A January 27 New York Times story, "The Epidemic That Wasn't," brought the news that researchers following children prenatally exposed to cocaine have found "the long-term effects of such exposure on children's brain development and behavior appear relatively small" and are "less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco."

Though the Times makes it sound like breaking news, the fact is many reputable people disbelieved the whole "crack baby" phenomenon from the beginning: Even Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose 1985 study spurred much of the early coverage, was lamenting as long ago as 1992 that medical research was being misused: "It's interesting, it sells newspapers and it perpetuates the us-vs.-them idea."

Did it ever. The despicable role played by the press corps is why the Times story feels not just too late but too little. The paper reports "there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to [crack cocaine] would produce a generation of severely damaged children," and goes on to cite inflammatory headlines as if they were merely reports on those fears, rather than the means of their creation. The truth is there would be no "crack baby" storyline if not for the zeal with which many in the press corps seized upon limited, qualified medical research as an excuse to at least entertain the idea of writing off huge numbers of overwhelmingly black and poor children. (Though the research pertained to cocaine in all forms, the story was always about crack, wasn't it?)

It wasn't a medical researcher who wrote, "The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth"; it was the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post, 7/30/89). Krauthammer had American Enterprise Institute media darling Douglas Besharov to thank for the term "bio-underclass", and Besharov wasn't shy about spelling out the wished-for social repercussions: "This is not stuff that Head Start can fix.... Whether it is 5 percent or 15 percent of the black community, it is there." Being violently wrong doesn't appear to have dimmed Besharov's media star; nor should we hold our breath for any apologies from Krauthammer for telling readers, "The dead babies may be the lucky ones."

The saddest part: Early on, researchers recognized that the social stigma attached to being identified as a "crack baby" could far outweigh any biological impact. The Times piece underscores that, with a source who says, "Society's expectations of the children and reaction to the mothers are completely guided not by the toxicity but by the social meaning" of the drug.

But it seems as though journalists are no more likely now than they were then to examine what it is about their own practices that would drive them to perpetuate such a "social meaning" when it was not supported by science and when its potential effects were so devastating.

Following up on the well-documented phenomenon wherein corporate news outlets justify their mode of getting "conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives" by using "the rationale... that Republicans were 'in power,'" ThinkProgress (1/28/09) now shows that "it appears that old habits die hard." Even with a Democratic president and congressional majority, "the cable networks are still turning more often to Republicans and allowing them to set the agenda on major issues, most recently on the debate over the economic recovery package":

In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that the five cable news networks--CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business and CNBC--have hosted more Republican lawmakers to discuss the plan than Democrats by a 2 to 1 ratio this week....

In total, from 6 AM on Monday to 4 PM on Wednesday, the networks have hosted Republican lawmakers 51 times and Democratic lawmakers only 24 times. Surprisingly, Fox News came the closest to offering balance, hosting 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. CNN had only one Democrat compared to 7 Republicans.

Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias explained the apparent thinking of TV bookers:

When the GOP is in power, it’s important to have more Republican guests because they’re the influential newsmakers. And when the GOP is out of power, it’s important to have more Republican guests to provide an alternative point-of-view to that presented by the powers that be.

As further evidence of conservatives' "all-out assault on President Obama's economic recovery plan"--with "media...aiding their efforts" all the way--ThinkProgress also recently tallied how "cable networks, the Sunday shows and the network newscasts promoted a controversial Congressional Budget Office non-report 81 times before the actual CBO analysis of the stimulus plan was released." Those outlets heavily featured right-wing pundits touting an "'analysis' that had concluded that 'it will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed' by President Barack Obama 'will boost the economy'"--even though the CBO information actually only was obtained when they "ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program" that was "based 'almost entirely on a review of historical data'... which likely applies 'less during an economic crisis like the one we currently face.'" The actual results of the full report, released only after the anti-Obama media orgy: "It finds that roughly two-thirds of the plan's recovery investments will come in the first 18 months after it is enacted."

Guessing that the departure of Bill Kristol from the New York Times op-ed page will be "sparing the paper any further embarrassment, Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell (1/26/09) has "a good belly laugh" at the Times notation of Kristol's farewell column, reading "All good things must come to end":

Let's recall some of the highlights of his one-year (plus two weeks) reign, as chronicled in my new book, Why Obama Won:

• His very first column earned a correction, when he misattributed a Michael Medved quote to Michelle Malkin....
• Who can forget when he told Stewart he was getting wrong information because he was relying too much on....the New York Times....
• Later, smitten with Sarah Palin during a brief cruise stopover in Alaska, he pushed her for veep, publicly and privately. Then he lobbied for McCain to let Palin be Palin, or as he urged: "Hockey Mom Knows Best." So we have Kristol partly to thank for McCain's single worst blunder and a real game-changer (though not as he intended) in the fall campaign.

All in all, Mitchell finds the Times reference to Kristol's commentaries as "good things" to be "a fitting end for a column that often made the Times read like the Onion." Read about Kristol's other great contribution to the 2008 election cycle in FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Misogyny's Greatest Hits: Sexism in Hillary Clinton Coverage" (5-6/08) by Jessica Wakeman

Catching Morning Edition correspondent Tom Gjelten asserting that Barack Obama's prohibition of "the CIA from holding any detainees in secret prisons" is "not a big change" since "those prisons are all closed anyway, according to U.S. officials," blogger mytwords (NPR Check, 1/23/09) is amazed by the "brilliant reasoning": "All the CIA secret prisons are closed because U.S. officials--who ran these covert, CIA criminal black sites for years and years--say they're shut down." But NPR's lack of skepticism fails to surprise the long-time public radio critic:

Yes, NPR is really out in front on this one. The CIA torture sites were making news way back in 2004 as this report from Human Rights Watch and this one from the Guardian indicate, but NPR didn't get around to the story until November of 2005, when it was safely out in the open in the Washington Post.

And as others have noted, there is no sense of moral/legal revulsion at the practice--only relentless suggestions that the practices have helped keep us secure or saved lives.

Read the FAIR magazine Extra! Update: "The Consequences of Covering Up: Washington Post Withholds Info on CIA Prisons at Government Request" (12/05) by Peter Hart & Jim Naureckas

Fox News anchor Brit Hume's gratitude toward George W. Bush recently was expressed by Hume's amazement that "this country would pass into a new presidency eight years later with not a single attack" since September 11, 2001. Mark Howard (News Corpse, 1/27/09) expands on Hume's list by noting "No hurricanes in New Orleans since Katrina. Bush kept us safe from nature," and "No comets have hit Earth since Tunguska, 100 years ago. Bush kept us safe from celestial collisions," and even "No sightings of the Four Horsemen on the Interstate. Bush kept us safe from the Apocalypse." While he recognizes that "the call has gone out to the Republican Establishment Media that it is only through Bush’s vigilance that any of us are alive today," Howard does have some caveats not aired at Fox:

Sure, he also ignored intelligence warnings prior to 9/11 that, had they been heeded, might have prevented it. And his crony-infested federal emergency response apparatus resulted in needless death and suffering after Katrina. And his job creation record is the worst since Hoover. And trillions of dollars were lost from retirement and pension funds. And 47 million Americans have no health insurance. And our constitutional liberties were revoked. But at least our cities have not been overrun by marauding herds of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?). And everyone knows that anything that didn’t happen since 9/11 was directly the result of Bush’s leadership. Well, except for the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden.

And that last bit, according to Howard's dark humor, "That was Keith Olbermann’s fault." Read about the germination of this Bush idolatry in the FAIR magazine Extra!: "From Bozo to Churchill" (5-6/02) by Mark Crispin Miller

Credited by the London Review of Books (1/29/09) as the "former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America," Henry Siegman's list of official Israeli claims that "most of the Western media have accepted" includes "that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed" and "that Israel has acted not only in its own defense but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies." In fact, Siegman is

not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel's actions, if any... has focused instead on whether the Israeli Defense Force's carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further.

In case you're wondering what kind of radical sources Siegman is getting this information from, he tells us that "this was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division." See the FAIR Media Advisory: "The Blame Game in Gaza: Erasing Israeli Actions to Fault Only Hamas" (1/6/09)

Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall (1/28/09) is bemoaning how "Republicans have been getting a lot of air time and minimal press criticism for a series of arguments about the stimulus that are in most cases transparently ridiculous":

For instance, I heard several House Republicans yesterday making the straight up argument that the renovation of the Capitol Mall wouldn't create any jobs or stimulate the economy. Well, obviously any major building project creates jobs. Nothing could be more straightforward. Whether it's the best long-term use of the money, in the sense of whether the building project will have spin-off effects creating greater productivity and growth over time, is a decent question. And looking at what's in the bill I find myself wishing that more of the more was being spent in a more concentrated fashion--largely on infrastructure projects. But every major building project creates jobs....

And yet for all of this, most reporters seem to take these nonsensical criticisms completely on face value, grading on a curve, as it were, not giving these folks a hard time because they're well-liked, much as we might with a dumb jock in the physics class who gets a free ride because no one expects anything different from him.

Marshall's final exhibit is a "headline piece from today in the Politico making the argument that simply doing nothing, a la the Hoover administration in the early '30s, is likely the best plan."

Blogger Brad Jacobson gives play-by-play (MediaBloodhound, 1/28/09) for an epic attempt by MSNBC's Chris Matthews to live down his one-time confession to having "felt this thrill going up my leg" during a Barack Obama speech. Matthews' reparation strategy: "How about facilitating a discussion about Obama's proposed stimulus plan with two lawmakers from the same party, the Republican Party?"

That's precisely what Matthews did during a segment on his January 27 edition of Hardball, inviting only Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) and Representative Mike Pence, the House Republican conference chair, to discuss the plan.

Not enough? How about a segment exploring whether Rush Limbaugh is the "new voice of the GOP," but once again facilitating the "balanced" discussion with two people on the right and no one on the left or even center? (Never mind that Limbaugh has been the voice of the Republican Party for two decades and counting.) In the very same broadcast, Matthews did this as well, bringing on MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan and right-wing radio talkshow host Heidi Harris. (You might remember that Harris, appearing on Hardball during the election season, had told Matthews that women vote for Democrats because they "tend to think with their hearts and not with their minds.")

But wait, there's more: "How about, in the process, framing a question based on Rush Limbaugh's assertions and posing it to these two other right-wingers while prefacing the question with the words, 'Let's get back to the facts here'?" To Jacobson, "this kind of fairness and balance not only rivals Fox News but threatens to out-Fox it"--not that this would be a new trend or anything; see the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Struggling MSNBC Attempts to Out-Fox Fox" (2/05) by Peter Hart

Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 1/28/09) points to an embarrassingly simple contradiction in the premise of Washington Post staff writer David Cho's worry that government plans to give cash to failing banks in exchange for current investors' shares "could also precipitate a sell-off across the banking system as investors flee, fearing they could be next":

The reason that the government would be injecting capital is that the bank is effectively bankrupt. Shareholders should know if their banks are effectively bankrupt. If they are, then they essentially have an asset that has no value. (In principle, shares of stock only have value if a company's assets exceed its liabilities. If it is bankrupt, then its liabilities exceed its assets.)

It would be a good thing if shareholders paid attention to the financial condition of the stocks they own. (Isn't this what fund managers get paid 7-figure salaries to do?) If it takes government action to get shareholders to look seriously at the bank stocks they hold, then this would be a plus of intervention, not a "danger."

Or, as Baker's own headline succinctly puts it: "Bank Stockholders Lose Money Because Their Banks are Bankrupt, Not Because of Government Capital." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Dean Baker on the Financial Crisis" (3/28/08)

Far from holding the feet of the powerful to the fire, "liberal" Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is the very model of the establishment-protecting beltway hack. Glenn Greenwald walks us through Cohen’s history of cheering for the capital's criminal class, with a focus on the columnist’s latest call to sweep torture under the rug.

A New York Observer profile of NBC Washington bureau chief Mark Whitaker looks at the differences between D.C., where Whitaker is now stationed, and New York City, where he's spent most of his career. (OMB chair Peter Orzag can turn heads at a D.C. party, but in NYC, no less than Beyoncé or Tom Cruise will do the trick!)

Along the way Whitaker makes an observation all New Yorkers can identify with--all New Yorkers who spend their waking hours rubbing shoulders with the wealthy, powerful and influential, that is. Pointing out how exciting things are currently in the capital, Whitaker reflects on the grim situation in NYC: "You go up to New York and everyone is talking about how much money they lost and who invested with Bernie Madoff."

It would be naive to think that someone assigned to that job would have much contact with the less than well-heeled, but it is a valuable reminder.

Attacking the White House's proposed economic stimulus plan (1/26/09), Rush Limbaugh explained that the issue pits his favored "supply-siders," who see the holy grail in tax cuts, against what he repeatedly referred to as, at least what sounded like "kineesian economists," who he described as partial to "government spending on shovel-ready projects of all kinds." ("Kineesian"--rhymes with "artesian"--is my phonetic version of what Limbaugh said, but listen for yourself.)

As you might have guessed, what Limbaugh meant to say was "Keynesian" (this is confirmed by the corrected transcript at his site), a well-worn adjective derived from the name of John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the last century or so.

In a top-of-the-show rant about the dangers of the Guantanamo detainees, Fox's Bill O'Reilly declared (1/25/09):

Just hours after President Obama announced he was going to shut down Guantanamo Bay, the feds confirmed that a released Gitmo inmate, 35-year-old Sahid al-Shahiri, had resumed terrorist activities in Yemen.

Now if this isn't a warning, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what is. Obama tells the world no more Gitmo, and a guy the Bush administration let go in 2007 is now a major Al-Qaeda terrorist again. So we can add this guy to a list of 61 former Gitmo detainees who have returned to being terrorists after they've been released, that according to the Defense Department. That's 11 percent of those let go returning to the terror world.

First of all, that 61 number is totally misleading. That total includes those the Pentagon thinks may have "returned" to the "battlefield." They say they only know for sure about 18 of them. And even those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.

Seton Hall professor Mark Denbeaux has pointed out (on MSNBC and elsewhere; Washington Independent, 1/23/09) that there are serious problems with the Pentagon's accounting:

They've failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DoD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo--much less were they released from there. They have counted people as "returning to the fight" for their having written an op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DoD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning--except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.

Of course, O'Reilly's bloviating has a deeper problems: If these people were terrorists, then the Bush administration should have had no trouble keeping them in prison. If they weren't terrorists, but became terrorists after being imprisoned for years, then Guantanamo's the problem and not the solution, isn't it?

Looking back on the good old days when we all supported torture, Richard Cohen writes today in the Washington Post (1/27/09):

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called September 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.

Back then, a Post poll gave George W. Bush an approval rating of 92 percent, which meant that almost no one thought he was on the wrong course. At the same time, questions about the viability of torture were very much in the air.  Alan Dershowitz was suggesting the creation of torture warrants--permission from a court to, in effect, break some bones....

The thoughtful Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter mulled the legality, the morality and the efficacy of torture.... Alter's essay created quite a stir--and to his considerable surprise, a lot of whispered support from liberals....  The conventional wisdom that torture never works--so counterintuitive as to be an absurdity--was not yet doctrine.

And so, Cohen concludes:

We were the ones, remember, who just wanted to be kept safe. So, it is important, as well as fair, not to punish those who did what we wanted done -- back when we lived, scared to death, in a place called the Past.

Fortunately, we don't have to take Cohen's word for what the past was like; thanks to the Web, we can visit it ourselves.  And when we do so we find that while it's true that a lot of Cohen's friends in the "liberal media" were keen on torturing people, the general public was much less so.  In a poll conducted by Investors Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor on November 7-11, 2001, 32 percent of the public said that they could "envision a scenario" in which they would support "government-sanctioned torture of suspects held in the U.S. or abroad"; 66 percent said they could not envision such a scenario.

Cohen's column is headlined "Torture? Prosecute Us, Too," which is evidently meant to suggest the absurdity of prosecuting anyone for torture.  Actually, though, the Nuremberg Trials established that advocacy of crimes against humanity is itself a crime against humanity.  And systematic torture is counted as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court.  Pundits ought to think long and hard about this before they dash off another 700 words about ticking time bombs.

An Associated Press headline about the "Issue of Terrorists' Rights to Test Obama's Pledge" to close the Guantánamo Bay prison facility spurs Salon critic Glenn Greenwald (1/26/09, ad-viewing required) to put a basic journalistic tenet as simply as possible: "The fact that the U.S. Government accuses someone of X does not mean that they are actually guilty of X":

It's a good thing that there was no Associated Press around (let alone Wall St. Journals and John Yoos) during debates over the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments. AP would have run articles describing the proposed guarantees of Due Process and prohibitions on Cruel and Unusual Punishment as "murderers' rights." John Yoo would have written Op-Eds arguing that "Child Molesters Have No Rights" and the Journal would have run editorials accusing advocates of those safeguards as being "Soft on Crime" and "pro-Rapist."

As today's AP article demonstrates, these debates aren't obsolete bygones of the Bush era. The Obama executive orders of last week left unresolved the question of what due process (if any) will be accorded Guantánamo detainees and, to a lesser extent, what interrogation techniques will be approved for them. The same people who cheered on the radical policies of the last eight years are now pressuring Obama to fill in those gaps by continuing the same policies, just in a different place and with a different name (something for which the media, virtually in unison, is openly yearning).

Greenwald closes with a warning that, "as the Yoo-mimicking headline from AP demonstrates, the same twisted Orwellian reasoning used to justify those policies--'Terrorists' Rights'--hasn't gone anywhere." Fortunately, neither has Greenwald.

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9-10/08)