Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has endorsed the draconian Arizona immigration law on the grounds that immigration has caused the state's crime to skyrocket--a claim that founders on the fact that crime in the state has actually gone down (FAIR Action Alert, 5/17/10).  Of late, he hasn't talked much about the immigration/crime angle, leading us to wonder whether he had figured out that he was all wet on the subject (FAIR Activism Update, 6/4/10).

But last Thursday (6/17/10), interviewing pro-immigration schoolteacher Jose Lara, O'Reilly returned to the topic with a fresh set of nonsense:

LARA: The fact is, Bill, and you can't deny this, that in cities that have large amounts of immigrants, crime is actually lower.

O'REILLY: It's lower because it's compared to before the recession. And that's why it's lower, because there aren't as many illegals here now--

LARA: No, it's not.

O'REILLY: --as there were because the economy's terrible. If you go back 10 years, every city is up big. And the intrusion on Arizona and California, as you know, is enormous in dollars and blood.

Once again, O'Reilly is just making things up. It's not true that crime in "every city is up big" compared to 10 years ago; looking at the FBI's violent crime reports for 2000 and 2009 in the 10 largest cities, the figures are down substantially in New York (down 44 percent), Los Angeles (57 percent), Phoenix (28 percent), Philadelphia (21 percent), San Antonio (14 percent), Dallas (45 percent) and San Diego (21 percent). Chicago doesn't release figures on rapes, so it doesn't have a comparable violent crime rate, but its murder rate declined 27 percent from 2000 to 2009. Violent crime in Houston rose 0.5 percent over the same time period; Las Vegas had a 52 percent jump, making it the one major city where crime actually was "up big."

What about Arizona and California--was the "intrusion...enormous in dollars and blood" in those states? Not so much blood, it turns out--violent crime in those states was down 16 percent and 19 percent, respectively, from 2000 to 2008 (the most recent year available).

It's worth saying again that the entire premise of O'Reilly's argument is wrong--there is no connection between immigration and crime, so it's unsurprising that the rise in unauthorized immigration to the United States has coincided with a dramatic fall in violent crime rates.

UPDATE: O'Reilly seems to be desperately seeking some way that he's somehow right on this stuff. Here he is last night (6/22/10):

Crime has gone down in all the border states. In El Paso, we did a big extensive study, the Factor did, of this. You can't break out illegal alien crime. You can't break it out because they don't keep stats that way. It's down. And a lot of people think it's because of the economy that fewer people are coming here to the United States because of jobs are harder to get.

Who thinks that, exactly?  The people who did the big extensive study at the Factor? If they had done such a study, they would have noticed that the fall in crime in El Paso is not a short-term phenomenon; violent crime in that heavily immigrant city is down 34 percent since 2000.

And that is consistent with national trends. As the Immigration Policy Center pointed out in a report, "Immigrants and Crime: Are They Connected?":

Although the undocumented immigrant population doubled to about 12 million from 1994 to 2005, the violent crime rate in the United States declined by 34.2 percent and the property crime rate fell by 26.4 percent. This decline in crime rates was not just national, it also occurred in border cities and other cities with large immigrant populations--such as San Diego, El Paso, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami.

Research assistance: Alyssa Figueroa

At the end of 2009, the Washington Post published an article that was produced by the Fiscal Times. As FAIR noted in an Action Alert (1/6/10):

The article, headlined "Support Grows for Tackling Nation's Debt" (12/31/09), was a product of the Fiscal Times, described in an accompanying note as "an independent digital news publication reporting on fiscal, budgetary, healthcare and international economics issues." More accurately, it's a propaganda outlet created and funded by Peter G. Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire and Nixon administration cabinet member who has long used his wealth to promote cuts in Social Security and other entitlement programs.

That Post's Fiscal Times piece was the subject of intense criticism, which the Post's ombud eventually addressed. As FAIR summed it up (1/13/10), ombud Andrew Alexander criticized the paper for a "glaring lack of transparency with its readers" by not disclosing the Fiscal Times' connection to Peterson and his interest in the issues it covers. Alexander added that the piece "was not sufficiently balanced," and that publishing a story so closely aligned with the agenda of the funder of the project  "was inviting suspicion about its motives."

Yesterday  the Post was at it again (6/20/10), publishing another Fiscal Times piece extolling work that Peterson is closely aligned with. Under the headline "Labor Leader, Chief Executive Team Up to Reduce the U.S. Deficit," Post readers are treated to a soft profile of two members (an "unlikely duo") of the White House's deficit reduction commission. Did the piece entertain serious criticism of the ideas being advanced so far by the commission (cutting Social Security, most notably)? Hardly--here's about as close as they got:

A debate is raging in Congress and among economists about whether this is the right time to start reducing deficits. Many liberal groups worried about high unemployment argue that the economy is still so weak that the government should keep spending and deficits high to prevent a double-dip recession. But lawmakers in both parties are balking at new stimulus spending, and some economists argue that the deficit needs to be reined in sooner rather than later.

What about disclosure, then? The Post offered a note at the top of the piece, mentioning that the reporters "work for the Fiscal Times, an independent news organization that specializes in fiscal and economic matters. It is funded by Peter G. Peterson, who separately supports groups that advocate for long-term debt reduction."

Ah, I get it.  Peterson has spent many millions of dollars warning about Social Security's threat to the nation's finances. But the news outlet he organized and bankrolls to make these arguments in journalistic form is separate from his long-standing political interest in these topics. Huh.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz (6/21/10) write about the investigative journalism produced by the Center for Public Integrity, and wonders about its independence:

The center has also received grants--including $300,000 last year--from the Open Society Institute founded by liberal philanthropist George Soros, sparking questions about whether its news agenda leans to the left. "We have a very clear firewall editorially," Buzenberg says. "We decide what we want to do and how we want to do it." Donors, he says, "may hate it and they may never fund us again, that's their right. . . .  It isn't free to produce. We've got to get money."

OK, I guess that's a concern on some level.

But if I were to ask Kurtz if the Washington Post's reliance on major corporate advertisers to continue publishing is "sparking" any questions about the paper's "news agenda," I think he'd wonder if I was a space alien.

FAIR has a new Action Alert (6/21/10) on misleading historical context about Gaza's rockets in the  coverage of flotilla attack in the New York Times and Washington Post. You can post copies of your letters to the papers, or responses on the alert, in the comments thread below.

For anyone who doubts that there is a double standard regarding racism in the U.S. media, read Marty Peretz's blog post (New Republic, 6/19/10) on the "crooked little emirate" of Dubai, in which he glibly comments that "Arabs are deft at disguising reality."

Peretz will certainly be able to continue to freely publish his anti-Arab screeds with little condemnation, yet Helen Thomas was pushed out of her job and rebuked by President Obama himself (AP, 6/8/10) and some pundits (FAIR blog, 6/14/10) for her comments telling Israelis to "get the hell out of Palestine" and to "go home" to Poland, Germany or the United States.  Thomas promptly apologized (FAIR blog, 6/9/10) and announced her retirement, but Peretz has written similar rants in the past regarding Arabs and Muslims that didn't raise many eyebrows.  Apparently, anti-Arab sentiment remains an acceptable part of the discourse on the Middle East.

Here's Peretz again, in language that was later scrubbed from the New Republic's website without comment (Salon, 3/6/10):

There were moments--long moments--during the Iraq War when I had my doubts. Even deep doubts. Frankly, I couldn’t quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right.  Go ahead, prove me wrong.

One more from Peretz (New Republic, 3/19/10):

Alas, in the Middle East, it’s mostly continuity and cruelty. This is a culture so unhinged by modernity that it clings to its crippled civilization. And who will tell me that the civilization of the Arabs, the civilization of Islam, is not crippled?

Where's the media outrage on this one?

(H/T Matt Yglesias.)

Senate Democrats are having trouble passing a spending bill that would, among other things, extend unemployment benefits and deliver much-needed financial aid to cash-starved states. Today the New York Times (6/18/10) explained the legislative logjam this way:

The spending and tax measure has become caught up in intensifying politics around deficit spending as members of both parties, reacting to rising public concern, have grown reluctant to vote for measures that add to federal red ink.

Reacting to public concern? As we've noted before, there is far more public concern that the government is not doing enough to stimulate job growth. Concern for the deficit comes much further down, when citizens are asked to rank them. (See some of those polls here.) So where reporters are getting this idea is somewhat mysterious (and let's not forget that no one should ascribe politicians' votes as evidence that they're "reacting" to public sentiment).

A similar idea was expressed in yesterday's Times (6/17/10) by Matt Bai, who argued that anti-corporate populism ("the oppressed are the poor, and the oppressors are the corporate interests who exploit them") is out of fashion, a quaint worldview that "made sense 75 years ago."

These days it's Tea Party populism that has taken hold: "This new American populism is why the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters."

Again, arguments like this would make a lot more sense if there was more evidence that the deficit is a "chief concern for voters."

The New York Times (6/18/10) reports from Brussels that "the mood here was upbeat" as Estonia adopted the euro as its official currency. Despite the debt crisis, reporter James Kanter writes, "the euro remains among the strongest currencies in the world, and membership opens the door to a club with global influence. For small and unsure countries on the fringes of the European Union, it doesn't get much better."

Quoting the European Union as praising Estonia's "sound economic and financial policies" in recent years, the article calls Euro membership a "recognition of the hard work and sacrifice it took to keep Estonia's bid on track" and "an important signpost that a country is on the way to achieving Western European standards of living."

There is a bit of balance to the article's cheerleading for Estonia's adoption of the euro. Towards the end, Kanter notes:

According to economists, the preparation to join the euro zone created some disadvantages for Estonia compared with neighboring countries, which have enjoyed a relative degree of flexibility by hanging on longer to their legacy currencies for now.

What "some disadvantages" means is not spelled out by the Times, but economist Mark Weisbrot (Guardian, 4/30/10) gives a good summary of the effects of the extreme austerity measures necessitated to keep Estonia's currency in sync with the euro:

The economy has shrunk by nearly 20 percent. Unemployment has shot up from about 2 percent to 15.5 percent. And recovery is expected to be painfully slow: The IMF projects that the economy will grow by just 0.8 percent this year. Amazingly, by 2015 Estonia is projected to still be less welloff than it was in 2007. This is an enormous cost in terms of lost actual and potential output, as well as the social costs associated with high long-term unemployment that will accompany this slow recovery.

To write an article about Estonia's economic policies without mentioning these facts is like leaving the Great Depression out of a history of Herbert Hoover's presidency.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement yesterday that promised to "liberalize the system by which civilian goods enter Gaza."  The announcement from Israel's security cabinet came after widespread international pressure on Israel following a deadly Israeli naval raid on a humanitarian flotilla trying to break the three-year old blockade of Gaza.

U.S. media echoed the Israeli press release in headlines like  "Israel to Ease Gaza Land Blockade" (New York Times, 6/17/10) and "Israel Eases Restrictions on Goods Bound for Gaza Strip" (Washington Post, 6/18/10). (CNN--6/17/10--at least attributed the claim in its "Israel to Ease Blockade of Gaza, Cabinet Says.")

But corporate news coverage in the United States omitted an important aspect of the story that undermines the narrative that Israel is "easing" its blockade of Gaza.  The Israeli daily Ha'aretz (6/17/10) reports:

The prime minister's office announced on Thursday that the security cabinet had agreed to relax Israel's blockade on the Gaza Strip, but as it turns out, no binding decision was ever made during the cabinet meeting.

The prime minister's office issued a press release in English following the meeting, which was also sent to foreign diplomats, was substantially different than the Hebrew announcement--according to the English text, a decision was made to ease the blockade, but in the Hebrew text there was no mention of any such decision.

U.S. corporate media have apparently decided to ignore the Hebrew press release that told a far different story about the blockade of Gaza.  Even if their correspondents in Jerusalem don't speak Hebrew, the online English version of Ha'aretz reported the news about the dual statements loud and clear yesterday afternoon.

Only time will tell which statement is true and whether Israel is really easing its land blockade of Gaza. (The naval blockade will remain in place, according to the New York Times story on the Israeli statement.)  Even if the English version were true, though, it doesn't seem like it will squelch criticism of the blockade--Israeli human rights organization Gisha (Guardian, 6/17/10) called the announcement "cosmetic changes," and said that "we need a policy that recognizes the rights of Palestinian residents of Gaza not just to consume but also to produce and to travel." Such viewpoints, however, are unlikely to get much of a hearing in the U.S. press.

This weekend the New York Times (6/13/10) reminded me once again that I am not the paper's target audience.

While supporters say the estate tax affects only the richest members of society and helps counteract the concentration of wealth, that million-dollar limit would seem to ensnare many people who consider themselves decidedly middle class--especially in the Northeast and California where home values are high.

What is the dividing line between wealthy and upper middle class? Or between someone who owns an estate and someone lucky enough to have bought a home decades ago and watched its value grow to seven figures?

Since the next paragraph acknowledges that less than 2 percent of estates would be affected next year (United for a Fair Economy says it's less than 1 percent), how can the Times publish this stuff with a straight face? If some two-year-olds don't consider themselves to be young, would the New York Times write about that seriously?

I wonder how many Times editors have homes worth more than a million bucks. I'm guessing more than one.

Today's Los Angeles Times (6/16/10) has this headline:

Debate Grows Over Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan

The lead:

Recent setbacks in Afghanistan have intensified debate over the wisdom of the Obama administration's plan to begin withdrawing U.S. military forces next summer and highlighted reservations among military commanders over a rigid timeline.

Debating the war-- let's have at it. On one side are U.S. military officials, who are portrayed as having "reservations" about a withdrawal timeline. On the other side: Sen. John McCain, who... well, has serious reservations about withdrawal timelines.

Not part of this debate: the 53 percent of the U.S. public (ABC/Washington Post, 6/3-6/10) who say the Afghan War wasn't worth fighting.

If James Risen's blogger critics were in kindergarten, as the New York Times reporter suggests, when he broke the story about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in 2005, then presumably they would have been in pre-K in 2004 when he first learned about the surveillance program. They would have moved up a grade as his paper sat on the story for a year (Extra! Update, 2/06), keeping news of the illegal spying under wraps until long after the 2004 elections.

Apparently Risen's critics were born sometime around 1999, when Risen was helping to railroad atomic scientist Wen Ho Lee with false spying charges (Extra! Update, 12/00).

This USA Today headline (6/16/10) seemed like the kind of thing one might stop to read:

Top Officer Sees Military Caution as Backfiring

The lead:

Commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have been reluctant to launch more secret operations because of an excess of caution about violating military rules and international law, a top Army officer says.

While one might not associate the military with an "excess of caution," the main source in the article is mainly concerned about the underutilization of "deception operations," tricks that can be used to fool the enemy.  Since this is all about, well, lying, "military officials declined to detail specific deception operations."

But then USA Today added:

The military is barred from launching operations that could be picked up by U.S. media. That is a particularly difficult line to walk in an age of the Internet and continuous news--a lie aimed at the enemy could inadvertently wind up portrayed as truth on American television or in newspapers.

Now, wait right there.... There's a chance there could by LIES printed in our media? Portrayed as the truth??

This completely hypothetical threat sounds serious.

Thomas Friedman sure knows how to flip reality on its head.  In his New York Times op-ed column today, Friedman hops on the bandwagon (FAIR blog, 6/10/10) of bashing Turkey for "joining the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran resistance front against Israel."

Friedman accuses Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan of no longer promoting democracy and instead being more focused on "praising Hamas instead of the more responsible Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is actually building the foundations of a Palestinian state."  Friedman says of Erdogan:

I'd love to see him be the most popular leader on the Arab street, but not by being more radical than the Arab radicals and by catering to Hamas, but by being more of a democracy advocate than the undemocratic Arab leaders and mediating in a balanced way between all Palestinians and Israel. That is not where Erdogan is at, though, and it's troubling.

Siding with the Palestinian Authority against Hamas would be a peculiar way of advocating for democracy in the Middle East, though.  In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Hamas categorically defeated Fatah in what former President Jimmy Carter called "free and fair" elections (CNN, 5/17/09).  The U.S., EU and Israel rejected those results (New York Times, 6/8/06), and after Fatah's U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Hamas in Gaza failed (Vanity Fair, 4/08), an "emergency government" composed of members of Fatah was installed (New York Times, 6/18/07). This "emergency government," still in place to this day in the West Bank, was not democratically elected and consolidated its power illegally (Electronic Intifada, 6/18/07).

In Friedman's alternate universe, the Turkish prime minister is not advocating for democracy because...he supports the democratically elected government in Palestine that Israel has been trying to overthrow by way of "economic warfare" (FAIR Blog, 6/14/10) instead of the unelected government approved by the United States.

There's been plenty of commentary about Monday's front-page New York Times story (6/14/10) announcing, "U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan."

Reporter James Risen's lead:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan War itself, according to senior American government officials.

Why this story appeared now was a question on a lot of people's minds, especially considering how Risen explained its timing:

American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.

So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan.

Risen hasn't taken kindly to the criticism, as Yahoo!News reporter John Cook found out when he tried to interview him. Risen snapped at Cook:

The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories.... Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.

Risen apologized for his outburst, explaining that he "didn't sleep well last night," thanks to all the criticism.

So what does the story mean, exactly? Some of the sleep-depriving commentary added some helpful context:

--The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder noted that Afghanistan's potential mineral wealth has been known for some time: "The story is accurate, but the news is not that new." He wondered if the story was really "a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war."

--Paul Jay also commented on the fact that this was already known, and that the Times should have raised questions about a possible connection to the U.S. troop surge:

The problem is, what the NYT describes as "beyond any previously known reserves" and "the previously unknown deposits" were in fact quite well known--in 2007, well before President Obama made the fateful decision to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

--And economist Dean Baker responded to the idea, advanced in a Times follow-up story, that this discovery would amount to $38,482.76 for every Afghan. He wrote:

It would be useful to note that this is a gross number, it does not subtract the cost of extracting the minerals nor does it consider that these resources would likely be extracted over many decades.

The thing that jumped out at me from the disturbing footage of Rep. Bob Etheridge (D.-N.C.) manhandling a young man, who had dared to approach him with a camera and a question, was the lawmaker's ominous assertion: "I have a right to know who you are."

He doesn't, of course--the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that the Bill of Rights protects the right to remain anonymous, including when talking to strangers face to face. Indeed, it would be odd if it did not do so, given that the principles behind our constitutional framework were largely explicated by three guys who pretended their name was Publius.

While Ethridge was wrong about what his rights were (and subsequently apologized for his conduct), the First Amendment strongly protects his questioners' right to ask questions of a public official in a public place; the fact that they appeared to have a conservative agenda behind their query (they wanted to know if Ethridge supported the "Obama agenda") only means that they were engaged in the kind of political speech that the amendment was designed to safeguard.

One would think that it would go without saying that politicians physically attacking amateur journalists is a bad thing--regardless of the politician's party or the journalists' politics.  But to judge by the discussion by readers at Talking Points Memo (6/14/10), there's a substantial contingent that agrees with this comment:

I don't think the man should even apologize for what he did. He was being willfully harrassed by political dirty tricksters plain and simple. Apologizing only plays into their hands. If he had really gone after them and kicked their asses like they deserved it wouldn't even bother me. After a certain point, harrassment and dirty tricks masquerading as "journalism" or "documentary" fimmaking is completely illegtimate. I have no sympathy at all for the jerks who harassed this guy and have no problem with his reaction to them because of who and what they are.

There are politicians in every party who are averse to critical questions, and some of them take physical action against those who ask them, as evidenced by video (pointed out by digby) of citizen journalist Mike Stark being attacked by Sen.  John Cornyn (R.-Texas) and a staffer for  Sen. George Allen (R.-Va.). It seems like something progressives should be against, regardless of who's doing the attacking.

UPDATE: Mike Stark makes several interesting points in the blog post he links to below in the comment thread, but I was particularly struck by  his closing remarks:

One last point on the Etheridge video. Compare it to the Cornyn video. Any difference is superficial, at best. The Etheridge video has been seen far and wide; Politico did an entire story on it and it was splayed across our TV sets all day yesterday. The Cornyn video was mentioned in passing in a Politico story about an entirely different subject (the Republican objection to being asked questions about the Franken Amendment), but was otherwise not seen anywhere except DailyKos and starkReports (the two places I posted it). If you doubt the existence of a Republican noise-machine, let this be a lesson.