Dick Morris was on the O'Reilly Factor the other night (10/28/09) advocating a troop escalation in Afghanistan--and his argument was characteristically peculiar:

Listen, terrorist gangs like Al-Qaeda are like HIV virus. They swim in your bloodstream. They don't make you sick. When they latch on to a cell, a nation state, and they use the DNA of that cell, they then become a threat. When they use the accoutrements of nationhood--secure boundaries, a diplomatic corps, an export and import trade, and air force and navy, a tax
system, a conscript population--then they can knockdown the World Trade Center. We have got to stop Al-Qaeda from taking over Afghanistan. And that means stopping the Taliban.

It's hard to say what exactly Afghanistan's diplomatic corps, let alone the landlocked nation's navy, had to do with the September 11 attacks, which were largely planned and executed by Saudi Arabian students based in Germany and the United States. But you have to give Morris credit for being loopy enough to make the case that occupying Afghanistan is necessary to prevent terrorism in the United States; generally corporate media pundits consider that assumption to be self-evident, and don't bother to explain it.

"Tax Refugees Staging Escape From New York," a New York Post headline declared yesterday (10/27/09). In an ordinary newspaper, you might take that as a signal that the story below was prepared to offer evidence that tax refugees were leaving New York--but the New York Post is no ordinary newspaper.

Instead, the piece by Andy Soltis (which is likely getting extra attention thanks to link from the Drudge Report headlined "'RICH' NEW YORKERS FLEEING AT ALARMING RATE") describes a report by a branch of the right-wing Manhattan Institute that says that people moving from New York, and particularly from New York City, make more money than people moving to New York. Soltis writes:

The average Manhattan taxpayer who left the state earned $93,264 a year. The average newcomer to Manhattan earned only $72,726.

As an explanation for this phenomenon, the Manhattan Institute "blames the state's high cost of living and high taxes," according to the story.  People who make less money are moving to New York City because it costs so much to live there? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's an alternative explanation: People often move to the city at the beginning of their careers, and leave when they get enough money to buy a house in the suburbs or retire.  Maybe that would explain the fact that the top two states New Yorkers moved to, according to the story, were Florida and New Jersey. At any rate, I've just given you more evidence to substantiate my theory than the Post offered to back up its "tax refugees" headline.

But then, it's hard not to think that the conscious aim of this story was to bamboozle its readers. Look at the lead paragraphs:

New Yorkers are fleeing the state and city in alarming numbers--and costing a fortune in lost tax dollars, a new study shows.

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City--meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

How many people reading that would suspect that the population of New York state  actually grew by about half a million people between 2000 and 2008--despite 1.5 million people "fleeing" the state?  Or that New York City gained about 200,000 residents from 2000 to 2006 (the latest Census estimate)? Or, based on the Manhattan stats cited earlier, that the median household income of Manhattan actually rose 20 percent from 2000 to 2007 (in 2007 dollars)?

For the New York Post reader, life is full of surprises.

I just received an email (from this guy's PR outfit) with the subject line:

President Obama's Attacks on Free Speech Opposed by Most Americans, Zogby/O'Leary Poll Finds

Tell me more!

Here's one of the "questions" asked in the poll, tailor-made for Fox News Channel:

Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions.  Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?

It's worth noting that this question only elicited 51 percent support.

Are there any other non-existent administration policies that polling outfits should be asking people about?

When Fox News Channel was developing Sean Hannity's TV show, it was known as Hannity & Liberal To Be Determined. That liberal turned out to be Alan Colmes, who would eventually leave the gig after doing his part by playing the Washington Generals to Hannity's Harlem Globetrotters. It hardly mattered who sat in the "left" chair--they were there to get roughed up by the home team.

Until recently, professor Jane Hall was a regular guest on the O'Reilly Factor, debating conservative Bernie Goldberg. She's left Fox, and as she explained to CNN's Howard Kurtz (10/25/09), she never considered herself a liberal anyway:

KURTZ: When you appeared regularly on O'Reilly, were you there as a token from the dreaded MSM?

HALL: Well, I was there as a defender of the MSM. And you wouldn't believe how many famous journalists I talked to, who said better you than me. Let me tell you my side of the story. They didn't want to come on. It is hard to do, because it was like, when did you quit beating your wife? That was usually the question. But I felt it was worth doing.

KURTZ: Do you consider yourself a liberal?

HALL: No.

KURTZ: You were paired with Bernie Goldberg, the conservative point of view, who wrote a book about the media's slobbering love affair with Barack Obama?

HALL: Right.

KURTZ: So was that a fair pairing, to have someone who has that point of view, and you? You consider yourself a journalist.

HALL: I consider myself a journalist. I'm now able to say opinions because I'm a professor. I consider myself a moderate. In that universe, I was probably considered a wacky professor by O'Reilly. He would sort of pat me on the head and say, now, Jane, I know you liberals feel this way. And I'd say, I'm not really a liberal. So, yes, there's not necessarily a left/right comparison on there.

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt writes today (10/26/09) on the fear that the public option is a backdoor effort to bring a single-payer system to the United States:

Private companies would have to raise their rates, so more people would choose the public plan, so private rates would rise further--and we could end up with only the public option and no competition at all. Single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door.

Post columnist Robert Samuelson on the same theme, also today:

Many would say: Whoopee! Get rid of the sinister insurers. Bring on a single-payer system. But if that's the agenda, why not debate it directly? It's not insurers that cause high health costs; they're simply the middlemen. It's the fragmented delivery system and open-ended reimbursement. Would strict regulation of doctors, hospitals and patients under a single-payer system provide control? Or would genuine competition among health plans over price and quality work better?

That's the debate we need, but in truth, doctors, hospitals and patients don't want to be limited, whether by government or markets. Congress reflects public opinion. Fearing a real debate, we fake it.

Well, this is good news. One of these guys should speak to an editor at the paper to encourage more op-eds on single payer, which has faced a virtual blackout in the corporate media debate (FAIR Media Advisory, 3/6/09). Maybe Fred Hiatt could speak to the person who runs the opinion pages at the Washington Post; after all, what better place to encourage a Washington debate?

Wait--isn't that Hiatt's job?

In the Washington Post (10/25/09), reporter Dan Balz has a piece about the "resurrection" of the public option in the Senate negotiations over healthcare reform. But like the Post's trumpeting of its recent poll on the issue, Balz's rationale doesn't make much sense. As he sees it, Senate Democrats "reevaluated the politics of the public option" in part because support was on the rise:

Then last week, new polls, one from the Washington Post and ABC News and the other from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, found clear majority support (57 percent) for a public option. The Post/ABC News poll showed support had risen five percentage points since August. The new numbers emboldened public-option supporters to press harder, even though the same polls continued to show the public divided over the overall shape of healthcare legislation.

As we pointed out already, the Post's numbers weren't all that revelatory; the public option was popular before (with as much as 62 percent support in a June 18-21 Post/ABC poll) and continues to be popular. As for the Kaiser numbers Balz singles out, that poll did find 57 percent support this month; however, the month before (9/11-18/09), Kaiser found the public option supported by 59 percent.

Figuring out why the press is pushing this "public option comeback" storyline is difficult to fathom, but it's undeniable that it is being sold with misleading citations of public opinion.

Mark Weisbrot had a good column in the London Guardian (10/23/09) about the highly circumscribed "debate" over the Afghanistan War (FAIR Action Alert, 8/25/09). He breaks down the lineup of a recent Meet the Press (10/11/09):

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former Army general and drug czar (under President Clinton) turned defense industry lobbyist. In a news article on McCaffrey entitled "One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex," the New York Times reported that McCaffrey had "earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." McCaffrey has appeared on NBC more than 1,000 times since 9/11/2001.

Retired Gen. Richard Meyers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Bush (2002-05). He is currently on the Board of Directors of Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of the largest military contractors in the world, and also of United Technologies Corporation, another large military contractor.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, Republican from South Carolina, a pro-war spokesperson who is one of the most regular guests on the Sunday talkshows.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, was apparently intended to represent the "other side" of the debate. Here is what he said: "Clearly we should keep the number of forces that we have.  No one's talking about removing forces."

"No one," in the above sentence refers to the American people, whom Levin understandably sees as nobody in the eyes of the U.S. media and political leaders. According to the latest (September 24) NYT/CBS News poll, 32 percent of those polled wanted U.S. troops out of Afghanistan within one year or right now. That was the largest group. Another 24 percent wants the troops "removed within one to two years." For comparison, the leadership of the Taliban is willing to grant foreign troops 18 months to get out of their country.

In other words, a majority of 56 percent of Americans wants U.S. troops out of Afghanistan about as soon as is practically feasible or even sooner. Yet Meet the Press--a mainstream network news talkshow since 1947--does not see fit to find one person to represent that point of view. The other major TV and radio talkshows that the right also labels "liberal" in the United States make similar choices almost every day.

When asked whether the U.S. should set a timeline for withdrawal, Levin answered "no."

This phenomenon of the non-debate is not confined to broadcast journalism; see recent FAIR Blog posts on fake Afghanistan debates in Time magazine (10/2/09), USA Today (9/17/09) and the Washington Post (9/01/09, 8/17/09).

CNN host Lou Dobbs presented some big news on--wait for it--immigration last night (10/22/09):

New evidence that the American public wants action on the illegal immigration crisis in this country. A new CNN poll finds the vast majority of the American public wants illegal immigration stopped and most want illegal immigrants now in the country to leave--Lisa Sylvester with our report.

The CNN poll is odd; the main question is, "Would you like to see the number of illegal immigrants currently in this country increased, decreased, or remain the same?" 73 percent chose "decreased." They asked a follow-up to find out if people want the numbers decreased "a little," "a lot" or if they'd like to seem all of them removed immediately. Thirty-seven percent of the total sample chose the latter option; if that's what Dobbs meant by "most" people, that's just inaccurate reporting of his own network's poll.

Dobbs' reporter Lisa Sylvester uses the poll to make a bigger political point:

SYLVESTER: But Mark Krikorian with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher immigration law, says if anything, these polling numbers show that comprehensive immigration reform is going to be a tough sell.

MARK KRIKORIAN: Clearly, it's not happening any time soon and these poll results really just underline that reality.

SYLVESTER: But President Obama still is insisting and committed to signing a comprehensive immigration bill.

The idea that responses to this poll reveal people's feelings towards "reform" is a giant leap, since the CNN poll does not seem to have asked about that. Other polls have, though, like an April 9 ABC/Washington Post survey:

Would you support or oppose a program giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and meet other requirements?

Support: 61 percent

Oppose: 31 percent

A CBS/New York Times poll (4/22-26/09) gave three options for dealing with undocumented immigrants:

Stay, Apply for Citizenship: 44 percent

Stay as Guest Workers: 21 percent

Leave: 30 percent

Since all three groups could describe themselves as wanting to see illegal immigration "decreased," there's no reason to believe that CNN's poll tells us much of anything about the immigration debate. It does, however, give Lou Dobbs something to talk about.

The White House's beef with Fox News Channel continues, as do the right-wing cable channel's bizarre attempts to defend their journalistic integrity. Take this example from today's New York Times (10/22/09). Obviously the White House is most offended by the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck; this is unfair, according to Fox:

But Michael Clemente, senior vice president for news and editorial programming at Fox, said the White House was conflating the network’s commentary with its news coverage. That, Mr. Clemente said, "would be like Fox News blaming the White House senior staff for the Washington Redskins' losing record."

Last time I checked, there were no White House staffers moonlighting in the Redskins' front office. Beck and Hannity, on the other hand, actually work at Fox News Channel--and were put there by Fox bosses. The analogy makes no sense, but then again it's hard to imagine a better defense for Fox's behavior.

In today's New York Times article, "Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow," there's some Green Revolution mythology propagated about how the policies "staved off famines affecting millions." As has been pointed out, though food production did increase, hunger actually increased as well just about everywhere affected by the Green Revolution; the reason the overall numbers showed hunger down was because China, as part of its own revolution including land reform, managed to reduce hunger dramatically. But the overall framing of the article is what bothers me more--the idea that it's "scientists and development experts" who are responsible for "feeding the world's growing population."

There are hints at the real problem, as when reporter Neil MacFarquhar notes that "the conundrum is whether the food can be grown in the developing world where the hungry can actually get it, at prices they can afford." He also notes legitimate concerns like the effect of climate change, which is worsening droughts in some areas, and the growth of biofuels, which gobble up available farmland. But he quickly returns to the main angle, explaining, "The track record of failing to feed the hungry haunts the effort." He quotes one official who explains the current problem in terms of a lack of aid money from the West: "Nobody has 20 billion and spare change in their sock drawer."

As Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé pointed out in Extra! (11-12/08), the problem is extreme inequality and lack of power for poor farmers; the hungry don't need experts and the G-8 to "feed" them, they need the opportunity to feed themselves, whether that be in the form of more equitable land reform, the ability to adopt their own sustainable agricultural methods, or freedom from the market distortions created by those very G-8 countries and experts. Even the climate change and biofuel concerns are primarily the result of damaging first-world energy policies that remain unaddressed--by those countries as well as by MacFarquhar. But it's no surprise those root causes go missing in a hunger story whose hook is a meeting of "development experts" and every source but one is either a government or aid official.

John K. Wilson (Obamapolitics, 10/16/09) on Rush Limbaugh and fake quotes:

When it came to people repeating false quotes about Limbaugh that Limbaugh himself had never bothered to deny, Limbaugh was outraged: "we are in the process behind the scenes working to get apologies and retractions with the force of legal action against every journalist who has published these entirely fabricated quotes about me, slavery, and James Earl Ray."

But when it came to his own false quotes, Limbaugh has been entirely indifferent to fake quotes.

In one of his books, Limbaugh claimed to be quoting James Madison: "We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." The quote was a fake. Limbaugh admitted: "The quote is not Madison's. But the misattribution of this statement (an error, not 'a lie') has been made by many over the years."

Ah, so when Limbaugh was publishing fake quotes, it was "an error, not 'a lie,'" and it was excused because the mistake was made "by many over the years."

On April 27, 1995, Limbaugh read examples of "liberal hate speech" by Pacifica radio host Julianne Malveaux and CBS reporter Eric Engberg from the right-wing Media Research Center's newsletter, unaware that he was reading fake quotes from the April Fool's edition published almost a month earlier. The next day (4/28/95), Limbaugh admitted the quotes were false, but he heroically refused to apologize to the journalists he had falsely smeared: "Given some of the things liberals actually do say, it's not too tough to believe they would say the things Bozell makes up." Limbaugh's error was even more amazing because he had made the exact same mistake of reading the newsletter’s fake quotes as if they were real one year before (Extra!, 7-8/94).

"U.S. Deeply Split on Troop Increase for Afghan War" is the headline on the Washington Post's October 21 report about its latest polling on Afghanistan.  The paper reports that "Americans are evenly and deeply divided" over sending 40,000 extra troops: "47 percent of those polled favor the buildup, while 49 percent oppose it."

If you've followed polling on this question, these results are striking--most recent surveys show the public is deeply troubled by the war and opposed to sending more troops. The most recent CNN survey (10/16-18/09), to take one example, found 39 percent support for sending more troops, and 59 opposed to that idea.

So who did the Post get those results? They've been asking questions about troop buildup in their other polls, but for this one they changed the wording of the question to this:

U.S. military commanders have requested approximately 40,000 more U.S. troops for Afghanistan. Do you think Obama should or should not order these additional forces to Afghanistan?

It's very likely that including references to "military commanders" and Obama skew the responses to the question--as has been noted, Obama tends to poll better than his policies do. One of the Post's recent polls (8/13-17/09) on Afghanistan was more neutrally worded:

Do you think the number of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan should be increased, decreased or kept about the same?

The result then: 24 percent favored an increase, 45 percent favored a decrease, 27 percent supported keeping troop levels the same. This led the Post to report the results of that poll under the headline, "Public Opinion in U.S. Turns Against Afghan War."

So did the Post change the wording of the poll to get a different outcome? Or did public opinion just dramatically reverse course in two months? The latter seems implausible.

Living up to the ridiculous notion that every right-wing slam on ACORN demands coverage in the "liberal media," the Washington Post ("Duo Release Another Video of Their Meeting With ACORN Worker," 10/22/09)  runs a story on the latest from the right-wing activists whose undercover videos shot at local ACORN offices got all the attention in the first place.

So what's the news? Well, apparently the duo appeared at the National Press Club to unveil a video of themselves at a Philadelphia ACORN office, where nothing much happened. The video they presented did not include any of the audio from ACORN workers--they removed those responses, allegedly for fear of being sued. And the pair refused to take questions from the press after their (sort of) press conference. Apparently the point of the whole exercise was to show that they spent 32 minutes at the office--and were thus not told to leave immediately.  How, exactly, does this qualify as  news?

Fans of Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt (and his journalistic partner, Stephen Dubner) might well have been surprised to hear about Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm's devastating debunking (10/12/09) of the climate change nonsense in the duo's new book, Superfreakonomics. Romm points out wacky assertions in the bestselling authors' sequel, like this passage they quote approvingly from former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold:

The problem with solar cells is that they're black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat--which contributed to global warming.

It's as if the premise of solar panels is that they don't absorb as much heat from the Sun as coal-burning plants, and Myhrvold has discovered that because they're black (actually, they're usually blue) this won't work. In reality, of course, the actual advantage of solar panels over coal-burning plants is that they don't burn coal.

That's a kooky thing to put in a book. But even worse is Levitt and Dubner's misrepresentation of actual climate scientist Ken Caldeira, of whom the authors say, "His research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight" (against global warming). Caldeira actually calls for outlawing devices that release carbon into the atmosphere, saying: "I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies.... It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero."

It's surprising that bestselling authors who have written regularly for the New York Times Magazine would get a story so ridiculously wrong--but maybe it shouldn't be. When the original Freakonomics came out, University of Michigan economist John DiNardo wrote a review (American Law and Economics Review, Fall/06) that pointed out that the book misrepresented a study that was cited as substantiation for one of Levitt's more controversial claims: that legalizing abortion led to lower crime rates. Citing a study by Cristian Pop-Eleches of children born after Romania banned abortion, Levitt and Dubner wrote:

Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals.

But in the actual study cited by Freakonomics, Pop-Eleches wrote:

On average, children born in 1967 just after abortions became illegal display better educational and labor market achievements than children born just prior to the change. This outcome can be explained by a change in the composition of women having children: urban, educated women were more likely to have abortions prior to the policy change, so a higher proportion of children were born into urban, educated households.

DiNardo has pointed out (though he does not do so in the version published in the American Law and Economics Review) that Pop-Eleches found that if you correct for demographic characteristics, children born after the abortion ban did less well than those born before, but this is very different from saying that the cohort did worse; DiNardo noted (quoting Pop-Eleches) that the study indicated that "the positive effect due to changes in the composition of mothers having children more than outweighs all the other negative effects that such a restriction might have had."

Levitt actually responded to diNardo's criticism in a snide blog post (Freakonomics blog, 2/6/08), which quoted Freakonomics' claim about the cohort doing worse, quoted Pop-Eleches' finding about outcomes after "controlling for...observable background variables," then deceptively concluded, "Sounds to me like Freakonomics and Pop-Eleches are saying the same thing"--ignoring the part where Pop-Eleches found that the cohort actually did better, thus giving readers no clue as to what DiNardo's actual complaint about Levitt's use of the paper was. ("C'mon, John, you're a top economist, and our book is 300 pages long. You must have better criticisms than that!" Levitt snarked. Well, yeah--most criticism sounds better when you actually explain it.)

This dishonest response to criticism foreshadowed Levitt's similarly slippery response (Freakonomics blog, 10/17/09) to Joe Romm's critique--see Climate Progress, 10/17/09. Maybe the climate change chapter from Superfreakonomics isn't an aberration--maybe people are just catching on to Levitt's smartest-guy-in-the-room act.

Following the 1992 GOP convention, FAIR's magazine Extra! (11/92) highlighted remarks made by Rich Bond in which the then-Republican national chair explained the strategy behind the right's relentless charges of liberal media bias:

There's some strategy to it. I'm the coach of a kids' basketball team and Little League Teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is "work the refs." Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.

In a recent appearance on MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews (10/19/09), Pat Buchanan gave a first-hand account of how the strategy paid off for him and at least one other member of the Nixon administration:

BUCHANAN: I know when we hit the New York Times, for example, in the '60s, all of a sudden, they blossomed with an op-ed page that had some conservatives on it and conservative voices there, and all the other newspapers did, as well.

MATTHEWS: That's how you got Bill his job. Is that how you got Bill Safire his job?

[LAUGHTER]

BUCHANAN: Well, listen, they went out looking for conservative--that's how I got my job! Create a vacuum out there and a real demand, you've got to put these people on, Chris, and go to work and....

Like Bond, Buchanan acknowledges that the ploy is disingenuous: In a Los Angeles Times interview (3/14/96) during his 1996 campaign for president, Buchanan praised the media for fairness: "I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage.... For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every Republican on Earth does that."

And of course it helps that the corporate media is acutely sensitive to charges of liberal bias--regardless of whether they are true or not.