This week on CounterSpin: The network camera crews have mostly packed up and gone home, but the political fights over reconstruction and rebuilding in Haiti are only just getting started. University of Texas professor Jemima Pierre was part of a delegation that recently visited Haiti, and she wrote about what she saw for the Nation. She'll join us to talk about what she found, and where the Haiti story is headed next.

Also on the show: Media technology can put more control in consumers' hands over the gathering and sharing of information and entertainment. But some folks, frankly, would rather it didn't. We'll talk with Megan Tady of the group Free Press about some of the most significant media industry battles going on right now that affect what you get to see and hear.

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Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (3/18/10) returns from his excursion into mocking right-wingers to return to his natural role of ridiculing single-payer advocates. His target today is Rep. Dennis Kucinich.  You know what's funny about him? He's short! Or, in Milbank's words, he's a "little man," a "little guy," a "diminutive figure" and--because he announced his support for the healthcare bill on St. Patrick's Day--a "leprechaun."

Actually, Kucinich is the exact same height--5 foot 7--as John McCain, whom Milbank can somehow write about without any elf jokes.

Milbank also includes a sneering reference to how Kucinich "led the city into default" when he was mayor of Cleveland. Yes, that's true--he stopped the plan to privatize the city's power system, which caused some banks to play hardball with the city's credit. He didn't blink, Cleveland still has municipal power and it saved the city and its residents tens of millions of dollars. It's hard to find many people in Cleveland who think Kucinich did the wrong thing.

But also... he's short! Like a leprechaun!

What most struck me as most strange, though, about Milbank's column was this line:

Our Kenyan Hawaiian commander in chief evidently has the luck of the Irish.

First of all, it's weird to refer to a president's state of birth as though it were an ethnicity. Who would anyone describe Bill Clinton as an Anglo Arkansan?  Ronald Reagan as an Irish Illinoisan? It's as if, like Cokie Roberts, Milbank doesn't really consider Hawaii to be part of the United States.

Secondly, Obama is part Irish on his mother's side--he's got Kearneys and McCurrys in his family tree.  But Milbank was apparently too struck by the hilarity of being "Kenyan Hawaiian" to look that up.

Broadcasting & Cable (3/17/10) spoke with the head of PBS's flagship New York station about the recent hire of Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and former MTV and NPR host Alison Stewart for PBS's forthcoming program Need to Know, which is replacing Now and the Bill Moyers Journal:

WNET.org president Neal Shapiro did not rule out the possibility of future synergies between Newsweek and Need to Know.

"We haven't talked about anything specific," he said. "But I think all kinds of natural synergies may happen."

Shapiro said he is not concerned that Stewart and Meacham, who has been a frequent guest on Charlie Rose as well as MSNBC's Morning Joe, will bring ideological baggage to the program.

"They are both are incredibly smart. And I think, given their intellect, neither are people you can pigeonhole left or right. I think they have a history of asking probing questions on all sides."

"Given their intellect" they can't be placed on the left or the right? Yeah, smart people are all centrists, I guess. And by "probing," Shapiro must mean something like treating sources with "charity and dignity and respect."

I'm also looking forward to public television giving us Newsweek synergies. It's hard to think of a better use of PBS resources than providing another platform for commercial journalism.  Maybe if we're really lucky we'll get some Mac Margolis on Need to Know.

Boy, the folks at Amazon.com sure are mean--to hear the New York Times tell it.

A March 18 story by Motoko Rich and Brad Stone begins:

Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according to two industry executives with direct knowledge the discussions.

It's very clear who's the villain in the story, tabbed on the website as "Amazon May Impede Access to Some Publishers' Books": The story talks about how the online bookseller is "pressuring publishers" with its "hardball approach," shortly after it was "widely accused of abusing its position" with similar tactics that "shocked the publishing world." If Amazon keeps it up, "it could harm its reputation in the eyes of customers and the publishing industry" and (in the words of a source) do "serious long-term damage to their own brand."

By implication, the hero would be Apple, which is also entering the electronic book market. Apple's business model, at any rate, doesn't get the harsh spin from the Times that Amazon receives.

Which is funny, because Apple's plan would result in consumers paying from 30 percent to 50 percent more to buy most e-books, and prevent publishers from allowing anyone else to undercut Apple's inflated prices. It's a terrible deal for consumers, whom you would think make up the majority of readers even in the Times' Business section--but the piece is written with the unstated assumption that we're all rooting for the publishers.

The word "profit" only comes up once in the article, in reference to the $9.99 Amazon wants to charge for titles for its e-book reader: "Many Kindle owners have said the low price motivates them to buy more e-books, but publishers feared that the price would eventually erode their profits."  But it was Rich, one of the article's co-authors, who did the reporting (3/1/10) that showed that the $9.99 price would give publishers about the same profit they make selling a hardcover for $26--and that the $12.99 price (let alone $14.99) gives them a significantly higher margin.

As FAIR pointed out at the time (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10),  however, Rich's earlier piece was likewise heavily spun so as to avoid giving readers the accurate impression that higher e-book prices are a rip-off for consumers. So it's not surprising that the same pro-publisher slant is found in her coverage today.

Via Climate Progress (3/16/10), Scientific American guest blogger John Horgan (3/16/10) makes a disturbing claim:

Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section's editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity.

Now, reviews of climate research literature show universal support for the notion that human-caused climate change is happening  (Nature, 12/3/04), and surveys of climate scientists find the same unanimity (Science Daily, 1/19/09). Major scientific organizations around the world have endorsed the consensus of the climate research field, and have expressed alarm at the dangers to humanity posed by climate change.

So if a majority of the staff of Science Times nonetheless doubts that human-caused climate change is a real danger, that means one of two things: Either the journalists at one of the nation's most visible sources of science news consider scientists to be a dubious lot who may well not know what they're talking about, or those journalists have not been paying attention to what the scientists are saying. Either way, it's troubling.

And the response by the New York Times science editor Laura Chang in the comments section was hardly reassuring:

I must say your sentence about the science staff doesn't make sense. There are more than 20 people on the Science Desk of the Times, and no one has ever taken a poll of their positions on human-induced global warming. As far as I know, everyone here who covers climate--including our neighbors in the environment pod, who provide the bulk of this coverage these days--keeps an open mind about the evidence.

If "keeps an open mind" means what it usually does, then the people who cover climate for the New York Times think the jury is still out on whether climate scientists should be believed when they say humans are causing a global climate disaster. Talk about your serious threats to humanity.

Last night on the O'Reilly Factor (3/16/10):

What I'm about to tell you is simply stunning.

A new survey published by the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious magazine, says that nearly half of primary care doctors in America could leave the medical profession if Obamacare is passed.

According to the Journal, 63 percent of physicians feel that healthcare reform is needed but should be done in a more gradual way. And an astounding 72 percent of doctors believe a public option, that is a government-run health insurance company, would have a negative impact on medical care in the USA.

Doctors hate the White House health plan--now that IS a story. And it's published in a reputable scientific journal!

Or not.

Anyone trying to find the research will likely see it first at a right-wing blog like Hot Air-- which linked to a New England Journal of Medicine "Career Center" website article that was actually the employment newsletter Recruiting Physicians Today. That this was not the journal itself would have been obvious to anyone reading the site.

The survey was done by the Medicus Firm, a "nationally retained physician search firm." The main point of their poll is that health reform will create some kind of uncertainty, which  means the "strongest physician recruiters and firms will be in demand"-- i.e., themselves.

After Media Matters investigated the matter, the New England Journal of Medicine posted an explanation on their site, explaining that the advertiser newsletter is not the journal, and they had nothing to do with the survey (which, it turns out, appears to have been an email survey of doctors in the firm's database).

After leading his show with a bogus tale, surely Bill O'Reilly will correct the record tonight. Right?

FAIR has a new Action Alert out on CNN's newest political commentator: Red State's Erick Erickson. For some indication of why this is perhaps the creepiest move by a cable network since MSNBC hired Michael Savage--and for an email address to communicate your feelings--click here.  Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or comments on the alert, in the comments thread here.

Washington Post columnists Dana Milbank and David Broder are both committed guardians of the establishment center, but they don't always interpret their role in the same way.

Milbank led the cheers for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as chief dragger to the right (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10), whereas Broder saw his blame-the-boss disloyalty as unseemly (3/4/10); on the other hand, it was Broder who thrilled recently to the "pitch-perfect populism" of Sarah Palin (2/11/10), while Milbank's column today (3/16/10) finds a similar spiel by Dick Armey to be as worthy of ridicule as, say, single-payer advocates (FAIR Blog, 6/12/09).

While Milbank's take-down of Armey's speech was amusing ("He asked if people 'agree with, with uh, with uh, help me out, uh, the great prime minister, English prime minister--Churchill'"), it was about as lo-cal as his more typical mockery of the left.  He quotes Armey's assertion:

Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.

To which Milbank retorts: "Who knew they had socialists in 1607?" But Milbank doesn't recall that Jamestown was in actuality a for-profit enterprise--a project of the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company. Perhaps that would have been too pointed a punchline for Milbank's ideological tastes.

On his weekend NBC show, Chris Matthews regularly posts a question to 12 regular pundit/journalists--what he calls "The Matthews Meter." This Sunday (3/14/10), the question was: "Should Obama Move to the Center Instead of the Left as a Reelection Strategy?"

Matthews explained it on the show:

Let's go to the bottom line. We took it to The Matthews Meter, 12 of our regulars. What's the smartest political route for Obama right now, play to the center or to the left? Well, no contest here. Eleven say play to the center; just one says go left.

That's about as clear a statement of the political bias of the corporate press corps as you're likely to see. The advice for Democrats is always the same--move to the right.

The discussion of why this would be a good strategy was about as convincing as the advice itself; one highlight was Matthews asking of Obama: "Do you think he's as good at faking it as Bill Clinton was? Can he pretend to be a centrist?"

Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/15/10) offers a "narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told," that ends with:

And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.

The idea that Saddam Hussein fooled the U.S. into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons is a very popular myth that has no real evidence behind it. (See Extra!, "Saddam's 'Bluff'"  by Peter Hart, 1-2/04; "From Speculation to History"  by Seth Ackerman, 5-6/04.) Needless to say, when you're complaining that a fictional film isn't factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren't fictional.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turns in a profile of Glenn Beck today (3/15/10) that includes a few interesting anecdotes. He reports that "Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists" from his own radio company, and that "a vice president was assigned 'to help keep an eye on that program' and review its content in advance--a full-time job."

Kurtz also notes that some Fox reporters aren't crazy about what his new fame is doing to them:

Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility.

Yes, Beck is somehow undermining Fox's credibility in a way that that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera and Brit Hume hadn't managed to do yet.

Fox has always been conservative-- it was founded on an explicitly political agenda, after all--albeit one that Fox anchors and personalities would occasionally try to argue was merely a myth cooked up by the liberal media.

So what these Fox reporters are really saying is that Beck's presence on Fox makes it more difficult to fool people.

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has not had a chance yet to respond to questions about his commentary on the ACORN hoax (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10), instead devoting his Sunday column (3/14/10) to a discussion of political labeling. It included this question:

Why is the American Enterprise Institute almost always called "conservative" in the Times, while the Brookings Institution seldom gets a label, although it has been described as a Democratic government in exile during Republican regimes?

First off, the right-wing AEI (Extra!, 3-4/99) is not "almost always called 'conservative' in the Times"; a Nexis search of the paper over the past year turns up 77 references to the think tank, of which 18 have the word "conservative" in the vicinity.  Twenty-three percent of the time is not "almost always."

And Brookings "has been described as a Democratic government in exile"--who, exactly, has described it thus? The only previous time that Brookings was described as a "government in exile" in the New York Times, it was a column (9/29/89) that said the think tank served as such for Democratic and Republican economists alike.

It would certainly be an odd shadow government for Democrats that provided a home for so many Republicans. While its current president, Strobe Talbott, was a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, his predecessor, Michael Armacost, was an undersecretary of state under Reagan (Extra!, 11-12/98); the president before that, Bruce MacLaury, worked for Nixon's Treasury Department (Extra!, 5/91). Brookings' current roster of experts includes George W. Bush administration alumni like Ted Gayer, Mark McClellan and Ron Haskins--not to mention prominent Iraq War hawks Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack (Extra! Update, 10/07).

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is making the rounds to promote his new book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. He landed on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday (3/14/10), interviewed by Tom Brokaw.  Brokaw asked him about his book's discussion of the Iraq War:

BROKAW:  And in it, you acknowledge when weapons of mass destruction were not found, everyone was startled and not very happy about that.  If that had been the case before war began, you couldn't have gotten congressional authorization.

ROVE:  Nor in all likelihood U.N. approval, as we had as well.

BROKAW:  Would you have launched the war if you had known there were weapons of mass destruction?

ROVE:  Well, as I say in the book, we would not have had either the authorization from Congress nor the U.N., and we probably would have found other ways to constrain his behavior.

There was no U.N. approval for the Iraq War.

The White House always argued that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave them legal cover for the war, but it did not--it warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm.

As the U.N. weapons inspectors were reporting back from Iraq, the White House was seeking a second Security Council vote that would have officially sanctioned military action. That effort was unsuccessful, and the U.S./U.K. attack began without that Security Council approval.

This is not ancient history, nor is particularly obscure; coverage of Iraq and the U.N. weapons inspections in early 2003 was fairly intense, and Brokaw's NBC newscast aired several reports on the U.S. efforts to win U.N. support for a war resolution. (Brokaw himself on March 10, 2003, for example: "Tonight, the French vowed to veto any U.S. war resolution at the U.N., while Secretary of State Powell continued to look for votes and a plan that would allow the United States to go to war with some kind of U.N. approval.")

Rove undoubtedly knows this history, too. What he's counting on is that journalists like Brokaw will either not remember these facts, or will be too polite to bring them up.

This week on CounterSpin: A new law in Utah says some women who miscarry should go to jail. You may have seen some coverage, but are journalists asking the right questions about the law's implications, and is there a bigger story here that's being missed? We'll hear from Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Also on CounterSpin this week: With a name like the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, you'd expect such a group is going to upset some big corporations. And they have, including launching a very successful campaign against media giant Disney. Well, maybe a little too successful; the group found itself evicted from its headquarters after Disney complained. We'll talk to Dr. Susan Linn from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood about that story.

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The Los Angeles Times reports (3/12/10) on a new study of local news from the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism's Norman Lear Center. The findings are hardly surprising: There is almost no local political coverage on TV news.  As the Times notes, "An average half-hour newscast devoted just 22 seconds to government issues, including city budgets, healthcare, layoffs and law enforcement." Coverage of local politics works out to just under 2 percent of the "news hole"; on the other hand, crime stories make up closer to three minutes of a given newscast.

While that's terrible, the L.A. Times waits until the end of the piece to tell us that the L.A. Times does just a little better:

A companion study also examined local coverage by the Los Angeles Times during the same 14-day period. The report found that while TV stations used 1.9 percent of its news hole (minus ads and teasers) for coverage of local government, the Times used 3.3 percent of its news hole (minus ads and teasers) for coverage of local government.