David Brooks (New York Times, 5/28/10) informs us that the idea that "government should have more control over industry" is one of the "predictably partisan and often puerile" reactions to the oil spill.  The lesson that smart people derive from the spill, Brooks says, is "that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand."

What follows is, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out (5/28/10), largely cribbed from a 1996 New Yorker essay by Malcolm Gladwell (1/22/96) that argued that "accidents are not easily preventable" because of various psychological pitfalls that humans are prone to--e.g., in Brooks' paraphrase, "people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters," and "people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices."

In other words, it's all very complicated, and what we need to do is work on "helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity" so we can "improve the choice architecture."

But is the story really all that complicated?  The New York Times had a story in yesterday's paper (5/27/10), headlined "BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast," about how the oil company chose to use a cheaper casing for the well, even though this could lead to a buildup of explosive gasses--as it seems did happen, leading to the catastrophic spillage in the Gulf.  Did BP make this decision because as human beings they have trouble understanding complexity?  Or did they make that choice because they are trying to pump oil as cheaply as possible so they can maximize their profits?

Of course, telling the story that way makes it sound like maybe you need to have some outside authority watching over companies engaged in dangerous activities to make sure their corner-cutting doesn't lead to disaster. And that would be partisan, and probably puerile.

Are Pakistanis more gullible than other people? That's what the New York Times would have you believe.  In a front page May 26 article, "U.S. Is a Top Villain in Pakistan's Conspiracy Talk," the Times reports that "Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan," where "the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan's collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here."

As a video sidebar that runs in the Web version of the Times article reports, "In most of the world these conspiracies are the stuff of fringe, but in Pakistan they make for mainstream television."

The Times notes some far-fetched allegations, including that the failed Times Square bombing suspect, Faisal Shezad, was a U.S. plant, but it also cites as conspiratorial a commentator who says that if the Times Square suspect were really trained by Al-Qaeda, he wouldn't have left his keys in the truck and the bomb would have actually worked. It's hard to see how that is a conspiracy theory, or even an unreasonable opinion.

But are Pakistanis more credulous than, say, Americans? Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald cites several instances of unfounded conspiracy theories  that were embraced by large numbers of Americans, including the 2003 poll that found 70 percent of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attacks.

But there's also the significant numbers of Americans who believe that Barack Obama is a Kenyan, a Muslim sleeper agent, a Communist sleeper agent, the Anti-Christ or some combination of these. And what of the many Americans--including some major media figures--who see global warming as a conspiracy hatched by the world's scientists?

There is one difference between the U.S. theories and their Pakistani counterparts. While there is  virtually no evidence for these U.S. allegations,  the Pakistani charges that "place the U.S. at center stage" are rooted, as the Times briefly mentions, in the U.S.'s imbalanced, largely secretive relationship with Pakistan, which includes the officially unacknowledged U.S. missile attacks in the country and the U.S.'s support for the former Pakistani dictatorship.

Moreover, the Times video sidebar closes with a clip of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's remarks about the Times Square bomb plot: "If, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we could trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences."

Of course, the Clinton threats undermine the Times' central theme that Pakistanis who see the U.S. as a menace to their country are all raving conspiracy nuts. Perhaps that's why they were relegated to the end of a video sidebar in the Web version of the story.

A troubling article from Newsweek (5/26/10) reports on efforts by both BP and government officials to limit media access to the aftermath of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials--working with BP--who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

Last week, a CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach. On Monday, Mother Jones published this firsthand account of one reporter’s repeated attempts to gain access to clean-up operations on oil-soaked beaches, and the telling response of local law enforcement. The latest instance of denied press access comes from Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Seaplane Inc., which was scheduled to take a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer for a flyover on Tuesday afternoon, and says it was denied permission once BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board.

It sounds like the crisis managers have learned the lessons of Gulf War and Iraq War media control only too well:

The problem, as many members of the press see it, is that even when access is granted, it’s done so under the strict oversight of BP and Coast Guard personnel. Reporters and photographers are escorted by BP officials on BP-contracted boats and aircraft. So the company is able to determine what reporters see and when they see it....

[AP photographer Gerald] Herbert accompanied local officials from Plaquemines Parish in a police boat on a trip to Breton Island, a national wildlife refuge off the barrier islands of Louisiana. With them was Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of Jacques, who wanted to study the impact of the oil below the surface of the water. Upon approaching the island, a Coast Guard boat stopped them. "The first question was, 'Is there any press with you?'" says Herbert. They answered yes, and the Coast Guard said they couldn’t be there. "I had to bite my tongue. That should have no bearing."

UPDATE: Date of article corrected.

Last week the Washington Post informed us that voters are "up in arms over the mounting federal debt"-- and thus politicians were being forced to scale back a new bill that would, among other things, extend unemployment benefits and send money to state governments facing serious budget shortfalls. This made little sense, since polls do not show public urgency about the debt or deficit; in fact, dealing with jobs is considered a much higher priority.

No matter. The Post has a piece today (5/27/10)--by the same reporter, Lori Montgomery--that begins, "Under fire from rank-and-file Democrats worried about the soaring national debt..." No such Democrats are quoted in the piece. Republican leader Mitch McConnell complains that, when it comes to the debt, "Democrats only seem interested in making it worse." Democrats Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid are said to believe the bill will pass, but do not believe they will muster much--if any--Republican support.

So the Post started by telling us that voters were "up in arms" over deficit spending. Now we're told that many Democrats feel the same way. In neither case does the Post give us much of a reason to believe this is true.

In a piece about European countries adopting austerity measures in response to the Greek financial crisis, the New York Times (5/26/10) acknowledges that some people think this is a terrible idea:

In most European capitals, the case for fiscal rectitude is now trumping fears that pulling away those props will hobble the fragile recovery. The voices opposing the budgetary turnaround come from unions and some opposition parties, like Labour in Britain and the Socialists in France, as well as some analysts.

"The euro area is adopting the wrong policy at the wrong moment and is thus making people suffer, which could lead to nationalistic reactions," said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a professor of economics....

But then comes the silver lining:

But other economists stressed that there was a way out.... In a recent research report on the euro area, economists at Deutsche Bank, led by Thomas Mayer, said that euro area countries "can learn some valuable lessons from the Baltics' experience over recent quarters." Those countries survived drastic budget consolidation without devaluing their currencies.

"Restoration of competitiveness and weighty fiscal consolidation in the absence of currency adjustment is difficult but doable," they said, "as long as politicians and the general public are willing to accept some upfront pain in return to longer-term gains."

What the Times doesn't say about the "valuable lessons from the Baltics' experience": Estonia's GDP has contracted by almost one-fifth, while Latvia's has shrunk by more than one-quarter. Both nations have unemployment now in the vicinity of 20 percent.

What about those "longer-term gains"? Well, Estonia--which is in considerably better shape than Latvia--is expected to have a lower standard of living in 2015 than it did in 2007 (Guardian, 4/28/10). The Times seems to have been so caught up in the excitement over the Baltic nations not devaluing their currency that it forgot to mention the horrendous human cost of this dubious accomplishment.

'

President Barack Obama does not like leaks coming out of his White House. Luckily, most of what is passed to reporters is not so damaging. Take this passage from the Washington Post (5/26/10):

Although senior administration officials have voiced growing disapproval of BP, the company operating the rig and responsible for the cleanup, the mission of the Friday trip is not to declare war on the firm, said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

Instead, the official said, the trip will demonstrate that Obama is "on top of it."

Anonymous White House officials are willing to speak candidly about the boss being "on top" of the BP disaster. Thank goodness the Post could grant anonymity to that brave soul, who risked his/her neck to deliver such valuable insight. Hopefully there are more scoops to come!

Thomas Friedman is upset in his New York Times column today (5/26/10) because Brazilian President Lula da Silva negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran.  Asks Friedman, "Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?" And he answers himself: "No, that's about as ugly as it gets."

Friedman quotes a source complaining that Iran had just executed "political prisoners who were tortured into confessions," but Lula "didn't mention a word about human rights."  Friedman presumably is aware that the U.S., too, has prisoners that it has tortured into confessions, and that it maintains the right to execute such captives.  Should Lula have said a word about those human rights issues as well, or would that just be an attempt to "tweak the U.S."?

Friedman has another expert who accuses Lula of "the thwarting of democracy across Latin America." Friedman's evidence: "He regularly praises Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator...while denouncing Colombia, one of the great democratic success stories, because it let U.S. planes use Colombian airfields to fight narco-traffickers."

"One of the great democratic success stories"?  Here's some excerpts from Amnesty International's latest annual report on Colombia's human rights record:

At least 296 people were extrajudicially executed by the security forces in the 12-month period ending in June 2008, compared to 287 in the previous 12-month period.... Paramilitaries continued to kill civilians and to commit other human rights violations, sometimes with the support or acquiescence of the security forces. Some 461 killings were attributed to paramilitaries in the 12-month period ending in June 2008, compared to 233 in the previous 12-month period.... At least 46 trade union members were killed in 2008, compared to 39 in 2007. Some 12 human rights defenders were killed in 2008, similar to the figure recorded in 2007.

Funny, most "democratic success stories" don't involve quite so much murdering of civilians. But then, most of them don't star a president whose brother helped organize death squads, as reported in the Washington Post on Monday (5/24/10).

So, to summarize Friedman, Lula should criticize the torture of prisoners by Iran--but presumably not by his fellow democrats in the United States. And he should promote democracy by praising  a government that continues to murder hundreds of civilians a year as a democratic success story.

No, it doesn't get much uglier than that.

Another development in the Obama administration's unprecedented efforts to criminalize the leaking of information to the press: Politico's Josh Gerstein (5/24/10) reports that a former FBI contractor was given a 20-month sentence for giving five classified documents to a blog.  The former contractor, Shamai Leibowitz, said he wanted to expose activity he believed was illegal. "This was a one-time mistake that happened to me when I worked at the FBI and saw things that I considered a violation of the law," he told the court as he received his sentence as part of a plea bargain.

Were, in fact, illegal activities going on at the FBI whose disclosure might benefit the public? It's not clear--including to the judge handing down the sentence, who did not review the classified documents.  "I don't know what was divulged, other than some documents," U.S. District Court Judge Alexander Williams Jr. declared, but he said "it had to be" a "very, very serious offense" because the Justice Department was initially seeking a 46-to-57-month sentence.

Judging the severity of a crime based on the degree of outrage of the prosecutor places an unwarranted trust in government authorities. Likewise, the assumption that everything the government declares to be a secret is properly so classified and therefore none of the public's business is a lot to take on faith.  Before sending an investigative reporter's source to prison, surely it's worth spending a few moments to determine what exactly they're being sent to prison for.

One of the most prevalent (and wrong-headed) interpretations of the recent elections is that both parties are dumping their respectable members in exchange for wild-eyed radicals. As Cokie Roberts explained it on ABC's  This Week (5/23/10):

COKIE ROBERTS: I'm not sure, Donna, that the voters this year care about somebody being out of the mainstream. I mean, the people they are choosing in these primaries are definitely people who are out of the mainstream, whether it's in Utah or whether it's in -- Arkansas is still out, up for grabs, but it looks like it's going toward the more liberal candidate in Arkansas.

JAKE TAPPER: That's the Bill Halter versus Blanche Lincoln race.

COKIE ROBERTS: Right. I mean, it is in state after state, it is not the mainstream candidate the voters are interested in.

Bill Halter is outside the mainstream? That might come as a surprise to, well, almost everyone. Ari Berman wrote a cover story for the Nation about Halter, pointing out that he's a deficit hawk opposed to cap-and-trade who is a little slippery on the Employee Free Choice Act.

As Berman put it post-election, in debunking this idea that both parties are catering to extremists:

Halter and Sestak are trying to pull Lincoln and Specter in line with the Democratic mainstream, which neither represents. Lincoln and Specter are enjoying Dem establishment support despite being ideologically to the right of mainstream Dem positions.

Their challengers are fueled by an energetic grassroots effort to let the Dem establishment know this isn't acceptable. The Tea Party brigade, by contrast, is pulling candidates to the right of mainstream Republicanism. Therein lies the difference.

The notion that moderate Democrats challenging conservative Democrats represents a threat to the mainstream says a lot about where Cokie Roberts is coming from--and reminds us that the media's general rule for Democrats is to move to the right.

In his May 23 column--"Moonshine or the Kids?"--New York Times columnist Nick Kristof has hit upon the "simplest option" for keeping poor African kids in school (and ending malaria): getting their fathers to stop drinking, smoking and whoring.

There's an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It's a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:

It's that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children's prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

Kristof gleans this from visiting some families in the Congo Republic in which, Kristof says, the fathers spend far more on alcohol than it would cost to send their kids to school or buy bed nets to protect them from malaria. He backs this evidence up with an MIT study that he links to, which he says shows

that the world's poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

That's right, the poorest of the world's children lack education and decent health to no small degree because their extravagant parents have their priorities in the wrong place. "That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous," Kristof writes. But "if we’re going to make more progress, and get kids like the Obamza children in school and under bed nets, we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths--and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution."

Actually, it does sound sanctimonious, haughty and callous--but more importantly, it's a seriously flawed argument. The study Kristof points to paints a different picture--one that doesn't back up the sweeping generalizations and conclusions he makes based on his anecdotal evidence.

First, it's bizarre that he mentions prostitution multiple times in his column, since the study doesn't actually mention it. (It doesn't seem to mention soft drinks, either.) As for the "extravagant" festivals, that plus other entertainment averages just a little over 2 percent--less than education spending.* I'd like to see what Kristof's entertainment budget looks like in comparison.

In fact, the study shows that in the 13 countries surveyed, the most "significant sums" the very poor spend are the 56 percent to 78 percent of their money that goes just toward food.

And how about education? Here Kristof cherry-picks and completely misrepresents the study data. Comparing overall average spending on education to particular countries' alcohol and tobacco spending is comparing apples to oranges. If you compare the overall averages, it's 2.7 percent on education (which most would call "about 3 percent," not "about 2 percent") versus 3.0 percent on alcohol and tobacco. Looking at particulars, those heavy-drinking and -smoking Indonesians Kristof highlights still spend more on education than their vices (6.3 percent vs. 6.0 percent), and the Mexicans in the study who spend 8.1 percent on alcohol and tobacco, come across looking much better when that's compared to how much they spend on education--6.9 percent--rather than the study-wide average, which is pretty much irrelevant.

Here's what the study says about spending on education: "The reason spending is low is that children in poor households typically attend public schools or other schools that do not charge a fee. In countries where poor households spend more on education, it is typically because government schools have fees (as in Indonesia and Cote d'Ivoire)."

As for alcohol and cigarettes, a high percentage (44 percent) say they want to be spending less on those. Those substances do happen to be addictive, and I have a feeling there aren't so many addiction programs available for them.

In other words, Kristof's "ugly secret" about the drinking, smoking, whoring poor is hardly ubiquitous, and getting parents to shift the tiny amount of income they spend on such things to education is highly unlikely to transform their children's prospects. Asking the poorest of the poor to put more of their minuscule disposable income towards their children's education might be the "simplest" option--if your goal is to let governments, and the global financial system that keeps those governments indebted and structurally adjusted, off the hook for making quality public education available, free of charge.

*Kristof seems to be using the study's numbers for the rural very poor--living on less than a dollar a day--so I'm using those numbers as well.

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt wrote a piece today (5/24/10) headlined, "In the Absence of Debate, Iraq and Afghanistan Go Unnoticed." Hiatt laments the silence surrounding U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ponders whether "the absence of debate reflects not full-bodied consensus but a wishful averting of eyes."

Fair enough. But what kind of debate does Hiatt wish the country to have, anyway? His job gives him a chance to affect the national discussion about these wars, and the evidence suggests that he's done little to provide a forum for dissenting views. 

As FAIR's Steve Rendall wrote in his study of the Post's op-ed page and Afghanistan (for the first 10 months of 2009):

In the Washington Post, pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.

At times the Post's editors seemed unaware that an antiwar position even existed. For instance, in an op-ed roundtable (9/27/09) appearing in its recurring "Topic A" feature, the section's editors, in their words, "asked foreign policy experts whether President Obama should maintain a focus on protecting the population and rebuilding the country, or on striking terrorists."

Excluding withdrawal from the discussion was a theme echoed by Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, who began a column (9/14/09): "It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option."

Interestingly, Hiatt also had a similar beef with the debate over healthcare reform--writing (from the right) back in October,  "Single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door." As we pointed out then, the Post had done next to nothing to provide an "honest debate."

If Hiatt really wants the country to debate these issues, he should start with his own paper.

The New York Times is being criticized for selective editing in its reporting on Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's misleading accounts of his military record--the paper posted on its website a clip of a speech where the Democratic Senate candidate makes his most direct claim to have served in Vietnam, but it edited that clip to leave out a nearby passage where he accurately depicts himself as serving "during the Vietnam War." The Times rejected the criticism in a response to Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent:

The New York Times in its reporting uncovered Mr. Blumenthal's long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service, which he acknowledged in an interview with the Times.  Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.

It is commendable to hold misleading politicians to account.  Our question is how universal this concern is at the New York Times. Political mavens may recall Ronald Reagan as one of the more striking examples of an elected official promoting fantasies about his military record; Reagan's claims to have personally witnessed the Holocaust as part of a government film crew at the end of World War II were first reported by the Washington Post's Lou Cannon in 1984 (3/5/84):

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir visited the White House last November 29, he was impressed by a previously undisclosed remembrance of President Reagan about the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. Repeating it to his Israeli Cabinet five days later, Shamir said Reagan had told him that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps.

Shamir said Reagan also informed him that he had saved a copy of the film because he believed that, in time, people would question what had happened....

Shamir's account appeared December 6 in the Israeli newspaper Maariv. It was confirmed last week to Edward Walsh, the Washington Post correspondent in Jerusalem, by Israeli Cabinet secretary Dan Meridor.

On Feb. 15, famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal met with Reagan in the White House and heard a similar story. Wiesenthal told Washington Post reporter Joanne Omang that he and Reagan had held "a very nice meeting," during which the president related "some of his personal remarks from the end of the war."

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, also was present. He told Omang that Reagan said he was "a member of the Signal Corps taking pictures of the camps" and that he had saved a copy of the film and shown it a year later to a person who thought the reports were exaggerated.

Reagan, in fact, never left the United States during World War II, when he worked for the military in Hollywood making propaganda films.  His footage of the death camps was a fantasy.

Now, this is not a case of a candidate for the Senate padding his resume; this is a sitting president offering an elaborate fabrication to another world leader. Yet the New York Times seems to have completely ignored the Post's scoop.  A thorough search of the Times' archives via Nexis turns up a solitary mention, in Reagan's obituary (6/6/04), and a remarkably rosy framing at that:

His flights of imagination remained equally vivid when he went to the White House. In 1983 he told Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel that as part of his war duties he had been assigned to film the Nazi death camps.

Apparently some politicians mislead, while others have vivid flights of imagination.

NBC reporter Ann Curry's fawning interview with actor Ben Affleck (NBC Nightly News, 5/19/10), about his celebrity activist work in the Congo, is downright embarrassing:

CURRY: Why do you pick the place that people think is actually one of the worst places in terms of the number of atrocities, in terms of the level of suffering, one of the worst places on Earth?

AFFLECK: I really do see tremendous hopefulness. I'm really moved by the power of folks to find solutions to their own problems. The Congolese sense of kind of strength and self-sufficiency and resilience.

CURRY: And he's seen it in four trips since 2007.

AFFLECK: They're rebuilding the engine.

CURRY: Realizing local organizations can make the difference, hat in hand...

AFFLECK: I went to a lot of other folks who were experts and who knew a lot more than I did, and I said, `Can you help me?`

CURRY: ...convincing major philanthropists to fund his multimillion-dollar Eastern Congo Initiative so he can make efforts like Christine's.

AFFLECK: How long was the fighting with the...

CURRY: He's a policy activist in the making.

AFFLECK: There's almost no sort of law, judicial authority. You need to build some kind of a political constituency before policymakers take action.

CURRY: Boy, you come with a lot of passion. Boy! I'm like--I'm against the wall here.

AFFLECK: Sorry.

CURRY: If there was a wall back here--I mean, no, no. Don't apologize. You're so passionate about this.

Really, why would you pick One of the Worst Places on Earth as the focus of your activism? The Nightly News certainly isn't too interested in paying attention to such a place, as their story on Affleck marks the fifth segment they've devoted to the Congo in as many years. Two of those stories, by the way, were about gorillas. Sadly, this is par for the course for the Congo.

The video, which captures the moment even better than the transcript, is here.

The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument:  BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad. Helping the paper flesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed  "a conservation group in Corpus Christi, Texas. " As we pointed out, ProPublica blogger Marian Wang did some digging, and found that "at least half of the 19 members of the group's board of directors have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry." The Times published an Editor's Note admitting that they should have hinted at this to readers.

But another point the Times made in that piece struck us as rather far-fetched:

The ruptured well, currently pouring an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the gulf, could flow for years and still not begin to approach the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqi forces when they left Kuwait in 1991.

36 BILLION gallons? This estimate sounded wildly inflated (as Richard Ward pointed out at CounterPunch). And it turns out that it was roughly a hundredfold exaggeration, as the New York Times explained in a correction today:

A news analysis article on May 4 about the severity of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, using information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, misstated the amount of oil that was spilled in 1991 into the Persian Gulf by Iraqi forces in Kuwait. The agency now puts the figure at 252 million to 336 million gallons--not 36 billion gallons, as it initially estimated.)

The paper's admitting its error, but blaming it on NOAA? According to the Energy Information Administration, the entire Persian Gulf produced 14 million barrels of crude a day in 1991, the equivalent of 588 million gallons--so a spill the size the Times was claiming would amount to the entire Gulf's output for two months. This should have sounded improbable to anyone writing or editing the story. But since the point of the piece was to downplay the severity of the BP/Deepwater disaster, one can see why that didn't happen.

I've commented before on the corporate media's tendency to cherry-pick election results to illustrate their favorite political moral: that Democrats need to move to the right.

Still, I was surprised, after a day of voting in which there was one major race pitting a Democrat against a Republican--the special election in Rep. Jack Murtha's old district in Pennsylvania, which the Democrat won quite handily--the New York Daily News provided this analysis (5/19/10):

Tuesday's balloting is a fresh reminder of what all the combatants have understood for months: It's a lousy year to be a Democrat, an incumbent or Barack Obama.

Based on what, exactly? The only election result that's even mentioned is Sen. Arlen Specter's Democratic primary loss to Rep. Joe Sestak. That just showed that last year was a lousy year to become a Democrat.