George Will's history of misquoting data to distort the climate change debate goes back nearly two decades--that we know of. As Extra! reported in 2003, in 1992 Will trashed Al Gore (Washington Post, 9/3/92) for being "cavalier with the truth" in his "wastebasket worthy" book Earth in the Balance. More from Extra!:

Will confronted Gore on the issue of global warming: "Gore knows, or should know before pontificating, that a recent Gallup Poll of scientists concerned with global climate research shows that 53 percent do not believe warming has occurred, and another 30 percent are uncertain."

It was Will, however, who should have read the poll more carefully "before pontificating." Gallup actually reported that 66 percent of the scientists said that human-induced global warming was occurring, with only 10 percent disagreeing and the rest undecided. Gallup took the unusual step of issuing a written correction to Will's column (San Francisco Chronicle, 9/27/92): "Most scientists involved in research in this area believe that human-induced global warming is occurring now." Will never noted the error in his column.

Considering Will's history of distortion on climate change and his refusal to correct his errors, it may be time to stop blaming Will, who doesn't seem able to help himself, and to put the blame on his Washington Post enablers, who have their own history of covering for Will's disinformation binges.

With left-of-center columnists critiquing the Beltway obsession with bipartisanship even in outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, it's no wonder that David Broder is upset (Washington Post, 2/19/09). He calls the idea that Obama should stop worrying so much about attracting Republican support "the worst advice he has received," warning that without reaching out to Republicans, Obama won't be able to "offset protectionist impulses among Democrats," and "Democrats will never tackle Social Security." Horrors!

To be fair, Broder does suggest that Obama can only achieve some other more progressive goals via bipartisanship, but his argument on these issues is farther-fetched:

When it comes to energy, regional and commodity interests will inevitably divide the Democrats. They always do. Oil, coal, natural gas and consumer groups will exert their will. If Obama writes off the Republicans in advance, he will end up with a watered-down bill--or nothing.

The problem with this claim is that, if you look at voting patterns, every Republican in both the House and Senate is to the right of every Democrat. While Broder nostalgically recalls the days of "Lyndon Johnson's forging the great civil rights acts with Sen. Everett Dirksen and Rep. Bill McCulloch, and Ronald Reagan's steering his first budget and tax bill through a Democratic House," the parties no longer include the Republican moderates and Democratic boll weevils that made such ideological crossovers possible.

Realistically, Obama will only be able to increase "bipartisan" support for his proposals by shifting them to the right.  Somehow I don't think that's going to keep Broder up nights.

While the U.S. economy's current ills have proven "that the people who run Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Wells and other major financial institutions may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer," Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/18/09) wants to know, "How much do taxpayers have to cough up to make up for their ineptitude?":

David Leonhardt's (February 18 New York Times) discussion of housing bailout plans never seems to consider the possibility that we would just let large numbers of foreclosures occur and let the banks eat their losses. Yes, many, if not most, of the banks will go under. So what? Why should taxpayers support convoluted schemes to protect these bank executives and their shareholders from their own ineptitude. We can protect homeowners by simply giving them the right to stay in their home as renters following foreclosure. It's a simple, costless and bureaucracy-free solution, but it screws the banks. So, the folks in Washington and the media apparently are not interested.

Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dean Baker on Stimulus Package" (1/30/09)

Even though "Al Jazeera English is also on the cusp of a carriage deal in Canada," Broadcasting & Cable's Marisa Guthrie reports (2/18/09) that the channel has "had little luck getting picked up by U.S. cable and satellite providers." As part of an effort to "appeal to consumers via a grassroots marketing campaign that attempts to dispel long-held attitudes about the network," AJE has "launched a website that bluntly addresses popular perceptions about the English language offshoot of Al Jazeera, the most-watched news network in the Middle East":

The site, IWantAJE.net, lets consumers send electronic letters directly to their cable or satellite provider demanding the channel. It also includes a "Speak Out" forum and a "Hits & Myths" page debunking popular assertions, such as: "Al Jazeera Supports Terrorism," "Al Jazeera Is Anti-Semitic," "Al Jazeera Is Anti-American" and "Al Jazeera Shows Beheadings."...

AJE filled a news vacuum during the recent war in Gaza, when Israel’s decision to ban foreign journalists from the region arguably gave Al Jazeera English a priceless amount of exposure. As the only English-language news organization with a presence in Gaza, its reports and video were widely seen on television sets in the U.S. and Canada. PBS's World Focus aired full segments. And other networks, including NBC News and the CBC, aired video from Al Jazeera English.

Indeed, "traffic on the network’s website... spiked by 600 percent during the war in Gaza." Contrast the fact that "more than half of that traffic came from North America" with current accessibility: "AJE is available in 130 million households internationally but is only carried in the U.S. in Burlington, Vt.; Toledo, Ohio; and Washington, D.C."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ken Picard on Al-Jazeera in Burlington" (6/6/08)

"A rather major problem with nearly all of NPR's reporting" has been identified by NPR Check blogger Mytwords (2/18/09) and named the "history scrub." The definition: "If the essential background history to a story reflects poorly on the actions of the U.S. government--that history will be deleted, scrubbed, sanitized--sent down the memory hole." The key example given is a February 17 All Things Considered in which host Michelle Norris "blandly explains that thousands more U.S. troops are headed off to Afghanistan and doesn't even chuckle in noting that the United States Institute of Peace [tee-hee] released some new policy recommendations for Afghanistan":

To discuss the report, Norris interviews Seth Jones, co-author with Christine Fair of the report. (Both authors are connected with the RAND Corp.) In fairness, a lot of what Jones says comes off as fairly informed and reasonable.... He even offered corrective to Michelle Norris' knee-jerk assumption that the answer to all problems in Afghanistan is more U.S. troops and military might....

What I found so stunning is that neither Norris nor Jones ever mentioned that the baseline of stable functioning "legitimate" local leaders was essentially destroyed and replaced by the most ruthless, fanatic and illegitimate leaders that the U.S. could recruit and train in its 1980s campaign to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. Even U.S. News & World Report acknowledges this basic history.  On NPR, though, it's as if this nasty little chapter of U.S. involvement in the sorrows of Afghanistan never even happened--or that it had no continuity with the current configuration of the U.S.-Afghanistan project.

Suggesting that NPR consider "airing the views and opinions of people who got it right for a change," Mytwords takes a "hop into the way-back machine" and links to "cartoonist Ted Rall's piece on Afghanistan written at the time when most were crowing about the stunning U.S. victory over the Taliban." The title of Rall's "disturbingly prescient" 2001 Village Voice article?: "How We Lost Afghanistan." For more on major media's unquestioning acceptance of the need for U.S. troop escalation in Afghanistan, listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Ann Jones on Afghanistan" (1/23/09)

Calling it "obvious" that "promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself," the latest from Thomas Frank (Wall Street Journal, 2/18/09) explains the corporate media's fetish for bipartisanship:

For the Beltway commentariat, however, transcending partisanship is the most meaningful of issues, more important, one senses, than the economic problems that trouble those people at town-hall meetings. "Nothing was more central to [Obama's] victory last fall than his claim that he could break the partisan gridlock in Washington," wrote the Washington Post's David Broder a few weeks ago, in an altogether typical expression of media perceptions.

The way I remember it, the No. 1 issue in the election was the collapsing economy, followed at some distance by the Iraq war. On both of these questions, Mr. Obama prevailed because he was the candidate who promised most convincingly to reverse Republican policies--not because he planned to meet the GOP halfway across the charred ruins of American prosperity.

The reason the Washington media think bipartisanship is the top issue, even when economic disaster stomps Americans like Godzilla, is because of the way it reflects their own professional standards. They are themselves technically impartial, and so it's only natural for them to wish for a hazy millennium in which everyone else in Washington is impartial, too.

Frank delineates the really insidious nature of what "is supposed to be high-minded stuff, this longing for a bipartisan golden age": "In some ways it is the most cynical stance possible. It takes no idea seriously, since everything is up for compromise." See the recent FAIR Media Advisory: "Bipartisanship=Shifting Right?: Media Mull White House Failures Over Stimulus Partisanship" (2/3/09)

In a blog post about how it must have been "So Much Nicer To Be George Will Before The Internet" (2/17/09), A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz looks back over how "on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn't happening" to "a funny story of Noam Chomsky's from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982":

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: He said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek--you know, four lines--in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it's false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We're kind of interested in your letter; where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they're published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971" --which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

Theorizing that these days "it must be hard for Will to get used to bluggs, because he's spent his entire career with total impunity," Schwarz doesn't spare those people responsible for publishing Will's damaging claptrap either: "Two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won't explain their behavior." See the newest FAIR Action Alert: "Does the Post Fact-Check George Will?: Columnist's Climate Change Denial Distorts Reality" (2/18/09)

Journalist, author and Guantánamo prisoner advocate Andy Worthington gives the lie (Future of Freedom Foundation, 2/16/09) to Washington Post reporters' exclamations over "'the complexity and dangers of the issue' of reviewing the prisoners' cases" after Obama's promise to close the illegal prison:

As the conservative judge and George W. Bush appointee Richard Leon discovered in the habeas corpus reviews of five Bosnian Algerians... in many cases "the complexity and dangers" are nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors, and the evidence itself cannot be substantiated.

With this in mind, it was, frankly, negligent of the Washington Post to cite the opinion of a "former senior official," who... claimed, "All but about 60 who have been approved for release are either high-level Al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people."

The problem with this official's statement is that it is demonstrably false. Of the 182 other prisoners tarred as terrorists by the official, it has long been established that only between 35 and 50 are regarded by intelligence officials as connected in any meaningful way with Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

In fact, Worthington found "a startling example of a prisoner who does not correspond to the opinion of the 'former senior official'" printed "just three days after the article was published in the Post, when Judge Leon ruled that a Yemeni prisoner, Ghaleb al-Bihani, could continue to be held... because he had been an assistant cook for the Taliban." See the currently print-only article in Extra!: "Dangerous Revisionism Over Guantánamo: Citing Dirty Evidence to Defend Dubious Detentions (2/09) by Andy Worthington

A New Republic editorial (3/4/09) about the decline of the mainstream media points a finger squarely at media critics:

The master narratives of both the right and the left have come to include the same villain: the hypocritical, biased elite media. And their combined grouching has helped foment the anti-media backlash.

Both sides do it--now there's a new one. The magazine uses Bernie Goldberg's skimpy (and error-filled) book Bias as an example of right-wing media criticism, then moves on to the left:

A mirror version of this critique emerged on the left. In this telling, it was the timid, lazy press corps that failed to rigorously challenge the president's core (mendacious) claims about his tax cuts and rationale for heading to war. Very valid criticisms. But these specific objections morphed into populist broadsides against what the left came to describe as "the mainstream media"--avatars of establishmentarian groupthink who bend to the latest conventional wisdom emerging from D.C. cocktail parties and neurotically fret that they might be just as biased as their conservative critics allege.

It's hard to know what to say about this, but let's try to find our way through the thicket. Left critics accuse the media of failing to challenge the Bush White House on the Iraq war and tax cuts. That's not the problem, even for the New Republic--those were "valid criticisms."

No, the problem is that this valid criticism has somehow "morphed into populist broadsides" against the media (which somehow the left recently took to calling "the mainstream media," in quotes because there's something suspicious about the name).  If that's not bad enough, the press is routinely criticized for being "avatars of establishmentarian groupthink who bend to the latest conventional wisdom emerging from D.C. cocktail parties."

It's hard to see how this caricature of left press criticism is any different from the "valid" criticism of the Bush White House--in fact, it's mostly the same thing. Corporate media rely on Beltway insiders to dispense Beltway conventional wisdom. The sales job on the Iraq War was an example of that, not an exception (though it may have been a rather extreme example).

The New Republic warns that this kind of anti-media rhetoric

creates a poisonous atmosphere. By assaulting the credibility of the press, it destroys its authority in the culture, giving cover to politicians who would rather avoid dealing with reporters in the first place.

If you believe that an overreliance on government spokespersons and official sources is part of the problem, then it's hard to lose much sleep worrying about politicians who will "avoid dealing" with the press. As for destroying media's "authority in the culture"-- well, one can only hope.

In a discussion with Jessica Newman of Campus Progress (2/17/09), Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman gives her motivations for entering journalism: "I just always saw it as a way to pursue issues of social justice, to hold those in power accountable, to really work hard to get at the truth." When asked if she sees "a successful and profitable way to embrace multimedia...in a for-profit system, like the mainstream media," Goodman makes an important distinction: "It depends on what you mean by a 'for-profit system'":

For the profit of society, yes. I can only speak from my own experience with what we do. [I] deeply believ[e] that we need to work on every kind of platform to get independent information out, which is why we're on community radio and NPR, Pacifica radio and PBS and public access TV and then on the Internet. We believed from the very beginning in working online and open source so that everyone can get information out there.... When we're on a station, it's bringing attention to that station, bringing resources to that station. Public access is under threat in the United States. You know, the telecoms and the cable companies don't want to have these free channels. But they're the ones--the cable companies--that get the monopoly in a town to have their cable network. They've got to give something back to the community. What better way to serve a community than to provide a space where people can make their own media, because the media are the most powerful institutions on earth.

In response to the old question of "what line as journalists should we draw between advocacy and objectivity," Goodman points out: "You really can’t become more of an advocate than the corporate press. They provide the model. Just look at the lead-up to the invasion [of Iraq in 2003]. All of the networks, over and over again, beating the drums for war. I know what every one of those journalists thinks because they talked about it all the time." See the FAIR article: "In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views" (3/18/03)

Free Press has some good news (2/17/09) about the "$7.2 billion to expand broadband access" contained in President Obama's new American Reinvestment and Recovery Act:

The law attaches open Internet conditions to broadband funds and directs the Federal Communications Commission to produce a national broadband plan.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will distribute the majority of the funds, $4.35 billion, through a temporary grant program. NTIA broadband projects must be completed within two years of the award, provide the greatest broadband speed possible, and adhere to Internet nondiscrimination and openness principles established by the FCC. The law also funds programs that promote increased broadband adoption in low-income communities.

While Free Press director Josh Silver is "pleased that this law requires taxpayer-funded networks to adhere to Net Neutrality principles," he warns that "these conditions only apply to the broadband lines built with stimulus money. We need Net Neutrality laws to ensure that all networks are open and free from discrimination." Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Deregulation's History of Empty Promises: Net Neutrality and the Supermedia Monopolies" (3-4/07) by Jeff Chester

In the wake of a George Will column (Washington Post, 2/15/08) attempting to refute the reality of climate change with a string of inaccurate claims, FAIR has an action alert calling on media activists to write to the Washington Post asking them to retract the falsehoods and explain their fact-checking procedures for columnists.

You can post copies of your letters to the Washington Post in the comments section below. Please remember that letters that maintain a civil tone are most effective.

USA Today's "Obama's War" cover story today (2/18/09) is long by that paper's usual standards, but can't seem to find any space for critics of the plan to send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Quoted in the piece:
--Barack Obama
--Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution
--political scientist Richard Eichenberg of Tufts University
--White House press secretary Robert Gibbs
-- Joe Biden
--Robert Gates, Pentagon
--Sen. Joe Lieberman, "a leading hawk on both wars."
--Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan
--Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic & International Studies
--U.S./NATO commander David McKiernan

USA Today does note, however, that public opinion is more mixed:

Those surveyed split evenly, however, when asked whether the U.S. should keep troops in Afghanistan until things get better, even if that takes years, or set a timetable for removing them regardless of what's going on there at that time.

Other polls suggest the public isn't crazy about an escalation either. When will those voices be heard in the media?

Today's New York Times features a piece by Thom Shanker that dwells on suspected budget cuts at the Pentagon. As the headline tells us, "After Stimulus Package, Pentagon Officials Are Preparing to Pare Back."

The piece gives little reason to believe that there are any such plans afoot; Obama did not campaign on cutting the Pentagon budget, and in fact we learn further on that any suspected cuts won't mean a total decrease in military spending:

Even if overall spending is reduced, the official Defense Department budget may actually grow over last year's spending plan, because billions of dollars in emergency spending that now passes through Congress in separate legislation is to be rolled back into the regular budget.

So what's going on here? Reading between the lines, you might conclude that the Pentagon is trying to manufacture a story here, expressing worries about a mostly non-existent problem in order to drum up some attention (and sympathetic press coverage).

Read a little more, though, and things start to get interesting. Spencer Ackerman reported at the Washington Independent two weeks ago (2/2/09) that the Pentagon had initially requested a $60 billion increase for 2010--an attempt, it seemed, to put pressure on the new administration, which was suggesting a mere 9 percent increase in Pentagon spending. Ackerman's updated report (2/18/09) suggests that the Pentagon and the White House have agreed on a $537 billion budget--a bigger increase than the White House had apparently wanted.

As Ackerman noted, "The Obama administration could jack its Pentagon budget request to $583,999,999,999.99 and you’d see a flurry of op-eds bemoaning a defense cut." That's probably true--and news reports like this from the New York Times perform a similar function on the Pentagon's behalf.

Politico reported (2/16/09) that a new poll shows that support for the Fairness Doctrine has dropped. Unfortunately, the policy described in the poll question bears no relationship to the Fairness Doctrine as it actually existed.

The Rasmussen polling firm asked respondents whether "the government should require all radio stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary." But the Fairness Doctrine never called for equal time for any points of view; it actually required, as codified in a 1959 amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, that "a broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance."

What was "reasonable" was deliberately left vague; in practice, the FCC interpreted it as requiring something like one hour of rebuttal for every five hours devoted to promoting a particular point of view.  In other words, a talkshow where the callers got as much airtime as the host, and where one out of every three callers disagreed with the host, would be perfectly in compliance with the Fairness Doctrine, without any other programming required.

Given that much more extreme and intrusive policy invented by the pollsters was only rejected by a modest plurality, you have to wonder how an honest description of the policy would poll.

See Extra!: "The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost It, and Why We Need It Back" (1-2/05) by Steve Rendall.