FAIR has a new Action Alert (9/13/10) pointing out ABC World News' misleading treatment of taxes and small businesses.  Please leave copies of your messages to ABC, or comments on the alert, in the comments thread of this post.

A new study of the guest lists for the Sunday morning chat shows finds that the networks prefer lawmaker guests who are white, male, older and Republican. The study was published by the George Mason University School of Law's Green Bag Journal, and got a brief write-up in the New York Times today (9/13/10).

And that means we got to hear excuses from the shows about why this is the case. Meet the Press executive producer Betsy Fischer spoke about how they are "committed to having a diverse group of voices on the program whose opinions and expertise reflect the cultural, economic and political landscape of our country." (The war in Afghanistan is just one area where they seem less interested in diverse voices.)

ABC's This Week offered another defense:

"We are always looking to represent diverse views on our program, but This Week is a news program and so our bookings are dictated by the news and newsmakers," said Ian Cameron, the executive producer of This Week on ABC.

The period covered by the study in 2009 was "dominated by three issues in Congress: healthcare, the economy and Afghanistan," Mr. Cameron said. "If you take a look at the committees who were most involved in these issues, most of the members both in the House and the Senate with the most seniority were white and mostly men."

At the risk of completely questioning the premise of the Sunday show format, maybe hosting weekly chats with  prominent politicians is not a particularly great way of illuminating the vital issues of the day.  It does give the major parties a platform from which to spout their talking points, which is really what the the producers are defending here as their way of doing journalism.

Speaking of Sunday shows, don't miss FAIR's study of the partisan guests on these programs, which appears in the new issue of Extra!. Using the VoteView scores of lawmaker guests, FAIR found that the Republicans who most frequently appear on the networks tend to be from the conservative wing of their party; the Democrats invited on the same shows are closer the middle.

There's a simple way of looking at the debate over the Bush tax cuts. The White House and most Democrats say they want to extend them for the vast majority of the population, but keep higher rates in place for families making over $250,000 a year. Republicans seem to know that "Keep Taxes Rates Low for the Rich!" isn't a winner, politically speaking. So they argue that these tax increases are really going to punish "small businesses."

There's ample evidence that this is mostly untrue--the number of "small businesses" that would affected is somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent, depending on how you define the term. But some media outlets seem unwilling to render judgment on the GOP's talking point--see the New York Times today (9/13/10):

Many Senate Republicans have said that letting the Bush cuts expire for high earners amounts to raising taxes on small-business owners, some of whom fall into those rates because they report their business earnings as personal income.

Or last week (9/9/10):

Mr. Boehner got out ahead of Mr. Obama's speech. Appearing on ABC-TV's Good Morning America, he said that extending the top Bush tax rates would benefit small businesses; Democrats argue that few small businesses pay taxes at the top rates.

Journalism should tell us more than what politicians say about this or any other issue. How something will work in the real world is vastly more important than what John Boehner thinks, or what "Democrats argue" in response to what Boehner says. Oddly enough, you had to read a Times editorial on the same day (9/9/10) to get a meaningful sense of what was going on:

Mr. Boehner's much professed concern for small businesses is misdirection. The tax cuts that Mr. Obama would let expire would affect very few owners of small businesses--how many do you know who make more than $250,000 a year?--by any common-sense definition of that term.

How would the debate over tax cuts change if more reporters were willing to let reality intervene in this debate?

NewsHour viewers last night (9/9/10) might have been surprised to see a long one-on-one conversation with far-right activist/lobbyist Dick Armey, promoting his new book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.

The interview gave Armey ample room to explain the Tea Party movement's beliefs, with host Judy Woodruff offering no real challenge to any of Armey's rhetoric--like when he claimed that Tea Party activists are "probably the kindest, gentlest, most gentle souls we ever saw. We had a million of them in town last September, and they left the town cleaner than they found it."

Armey is wildly exaggerating the size of that Tea Party protest. (It's not the first time his group has done so.) That makes some sense, though, considering that FreedomWorks has been intimately involved with organizing, training and in some cases directing these activists.

A more helpful assessment of Armey's work appeared on many PBS stations last year, courtesy of the Bill Moyers Journal (9/18/09), which pointed out that Armey's stirring calls for getting the government out of our lives and away from our healthcare are difficult to square with Armey's reliance on government healthcare benefits throughout his career--first as a professor at a state university, and then as a Congressman:

And when he retired from Congress 18 years later, he was insured by that plan until he turned 66 and Medicare, another government program, kicked in.... You can't blame him for keeping his government health plan. It's great. It gave him a lot of options, dozens of private insurers to choose from, and with 8 million members in it, the federal government's got the muscle to negotiate some of the best premiums and drug prices in the country.

And there's more:

Now get this: Dick Armey thought so much of that federal health plan--the Cadillac of coverage--that he tried to keep it as his primary carrier, instead of that other federal program, Medicare.

Mr. Armey wanted an option. A government option. How about that?

But he couldn't get out of Medicare without losing his Social Security (they're hitched together--you give up one, you give up both), so he's suing to divorce the two.... And now he says he's happy to buy his health insurance on his own.

That bit of history would have been helpful for NewsHour viewers who had to listen to Armey denounce Social Security and Medicare for being mandatory: "Let all subscription to government support and assistance programs be voluntary." Huh.

PBS anchor Judy Woodruff had a message for viewers at the close of the interview--they'll be interviewing "liberal Democrat" Arianna Huffington to get a "very different perspective." But "balance" isn't really the problem here. There are countless authors who've written interesting political books who deserve airtime; why grant a soft interview to someone like Dick Armey, who has no problem airing his views on commercial media? Huffington has plenty of opportunities to share her views as well. (She runs a rather popular website, for starters.) Remember the point of public broadcasting is to strive to "provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard." A politician-turned-corporate lobbyist wouldn't seem to qualify.

When Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies appeared on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin last week, she challenged Barack Obama's assertions that U.S. combat in Iraq was ending and that the  last combat brigade was leaving the country, describing the plans the U.S. actually has in store for Iraq:

The policy has not changed. It is true that the number of troops are significantly lower than they were at their height of 165,000; it's now down to about 50,000. That's a good thing. Reduction in troops is a good thing. But the notion that this troop reduction somehow means that all combat brigades, let alone combat troops, are out of Iraq is just specious.

The 50,000 troops that are in Iraq now are combat troops. The Pentagon has, in their own words, remissioned them. They have given combat troops a new mission, which is for training and assistance of the Iraqi military. But they remain combat troops, ready to reengage in combat at any given moment.

We heard from President Obama about the Fourth Stryker Brigade, which is, as he described it, the last combat brigade leaving Iraq. We didn't hear about the 3,000 new combat troops, more combat troops, from Fort Hood in Texas, who were just deployed to Iraq about 10 days ago. We also didn't hear about the 4,500 special forces, which have the job, one, of continuing its counterterrorism operation, meaning using its capture-or-kill list to run around the country and capture or kill people. The other is to train their Iraqi counterparts, the Iraqi Special Operations Force, which is shaping up to be something that looks suspiciously like an El Salvador-style death squad. This is not the end of combat.

This was newsworthy enough, though few other media outlets challenged the White House "end of combat" hype. But Bennis had something even more troubling to add. When CounterSpin pointed out that John Pilger was reporting in the New Statesman that  U.S. policy with regard to airstrikes and bombings would be unaffected by the "new" policy, and that U.S. military contractors would be increasing in numbers, Bennis responded:

Absolutely. The number of contractors is quite disturbing, both in its own right and because it's the beginning of a process underway of militarizing U.S. diplomacy. There will be 7,000 new armed contractors coming into Iraq solely to work under the auspices of the State Department, not the Pentagon, when the State Department becomes the primary U.S. agency in Iraq. What we really didn't hear from President Obama is that the transition underway is not so much from U.S. control to Iraqi control as much as it is from Pentagon control to State Department control. The agreement that was signed between the U.S. and Iraq that requires, if it doesn't get changed--which is, I think, a likely possibility--required all U.S. troops and armed contractors under Pentagon control to be out of the country by the end of next year does not apply to contractors, armed or not, under the auspices of the State Department. So with this giant new embassy that holds 5,000 diplomats--it's the size of Vatican City--there will be at least 7,000 armed contractors. The State Department is bringing in armored cars, surveillance drones, planes and their own rapid response forces. So what we're seeing is the Pentagon leaving, largely, but the State Department taking on military tasks.

The planned militarization of the State Department has received some coverage in recent months. Stories by McClatchy's Warren Strobel, the Associated Press' Richard Lardner and Michael Gordon in the New York Times have reported on the State Department's new military role, fortress-like embassies, planned use of military contractors and purchase of military equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters and armored vehicles. According to AP's Lardner, State Department documents sent to the Pentagon last April reveal the agency expressing the need to "duplicate the capabilities of the U.S. military" by the end of 2011, when all American military forces are required to leave Iraq.

But journalists beguiled by the White House hype were apparently too busy perpetuating it to address such meddlesome details.

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald pointed out, NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported the withdrawal of combat forces without qualification (8/18/10): "It's gone on longer than the Civil War, longer than World War II.  And tonight, U.S. combat troops have pulled out of Iraq." Greenwald also cited liberal MSNBC commentators like Keith Olbermann, who touted the story as an historic event in a "special edition" of Countdown where his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow gushed about the last U.S. combat troop to leave Iraq: "We just saw, right here live with that gate closing, the last U.S. combat troop. I'm totally covered in goose bumps. It is an important moment.’"

Greenwald did offer deserved kudos to Associated Press standards editor Tom Kent, who instructed AP journalists in a memorandum to challenge the White House hype, writing, "To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials."

But, overall, it was a bad showing by journalists, many of whom seemed more interested in regurgitating an officially endorsed feel-good story rather than the more complex truth that the U.S. military involvement in Iraq would  continue, and continue in some strange new ways.

If you own a television or read a newspaper, you may have heard by now that a pastor in Florida plans to burn copies of the Quran on Saturday. The only reason you know anything about this is because the national media have decided, for reasons that are entirely unclear, to give this guy a platform. As Michael Calderone noted at Yahoo!, this pastor appeared on the front page of over 50 different newspapers...on Wednesday.  As Calderone pointed out, he doesn't even have that many members of his church.

Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas put the blame where it mostly belongs--on the media:

I ask you: If a sad little man burns some Qurans in the woods, and the media aren't there to film it, is it news?

Now, predictably enough, we are in the next cycle of coverage, with TV shows booking their "Should We Even Be Covering This Story?" segments. I know this because we've been called to appear on such programs. The funny thing is when you tell a producer that your comment on this story is that it isn't worth talking about, the response is inevitably something along the lines of, "Well come on and say that!"

Matt Bai has a piece in the New York Times today (9/9/10) explaining how Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the American economy. One claim in the piece jumps out; after explaining that large infrastructure projects--rail lines, broadband, etc.-- are "things that only an active government could realistically do," Bai claims:

Getting such projects done justified some tolerable level of public debt, proponents argued, just as a family might consider a steep mortgage on a home in a high-quality school district to be an investment in the children's success.

And yet, little was achieved by way of investing in 21st-century infrastructure, largely because the public never seemed open to the idea of huge new spending.

The public doesn't like the idea of spending more on infrastructure? Really? Bloomberg (12/10/09) had a poll on this last year, and its write-up led with this finding:

Americans want their government to create jobs through spending on public works, investments in alternative energy or skills training for the jobless.

And later:

Two-thirds of Americans back boosting spending on infrastructure. Six of 10 also support more spending on alternative energy to stimulate job growth, another measure Obama announced.

"The best thing we could do is take some public money to rebuild our infrastructure and improve it," says poll respondent Richard Kellaway, 75, a Unitarian Universalist minister who lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Unemployed people "could be put to work in a matter of days."

But maybe Bai knows about a national referendum that was conducted that we somehow didn't hear about.

PBS's Nova is taking money from one of the biggest bankrollers of climate change denial--and,  surprise surprise, the resulting programming tells viewers not to worry about climate change.  But PBS's ombud doesn't see this as a conflict of interest--because Nova is a "consistently first-rate program," and he trusts it.

Nova's conflict of interest was highlighted out by Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (9/7/10), who had previously caught the Smithsonian promoting strange climate science after getting a grant from oil billionaire David Koch (Climate Progress, 4/1/10). Koch, who's a major funder of propaganda rejecting the science of climate change, is also one of the main underwriters of the popular PBS science program Nova--which is in itself a case of strange bedfellows.  (Another major sponsor of Nova is ExxonMobil, the other top funder of science-denial in support of  oil industry profits.)

With the New Yorker's Jane Mayer (8/30/10) calling attention to the Koch family's political donations--and mentioning the fear that David Koch's contributions are affecting the Smithsonian's exhibits--people naturally paid more attention to the donor credit for David Koch on a recent Nova rerun (8/31/10) called "Becoming Human." What raised more than a few eyebrows was the program's enthusiasm for climate change as a  driver of human evolution--with a not-so-subtle suggestion that we should bear this in mind in our current era of rapidly shifting weather:

Narrator: It is a simple but revolutionary idea: Human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility. We're not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many; we are creatures of climate change.

Geographer Mark Maslin: I think we should actually look to our proud ancestry and how we evolved in East Africa and say: "That's how we survived that. We can survive the future, because we are that creature, because we are that smart."

Note that Maslin is not actually a climate-change denier--he's really a strong advocate for immediate action to restrict carbon emissions--but Nova quotes him as though he takes the don't-worry-be-happy stance adopted by...well, people like David Koch. Why is that?

As usual, PBS insiders take the position that where you get your money from is absolutely irrelevant, once again rejecting the entire rationale for public broadcasting: "Nova, like all WGBH programs, maintains complete, independent editorial control of its content," Nova executive producer Paula Apsell told PBS ombud Michael Getler. Getler, for his part, declares that "one rarely knows when or how, if at all, influence works its way," and that "as a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust Nova"--a hands-off stance that would seem to reject the entire rationale for having an ombud.

PBS's position echoes the Smithsonian's--David Koch is "very interested in the content, but completely hands off," museum director Cristián Samper told the New Yorker. And that's Koch's position as well; asked by Archeology magazine (2/17/09) if he was involved in the editorial content of Nova's evolutionary programming, he replied:  "No, I am not. I've been following the Nova series ever since it first came on the air. I'm a great admirer."

In that same interview, though, Koch describes a visit to Olduvai Gorge to inspect the Leakey digs, which he also bankrolls: "When I got there they had discovered a Hominin's bones. They left them in the earth, waiting for me to arrive. And then when I arrived, they let me pull them out of the ground, which was kind of fun."

Presumably the Leakeys let him extract those bones not because of his paleontological expertise, but because they knew it would make a major donor happy. Nova also knows that downplaying the dangers of climate change would make its major donors happy--and it aired a program that presented climate change as a positive force for good. If you want to believe that that's a coincidence--well, all you have to do is trust Nova.

The Washington Post's editorial page weighed in (9/7/10) on the Israel/Palestine negotiations by noting that

the news in the West Bank has been far less encouraging. In two shooting attacks last week, four Israelis were killed and two others wounded, interrupting what had been nearly three years of peace in the territory.

My colleague Jim Naureckas blogged about this in response to a recent New York Times op-ed.  Even if you are restricting your focus to the West Bank (as the Post is), the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem counted 24 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces from the beginning of 2009 to July 31, 2010, and two Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians.

UPDATE: Year corrected.

Barack Obama has long supported the idea of extending the "Bush" tax cuts for 98 percent of the population. The highest-earning 2 percent, meanwhile, will see their top tax rates go back up to where they were in the 1990s.

The Washington Post has a story today (9/8/10) that more or less explains this fact. The headline of the story is "Obama Set Against Bush Tax Cuts." Is the Republican National Committee suggesting headlines for the paper?

Meanwhile, the New York Times has a similar preview of Obama's announcement today, headlined "Obama Is Against a Compromise on Bush Tax Cuts."  I suppose this depends on what one means by "compromise." Obama has long supported renewing many of the tax cuts in question--a position Republicans have so far rejected--but that doesn't seem to qualify.

Further muddying up the issue is the fact that Obama is proposing  an "election-season economic package that is otherwise designed to entice support from big businesses and their Republican allies." The Times goes on to note that the White House is supporting corporate tax policies that have "longstanding Republican and corporate support."

So he's pushing policies designed to appeal to Republicans and corporations--but he's refusing to "compromise"?

Daniel Hernandez wrote an article for Extra! last year (6/09) about the tendency of U.S. corporate media to treat Mexican violence as a phenomenon that threatens to "spill over" into the U.S.--as in New York Times headlines like "Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over From Mexico, Alarming U.S." (3/23/09) and "Wave of Drug Violence Is Creeping Into Arizona From Mexico, Officials Say" (2/24/09). Hernandez's article, "Does Violence 'Spill Over' or Come Home to Roost?," questioned this framing of the story:

It is a treatment of Mexico's crisis as something foreign, unknown and dangerous, as opposed to a threat affecting an intimately close neighbor--and, in many respects, a crisis that is at least partly a product of American policies.

A new report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns (9/10)  underscores how this "spill over" metaphor distorts reality:

In recent years, the escalating drug cartel violence in Mexico has claimed tens of thousands of lives, fueled in part by thousands of guns illegally trafficked from the United States. In fact, 90 percent of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States.

Most of the guns come from Texas, California and Arizona, the report finds--with Texas, Arizona and New Mexico supplying disproportionate numbers in comparison to their populations.

An imaginary crime wave supposedly caused by unauthorized immigration from Mexico has been frequently offered by pundits as a rationalization for Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant law (Extra!, 7/10). It would be more helpful for media observers to call attention to the actual assistance U.S. gun dealers are providing to violent criminals on the other side of the border.

A recent FAIR study (Extra!, 8/10) looked at politically themed books reviewed by the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN show After Words and concluded that both outlets heavily favored white male authors and reviewers. The Times came off particularly badly in the study, which revealed 95 percent of the U.S. authors reviewed, and 96 percent of the reviewers, were white.

As far as gender was concerned, women--who obviously make up roughly 50 percent of the population--accounted for just 13 percent of the authors and 12 percent of the critics.

Today, Slate weighed in on the New York Times Book Review's biases. Picking up on a controversy sparked by author Jodi Picoult's charges of gender bias at the review, Slate published a study showing that 62 percent of the the fiction book's reviewed by the section were written by men, and the subset that were also reviewed in the daily paper were 71 percent male-authored.

Are New York Times book reviews a white male ghetto in an otherwise more diverse newspaper? Well, no. On gender, numerous byline studies have shown the paper heavily favoring male reporters, particularly on the front page. One such study conducted for FAIR (Extra!, 8/04) found that 88 percent of the Times front-page articles were written by men.

Now a new study has emerged showing that the Times runs more than six times as many obituaries on men as they do on women. According to the website NYTPicker (8/29/10), so far in 2010, 85 percent of the paper's obituaries have been about men, with men's obits out pacing women's 606 to 92.

So the Times' male bias prevails, even in death.