The world of the media watchdogosphere has really been amped up of late. So much so that I don’t have time to summarize what’s going on…

But there seems to be a bit of rational panic driving the famous players to ramp up their efforts, as if they can feel the narrative that could create a Democratic landslide in November slip through their fingers.

In Jamison Foser’s latest, he lets us know what we can do (and I’m happy to say I link to pretty much all of Foser’s suggestions in the sidebar)…

FAIR has been doing important work for decades. It recently released an excellent look back at “the Iraq War’s Pollyanna pundits.” Think Progress doesn’t focus strictly on the media, but it does post criticism of media coverage of politics and policy nearly every day. Many progressive weblogs do the same. Some, such as News Hounds, who “watch Fox so you don’t have to” (unfortunately, we still have to) are dedicated to monitoring and critiquing specific media outlets. Others, like Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler blog, do valuable work chronicling and debunking the media-created storylines that shape our understanding of the political process. Alterman, author of the landmark What Liberal Media? (Basic Books, 2003) continues to provide excellent insight and analysis through his blog, Altercation, and regular columns for The Nation and the Center for American Progress. Greg Sargent of The American Prospect and New York magazine writes a new blog for the prospect called The Horses Mouth, which focuses on the political news media and often includes excellent original reporting. Huffington Post recently introduced “Eat the Press,” a section that promotes progressive media voices and highlights conservative outrages.
Peter Daou, founder and editor of the Daou Report (and, in the interest of full disclosure, currently a consultant to Media Matters) is a frequent, and forceful, advocate for real change in the media landscape. Rolling Stone contributing editor Eric Boehlert’s new book, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (Simon & Schuster, May 2006), like his previous writing for Salon and the Huffington Post, is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in how the media have distorted our understanding of politics and public policy.

All of them — among others — are worthy of your time and support. They aren’t all for everybody; find the ones you like. Share their work with family, friends, and coworkers. Buy their books.

There’s a modified excerpt from Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs at Washington Monthly about how “high school” the Note is…

In the spring of 2005, a story came along that was so important, so history-altering that it threatened to revive a killer press instinct that had been dormant for the previous four years. Of course, it helped that it was a Clinton-flavored scandal: That May, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former campaign finance director, David Rosen, went on trial for his handling of a 2000 fundraiser staged in Hollywood to benefit Clinton’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. Rosen was accused of hiding, or underreporting, $800,000 worth of costs. At the time, CNN political editor John Mercurio suggested that Rosen’s funny money trial “reminds people of Whitewater” and the “sleazy side of the Clinton administration that [Hillary] and the president are both trying to forget.”

Taking the lead in trumpeting the importance of the Rosen trial was ABC’s The Note. An inside-baseball daily tip sheet for a readership it has dubbed the “Gang of 500″ (politicians, lobbyists, consultants, and journalists who help shape the Beltway’s public agenda), The Note is posted online every weekday morning and is widely viewed as the agenda-setter for the political class. On 14 different days between May 2 and 27, The Note posted cumulatively nearly forty links to Rosen-related articles, calling them “must-read.” A typical Note entry came on May 10, highlighting “The opening and closing paragraphs in Dick Morris’ New York Post column–perfectly explaining why the David Rosen story is going to be with us for a while.”

On the day before the Rosen verdict, The Note listed “Waiting for the Rosen verdict” as the number-one priority among the Gang of 500. The next day, a federal jury acquitted Rosen of any wrongdoing. How did The Note handle this news about the trial it had hyped? By ignoring it. The next edition of The Note included a long round-up of must-reads from the Memorial Day weekend. Rosen’s not-guilty verdict was not among them.

We may be a little nervous, but it seems to be bringing all who care about these media issues to a new kind of organized front.

The Dark Side, the Frontline special that was on last night covered mostly familiar territory, but had some details I’d never quite heard before.

The most damning was the suggestion that Rumsfeld held off on sending U.S. troops into Afghanistan to get bin Laden because of political infighting with George Tenet. Oy.

Dan Froomkin writes a follow-up about “The One Percent Doctrine” that was highlighted in the Frontline special…

Barton Gellman writes in a Washington Post book review that Suskind “tells some jaw-dropping stories we haven’t heard before.” Among them, the story of the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations, he turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure he was alleged to be.

Writes Gellman: “Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was ‘echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,’ Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as ‘one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.’ And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. . . .

” ‘I said he was important,’ Bush reportedly told [then-CIA director George] Tenet at one of their daily meetings. ‘You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?’ ‘No sir, Mr. President,’ Tenet replied. Bush ‘was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,’ Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, ‘Do some of these harsh methods really work?’ Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.’ And so, Suskind writes, ‘the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.’ ”

Gellman asks the right question: “How could this have happened? Why are we learning about it only now?”