Even though "James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis first told the world about waterboarding in May 2004," Dan Froomkin (WashingtonPost.com, 5/4/09) is having to argue that "that doesn't mean that the rest of us are as guilty as the people who committed the crimes--or that those who ordered those crimes should avoid accountability." While Newsweek's Jacob Weisberg and the Post's own Michael Kinsley are among those "arguing that the nation's collective guilt for torture is so great that prosecution is a cop-out," Froomkin has some "big problems with this argument":

While it's true that the public's outrage over torture has been a long time coming, one reason for that is the media's sporadic and listless coverage of the issue. Yes, there were some extraordinary examples of investigative reporting we can point to, but other news outlets generally didn't pick up these exclusives. Nobody set up a torture beat, to hammer away daily at what history I think will show was one of the major stories of the decade. Heck, as Weisberg himself points out, some of his colleagues were actually cheerleaders for torture. By failing to return to the story again and again--with palpable outrage--I think the media actually normalized torture.

Looking at journalists' "obligation to shout this story from the rooftops, day and night," Froomkin finds that, "instead we lulled the public into complacency."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen uses the Frank Ricci Supreme Court case to attack affirmative action:

The justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things have changed. For most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant. Everyone knows this. Every poll shows this. Maybe the Supreme Court will recognize this.

First of all, affirmative action was never solely about racism--though the media have long made race their primary consideration in how they talk about the issue.

But to Cohen's actual, umm, "point": Every poll shows that race is irrelevant? Too bad for Cohen that the Washington Post recently asked people about this in a poll (1/13-16/09):

"How big a problem is racism in our society today? Is it a big problem, somewhat of a problem, a small problem or not a problem at all?"

A Big Problem: 26%
Somewhat of a Problem: 48%
A Small Problem: 22%
Not a Problem:  4%

Richard Cohen appears to be in the 4 percent who don't think that racism is at all a problem anymore.  The other 96 percent of us wish him luck in his journey back to the real world.

Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz (5/3/09) seemed startled when the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza argued that "just because Bush or some previous president didn't garner as much coverage as Michelle and Barack Obama did doesn't tell you anything about press bias one way or another."

"Are you kidding?" Kurtz exclaimed.

He didn't express any similar surprise when CNN in-house conservative Amy Holmes came up with this "little-known fact":

The Washington Times reported this last week.... Actually, at this point in his presidency, Barack Obama is the fourth least popular of the past five presidents. You wouldn't know that from the press coverage, and you wouldn't know that George Bush...at this point in his presidency, in 2001, after having had the recount, not even winning the popular vote, in fact had higher Gallup approvals than Barack Obama does right now.

Well, no, you wouldn't know those things, because they aren't true. At the 100-day mark, Gallup found a job approval rating for Obama of 65 percent--three percentage points higher than the 62 percent that George W. Bush had at the same point in his first term. Gallup's polling found that Obama had a higher 100th-day approval rating than Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon as well. Of the last seven presidents, only Ronald Reagan, at 68 percent, had a higher job-approval rating--and Reagan, as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert pointed out (4/29/09), had just survived an assassination attempt in March 2001.

So how could the Washington Times have gotten it so wrong? A commenter on Media Matters' website traced this right-wing talking point back to a blog post by Judith Apter Klinghoffer on the History News Network (3/24/09). Klinghoffer declared that "Obama's Poll Numbers Trail Those of W."--a conclusion she reached by comparing Bush's job-approval rating to a number she calculated by combining the ratings of "excellent" and "good" received by Obama when people were asked what kind of job they thought he was doing.

Needless to say, you can't directly compare the answers to two different polling questions--particularly not when you can compare the results of the same question being asked. But the apples-to-oranges comparison produced results that were appealing to the right, so you soon saw James Pinkerton citing this bogus finding on Fox News Channel (4/25/09): "Judith Klinghoffer, writing for the History News Network, made the point that Obama ranked seventh out of the last nine presidents in Gallup poll opinion ratings. So seventh out of nine is not so good." Three days later, the Washington Times was making the same argument--and then it ends up on the not-so-well-named Reliable Sources.

Kurtz did take issue, sort of, with Holmes' claim, which ran counter to a wealth of polling data on Obama's approval ratings: "Although his numbers, we have to say, are pretty good." But when Holmes retorted: "They're pretty good, but comparatively. You're asking comparatively, how does the press treat these politicians different, and they do," Kurtz conceded: "OK. Fair enough."

Actually, that doesn't seem very fair at all.

Blogging at SinglePayerAction.org today (5/4/09), Corporate Crime Reporter's Russell Mokhiber describes the contents of a "much-hyped special section on healthcare" from Politico that features below the headline a Matt Wuerker cartoon of "the U.S. healthcare system" as a patient--"and you can't touch patient or you'll get zapped. As in: 'Bzzt! Don't even go near proposing single payer. You'll be called a socialist!'":

The issue is jam-packed with $10,000 full-page ads from the usual suspects: United Health Group, the drug industry (the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association), the high-tech medical equipment industry (Advanced Medical Technology Association) and corporate liberal groups like AARP.

All of which oppose what the majority of doctors and the majority of the American people want--a single-payer, Medicare-for-all, everybody-in, nobody-out, free-choice-of-doctor-and-hospital healthcare system.

The Politico healthcare issue features five news articles and six opinion pieces.

Not one of which mentions single-payer.

Mokhiber can only conclude that "the editors at Politico apparently heeded Wuerker's warning" with "not a mention of single-payer in the entire issue (other than Wuerker's warning)." Listen to the recent FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Ellen Shaffer on Healthcare" (3/6/09)

While asserting the extremely simple journalistic principle that "Past Records Should Matter In Assessing Views on the Economy," Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/2/09) is willing to admit that

everyone makes mistakes, but the odds are that anyone who couldn't see an $8 trillion housing bubble is not a really good person to rely upon for predictions on the economy. Joe Nocera gives a quick survey of some radically conflicting forecasts in his [New York Times] column today.

It's worth noting that all the optimists completely the missed the bubble and the impact that its collapse would have on the economy. At least some of the pessimists, most notably Nouriel Roubini, recognized that the conditions for a serious crisis were being created years ago.

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

Slate's Jack Shafer (5/1/09) has had his fill of NPR senior news analyst Cokie Roberts' "four minutes of on-air blather about politics, the economy and world events with whichever unlucky Morning Edition host has drawn the short straw" on Mondays. Shafer writes of how, "drained of controversy and conflict, the Cokie minutes provide perfect editorial balance if your idea of balance is zero":

I can think of no comparably sized media space that's as void of original insight and information as Roberts'. Her segments, though billed as "analysis" by NPR, do little but speed-graze the headlines and add a few grace notes. If you're vaguely conversant with current events, you're already cruising at Roberts' velocity. Roberts doesn't just voice the conventional wisdom; she is the conventional wisdom.

Initially wanting to "blame NPR for the segment's wretchedness or Morning Edition hosts Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep for pitching her nothing but giant, slo-mo softballs," Shafer then reconsiders: "No, softball isn't the right sports analogy, if only because Roberts never puts wood on the questions. The segment really unfolds like a brief set of air tennis, with Roberts and a host play-acting a vigorous volley"--which might in some sense be lucky for listeners, considering what comes out when Roberts actually tries to say something....

Two newspapers have flagged some concerns about Barack Obama's popularity, citing a new poll to raise questions about the public's enthusiasm for White House policies so far. Both accounts, though, seem to try to hard to stretch the rather awkward poll results to match their arguments.

In the Los Angeles Times (5/3/09), Peter Nicholas noted that while the public still supports Obama, "the activist government Obama has unleashed is increasingly worrisome to voters, polls show."

He explained:

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that 47 percent of those surveyed believe "government should do more," compared with 46 percent who believe "government is doing too many things." In July, the gap between those who wanted government to do more and those who believed it was doing too much was 11 percentage points.

So there is now a 47-46 split on whether government should "do more" or whether it is "doing too many things." Those are rather vague categories, but the point is that we can see an 11 point shift from February. It's worth noting that the new numbers are about the same as last October, which might suggest that it's hard to put too much weight on one poll question. And this question was only asked of half the sample this time around (which raised the margin of error from 3.1 to 4.4 percentage points).

Today, New York Times reporter John Harwood tried to make a similar point, noting that while Obama is still popular (judging by the "is the country on the right track" polling):

Paradoxically, however, that success may complicate Mr. Obama's task going forward by easing the sense of crisis. And that, in turn, could help Republicans argue that he seeks an excessively costly expansion of government's role.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in February showed that 51 percent of Americans wanted government to do more to solve problems, compared with 40 percent who said government was "doing too many things." Last week, the same survey showed an even split; a 52 percent majority said Mr. Obama had taken on "too many other issues" besides the economy.

Harwood is actually comparing the results of different poll questions. That latter question about doing too much outside economic policy is what he's trying to emphasize, but one look at the wording of that question might give you pause:

"Looking at President Obama's first 100 days, do you feel that he and his administration have had a clear and sharp focus on the economy, or do you feel that President Obama and his administration have been trying to take on too many other issues at the same time?"

The loaded language--has the White House been "clear and sharp"-- seems designed to get a negative response. And it echoes one of the favorite complaints of the Beltway press corps of late--that Obama is trying to do too many things at once. Now they've got a poll to match their anxiety.

Reporting on how "Jay Severin, the fiery right-wing talkshow host on Boston's WTKK-FM radio station, was suspended yesterday," (5/1/09), the Boston Globe's David Abel lists just a few of the "fiery" jock's "incendiary comments":

In one of his broadcasts this week, Severin said: "So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico--women with mustaches and VD--now we have swine flu."

Later, he described Mexicans as "the world's lowest of primitives."

"When we are the magnet for primitives around the world--and it's not the primitives' fault by the way, I'm not blaming them for being primitives--I'm merely observing they're primitive," he said.

He added that Mexicans are destroying schools and hospitals in the United States. He also criticized their hygiene.

"It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America," he said.

He added: "We should be, if anything, surprised that Mexico has not visited upon us poxes of more various and serious types already, considering the number of criminaliens already here."

With such a menagerie of hateful statements in just one show, it's perhaps unsurprising that WTKK's spokesperson had trouble picking the one Severin is actually being disciplined for, having "declined to say which of his comments... sparked the suspension." On the other hand, it's not really possible that WTKK has been blind to Severin's true nature this whole time--as Abel tells us:

On a 2004 broadcast, he compared U.S. Muslims to a fifth column, and when a caller suggested that the United States should befriend Muslims, Severin responded: "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."... Severin has also been criticized over the years for falsely saying that he had won a Pulitzer Prize and that he had earned a master's degree from Boston University.

It's worth remembering that in 2005, a year after these genocidal comments, MSNBC gave Severin a job co-hosting a show. Luckily, the show's main host was Tucker Carlson, so few people watched it.

Interviewing Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild on Democracy Now! (5/1/09), Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman get the now 100-year-old magazine's high-minded take on the threatened existence of other periodicals:

Rothschild: Well, the magazine industry is in crisis. The newspaper industry is in crisis. A lot of the news weeklies don’t know how to function right now; the idea that you have a Newsweek magazine right now, that's antiquated. That's a dinosaur. People get the news within minutes or hours; they don’t need to go find it a week later as to what happens. So the intellectual reason for being for these magazines is kind of kaput. And their economic model is kaput, too.

So I think magazines, to the extent that they're going to be able to survive and the Progressive is going to be able to survive, need to become more like books or need to take a higher altitude look at the news and do investigative reporting and give people analysis that they can't find anywhere else. But if you just say what did Barack Obama say at his press conference yesterday, newspapers and magazines are going to go.

The "cardinal principles" to which Rothschild ascribes his publication's longevity: "We're still fighting corporate power. We're still fighting for civil liberties and human rights and against these foreign interventions that just help the corporations."

In his latest Salon blog entry (5/1/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald displays his find of "a perfect illustration of how severely our political spectrum has shifted in the last two decades and how depraved and extremist our political and media classes have become"--one quote of the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer rebutting those who "believe you never torture. Ever":

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. . . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. . . .

as compared to the text from Article II/IV of the "Convention Against Torture, signed and championed" by none other than Ronald Reagan:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . .  Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law.

That Ronald Reagan's ideas "are ones that are now--in the view of our dominant media narrative--the hallmarks of The Hard Left" is clearly demonstrated by the fact that

Reagan's explicit view that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" permits signatory nations (such as Spain) to prosecute torturers from other countries (such as the U.S.) is now considered so fringe that it's almost impossible to find someone in mainstream American debates willing to advocate it.

Critiquing the April 24 edition of NPR's "increasingly vacuous and self-indulgent" Planet Money show, blogger Brian (NPR Check, 4/24/09) notices that the "five long minutes" spent discussing "how long it would take to count to 165 million (the AIG executive bonuses), 45 billion (Bank of America's bailout so far), and 1.2 trillion (total estimated federal bailouts of banks so far)," came right after "a long week of severely deficient coverage of actual financial news" like "40 seconds Morning Edition spent pararaphrasing a New York Times article on the looming Chrysler bankruptcy":

The sad thing is that it actually might have been helpful to provide some real context for the scale of the federal bailouts. However, rather than counting to 1.2 trillion, it would be much more useful to place the bailout figures into contexts that matter, such as comparing the AIG bonuses to the median U.S. household income ($50.2 K in 2007); comparing the $45 B to BOA's ownership equity ($146 B); or comparing the $1.2 T in bailout funds to the U.S. GDP ($14.3 T) or the annual U.S. federal spending (approximately $3 T).

Admitting that these examples are "still not exciting, to be sure," Mytwords considers them "perhaps a little more meaningful than counting for 39,000 years."

The Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama's desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn't going to work:

The administration's strategy--to open up a constructive dialogue with Venezuela and avoid being cast as Mr. Chavez's Yanqui foil--is reasonable; it is also the same strategy as was tried, unsuccessfully, by the previous two administrations.

It's hard to imagine that anyone believes that the Bush administration's Venezuela policy amounted to "constructive dialogue." The Bush administration--at the very least--seemed to approve of the April 2002 coup that briefly removed Chavez from power. And Bush policy after that disaster was hardly more "constructive."

Even more curious is the Post's suggestion that President Bill Clinton had similar trouble with Chavez. That sounds implausible; Chavez was elected in 1998 and took office the following year--leaving very little time for Clinton's generous attempts at dialogue to be rebuffed by Chavez. Chavez, for his part, told Post co-owner Lally Weymouth that he "entertained the best of relations with the Clinton administration." (See Extra!, 11-12/06.)

But when it's Hugo Chavez they're talking about, apparently, for the Post editorial page the facts don't matter.

Most opinion polls show that the American public gives President Barack Obama high marks so far. Those are not the polls Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly reads. As he announced at the top of his show on Thursday:

A new Rasmussen poll on President Obama is somewhat startling and worth analyzing because Rasmussen is very accurate.

According to the data, 34 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president's job performance, while 32 percent strongly disapprove. So that's why the debate over Barack Obama is so raucous. He may be a popular guy, but the country remains divided on the job deal.

If by "accurate" O'Reilly means "completely different from every other poll," he might have a point. In polls taken since his inauguration, Obama's lowest approval rating was 55 percent, and his highest disapproval rating was 35 percent; the latest Fox poll was more typical, with 62 percent approval/29 percent disapproval. So the country is in fact not "divided on the job deal," as O'Reilly claims.

In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how "mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming," Robert Parry writes that

one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept of objective journalism by routinely ignoring those principles, which demand that a reporter set aside personal prejudices (as best one can) and approach each story with a common standard of fairness.

The truth is that powerful mainstream news organizations have their own sacred cows and tend to hire journalists who intuitively take into account whose ox might get gored while doing a story. In other words, mainstream (or centrist) journalism has its own biases though they may be less noticeable because they often reflect the prevailing view of the national Establishment.

Parry looks to "double standards" in corporate reportage on Nicaraguan Contras in the '80s and the 2005 "assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri" to make clear that "how that translates into daily coverage is that an American news outlet often will demand a much lower threshold of evidence about serious accusations against a perceived U.S. enemy than an ally." Anyway, as a longtime FAIR associate once noted on the age-old debate over the merits of journalistic objectivity: "Passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy."

During coverage of the Obama administration's 100-day mark, MSNBC had war reporter Richard Engel and anchor Tamron Hall interview MSNBC analyst Barry McCaffrey, who CJR.org's Clint Hendler (4/29/09) calls "the retired army general whose many conflicts of interest have been analyzed by David Barstow's now-Pulitzer Prize winning reporting for the New York Times." When asked by Engel about attempts to "draw away the Taliban's source of funding by cutting down the opium crop or burning it or whatever," McCaffrey was emphatic: "I think we’ve got to take it on. But, you know, the lead agent can't be U.S. combat troops. It's got to be Afghans chopping down opium poppy." Hendler thinks he knows the source of McCaffrey's enthusiasm, even if the MSNBCers don't (or at least aren't saying):

Neither Hall, Engel nor McCaffrey made mention of DynCorp, a major military contractor that's doing exactly that--training Afghans to eradicate poppies.

Nor did they mention that McCaffrey sits on DynCorp's board, which according to federal contracting records, garnered contracts in 2008 and 2009 worth over $323 million dollars with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, including its work in Afghanistan.

Read more on media treatment of Barry McCaffrey and his Pentagon brethren in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Network News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits" (6/08) by Isabel Macdonald.