FAIR put out an Action Alert today (2/9/10)  on a USA Today report that presented dubious, one-sided claims about  Social Security's supposed crisis.  Feel free to post your messages to the paper, or share your ideas about the alert, in the comments thread here.

Last month CJR blogger Curtis Brainard (1/29/10) complained that the media were not giving enough attention to some complaints--mostly from climate change deniers--about the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and complaints about IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. Jim Naureckas suggested right here that this was a bad idea, but today the New York Times (2/9/10) seemed to take CJR's advice.

The headline ("U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege") and second paragraph suggest something important:

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri's resignation last week.

So what's the status of these charges? You have to read a few more paragraphs until you're told that "several of the recent accusations have proved to be half-truths," and that the "general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions." Well, shouldn't that be made clear from the start?

There are two scientific criticisms made about the last IPCC report--one has been found baseless, while the other was an actual mistake, though the magnitude of the error seems to have been overstated. But that's apparently good enough to craft a whole story around the "IPCC Under Siege" theme, and to collect quotes from the likes of leading denier Christopher Monckton: "The chair is an Indian railroad engineer with very substantial direct and indirect financial vested interests in the matters covered in the climate panel’s report. What on earth is he doing there?"

Monckton is, among other things, "the chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute"-- a climate change denying think tank that apparently does not disclose its funders (SpinProfiles). Yet apparently the Times sees Monckton as a credible source for critiquing the head of the IPCC for failing to disclose his financial ties.

Blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/9/10), responding to a Des Moines Register poll that found "a third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the 'tea party' movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government":

Thirty-eight percent of Americans have a favorable view of Cuba and 36 percent are favorably disposed toward socialism, but I don't see anyone writing newspaper articles about how a populist wave of socialism is sweeping the country.

At the end of January, Obama education secretary Arne Duncan told a cable news show (TV One's Washington Watch, 1/31/10),  "I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina." In reporting on Duncan's remarks, the January 30 Washington Post apparently couldn't find anyone to challenge the notion that Katrina was a good thing.

CNN aired a segment the same day featuring guests Roland Martin, a CNN regular and the host of Washington Watch, the program where Duncan made the remarks in question; and CNN education contributor Steve Perry, a magnet school founder, champion of vouchers and all-around public school critic.

Martin applauded the progress New Orleans public schools have made, citing improving test scores. But Perry, who said he agreed with Duncan, went much further, sounding frankly unhinged as he actually lamented that there could not be more Katrinas for the sake of U.S. education: "I'm saying that we can't have a Katrina in all of the 50 states."

Nowhere in the CNN segment or the Washington Post report was there anyone to challenge Duncan's remarks or to explain that the reason New Orleans test scores have increased is that post-Katrina rebuilding has largely driven out the poor and black populations who had been so poorly served by the city's schools pre-Katrina.

All in all, it was education coverage designed to make you dumber.

Here's a classic example of how the conservative media smear machine works. In a video less than four minutes long, Rep. Barney Frank describes how the Wall Street Journal's John Fund lied about him, how that lie was amplified by the right's media echo chamber, and how, when he called Fund on the lie, Fund admitted he was wrong, but refused to retract.

The following is a transcript of Frank's February 3 remarks from the floor of the House of Representatives:

Mr. Speaker, I recently got some first-hand experience with the way in which the right-wing propaganda machine operates.  The pattern appears to be to begin with a lie and then have that lie multiply through an echo chamber that repeats it and repeats it.  In this case, a man named John Fund, who is an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, one of the most right-wing of our publications these days on the editorial page, just told a lie about me in November of last year.

He gave a speech at Restoration Weekend--I don’t know what they were restoring, but it certainly wasn’t respect for the truth--and he said that: "Democrats were rattled by the November 3 election results.  What do liberals do when they lose an election? They change the rules.  In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration."  It'll be "felon re-enfranchisement."  "The feds will tell the states, 'Take everyone on every list of welfare recipients you have, everyone on every list of unemployed you have.'"

It's a lie; he made it up.  Its not even a misinterpretation, it's not a quote taken out of context, it is a total myth.  There is no such bill. There wasn't in November.  But then the right-wing echo chamber picks it up.  The Washington Times, the voice of the Reverend Moon, says, "Schumer and Frank have plans to ram through legislation that will produce universal voter registration," and they say "It'll be on the floor of the house in two weeks."  It's the lie repeated.

Glenn Beck joined in, Rush Limbaugh joined in.  This begins with a totally fictional accusation by John Fund with no basis whatsoever. It is then repeated by Glenn Beck, and repeated by the Washington Times and repeated by Rush Limbaugh.  None of them having checked what we were talking about.  None of them seeing if it was accurate.  I was asked by the Situation Room, why I had done that?  My response was: "Done what? I didn’t do it."  So I checked in on it, I found that the source of this was Mr. Fund's totally irresponsible myth in November.

So I wrote to Mr. Fund and I will put this letter in there, and said, "I was puzzled to have you say this, I checked, I now write to tell you that you are entirely wrong in your assertion about me and in the absence of your being able to show any basis in which you made such a statement, to ask you to acknowledge that fact."

He's not only a liar, he's a coward.  He wouldn't do it.  My staff member, Mr. [Harry] Gural, asked him, called him up and said, "Well, what was this based on?"

He said, "I made a mistake."

"Well, have you issued a retraction?"  Mr. Gural asked him.

"Oh, yeah," he said.

"Can we see a copy?" Mr. Gural reasonably asked.

"Oh, I, uh, told a couple of people."

So here we are.  Mr. Fund makes it up.  It's a lie.  It's a myth.  There was nothing there and it's to discredit all Democrats, his right cohorts then echo it and echo it.  The next you know, it's going to be coming on the floor of the House in two weeks and people will hear it and it's all over the blogs: "This is the Democrats' disregard for the electoral process."

And when we call Mr. Fund's attention to the fact that this was a lie, what does he say?  "Whoops."  But he's not going to tell anybody about it.

Mr. Speaker, this is not the only case of this. And I know this has happened before, but because I was directly involved here, I am in a position to document this.

It begins with a lie from this editorial writer from the Wall Street Journal, it is then a lie repeated by all of his right-wing colleagues and then when he is nailed in the lie, he simply blithely refuses to do anything about it.  I hope people will take from this  the lesson to be very skeptical when these right-wing propagandists, Limbaugh or Beck or the Washington Times or the Wall Street Journal editorial board, propagate these vicious smears.

The fact that Paul Krugman writes columns for the New York Times means that the paper's readers are occasionally treated to a good media criticism--like today (2/5/10). He writes:

These days it's hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.

And the reality:

Let's talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met--appropriately--with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.

This is important--especially when compared to news stories that tell you things like this:

--"Independent voters in particular are uneasy about a tide of red ink in the wake of the billion-dollar packages for Wall Street, automakers and stimulus spending." (USA Today, 2/3/10)

--"Deficit spending, in turn, has caused the nation's accumulated debt to swell to dangerous levels." (Washington Post, 1/20/10)

Or the ABC World News report (2/1/10) that attempted to explain the deficit by focusing on the meaning of a billion: "And when we start tossing around a billion, it's a huge number. Just think, a billion hours ago, we were in the Stone Age." Well, that clarifies things.

For more media criticism on the deficit, see Extra!: "The Deficit Distraction: Media Push Spending Cuts Over Stimulus" (9/09) by Veronica Cassidy.

"I miss John McCain," writes the Washington Post's Dana Milbank today (2/5/10). Milbank calls himself "an original McCainiac"-- by which he means that he, like so many others in the corporate media, adored the so-called "maverick" John McCain of the 2000 presidential campaign.

As we've pointed out plenty of times before, McCain's Senate record has staunchly conservative throughout his career--except for those anomalous years, just before and after his unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, when the press mostly fell in love with him. Wishing for that McCain to return is akin to wishing that politician would just lie to you one more time.

The Washington Post's Eli Saslow (2/3/10) on Obama:

He is a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it.

It's true that very few presidents come from the middle class--except for Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding and Woodrow Wilson, it's hard to think of a single example from the last hundred years.

Curtis Brainard of CJR's Observatory blog (1/29/10) complains about the lack of coverage of what he calls "Glaciergate":

Almost two weeks ago, the Sunday Times, a British newspaper, "broke" the story that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had made significant errors in its 2007 report on the impacts of global warming....

The report stated that there was a very high likelihood that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Three days after the Times published its article, the IPCC essentially admitted that this was an error (while glaciers in the region are melting, they are unlikely to vanish that quickly) and apologized (pdf) for the "poorly substantiated" claim.

In the days after the story first broke, the New York Times and the Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the U.K., India and Australia have been eating the American media's lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.

But the New York Times never reported the IPCC's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 before publishing the debunking article. The Washington Post mentioned it in a story (11/22/09) that focused on the Indian environmental minister's rejection of the claim. The Christian Science Monitor had one piece (11/5/99) on melting Himalayan glaciers that quoted a source saying "the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high"--but this was not a quote from the IPCC report, which wouldn't appear for another eight years, but from the International Commission on Snow and Ice, which was part of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences.

None of these papers, then, thought that the IPCC's statement that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 was in itself worth mentioning, let alone basing a story around. So how much effort should the same papers spend reporting on the withdrawal of this claim? That depends on whether you think melting glaciers, or scientific misstatements about melting glaciers, are the bigger threat to humanity.

You see the same emphasis on science process trivia over the actual phenomena scientists are studying in a British Guardian story headlined "Leaked Climate Change Emails Scientist 'Hid' Data Flaws" (2/1/10), which is no doubt getting a lot of U.S. traffic today via a link from Drudge. In the fifth paragraph, the story reveals that contrary to the implication of the headline and subhead ("Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures"), the story actually has no bearing on the reality of climate change:

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

And how do they do that, exactly?

Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

So essentially this story reveals that before a scientist was cleared of suspicions of scientific wrongdoing, he was suspected of scientific wrongdoing. Stop the presses!

That a respectable paper like the Guardian would trumpet this as an important scoop--and that a media watchdog like CJR would be calling for more in this vein--is a testimony to how deeply the "Climategate" hackers have distorted the discussion over the most important environmental issue of our lifetimes. See the brand-new issue of Extra!: "'Climategate' Overshadows Copenhagen: Media Regress to the Bad Old Days of False Balance" (2/10) by Julie Hollar.

From CNN's American Morning (2/1/10), an interview by anchor Kiran Chetry with White House OMB director Peter Orszag:

CHETRY: You also talk about letting taxes expire for families that make over $250,000. Some would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class.

ORSZAG: Well, I guess it's not the parts of the country where I've been.

Households that make $250,000 or more a year make up 1.5 percent of the U.S. public.

FAIR has long complained (Extra!, 7-8/95; Extra Update!, 12/98) about corporate media's avoidance of the word "terrorism" to describe the murder of doctors who perform abortions, even though it meets the standard definition: the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve a political purpose. But the term is still glaringly absent from the corporate media discussion of attacks like Scott Roeder's assassination of abortion provider George Tiller. (For an exception to the rule, see an Oregonian editorial, 1/29/10.)

The choice of terms makes a crucial difference in the way the issue of violence against women's health clinics is discussed. Take an AP piece that ran after Roeder was convicted, which ran under the headline "Conviction Angers Anti-Abortion Militants" (1/30/10):

Testifying in his own defense, a remorseless and resolute Roeder insisted he had committed a justified act for the defense of unborn children by killing Dr. George Tiller, one of the country's few physicians to offer late-term abortions. It was a bold legal strategy that, if successful, had the potential to radically alter the debate over abortion by reducing the price for committing such an act of violence.

When it failed, those who share Roeder's passionate, militant belief against abortion were outraged: One said they are getting tired of being treated as a "piece of dirt" unable to express the reasons for such acts in court. So while relieved at the outcome, abortion-rights advocates worry a verdict that should be a deterrent will instead further embolden those prone to violence.

It's hard to imagine AP publishing an article that treated the claim that "terrorism" was justifiable as a "bold legal strategy" with the "potential to radically alter the debate," or suggest that handing out a lesser sentence to a "terrorist" might avoid "emboldening" others in his movement.  That's because the word "terrorist" comes with an assumption that killing people to promote your cause is inherently illegitimate.  When the issue is abortion, however, it seems like the corporate media thinks the jury is still out.

FAIR has a new Action Alert (1/29/10) about All Things Considered's obituary of historian Howard Zinn, which "balances" the praise of Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond with a substance-free attack by far-right activist David Horowitz. If you communicate with the NPR ombud (which requires using a Web form), feel free to copy your message and post in the comments here.

David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist who speaks for the little guy who eats at the Applebee's salad bar, has figured out (1/29/10) what Barack Obama ought to do:

Force the country to accept common sacrifice.  This is the issue that unlocks everything else.... Establish your credibility and offer to raise taxes on the lower 98 percent.

At a time of 10 percent unemployment,  when the median wage for male workers is lower than it was in 1974, Brooks has a solution: Let them not eat so much cake.

AP's story (1/28/10) on Ben Bernanke's reconfirmation as chair of the Federal Reserve states plainly what is more usually the unstated assumption in corporate media coverage of the Fed:

The battle over Bernanke's confirmation has been a test of central bank independence, a crucial element if the Fed is to carry out unpopular but economically essential policies.

From this perspective, the Federal Reserve is an organization of financial philosopher kings who must be insulated from democracy in order to do what is best for us. There is another way to look at it, of course: that the Fed essentially represents the interests of the financial industry, and that its independence is crucial if it is to carry out unpopular but economically very profitable policies--such as maintaining the value of money, otherwise known as fighting inflation, by keeping people out of work who would otherwise be employed. You will not often find this alternative perspective discussed in corporate media.

AP's Calvin Woodward, who has the standing assignment of  "factchecking" political speeches, continues to be an embarrassment to genuine factcheckers everywhere--substituting his own weird value judgments, semantic games and crystal-ball gazing for genuine examination of facts (FAIR Blog, 10/30/08, 2/25/09, 4/30/09).  In his post-State of the Union effort (1/27/10), he singles out Barack Obama's call for a non-military discretionary spending freeze, pointing out that during the 2008 campaign Obama had said that rival John McCain's proposal for a spending freeze was "using a hatchet where you need a scalpel." Saying that Obama's "proposal is similar to McCain's," Woodward complained that "he didn't explain what had changed."

Actually, regardless of what you think of the freeze proposal, the administration has explained quite specifically how the two proposals are supposed to differ: While McCain's "hatchet" would freeze funding for individual programs, Obama's "scalpel" would freeze overall domestic discretionary spending, allowing some programs to expand while others are cut (White House Blog, 1/26/10).  Again, you can question the wisdom of the policy, but you can't claim that the White House doesn't offer an explanation of how Obama's approach differs from McCain's. Or rather, if you work for AP, you not only can--you can make it the centerpiece of your "factchecking" article. (The article's headline is a pun about Obama's "Hatchet' Job.")

Woodward indulges in fortune-telling when he dismisses Obama's talk of creating a deficit-cutting commission as a "weak substitute" for a congressionally established panel: "Any commission set up by Obama alone would lack authority to force its recommendations before Congress, and would stand almost no chance of success."  Actually, Nostradamus, the Senate plan for a deficit commission would have required three-fifths majorities in both houses to enact the recommendations (McClatchy, 1/26/10),  proposals that came from a White House-created panel could pass by majority rule (since deficit-cutting measures fall under the Senate's reconciliation rules)--a far easier political hurdle.  (Once more, the question of whether such "success" is to be hoped for is another matter--see FAIR Action Alert, 1/6/10.)

Woodward follows Obama's "Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan" with the retort, "But Obama can't guarantee people won't see higher rates or fewer benefits in their existing plans." Because an honest president would have pointed out, apparently, that his or her reform bill wouldn't permanently eliminate all medical inflation.