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Emmy Awards: Sally Field Censored by FOX
At last night’s 59th Annual Emmy Awards, Sally Field, who won Best Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Nora Holden Walker in ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters,” was censored by FOX as she was about to make a point about the Iraq War.
Click through to watch the video.

Al Gore wins Emmy for Current TV.
Tonight, Al Gore won an Emmy for Current TV, his global television network that allows viewers to “create and influence what airs on TV.” The audience gave Gore a long standing ovation as he and his Current TV partner, Joel Hyatt, walked onstage to receive the award for “interactive television services.”
Click through to watch the acceptance speech.

Please notice the difference in reporting on Alan Greenspan’s revelation that the Iraq War is all about the oil.  AFP says that Greenspan mentions the opinion in his new book, as though he were some kind of innocent bystander.  Reuters tells us, though, that Greenspan himself “told the White House before the Iraq war that removing Saddam Hussein was ‘essential’ to secure world oil supplies.”  As usual, Greenspan is trying to have his cake and eat it, too.  Krugman’s latest column reminds us of other Greenspan cake-eating incidents.

The Weak Economy Is Not an Excuse for Greenspan’s Housing Bubble (by Dean Baker)
In trying to justify his decision to ignore the growth of the housing bubble, Alan Greenspan told the NYT that the economy was very weak in 2001-2003 and he feared deflation and further decline. The proper response should have been to ask Greenspan, or to point out to readers, that the economy was weak in the years 2001-2003 because Greenspan had allowed the stock bubble to grow out of control. The crash of this bubble led to a recession from which it was very hard to extricate the economy. If Greenspan felt that the economy faced an extraordinary situation in 2001-2003 it was the result of his own mismanagement.

Whose Betrayal? (by George Lakoff)
MoveOn’s “General Betray Us?” ad … hit a nerve. In the face of truth, the right-wing has been forced to change the subject — away from the administration’s betrayal of trust and the escalating tragedy of the occupation to of all things, an ad! To take the focus off maiming and death and the breaking of our military, they talk about etiquette. The truth has reduced them to whining: MoveOn was impolite. Rather than face the truth, they use character assassination against an organization whose three million members stand for the highest patriotic principles of this country, the first of which is a commitment to truth.
Here’s something an awful lot of progressives don’t understand, and that is that IF IT HADN’T BEEN THE MOVEON AD, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SOMETHING ELSE that the right wingers latched on to and made an issue of.  They are the supreme distractors, and they’d have found something to bend, twist, and mutilate in order to take the attention away from their gigantic failures.  So progressives should think about that before joining in the most recent the chorus criticizing other progressives for how they worded something.

Kerry slams Boehner again over the GOP leader’s outrageous “small price” comment
There has been virtually no outrage from the GOP over the House Republican leader’s assertion that the loss of lives in Iraq is a “small price” to pay.  But John Kerry is on the offensive, slamming Boehner again … : “‘Assure him that for any parent, it is not a small price for any community in America that’s been attending those funerals, it is not a small price, and I’d like to see the Republicans show the same kind of outrage that they seem to reserve for partisan purposes for as outrageous a comment as that, that suggests dying in Iraq is a small price.’ He said.” The media and the GOPers, who were apoplectic last year over Kerry’s “botched joke,” have been largely silent about Boehner’s boner.
And conversely, we should help other progressives amplify their criticisms of truly offensive statements by right wingers.  When will we learn that we have to build as efficient a megaphone as they have?

Local Paper Covers Non-Combat Death of Female Soldier
As we have often noted in the past, to gauge the true cost of the Iraq war on Americans and their families one needs to consult local newspapers. They go well beyond the simple death toll of 2700 or 3700 or whatever it might be to show the full impact and the views of their loved ones.

Blaming Jane Fonda for the Demise of Nuclear Power in the United States (by Dean Baker)
And you thought that Jane Fonda was only responsible for losing the Vietnam War. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt are now blaming her also for the fact that no nuclear power plants have been constructed in the United States for the last quarter century. The culprit in their view is her 1979 move The China Syndome, about the meltdown of a nuclear power plant, the release of which preceded the accident at the Three Mile Island by 12 days. Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt argue that there was no serious harm caused by the Three Mile Island accident, but as a result of the fears created by the film, the nuclear industry has been prevented from building new plants… Maybe the NYT should give Jane Fonda a column to get some more serious economic analysis into the paper.

Headlines from Media Matters for America:

Stephanopoulos understated Dem support for keeping reduced military presence in Iraq

On Fox News Sunday, Wallace failed to challenge Gates’ claim that troop withdrawals will be based on “successes”

In health-care special featuring mainly free-market advocates, Stossel endorsed Health Savings Accounts

Broder touted Lindsey Graham’s desire for “reality-based [Iraq] policy”

NY Times misrepresented Clinton’s position on 2002 Iraq resolution

Hannity admits FOX NEWS became activists and helped to defeat the Immigration bill
Sean Hannity got a little carried away and had a moment of honesty on H&C the other night with Laura Ingraham. He was all pumped up and admitted that FOX News helped defeat the immigration bill.
Click through to watch the video.

New York Post Will Publish Weekly Page Six Magazine
The New York Post is introducing Page Six Magazine as a Sunday insert. The title refers to The Post’s gossip page, but the magazine will be broader than its namesake.
Because the one thing we need is more gossip reporting.

Iran Holocaust show sympathetic to Jews
It is Iran’s version of “Schindler’s List,” a miniseries that tells the tale of an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helps Jews escape the Holocaust — and viewers across the country are riveted.

Reuters Choses Attribtor to Protect Content
Reuters has chosen the Attributor Corporation to protect its content. Attributor will now be fingerprinting original Reuters content as well as monitor the vast Internet for analyzing the distribution of Reuters’ content across the web. As Reuters continues to modify and enhance its online distribution and strategy, Attributor will better enable the news provider to better spread content while keeping it protected.

Walter Cronkite Comes Back
The former CBS anchor is about to sign with an aptly named network, Retirement Living TV, a start-up channel aimed at people over the age of 55.

NFL radio station hosts joke about rape, tell Saints fans displaced by Katrina to stop whining and shut the hell up
Why should the NFL commissioner care about the on-air comments of the hosts of the official radio station of the Raiders? Because they are tainting your brand with their horrific, cruel and crude comments. They are insulting the fans of another franchise and, to quote from the Fan Code of Conduct from another NFL franchisee, “Harassment of visiting team fans will be considered unruly behavior and grounds for ejection.” Why should the hosts of the Raider flagship station be held to a LOWER standard than a fan attending an NFL football game?
Click through to listen to Spocko’s audio clips of the statements made by KSFO talk show hosts on the air.

Old-World Media Start to Feel the Pain
American companies are shifting more and more marketing dollars out of paid media. You see it happening every day as marketers—smart ones, at least—talk about things such as word-of-mouth and conversational marketing, the kind of activity that doesn’t feed the coffers of media sellers or traditional ad agencies and hence goes unmeasured in bellwethers such as TNS reports. Now that long-bubbling discontent, something that was happening before the bottom fell out of the mortgage market, is beginning to show up in macro ways.

Coming This Fall: A New Breed of Promo
Fox Tests Out Five-Second Spots, While NBC Tries a New Format With Honda