This Washington Post headline (2/13/10) caught my eye:

2008 Habeas Ruling May Pose Snag as U.S. Weighs Indefinite Guantanamo Detentions

You have to read the piece somewhat closely to understand what they're taking about. The terrorism case against one Guantanamo detainee was "ironclad" until a federal judge deemed it "too weak"--because some of the statements against the defendant had been "coerced." This has happened repeatedly--judges "'have gutted allegations and questioned the reliability of statements by the prisoners during interrogations and by the informants." This is bad news, we're told; "the government is likely to suffer further losses" in court.

You have to read almost to the end of the piece before you get a more direct view of things:

The government also relied on Hatim's interrogations and his testimony at military hearings, during which he is said to have admitted to training at an Al-Qaeda military camp. Judges have been skeptical of such statements unless the government provides evidence that the men were not seriously mistreated. In Hatim's case, the Justice Department did not dispute his contention that he was tortured in U.S. custody and that he made those admissions to avoid further mistreatment.

The government is trying to justify holding prisoners indefinitely based on evidence gleaned from torture. That is the "snag" referenced in the headline.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank thinks it's pretty silly for Republicans and climate change deniers to say that the recent snowstorms mean that climate change is phony.

BUT.... don't think for a second that Milbank's going to let "greens" off the hook that easy. No way. As he put it on Sunday (2/14/10): "There's some rough justice in the conservatives' cheap shots. In Washington's blizzards, the greens were hoist by their own petard."

How so?  Climate activists "have argued by anecdote to make their case," especially Al Gore, who has warned of  a whole menu of negative consequences from climate change. Milbank writes: "It's not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heatwave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle."

Milbank has more:

Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center's Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that "the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature" points to human-caused warming and that doubters "don't understand the science."

The science is overwhelming--but not definitive. Romm's claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, who confessed that "there's a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system" and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what's going on. "Unfortunately we don't have that data so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data."

Aside from lamenting Romm's comments for being so "well-worn," did Jeff Masters really "shoot down" climate analyst Romm? That's not what Masters says happened; he has a response on his site, where he writes, "I agree with Dr. Romm's statement." Milbank's storyline--both sides are exaggerating--is a familiar one, but it's also entirely misleading. As is his drive-by summary of the whole "Climategate" scandal:

The scientific case has been further undermined by high-profile screw-ups. First there were the hacked e-mails of a British research center that suggested the scientists were stacking the deck to overstate the threat. Now comes word of numerous errors in a 2007 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear in 25 years.

There is no credible evidence that climate scientists were "stacking the deck." It is hard to figure out what he means by "numerous" errors in the 2007 report; there are two prominent allegations, including the aforementioned glaciers error. The New York Times determined that the complaints have amounted to "half-truths." Milbank's assertion, then, that the "scientific case has been further undermined" is specious. But the point of climate change denial is to manufacture a political scandal--which is what journalism like this does well.

From one of today's New York Times stories (2/16/10) about the NATO/U.S. campaign in Marja, Afghanistan (emphasis added):

The heavy civilian toll highlighted the stressful and confusing nature of the fighting, especially in Marja, and of the difficulties inherent in conducting military operations in a guerrilla war, where insurgents can hide easily among the population.

Still, the deaths are troubling to the American and NATO commanders, who have made protecting civilians the overriding objective of their campaign--even when doing so comes at the expense of letting insurgents get away. The stream of news releases flowing from NATO headquarters detailing the episodes is testament to how seriously military commanders here take the problem.

Indeed, nothing demonstrates humanitarian concern more profoundly than numerous press releases.

On Tuesday, the New York Times (2/9/10) was front-paging a non-story about criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- hyping accusations about scientific misconduct and conflicts of interest that the paper itself called "half-truths" (FAIR Blog, 2/9/10).

Well, it turns out that there was quite a bit of snow on the East Coast this week, which seemingly inspired another awful piece (2/11/10), this one headlined "Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze." The whole premise of the piece is based on complaints from right-wing climate change deniers--Sen. James M. Inhofe, assorted "global-warming critics," Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and the Virginia Republican party.

Not to worry, though; they're anti-science hysteria is "balanced" by a few comments from actual scientists. But at one point reporter John Broder counterposes "most climate scientists" who argue that severe storms could be linked to climate change with "some independent climate experts" who don't see the link. Why such scientists are "independent" isn't clear; nor is it actually clear who the so-called independents are anyway, since that argument was substantiated with this:

As an illustration of their point of view, the family of Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, a leading climate skeptic in Congress, built a six-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and put a cardboard sign on top that read "Al Gore's New Home."

James Inhofe is no way a climate expert--unless you count the number of times he is cited in the corporate media talking about climate change.

For more on corporate media's misreporting of global warming, see Extra!'s "Special Issue on Journalism and Climate Change" (2/10).

As Steve Rendall noted here (1/22/10), Scott Horton's explosive Harper's report (3/10) on several ostensible suicides at Guantanamo has received very little mainstream media attention--despite the fact that Horton's account suggests that the prisoners were murdered by U.S. officials at a "black site" within the Guantanamo facility.

But never fear--the story has finally broken through. And in the New York Times, no less!

Sort of... it's on the letters page.

To the Editor:

Re "Editorial Shake-Up as Harper's Tries to Stabilize in a Downturn" (Business
Day, February 1):

I'd like to clarify your report of something I said at a Harper's Magazine
staff meeting on January 27. When I complained that "the mainstream media is
ignoring it to death," I was referring not to the magazine itself but to our
March cover story by Scott Horton, which challenges the official government
account of the alleged suicides by three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

John R. MacArthur
Publisher, Harper's Magazine
New York, February 6, 2010

So just to be clear: The Times story about Harper's referred to the magazine being ignored by the rest of the media--and the Times managed to omit the specific story the publisher said the media were ignoring.

The Financial Times' Edward Luce (2/3/10) had a report last week that blamed some of the Obama administration's problems on the president's overreliance on four top advisers--particularly chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who "in addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration...has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters."

More illuminating than the article itself may be the Washington press corps' reaction to it, as described by AlterNet's Steve Clemons (2/9/10):

Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect, wrote that "Luce has written what seems to me the best and most succinct rundown of what's gone wrong in the White House, with particular attention to the role of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel." But some of the big aggregators out there--Mike Allen at Politico and ABC's the Note among others--didn't give Luce's juicy and lengthy essay any love.

Why not? Allen is a good friend of mine and tries to keep a good balance between tough-hitting political stuff, but also goes out of his way to give strokes to those in the White House he can -- particularly "Axe" -- who is a regular in Mike's daily Playbook....

But this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the "four horsepersons of the Obama White House" will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay "legs."'

In other words, Washington political journalists can't tell you what's going on inside the White House because then they would lose access to what's going on inside the White House.

FAIR put out an Action Alert today (2/9/10)  on a USA Today report that presented dubious, one-sided claims about  Social Security's supposed crisis.  Feel free to post your messages to the paper, or share your ideas about the alert, in the comments thread here.

Last month CJR blogger Curtis Brainard (1/29/10) complained that the media were not giving enough attention to some complaints--mostly from climate change deniers--about the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and complaints about IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. Jim Naureckas suggested right here that this was a bad idea, but today the New York Times (2/9/10) seemed to take CJR's advice.

The headline ("U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege") and second paragraph suggest something important:

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri's resignation last week.

So what's the status of these charges? You have to read a few more paragraphs until you're told that "several of the recent accusations have proved to be half-truths," and that the "general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions." Well, shouldn't that be made clear from the start?

There are two scientific criticisms made about the last IPCC report--one has been found baseless, while the other was an actual mistake, though the magnitude of the error seems to have been overstated. But that's apparently good enough to craft a whole story around the "IPCC Under Siege" theme, and to collect quotes from the likes of leading denier Christopher Monckton: "The chair is an Indian railroad engineer with very substantial direct and indirect financial vested interests in the matters covered in the climate panel’s report. What on earth is he doing there?"

Monckton is, among other things, "the chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute"-- a climate change denying think tank that apparently does not disclose its funders (SpinProfiles). Yet apparently the Times sees Monckton as a credible source for critiquing the head of the IPCC for failing to disclose his financial ties.

Blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/9/10), responding to a Des Moines Register poll that found "a third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the 'tea party' movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government":

Thirty-eight percent of Americans have a favorable view of Cuba and 36 percent are favorably disposed toward socialism, but I don't see anyone writing newspaper articles about how a populist wave of socialism is sweeping the country.

At the end of January, Obama education secretary Arne Duncan told a cable news show (TV One's Washington Watch, 1/31/10),  "I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina." In reporting on Duncan's remarks, the January 30 Washington Post apparently couldn't find anyone to challenge the notion that Katrina was a good thing.

CNN aired a segment the same day featuring guests Roland Martin, a CNN regular and the host of Washington Watch, the program where Duncan made the remarks in question; and CNN education contributor Steve Perry, a magnet school founder, champion of vouchers and all-around public school critic.

Martin applauded the progress New Orleans public schools have made, citing improving test scores. But Perry, who said he agreed with Duncan, went much further, sounding frankly unhinged as he actually lamented that there could not be more Katrinas for the sake of U.S. education: "I'm saying that we can't have a Katrina in all of the 50 states."

Nowhere in the CNN segment or the Washington Post report was there anyone to challenge Duncan's remarks or to explain that the reason New Orleans test scores have increased is that post-Katrina rebuilding has largely driven out the poor and black populations who had been so poorly served by the city's schools pre-Katrina.

All in all, it was education coverage designed to make you dumber.

Here's a classic example of how the conservative media smear machine works. In a video less than four minutes long, Rep. Barney Frank describes how the Wall Street Journal's John Fund lied about him, how that lie was amplified by the right's media echo chamber, and how, when he called Fund on the lie, Fund admitted he was wrong, but refused to retract.

The following is a transcript of Frank's February 3 remarks from the floor of the House of Representatives:

Mr. Speaker, I recently got some first-hand experience with the way in which the right-wing propaganda machine operates.  The pattern appears to be to begin with a lie and then have that lie multiply through an echo chamber that repeats it and repeats it.  In this case, a man named John Fund, who is an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, one of the most right-wing of our publications these days on the editorial page, just told a lie about me in November of last year.

He gave a speech at Restoration Weekend--I don’t know what they were restoring, but it certainly wasn’t respect for the truth--and he said that: "Democrats were rattled by the November 3 election results.  What do liberals do when they lose an election? They change the rules.  In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration."  It'll be "felon re-enfranchisement."  "The feds will tell the states, 'Take everyone on every list of welfare recipients you have, everyone on every list of unemployed you have.'"

It's a lie; he made it up.  Its not even a misinterpretation, it's not a quote taken out of context, it is a total myth.  There is no such bill. There wasn't in November.  But then the right-wing echo chamber picks it up.  The Washington Times, the voice of the Reverend Moon, says, "Schumer and Frank have plans to ram through legislation that will produce universal voter registration," and they say "It'll be on the floor of the house in two weeks."  It's the lie repeated.

Glenn Beck joined in, Rush Limbaugh joined in.  This begins with a totally fictional accusation by John Fund with no basis whatsoever. It is then repeated by Glenn Beck, and repeated by the Washington Times and repeated by Rush Limbaugh.  None of them having checked what we were talking about.  None of them seeing if it was accurate.  I was asked by the Situation Room, why I had done that?  My response was: "Done what? I didn’t do it."  So I checked in on it, I found that the source of this was Mr. Fund's totally irresponsible myth in November.

So I wrote to Mr. Fund and I will put this letter in there, and said, "I was puzzled to have you say this, I checked, I now write to tell you that you are entirely wrong in your assertion about me and in the absence of your being able to show any basis in which you made such a statement, to ask you to acknowledge that fact."

He's not only a liar, he's a coward.  He wouldn't do it.  My staff member, Mr. [Harry] Gural, asked him, called him up and said, "Well, what was this based on?"

He said, "I made a mistake."

"Well, have you issued a retraction?"  Mr. Gural asked him.

"Oh, yeah," he said.

"Can we see a copy?" Mr. Gural reasonably asked.

"Oh, I, uh, told a couple of people."

So here we are.  Mr. Fund makes it up.  It's a lie.  It's a myth.  There was nothing there and it's to discredit all Democrats, his right cohorts then echo it and echo it.  The next you know, it's going to be coming on the floor of the House in two weeks and people will hear it and it's all over the blogs: "This is the Democrats' disregard for the electoral process."

And when we call Mr. Fund's attention to the fact that this was a lie, what does he say?  "Whoops."  But he's not going to tell anybody about it.

Mr. Speaker, this is not the only case of this. And I know this has happened before, but because I was directly involved here, I am in a position to document this.

It begins with a lie from this editorial writer from the Wall Street Journal, it is then a lie repeated by all of his right-wing colleagues and then when he is nailed in the lie, he simply blithely refuses to do anything about it.  I hope people will take from this  the lesson to be very skeptical when these right-wing propagandists, Limbaugh or Beck or the Washington Times or the Wall Street Journal editorial board, propagate these vicious smears.

The fact that Paul Krugman writes columns for the New York Times means that the paper's readers are occasionally treated to a good media criticism--like today (2/5/10). He writes:

These days it's hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.

And the reality:

Let's talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met--appropriately--with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.

This is important--especially when compared to news stories that tell you things like this:

--"Independent voters in particular are uneasy about a tide of red ink in the wake of the billion-dollar packages for Wall Street, automakers and stimulus spending." (USA Today, 2/3/10)

--"Deficit spending, in turn, has caused the nation's accumulated debt to swell to dangerous levels." (Washington Post, 1/20/10)

Or the ABC World News report (2/1/10) that attempted to explain the deficit by focusing on the meaning of a billion: "And when we start tossing around a billion, it's a huge number. Just think, a billion hours ago, we were in the Stone Age." Well, that clarifies things.

For more media criticism on the deficit, see Extra!: "The Deficit Distraction: Media Push Spending Cuts Over Stimulus" (9/09) by Veronica Cassidy.

"I miss John McCain," writes the Washington Post's Dana Milbank today (2/5/10). Milbank calls himself "an original McCainiac"-- by which he means that he, like so many others in the corporate media, adored the so-called "maverick" John McCain of the 2000 presidential campaign.

As we've pointed out plenty of times before, McCain's Senate record has staunchly conservative throughout his career--except for those anomalous years, just before and after his unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, when the press mostly fell in love with him. Wishing for that McCain to return is akin to wishing that politician would just lie to you one more time.

The Washington Post's Eli Saslow (2/3/10) on Obama:

He is a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it.

It's true that very few presidents come from the middle class--except for Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding and Woodrow Wilson, it's hard to think of a single example from the last hundred years.

Curtis Brainard of CJR's Observatory blog (1/29/10) complains about the lack of coverage of what he calls "Glaciergate":

Almost two weeks ago, the Sunday Times, a British newspaper, "broke" the story that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had made significant errors in its 2007 report on the impacts of global warming....

The report stated that there was a very high likelihood that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Three days after the Times published its article, the IPCC essentially admitted that this was an error (while glaciers in the region are melting, they are unlikely to vanish that quickly) and apologized (pdf) for the "poorly substantiated" claim.

In the days after the story first broke, the New York Times and the Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the U.K., India and Australia have been eating the American media's lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.

But the New York Times never reported the IPCC's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 before publishing the debunking article. The Washington Post mentioned it in a story (11/22/09) that focused on the Indian environmental minister's rejection of the claim. The Christian Science Monitor had one piece (11/5/99) on melting Himalayan glaciers that quoted a source saying "the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high"--but this was not a quote from the IPCC report, which wouldn't appear for another eight years, but from the International Commission on Snow and Ice, which was part of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences.

None of these papers, then, thought that the IPCC's statement that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 was in itself worth mentioning, let alone basing a story around. So how much effort should the same papers spend reporting on the withdrawal of this claim? That depends on whether you think melting glaciers, or scientific misstatements about melting glaciers, are the bigger threat to humanity.

You see the same emphasis on science process trivia over the actual phenomena scientists are studying in a British Guardian story headlined "Leaked Climate Change Emails Scientist 'Hid' Data Flaws" (2/1/10), which is no doubt getting a lot of U.S. traffic today via a link from Drudge. In the fifth paragraph, the story reveals that contrary to the implication of the headline and subhead ("Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures"), the story actually has no bearing on the reality of climate change:

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

And how do they do that, exactly?

Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

So essentially this story reveals that before a scientist was cleared of suspicions of scientific wrongdoing, he was suspected of scientific wrongdoing. Stop the presses!

That a respectable paper like the Guardian would trumpet this as an important scoop--and that a media watchdog like CJR would be calling for more in this vein--is a testimony to how deeply the "Climategate" hackers have distorted the discussion over the most important environmental issue of our lifetimes. See the brand-new issue of Extra!: "'Climategate' Overshadows Copenhagen: Media Regress to the Bad Old Days of False Balance" (2/10) by Julie Hollar.