Politico has a story about how congressmembers and their staffs are avoiding the Colbert Report that contains this anecdote:

"My experience with that show is like herpes. It never goes away, and it itches and sometimes flares up," said a former aide to Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, after his boss appeared on the show in 2006. The conservative Georgia Republican, co-sponsor of a bill requiring that the 10 Commandments be displayed in Congress, was skewered by Colbert in a segment of "Better Know a District" for appearing to be able to name only three of the commandments.

The episode has "haunted" the office for years, the former aide said. “I deeply regret letting him go on the Colbert Report."

Colbert gave the guy the dumbass demagogue herpes!

Seriously, Rep. Westmoreland isn't haunted by Colbert. He's haunted by the reality of his ignorant demagoguery, briefly exposed on Colbert.  (Watch the video--it's not Colbert's editing that makes him come across as he does.) The Colbert Report is one of the few places where this sort of thing can happen anymore--and that should be the key point. Politicians are avoiding Colbert in favor of more friendly and servile venues--like news outlets.

An important story is happening right now that's not getting a whole lot of media attention. A military court is investigating claims that members of a U.S. Army Stryker unit randomly killed Afghan civilians. Some of the soldiers say they were pressured by a commanding officer into participating in the crimes. There are also reports that soldiers took photos of the dead Afghans, along with body parts. One of earliest accounts I'd read of the story appeared in the British media (Guardian, 9/9/10).

The basic outline of the story was recounted in a New York Times story on September 27. But the headline of the piece in some editions (it's still here) was striking:  "Drug Use Cited in Unit Tied to Civilian Deaths."

That is a reference to the brief mention near the bottom of the piece from one lawyer who suggested there was widespread drug use in the unit. That would hardly seem like the most important revelation in the article.

Or consider how NBC Nightly News covered the same story on September 28, courtesy of anchor Brian Williams:

An interrogation video is providing chilling details about how a group of American soldiers allegedly murdered Afghan civilians, and what we're learning is from the soldiers themselves. It's all part of a case that could have an impact on the war in Afghanistan and perhaps put American troops at greater risk of retaliation.

Is it really necessary to justify coverage of the random murder of Afghan civilians by pointing to the hypothetical deaths of U.S. soldiers in response?

You may remember James O'Keefe as the video hoaxter who fooled media into thinking ACORN gave tax advice to a man wearing a pimp costume (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10). Or as the miscreant whose attempts to interfere with Sen. Mary Landrieu's office phones got him arrested (Extra!, 4/10).

Now O'Keefe has a new claim to fame as the guy who tried to turn sexual harassment into reality TV.

CNN is reporting today (9/29/10) that one of its reporters, Abbie Boudreau, was the target of a bizarre, misogynistic scheme by O'Keefe's video production team--"Project Veritas"--to lure her on to a boat where she would be videotaped as O'Keefe attempted to seduce her amidst sexual paraphernalia. Boudreau was alerted to the plan at the last minute by one of O'Keefe's colleagues who recognized that "the idea is incredibly bad" with "the potential for unnecessary backlash."

The whistleblower, Izzy Santa, described the harassment plan in a note to one of Veritas' backers:

Today, James is meeting with a CNN correspondent today on his boat. She is doing a piece on the movement of young conservative filmmakers.

She doesn't know she is getting on a boat but rather James' office. James has staged the boat to be a palace of pleasure with all sorts of props, wants to have a bizarre sexual conversation with her. He wants to gag CNN.

According to a written plan, the "equipment needed" for the stunt included "hidden cams on the boat," a "tripod and overt recorder near the bed, an obvious sex tape machine," as well as a "condom jar, dildos, posters and paintings of naked women, fuzzy handcuffs" and a blindfold.

The blueprint included a script for O'Keefe to read, apparently written by O'Keefe associate Ben Wetmore:

My name is James. I work in video activism and journalism. I've been approached by CNN for an interview where I know what their angle is: They want to portray me and my friends as crazies, as non-journalists, as unprofessional and likely as homophobes, racists or bigots of some sort....

Instead, I've decided to have a little fun. Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath.

Please sit back and enjoy the show.

The document, labeled "CNN Caper," tried to anticipate how the cable network would respond and planned a counterreaction:

If they pursue this as you are a creep, you should play it up with them initially only to reveal that the tape was made beforehand confirming this was a gag.... If they [CNN] admit it was a gag, you should release the footage and focus on the fact they got punked, and make sure to emphasize Abbie's name and overall status to help burden her career with this video, incident and her bad judgment in pursuing you so aggressively....

If they go on the attack, you should point out the hypocrisy in CNN using the inherent sexuality of these women to sell viewers and for ratings, passing up more esteemed and respectable journalists who aren't bubble-headed bleach blondes and keep the focus on CNN.

Trying to figure out what to do if O'Keefe came out of this looking like a creep was perhaps the one good idea that went into the planning of this operation.

Media Matters' Jamison Foser (9/29/10) pointed out that when O'Keefe was running his ACORN hoax, the ombuds for both the New York Times and Washington Post wrote columns complaining that their papers weren't taking him seriously enough. Maybe there ought to be some soul-searching at these outlets over why they gave him as much credence as they did.

Follow Jim Naureckas on Twitter @JNaureckas.

There's a push for the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act before Congress adjourns for the season, which has sparked some pushback from right-wingers given prominent platforms in the corporate media. The Act, which already passed the House, would help enforce and close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963; under the law, women would actually be able to find out how much their male colleagues make without either of them facing retaliation. A September 22 New York Times op-ed by Christina Hoff Sommers of AEI and an October 4 George Will Newsweek column both attack it as unnecessary--in Will's words, "It is ludicrous to argue that women should be regarded as victims in patriarchal, phallocentric America and must be wards of government."

Sommers says the law "overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women," while Will--relying heavily on Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the conservative Hudson Institute--argues that "pay disparities largely reflect women's choices." As an example, Will says women hold so few science and technology jobs and faculty position because they just don't want those jobs--after all, hardly any women who go to all-women's colleges, where they're surely not discriminated against, study those things. At Bryn Mawr, for instance, only 4 percent major in chemistry and 2 percent in computer science. (Will also makes liberal use of irrelevant factoids, such as the fact that women live longer than men, now receive more doctoral degrees than men and may soon be a majority of the workforce.)

Heather Boushey has a good take-down of Sommers' op-ed on Slate--most of which applies to the Will column as well--in which she makes clear that "Sommers is the one overlooking mountains of research that demonstrate just the opposite." Both Sommers and Will compare groups of women who are better educated to groups of men who are less educated to "prove" that women sometimes even earn more than men. In an earlier critique, Boushey explained that

there are two ways to look at the gender pay gap. The first way is to ask whether equally skilled men and women in comparable jobs are paid the same. That's the way to gauge workplace fairness. Do women with similar credentials in similar jobs earn as much as the men they work with? It's in this context that the answer remains no.

Ten years out of college, women who went to the same kind of college, got the same kinds of grades, held the same kinds of jobs and made the same choices about marriage and number of kids as their male peers earn 12 percent less than those men. Boushey also cites a Cornell study that 40 percent of the total gender pay gap couldn't be explained by women's choices, the only culprit Sommers or Will blame.

As for Will's claim about the sciences, Bryn Mawr chemistry professor Michelle Francl points out in the comments section that nationally less than 1 percent of all students major in the physical sciences, and only 0.66 percent of women study chemistry--so Bryn Mawr''s 4 percent is actually astonishingly high: "I can do the math (and enjoy it, too)--women at Bryn Mawr are six times as likely to major in chem than in the population as a whole. Still think there's not a difference?"

Jeffrey Trachtenberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal (9/28/10), reports in "Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books" that electronic publishing is ruining authors:

It has always been tough for literary fiction writers to get their work published by the top publishing houses. But the digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers.

Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America's top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.

Trachtenberg gives us what he presents as the economic realities--as usual in such articles, reality as viewed by the big publishing houses:

The new economics of the e-book make the author's quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15 percent, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70 percent, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25 percent of that, or $2.27, to the author.

The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

Left out of this, of course, is the publisher's investment in each book--which is obviously much lower with an electronic copy that doesn't require printing, storage or shipping. According to the New York Times' calculations (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10)--which are based on a $26 hardcover rather than $28--the net profit on each hardcover copy is $4.05; the net profit on a $12.99 e-book, if you use the Journal's royalty figure, is $5.54--or $1.49 more profit than with hardcover publishing.

Suppose royalty rates were increased so that publishers made the same profit on an e-book as on a hardcover book. That would give the  author $3.77 per e-book sold, as opposed to (by the Times' reckoning) $3.90 for a hardcover sale.  As the law of supply and demand will tell you that it's possible to sell a lot more copies at $12.99 than at $26 or $28, it's clear that authors could maintain or increase their standard of living in a digital world--if publishers weren't intent on grabbing a bigger slice of the pie.

Update: See also James Ledbetter's take on this in Slate (9/28/10), "The Journal Asks Us to Weep for Literary Novelists."

Follow Jim Naureckas on Twitter @JNaureckas.

Agence France Presse (9/28/10) has an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales about WikiLeaks--apparently because of their proximity in alphabetical order.  Wales says that he wishes WikiLeaks didn't have "wiki" in its name--fair enough; he's free to wish that. But he goes on to say:

In the most recent round of leaks, the New York Times...actually redacted certain information that could put people in harm's way whereas WikiLeaks is planning to publish absolutely everything.... I think it is really important, when we have sensitive information, that we do rely on responsible journalists to sort through it for us.... It's much better than dumping all kinds of crazy information online and get people killed.... I don't think [WikiLeaks editor] Julian Assange wants those people killed, however if he irresponsibly follows the policy of releasing absolutely everything, it's incredibly dangerous for those people.

There's no indication in the piece that AFP tried to get a response from the group that its story is accusing of recklessly putting people's lives in danger.  Granted, WikiLeaks might be hard to get hold of these days. But two minutes of googling would turn up plenty of quotes like this one from Assange (Huffington Post, 8/14/10):

He said WikiLeaks was about halfway though a "line-by-line review" of the 15,000 documents and that "innocent parties who are under reasonable threat" would be redacted from the material.

Clearly, WikiLeaks does not have a "policy of releasing absolutely everything"--as a "responsible journalist" would have noted, rather than "dumping all kinds of crazy information online."

Follow Jim Naureckas on Twitter @JNaureckas.

Two things that are true:

--The discussion of Larry Summers leaving his job as director of the White House Economic Council often failed to provide any sense of progressive criticism of his tenure, or of White House policy. (Republican criticism was well-represented, though.)

--The Washington Post's "Topic A" op-ed features are often terrible.

On Sunday (9/26/10) it all came together, with a Post "Topic A" discussion about the performance of Obama's economic team.

The Post got responses from former Bush economic adviser N. Gregory Mankiw and McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who are both unsurprisingly critical. The paper also sought comment from Dino Kos, a "managing director at Portales Partners LLC" who argued the stimulus was ill-conceived and declared that the "government has made commitments--especially Social Security and healthcare--that cannot and, ultimately, will not be fulfilled. Future governments will default on those promises one way or the other."

Diane Lim Rogers of the center-right Concord Coalition stressed the need to "start living within our means." Author Sebastian Mallaby says the Obama team "has gotten the big calls right." He does have his criticisms, though: "The president's rhetoric, if not his policy, has sometimes been excessively tough on business, contributing to nervousness in corporate boardrooms. There can be no durable recovery until businesses start to invest, so beating up on captains of industry may be good short-term politics but is lousy economic strategy."

And Moody's economist Mark Zandi--who has recently advised Republicans and Democrats--has a similar take, writing that the White House team "deserves high praise."

But where are the voices who would criticize the White House record from the left? It seems as if that point of view can't get much of an airing, in the Post or elsewhere.

Longtime Hugo Chavez critic Jackson Diehl leads his Washington Post column today (9/27/10)

Debate in Washington about Hugo Chávez --to the extent that it exists--generally centers on whether the Venezuelan strongman is a genuine threat to the United States or a buffoonish nuisance who is best ignored.

This narrow debate over Chavez's rule in Venezuela is something FAIR has documented on the country's top op-ed pages.

Of course, Diehl's point is that Chavez is a genuine threat, so anyone who takes the other position--that he's  merely an annoying buffoon--is naive.

CNN president Jon Klein is out--replaced by Ken Jautz, who was the boss at Headline News. He is, among other things, the guy who brought Glenn Beck to television:

CNN's Headline News has hired radio talkshow host Glenn Beck to host a one-hour primetime show, according to a Daily Variety report (1/17/06). Variety quotes CNN Headline News president Ken Jautz's description of Beck: "Glenn's style is self-deprecating, cordial; he says he'd like to be able to disagree with guests and part as friends. It's conversational, not confrontational."

As Klein leaves, I can't help but remember that back in 2005 he explained to Charlie Rose that there couldn't be a left-liberal answer to Fox News because those people "don't get too worked up about anything." As FAIR noted back then:

When Rose asked if there could ever be a successful progressive version of Fox News Channel, Klein thought not. He explained that while Fox was tapping into a brand of "mostly angry white men" conservatism,

a quote/unquote, "progressive" or liberal network probably couldn't reach the same sort of an audience, because liberals tend to like to sample a lot of opinions. They pride themselves on that. And you know, they don't get too worked up about anything. And they're pretty morally relativistic. And so, you know, they allow for a lot of that stuff.

Now you can argue that MSNBC doesn't really do the same thing as Fox. (Who could, really?) But it's pretty clear that someone in management over there decided--once it was safe to do so--that you could play to the left.  And you know what happened? Most of the time, they wind up getting more prime-time viewers than CNN.

We're really proud of the FAIR Blog; it's the easiest, fastest way for us to post short, sharp critiques of the corporate media. And it's a place where our readers can chip in, too--to point us to new information, or to tell us they think we're completely missing the point.

The blog, like everything else FAIR does, isn't supported by corporate advertising. It's up to our readers and supporters to keep it going. Right now FAIR is in the midst of a fall fundraiser to make sure we can keep doing what we do as we head into our 25th year.

For a $60 donation, we'll send you a DVD of the fantastic documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America, which documents Daniel Ellsberg's heroic leaking of the Pentagon Papers. And we'll also send you The Bomb, a short, powerful book from historian Howard Zinn, which he finished shortly before he passed away early this year.

Of course, any and every donation counts. Make yours today.

The media accolades that have greeted the new documentary Waiting for Superman confirm what FAIR documented in the September issue of Extra!--that the corporate media debate over education "reform" is heavily tilted in the direction of those who bash teachers' unions, cheer the White House's Race to the Top grants and charter schools, and lionize "reformers" like D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee.

Dana Goldstein's review of the film in the Nation (9/23/10) is worth reading. As she puts it right at the beginning:

Here's what you see in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.

Here's what you don't see: the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse); charter school teachers, like those at the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, who are unionized and like it that way; and noncharter neighborhood public schools, like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, that are nationally recognized for successfully educating poor children.

More organizing around the film is taking place at NotWaitingforSuperman.org, a project of Rethinking Schools.

On Wednesday night's broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (9/23/10), Gwen Ifill announced: "Now to the first of several conversations on whether or not to extend tax cuts that expire at the end of the year."

The first guest was Republican Glenn Hubbard, who Ifill told viewers "was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, and he helped to design those cuts." Not surprisingly, he is a big supporter of extending the tax cuts, and gave the usual laundry list of reasons why, and criticized Obama for creating uncertainty in the markets and so on.

So who else will they feature in this series? One clue came at the end of the show:

JUDY WOODRUFF: In our next conversation, we will hear from Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who once testified in favor of the Bush tax cuts. He now argues, it's time to let them lapse.

Greenspan, it should be noted, is a conservative Republican, elevated to the Fed by Ronald Reagan, and a lifelong devotee of Ayn Rand. If the point of the series is to explore the tax debate among conservatives, the NewsHour is off to a great start.

Ifill has previously despaired at the partisanship of this debate--Republicans say one thing, Democrats say something else, which led her to wonder: "Is there any real way to sort that out, or is it in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain?"

Sorting it out is the job of journalists. NewsHour can't do that without finding some independent experts to talk about the issue.

Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson (9/18/10) has had it with the way we discuss economics:

With every election, we descend into soundbite economics. Rhetorical claims grow more partisan and self-serving.... These debates confirm the dreary state of economic discourse.

He points his finger at both the right and the left, but then goes on to basically endorse the right-wing critique of Obama's policies--as in, "Confidence is crucial to stimulating consumer spending and business investment, and Obama constantly subverts confidence." As an example, Samuelson writes that "the moratorium on deepwater drilling kills jobs."

It's refreshing to see that he's not stooping to partisan soundbites! A recent White House report showed that job loss due to the moratorium is much lower than was expected, and that many of those job losses will be temporary. As Grist noted (9/17/10), the Wall Street Journal reported that Louisiana parishes tied to the drilling industry saw some job increases.

Samuelson goes on to refer to Obama's plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy another sign of  "his delusional approach." Again--good to see that he's avoiding partisan soundbites. The problem, as Samuelson sees it, is that the tax cuts will hurt small businesses--the tax increases will "affect 725,000 returns with about $400 billion of business income." As Dean Baker pointed out, the tax hikes for the vast majority of those considered small business will be small:

The Joint Tax Committee of Congress projected that the average tax hit on tax filers with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000 (the vast majority of the affected small businesses) would see an increase in their taxes of just $500. This is unlikely to have much impact on their hiring and growth. It is also worth noting that the higher Clinton era tax rates were in place in the late '90s, when the economy was generating more than 8,000 jobs a day.

Samuelson wraps up the piece by noting that our "campaign discourse is strangely disconnected from underlying economic realities." Is he talking about his column?

The New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg (9/22/10), writing about "brusque and brilliant economist" Lawrence Summers stepping down as President Obama's chief economic adviser, cited House minority leader John Boehner's charge that "Mr. Obama's team lacked 'real-world, hands on experience,' a direct shot at Mr. Summers' career as an academic." She followed this by writing, "News of Mr. Summers' departure set off speculation that Mr. Obama would replace him with a corporate executive to counter the impression that he is anti-business."

The Washington Post's Lori Montgomery (9/22/10) reported similarly, "Sources said the White House is considering whether to choose a candidate who could blunt criticism that the administration has been anti-business, such as a corporate chieftain or prominent investor."

This suggestion that Summers represents an "anti-business" strain of economic thinking is absurd. While it's true that most of his career has been spent in academia and government, prior to joining the administration he was working as a managing director at DE Shaw, a gigantic hedge fund that paid him $5.2 million for his services in 2008.  In the same year, he collected $2.7 million in consulting fees from other financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. Clearly Wall Street was not turned off by his "anti-business" attitudes.

This background was rehearsed just yesterday in a New York Times blog post (DealBook, 9/21/10), which noted that "Mr. Summers has often been criticized for his close ties to the financial sector and dubbed a conduit for Wall Street to influence the White House." Such criticism does not seem to have been noticed by Stolberg.

After citing Obama's praise of Summers, Montgomery at least notes that "congressional Republicans--and some Democrats--have been more critical of Summers' tenure." But she goes on to say that Boehner accuses the White House "of pursuing misguided economic policies that ran up record deficits without creating jobs or significantly improving the economy"--a view, Montgomery says, that is rejected by "many prominent economists."  The complaints that "some Democrats" have about Summers are left unspecified, the idea that there is anything "anti-business" about Obama's Wall Street-friendly economic adviser goes unrebutted.

Martin Peretz, owner/editor of the New Republic, has come under fire recently for his anti-Muslim comments--leading to protests at Harvard, where Peretz is scheduled to be honored with an endowed chair in social studies named for him.

Peretz's bigotry has been well-known for years--and is not confined to Muslims or Arabs, though those may be the most frequent targets of his prejudice. Here's a remark made by Peretz at a forum on black/Jewish relations in 1994 (New York Newsday, 3/28/94; Washington Post, 3/28/94; cited in Extra!, 3-4/96):

So many people in the black population are afflicted by deficiencies, and I mean cultural deficiencies, which Jews, for example, didn't.... I would guess that in the ghetto a lot of mothers don't appreciate the importance of schooling.

UPDATE: Sourcing clarified; one missing word restored.

UPDATE 2: See "Double Your Standard: Repudiation, Forgiveness and Martin Peretz" (Extra!, 9-10/94) by Alexander Cockburn for reactions and non-reactions to Peretz's comments.