The cover of Newsweek (4/26/10) proclaims: "Don't Mess With Texas: What Governor Rick Perry's Hard-Right Creed Tells Us About America."

I can't say I learned much about America, but I guess I learned something about Newsweek:  They really like Rick Perry.

The story, by Evan Thomas and Arian Campo-Flores, begins with the observation, "The myth of the once and future king is as old as Camelot, as ancient as the Bible." Perry, it seems, is a living example of such a "redeemer":

In Texas, his name is Rick Perry. Raised in a ranch house with no running water in the West Texas town of Paint Creek, yell leader at Texas A&M, Air Force pilot, longest serving governor in Texas history. Ruggedly handsome in a Marlboro Man sort of way, with a rich mane of brown hair, slightly tinged with silver gray. Perry, 60, stands for less government and more growth, for freedom and against bureaucracy, for Texas and against Washington. It's a message that has made him a very popular politician in Texas, particularly among conservative white males. As the Tea Party movement gains momentum, as more Americans are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, Perry is their kind of hero.

Newsweek goes on to wonder if Perry might really be "the second coming of Ronald Reagan, the plain-spoken man from the West who presided over a new 'Morning in America' by cutting taxes, reducing government (well, promising to) and standing tall against the nation's enemies?"

Well, gee, maybe they should just skip the election? Would anyone be foolish enough to run against this handsome savior? Yes, it turns out--an uninspiring bald guy:

Perry's Democratic opponent in November will be Bill White, the popular three-term mayor of Houston. White couldn't be more different from Perry. He went to Harvard. He speaks fluent Spanish. He's pasty white, with a bald pate and big ears. He talks in an even, slow monotone and refrains from gunslinging rhetoric. He's kind of like President Obama without the good looks and charisma--a cerebral man who craves consensus and relishes tackling problems by gathering a roomful of smart people with diverse views to hash things out.

What a bore.

After the story's fourth paragraph tells us that under Perry, "Texas somehow avoided the worst of the Great Recession," the second-to-last sentence discloses that the Texas economic miracle might turn sour in a hurry:  "Economic experts are predicting a shortfall of at least $15 billion in the coming year." This after the state got $16 billion in stimulus money from the federal government last year. (Perry, you see, thinks Obama "is hellbent on taking America towards a socialist country.")

And you wouldn't know this from reading Newsweek's puff piece, but Perry and his pasty, uncharismatic Democratic challenger are in a pretty tight race, with Perry holding a four-point lead. Newsweek doesn't have time to mess with such nuance.

The PBS program Frontline on April 13 offered a look at the White House drive for healthcare reform titled Obama's Deal. Like a previous Frontline special about the U.S. healthcare system, the program failed to adequately include single-payer. But the way the show did it this time was remarkable.

Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program was interviewed by Frontline--leading one to suspect that the show might include some discussion of truly universal healthcare systems like single-payer (aka Medicare for All).

But the program was a major disappointment. As she wrote (Consortium News, 4/15/10) after it aired, "Curiously, just as it was in the health 'debate,' single-payer, improved Medicare for All, was also excluded from the film."

The strange thing is that Flowers actually appears on the show (albeit briefly), in a scene recounting how single-payer activists disrupted a Senate Finance Committee hearing last May. But the protesters' views are muddled by Frontline.

As the program explained it, insurance industry lobbyists were working to kill the public option from the Senate bill. At this point single-payer activists appear. As Flowers explained:

The producers at Frontline carefully cut single-payer out of the film. When the host, Mr. [Michael] Kirk, interviewed me for "Obama's Deal," we spoke extensively of the single-payer movement and my arrest with other single-payer advocates in the Senate Finance Committee last May. However, our action in Senate Finance was then misidentified as "those on the left" who led a "counterattack" because of "liberal outrage" at being excluded.

The framing of the Frontline segment would lead viewers to believe these activists were public-option proponents, which they are not. Groups like PNHP were critical of the public option--a government-run insurance plan that would be offered to some as an alternative to mandatory private health insurance--arguing that it would leave the insurance industry intact as dominant players in the healthcare business.

After Frontline aired footage of the arrests of single-payer activists, a voice says: "So what Chairman Baucus has decided this option cannot be part of the discussion at a Senate hearing? Now, I think that's wrong. I don't think it's fair." The implication was that "option" here refers to the public option-- since no other option had been mentioned.

That voice was actually MSNBC host Ed Schultz--a supporter of single-payer.  His full quote (5/7/09) would have made that clear:

Now, let me explain single-payer for just a minute.

The money comes from one source, the government. Now, you and I pay taxes, OK. The government pays the bill. It's that simple.

Patients are not caught in the middle between doctors and insurance companies, no game-playing here. There's no middleman. You know? There's no decision-makers between you and your doctor. It's a clean deal.

So what Chairman Baucus has decided, this option cannot be part of the discussion at a Senate hearing? Now, I think that's wrong. I don't think it's fair.

Thus single-payer activists were transformed into advocates for the public option.

This is not the first time that Frontline has decided that a conversation about healthcare reform should exclude single-payer from the discussion. The March 31, 2009 Frontline special Sick Around America avoided discussions of national healthcare plans. This omission led Frontline correspondent T.R. Reid--who had hosted a previous Frontline special  (4/15/08) that examined various public healthcare models-- to withdraw from the project.

PBS ombud Michael Getler agreed with those who thought the show missed a chance to discuss single-payer. It looks like the program has done so again.

In a lengthy New Yorker piece (4/26/10) about the Amazon/Apple battle over e-books, Ken Auletta paints some familiar heroes and villains:

"The [publishing] industry's great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses--and help make them profitable. E-books are booming.... But publishers were concerned that lower prices would decimate their profits." If Amazon gets away with selling e-books for $9.99, Auletta quotes one publishing CEO, "to my mind it's game over for this business." Amazon is depicted as controlling and mercenary:

Many publishers believe that Amazon looks upon books as just another commodity to sell as cheaply as possible, and that it sees publishers as dispensable.... Publishers maintain that digital companies don't understand the creative process of books. A major publisher said of Amazon: 'They don't know how authors think. It’s not in their DNA."

Publishers, on the other hand, are remarkably altruistic: "Publishers' real concern is that the low price of digital books will destroy bookstores, which are their primary customers," Auletta writes. But they're equally concerned about the well-being of authors:

Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of whom do not initially have much commercial promise. They also give advances on royalties, without which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to research new books....  Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.

It's a good story--but it belongs in the fiction section: The idea that publishers need to break Amazon's $9.99 pricing structure in order to be profitable is self-serving spin. As the New York Times' Motoko Rich reported in a story that bent over backwards to give the publishers' side (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10), publishers make about as much from a $10 e-book as they do from a $26 hardcover: $3.51-$4.26 vs. $4.05, by Rich's estimates. The  higher prices that publishers claim are necessary to keep the industry alive will actually give profits a nice boost: to as much as $5.54 for a $12.99 e-book; Rich doesn't give figures for a $14.99 book, but much of that extra price would go to the publisher.

Although Auletta allows publishers to pat themselves on the back for their "author-oriented culture," they give themselves a much better deal than they give writers on e-book sales: While a traditional hardcover sale nets about the same amount of money for author and publisher,  with e-books the publisher takes almost twice as much in profits as they give out in royalties.

The publishers' goal is to get an e-price that gives them sharply higher profits per unit with far less investment--and isn't that every capitalist's dream?  It's a shame that Auletta feels the need to dress that up as some kind of salvation of literature, though.

E.J. Dionne has a good column in the Washington Post today (4/19/10) looking at the Tea Party movement, and pinning a fair amount of blame on the press: "The news media's incessant focus on the Tea Party is creating a badly distorted picture of what most Americans think and is warping our policy debates." Looking at the most recent poll of Tea Party supporters, Dionne concludes that racism is clearly a factor in motivating many of these activists.

And he makes this point:

This must be the first "populist" movement driven by a television network: Sixty-three percent of the Tea Party folks say they most watch Fox News "for information about politics and current events," compared with 23 percent of the country as a whole.

The right-wing fifth of America deserves news coverage like everyone else, and Fox is perfectly free to pander to its viewers. What makes no sense is allowing a sliver of opinion to dominate the media and distort our political discourse.

I find it very peculiar that the New York Times can publish an editorial observer piece about unheeded warnings--"Cassandra, the Ignored Prophet of Doom, Is a Woman for Our Times," by Adam Cohen (4/19/10)--without once mentioning climate change.

The piece cites various foretold disasters--Bernie Madoff, sexual abuse by priests, the financial meltdown, September 11, New Orleans--without mentioning the looming catastrophe whose impact seems likely to eclipse all of these. (One of China's top economic planners recently predicted that the economic disruption caused by global warming "would be equivalent to that of the two world wars and the Great Depression combined.") Cohen does mention Al Gore as the originator of the phrase "inconvenient truth," but recalling which truth Gore was referring to is left as an exercise for the reader.

But perhaps this omission is not so strange, considering that more than half of the paper's science writers are reportedly doubters when it comes to climate change (FAIR Blog, 3/17/10).  That would explain why the Times put stories questioning climate scientists on the front page (11/21/09) while relegating reports clearing them of the charges against them to brief items in the back pages (3/31/10, 4/15/10).  Maybe in this instance, the Times believes, Cassandra happens to be wrong.

The New York Times had an odd correction today (4/16/10):

A picture caption on Thursday with the continuation of a news analysis article about a shift in the Obama administration’s Middle East policy referred incorrectly to Ramat Shlomo, the name of a Jewish housing development that Israel says it is expanding despite objections by the United States and the Palestinian Authority. It is a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, not a settlement in the West Bank.

Ramat Shlomo is, in fact, in the West Bank, defined as that part of the Palestine Mandate that was controlled by Jordan from 1948-1967 and occupied by Israel since the '67 war. East Jerusalem is that part of the West Bank that Israel claims sovereignty over--a claim that is not recognized by the rest of the world, except, apparently, the New York Times.

The word "neighborhood" is a euphemism promoted by the Israeli government to foster the impression that it is normal and proper for a country to move its citizens onto territory captured in war. In fact, this is contrary to international law. The regular term for these illegal communities is "colonies"; in the Occupied Territories, they are usually referred to as "settlements," which was originally a euphemism but no longer functions as such because it has become too associated with the ugly reality.

So to say that Ramat Shlomo is a West Bank settlement is perfectly correct.  It is, however, politically incorrect to say so at the New York Times.

Andrew Tyndall makes a good point about how the network newcasts covered the Upper Big Branch mining disaster (flagged by Liz Cox Barrett at CJR):

Not once, in all five days of coverage, did a single reporter mention the organization that has worked hardest over the decades to make sure that mining management does not cut safety corners and that miners can monitor their own working conditions with impunity. The union went unmentioned, as did the fact that the Upper Big Branch workforce went unorganized.

Rush Limbaugh, for his part, did mention the miners union--to bash the non-existent union at Massey (Think Progress, 4/13/10):

Where was the union? The union is generally holding these companies up demanding all kinds of safety. Why were these miners continuing to work in what apparently was an unsafe atmosphere?

Alerted to the fact that Massey was, in fact, famously anti-union, and had busted the union at the Upper Big Branch mine, Limbaugh tried to find a way to save himself (4/15/10):

So I checked the e-mail during the break and a bunch of people say: "Hey, Rush, there was no union at that mine. At that Massey mine there was no union. Blankenship kept the union out of there.  You can't blame the union for it."  The left are trying to blame the Massey disaster on its union-busting, in fact.  But: "In 2009 the National Labor Relations Board agreed with a decision that Massey Energy rehire 85 coal miners who said they had been discriminated against because they were union members."  So there were union workers there, and so the United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety.... You people, it's been 21 years.  At some point you are going to learn: If you go up against me on a challenge of fact, you are going to be wrong.  It's just that simple.

Is it really that simple? Workers who belong to a union getting their jobs back at a non-union mine is not at all the same as workers having the protection of a union contract. But one of the remarkable things about Limbaugh is that even his most logically tenuous claims may be built on a foundation of make-believe. As UMWA president Cecil Roberts pointed out in the AFL-CIO blog (4/16/10):

Yesterday, Rush said on his program, "But in 2009, the [NLRB] agreed with the decision that Massey Energy rehire 85 coal miners who said they had been discriminated against because they were union members. So there were union workers there. So the United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety, the United Mine Workers of America."

Wrong again, Rush. The decision you refer to was AT ANOTHER MINE! And Massey is appealing that decision, meaning the workers who were discriminated against at the Cannelton mine (in another county from the Upper Big Branch mine) have yet to reclaim their rightful jobs as the NLRB ordered.

Those are the facts. Who's wrong now, Rush?

Continuing in the fine media tradition of treating dead civilians mostly as a problem for the people who kill them, USA Today offers readers this (4/16/10):

Deaths of Afghan Civilians Double

Accidental killings hurt NATO effort

By Paul Wiseman
USA TODAY

KABUL — Deaths of Afghan civilians by NATO troops have more than doubled this year, NATO statistics show, jeopardizing a U.S. campaign to win over the local population by protecting them against insurgent attacks.

From his Web column today (4/16/10):

After initially dismissing the tea types as an unimportant sideshow, the media are drinking deeply from that particular cup, especially with today being Tax Day and all.

If by "dismissing" Kurtz means "featuring on the network evening newscasts," he might have a point--since that's how last year's Tea Party Tax Day protests were actually covered.

But Kurtz has always had weird ideas about how much coverage the Tea Party events should receive. A year ago he criticized several newspapers for not devoting enough coverage to the protests--though the actual protests, uhh, hadn't happened yet: "The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4.... The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today."

Update: Amy Gardner and Michael Ruane have a news report  in the Washington Post today (4/16/10) on the Tea Party protests that would seem to meet even Howard Kurtz's standard for boosterism, particularly with this passage:

The showing, while smaller than the crowds that gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, made clear that the ire and energy that have defined the tea party movement since it became a force last summer have not abated.

Funny, you would think that smaller crowds would be a sign that the "ire and energy" of the Tea Party movement have abated.  Isn't that what "abated" means?

The New York Times' Jackie Calmes has a report today (4/15/10) about the brewing fight over the Bush tax cuts, which were passed for limited time period and will phase out if Congress does not pass legislation to extend them. The Obama White House will ask lawmakers to renew most of the tax cuts, but let those for wealthy taxpayers expire. This obviously does not sit well with Republicans, and they have a plan, which the Times describes in the third paragraph of the story:

For all of the talk from President Obama and his party of ending the Bush tax cuts, letting that happen could be harder for some Democratic lawmakers from Republican-leaning districts or states. Republicans already are reviving what has sometimes proven an effective, if disputed, argument in the past: that rich taxpayers include many small businesses whose owners pay income taxes as individuals.

So Republicans will say that small business will be hurt if the tax cuts expire as the law stipulates. This argument is "disputed." How, and by whom? Well, if you want to know that, you have to read all the way to the final two paragraphs of the article (emphasis added):

 Democrats express confidence that Republicans will not kill a bill that benefits most Americans. But some worry that Republicans could delay action by pressing the argument that it would increase taxes for small businesses, discomfiting Democrats with re-election troubles and requiring some Republican votes for a supermajority.

Already Democrats are countering that most small businesses would not be affected; government data show that 97 percent of individual tax returns with business income would not be hit by the top rates. But, some Democrats acknowledge, the Republicans’ argument has proven politically potent in the past.

So now, after reading to the very end of the article, we know the answer--that this GOP talking point is bogus. Why not put that at the top, where the claim about hurting small businesses actually appears?

The reason these arguments are "politically potent" might have something to do with the media's reticence to call them what they are.

Andrew Breitbart is the right-wing Internet provocateur behind the ACORN video hoaxes, which purported to show a pretend pimp-and-prostitute duo getting criminal advice from the community organizing group ACORN. That's not what happened, but Breitbart's inaccurate presentation was taken at face value.

Yet some in the media are still treating Breitbart seriously. Washington Post ombud Andrew Alexander wrote a column on April 11 taking his cue from Breitbart's latest effort, which is to attempt to cast doubt on the widely reported racist incidents at Tea Party protests at the Capitol on March 20, the day of the final health reform vote. Two black Democratic representatives--Andre Carson and John Lewis--say they were called "nigger." Breitbart says they're liars--it never happened. And he's posted videos of the protests with no audible racist invective.

There's just one problem; as Associated Press reporter Jesse Washington pointed out (4/13/10), the videos Breitbart is touting were shot after the incidents took place.

So a guy who pulled off one very successful media hoax is trying to pull off another one. You'd think that after being burned on the ACORN story, journalists wouldn't pay much attention to Breitbart. But not Andrew Alexander, who closed his column noting that Breitbart's efforts

may be publicity-seeking theater. But it's part of widespread conservative claims that mainstream media, including the Post, swallowed a huge fabrication. The incidents are weeks old, but it's worth assigning Post reporters to find the truth. After all, a civil rights legend is being called a liar.

There are lots of things reporters should be looking into. This is not one of them. Especially considering that the guy leading this campaign pulled off a "huge fabrication" of his own--which was "swallowed" whole by outlets like the Washington Post. Alexander's right that Lewis, a civil rights legend, is being called a liar. But the charge is coming from a liar. If Alexander is truly concerned that his paper has published fabrications, he could start by calling for an investigation of the paper's coverage of Breitbart's ACORN hoax-- especially since Alexander criticized the Post for not covering the ACORN story enough.

Last week the Drudge Report flagged an Associated Press report (4/5/10) by Stephen Ohlemacher with the headline: "Rob Thy Neighbor: Half of American Households Pay No Fed Income Tax."

The piece in question said more or less the same, making it a popular item for right-wing pundits eager to pounce on tax freeloaders. But the AP article was problematic right from the start: "Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it's simply somebody else's problem."

Ohlemacher later elaborated:

The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners--households making an average of $366,400 in 2006--paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

The piece leaves out some crucial context--namely, how the wealthy have fared in recent years. If you're going to point out that they're carrying much of the income tax burden, you might want to note that could have something to do with how much they're earning.

New York Times business columnist David Leonhardt (4/14/10) writes a valuable corrective to this today, pointing this out:

Over the last 30 years, rates have fallen more for the wealthy, and especially the very wealthy, than for any other group. At the same time, their incomes have soared, and the incomes of most workers have grown only moderately faster than inflation.

So a much greater share of income is now concentrated at the top of distribution, while each dollar there is taxed less than it once was.

The headline figure touted by AP and Drudge--that 47 percent pay no federal income tax--is a "distraction," writes Leonhardt. And while it might be true when it comes to income taxes, it misses the point when it comes to the overall tax burden:

Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.

Fox News host Glenn Beck (4/13/10) came out against Social Security yesterday:

Have you ever wondered why we even have Social Security? It's not an American idea. It's first from Germany in the late 1800s. Hmmm, lets see, who else was prominent in Germany at that time...Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is where the first progressive ideas came from, and when those ideas floated across the Atlantic, they took America off course.... The progressive wave of European social insurance infected America and this is the result of it. This is European thinking, not American.

Now, factchecking Glenn Beck is a bit like telling Jackson Pollack to color within the lines, but it's worth pointing out, as Matthew Yglesias (4/8/10) noted, that Nietzsche was not only not a progressive, he actually comes across as someone who today might be a Glenn Beck fan:

Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. For it desires an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community.

But more interesting than Beck's forays into 19th century German philosophy are his attempts to whip up some resentment among his audience toward high-living grandmothers:

When FDR signed that Social Security bill, it wasn't designed to subsidize a cushy retirement, so seniors could jet set all across the globe on vacations. Social Security was meant as insurance....  In1930 life expectancy was only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65! You weren't even expected to ever get the benefits. Today life expectancy is 75 years for men, 80 years for women, and too many people rely and count on Social Security funding their weekly shuffleboard tournaments. You should have saved!

The odd thing about this is that Beck's audience, as with cable news in general, is pretty old--in a typical recent week, roughly 72 percent of his audience was 54 or older (assuming he doesn't have a lot of under-18 fans).  You have to wonder--how do they feel being painted as a bunch of freeloaders, currently or in the near future?

Beck may be falling into the trap of assuming that his followers have the same ideology that he does. He may oppose government social programs in general because he thinks such programs aren't "American"--but there's a large number of white Americans who oppose welfare programs because they are perceived as mainly benefiting black people, at the same time that they support social insurance programs like Social Security because they are seen as helping white people. One suspects that such people make up a significant percentage of Beck's biggest fans.

Veteran corporate journalists tend to dismiss the Internet age for delivering news with a point of view. In the good old days, you received a broad array of information from a broad array of guests. But nowadays you only read or watch things that conform to your political point of view.

It's not clear that this is even true, but it's pretty unconvincing coming from the likes of former Nightline host Ted Koppel (via TVNewser, 4/13/10).

In response to a question from anchor Katty Kay about a new Pew Research survey--in which 64 percent of broadcast news executives believe the biz is heading in the wrong direction--Koppel said: "I think it's even worse. I think it's a disaster."

"I think we're living through the--I hope--the final stages of what I like to call the age of entitlement.... We now feel entitled not to have the news that we need but the news that we want. We want to listen to news that comes from those who already sympathize with our particular point of view. We don't want the facts any more."

FAIR's landmark study of Nightline found a striking bias towards elite, right-leaning guests: The four most frequent guests were Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Elliott Abrams and Jerry Falwell. Guests were overwhelmingly white and male; few represented public interest groups or were critics of U.S. policy.

(Koppel once boasted of Kissinger: "Henry Kissinger is, plain and simply, the best secretary of state we have had in 20, maybe 30 years.... I'm proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger. He is an extraordinary man. This country has lost a lot by not having him in a position of influence and authority.")

In a seven-week stretch in early 1995, Koppel spent almost half his airtime discussing the O.J. Simpson trial. During the turbulent protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, Koppel's program chose to skip the news entirely.

Koppel should, of course, feel free to lecture about the decline of journalism and the problems inherent in having multiple sources of information coming from different perspectives available in the world. But it's worth remembering that, back in the good old days, Koppel wasn't doing much to bring a broad public debate to the national airwaves... unless you're a big fan of Henry Kissinger.

Front-page headline in the New York Times today (4/13/10):

Civilians Killed as U.S. Troops Hit Afghan Bus

The paper seems to have a real problem with writing a headline that informs readers in a straightforward way that the United States kills civilians.