In his stint as interim host of ABC's This Week, Jake Tapper has arranged for the fact-checkers at Politifact to review what the guests say on the ABC Sunday morning show. An idea worth applauding, it came to Tapper via NYU's Jay Rosen. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz asked NBC Meet the Press anchor David Gregory if he'd consider a similar arrangement for his show:

An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."

While FAIR Blog complained earlier (3/30/10) that coverage of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal was overlooking Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's involvement in the story before he became Pope Benedict XVI, yesterday two prominent op-eds focused on this history. Unfortunately, both op-eds present a highly selective version of Ratzinger's role.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (4/12/10) cites the reporting of Jason Berry (National Catholic Reporter, 4/6/10), who is critical of Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, for his support of Marcial Maciel Degollado, a child molester who founded the influential Legion of Christ:

Only one churchman comes out of Berry's story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger. Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money 'for his charitable use.' The cardinal 'was tough as nails in a very cordial way,' a witness said, and turned the money down.... It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.

The Maciel case was similarly cited in a USA Today op-ed (4/12/10) by Philip Lawler, editor of the Catholic World News (and former Senate candidate of the far-right Constitution Party), as evidence of Ratzinger's integrity: "Soon after his election, he instigated action against another notorious abuser: the head of a wealthy and influential religious order."

You wouldn't think from reading these testimonials that Ratzinger was first informed about Maciel's pattern of abuse in 1994, at which time the cardinal reportedly said that the Maciel case was a "touchy problem" due to the "benefits" the priest had brought to the Vatican. (The future pope was later quoted, "One can't put on trial such a close friend of the pope as Marcial Maciel.") Nor would you imagine that Ratzinger's secretary had written in 1999 to the men who had brought detailed charges against Maciel to say that the case against the cleric was considered closed (London Observer, 4/24/05). These details put Benedict's discipline of the then-86-year-old Maciel in 2006 in a less-heroic light.

Both writers also present Ratzinger's centralization of sexual abuse investigations under his office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as evidence for his zeal to persecute child abusers in the church. "It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office," Douthat wrote, while Lawler noted, "In 2001, at Cardinal Ratzinger's urging, all disciplinary cases involving sexual abuse by Catholic priests were assigned to the Vatican office he then headed."

Unmentioned was the controversy over the letter Ratzinger wrote in 2001 threatening to excommunicate any bishop who discussed abuse cases outside of the church's legal system (Extra!, 7-8/08; FAIR Media Advisory, 5/13/08). Ratzinger's 2002 assertion that the scandal amounted to a persecution of the church--"I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign" (Zenit, 12/3/02)--was not quoted.

Both Douthat and Lawler are surprisingly critical of Pope John Paul II, long a hero to conservative Catholics, for protecting prominent pedophiles. This criticism would come across as more sincere if the record of the current head of the church were subjected to the same scrutiny.

The evidence Newsweek presents to back up the heading of a recent Web article--"Priests Commit No More Abuse Than Other Males" (4/8/10)--is remarkably unpersuasive.

Here's the main argument offered by reporter Pat Wingert:

The only hard data that has been made public by any denomination comes from John Jay College's study of Catholic priests, which was authorized and is being paid for by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops following the public outcry over the 2002 scandals. Limiting their study to plausible accusations made between 1950 and 1992, John Jay researchers reported that about 4 percent of the 110,000 priests active during those years had been accused of sexual misconduct involving children. Specifically, 4,392 complaints (ranging from "sexual talk" to rape) were made against priests by 10,667 victims....

Experts disagree on the rate of sexual abuse among the general American male population, but [National Center for Missing and Exploited Children president Ernie] Allen says a conservative estimate is one in 10. Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says her review of the numbers indicates it's closer to one in 5. But in either case, the rate of abuse by Catholic priests is not higher than these national estimates.... Even those numbers may be low; research suggests that only a third of abuse cases are ever reported (making it the most underreported crime).

So a study funded by the Catholic bishops found that there had been "plausible accusations" against 4 percent of priests active between 1950 and 1992.  That end date is convenient: Wingert notes later, by way of trying to explain why priests seem to molest more kids than they actually do, that two-thirds of complaints against priests have been made since 1992.  So a study that included all "plausible accusations" against priests since 1950 would likely produce a figure closer to 12 percent than 4 percent.

Wingert then compares this to estimates--including one by the person who did the bishop-funded study, though the reporter doesn't note this--that 10 to 20 percent of all U.S. males have sexually abused children. Regardless of how credible these figures seem, they're clearly not directly comparable to the John Jay number; there certainly have not been "plausible accusations" of pedophilia against 12 million to 24 million living American men. (Though Wingert seems to think that there might have been, writing that the 20 percent  figure "may be low" because "only a third of abuse cases are ever reported."  So 60 percent of  U.S. males may be secretly engaging in child sex abuse?)

For a more comparable figure, there were 60,749 perpetrators of child sexual abuse identified by the federal National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System in 2008; assuming these were all adult males, that works out to a rate of about 0.05 percent for that group. Now, that's one year, not 42, but even if there were no recidivism at all, it's still clear that the priests in the John Jay study were accused of molesting children at a considerably higher rate than that--and that's a study that leaves out the bulk of such accusations.

As yet another study is released documenting the damaging health effects of breathing in toxic Ground Zero dust, it's good to see corporate media outlets taking it seriously. (Most media outlets, anyway--the New York Post continues to give a platform to deniers.)

It's worth remembering, though--since they won't remind you--that for many months after 9/11, some outlets--the New York Times in particular--downplayed the fallout and mustered shockingly little journalistic skepticism of government reassurances about safety.

The attitude of Andrew Revkin, the Times' environmental reporter at the time, says it all. As I wrote in 2006:

The Times' Revkin told American Journalism Review (1–2/03), "We were, I think, bending over backwards to be sure we were reporting a risk only if we knew it, whereas others, I feel rather strongly, were flipping it the other way." Revkin cited the Daily News as an example. When asked how he thought the 9/11 health story would end, Revkin told AJR, "I think it's going to fade away."

Instead of acting as the watchdog it's supposed to be, the New York Times reinforced misleading government claims that directly impacted the lives and health of thousands of New Yorkers. It's an important history that you won't hear about from the Times, which has never acknowledged or apologized for its reporting.

You can read that history in my article, "Gullibility Begins at Home: NYT Accepted False Reassurances on Ground Zero Safety" (Extra!, 11-12/06).

The Washington Post (4/8/10) continues its crusade against Social Security (Action Alert, 1/6/10; FAIR Blog, 5/15/09, 5/13/09,  4/1/09) in a front-page news story by Neil Irwin and Lori Montgomery:

Social Security is already draining resources from the broader federal budget, as spending on benefits has risen above this year's Social Security tax collections. While that gap is expected to be fleeting, the program, the largest single item in the federal budget, is projected to require sustained support within the next 10 years.

If you are a retiree under the age of roughly 90, then you paid extra Social Security taxes--cumulatively amounting to trillions of dollars-- precisely so that the Treasury would be giving money back to the system during your retirement, thus keeping the system in the black. The Treasury is "supporting" Social Security in precisely the same way that your friend is "supporting" you when he pays back that money he borrowed from you.

New York Times media reporter David Carr wrote the other day (4/5/10) about Sarah Palin's wide-ranging appeal:

Ms. Palin still gets a session in the media spanking machine every time she does anything, but the disapproval seems to further cement the support of her loyalists. Ms. Palin may or may not be qualified to represent America around the world, but she certainly represents vast swaths of the American public and has a lucrative new career to show for it.

If we don’t see why, then maybe we deserve the "lamestream media" label she likes to give us.

Mark Halperin of Time (3/29/10) expressed a similar hurts-so-good enthusiasm for Palin's attacks on the press:

Quippy and tart, she mocked the "lamestream media," and offered her usual punch of charm and charisma, something the public and the press have hungered for since she mostly limited her exposure to Facebook updates, Twitter tweets and calculated appearances on Fox News, her new employer.

Indeed, by carefully controlling her own visibility--and refusing to be challenged or held accountable by adversaries or the press--she has become even more irresistible as programming and copy.

There are few, if any, political figures who are treated this way by corporate media. She launches regular attacks on them, almost entirely without merit, and their response is, "Huh, she must be on to something there." There is no way one could imagine a figure on the left being treated this way. When Dennis Kucinich chided Koppel in a presidential debate for asking silly questions, ABC's response was to stop covering his campaign (Action Alert, 12/11/03). When Stephen Colbert nailed the press for its pro-Bush reporting, they sneered at him (Extra! Update, 6/06).

As for Sarah Palin's "appeal," her rating in the latest Washington Post poll (3/23-26/10) is 37 percent favorable, vs. 55 percent unfavorable.

Hillary Clinton's latest poll figures (AP-GfK, 3/3-8/10), by contrast, are 66 percent favorable, 31 percent unfavorable.

When's the last time you heard corporate media claiming that Clinton "certainly represents vast swaths of the American public"?

New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner has a piece today (4/7/10) headlined "Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance," which attempts to show that there is a new move away from armed resistance to Israeli occupation. You get that message pretty clearly from Bronner's language: He calls it a "new approach" and argues, "Nonviolence has never caught on here."

That's not so; if anything, Palestinian nonviolence just hasn't caught on at the New York Times. As Patrick O'Connor wrote in 2005:

Over the last three years the New York Times has published only three feature articles on Palestinian nonviolent resistance. This despite the fact that Palestinians have conducted hundreds of nonviolent protests over the last three years throughout the West Bank against Israel's construction of the Wall on Palestinian land, and despite the fact that the Israeli army killed nine Palestinian protesters, wounded several thousand protesters, harassed and collectively punished villages that protested, and arrested hundreds of protesters, including nonviolent protest leaders.

More recently (1/28/10),  Edith Garwood at Amnesty International criticized Barack Obama, musician Bono and Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for saying that Palestinians need to find their MLK/Gandhi--ignoring the fact that Palestinians nonviolently resist every single day, and such actions have roots that go back to the 1900s:

Complicit too is the media's noncoverage of nonviolent direct actions and damaging comments by someone of Bono's stature that completely ignores the vital nonviolent struggle and committed activists.

Palestinian leaders like Ghassan Andoni, Mustapha Barghouti,  Jamal Juma’, Abdallah Abu Rahme, Mohammed Othman and Jean Zaru , among others, continue to speak publicly and organize direct actions to nonviolently protest injustices.

FAIR has a new action alert out about the New York Times' snubbing the U.S. Senate candidate Jonathan Tasini. While the paper has given intensive coverage to numerous New Yorkers who thought about challenging appointed incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand--but in the end decided not to run--the Times has ignored Gillibrand's most prominent actual rival in the Democratic primary, aside from one rather snarky profile that appeared in January. Click here to send a message to the Times--which you can post a copy of in the comments thread below.

Like Andrew Malcolm (FAIR Blog, 4/6/10), Bill O'Reilly (O'Reilly Factor, 4/5/10) has a bone to pick with how the "left-wing media" have representing the Tea Party movement.

First, he complained, "Tea Party folks were labeled stupid, too dumb to understand complicated issues." Then the media said that "many Tea Party people are racist and far-right cranks."

O'Reilly then refuted these charges by citing a poll that suggested that "the majority of Tea Party supporters in America are not Republicans."

If I were a Republican, I'd be offended.

Right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg leads his column today (USA Today, 4/6/10):

Congratulations! This is your last week working for the man--at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that by Friday, Americans will have spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their taxes. If Democrats have their way, Tax Freedom Day will keep getting later and later.

Every year there are journalists swallow this line--and every year, the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities points out that the Tax Foundation's study has serious methodological flaws.  Most  importantly, the group points out that even the Tax Foundation doesn't claim that it's showing how far into the year the typical American must work in order to pay their taxes. As CBPP's report this year puts it:

The Tax Foundation itself acknowledges this issue in a methodology paper accompanying its report, pointing out that its estimates reflect the “average tax burden for the economy as a whole, rather than for specific subgroups of taxpayers.” Journalists and others who report on "Tax Freedom Day" as if it represented the day until which the typical or average American must work to pay his or her taxes are misinterpreting these figures and inadvertently fostering misimpressions about the level of taxes most Americans pay.

Is the Tea Party movement actually more politically diverse than the "liberal media" would have you believe?  Andrew Malcolm, a blogger for the L.A. Times who used to be Laura Bush's press secretary, thinks so. He wrote yesterday (4/5/10) about a pair of polls that came out about the Tea Party movement:

For upwards of 12 months now members of the so-called Tea Party protest movement have been stereotyped, derogated and often dismissed by some politicians and media outlets.

They've been portrayed variously as angry fringe elements, often inarticulate, potentially violent and merely Republicans in sheep's clothing or disgruntled pockets of conservatives blindly lashing out at a left-handed President Obama....

Alas for stereotypes, they're convenient, often catchy. But not necessarily true.

Now, comes a pair of polls, including Gallup, that paint a revealing detailed portrait of Tea Party supporters in most ways as pretty average Americans.

Oddly, though, the polls cited by Malcolm don't say anything about whether the Tea Party activists are angry, inarticulate or violent--or whether they're motivated by racial resentment, which is another criticism frequently leveled at the movement. Instead, the polls mostly provide basic demographic information that is largely irrelevant to the "stereotypes" Malcolm cites about the Tea Party movement.

The polls do give some information about partisan and ideological identification--and on these measures Malcolm's account is quite misleading.   He cites a survey by the Winston Group, a Republican polling firm, that found that 17 percent of Tea Party supporters identify as Democrats as an indication that the movement has a "bipartisan breakdown"--and are therefore the "commonsense Americans" they are portrayed to be by Sarah Palin.  But at 17 percent percent, the Tea Parties would have about half as many Democrats as in the general population--and at 57 percent Republican, it would have more than twice as many Republicans.  That's actually not very "bipartisan."

And while the one poll got 17 percent Democrats, the other poll, by Gallup, found the Tea Party base was only 8 percent Democratic--one-quarter of the party's proportion in the general population.  That's less than the 12 percent of Tea Party supporters who told Gallup they support the new healthcare law--a proportion Gallup calls "a uniformly negative reaction."

As for ideology, both polls show Tea Party supporters are much more likely to describe themselves as "conservative" and much less likely to identify as "liberal" than Americans as a whole.

Most of these distortions can be laid at Malcolm's feet, but there's one misrepresentation of the polling data that Gallup has to be held responsible for. Malcolm accurately quotes Gallup's Lydia Saad as saying that "Tea Partiers are quite representative of the public at large" in terms of "race," among other demographic qualities.  But Gallup's chart indicates that 6 percent of  Tea Party supporters identified as non-Hispanic blacks--versus 11 percent for respondents in general.  Would a group that was 28 percent female be considered "quite representative of the public at large" in terms of gender? That's the claim that Gallup is making about the Tea Party movement and race.

(For more on these Tea Party polls, see Political Animal, 4/5/10, and Plum Line, 4/5/10.)

A short New York Times piece by Ian Urbina (4/2/10) serves as an update of sorts on the future of community organizing group ACORN, which says it will continue to have a national presence. Urbina includes this description of the now-infamous right-wing video hoax that did much of the damage to the group:

ACORN has faced a drastic drop in federal money and foundation support after a video sting was publicized last fall. In at least one of the undercover videos, ACORN employees were shown advising a young conservative activist, who posed as a prostitute, how to conceal her criminal activities in the course of trying to buy a house.

It's worth noting how far the Times is from where it started on this story; see the list below, culled from FAIR's March 11 alert.

No matter what, a story about ACORN seems to require an over-the-top accusation from a right-wing figure. In this case it's Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), who says that state offices that have severed ties to ACORN "are like career criminals who adopt aliases without changing their criminal lifestyles." As a reader pointed out to the Times, Issa seems to have been convicted of more crimes--in the form of a misdemeanor gun-possession charge (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/2/03)--than ACORN has.

You would think that reporters would be wary of letting right-wing sources spin them on ACORN--that's how the Times got into trouble in the first place. Remember, the Times used to tell readers that ACORN workers eagerly helped the undercover activists devise their criminal schemes:

--(9/16/09)

"...amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and a pimp and recorded on hidden cameras in visits to ACORN offices.... Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful about the success of the tactics in exposing ACORN workers, who appeared to blithely encourage prostitution and tax evasion."

Videomaker James O'Keefe "was dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risque high school play. But in the footage made public--initially by a new website, BigGovernment.com--ACORN employees raised no objections to the criminal plans. Instead, they eagerly counseled the couple on how to hide their activities from the authorities, avoid taxes and make the brothel scheme work."

-- (9/19/09)

"Their travels in the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of ACORN, the national community organizing group, caught its low-level employees in five cities sounding eager to assist with tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution."

-- (9/27/09)
"a video sting had caught ACORN workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes."

-- (10/4/09)
"To recap: Two conservative activists with a concealed video camera, posing as a prostitute and her pimp, visited offices of ACORN, the community organizing group, and lured employees into bizarre conversations about how to establish a bordello, cheat on taxes and smuggle in underage girls from Central America."

-- (1/28/10)
"Mr. O'Keefe is a conservative activist who gained fame last year by posing as a pimp and secretly recording members of the community group ACORN giving him advice on how to set up a brothel."

-- (1/31/10)
"Mr. O'Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group ACORN--eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become ACORN's undoing.

NPR ombud Alicia Shepard has posted an article (4/2/10) headlined "Where Are the Women?,"  a summary of a study of the gender diversity of high-profile NPR programs.

The most important findings:

With the aid of NPR librarian Hannah Sommers, we compiled a list of regular commentators, who are not NPR employees but are paid to appear on air. There are 12 outside commentators who appeared at least 20 times in the last 15 months. The only woman is former NPR staffer, Cokie Roberts (51 times), who is on ME [Morning Edition] most Mondays talking politics.

And:

We also looked at the number of people from outside NPR who were interviewed by NPR news shows, or whose voices appeared in reporters' stories. For this analysis, we examined 104 shows, using a "constructed week" sampling technique from April 13, 2009 to January 9, 2010.

Those figures are equally discouraging.

NPR listeners heard 2,502 male sources and 877 female sources on the shows we sampled. In other words, only 26 percent of the 3,379 voices were female, while 74 percent were male.

Shepard pointed out that women are much more prominent as reporters and hosts on NPR--close to 50-50.

The findings about NPR sources reflect only a slight improvement over the gender imbalance documented in previous FAIR studies of NPR programming: A study looking at shows from 1991 (Extra!, 4-5/93; press release, 3/29/93) found only 19 percent female sources, while a study of 2003 sources (Extra!, 5-6/04) turned up 21 percent. In terms of commentators, NPR might have been doing slightly better in 1991, when four of 27 commentators featured more than once were women.

Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep expresses his problems with the survey; he calls it "unsatisfying," though the same could be said for his criticism. He suggests, without offering evidence, that NPR's lengthier in-studio interviews are more often with female guests; when public broadcasters have offered similar rationalizations in response to FAIR criticism in the past, such objections haven't held up (Activism Update, 10/18/06).

The upshot is that NPR says it's trying hard to make improvements in this area, and they'll try even harder. But given the fact that 11 of the top 12 commentators on NPR are men, and that the only woman is Cokie Roberts, it looks like they're not trying hard enough. Kudos to Shepard for doing this work.

The New York Times has a web headline today (4/5/10): "U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women."

The story explains that the "role" the U.S. played in the killing of the three women was that it killed them.

When this story first broke, NATO officials denied the killings, and tried to blame the murders on others. The Times story includes this gruesome detail:  "Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide the true nature of their deaths."

As is often the case, the piece includes discussion of the political problems for the U.S.:

The disclosure could not come at a worse moment for the American military: NATO officials are struggling to contain fallout from a series of tirades against the foreign military presence by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has also railed against the killing of civilians by Western forces.

Reporter Jerome Starkey of the Times of London had written about this incident for the Nieman Watchdog on March 22, explaining how his own investigation (3/13/10) suggested a NATO cover-up. Starkey's Nieman piece criticized the self-censorship in Afghanistan--and the fact that writing critically can get you in trouble with military handlers:

I was thrown off a trip with the Marines Special Operations Command troops (MarSOC) last year when they realized I had written a story many months earlier linking their colleagues to three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents.

The platoon commander boasted that his Special Forces were "a fusion of weapons and intelligence." Two hours later he asked me what my name was. Then he booked me on the next flight out. At least we know the weapons work.

He adds: "NATO lies and unless we check them, they get away with it. If we check them, they attack us. It's unpleasant but important."

Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann made two false claims about healthcare on CBS's Face the Nation last Sunday that went unchallenged by host Bob Schieffer. CBS did, however, post an article on their website challenging her claims. FAIR has a new action alert encouraging Face the Nation to debunk Bachmann's lies on its upcoming April 4 broadcast. Read the alert here and post your letters to CBS below.