Associated Press reporter Calvin Woodward has a history of straining to catch Barack Obama in factual errors. But today's review of last night's Obama press conference may have hit a new low in absurdity.

In the piece, headlined "Fact Check: Obama Disowns Deficit He Helped Shape," Woodward takes issue with Obama's statement: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me." Woodward's criticism: "It actually was him--and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years--who shaped a budget so out of balance.... Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator."

Well, if an Illinois senator bears more responsibility for the federal budget than the president, than why is Woodward wasting his time covering what President Obama has to say about the budget? Shouldn't he be interviewing Roland Burris instead?

Brad Jacobson has an incisive take (Media Bloodhound, 4/29/09) on the consequences of mealy-mouthed torture language at the New York Times, where public editor Clark Hoyt

provides he said/she said examples to show how the public has reacted. But in doing so, in this context, he turns the very idea of news reporting--that it should be based on fact rather than opinion--on its head and, in effect, concedes that Times editors, on news stories as serious as torture, are allowing public sentiment to color their reports.

Robert Ofsevit of Oakland, Calif., asked, "Why can’t the New York Times call torture by its proper name?" He added, "Please find more backbone and fulfill your journalistic responsibilities by describing these immoral and illegal practices for what they were." Theodore Murray of Cambridge, Mass., said that if the Times fails to adopt the word torture, "you perpetuate the fantasy that calling a thing by something other than its name will change the thing itself."

But Cynthia Jacobson of Phoenix said the Times is "outrageously biased" to use a term like brutal. "The Times has simply placed itself as one actor in a political fight, not a neutral media outlet," she wrote.

And herein lies the crux of what Hoyt--who is supposed to be the Paper of Record's ombudsman, not its cheerleader--should be addressing in this column: ...If the Times called techniques such as waterboarding torture in its reporting, which it should based on U.S. and international law, legal experts, historians, military judges, combat veterans and human rights organizations, and described, however briefly, what that torture entailed, then the use of modifying adjectives such as "harsh" or "brutal" would not only be superfluous but, in a news story, better left out.

In fact, Jacobson sees that if the Times insists on omitting the basic facts that "a) waterboarding is torture and b) torture is illegal," instead "simultaneously ascribing arbitrary descriptors to it like 'brutal' or 'harsh,'" then the paper "is not only denying its readers the necessary information to understand the issue but this denial may also lead directly to accusations of bias."

Free Press is welcoming (4/28/09) as "a long overdue step in the right direction" the news that "Cablevision announced plans to offer download speeds of 101Mbps and upload speeds of 15Mbps" without charging "usage caps or overage fees" to users. Research director S. Derek Turner explains that the plan

does, however, beg the question why Cablevision can offer fast access with reportedly no caps or overage fees, when others claim such a plan would cause the sky to fall and an exaflood to break the Internet. We hope this new announcement will put an end to the bandwidth bogeyman.

We also encourage companies like Cablevision to think about the other part of the value equation--price. These days, lower prices are just as important as faster speeds.

For some of the history feeding Turner's healthy skepticism about giant media corporations' claims regarding the Internet, read the fair magazine Extra!: "Deregulation's History of Empty Promises: Net Neutrality and the Supermedia Monopolies" (3-4/07) by Jeff Chester.

Sure that Andrew Sullivan "would be horrified" by the idea that he and Cindy Sheehan agree on anything, Jonathan Schwarz nonetheless quotes (A Tiny Revolution, 4/25/09) the Atlantic.com blogger's declaration of "love" for the Internet, because "can you imagine what those thugs would have gotten away with without it?" Sheehan's similar 2005 statement--"Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state"--spurs Schwarz to celebrate the democratizing power of online media:

I'm not sure we'd be a fascist state without the beautiful, beautiful tubes. But the difference they've made is gigantic. Recall this story about Obama's decision to release the torture memos:

Mr. Obama wrestled with the decision into Wednesday night...

One key factor was the online publication last week by the New York Review of Books of an International Committee of the Red Cross account of detainee interrogations [penned by Mark Danner]. The president read the account and concluded "virtually everything that was in these memos was out in the public domain," said the senior official.

Without the internet, would Obama have cared the Red Cross report had appeared in an ultra-egghead publication with a circulation of 140,000? Would he even have known? Likely no to both. As Donald Johnson commented over at Obsidian Wings:

[T]he issue has come much further than I would have ever expected--if you'd asked me in 2001 if the U.S. would torture people in the war on terror I would have guessed we would, but I wouldn't have expected it to have ever reached the mainstream press, except maybe in scattered articles that wouldn't receive much notice.

Schwarz opines that, "in any case, there's no question the Internet will have a deeply chilling effect on the Cheneys of the future," imagining how "during every meeting in which they organize their criminal conspiracies, someone will say: 'What would this look like if it ends up online?'"

USA Today had a remarkable headline (4/29/09) on a story about Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter switching from the Republican to the Democratic Party:

Leaving GOP, Specter Gives Dems a Boost in Stifling Dissent

The headline writer does not seem to understand the meaning of the word "dissent," which is the expression of opposition to reigning policies, not the ability to prevent policies from being enacted even when they're supported by a majority of elected representatives.

This same misunderstanding is found in the article itself, which reports, "As a minority in the House and without the votes to filibuster the Senate, Republicans would find it harder to block Democratic initiatives or even be heard." Actually, each side does get a chance to debate in the Senate, even if there is no filibuster; if corporate media won't cover the views of elected critics who don't have the power to block legislation, that would seem to be a problem of--well, of a media that doesn't understand what "dissent" means.

A couple of recent FAIR Blog posts have dealt with apologists for torture: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who misled ABC News about the effectiveness of waterboarding.  What's striking is how they both offer the same insight into why torture is attractive--it met their post-September 11 psychological needs.

Kiriakou told ABC (12/10/07): "At the time I was so angry and  I wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the United States that I felt it was the only thing we could do."

He sounds a lot like Cohen writing in the Post (4/28/09):

The horror of September 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station--the memorials still fresh--without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day--yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance--and that ember glows within me still. I know that nothing Obama did this month about torture made America safer.

It doesn't sound like it's about making America safer, though, does it?  It sounds like it's about taking care of Richard Cohen's deep psychic wounds.  Does torture work--to make newspaper pundits feel better?  That seems to be the real question on the table.

We're not in the habit of linking to Accuracy In Media--and here's an Extra! article that explains why--but I thought this piece, by the apparent though unacknowledged daughter of USA Today founder Al Neuharth, deserved an exception.

Writing in response to a USA Today column by Neuharth (3/20/09) celebrating his six adopted children, Rosamunda Neuharth-Ozgo writes:

My mother, Betty Moore, met Mr. Neuharth in St Paul, Minn., in 1962, at an Associated Press convention. At the time, he was a young editor with the Detroit Free Press and my mother was a Paris-based translator in town on business. I am the result of their affair which continued for more than a year.

With Mr. Neuharth reneging on his paternal responsibilities and my mother unable to care for me, I spent the first few years of my life in a foster home under auspices of the New York City Department of Welfare.

Al Neuharth paid child support to my mother for 21 years, per a 1963 New York City Family Court agreement, but over the years he has gone to great lengths to hide my existence from the world. Despite the overwhelming evidence--which also includes a striking physical resemblance and the fact that his name is listed on my birth certificate--he has steadfastly refused to acknowledge that I am his daughter or to have anything to do with me.

Neuharth-Ozgo recounts various steps that Neuharth has taken over the years to keep her story out of the public eye--including scuttling an authorized biography by Mike Gartner when the former NBC News chief decided he would include a chapter on Neuharth-Ozgo.

Obviously, if Neuharth is really Neuharth-Ozgo's father, it's grotesque for him to be quoting his (third) wife talking about how "what you do for children who need help means more than anything else in your life."

But even taking at face value his claim that he is not her father, and only paid child support to her mother to avoid publicity--is it really so hard to imagine that a person who grew up with your name on her birth certificate might believe that she's related to you? While as Neuharth-Ozgo notes, there weren't DNA tests when she was born, there certainly are now, and the compassionate thing would be for Neuharth to take a paternity test and put her mind at ease one way or another.

In his column today, Washington Post's Richard Cohen tells us that he is against torture, which itself is not remarkable.  His real point is this:

Yet the debate over torture has been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Of course it works--sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works. I refer you to the 1995 interrogation by Philippine authorities of Abdul Hakim Murad, an al-Qaeda terrorist who served up extremely useful information about a plot to blow up airliners when he was told that he was about to be turned over to Israel's Mossad. As George Orwell suggested in 1984, everyone has his own idea of torture.

If the threat of torture works--if it has worked at least once--then it follows that torture itself would work. Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves. This is also the position of Dick Cheney, who can sometimes be both, but in this, at least, he has some support.

If something "sometimes or rarely" works, that's hardly a testament to its effectiveness. As others with more first-hand knowledge of the use of torture than Richard Cohen have argued, torture doesn't produce reliable information.

What Cohen seems to be saying the mere threat of torture cracked this one case. First of all, it would seem that Murad was, in fact, tortured. But whether it was torture or threat of torture was really what "worked" is not really the question; as Washington Post writer Lorraine Adams wrote in a review of an Alan Dershowitz book:

What solved the case, court records show, was that Murad was stupid enough to have started a fire from the explosives, which brought police. In the apartment, they found a computer that detailed the plot, which entailed using liquid explosives to simultaneously destroy 12 commercial planes carrying Americans. Police easily confiscated the explosives in the apartment; the computer supplied names and numbers for the plotters. All were arrested and convicted.

Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture, reached a similar conclusion:

As the Washington Post has reported, Manila police got all their important information from Murad in the first few minutes when they seized his laptop with the entire bomb plot. All the supposed details gained from the 67 days of incessant beatings, spiced by techniques like cigarettes to the genitals, were, as one Filipino officer testified in a New York court, fabrications fed to Murad by Philippine police.

In other words, it would seem that Richard Cohen is using an example of torture not working to argue that torture might, in theory, work.

The more puzzling leap of faith, though, comes when Cohen writes that the "torture works" theory has defenders in high places: "Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves." Well, of course they can. There are "some" scientists who don't believe in climate change. Does the fact that they have that opinion mean that they're right?

We noted recently that a New York Times story about the waterboarding of two Al-Qaeda detainees included a bit of media criticism. The Times mentioned that in 2007, ABC featured an interview with former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who claimed that "Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew." This would be hard to square with what we now know-- that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.

The Times pushed the story further on today's front page, with Brian Stelter putting the focus squarely on that 2007 ABC report and the effect it had on the public debate over torture--namely, to bolster the claims of pro-torture pundits:

"It works, is the bottom line,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the next day. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

Perhaps most shameful is the reaction the Times got from ABC reporter Brian Ross:

Mr. Ross, who received a George Polk Award for a series on interrogation, expressed no regret about the Kiriakou interview and praised him for speaking publicly. He said ABC was preparing a story that would address the previous reporting.

“Kiriakou stepped up and helped shine some light on what has happening,” Mr. Ross said. “It wasn’t the huge spotlight that was needed, but it was some light.”

Really? A reporter learns that his only source for a major report that sought to vindicate government-sanctioned torture wasn't telling the truth, and his reaction is to praise that source?  Kirikaou didn't "shine some light" on anything, unless that phrase now means the opposite of what it's always meant.

The always-thorough Glenn Greenwald documents other missteps by Ross in his coverage of torture. And don't forget to listen to Greenwald on last week's CounterSpin, or read the transcript.

An April 24 New York Times op-ed from "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg contends "that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a hopeless cause and that public money is better spent on research and development of renewable energy"--which Jonathan Hiskes of Grist calls (4/27/09) "a classic Lomborg argument--deliberately provocative and presenting several worthy goals as an either/or choice. Choose either emissions caps or R&D, he proposes. You can't have both." Pointing out that Lomborg "makes no mention of the tremendous potential that carbon regulation has to raise money for clean energy R&D," Hiskes gives us some background:

Lomborg made his name in 2001 by publishing The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, a 540-page attack on conventional green wisdom. It suggested that supposed environmental crises--including global warming--were "phantom problems" drummed up by the environmental old guard to serve its own ends. That prompted Grist to respond with A skeptical look at The Skeptical Environmentalist, a special series in which experts scrutinized Lomborg's claims in their fields.

Did much debunkery ensue? Oh yes it did. Nobel-winning Climatologist Stephen Schneider exposed Lomborg's selective use of statistics in his climate analysis. Energy expert David Nemtzow called out Lomborg for knocking down a straw man of fossil fuel scarcity. Biologist E.O. Wilson blasted holes in Lomborg's "stop worrying" analysis of species extinction. And more.

As Schneider complained eight years ago, the most vexing question might be how Lomborg keeps getting such high-profile attention. And that prompts a question about the New York Times' rationale for going to Lomborg for this essay. He is, basically, a climate change denier. Granting him space on the NYT op-ed page is yet another example of the media treating a scientific matter as just another political topic fit for debate.

By way of comparison, Hiskes "wonders, would they grant the same privilege to the wackos who think HIV doesn’t cause AIDS?"

The Daily Howler's Bob Somerby has a look (4/27/09) at how Newsweek bigshot Fareed Zakaria "pandered and fawned in dragging out yesterday's panel" on his CNN show

Zakaria: As I was thinking about the smartest people I could gather to talk about the first stage of Barack Obama’s presidency, I thought of that wonderful quotation from Oscar Wilde: "Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."

So today, I'll be talking with a panel of geniuses. Each of them has books and accomplishments too numerous to mention. I'll talk about a few. The others will be on the screen.

With a set up like that you must be on the edge of your seat, right? Well here's the full roster of Zakaria's "panel of geniuses": Jon Meacham, Walter Isaacson and Peggy Noonan. Click on each of those names for a look at the real nature of their intellects. And click here to read of Zakaria's--Extra!: "Fareed Zakaria, Spokesperson for the Global Elite: Newsweek Pundit Presents Pro-Corporate Views as the Poor’s Perspective" (7-8/08) by Roger Bybee.

Quoting Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter's strong words on the Keith Olbermann show about how "it's important, historically, to look at the context of" the "effort in these OLC memos to try to dress [torture] up as something else," Hullabaloo blogger digby takes issue (4/24/09) with his statement that "Dick Cheney stands almost alone" in still publicly defending the memos:

Yes, Dick Cheney is forlorn and all alone. Many of the people who advocated taking the gloves off are leaving him out there hanging today. And one of them is Jonathan Alter.

See, he forgot to mention--and Keith apparently didn't know--that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 this torture talk didn't come out of nowhere or even from the dark recesses of Cheney's evil mind. Jonathan Alter himself was one of the people who brought it up almost instantly: "Time to Think About Torture" By Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, November 5, 2001.

Clearly, the Pentagon wasn't alone in advocating torture from the moment 9/11 happened. It was being advocated in the pages of major newsmagazines by so-called liberal columnists who are now commenting on what "Cheney did" as if they weren't even in the country at the time.

Read FAIR's review of such craven commentators at the time Extra!: "Pro-Pain Pundits: Torture Advocates Defy U.S., International Law" (1-2/02) by Steve Rendall

Having covered the U.S. war on Afghanistan at his TomDispatch website from the outset, Tom Engelhardt marvels (4/23/09) at how, "almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away" of "so many lives snuffed out so regularly for more than seven years now." But at this point, "unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers." And the context of such news, when it does make those inside pages, is cookie-cutter awful:

Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs--so many "insurgents," or "terrorists," or "foreign militants," or "anti-Afghan forces" killed in an airstrike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area hit insists that those dead "terrorists" or "militants" were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral.

Engelhardt writes of this automaton coverage that "it's true that we forget these killings easily--often we don't notice them in the first place--since they don't seem to impinge on our lives." But the irony right now is particularly startling to Engelhardt because "only this week, our media was filled with ceremonies and remembrances centered around the tenth anniversary of the slaughter at Columbine High School. Twelve kids and a teacher blown away in a mad rampage. Who has forgotten? On the other side of the planet, there are weekly Columbines."

Noting that, "for the last decade or so, Washington has indulged Pat Buchanan as a sort of crazy political uncle" by having "agreed to forget about his long track record of racially questionable commentary and writing," TPM Muckraker's Zachary Roth and Justin Elliott (4/24/09) have caught a column "for the far-right web magazine, Human Events," that doesn't quite jibe with the image portrayed on Buchanan's "frequent MSNBC appearances, where he plays a mostly well-mannered, if hardline, conservative."

The commentary in question asserts that "family-and-faith, God-and-country" America "does not comprehend how the president could sit in Trinidad and listen to the scrub stock of the hemisphere trash our country--and say nothing." Taking a closer look at the "scrub stock" descriptor in that sentence, Roth and Elliott find a definition no less offensive in its connotations for being so archaic:

There's no record of it appearing in the New York Times since 1943. (Hey, no one ever called Buchanan hip!) Until then, it was almost exclusively used to refer to an inferior breed of farm animal, usually cattle or horses, as when the paper reported in 1907: "Financial Disturbance Forces Cattlemen to Sell 'Scrub' Stock to Hold Prime Grades."...

In other words, "scrub stock" essentially means an inferior breed.

It's worse than that, though. There's evidence that theorists of racial and genetic superiority--an area of pseudo-scientific "scholarship" that was in vogue even among mainstream intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century--explicitly extended the use of the phrase beyond animals and into humans. In short, the phrase has been used by both eugenicists and racial segregationists to argue for the superiority of the white race.

See FAIR's regrettably still-relevant article: "In His Own Words: The History Book on Patrick Buchanan" (10/3/99) by Jeff Cohen

A New York Times op-ed by Roger Cohen saying that, because post-September 11 "journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable," he is "wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed," has moved First-Draft.com blogger Athenae (4/24/09) to declare that "I really think I hate this about our pundit class more than anything":

Well hey, so long as everybody screwed up, it's all fine! So long as there wasn't a single voice raised in opposition to what was done, so long as we didn't shout down anybody who had a different idea of things, so long as nobody who spoke up against this bullshit was punished, drummed out of public life, called a traitor on national television or demonized for daring to opine that instituting a regime of torture was pretty fucking stupid, so long as we are all equally complicit in this there's no need to punish anybody. Because if it's all of us, then it's none of us really, and isn't it funny how that always works out so beautifully?

I am just so violently opposed to the idea of transferring your moral cowardice onto the country at large to get it to share the blame for your own wussitude on the fundamental questions of our time. It is just so incredibly cheap and small and mean.

Athenae reminds Cohen that the "fact of the matter is, not everybody lost their damn minds, and it is a profound dishonor to those who held to their convictions in the face of overwhelming public pressure to go all kill-crazy that we lump them in with the nutballs painting their chests red, white and blue." See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Wrong on Iraq? Not Everyone: Four in the Mainstream Media Who Got It Right (3-4/06) by Steve Rendall