Trying to explain why Need to Know, the PBS public affairs show that appeared in the Friday night timeslot vacated by Bill Moyers Journal and Now, has gotten such a cool reception from viewers, co-host Allison Stewart seems to blame nostalgia. "Obviously you can't replace Bill Moyers," says Stewart
(Show Tracker, 8/5/10). "That's just a ridiculous notion."

The funny thing is, Bill Moyers was replaced: When he left Now to resume doing Bill Moyers Journal, David Brancaccio took over as host, later joined by Maria Hinojosa. Under their tenure, Now retained its loyal following, because Brancaccio and Hinojosa were pursuing the same kind of independent investigative journalism that Moyers had aspired to--the kind of programming that PBS was created to air because it's unlikely to be produced by commercial networks.

If those same viewers find Need to Know lacking, it's not because Stewart and co-host Jon Meacham aren't Moyers--it's because they don't understand the journalistic values that Moyers represented.

USA Today had a piece yesterday (8/5/10) about new rules of engagement issued in Afghanistan by Afghan War commander Gen. David Petraeus. The new rules--much like the old rules--"are aimed at limiting civilian casualties," the paper's Jim Michaels reports in its own voice, explaining:

At the heart of counterinsurgency doctrine is the principle that winning over the population is the key to defeating insurgents. Civilian casualties can alienate the population.

That's the surviving population, presumably.

USA Today doesn't quote anyone skeptical of the Pentagon's claim that not killing civilians is a top priority, instead reprinting the official assertion of good intentions without comment: "We must continue--indeed, redouble--our efforts to reduce the loss of innocent civilian life to an absolute minimum."

Such deference is not, of course, extended to the official enemy, which as it happens recently released its own rules regarding protection of civilians:

The update comes as the Taliban's top leader also issued guidance aimed at limiting civilian casualties. The allied command dismissed Mullah Mohammed Omar's guidelines, surfacing last month, as propaganda.

"Mullah Omar's new directive has done nothing to protect the Afghan people from further harm," Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a military spokesman, was quoted in the statement.

"This is either a smoke screen to repair the Taliban's well-earned reputation for brutality, or insurgent groups are simply ignoring their leader," he said.

The United Nations has said insurgents in Afghanistan have caused more civilian casualties than international and Afghan government troops.

Since Omar's document was released, insurgents have killed 43 Afghan civilians and wounded 65, according to the allied command in Kabul.

The article lacks any statistics on how many Afghan civilians have been killed by the U.S. and its allies. According to estimates made by the U.N., Human Rights Watch, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Watch and other observers, at least 5,568 noncombatants were directly killed in U.S.-led military actions in the first nine years of the war. In 2009, when Petraeus predecessor Gen. Stanley McChrystal issued the rules ostensibly  protecting civilians, the U.N. reports that there were nevertheless 596 civilians killed by the U.S. and its allies, making it a more or less typical year.  Since these figures did not appear in the USA Today report, there was no call for a quote wondering whether such rules were a "smoke screen" or whether they were simply being ignored by troops on the ground.

The lesson of USA Today's article is clear: The intentions of official enemies are to be judged by their actions, whereas the actions of one's own government are to be judged on what it proclaims its intentions to be.

We often heard during the WikiLeaks controversy that civilian deaths in Afghanistan are well-covered in the corporate media, so the revelations in the documents about such incidents were "old news."

A report in today's Times from Rod Nordland ("Afghans Say NATO Strikes Killed Civilians," 8/6/10) teaches a useful lesson in how such reporting appears.

There are actually two different attacks discussed in the piece, but the more revealing coverage concerns fallout from a July 26 attack. The Afghans say 52 civilians died. But the verdict from the U.S./NATO side is very different--and the Times delivers it via an anonymous source (emphasis added):

In another case of civilian casualties, Afghan and coalition officials continued to dispute what happened in the Sangin district of Helmand Province on July 26, when United States Marines fired a missile at a house from which they had received gunfire.

A senior intelligence official for the international forces, speaking on condition of anonymity as a matter of policy because of his position, said that about six civilians were killed, as well as Taliban fighters, for a total of 14 deaths. The civilians were killed when the Marines fired a shoulder-mounted Javelin rocket at a house where Taliban had taken up positions on the roof, while keeping civilians trapped inside.

The unnamed official added more details about the level of U.S. restraint:

"The Marines were unbelievable in the length of the time they waited to return fire," the official said, adding that they took fire from the house for more than four hours before the decision to fire the rocket was made.

So was it six dead civilians or 52? The Times gets more from their source:

Asked to explain the divergence in accounts, the international force official said, "In Helmand, there are significant political challenges going on, to put it mildly." In addition, coalition forces were unable to visit the scene because the Taliban controlled the area, the official said.

In passing, the Times quietly noted that "officials from the international force denied at first that civilians had been killed."

In other words, the people who at first said they didn't kill anyone at all now say that they killed a few people--far fewer than the Afghans are claiming were killed.  But you shouldn't trust those people anyway. And also, please don't use my name.

FAIR just released an action alert about the New York Times and a factchecking failure on its op-ed page. Read the alert if you haven't already, and if you decide to write to the Times, please share your letter in the comments section below.

In Howard Kurtz’s latest column (8/2/10), the Washington Post media reporter bemoans the new media atmosphere as a "search-and-destroy culture"  that is "as likely to vilify journalists as political and corporate leaders." Kurtz counts himself among those vilified journalists, citing recent criticism over his defense (7/22/10) of Fox News' handling of the Shirley Sherrod debacle:

I know what it's like to be caught in the crossfire. When I reported that Fox News did not air the Sherrod video until after she had been fired, I got hammered by the left, and some commentators just ignored the chronology. (And conspiracy theorists pounced when I left out that a Fox online story had run an hour or so before the firing--hardly the reason that Sherrod was canned.)

Those "conspiracy theorists" apparently include FAIR, which pointed out Kurtz's oversight on this blog two weeks ago (7/23/10). But FAIR is not alone; the L.A. Times (7/24/10) and Media Matters (7/29/10) made similar points.

Do you really have to be a "conspiracy theorist," though, to think that a White House that's worried that a story will appear on Fox News would keep an eye on Fox's websites? As FAIR noted in its original criticism:

If the question is whether Sherrod was "done in" by Fox, you have to ask a question that doesn't seem to concern Kurtz: How did the doctored videotape come to the attention of the Obama administration? As the Media Matters timeline discloses, many blogs and conservative websites, including Foxnews.com and Fox  Nation, were discussing Sherrod's "racism" hours before her resignation. Isn't it likely that the Fox News website was among the most prominent of these; and, in turn, isn't it possible that that's where the White House learned about the story?

Matthew Yglesias (8/3/10) has a good takedown of  senators John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn's (R.-Ok.) list of supposedly wasteful stimulus projects that generated an "exclusive" on ABC's Good Morning America (8/3/10):

Jon Chait observes that McCain and Coburn also seem to have decided that anything relating to animals is necessarily waste. Hence a small grant to fund research on cocaine addiction and relapse is turned into "Monkeys Getting High for Science." Hardy-har-har. There's a case to be made that the government has no role to play in funding scientific research, but it's a mighty bad case. If you think the government should fund research in the health and medical fields, then of course you're going to be funding some experiments that involve monkeys. Even though monkeys are funny.

This animals-are-funny principle was followed by ABC's Jonathan Karl, who cited "among the highlights" of the McCain/Coburn press release not only the monkey study but also "nearly $1 million for the California Academy of Sciences to study exotic ants." That's doubly funny because they're bugs and they're "exotic." But the reason you would want to study exotic insects (meaning non-native) is that they're a threat to agriculture, either current or potential. Agriculture is a $36 billion-a-year industry in California--but this crucial context was ignored by ABC.

But including the context is dangerous, because it has the potential to reveal that what you're reporting is completely pointless. Karl led off his report with this example:

KARL: The Forest Service is spending more than $500,000 to replace the windows at this Mount St. Helens visitors center. It could sure use a facelift, but--

ANSWERING MACHINE: Coal Water Ridge Visitor Center is now closed.

KARL: The visitors center is closed and there's no plans to reopen it.

What an outrageous waste of taxpayer money! But then Karl follows up with this crucial bit of information: "The Forest Service told us, they are fixing it up to sell it." If that had been mentioned in the first place--"The Forest Service is spending half a million dollars to fix up a shuttered visitors center in order to sell it"--that wouldn't have sounded crazy at all; lots of homeowners make similar decisions about their property every day. But if it didn't sound crazy, it wouldn't have been a catchy way to lead off the report.

Of course, the real point of the list is not the individual items, but the general point that the whole stimulus program was a waste of money that failed to boost employment. On this economic question, ABC cites exactly one expert: John McCain, who declares of the projects he listed, "I think none of them really have any meaningful impact on creating jobs." This is the politician who declared during the 2008 campaign (Think Progress, 1/18/08), "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should."

The Congressional Budget Office (5/25/10), whose understanding of economics is somewhat more advanced, estimated that in the first quarter of this year, the stimulus bill created the equivalent of 1.8 million to 4.1 million full-time jobs. This is context that ABC could have included in its story, but chose not to--perhaps because it would have revealed that the story had no real point.

Every Sunday on ABC's This Week there is a feature that names the U.S. servicemembers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan the previous week. Christiane Amanpour is the new host of the show, and the segment continues. But her critics see something sinister at work.

This is how previous host Jake Tapper generally introduced the list:

This week, the Pentagon released the names of 16 soldiers and marines killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Sunday, this is what Amanpour said:

We remember all of those who died in war this week, and the Pentagon released the names of 11 U.S. servicemembers killed in Afghanistan.

Washington Post critic Tom Shales, still apparently enraged that Amanpour got the job in the first place, slammed this performance:

Perhaps in keeping with the newly globalized program, the commendable "In Memoriam" segment ended with a tribute not to American men and women who died in combat during the preceding week but rather, said Amanpour in her narration, in remembrance of "all of those who died in war" in that period. Did she mean to suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?

That got a plug from NewsBusters, the blog affiliated with the right-wing Media Research Center. The MRC's Brent Baker had already weighed in, slamming Amanpour on Sunday for "phraseology which put the U.S. deaths second to all the wars around the world."

Meanwhile, back in reality, Amanpour's debut featured an interview with Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that focused on the threat to the Afghanistan war effort posed by the WikiLeaks disclosures. In her other interview, Amanpour brandished a copy of the new issue of Time magazine and asked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, "Is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan again?"

And Amanpour tried to put the best spin  on the war:

What I think a lot of people maybe don't get is that the Afghan people still want the American forces there. In the latest ABC poll, it shows that 68 percent of the Afghan people actually want the American forces still there. Do you think that there has been an opportunity missed or should there be an opportunity seized by yourself, maybe by the president, to go out and speak to the American people more about Afghanistan, about the strategy, about why it's important?

Spoken like a true Taliban sympathizer.

As Steve Rendall explained here last week,  the recent Washington Post editorial ("Colombia Proves Again That Venezuela Is Harboring FARC Terrorists") doesn't really back up its argument that there is some sort of Venezuelan conspiracy to aid the Colombia rebel group FARC. "That Venezuela is backing a terrorist movement against a neighboring democratic government has been beyond dispute since at least 2008," the Post claimed--though there is most certainly a dispute about that evidence.

On Saturday (7/31/10), the Post printed an article by Latin America correspondent Juan Forero, which took a look at this controversy.  What's most notable is that he doesn't reach the same conclusion about the Colombian evidence as the Post's editorial page does; he even unhelpfully notes that FARC members "frequently cross frontiers," which might suggest that their supposed presence on Venezuelan territory does not necessarily indicate support from the Venezuelan government.  

I understand the difference between an editorial and a news report. But is it the Post's position that its reporters must stick to the facts, while the editorial page can say whatever it wants? There's some history to suggest this is the case, but some clarification from the paper would be welcome.

The Afghanistan documents posted by WikiLeaks were obviously the big story of the week. So how did the network Sunday shows react to these disclosures, which have the potential to open up a real debate about the Afghan War?

NBC's Meet the Press interviewed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen.

ABC's This Week featured an interview with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

On CBS, Face The Nation had Mike Mullen.

What would state broadcasting look like again?

CBS also had an interview with Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations (formerly of the Bush administration), who urged the U.S. to wage a more traditional counterterrorism war, "where we use drones, we use cruise missiles. We use covert operatives, we use Special Forces."

That would seem to be the kind of criticism of the Afghanistan War that is allowable.

It's worth noting that the new PBS program Need to Know discussed WikiLeaks on Friday. As co-host Alison Stewart put it at the top of the show: "Much ado about nothing or putting lives at risk? The effects of the WikiLeaks on the war in Afghanistan."

Those are the only choices? Need to Knows' guest was Joshua Foust, a blogger/writer who is a critic of WikiLeaks and is generally skeptical that there's much of value in the leaked reports.

Israeli historian Efraim Karsh argues in the New York Times (8/2/10) today that Arabs have lost interest in the Palestinian cause, which apparently is a good thing because that severs "the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems," making it a "positive" sign of hope for future Arab/Israeli peace.

But Karsh's argument has little basis in fact. The opinion piece takes off from his selective interpretation of a recent poll which, as Marc Lynch of Foreign Policy points out, is not at all scientific. Conducted by the Arabic-language news outlet Al Arabiya (National, 7/22/10), the online survey found that (in Karsh's words) "a staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian/Israeli peace talks."

There's a world of difference between people in the Arab world saying they couldn't care less about "peace talks" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and not caring about the Palestinian cause. In fact, it would be surprising if Arabs, both in Palestine and throughout the Arab world, did express hope in the moribund "peace talks" currently ongoing. Since the Israeli/Palestinian "peace process" started in the early 1990s, Palestinians have gotten little in return besides an ever-growing colonization process in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a separation barrier that annexes illegal Israeli settlements and restricts freedom of movement for Palestinians, and brutal Israeli assaults that have killed many innocent civilians (GRITtv, 7/21/10).

Another wrench is thrown into Karsh's argument that "many Arabs have apparently grown...apathetic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict" when one looks at a 2009 poll of Arab public opinion conducted by the University of Maryland and Zogby International. According to the poll, 76 percent of respondents put "the Palestinian issue" as either the "most important" issue or as one of their "top 3 priorities."

As a recent statement from the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to the U.S. made clear (War in Context, 7/8/10), contrary to Karsh's claim that there is no link between the resolution of the conflict and "peace and stability in the Middle East," Palestine remains a core issue in the Arab world.