The New York Times' David Carr (9/20/10) compares involvement by media figures in politics--exemplified by CNBC's Rick Santelli and various Fox News figures fueling the Tea Party movement, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's dueling answer rallies to said movement--to "a football game where the reporters and commentators, bored by the feckless proceedings on the field, suddenly poured out of the press box and took over the game." Writes Carr: "In politics, it seems as if the media is intent on not just keeping score but also calling plays."

Regardless of what one thinks of any particular media figure's political advocacy, it should be remembered--in a nation that was basically imagined into existence by a political commentator named Thomas Paine--that there is nothing at all unusual or alarming about people writing and talking about politics in the hopes of affecting the course of political life. Indeed, that's the most obvious reason to become a political journalist, and the assumed role of journalism that underlies the First Amendment. It's only the corporate media tradition of trying to conceal the political opinions of journalists in the hopes of marketing the broadest possible audience to advertisers that makes it seem natural to think of journalists as people who ought to confine themselves to "keeping score" rather than getting directly involved in the sport of politics.

In the New York Times today (9/20/10), Michael Shear writes:

But as the first full week of the 2010 general election season opens across the country on Monday, Washington is scheduled once again to debate immigration and gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in the military, two deeply divisive social issues that threaten to polarize the conversation on the campaign trail.

Repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is widely supported by the public. Public opinion on immigration policy is somewhat more complex; this story is referring to the legislation known as the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for students who have been here five years and are either attending college or have served in the military. One survey found 70 percent support for the proposal.

It would be much more helpful if reporters explained that when they talk about "divisive social issues" that will "polarize" the election campaign season, they mean that a handful of Republican politicians will very loudly endorse the views of a shrinking segment of the public.

PBS ombud Michael Getler, inspired at least in part by this post on FAIR Blog, addressed Dick Armey's recent appearance on the PBS NewsHour in his September 17 column. Getler wrote that the Armey segment, which was paired with a later interview with Arianna Huffington, "didn't work," since the guests seemed to have very different agendas. The pairing wound up as a "big public relations win for Armey as mostly a platform for his views, while Huffington's main point was that 'the solutions are beyond left and right' and spent as much or more time bashing the Obama administration, aside from noting that the problems grew from 'obviously a failure of the Bush years.'"

Getler goes on to make excellent points about the larger context:

One is that Huffington may be labeled as "a liberal Democrat," but she and her widely viewed website strike me, as a reader, as an equal-opportunity critic. Armey is not. There are plenty of sharp, critical assessments of the Democratic Party and administration on her site. For me, this fits into a purely anecdotal sense that I have that much of mainstream television coverage for some time now is more from a center-right starting point than left-center-right, where far more talking heads and pundits that are described as liberal or left-of-center, actually are closer to the center and just as likely to criticize the left as the right. That is usually not the case, at least as it seems to me, with conservative or right-of-center guests and pundits.

Another point goes to something I posted back in May in the aftermath of the shutting down of two major PBS public affairs programs--Bill Moyers Journal and Now on PBS. I said: "Both provided an outlet for people and subjects that are not in the safe, comfortable center of what passes for most public affairs programming on television. Rather, they often presented guests and topics that rarely get an airing, although what they have to say is of interest to many people who live and think outside that safe comfort-zone."

Both Armey and Huffington, even though controversial, are in what I'd consider that comfortable, or familiar face, zone. Both have many friendly TV and web platforms where their views and books can be, and are, promoted.

Liberal TV pundits are often actually just centrists? PBS should do more to feature views of those outside the Beltway and media elite? FAIR couldn't agree more.

The current media fervor for austerity measures instead of stimulus policies at a time when the economy is suffering from insufficient demand is nothing new. John Maynard Keynes' media criticism in a 1931 letter to a journalist friend (Fabius Maximus; 6/21/10) could have been issued today:

To read the newspapers just now is to see Bedlam let loose. Every person in the country of super asinine propensities, everyone who hates social progress and loves deflation, feels that his hour has come, and triumphantly announces how, by refraining from every form of economic activity, we can become prosperous again.

(The quote can be found in Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, by Donald Edward Moggridge.)

French protesters took to the streets early this month in opposition to proposed austerity measures that would, among other things, delay the legal age for receiving retirement benefits. The passage of such a bill on September 15 by  the lower house of France's legislature, the National Assembly, occasioned further protests. (The bill hasn't come before France's upper house.)

Though U.S. news outlets like to claim objectivity, the actual rules of corporate journalism allow for mockery and derision of people and ideas  that don't fit a corporate-friendly template. As FAIR has documented throughout the years, U.S. corporate media despise French workers, routinely casting them as lazy, spoiled and demanding, and in need of having austerity measures imposed upon them (e.g., here, here and here).

This helps to explain why the Associated Press found it permissible to ridicule the significance of increasing the age for French pensions from 60 to 62, reporting in the lead of its news story, "France's National Assembly voted to delay retirement until the ripe old age of 62."

It may also explain why the AP can't be bothered to get facts straight. The law passed by the French National Assembly would raise the legal age for receiving partial retirement benefits from 60 to 62 in 2018;  the French are also increasing eligibility for full a pension entitlement, from 65 to 67. Not much different than the U.S.'s Social Security system, where one can get partial retirement benefits at 63.  (Sixty-seven is considered the "normal" retirement age in the U.S., though one gets maximum benefits by delaying retirement until 70.)

A Wall Street Journal report about the proposed French changes  came with lavish graphs, including one  comparing the ages at which retirees receive pensions from country to country. The graph accurately listed the U.S. at 67 years old, the age at which a normal pension is awarded (to those born after 1960); but the age listed for  France, which should have been 65, was listed as 60.

The AP and the Wall Street Journal were not the only outlets botching the reporting. U.S. outlets that failed to stipulate that the 60 to 62 age change was only for partial benefits included the New York Times,  Washington Post and CNN. In fact, reporting that accurately explained that that the French plan was to  increase the age for full retirement benefits from 65 to 67 was the exception.

But reporting the story factually would diminish its French worker-bashing value and, besides, no one important got hurt.

With all the talk of the Iraq War winding down (never mind the ongoing violence, the U.S. troops still fighting, or the continuing U.S. casualties), filmmaker Michael Moore makes an important point about how the war started--specifically, that it happened not despite but because of the way the "liberal media" behaved:

But most importantly, they made this war (and its public support) happen because Bush & Co. had brilliantly conned the New York Times into running a bunch of phony front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had all these "weapons of mass destruction." The administration gleefully fed this false information not to Fox News or the Washington Times. They gave it to America's leading liberal newspaper. They must have had a laugh riot each morning when they'd pick up the New York Times and read the nearly word-for-word scenarios and talking points that they had concocted in the vice president's office.

I blame the New York Times more for this war than Bush. I expected Bush and Cheney to try and get away with what they did. But the Times--and the rest of the press--was supposed to STOP them by doing their job: Be a relentless watchdog of government and business--and then inform the public so we can take action.

Instead, the New York Times gave the Bush administration the cover they needed. They could--and did--say, "Hey, look, even the Times says Saddam has WMD!"

Indeed, as Moore makes clear, right-wing media weren't  the only ones backing the Bush White House--MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for his anti-war views, while the ranks of media war boosters included Times editor Howell Raines, Times columnists Bill Keller and Nicholas Kristof (who attacked Moore for opposing the war), and New Yorker editor David Remnick.  Few media reputations suffered as a result of supporting the Iraq War. The few who opposed it, on the  hand, paid the price.

The New York Times (9/16/10) points out in a write-up of its new poll :

The economy and jobs are increasingly and overwhelmingly cited by Americans as the most important problems facing the country, while the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries.

Huh. The New York Times has spent a lot of time telling readers that the public cared very deeply about this, as FAIR noted in a June 24 Action Alert, which asked the paper to provide evidence for assertions like Times reporter Matt Bai's suggestion (6/17/10) that "the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters," or for the Times' report (6/18/10) that the Senate's failure to pass a spending bill was evidence that lawmakers, "reacting to rising public concern, have grown reluctant to vote for measures that add to federal red ink."

An AP piece published across the Web today (9/16/10) carries this headline: AP-GfK Poll: Nearly Half Oppose Tax Hikes for Rich.

Well, that's one way of looking at it--just like you could report the results of the 1988 election by saying that Michael Dukakis got "nearly half" of the popular vote. The more logical way of putting it would be that more than half support letting tax cuts expire for the rich: 54 percent to 44 percent. But framing it instead around the minority position lets them focus on how Democrats might worry about "provoking the 44 percent who say the reductions should include the wealthy," as opposed to worrying about provoking the majority who don't feel that way.

And that majority is particularly strong among Democratic voters (three quarters), who are presumably the ones Democratic lawmakers need to be most worried about, particularly given the sharp drop in enthusiasm among those voters.

It's also worth pointing out that this poll seems to be a bit of an outlier, according to the data available on PollingReport.com: A recent Pew poll conducted at basically the same time (9/9-12/10) put support for keeping tax cuts for the super rich at only 29 percent (16 percent among Democrats), a National Journal poll (8/27-30/10) put it at 35 percent, and a USA Today/Gallup poll (8/27-30/10) had it at 37 percent. A media outlet's write-up of its own poll doesn't often include such information about other polls, but it certainly would be helpful to readers trying to make sense of the numbers.

"Aren't there things Obama & Co. could have done differently?" Howard Fineman writes in the current issue of Newsweek (9/20/10).  "Election Day is still seven weeks away--but it's not too early for a 'pre-mortem.'"

No, never too early--especially since Fineman's column offers the same advice corporate media pundits have been giving to Democratic politicians  for at least the past 30 years: Move to the right. "Obama's 2008 victory was a personal one," Fineman quotes Bill Clinton adviser Bill Galston. "It wasn’t a vote for a more expansive view of the role and reach of government." You may have thought that enacting healthcare reform was a central promise of the Obama campaign, but no--apparently we just voted for him to hang out with us.

Instead, writes Fineman, "Obama--an overachiever, the guy who fills up a second blue book on the extra credit question--tried to do it all." For example, he foolishly tried to address the global catastrophe of climate change, pushing the House to vote for a cap-and-trade bill: "With this one early vote, the president exhausted his chits with Blue Dog, swing-state moderates and the coal-staters, who were then reluctant to help him on other matters." If only he had saved those chits!

If this doesn't make much sense to you, then you may suffer from another malady Fineman diagnoses in Obama: He hasn't "seemed all that curious about what makes Democratic insiders tick." That's certainly not Fineman's problem.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (9/12/10) deals in part with the news outlets sought out by different partisan and ideological groups--Democrats and Republicans; conservatives, moderates and liberals. Which outlets are attractive to which groups--particularly the most polarized groups in the survey, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats--sheds an interesting light on the question of press bias.

First, when looking at generic media categories, you see that many of them are more attractive to the right than to the left: When asked which outlets they used regularly, conservative Republicans were more likely than liberal Democrats to name local TV (50 percent vs. 40 percent), daily newspapers (47/40) and community papers (37/26). Others were relied on more or less as much by both political poles: network evening news (23/24), Sunday morning shows (11/13) and news blogs (12/13). The categories that were less attractive to the conservative Republicans than to liberal Democrats were morning shows (15/21) and news magazines (7/16).

There is a widespread public perception--one that FAIR has offered much evidence to debunk over the years--that there's a pervasive liberal bias in U.S. news media. When asked about journalistic bias by the Pew survey, 43 percent said they saw mostly liberal bias, with only 23 seeing mainly conservative slant. If newspapers and TV news were biased against the right, though, one would expect that the left would find them to be more attractive--yet that doesn't seem to be the case. (Bear in mind that the percentages cited are of the groups themselves--it doesn't matter how big a fraction of the general public each subset represents.) Are right-wingers more willing to accept news whose point of view they disagree with? That's not what they tell Pew: 41 percent of conservative Republicans said they prefer to get news from sources that share their political point of view, vs. 33 percent of liberal Democrats.

Turning to specific news outlets, the one that's most attractive to either wing is, unsurprisingly, Fox News--watched regularly by 48 percent of conservative Republicans and only 7 percent of liberal Democrats. Though the audiences of its rivals, CNN and MSNBC, did skew left (10/26 and 5/18, respectively), neither was as attractive to the left as Fox was to the right, and the ratios were not as lopsided: Fox is watched by one side seven times more than the other, vs. three times as much for CNN and four times as much for MSNBC. C-SPAN had a less polarized audience (2/3).

Looking at individual cable shows, the survey found a handful of Fox shows that strongly appealed to conservative Republicans and were virtually ignored by liberal Democrats: The O'Reilly Factor (27 percent vs. 1 percent), Hannity (20/0) and Glenn Beck (19/0). MSNBC's roster had shows that were correspondingly ignored by conservative Republicans, but were not nearly so attractive to liberal Democrats: Hardball (1/7), Maddow (1/7) and Countdown (0/7).  The satirical shows of Comedy Central (Daily Show, 3/14; Colbert Report, 2/11)  came closer to the appeal of the Fox programs for liberal Democrats, but their audiences were somewhat less politically homogeneous.

Two radio outlets were included in Pew's survey: the Rush Limbaugh Show and NPR. Limbaugh's program had political demographics similar to Fox's programs (17/1), whereas NPR looked more like CNN (6/23).

Finally, among national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today had more appeal to the right (both 7/3), whereas the New York Times had much more appeal for the left (1/13).  This was perhaps the most surprising finding in the survey of political media preferences: The politics of the Times, in our evaluation, are not that different from USA Today's. The Times does, of course, derive much of its circulation from its home city, which has a liberal Democratic political culture. One also suspects that having "USA" as part of a name has more cultural appeal to conservatives than "New York."

Los Angeles Times columnist James Rainey (9/15/10) takes a look at "experts" appearing on local newscasts who are actually paid spokespeople for commercial interests--without viewers being made aware of this fact.

He focuses on "toy expert" Elizabeth Werner, who makes appearances on local stations to talk up new products--on behalf of a company paid by toy manufactures to do so. Her employer, DWJ Television, says it tells TV stations that companies are footing the bill for her promotional appearances. If that's true, then the burden is clearly on the stations to tell viewers about this connection. Rainey argues that it's the law, too:

Federal law requires disclosure, too, "when a broadcast station transmits any matter for which money, service or other valuable consideration is either directly or indirectly paid." That would include noting that advocates giving an opinion about a product have been paid to do so.

Station operators must "exercise reasonable diligence" in trying to discern whether promotional payments have been made, FCC regulations say. Stations that fail to disclose, with either a spoken or on-screen disclaimer, can be fined up to $37,500 per violation. But you don't hear about a flood of penalties coming out of Washington, do you?

Rainey looked at three of Werner's recent appearances--in Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix--and reports:

A spokesperson for the two Fox stations and the news director at the Phoenix outlet told me they had been told absolutely nothing about Werner being paid to tout products, which ranged from a Play-Doh press to a new Toy Story video game to the Paper Jamz electronic guitar.

Assuming they really didn't get any notice of Werner's pay arrangement (and the Phoenix station offered one e-mail that didn't disclose the sponsorship), that would put the stations in the clear, right?

Wrong. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a newsroom knows that when someone comes through the door offering their expertise, you start asking questions.

One would hope so, at least.

There was something depressing about a recent discussion on the PBS NewsHour Monday night (9/13/10) about the debate over what to do with the Bush-era tax cuts.

The politics of the tax debate is well-known; most Democrats want to extend them for all but the top brackets, while the Republicans want to renew the cuts that affect only the wealthiest taxpayers (which could cost the government an additional $700 billion in lost revenue over the next decade). The Republican argument is that allowing the tax cuts to expire on families earning more than $250,000 would hurt "small businesses."

So here's how host Gwen Ifill and Wall Street Journal reporter Naftali Bendavid summed things up:

GWEN IFILL: But when it comes right down to it--and we've debated this endlessly on this program, exactly about who is right about this. But when the president says it's a $700 billion bill to do it the way the Republicans want, and the Republicans say you're raising the taxes on people who are the engines of the economy, is there any real way to sort that out, or is it in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain?

NAFTALI BENDAVID: Well, my sense is that it's in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain. There are compromises that are being floated. You know, there's a proposal out there to only raise taxes on people making a million or more, so it would really be the high-end earners. But my sense is that this is much more about both parties having a position than about reaching some sort of compromise.

Of course political parties disagree; that's a given. But that disagreement doesn't make things "uncertain." Reporters can--and obviously should--evaluate the strength of the arguments coming from politicians, and not merely relay contradictory claims; that's the real way to sort things out that Ifill is looking for.

So when Republicans say that a tax increase on the wealthy is a small-business-harming job-killer, reporters should tell people whether there's any reason to believe that. (Hint: There isn't.) When journalists refuse to do their jobs, and are content to sit neutrally by while politicians posture endlessly, the debate goes from bad to worse.

Today in the New York Times (9/15/10) Woody Allen was interviewed on his latest film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and had this to say about the state of journalism:

Q. Were you prepared for the firestorm of media coverage you set off by casting Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in your next movie, Midnight in Paris?

A. I was very surprised at the level of journalism that occurred in relation to her. She has a small part in the movie--a real part, but it's a small part. And I shot with her the first day, and then all the papers said she was terrible, and I did 32 takes with her. Of course I didn't even do 10 takes with her. This was just a magical number that some guy created in a room. Then they printed that her husband came to the set and was angry with her. He came to the set once, and he was delighted. He felt she was a natural actress and couldn't have been happier.

Q. That would make a good blurb for the movie poster.

A. For some reason, the press wanted to say bad things about her. I don't know if they had something against the Sarkozys, or it was a better way to sell papers. But the fabrications were so wild and so completely fake, and I wondered to myself, Is this what happens with Afghanistan and the economy and matters of real significance? This is a trivial matter. That's a longwinded answer to your question: I was not prepared for the amount of press that was attached to the picture because of Madame Sarkozy.

After Hurricane Katrina, the airwaves were filled with media promises to pay attention to long-neglected stories about poverty and racism. As FAIR documented (Extra!, 9-10/07), that promise didn't amount to much; three years of newscasts (covering September 2003 through October 2006) provided just 58 stories about poverty.

On September 12, ABC World News devoted almost 100 words to the news that, according to anchor Dan Harris:

170,000 families were homeless, rather, in homeless shelters in 2009. That's a 30 percent increase in two years. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau is expected to announce this week that as many as 15 percent of American families lived in poverty last year, up from 13.2 percent.

Harris' set-up for this brief report--that was pretty much the whole thing--was to announce that these were "some new economic numbers that could prove troubling for Democrats trying to hold onto power in Congress." And probably even worse news for the homeless families.

PBS ombud Michael Getler has thankfully expanded on his "I trust Nova" response to concerns that public TV's leading science program might be influenced by its climate change-denying funders (FAIR Blog, 9/8/10). In a more extensive response to those who thought they detected the fingerprints of oil tycoon David Koch (and industry giant ExxonMobil) in a Nova broadcast, Getler (9/13/10) suggests that those critics might have reason to be suspicious.

Getler points to the interconnection of Koch's gifts to Nova and to the Smithsonian museum, which has a David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins that portrays climate change as a driving force behind our species' evolution. The curator of this exhibit, Rick Potts, appears in Nova's "Becoming Human" program (rerun 8/31/10), making a similar case. As Getler notes:

The segment did leave you with both a subtle message and the feeling that climate change may not be so bad, or bad at all. Of course, it may be very bad and there is nothing about that in the episode.

I’m not judging the science here, or even the program itself. But the three-way link between Potts, the Smithsonian and David Koch are not explained in the program or online and, somehow, they should have been, even though this was a re-broadcast. Failure to do so adds to the question of whether any red flags went up inside Nova last year or this year or whether they just didn’t want to call attention to those connections.

Nova remains unapologetic and indeed seems indignant that anyone would question the integrity of their science reporting. In a statement to Getler, the program responds to Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm, who had criticized the "Becoming Human" series:

By taking the final few minutes of Nova's show out of context, as if the episode were intended to be a major exploration of humanity’s future rather than its past, Dr. Romm has distorted Nova's efforts to engage in much-needed, responsible, popularization of a scientific field that is constantly under siege from doubters of evolution.

The reference to "doubters of evolution" makes one wonder: What would people say if the top few of Nova's most generous supporters included the two most prominent funding sources for "intelligent design" advocacy? Surely the mere fact that a science program was bankrolled by proponents of pseudo-science would raise eyebrows. And if there creationist shibboleths found their way into Nova's programming, however subtly, there would be howls of protest.

Koch's denial of climate change is no less a pseudo-science than creationism. The big difference is that evolution, unlike global warming, is not a catastrophe that requires urgent action, so its skeptics are much less dangerous--and have pockets not nearly so deep as those who benefit from not taking action against global warming.