflict, if mere partisanship (liberal vs. conservative) in the West could produce such damage to the screens upon which we observe our world, imagine what kind of an impact the implicit, constant threat of sudden death, has on reporters working in Palestinian territories.

Two of her former bosses, CBS Evening News executive producers Jim Murphy and Rick Kaplan, called her a “pit bull.” That was when Sharyl was being nice. Now that she’s no longer on the CBS payroll, this pit bull is off the leash and tearing flesh off the behinds of senior media and government officials. In her new memoir/exposé Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington” (Harper), Attkisson unloads on her colleagues in big-time TV news for their cowardice and cheerleading for the Obama administration while unmasking the corruption, misdirection and outright lying of today’s Washington political machine.

Note the combination of intimidation and advocacy (cowardice and cheerleading). It’s a pervasive factor in media coverage of the Arab Israeli conflict: rather than admit to giving into intimidation, one adopts the narrative of the intimidator, the guarantor of your fragile safety. Stockholm syndrome journalism. Dhimmi journalism: you gain your protection (dhimma) through your submission to coercive demands.

‘Not until the stock split’ Calling herself “politically agnostic,” Attkisson, a five-time Emmy winner, says she simply follows the story, and the money, wherever it leads her. In nearly 20 years at CBS News, she has done many stories attacking Republicans and corporate America, and she points out that TV news, being reluctant to offend its advertisers, has become more and more skittish about, for instance, stories questioning pharmaceutical companies or car manufacturers. Working on a piece that raised questions about the American Red Cross disaster response, she says a boss told her, “We must do nothing to upset our corporate partners . . . until the stock splits.” (Parent company Viacom and CBS split in 2006). OFTEN [NETWORK EXECUTIVES] DREAM UP STORIES BEFOREHAND AND TURN THE REPORTERS INTO “CASTING AGENTS” Meanwhile, she notes, “CBS This Morning” is airing blatant advertorials such as a three-minute segment pushing TGI Fridays’ all-you-can-eat appetizer promotion or four minutes plugging a Doritos taco shell sold at Taco Bell.

Anyone watching CNN International since their move to Abu Dabi knows just how many infomercials they run for United Arab Emirates et al.

Reporters on the ground aren’t necessarily ideological, Attkisson says, but the major network news decisions get made by a handful of New York execs who read the same papers and think the same thoughts.

Shades of the BBC folk walking around with their copies of the Guardian, and its impact on “framing” the Middle East conflict.

Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say . . .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she writes.

This helps explain the ideological animus towards Israel that permeates editorial chiefs who are out of the reach of (immediate) Hamas retaliation. There are some key players who want to use their ability to set an agenda to impose a particular “take” on reality, here described by Attkisson as “New York image.”

No wonder people think the Jews control the media – I wouldn’t be surprised to find a large number of Jewish progressive, secular, and as-a-Jew, players in this game, most recently self-represented by Barney Frank. (NB: he’s ashamed of Netanyahu but not of Obama; he, like the news media, sides with the bully.)

The New York Times isn’t obsessed with a guilty Israel by accident. It offers yet one more proof that gentiles who love to hear Jewish self-critics, end up making critical epistemological mistakes.

Reporting on the many green-energy firms such as Solyndra that went belly-up after burning through hundreds of millions in Washington handouts, Attkisson ran into increasing difficulty getting her stories on the air. A colleague told her about the following exchange: “[The stories] are pretty significant,” said a news exec. “Maybe we should be airing some of them on the ‘Evening News?’ ” Replied the program’s chief Pat Shevlin, “What’s the matter, don’t you support green energy?” Says Attkisson: That’s like saying you’re anti-medicine if you point out pharmaceutical company fraud.

Here’s the PC police, enforcing the agenda by stigmatizing the bearer of bad tidings. (Thomas Kuhn has a whole chapter (6) on how scientists resist recognizing anomalies to the expectation of their paradigms.) The PC police are essentially saying: “We know better than the public what’s good for the country/ world/ humanity and so we will control the information they get, take out the anomalies, in order to support the right (correct) policies.” This is precisely not what journalism is about.

And yet, in the Middle East this principle operates precisely according to the principle: nothing that might shift people from the Palestinian David vs. Israeli Goliath framework in which the Israelis are the bullies and the Palestinians their innocent victims. This currently (if somewhat inanely) the chosen framework of the “global progressive left,” alas stricken with Israel Derangement Disorder.

This results a few “rules” of journalistic thumb, the “journalistic procedures when reporting from Palestinian territory. Reporters are expected to present

no really embarrassing stories about the Palestinians (e.g., savage lynching, genocidal incitement , or killing their own civilians), nor links to global Jihad.

few really favorable stories about the Israelis, especially not during open hostilities.

many Palestinian lethal narratives as news stories.

many analyses of Israel as the stumbling block to peace, indeed cause of the conflict.

It’s characteristics mark not only the product, but the method of lethal journalism.

A piece she did about how subsidies ended up at a Korean green-energy firm — your tax dollars sent to Korea! — at first had her bosses excited but then was kept off the air and buried on the CBS News Web site. Producer Laura Strickler told her Shevlin “hated the whole thing.”

Stories get killed, and sometimes they should be killed. Our problem is that the people deciding on what to kill have strayed far from the two golden pillars of journalism, accuracy and relevance. There’s enough judgment at play in being fair, one need not turn it into a propaganda campaign, all the while accusing the folks you’re unfairly criticizing, of bullying and partisanship.

‘Let’s not pile on’ Attkisson mischievously cites what she calls the “Substitution Game”: She likes to imagine how a story about today’s administration would have been handled if it made Republicans look bad. In green energy, for instance: “Imagine a parallel scenario in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally appeared at groundbreakings for, and used billions of tax dollars to support, multiple giant corporate ventures whose investors were sometimes major campaign bundlers, only to have one (or two, or three) go bankrupt . . . when they knew in advance the companies’ credit ratings were junk.”

This principle is an excellent exercise in empathy and fairness, and a much-needed exercise among journalists today. And yet, there seems to be a real failure to apply these rules to those one believes have gone beyond the bounds of decency… in this case, the “right-wing.”

Indeed, many more than just journalists show alarmingly similar patterns of uniformity of message favoring those they have identified as “the good guys” and failure to be fair to people they have identified in their own minds as the problems. This generation’s information professionals, from the groves of academe, to the adrenaline of the photographic world, vehiculate the memeplex of Israel, the scapegoat – the Misfortune of our times.

The current academic world represents a cognitive catastrophe brought on by a systematic neglect of these basic exercises in empathy. Entire fields taken over by cognitive warriors who politicized knowledge (thus conducting the very kind of campaign against the West that Saïd accused the West of conducting). And all the while, the guardians of standards of scholarship watched and some even welcomed the activist turn. Now, aggressive, post-colonial “scholars,” increasingly grotesque in their public sentiments, and fascist (“revolutionary“) in their techniques, press an absurdly twisted moral cause (BDS), while a large, impotent because non-committal, “center” (and even decent left) watches in growing dismay.

But whom to blame?

Apparently, Western activist journalists (who now apparently inhabit positions of editorial authority in “New York”) find it hard to apply this excellent principle of fairness – an empathic exercise – to themselves. Ironically, they systematically exploit the information and analysis from Israeli self-critics, who apply that principle with abandon, much to the detriment of their own side. Indeed, they assist in turning these self-accusations into weapons of attack.

Here’s Peter Beinart, trying to blame Netanyahu for the war in Gaza this summer, applying the empathic exercise.

“If Abbas had declared that because of the Gaza War he no longer supports two states, American Jewish groups would have screamed with fury.”

In fact, the fair version of this exercise in fairness asks: what if Beinart were (note subjunctive contrary to fact) to apply to the Palestinians the same standards of doubt about sincerity of motive that his analysis applies to Israeli leaders? The avalanche of evidence for duplicity and bad faith he would find on the other side, would sweep away the Israeli scraps he’s diligently working over here.

If you’re a real journalist, you may not systematically probe the motives of one side of a conflict and give the other a free pass. Advocacy journalists, on the other hand, act as if you not only may, but in some special cases where the “good guys” are obvious (!), you must!

Dumping on Israel is just applying the post-colonial paradigm. Who could possibly not side with the Palestinians, the designated underdog?

The ironies this can lead to fairly boggle the mind. Here, at the beginning of some letters to the Guardian, complaining about the BBC’s Zionist coverage, the editors add the following photo and caption:

And yet, the dead child here, was killed by Hamas rocket fire so carelessly fired that it regularly lands on the very Palestinian victims for whose suffering everyone assumes Israel must be responsible.

Were the journalists to be a fraction as self-critical as the Israeli auto-critics like the Haaretz crowd, they could not report the way they do.

As a result, the mainstream coverage of the Middle East is riddled with consistent inconsistencies: the most heinous behavior of the Palestinians gets short shrift – investigative stories like the rape of Western women who come to show their solidarity with the Palestinians, for example – while the slightest Israeli miscue (even when not) gets top billing. Jodi Rudoren, for example, will write extensively about Israeli efforts to censor her, while dismissing the extensive evidence of Hamas intimidation as “nonsense,” even as her colleague Robert Mackay carefully enumerates every example of Israeli hostility to the press. Whatever one does, one must not affirm the “Israeli narrative.”

Attkisson continued her dogged reporting through the launch of ObamaCare: She’s the reporter who brought the public’s attention to the absurdly small number — six — who managed to sign up for it on day one.

Imagine if this were a Republican president incompetently pushing a policy they disagreed with…

HER BOSSES HAD A RULE THAT CONSERVATIVE ANALYSTS MUST ALWAYS BE LABELED CONSERVATIVES, BUT LIBERAL ANALYSTS WERE SIMPLY “ANALYSTS.” “Many in the media,” she writes, “are wrestling with their own souls:

One would hope that this wrestling with their souls is going on among serious young journalists not only in the USA, but in the Middle East as well. Actually, any level of fairness and self-awareness, and discipline in informing, has long since disappeared from the media coverage of this conflict.

They know that ObamaCare is in serious trouble, but they’re conflicted about reporting that. Some worry that the news coverage will hurt a cause that they personally believe in. They’re all too eager to dismiss damaging documentary evidence while embracing, sometimes unquestioningly, the Obama administration’s ever-evolving and unproven explanations.”

Do they do this in advocacy (eager), or cowardice (afraid)? In either case, it’s unprofessional. It is a violation of the very principles of honest journalism: reporters tell us as accurately as possible the most relevant information. Granted both involve judgments, and therefore, subjective elements play a role, but the idea that an a priori commitment would determine what journalists did and did not tell their audience, is shameful.

Were a large number of journalists to denounce the bullying the White House apparently dishes out freely to dissident reporters, this wouldn’t be happening. Instead it’s Omertà, and Attkisson gets hung out to swing in the wind. Group mind is the product of cowardice.

In his brilliant and too brief exchange with Stephen Colbert, Leon Wieseltier noted:

A democratic open society places an extraordinary intellectual responsibility on ordinary men and women, because we are governed by what we think, by our opinions. So the content of our opinions and the quality of our opinions and the quality of the formation of our opinions, basically determines the character of our society. And that means that… a thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy.

The only small amendment or addition I’d make to that remark is “the quality of the information that goes into the formation of our opinions.” What both Matti Friedman and Sharyl Attkisson are telling us is that where two key issues are concerned – the Middle East conflict and White House policy – it’s garbage in, garbage out.

And today’s tensions between Obama and Netanyahu are a direct result, with an Obama administration that thinks the failure of peace is Israel’s fault, and Netanyahu as chief obstruction, a bully administration that exacts revenge for slight from friends, but has no response to public humiliation by foes.

One of her bosses had a rule that conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives, but liberal analysts were simply “analysts.” “And if a conservative analyst’s opinion really rubbed the supervisor the wrong way,” says Attkisson, “she might rewrite the script to label him a‘right-wing’ analyst.”

The terms right and left have long been used as polemical weapons. This particular usage makes it clear that at least at CBS, the prejudice is against the right (“conservative,” and “right-wing” being used as terms to undermine someone’s credibility), and the effort goes into presenting the left and liberals as neutral, unbiased analysts.

In mid-October 2012, with the presidential election coming up, Attkisson says CBS suddenly lost interest in airing her reporting on the Benghazi attacks. “The light switch turns off,” she writes. “Most of my Benghazi stories from that point on would be reported not on television, but on the Web.”

This, like the extraordinary publication of an extraordinarily bad study of casualties in Iraq (civilian casualties inflated by several times, revealed subsequently by Wikileaks) by the Lancet, online, just before the presidential election in 2004, represents the media’s way of trying to shape public opinion just before an election. In the case of the Lancet, it failed. In the case of Benghazi, it succeeded.

Two expressions that became especially popular with CBS News brass, she says, were “incremental” and “piling on.” These are code for “excuses for stories they really don’t want, even as we observe that developments on stories they like are aired in the tiniest of increments.” Hey, kids, we found two more Americans who say they like their ObamaCare! Let’s do a lengthy segment.

Even as a spoof, this describes a mentality that, alas, flourishes in the reporting from the Israel-Islamist conflict. One might even argue, it dominates it.

Friends in high places When the White House didn’t like her reporting, it would make clear where the real power lay. A flack would send a blistering e-mail to her boss, David Rhodes, CBS News’ president — and Rhodes’s brother Ben, a top national security advisor to President Obama. The administration, with the full cooperation of the media, has successfully turned “Benghazi” into a word associated with nutters, like “Roswell” or “grassy knoll,” but Attkisson notes that “the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama administration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a coverup.”

And yet, somehow, the mainstream news media have managed to relegate Benghazigate to Fox and the “right-wing” nutters. Thus are cocoons spun around a public which, in any case, would rather not know.

Similarly, though the major media can’t mention the Fast and Furious scandal without a world-weary eyeroll, Attkisson points out that the story led to the resignation of a US attorney and the head of the ATF and led President Obama to invoke for the first time “executive privilege” to stanch the flow of damaging information.

With the evidence available in all these cases, an aroused press would have pursued a Republican president, fully convinced they were doing their jobs, even as they imposed their unprofessional agenda.

Attkisson, who received an Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow award for her trailblazing work on the story, says she made top CBS brass “incensed” when she appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show and mentioned that Obama administration officials called her up to literally scream at her while she was working the story.

Good example of the intimidation omerta. She had let the public know how the White House handles dissent, a revelation embarrassing to the administration (as one would it hope it would be). So how to handle it someone “unreasonable” like Attkisson? Shut her down.

One angry CBS exec called to tell Attkisson that Ingraham is “extremely, extremely far right” and that Attkisson shouldn’t appear on her show. Attkisson was puzzled, noting that CBS reporters aren’t barred from appearing on lefty MSNBC shows.

Classic: “extremely, extremely far right” – that stigma – and that Attkisson shouldn’t appear on her show anymore – ostracism.

Among Middle East correspondents, this kind of branding and banning cleaned out almost all the journalists who were fair-minded about the conflict, branding virtually any “defense” of Israel – including the presenting of evidence that supported her narrative – “right-wing” and “Zionist propaganda.” And they made Israeli journalists who self-consciously adopted the Palestinian narrative (Gideon Levy and Amira Hass) mainstream in the West.

After the Al Durah Jihad began, the lethal journalists chased anyone who presented evidence that favored the Israeli narrative from the field. Thus only a couple of brave journalists (Esther Schapira in Germany and James Fallows in USA) questioned the veracity of Al Durah, the image choc of the Intifada, the anchor of that inverted David/Goliath frame. And the one with the largest possible influence, pulled out of the debate before asking the really hard questions.

She was turning up leads tying the Fast and Furious scandal (which involved so many guns that ATF officials initially worried that a firearm used in the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords might have been one of them) to an ever-expanding network of cases when she got an e-mail from Katie Couric asking if it was OK for Couric to interview Eric Holder, whom Couric knew socially, about the scandal. Sure, replied Attkisson. No interview with Holder aired but “after that weekend e-mail exchange, nothing is the same at work,” Attkisson writes. “The Evening News” began killing her stories on Fast and Furious, with one producer telling Attkisson, “You’ve reported everything. There’s really nothing left to say.”

Oh how many times one heard that in the Al Durah affair.

Readers are left to wonder whether Holder told Couric to stand down on the story.

Ummmmmm… right.

No investigations Attkisson left CBS News in frustration earlier this year. In the book she cites the complete loss of interest in investigative stories at “CBS Evening News” under new host Scott Pelley and new executive producer Shevlin. She notes that the program, which under previous hosts Dan Rather, Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer largely gave her free rein, became so hostile to real reporting that investigative journalist Armen Keteyian and his producer Keith Summa asked for their unit to be taken off the program’s budget (so they could pitch stories to other CBS News programs), then Summa left the network entirely. When Attkisson had an exclusive, on-camera interview lined up with Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the YouTube filmmaker Hillary Clinton blamed for the Benghazi attacks, CBS News president Rhodes nixed the idea: “That’s kind of old news, isn’t it?” he said.

Imagine how frustrating it is to hear historians say, “but Al Durah, that was so long ago.”

Sensing the political waters had become too treacherous, Attkisson did what she thought was an easy sell on a school-lunch fraud story that “CBS This Morning” “enthusiastically accepted,” she says, and was racing to get on air, when suddenly “the light switch went off . . . we couldn’t figure out what they saw as a political angle to this story.” The story had nothing to do with Michelle Obama, but Attkisson figures that the first lady’s association with school lunches, and/or her friendship with “CBS This Morning” host Gayle King, might have had something to do with execs now telling her the story “wasn’t interesting to their audience, after all.”

I have all through my career wondered at the assurance with which editors speak about “what the public wants.” The emergence of the blogosphere in the early aughts arose from the free access to an unmediated audience. Many of those “letters to the editors” that didn’t get published by the guardians of the public sphere, found enthusiastic audiences.

A story on waste at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, planned for the CBS Weekend News, was watered down and turned into a “bland non-story” before airing: An exec she doesn’t identify who was Shevlin’s “number two,” she says, “reacted as if the story had disparaged his best friend. As if his best friend were Mr. Federal Government. ‘Well, this is all the states’ fault!’ . . . he sputtered.” Meanwhile, she says, though no one confronted her directly, a “whisper campaign” began; “If I offered a story on pretty much any legitimate controversy involving government, instead of being considered a good journalistic watchdog, I was anti-Obama.”

Stigmatizing dissent.

Welcome to Zion, the oldest maligned group in recorded history. We know what it’s like to be denied a voice, dismissed as “partisan,” by highly partisan people.

Yet it was Attkisson who broke the story that the Bush administration had once run a gun-walking program similar to Fast and Furious, called Wide Receiver. She did dozens of tough-minded stories on Bush’s FDA, the TARP program and contractors such as Halliburton. She once inspired a seven-minute segment on “The Rachel Maddow Show” with her reporting on the suspicious charity of a Republican congressman, Steve Buyer.

Rachel Maddow, the voice of advocacy journalism on the Left. If it helps the cause, green light; if it harms, blinking yellow to red. Watch the BBC journalist handle the stunning (and almost certainly accurate) assessment of Colonel Richard Kemp that Israel took the most extensive measures to protect innocent civilians in war than any other army in the world.

He’s been on BBC subsequently, but somehow his interviewers never had time to return to this particular topic as the interrupting BBC interviewer suggested they would be so eager to do later.

Attkisson is a born whistleblower, but CBS lost interest in the noise she was making.

I.e., when the POTUS was perceived to be on the side of the progressives.

‘They’ll sacrifice you’ Ignoring Attkisson proved damaging to CBS in other ways. When a senior producer she doesn’t identify came to her in 2004 bubbling about documents that supposedly showed then-President George W. Bush shirked his duties during the Vietnam War, she took one look at the documents and said, “They looked like they were typed by my daughter on a computer yesterday.” Asked to do a followup story on the documents, she flatly refused, citing an ethics clause in her contract. “And if you make me, I’ll have to call my lawyer,” she said. “Nobody ever said another word” to her about reporting on the documents, which turned out to be unverifiable and probably fake.

Probably? This was one of the great moments of the nascent blogosphere: internet empiricists in their “pajamas,” among them, Charles Johnson, won, and media bullies like Dan Rather lost.

After Pelley and Shevlin aired a report that wrongly tarnished reports by Attkisson (and Jonathan Karl of ABC News) on how the administration scrubbed its talking points of references to terrorism after Benghazi, and did so without mentioning that the author of some of the talking points, Ben Rhodes, was the brother of the president of CBS News, she says a colleague told her, “[CBS] is selling you down the river. They’ll gladly sacrifice your reputation to save their own. If you don’t stand up for yourself, nobody will.” After reading the book, you won’t question whether CBS News or Attkisson is more trustworthy.

I look forward to reading the book (when Kindle delivers it). I suspect that readers will gain a better picture of the forces at work in our mainstream news media in the last decade. With that, readers and viewers – consumers of the produce of information professionals – will hopefully have a better sense of how to evaluate the reliability of their presentations of evidence.

If not now, when?