Via Climate Progress (3/16/10), Scientific American guest blogger John Horgan (3/16/10) makes a disturbing claim:

Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section's editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity.

Now, reviews of climate research literature show universal support for the notion that human-caused climate change is happening  (Nature, 12/3/04), and surveys of climate scientists find the same unanimity (Science Daily, 1/19/09). Major scientific organizations around the world have endorsed the consensus of the climate research field, and have expressed alarm at the dangers to humanity posed by climate change.

So if a majority of the staff of Science Times nonetheless doubts that human-caused climate change is a real danger, that means one of two things: Either the journalists at one of the nation's most visible sources of science news consider scientists to be a dubious lot who may well not know what they're talking about, or those journalists have not been paying attention to what the scientists are saying. Either way, it's troubling.

And the response by the New York Times science editor Laura Chang in the comments section was hardly reassuring:

I must say your sentence about the science staff doesn't make sense. There are more than 20 people on the Science Desk of the Times, and no one has ever taken a poll of their positions on human-induced global warming. As far as I know, everyone here who covers climate--including our neighbors in the environment pod, who provide the bulk of this coverage these days--keeps an open mind about the evidence.

If "keeps an open mind" means what it usually does, then the people who cover climate for the New York Times think the jury is still out on whether climate scientists should be believed when they say humans are causing a global climate disaster. Talk about your serious threats to humanity.

Last night on the O'Reilly Factor (3/16/10):

What I'm about to tell you is simply stunning.

A new survey published by the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious magazine, says that nearly half of primary care doctors in America could leave the medical profession if Obamacare is passed.

According to the Journal, 63 percent of physicians feel that healthcare reform is needed but should be done in a more gradual way. And an astounding 72 percent of doctors believe a public option, that is a government-run health insurance company, would have a negative impact on medical care in the USA.

Doctors hate the White House health plan--now that IS a story. And it's published in a reputable scientific journal!

Or not.

Anyone trying to find the research will likely see it first at a right-wing blog like Hot Air-- which linked to a New England Journal of Medicine "Career Center" website article that was actually the employment newsletter Recruiting Physicians Today. That this was not the journal itself would have been obvious to anyone reading the site.

The survey was done by the Medicus Firm, a "nationally retained physician search firm." The main point of their poll is that health reform will create some kind of uncertainty, which  means the "strongest physician recruiters and firms will be in demand"-- i.e., themselves.

After Media Matters investigated the matter, the New England Journal of Medicine posted an explanation on their site, explaining that the advertiser newsletter is not the journal, and they had nothing to do with the survey (which, it turns out, appears to have been an email survey of doctors in the firm's database).

After leading his show with a bogus tale, surely Bill O'Reilly will correct the record tonight. Right?

FAIR has a new Action Alert out on CNN's newest political commentator: Red State's Erick Erickson. For some indication of why this is perhaps the creepiest move by a cable network since MSNBC hired Michael Savage--and for an email address to communicate your feelings--click here.  Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or comments on the alert, in the comments thread here.

Washington Post columnists Dana Milbank and David Broder are both committed guardians of the establishment center, but they don't always interpret their role in the same way.

Milbank led the cheers for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as chief dragger to the right (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10), whereas Broder saw his blame-the-boss disloyalty as unseemly (3/4/10); on the other hand, it was Broder who thrilled recently to the "pitch-perfect populism" of Sarah Palin (2/11/10), while Milbank's column today (3/16/10) finds a similar spiel by Dick Armey to be as worthy of ridicule as, say, single-payer advocates (FAIR Blog, 6/12/09).

While Milbank's take-down of Armey's speech was amusing ("He asked if people 'agree with, with uh, with uh, help me out, uh, the great prime minister, English prime minister--Churchill'"), it was about as lo-cal as his more typical mockery of the left.  He quotes Armey's assertion:

Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.

To which Milbank retorts: "Who knew they had socialists in 1607?" But Milbank doesn't recall that Jamestown was in actuality a for-profit enterprise--a project of the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company. Perhaps that would have been too pointed a punchline for Milbank's ideological tastes.

On his weekend NBC show, Chris Matthews regularly posts a question to 12 regular pundit/journalists--what he calls "The Matthews Meter." This Sunday (3/14/10), the question was: "Should Obama Move to the Center Instead of the Left as a Reelection Strategy?"

Matthews explained it on the show:

Let's go to the bottom line. We took it to The Matthews Meter, 12 of our regulars. What's the smartest political route for Obama right now, play to the center or to the left? Well, no contest here. Eleven say play to the center; just one says go left.

That's about as clear a statement of the political bias of the corporate press corps as you're likely to see. The advice for Democrats is always the same--move to the right.

The discussion of why this would be a good strategy was about as convincing as the advice itself; one highlight was Matthews asking of Obama: "Do you think he's as good at faking it as Bill Clinton was? Can he pretend to be a centrist?"

Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/15/10) offers a "narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told," that ends with:

And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.

The idea that Saddam Hussein fooled the U.S. into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons is a very popular myth that has no real evidence behind it. (See Extra!, "Saddam's 'Bluff'"  by Peter Hart, 1-2/04; "From Speculation to History"  by Seth Ackerman, 5-6/04.) Needless to say, when you're complaining that a fictional film isn't factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren't fictional.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turns in a profile of Glenn Beck today (3/15/10) that includes a few interesting anecdotes. He reports that "Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists" from his own radio company, and that "a vice president was assigned 'to help keep an eye on that program' and review its content in advance--a full-time job."

Kurtz also notes that some Fox reporters aren't crazy about what his new fame is doing to them:

Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility.

Yes, Beck is somehow undermining Fox's credibility in a way that that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera and Brit Hume hadn't managed to do yet.

Fox has always been conservative-- it was founded on an explicitly political agenda, after all--albeit one that Fox anchors and personalities would occasionally try to argue was merely a myth cooked up by the liberal media.

So what these Fox reporters are really saying is that Beck's presence on Fox makes it more difficult to fool people.

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has not had a chance yet to respond to questions about his commentary on the ACORN hoax (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10), instead devoting his Sunday column (3/14/10) to a discussion of political labeling. It included this question:

Why is the American Enterprise Institute almost always called "conservative" in the Times, while the Brookings Institution seldom gets a label, although it has been described as a Democratic government in exile during Republican regimes?

First off, the right-wing AEI (Extra!, 3-4/99) is not "almost always called 'conservative' in the Times"; a Nexis search of the paper over the past year turns up 77 references to the think tank, of which 18 have the word "conservative" in the vicinity.  Twenty-three percent of the time is not "almost always."

And Brookings "has been described as a Democratic government in exile"--who, exactly, has described it thus? The only previous time that Brookings was described as a "government in exile" in the New York Times, it was a column (9/29/89) that said the think tank served as such for Democratic and Republican economists alike.

It would certainly be an odd shadow government for Democrats that provided a home for so many Republicans. While its current president, Strobe Talbott, was a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, his predecessor, Michael Armacost, was an undersecretary of state under Reagan (Extra!, 11-12/98); the president before that, Bruce MacLaury, worked for Nixon's Treasury Department (Extra!, 5/91). Brookings' current roster of experts includes George W. Bush administration alumni like Ted Gayer, Mark McClellan and Ron Haskins--not to mention prominent Iraq War hawks Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack (Extra! Update, 10/07).

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is making the rounds to promote his new book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. He landed on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday (3/14/10), interviewed by Tom Brokaw.  Brokaw asked him about his book's discussion of the Iraq War:

BROKAW:  And in it, you acknowledge when weapons of mass destruction were not found, everyone was startled and not very happy about that.  If that had been the case before war began, you couldn't have gotten congressional authorization.

ROVE:  Nor in all likelihood U.N. approval, as we had as well.

BROKAW:  Would you have launched the war if you had known there were weapons of mass destruction?

ROVE:  Well, as I say in the book, we would not have had either the authorization from Congress nor the U.N., and we probably would have found other ways to constrain his behavior.

There was no U.N. approval for the Iraq War.

The White House always argued that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave them legal cover for the war, but it did not--it warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm.

As the U.N. weapons inspectors were reporting back from Iraq, the White House was seeking a second Security Council vote that would have officially sanctioned military action. That effort was unsuccessful, and the U.S./U.K. attack began without that Security Council approval.

This is not ancient history, nor is particularly obscure; coverage of Iraq and the U.N. weapons inspections in early 2003 was fairly intense, and Brokaw's NBC newscast aired several reports on the U.S. efforts to win U.N. support for a war resolution. (Brokaw himself on March 10, 2003, for example: "Tonight, the French vowed to veto any U.S. war resolution at the U.N., while Secretary of State Powell continued to look for votes and a plan that would allow the United States to go to war with some kind of U.N. approval.")

Rove undoubtedly knows this history, too. What he's counting on is that journalists like Brokaw will either not remember these facts, or will be too polite to bring them up.

This week on CounterSpin: A new law in Utah says some women who miscarry should go to jail. You may have seen some coverage, but are journalists asking the right questions about the law's implications, and is there a bigger story here that's being missed? We'll hear from Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Also on CounterSpin this week: With a name like the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, you'd expect such a group is going to upset some big corporations. And they have, including launching a very successful campaign against media giant Disney. Well, maybe a little too successful; the group found itself evicted from its headquarters after Disney complained. We'll talk to Dr. Susan Linn from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood about that story.

Click to play to listen:

The Los Angeles Times reports (3/12/10) on a new study of local news from the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism's Norman Lear Center. The findings are hardly surprising: There is almost no local political coverage on TV news.  As the Times notes, "An average half-hour newscast devoted just 22 seconds to government issues, including city budgets, healthcare, layoffs and law enforcement." Coverage of local politics works out to just under 2 percent of the "news hole"; on the other hand, crime stories make up closer to three minutes of a given newscast.

While that's terrible, the L.A. Times waits until the end of the piece to tell us that the L.A. Times does just a little better:

A companion study also examined local coverage by the Los Angeles Times during the same 14-day period. The report found that while TV stations used 1.9 percent of its news hole (minus ads and teasers) for coverage of local government, the Times used 3.3 percent of its news hole (minus ads and teasers) for coverage of local government.

Actual Washington Post headline today (3/11/10):

Rise in Washington Area Unemployment Seen as Good Sign for Economy's Recovery

Reporter V. Dion Hayes tries to explain:

Rising unemployment as a positive sign may sound counterintuitive, but economists explain it this way: The increase suggests that long-term unemployed people in the D.C. area who had given up looking for work have restarted their job hunt, perhaps because they see evidence that the region's economy is improving and that employers are beginning to hire again. On the other hand, the declining national rate indicates that discouraged workers elsewhere have remained out of the labor force because they do not see any reason to look for work.

There are actually other measurements of unemployment put out by the federal government that don't force editors to come up with such ridiculous headlines--and might help readers understand what's going on better. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the number of people who have given up looking for work but want a job ("marginally attached" people), as well as those who are working part time but want to be working full time; those numbers are publicly available, yet journalists rarely use them. (For more on such media malpractices, see Veronica Cassidy's article, "Misleading Indicators," in the January 2009 issue of Extra!.)

Yesterday (3/10/10) there was  a House floor debate on Rep. Dennis Kucinich's push to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.  Kucinich's bill--which is based on the War Powers Act--was defeated, but it sparked hours of rare discussion of the White House's war policy ( in spite of the Washington Post's efforts to minimize the discussion as left-wing "venting").

The most dramatic moment came when Rep. Patrick Kennedy chastised the press corps for skipping out on the discussion:  "There's two press people in this gallery.... We're talking about Eric Massa 24-7 on the TV, we're talking about war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives and no press? No press."

He added: "The press of the United States is not covering the most significant issue of national importance and that's the laying of lives down in the nation for the service of our country. It's despicable, the national press corps right now."

Watch the video:

FAIR has a new Action Alert out pointing out that the New York Times has repeatedly published accounts of the right-wing anti-ACORN videos that credulously accepted assertions that have turned out to be false--for example, that one of the video-makers, James O'Keefe, went into ACORN offices dressed as a cartoon pimp. See the alert here for the real story--and feel free to post copies of your messages to the Times or to respond to the alert in the comments thread here.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England "a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs." Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

--Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru (National Review Online, 3/8/10, via Crooked Timber, 3/9/10)

So, David Paterson will become the massa who gets to appoint whoever gets to take [Rep. Eric] Massa's place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson's gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.

--Rush Limbaugh (Rush Limbaugh Show, 3/9/10, via Media Matters, 3/9/10)