The Washington Post editorial (5/14/09) on the Social Security and Medicare trustees' report didn't break much new ground, other than perhaps a uptick in the sarcasm quotient. ("Oh, please" is their retort to critics who point out the paper's demonstrable hostility to the Social Security program.)

But this line jumped out at me as noteworthy:

Furthermore, the size of the Social Security surpluses has shrunk, posing a problem for the government since it relies on these funds to help plug its deficits. Over the next seven years, the cumulative surpluses will be $157 billion instead of the previously estimated $454 billion, forcing the cash-strapped feds to borrow even more than they had expected.

This is wrong in an important way: The Social Security surpluses are money that the program is lending to the U.S. government; when the government accepts this money, it is borrowing it, with a legal obligation to pay it back--just as if it had borrowed money from private sources.  So whether or not the Social Security surpluses have shrunk doesn't change the amount of money the government is borrowing--it just changes who the government will owe the money to.

But folks like the Washington Post editorialists don't seem to see the money being loaned by Social Security as really being a loan--that's why they express alarm at the fact that "the date when the Social Security trust fund will start running deficits has moved closer by a year, to 2016." Now, the reason that there is a Social Security surplus is that taxes dedicated to the program were raised in 1983 for the specific purpose of paying for the baby boomers' retirement--which will be well underway by 2016 and which will be mostly over by the time that the trust fund is scheduled to run out in 2037.

If the government doesn't actually intend to pay back that money--if it hopes to engineer a new "save" of Social Security that results in the money continuing to flow indefinitely from the program to the Treasury--then a fraud will have been perpetrated on the working Americans. And the Washington Post will no doubt cheer this fraud as an act of fiscal prudence.

The Associated Press' Shawn Pogatchnik (5/12/09) has the incredible and deeply alarming story of Dublin sociology student Shane Fitzgerald having "posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia" just as the world's reporters were writing up the March 18 death of composer Maurice Jarre. Intended for "testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news," Fitzgerald's fib "flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper websites in Britain, Australia and India"--in short, "Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked."

"They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first"--and from there it only gets more embarrassing:

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began....

So far, the [London] Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version--or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source--and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

Not only did the Guardian honestly own up to its mistake, but readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth got "the moral of this story" right in her May 4 column on the episode: It's "not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source." For his part, Fitzgerald himself now is "100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," and in doing so "would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

Current Anti-Advertising Agency CEO Steve Lambert and founder Jordan Selier have posted (AntiAdvertisingAgency.com, 5/12/09) their letter to the New York Times responding to a May 11 piece that cites one NYC advertising executive asking, "All you have to do is walk out the door for lunch and notice the number of vacant storefronts... so why not get in there and put a message in there?":

I know why not, because it's a crime! And I was disappointed that the Times didn't mention this. Outdoor advertising is regulated by the Department of Buildings for several reasons; so billboards aren't erected in dangerous places and ways, to regulate advertising to specific districts keeping the city livable, and to prevent persuasive messages from being placed anywhere and everywhere a corporation can buy space.

The Department of Buildings has strict regulations on size and these storefronts turned billboards are simply too large for nearly every commercial district in New York with the exception of Times Square.

Deeming the Times "mistaken in reporting on this as a 'thriving' type of advertising emerging from declining economy," Lambert and Selier would rather the paper "call it what it is, advertisers desperate for profits, committing organized crime and hurting the livability of our city"--and even urge "New Yorkers who care" to "have them removed! Or just tear them down themselves."

Hearing "the whining retreat of a whipped pup instead of the toothy growl of a watchdog," the Colorado Independent's John Tomasic (5/11/09) quotes Washington Post reporter Paul Kane answering an online question with a new excuse for refusing to "call waterboarding people and slamming them into walls torture"--"because [the Post] fears a lawsuit for libel":

New York, N.Y.: What’s the difference between the "harsh interrogations" I keep reading about in the Post and actual "torture"? If it's the same thing, then why not just call it "torture"? I don't get it. Aren't you guys continuing to catapult Bush-era propaganda when you use such Newspeak euphemisms for what we all (finally) know was clearly torture, based on U.S. and International law?

Paul Kane: You can't call someone a convicted murderer until he/she has actually been convicted. Understand? Get it? The reason we say "alleged" murder and things like that is for our own legal protection. So we can't be sued for libel. Take a look at financial reports on the newspaper business. We're not going to do anything that leads to us losing any more money these days.

Tomasic fantasizes about "journalists standing up for themselves against the Bush administration, albeit belatedly, and asserting their right to speak truth to power," but instead has to read "absurd stories like this one last week from Post reporter Carrie Johnson":

Former Bush administration officials have launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.... The memos offered support for waterboarding, slamming prisoners against a flexible wall and other techniques that critics have likened to torture.

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Glenn Greenwald on Torture" (4/24/09)

Medical librarian blogger Laika Spoetnik (Laika's MedLibLog, 5/8/09) has taken a long look at the international media "tsunami" generated by the Australian paper's one sentence on "a fake Elsevier/Merck journal. It says: 'The drug company also allegedly produced an entire journal--called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine--and passed it off as an independent peer review publication.'" Among Spoetnik's findings:

• It had the looks of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles
• Most of the articles presented data favorable to the Merck products Fosamax (for osteoporosis) and Vioxx...
• There are several ads for Fosamax and Vioxx
• It is unclear who wrote the editorials...
• There is no disclosure of company sponsorship
• Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes (confirmed by Elsevier)

Unsurprised by such odious behavior from a pharmaceutical giant like Merck, Spoetnik still thinks it "remarkable that 'the reliable and authorative' Elsevier, publisher of journals like the Lancet [and tons of U.S. periodicals], lends itself to a biased publication of articles that only serve as promotional material."

While Glenn Greenwald and Camille Paglia catch us up on the increasingly hateful and dangerous language emanating from conservative talk radio--including Mark Levin show substitute host Andrew Wilkow repeatedly calling a gay man a "vile sodomite" and Limbaugh sub Mark Davis joking about the murder of top Democratic officials--there are other signs the genre is growing increasingly desperate in the midst of dwindling conservative and GOP fortunes.

Take Monica Crowley, the Fox News contributor and talk radio host. While the former assistant to the disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon may not be the most hateful in the nation's vast toxic lineup of talk jocks, she is often among the more delusional and strange. She has advanced the bigoted and baseless rumor that "Barack Obama is not black African, he is Arab African"; and she has stated that Iran supports Al-Qaeda and may already have nuclear weapons.

In one deranged diatribe following the Democratic primaries, Crowley described in graphic detail what she said Hillary Clinton--now Barack Obama's Secretary of State--was going to do to politicians who had backed Obama:

You know, if you're backing the "hope" guy, well, that's too bad for you, and it will be too bad for you because girlfriend will cut you. She will strap you into the electric chair. Then she will waterboard you. Then she will slowly and methodically pull off each one of your toenails. Then she will deprive you of sleep by blasting "The Best of the '80s Hair Bands" at you, and then she will cut off your manhood, and then she will throw the switch. This is what Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Bill Richardson, Oprah and Maria Shriver all have to look forward to. None of them should be starting their personal cars in the morning.

On her show this past Saturday (WABC-AM, 5/9/09), Crowley turned reality on it head with a claim that even many of her listeners must know is false: that young people are flocking to the right.  Crowley asked the question, "If you want to know why young people are gravitating toward conservatism and the Republican Party," and answered it by blaming Obama White House spending. She said the demographic shift "is why [Democratic strategist] James Carville is in panic mode."

Actually, Carville has been in the media a lot recently (e.g., here) flogging his new book, Forty More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, and gloating about the crappy state of the GOP and the conservative movement.

Among the reasons for Carville's glee is that Democrats, not Republicans, are doing especially well with young people. According to a May 11 report from the Gallup Poll:

Although Democrats currently enjoy a party identification advantage over Republicans among Americans at every age between 18 to 85, the Democrats' greatest advantages come among those in their 20s and baby boomers in their late 40s and 50s.

With the GOP and the conservative movement in such low water, it's puzzling why Crowley thinks her Pollyanna pronouncements to the contrary help that situation. But then again, it's also hard to see why talk radio hosts think anti-gay slurs and jokes about killing Democrats are good for them either.

Yesterday the Social Security and Medicare trustees' reports were released. This annual ritual often gives reporters a chance to exaggerate the long-term problems of the Social Security system.  This year, the news was more or less what folks were expecting: By the trustees' forecasting, Social Security's trust fund will be depleted in 2037, while Medicare's hospital fund will run out of money in 2017.

Somehow, the Washington Post decided that Social Security was the real concern--its page-one story is headlined "Alarm Sounded on Social Security."

The lead rings the same bells:

The financial health of the Social Security system has eroded more sharply in the past year than at any time since the mid-1990s, according to a government forecast that ratchets up pressure on the Obama administration and Congress to stabilize the retirement system that keeps many older Americans out of poverty.

Much less attention is given to Medicare, which the Post does tell us deep in the piece "remains the more urgent problem." The paper sure has a funny way of showing its urgent concern, though.

As FAIR noted, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan tried to provide some perspective about Social Security and Medicare two years ago. When NBC's Tim Russert asked him about the health of Social Security and Medicare, Greenspan said that Social Security's problems were minor. Economist and former Social Security trustee Robert Reich writes, "Don't be confused by these alarms from the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one."

The Washington Post, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, are sending a very different message.  As Dean Baker has documented for some time, the paper just seems to have something against the program.

Political Animal's Steve Benen (5/12/09) notes a recent Rush Limbaugh broadcast (5/11/09) that makes the racist subtext of the right's critique of Barack Obama virtually explicit:

The [economic] deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps. But in the Oval Office of the White House none of this is a problem. This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation's wealth and return to it to the nation's, quote, "rightful owners." Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on.

So Limbaugh thinks Obama is intentionally creating unemployment in order to boost food stamps, unemployment and welfare as a form of "forced reparations"; he's wrecking the economy, in other words, in order to benefit black people.  If Limbaugh is the voice of opposition to Obama, no wonder that opposition is so concentrated in the states of the old Confederacy.

FAIR has a new Action Alert on 60 Minutes' May 10 broadcast extolling the virtues of unmanned drones, with no perspectives at all from critics of the weapons--who might have pointed out that they kill 50 innocent civilians for every Al-Qaeda leader they assassinate.
Please copy your letters to 60 Minutes to the comments thread here.

When Oprah Winfrey addressed Duke's 2009 graduating class at a May 10 commencement, she talked about the pleasures of being wealthy: "It's great to have nice homes!... It's great to have a private jet. Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn’t great is lying to you." "But," said Oprah, "you haven't completed the circle of success until you help someone else move to a higher ground and get to a better place."

Wall Street Journal Wealth Report blogger Robert Frank wasn't so interested in helping others part, but he really liked the part about how great it is to own your own private jet:

The golden nugget here is the jet part. In these times of hair-shirt capitalism and envy politics, the wealthy have been going to great lengths to pretend they don’t enjoy luxury or want nice stuff. If Oprah were like most of the faux-populist rich today, she would have said something like: "I don’t need private jets, in fact I’m happier flying commercial and living in a small house. I like the simple life." Of course, she would be lying.

But she didn't. She told the truth, which is that flying in a private jet is one of the great material perks that money can buy. (Talk to anyone who used to be rich and they will say one thing they really miss is the jet. Apparently Oprah's ride is a $42 million custom-build Global Express XRS built by Bombardier Aerospace.)

So Oprah says it's great to be wealthy and it's important to help people, and Frank applauds her for courageously acknowledging how great it is to be wealthy. But, then, what was I expecting? Frank writes the Wealth Report, "a daily blog focused on the lives and culture of the wealthy."

Free Press' new report suggesting "how the government should respond to the current crisis in journalism"--"Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy" (5/12/09)--addresses both "short- and long-term strategies." Among their transformative ideas:

• New Ownership Structures. Encouraging the establishment of nonprofit and low-profit news organizations through tax-exempt and low-profit limited liability company (L3C) models.
• New Incentives. Creating tax incentives and revising bankruptcy laws to encourage local, diverse, nonprofit, low-profit and employee ownership.
• Journalism Jobs Program. Funding training and retraining for novice and veteran journalists in multimedia and investigative reporting.
• R&D Fund for Journalism Innovation. Investing in innovative projects and experimenting to identify and nurture new models.

Free Press' Victor Pickard warns that "the collapse of advertising-supported journalism may leave whole sections of the population without a fully functional press, and that is simply unacceptable for a democracy." He urges consideration of these imaginative initiatives "to help keep reporters on the beat, while also investing in long-term models for public service journalism."

Eugene Hernandez of indieWIRE.com reports (5/11/09) that NPR censored its own review of the Outrage documentary for "nam[ing] politicians believed to be closeted homosexuals in the film, specifically those whose public voting record counters the civil rights of gay and lesbian Americans." NPR cited its privacy policy as reason, but to Hernandez "it seems to support charges by [director Kirby] Dick, made in the film, that the mainstream media has a history of handling stories of politicians same-sex orientations with kid gloves":

"It's not about outing," [Outrage distributor Eamonn] Bowles noted today, reiterating a point being made continuously by filmmaker Kirby Dick (see related indieWIRE interview), "It's about hypocrisy, people are saying one thing and doing another."

"The entire point of Outrage is that there is an 'overriding public need to know' about the kinds of men profiled in Outrage,'" film critic Nathan Lee told indieWIRE on Sunday. "Let's say [Florida Gov.] Charlie Crist had a record of voting for vigorous anti-immigration policies, and then it was rumored that he employed illegal immigrants. The press would have absolutely no qualms investigating him to the hilt in the public interest of exposing hypocrisy. Why should it be any different in the case of possibly gay public figures who vote against the civil rights of gay people, or, in the case of HIV/AIDS funding, their very life and death?"

Bowles points out to indieWIRE "that the gay press has been covering these stories for years, but the mainstream media has refused. He added that, while the movie has generated a lot of attention from the press, some mainstream outlets, including two national networks, have declined to cover the allegations in the film."

Noticing how PBS's Gwen Ifill has a penchant for "filling her Washington Week program with journalists who almost invariably agree with each other instead of actually debating the issues of the week," critic Charles Kaiser decided to contact her (CJR.org, 5/8/09) about a recent "discussion of torture in which the only issue the panelists identified was how the Obama administration should deal with the political fallout from the demands for a full-scale investigation and/or prosecution of the officials responsible for American torture."

Kaiser's question of whether it would "ruin the discussion to have one person who believes that a full investigation of American torture and prosecutions of those responsible for it are the only way to rescue the honor of America" received a curt reply from Ifill: "Opinion? You were watching the wrong program if that's what you were looking for."

Aside from its snide tone, Kaiser spells out for Ifill exactly what's wrong with this view:

Gwen,

Everyone at that table obviously believed that investigating and/or prosecuting torture was a political problem for the Obama administration, and nothing more.

That is an opinion, Gwen. The fact that all of you shared it doesn't make it anything else. It does mean you were incapable of acknowledging any other point of view.

This is why we call it "the Washington bubble."

To top it off, after Ifill's subsequent offer to "feel free to call me during working hours. You know how," Kaiser reports that "after three more e-mail requests for an interview, and four voicemails left for Ifill and her two producers over two weeks, the anchorwoman never managed to return any of our phone calls."

The New York Times' Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner (5/9/09) wrote about the Israeli government's development plan in Jerusalem--a "$100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital."

According to the Times report, this will involve tearing down some Palestinian homes around the city, while at the same time cleaning up other areas and putting up "new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history."

Bronner and Kershner explain the different reactions to these moves:

The parts of the city that are being developed were captured in the 1967 Middle East war, but their annexation by Israel was never recognized abroad.

At the same time, there is a battle for historical legitimacy. As part of the effort, archaeologists are finding indisputable evidence of ancient Jewish life here. Yet Palestinian officials and institutions tend to dismiss the finds as part of an effort to build a Zionist history here.

In other words, while the Israeli narrative that guides the government plan focuses largely-- although not exclusively--on Jewish history and links to the land, the Palestinian narrative heightens tensions, pushing the Israelis into a greater confrontational stance.

Well, those Palestinians are always angry about something.

Apparently tearing down buildings is focusing on "history," while downplaying archeology is "heightening tensions." Good to know.

(h/t Angry Arab)

We've written about this before, but today (5/11/09) the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turned in another example of journalists who seem to believe Google is what's killing their industry. Responding to talks between his employer and Google about some sort of collaboration, Kurtz writes:

Hanging over the talks is the reality that the search giant, while funneling vital traffic to news sites, vacuums up their content without paying a dime.

I'm not sure what it is that Google is accused of "vacuuming." Kurtz is likely referring to Google News, which lets users search many media outlets at once. The main Google News page features the headlines of what the search engine determines to be popular stories, sometimes with the first sentence or so of the accompanying article. Anyone who wants to read the full article can follow a link to the news site itself.

By way of analogy, for years most daily newspapers--including the Washington Post--have include a page of TV listings, giving the titles and air times of programs one might want to watch. Sometimes they go further and offer a plot summary; other times the paper will tell me that a given movie is terrible. Does all of this amount to stealing from the TV stations, since the newspaper profits from the ads it sells next to these listings? I wouldn't think so, but I'm not sure how what Google does is all that different.