Washington Monthly's Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (7/16/09) has observed that on July 15, "the Associated Press reported that the House Democratic healthcare plan cost '$1.5 trillion,'" and "by the afternoon, the AP reporting didn't attribute the price tag to anyone; it just stated the figure as fact."

Even though "the day before the AP blasted the $1.5 trillion figure to the world, the Congressional Budget Office pointed to a roughly $1 trillion cost over 10 years," Benen notes how "the AP not only went with the much higher figure, it made no reference to the CBO score."

Considering this, he writes that he had

hoped the AP would at least notice the criticism, and clarify the issue in the future. No such luck--this AP report ran about a half-hour ago: "Votes were planned Thursday in the Education and Labor and Ways and Means committees on a $1.5 trillion plan that majority House Democrats presented this week."

No source, no reference to the CBO figure released Tuesday, and no mention of the fact that House Democrats reject the "$1.5 trillion" figure.

Naturally, others are picking up on the AP's reporting, and relaying the disputed figure. Time's Mark Halperin noted this morning that House committees are expected to vote today "on the Democrats' $1.5 trillion plan."

I don't mean to sound picky, but reporting like this not only misinforms news consumers, it also has the potential to adversely affect the larger policy debate. If the AP is intent on using the $1.5 trillion figure, it could at least add some language to reflect the concerns, such as "a number Democratic leaders dispute," or, "though the CBO puts the figure closer to $1 trillion." Something.

Acknowledging that "the exact price of the proposal is unclear at this point" and "it's possible the final figure may exceed, or not, the current figures," Benen insists that, "in light of the published CBO score, the AP's reporting is sloppy and incomplete, and runs the risk of undermining reform efforts."

In other "undermining reform efforts" news, watch Barack Obama's 22-year personal physician tell how ABC uninvited him from their healthcare forum two days before the prime-time event, where he was planning to ask about single-payer healthcare.

Editor & Publisher is running a wire item (Associated Press, 7/16/09) on the Richmond Times-Dispatch's recent front-page editorial and website video "expressing regret for supporting the state's fight to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s."

The paper's confession of its "central role in the 'dreadful doctrine' of Massive Resistance--a systematic campaign by Virginia's white political leaders to block school desegregation"--functions as testament to both their current integrity and one of the darkest episodes of U.S. journalism. Here's an except:

Fifty years ago Virginia had a rendezvous with destiny and came up wanting. It scorned human rights and the promise of the Declaration of Independence....

Throughout the episode, [parent company] Richmond Newspapers played a central role--but not a centering one. The hour was ignoble. Editorials in the [pre-merger] News Leader relentlessly championed Massive Resistance and the dubious constitutional arguments justifying its unworthy cause. Although not so intimately engaged, the Times-Dispatch was complicit. The record fills us with regret....

Words have consequences. Artful paragraphs promoted ugly things. Stylish sentences salted wounds. Euphemism was profligate. As members of the Fourth Estate, these pages did not keep a proper distance, either....

Yesteryear's words cannot be revoked. They endure on newsprint yellow and brittle, on microfilm, and in the computer files into which they have been translated. They belong to history, and history lives. It is well and good that the words be remembered, as a warning perhaps best.

Free Press campaign coordinator Misty Perez has sent out (7/15/09) a call to action in light of the astonishing figure that "in the first three months of 2009, the phone and cable industries spent at least $20 million to hire more than 400 lobbyists" in an effort to "push for policies that fatten phone and cable profits while leaving us with an Internet that is too expensive and too slow." Why their sense of urgency?:

Right now, the FCC is crafting a national broadband plan that could fix our national broadband problem. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps called this plan "the most formative--indeed, transformative--proceeding ever in the Commission's history."

We desperately need it. Without such a plan, America has dropped to 22nd place in the world in broadband penetration, with approximately 40 percent of the country still not connected to high-speed Internet services.

If the lobbyists have their way, America will continue to fall further and further behind the rest of the world.

But if we get our way, we can reinvigorate the economy, open up public participation in government, empower a new generation of journalists, and give everyone the opportunity to prosper in the 21st century.

Perez links to a "pretty stunning" online "graphic to see how many phone and cable lobbyists there really are in Washington--and how much is being spent"--and asks that we "tell the FCC to support media that's participatory, open and democratic--and not to hand the keys to the Internet to the old guard."

Arianna Huffington's latest column (Huffington Post, 7/13/09) presents a compelling portrayal of the power of new democratic media--versus the self-preserving corporate model of news gathering--in the Chinese government response to major riots last week: "It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest." But here's the rub: "At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area":

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media--and offered traditional reporters a front-row seat.

China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bussed-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.

The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.

As Huffington reminds us, "the truth is, you don't have to 'be there' to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."

Driving home the point that "the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing," Huffington then excerpts one of the most damaging journalistic examples of this in our time:

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the New York Times in April 2003.

Writing that "the swine flu outbreak that wrecked Mexico's economy this spring, and that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic last month, may become a case study in reckless journalism," Miami Herald Latin America correspondent Andres Oppenheimer (7/8/09) admits that he "had taken it for granted that the disease had started in Mexico" since "that's what most press reports said."

But he "recently found myself scratching my head" over a "Pan American Health Organization press release that 'the new virus, which emerged in Mexico and the United States in April,' has spread to 74 countries." Follow-up questions put to one of the organization's spokespeople brought the reply that "it's not clear that this pandemic started in Mexico.... We may never know in which country it started."

But none of this stopped the usual crowd of hyperventilating anti-immigration--or rather, anti-Hispanic immigration--radio and cable television hotheads from pointing at Mexico as the unequivocal origin of the disease.

According to the Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group, conservative-nationalist radio talk show host Michael Savage said on April 24, "Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico."

In another example of irresponsible journalism cited by the watchdog group, Fox's contributor Michelle Malkin wrote in her blog on April 25, "Hey, maybe we'll finally get serious about borders now." She added, "I've blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration."

On April 27, CNN's Lou Dobbs started his nightly show saying, "We begin with dire new warnings about the worsening outbreak of swine flu. This outbreak is spreading from Mexico to the United States and around the world."

Indeed, Oppenheimer gives us the charming fact that "some radio and cable-television presenters called it the 'Mexican flu.'"

The Herald reporter doesn't claim to "have an answer for how this story should have been reported early on," but he posits that, "just as scientists are looking into the history of the H1N1 outbreak to learn how to better handle future pandemics, we in the media should look at how to handle these kinds of stories more responsibly in the future"--and, crucially, "expose reckless charlatans for what they are."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Bart Laws on Swine Flu" (5/8/09).

The latest segment to be made available online (7/7/09) from Robert Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan documentary features the president of the Global Fund for Women Kavita Ramdas challenging U.S. media tropes about improved women's conditions since the U.S. invasion: "The perception of the women of Afghanistan having been severely oppressed only under the regime of the Taliban, and then having been freed by the united States' military intervention in 2001, is a false perception."

The film continues:

Ann Jones, author Kabul in Winter: We got reports back that indeed that had been accomplished and the women had thrown off their burqas and gone back to school and gone back to work and things were wonderful for women. This is complete mythology. It didn't happen.

Member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan [having to speak with her image blurred for her own protection]: Now the cases of violence against women are more than the Taliban time. There is 23 rape cases in two months in North Afghanistan. There is a lot of violence against women in West Afghanistan.

As Ramdas describes "rape, pillage, plunder, the abduction of young girls, the threatening of schoolteachers," a November 2008 BBC report narrator vocalizes that which cannot be spoken in U.S. media: "Girls attacked with acid for daring to go to school. Despite initial gains, women's rights, and even women themselves, are increasingly under attack."

Llisten to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Robert Greenwald on Rethink Afghanistan" (5/1/09).

Former PR agent Wendell Potter's stories of how he helped the health insurance's industry's campaign "to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko" calls to mind just how successful that campaign was. Corporate media coverage of the debate raised by the film's expose of the for-profit insurance system went out of its way to demonize Moore. USA Today ran an editorial tied to the film against a single-payer healthcare plan, which was paired with an "Opposing View" from an insurance executive that denounced single-payer even more harshly. CBS News' Jeff Greenfield distinguished himself with his (inaccurate) claim that the U.S. doesn't have public funding for healthcare because "Americans are just different." And reviewing CNN's report on Sicko can only make one relieved that Sanjay Gupta turned down the job of surgeon general.

If you'd like to see an end to this kind of insurance industry PR masquerading as journalism, you can sign FAIR's petition calling for the inclusion of the single-payer option in coverage of the healthcare reform debate.

New York Times reporter John F. Burns turned in a piece on Sunday about the debate in Britain over the Afghanistan war ("Criticism of Afghan War Is on the Rise in Britain," 7/12/09), in light of the increase in British casualties in recent weeks. Burns writes:

So far, however, the reaction in Britain has not run to the kind of popular groundswell for withdrawal that President George W. Bush faced when the war in Iraq worsened after his re-election in 2004.

To careful readers of the Times, this is more than a little jarring. While there is certainly some truth to the idea that there was a "popular groundswell" in the United States in favor of withdrawal, the paper spent quite a bit of time after 2004 trying to convince readers that withdrawing troops from Iraq was a terrible idea, and not a very popular one (among Americans or Iraqis). It's nice that in 2009, in a story about a different country and a different war, this reality is finally allowed to slip into the paper's reporting.

What Burns is really seeing in Britain is something else entirely--an "outcry from those who say the government must answer for the growing number of soldiers killed because of what they describe as an underfinanced defense budget, $55 billion this year." It's hard to say how prevalent these feelings are, but the assumption is that support for withdrawal is minimal. Recent polls suggest otherwise, however; while the recent British deaths have not pushed the public firmly in either direction, those who want to get out of that country are a sizable share of the population.

As the Guardian reported yesterday on its new survey, "Today's poll findings show that 42 percent are in favour of the immediate withdrawal of British troops, and a further 14 percent want them home by the end of the year." This was the same finding that the pollsters had recorded in 2006. In what year this pro-withdrawal majority will be noticed by the Paper of Record is anyone's guess.

Number of stories in the Nexis news database dated today that mentioned Sen. Jeff Sessions' (R.-Ala.) questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, in which Sessions accused Sotomayor of harboring ethnic prejudices: 69

Number of such stories that recalled that Sessions was rejected as a judicial nominee in 1986 in part because of his approving remarks about the Ku Klux Klan: 2

Stating quite succinctly how "there is an ongoing issue about whether global warming deniers should be treated seriously by the media, given that they have about as much scientific support for their position as the flat-Earth crew," economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/11/09) notes how the July 11 "New York Times goes them one better in finding a global warming ignorer":

Apparently, Ben Stein has never heard about global warming. How else can someone interpret this paragraph:

I don't believe we need to do something radical about energy, but even assuming that we do, why do it right now? Do we need to take one of the few sectors that is working like clockwork through the recession--oil refining--and wring its neck by making it pay for pollution "cap and trade" credits? Why attack a healthy industry when so many other sectors are ill? What is all of this anger at Big Oil, which has not done anything blameworthy, all about? Why endlessly beat up the companies that keep the country going?

He then goes on to complain about the Obama administration's efforts to change the laws on foreclosures. This would be a good idea, except the Obama administration is not working to change the laws on foreclosure.

Baker explains that "Stein is opposed to this plan because he is worried that it will further discourage mortgage lending," even though "there is no problem of mortgage lending at present. Mortgage rates are near historic lows and the Mortgage Bankers Association applications index indicates that few people are having trouble getting mortgages." Baker is impressed with how, "once again, Ben Stein distinguishes himself by how many things he can get really seriously wrong in a relatively short column."

Viewing "two excellent pieces by the American News Project about the Fed's astonishing actions during the current meltdown," A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz (7/12/09) confirms that "ANP does great work, and I commend them for taking on this subject—especially since it's covered nowhere else, including on progressive blurms." But he's nonetheless reminded of a June 29 TruthDig piece in which war reporter Chris Hedges tells why "The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free":

The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone...make little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis, we must also communicate in new forms... This style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion and passion...will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda....

We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased.

Despite their great efforts, Schwarz feels ANP still are "suffering from exactly the problem Hedges describes. To start with, what is the Fed? How does it work? Perhaps 900 people total in the U.S. could tell you. So for everyone else it's automatically like gossip about strangers--i.e., extremely boring."

Longtime health insurance company bigwig and former holder of "the ultimate PR job," Wendell Potter recently told PBS' Bill Moyers (Bill Moyers Journal, 7/10/09) how he had been "involved in the campaign by the industry to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko," and now sees that "the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used... back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan" for national healthcare reform.

Potter told Moyers that he "knew that 47 million people were uninsured, but I didn't put faces with that number" until he "picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a healthcare expedition was being held a few miles up the road." Seeing "people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care," sparked his defection from the PR machine, and ultimately moved him to appear on Moyers' show to describe the insurance companies' fear of "high-profile cases":

When you have a case like that--a family or a patient goes to the news media and complains about having some coverage denied that a doctor had recommended. In this case, Nataline Sarkisyan's doctors at UCLA had recommended that she have a liver transplant. But when the coverage request was reviewed at Cigna, the decision was made to deny it.

It was around that time, also, that the family had gone to the media, had sought out help from the California Nurses Association and some others to really bring pressure to bear on Cigna. And they were very successful in getting a lot of media attention, and nothing like I had ever seen before....

It got everyone's attention. Everyone was focused on that in the corporate offices.

Unfortunately, the U.S. press' general attention toward the larger story of insurance company evildoing has been neglectful to say the least, as exemplified by the fact that this was Potter's "first extended television interview since leaving the health insurance industry...last year." Encourage journalists to correct at least part of this by signing FAIR's petition to Tell Media: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate.

A Seattle Times op-ed column (7/4/09) by Free Press' Victor Pickard and Joseph Torres discussing the fact that "the public's changing media habits have eroded the newspaper industry's monopoly on the local ad market" describes the corporate response thus: "The big media companies are pressuring Congress to prop up their failed business models by allowing more media consolidation and relaxing antitrust laws so they can collude on new 'pay wall' and pricing schemes."

Reaffirming that "despite the many shortcomings of newspapers, our democracy requires a free and vibrant press," Pickard and Torres still maintain that

these shortsighted measures aren't the answer. We must recognize that the current crisis isn't just about the future of newspapers; it's about the survival of democracy-sustaining journalism. We now have a unique and fleeting opportunity to overhaul our media system and advocate for policies that would serve the informational needs of diverse communities....

For too long, newspapers and other mainstream-media outlets have abandoned their commitment to public service in the pursuit of short-term gains. Even today, many newspapers remain profitable but their corporate owners are burdened by huge debt loads incurred during earlier consolidation sprees.

We need new models whose sole criterion for success is not profit maximization. News isn't just another commodity. Journalism is an essential public service and critical infrastructure. Like many public goods, journalism has never been fully supported by the market; it always has been subsidized. But the advertising-subsidy system no longer works.

Detailing "much that needs to happen to rescue failing news operations while supporting the creation of new ones," the Free Pressers name a radically anti-corporate top priority: "First, we must rescue good assets from bad owners. Journalism is too precious to leave its future in the hands of absentee corporate owners." The Free Press group "recently released a report endorsing five policy proposals that would help sustain newsrooms." Hear more on this important topic on FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

Brad Jacobson is resurrecting the "NYT Front|Back" feature of his Media Bloodhound blog (7/10/09)--spotlighting the New York Times' "penchant for placing a supremely unnewsworthy story on its cover while burying a vital one in its back pages"--only for "the most egregious and absurd examples."

The current example being their July 7 front-page headliner, "In Sex Film Industry, Some Long for a Real Plot":

No, this isn't satire. It's a cover story on our nation's paper of record.... The article opens:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. "I couldn’t wait to get my next script," she said.

There's no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

Jacobson commiserates with the Times editors' concerns: "Two wars. Jobless rate at nearly 10 percent. Healthcare in crisis. And if that weren't enough to bear, now there are dwindling plot lines in our pornography!"

Meanwhile, the same day's placement of an "In Senate, Debate on Detainee Legal Rights" piece way back on page A18 has Jacobson convinced that "apparently the Times thinks Americans are, as the kids say, so over the issue of detainee rights that the dearth of pornography plots trumped this story by 18 pages":

Intro:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts....

"So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?" Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

Looking past "this article's banishment to the back pages," Jacobson notes how "the story fails to include a substantive factual rejoinder to Senator McCain's misleading statement"--the facts being that "scores of detainees have already been released by the U.S.," but only "after being held for years with no charge and incurring what the Times calls 'brutal' interrogation techniques but the rest of the world calls 'torture.'"

News Corpse blogger Mark Howard (7/8/09) has linked to a London Guardian "story that simply must be read":

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Cautioning that "the rest of the story just gets more lurid," Howard then updates with what he deems a "shocking look into the way that Murdoch and his accomplices operate" on this side of the Atlantic--namely, through absolutely shameless toadyism:

Rupert Murdoch appeared on his own Fox Business Network today where Stuart Varney, who is notorious for aggressively challenging (i.e., interrupting) liberals, attempted to ask him a question:

Varney: The story that is really buzzing all around the country, and certainly right here in New York, is that the News of the World, a News Corporation newspaper in Britain…
Murdoch: No, I'm not talking about that issue at all today.
Varney: OK. No worries, Mr. Chairman. That's fine with me.