The Washington Post has a story today (5/19/10) that leads with this:

With voters up in arms over the mounting federal debt, congressional Democrats are growing increasingly queasy about adding to the nation's tab, with some arguing that additional spending to prop up the economy and help the unemployed should be paid for or abandoned.

The headline--"Democrats Queasy About Deficit Spending"--seems true enough, in the sense that reporter Lori Montgomery quotes some Democrats saying as much. But are voters really "up in arms" over the debt? That's not borne out by polls of voters' concerns. If you check the recent surveys at Polling Report, the debt/deficit ranks well behind jobs and the economy when people are asked to rank the top problem facing the country. The spread is 49-5 percent from CBS/NYTimes, 47-15 from Fox and 35-20 from NBC/WSJ.

Some of the spending that apparently makes some Democrats "queasy" is focused, as the Post acknowledges, on jobs. It would be a very different article if it pointed out that dealing with this problems is the voters' chief concern.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly continued his efforts to link Arizona's harsh immigration law to the non-existent immigrant crime wave. Last night (5/18/10), with Cathy Areu of Catalina magazine:

O'REILLY: OK, so you would just sit there and just status quo it? Status quo?

AREU: Immigration is down, actually, in Arizona. Status quo's working beautifully.

O'REILLY: Down everywhere.

AREU: Well, crime is down and immigration is down. So, actually, things are better.

O'REILLY: Crime in Arizona is up. Immigration's down because of the economy.

As we pointed in our Action Alert-- and has been pointed out elsewhere by actual journalists--crime is down in Arizona.

Later in the segment:

AREU: El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States.

O'REILLY: That's a bunch of baloney.

If by "bunch of baloney" O'Reilly means "true," then he's got a point. El Paso has long been one of the country's safest big cities, a point made recently in the L.A. Times (5/13/10):

The Mexican border metropolis of Ciudad Juarez now has a higher murder rate than Baghdad as drug cartels battle for turf. Its neighbor on the U.S. side, El Paso, has long been one of the nation's safest big cities, with more than 600,000 people. Last year it was ranked second-safest behind Honolulu.

"Life in El Paso is good," said police spokesman Michael Baranyay, citing the one homicide the city has logged this year.

If you want to help push O'Reilly to stop these slurs, sign FAIR's petition to Fox.

The U.S. has drawn up a new round of proposed sanctions against Iran that they intend to present before the U.N. Security Council. This is obviously a rebuke of Brazil and Turkey for negotiating their own deal with Iran. The Washington Post refers to the countries as "two junior Security Council members" that " swooped in with their own deal with Iran to forestall new penalties on the Islamic republic." 

Brazil and Turkey are unsurprisingly upset at the U.S. move, and the Post tells us (5/19/10) that this reaction is of some concern:

The reaction signified potential difficulties ahead in winning unanimous approval for the resolution. Three previous sanctions resolutions on Iran were approved without any "no" votes--usually, a draft agreement among the five permanent members of the council faces little opposition from the 10 rotating members--and anything less than that would represent a fracturing of international unity on Iran.

 "International unity" means the small group of powerful nations that want to pursue sanctions against Iran. What the rest of the world actually thinks about all of this is apparently irrelevant.

A deal between Iran, Brazil and Turkey to ship some of Iran's uranium out of the country to be enriched in Turkey and returned for use in a Iranian medical reactor has elicited some elite media panic. An early New York Times Web headline read, "Iran Offers to Ship Uranium, Complicating Sanctions Talks." The Wall Street Journal (5/17/10) went with "Iranian Nuclear Deal Raises Fears."

The story in the print edition of the Times (5/18/10) focuses much of its attention on the U.S. reaction to the deal. This passage is especially meaningful:

Rejecting the new deal, however, could make President Obama appear to be blocking a potential compromise. And the deal shows how Brazil and Turkey, which for their own economic interests oppose sanctions, may derail a fragile international consensus to increase pressure on Iran.

Rejecting a deal doesn't make one "appear" to be blocking compromise--that's precisely what you're doing.

More importantly, the idea that the "fragile international consensus" favors increasing sanctions on Iran makes sense only if you believe that that expression refers exclusively to certain major powers, which can force their will via the U.N. Security Council.

This is not the first time the New York Times has explained Iranian nuclear diplomacy in such terms. Here's Noam Chomsky (ZNet,  2/16/08), reviewing an earlier, similar example:

To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that "Iran's intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions." The rest of the world happens to exclude the large majority of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran's right to enrich Uranium, in accord with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since they do not reflexively accept U.S. orders.

We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the U.S./Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here is one idea: (1) Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the NPT. (2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran, Israel and U.S. forces deployed there. (3) The U.S. should accept the NPT. (4) The U.S. should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.

The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls were released a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed "the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian people, [who] seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find common sense solutions to some of the most crucial questions" facing the two nations, favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results suggest that if the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies, this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

A long New York Times Magazine piece (5/16/10) about start-up online journalism outlets brings us some troubling news about the wall between editorial content and advertising:

One thing many of these new strategies have in common is a willingness to transgress time-honored barriers--for instance, by blurring the division between reporting and advertising. True/Slant offers to let advertisers use the same blogging tools that contributors do, to produce content that, while labeled, is blended into the rest of the site. Such marketing deals are central to the company’s plans for future revenue growth. "Everywhere I go, the whole notion of enabling marketers to create content on a news platform is well received," Lewis Dvorkin says. "It's the way the world is moving."

Not long ago, such an idea would have been considered heretical, and in many newsrooms, it still is. But clearly, attitudes are shifting. "Hopefully we're breaking down the silliness of how church and state was historically implemented," says Merrill Brown, a veteran media executive and investor who is currently building a network of local news sites. Once, most journalists took a posture of willful ignorance when it came to the economics of the industry: They never wanted to sully themselves by knowing the business. The recession has, through fear and necessity, made capitalists out of everyone.

For proof that catering to advertisers is not "heretical" in the rest of the media, and that journalism is the worse for these "shifting" attitudes, read FAIR's new Fear & Favor report in the May issue of Extra!

Do you want to know what environmentalists think of the "compromise" climate bill unveiled by senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman yesterday? If so, don't read the New York Times today. Times reporter John M. Broder (5/13/10) quotes Kerry, Barack Obama (a supporter of the bill) and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (formerly a somewhat iffy supporter).

He also references the feelings of two main industry groups--the Edison Electric Institute and the American Petroleum Institute--as well as BP, ConocoPhillips and the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Then, in the second-to-last graph:

Some environmental advocates were involved in drafting the bill and were highly supportive. But other environmentalists said the bill did not go far enough and offered too many concessions to win industry support.

Well, that tells you...nothing.

Assessments from environmental groups aren't hard to come by. The headline of the Public Citizen press release conveys their view: "It's a Nuclear Energy-Promoting, Oil Drilling-Championing, Coal Mining-Boosting Gift." The Institute for Public Accuracy's release refers to a " Bonanza of Corporate Giveaways." Such views would have been helpful for readers interested in assessing the bill's actual contents.

Under the not-too-promising headline "Afghans' Distrust Threatens U.S. War Strategy" (5/13/10),  the New York Times reports that U.S. success in the Afghan war "may well depend on whether Afghans can overcome their corrosive distrust of President Hamid Karzai’s government."

Why that lack of trust would be deemed "corrosive," or why they should trust someone many think stole the recent election, is not clear.

Moving on to this:

Despite the commitment of more troops by Mr. Obama and a new strategy that has emphasized the protection of Afghan civilians, few in Afghanistan believe that a functional government that holds the country together can be created on the timetable outlined.

The new U.S. strategy of... protecting civilians?

Would that be the one that the Times covered last week?

Shootings of Afghans on Rise at Checkpoints
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Shootings of Afghan civilians by American and NATO convoys and at military checkpoints have spiked sharply this year, becoming the leading cause of combined civilian deaths and injuries at the hands of Western forces, American officials say.

The piece added: "These shootings are a major reason civilian casualties in Afghanistan are soaring after a much-publicized period of decline."

And later:

A recent military-commissioned survey of almost 2,000 residents of Kandahar Province found that American and NATO convoys were perceived as equally as dangerous as roadside bombs and more dangerous than Taliban checkpoints.

It sounds like  Afghans might have a "corrosive distrust" of someone else too.

Canada's Globe and Mail decided to do a special issue on Africa this Monday, and who better to guest edit than Bono and Bob Geldof? There's a piece about their day at the paper that's truly absurd. Here's the section on "Opinion Pages":

They move back to the meeting table to discuss more content for the paper. Bono asks for a cup of tea, with a drop of milk. Geldof takes his coffee black. Comment Editor Natasha Hassan goes over options for opinion pieces to run in Monday's paper. Christy Turlington has written a piece on maternal health, drawing from her experience filming a documentary in Tanzania. "She's pretty impressive on this subject," Bono says.

Natasha runs the Monday editorial cartoon by Bono and Geldof. They chuckle. "That's funny," Bono says. "I'd like a copy of that, actually."

So why does it take two rich white men to edit a special issue on Africa? Well, the Globe and Mail's glad you--and reader Sarah Kibaalya of Toronto--asked. Globe editor John Stackhouse put Kibaalya's question to Geldof and Bono in a video segment of reader questions. Geldof explained that he is not, in fact, speaking for Africans, just for himself. As for Bono? "Yeah, uh, I don't see color, I don't think. I mean, I just, I forget.... It's not about being African, it's about being human."

And if you were as enlightened as they are, you'd probably just forget that they're white Europeans. Besides, could there possibly be anyone better qualified to educate Canadians about Africa? Stackhouse himself argued in the day's editorial:

Mr. Geldof and Bono recognize their star power, and its ability to cast light on the shadows of public debate. That's a good tool. They also don't presume to speak for Africans, or Canadians. They were here as global citizens, confronting a global issue.

The duo have hijacked G8 meetings to make poverty a central theme. Working with Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, they ran a global campaign that obliterated nearly $100-billion in African debt. Working with presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, they helped put HIV-AIDS atop the U.S. foreign-policy agenda.

Rock stars? Consider this: Mr. Geldof carries development-finance documents under his arm when he goes out for dinner. An active musician, he's also a significant London-based investor and business operator, and one of Europe's most influential political activists on debt, poverty and AIDS.

Bono is more lyrical, but no less focused. He spends as much time on African issues as on music. In March, he traveled to five African countries, and then went to the White House to brief President Barack Obama. When he landed Saturday in Toronto, he immediately turned on his phone and called a U.S. senator, to continue a conversation about U.S. policy on Africa.

Bono has been to Africa and talks to important people about Africa a lot. And Geldof brings development-finance documents to dinner! Who could be more qualified?

The Globe did somehow manage to scrounge up an actual African to guest edit their Web content for the day--Kenyan activist and blogger (and Harvard law grad) Ory Okolloh. Okolloh explained in her online guest editorial why she accepted the job:

I’m sure [Geldorf and Bono] have the best of intentions, but the role of the African voice both in addressing our problems and the solutions to those problems is one that needs to remain at center stage if the continent is to make progress. So while the paper edition might focus on what the world can do for Africa, my role as the guest editor will be to return to the question of what can Africans do for Africa and what are we doing for Africa (and indeed for the rest of the world) by highlighting different voices and stories from around the continent.

For more on corporate media's penchant for covering Africa through Western celebrities and why that actually is a problem, see "Bono, I Presume?" (Extra!, 5-6/07).

(h/t Africa Is a Country)

There's a certain the-monster-isn't-so-bad genre of journalism--profiling some character known for vicious misanthropy, usually a right-wing media personality, only to assure readers that once you get to know them, you realize that they don't actually mean all the nasty things they say.  (The Time cover story on Ann Coulter discussed here is perhaps the classic example.)

Today the New York Times (5/12/10) offers us an intimate look at Eric Erickson under the headline "CNN Pundit Draws Ire From All Sides." Erickson is the blogger best known for his assertion that Supreme Court Justice David Souter was a "goat-fucking child molester." (See FAIR Action Alert, 3/16/10, for more examples of Erickson's wit.) But Times reporter Shaila Dewan presents him as a softie: "Over coffee, Mr. Erickson, 34, hardly comes across as a screamer. He is more preoccupied with finding a babysitter for his two small children because his wife, Christy, is sick."

Dewan does refer to a couple of Erickson's screeds, but dismisses them with this: "What critics have not noted is that Mr. Erickson, the editor of the influential conservative blog RedState, is as hard on many Republicans and conservatives as he is on Democrats."

Two things to note: "Exhorting Tea Party followers (he considers himself one) to move beyond protests and get involved in the nitty-gritty of precinct-level politics" is not actually an example of Erickson being hard on Republicans or conservatives, although the Times presents it as one.

And critics were not upset about Erickson's mindless hatred because it was only aimed at Democrats; Souter, after all, is a Republican. It's the mindless hatred itself that's the problem.

Newsweek has another installment in the don't-blame-Arizonans coverage of the state's new immigration law (FAIR Blog, 4/28/10, 5/3/10, 5/4/10). Under the charming headline "Mexican Standoff," reporter Eve Conant writes:

Some accuse lawmakers and the 70 percent of Arizonans who support the bill of acting like Nazis, or of turning Arizona into an apartheid state. But spend some time in Arizona, and you may come to see why so many Arizonans want this.

The bulk of what follows is Conant's account of a month worth of ride-alongs with Arizona law enforcement officials, who showed her a number of ostensibly immigrant-related crimes. "It's terrifying to live next door to homes filled with human traffickers, drug smugglers, AK-47s, pit bulls, and desperate laborers stuffed 30 to a room, shoes removed to hinder escape," Conant writes.

No doubt it is, but how many Arizonans actually do live next door to such places? As we've pointed out before, there's nothing particularly remarkable about the state's crime rate; it had 483 violent crimes reported per 100,000 people in 2007, according to the Statistical Abstract, just slightly more than the national average of 467--and well below the rate of such well-known crime hubs as Delaware and Maryland, where the police are not yet mandated to demand the papers of brown-skinned citizens. And there's no reason to think that immigrants are responsible for more violent crime than their native-born counterparts; research suggests the opposite.

If a state passed a law that had the effect of discriminating against African-Americans, and a newsweekly argued that the law was understandable by recounting anecdotes of blacks in that state who were involved in crimes, one would have to say that the magazine was being remarkably racist.  I don't see why you'd say anything different about Newsweek's article.

"Elena Kagan Is Miles Away From Mainstream America" is the headline on Kathleen Parker's Washington Post column this morning (5/12/10).  What exactly does that mean?

Well, on first blush, it seems to have to do with where she's from: "Coincidentally, she shares the same home town as the other two women on the court. Assuming Kagan is confirmed, all three women will hail from New York."  And why does this matter? "Spending one's formative years walking past the infamously crime-riddled Murder Hotel en route to school, as Kagan did--and, say, walking past the First Baptist Church to ballet class--are not the same cultural marinade."

To which, as a proud adopted New Yorker, I say: Huh? The "Murder Hotel" was a dilapidated residential hotel on the Upper West Side block that got its tabloid nickname from a murder that occurred there; it's not particularly infamous, but it was on the block that Kagan grew up on, and her dad helped shut it down.

But we also have ballet classes in New York City--actually, there are even famous ballet troupes based here--and, believe it or not, we also have Baptist churches here--249 of them, according to this church-locating service.  I don't know if Kagan ever took ballet class, but if she did, she could very easily have walked by the First Baptist Church on her way to them--it's at Broadway and West 79th Street, about four blocks from her house.

But this fantasy that New York City is some kind of alien world, where ballet and Baptists are unknown, is the crux of Parker's argument: "It seems remote to unlikely that a woman whose life has involved Baptist churches and ballet slippers would find herself on a track to today's Supreme Court, though that ought not to be the case."

Could it be that Parker's argument is not really about dance class, or even about New York City? That is suggested by her examples of justices whose backgrounds, unlike Kagan's, are a "help in claiming identity with ordinary people": She cites Clarence Thomas ("from a rural Georgia backwater") and Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito (each is a "the child of recently arrived immigrants"). Scalia, like Kagan, is a native of New York City, and yet, puzzlingly, he's a poster child for fitting in with regular Americans.  Could there be something else about Kagan that sets her apart from "mainstream" Americans?

Well, yes, there is something.  "More than half the country also happens to be Protestant, yet with Kagan, the court will feature three Jews, six Catholics and nary a Protestant. Fewer than one-fourth of Americans are Catholic, and 1.7 percent are Jewish." Though, again, the Catholics Scalia and Alito are held up as exemplars of ordinariness, so their religion isn't putting them outside that "mainstream"--you know, the one where people attend churches, Baptist or otherwise.

Conservatives have made a trope out of "San Francisco values"--a phrase that mainly serves to link Democrats to the most gay-identified city in hopes of attracting homophobic votes. When I hear conservative media figures going on about New York City, I hear the same thing--only with Jews instead of gays.

Correspondent Pete Williams last night on NBC Nightly News (5/10/10) gave viewers the scoop on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's record as dean of Harvard law school: "She diversified the faculty, hiring prominent conservatives."

Kagan also hired almost no people of color and very few women, in a historically white and male faculty. It's an interesting definition of "diversify."

According to a Washington Post article (5/10/10) on the front page of its metro section, the traditional image of the U.S. suburb is being spoiled as they become less wealthy, white and native-born. No, really.

Carol Morello's story began:

Ozzie and Harriet, R.I.P.

The idealized vision of suburbia as a homogeneous landscape of prosperity built around the nuclear family took another hit over the past decade, as suburbs became home to more poor people, immigrants, minorities, senior citizens and households with no children, according to a Brookings Institution report to be released Sunday.

As Atrios asked, "Nobody noticed what's wrong with this paragraph?"

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam writes of his first job in journalism, at "now-foundering Newsweek," which he describes as being "like an upside-down journalism school, where I learned an astonishing number of bad habits." But it clearly gave him some valuable insights into how corporate journalism works:

I was an editorial assistant/fact-checker, with duties analogous to those of an 18th-century cabin boy in the Royal Navy.... In addition to pouring vodka I checked facts, a process that left me bleakly cynical about journalistic accuracy. We would publish whole stories that were lies--Francois Mitterrand's plan to destroy the French economy was a recurring theme--but at least the names were spelled correctly. Two Ts, two Rs. I will never forget.

He also describes 1970s-era Newsweek's Cold War crusade, featuring the work of a future editor of the Washington Times:

We printed many "exclusives" by a remarkably tanned, anti-Communist crusader named Arnaud de Borchgrave, known as "the little count." De Borchgrave would announce his masterpieces with the antiquated phrase "Three bells!" an allusion to the old wire-service tickers which used to chime bells touting stories of capital importance. Everyone laughed at de Borchgrave's copy, but we printed it anyway.

And there you have what is meant by "liberal media": Publishing right-wing propaganda, but privately making fun of it.

Washington Post critic Tom Shales (5/11/10) didn't think much of the debut of the PBS show Need to Know. Given the reactions from viewers at the Need to Know website, and those published by PBS ombud Michael Getler, he's not the only one who found the show a disappointment--or, as Shales put it, a "monstrosity" and "a specious wheeze."

But he seemed to save a special kind of scorn for co-host Alison Stewart. Responding to the show's fawning interview with Bill Clinton, Shales wrote that "she looked as though she would have been much more comfortable in Clinton's lap."

Uh huh.

When ABC announced that they had hired CNN's Christiane Amanpour to be host of the Sunday morning show This Week, Shales (3/23/10) seemed genuinely upset, balking that Amanpour lacked inside-the-Beltway credentials (I think he meant that as a criticism) and noting that some conservatives believe her to be too critical of Israel. Shales even insinuated that Amanpour's upbringing could be a problem: "Her family fled Tehran in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution, when she was college age. She has steadfastly rejected claims about her objectivity."

Shales went back for more in a Post Web chat, writing:

And neither you nor I has stooped to mentioning that hair of hers--yipe. What's the deal with that, as David Letterman might say.

The blog Jezebel headlined a roundup of his worst commentary, "WaPo TV Critic Tom Shales Has a Lady Problem."

Indeed.