TVNewser posts word of a CNN special this weekend hosted by Fareed Zakaria:

Fareed Zakaria will debut his first primetime special this weekend, solidifying his new role at CNN. The special, Restoring the American Dream: A Fareed Zakaria GPS Special, will feature Zakaria's talks with four global CEOs, who provide advice for businesses and political leaders in the U.S.

His guests will include: Former IBM chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner, Google, Inc. chairman/CEO Eric Schmidt, Coca Cola Company chairman/CEO Muhtar Kent and Alcoa, Inc. chairman/CEO Klaus Kleinfeld.

The CNN press release tells us the CEOs will discuss "America's unacceptable unemployment rate…and how America can leverage the keys to bringing good jobs back to America--education and innovation." Because when I want to know about unemployment and the state of the American dream, the first--and only--people I want to hear from are CEOs.

Is Zakaria looking to take Charlie Rose's job?

Alan Suderman at Washington City Paper (10/28/10) caught NBC host David Gregory moderating an education event at a Washington hotel, where the Meet the Press host lavished praise on controversial former D.C. schools chancellor (and media darling) Michelle Rhee:

Before we begin, we have Chancellor Michelle Rhee here, and I just want to say publicly what I say privately, which is, thank you for what you've done, thank you for your commitment, for your leadership, for your stick-to-it-ness and for the result that you have achieved. Washington, D.C., will miss you greatly.... But your commitment to kids and to education endures, and there will be a great many people lining up to support you and your efforts.

As Suderman notes, "It's hard to imagine he would dare say something like that publicly about any other polarizing national figure."

An audience member posed some critical questions to Gregory about his show, chastising the host for asking too many softball questions and ignoring important issues like military spending. Gregory was having none of it:

"Sir, sir, you know what, with all due respect, I don't know which program you're watching because every week--I'm not going to get in a debate with you--I ask about taxes, I ask about how you pay for taxes," Gregory said, later adding: "And by the way sir, I've also dedicated the program to talking about education and about reform as well."

At this point, the man tried to interject, but Gregory wouldn't have it: "No, sir, I get the last word here, you asked the question.... Just because people don't listen or don’t take action behind it is not something I can directly control."

As for Gregory's commitment to doing shows about education "reform," here's a taste of how that actually works (Extra!, 9/10):

On November 15, 2009, NBC's Meet the Press assembled a panel featuring Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Republican leader Newt Gingrich and community activist Al Sharpton--all of whom are more or less on the same side of corporate-friendly school "reform." An opposing view could be found in a taped soundbite from the American Federation of Teachers' Weingarten--which was then countered with a soundbite from Rhee. All of which served as a setup for NBC host David Gregory to pose this question to Duncan: "Why should anybody believe that a Democratic president, who relies on interests like the unions who are out there organizing and who vote, why should somebody believe that he's really going to take them on, that you are really going to take them on to force accountability?"

The conventional wisdom among corporate pundits has long been that Democrats have to move to the right in order to win. You're likely to hear a lot of this after Tuesday, but there's already plenty of advice being offered in advance of the Democrats' likely midterm defeat.

Time's Joe Klein has his take in the new issue of the magazine (11/8/10). He writes that "with the prospect of a Congress tilted toward the right, Obama will have to figure out new ways to sell his wares, if he can sell them at all." Klein urges Obama to think big--and to think nuclear:

If Obama wants to get a major stimulus program through the next Congress, he should propose the National Defense Nuclear Power Act. And make it big: a plan to blast past the current financing and licensing quagmires and break ground on 25 new nuclear plants between now and 2015.

Klein adds:

Some environmentalists still see nuclear power as unclean, though their argument has been wilting over time as France and Japan, among others, have proved the safety and efficacy of such power and climate change has emerged as our most pressing environmental problem. There will be those who argue, correctly, that given the current abundance of natural gas, nuclear power is too expensive--but it won't be in the future, and the price can be dramatically reduced if the government provides direct, no-interest construction loans rather than loan guarantees.

It's worth recalling that Obama has already made one substantial step in the pro-nuclear direction this year, providing billions in loan guarantees for a new nuclear plant in Georgia  (a move some in the media embraced).

The objection from anti-nuclear environmentalists is not that it's merely "unclean"--though that is a serious concern.  Despite massive amounts of government assistance, the industry hasn't convinced Wall Street investors that nuclear power is a profitable business. Klein's answer seems to be more corporate welfare to prop up an industry already long dependent on substantial government support.

It goes without saying that the progressive base of the Democratic party is where you're most likely to find opposition to nuclear power--which is probably a big part of what makes calling for Obama to embrace it seem so appealing to bash-your-base pundits like Joe Klein.

New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney has a long piece (10/29/10) about California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for Senate. Both are expected to lose on Tuesday, which leaves Nagourney wondering why women aren't more eager to support female politicians. The piece poses a lot of big questions--the fact that both are struggling "raising questions about money, gender and Americans' views of candidates who come out of corporate boardrooms." It is surprising that they are trailing Democrats who are "symbols of liberal policies and nearly as old as talking pictures."

Nagourney gets to gender:

And all this flows into the question of gender. California, of all states, has shown little reluctance to vote for women: Both of its senators are women, Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Democratic primary for president here in 2008 and this is the state that sends Nancy Pelosi to Congress.

So why not Whitman and Fiorina, then?  We're told that they exemplify "this new breed of tough female corporate executives looking to shift into public office. This has not always proved to be the best pedigree for a male candidate, and some pollsters and analysts suggested, that it might prove even more complicated for a woman as gender roles continued to evolve."

In the last paragraph, Nagourney finally arrives at the most logical conclusion: Women tend to support Democratic politicians, and perhaps even more so in California, a Democratic-leaning state:

And in a state that might have pioneered the notion of identity politics, these races show that women are the last voters that Ms. Whitman and Ms. Fiorina should be counting on. Women here are much more likely to vote ideology and issues than gender. In Thursday's poll, the last Field Poll that will be done before the election, Mr. Brown led Ms. Whitman among women by 51 percent to 35 percent.

In other words, women vote on the issues, and these candidates--who happen to be women--don't support the kinds of policies most women support. So, yeah, it's kind of a mystery why they're not ahead in the polls.

Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina (10/28/10) responded to criticism from Climate Progress' Joe Romm (10/26/10) and FAIR Blog (10/27/10) of the magazine's recent coverage of climate change:

In actuality, Scientific American reports on climate-related science in depth in nearly every issue and frequently online. You can see a sample list of past print and online-only articles at "Want to Learn More about Climate Change?," including coverage of carbon and climate back to 1959. Climate is the issue of our time. We covered the debate surrounding Judith Curry as a news event in this topic area--and as a way to foster discussion of climate issues in general. As is clear in the article, the vast majority of the scientific community--and Curry herself--believe the evidence supports the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

Climate Progress and FAIR also have criticized a related reader poll about climate change: Consumer media outlets frequently conduct reader polls about content, and Scientific American is no exception....  Such polls are surely not "scientific," and nobody claims they are, but their interactive nature promotes audience engagement. It's unfortunate--although in hindsight not surprising--that certain people would take the opportunity to manipulate the results by repeat voting.

Last, both sites have noted a Shell poll with advertisement, and speculated about its significance. Advertisements are handled by the ad-sales department without the editorial board's input or consent.

As the author of the FAIR Blog post that criticized Scientific American, let me clarify that my worry is not that the editorial staff there doesn't believe that human activity is raising Earth's temperature. Anyone who takes the science seriously believes that--anyone, in other words, who looks at the findings of climate scientists and doesn't believe they are engaged in a massive conspiracy to hoax the public, or that the field's scientific method is fatally flawed. My worry, rather, is that Scientific American is engaging in false balance--that is, pretending that there is a legitimate debate where they do not actually believe one exists.  That is the implication when a science magazine polls its readers--whether "scientifically" or not--about "what is causing climate change."

The message I get from Michael Lemonick's article (11/10)--which is subheaded "Why Can't We Have a Civil Conversation About Climate?"--is that scientists should treat the arguments of climate denialists as serious and constructive contributions to the scientific discussion: If denialists are all "lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments," Lemonick writes, then they have "cause for grievance." It's hard to imagine Scientific American suggesting that similar respect be accorded to other pseudo-scientific movements: Why can't we have a civil conversation about Bigfoot? Why can't we have a civil conversation about Atlantis?

More to the point, why can't we have a civil conversation--one that concedes that "both sides" have "worthy arguments"--about the link between tobacco and lung cancer? That's an article that I trust we won't soon see in Scientific American. But then, Scientific American doesn't accept tobacco advertising--but it does take ads from oil companies like Shell, the sponsor of the pop-up poll that appeared on the magazine's website. (An aside: News outlets ought to have ethical guidelines that prevent the ad-sales department from selling ads, like that one, that are designed to confuse readers into thinking they are editorial content.)

Finally, if "climate is the issue of our time," as DiChristina says, then why did her magazine run an article last year (10/09)  by an oil industry executive about the future of oil that ignored that issue altogether?

Joe Romm (10/28/10) also responded to DiChristina's defense of her magazine. SciAm contributing editor John Rennie (PLoS Blogs, 10/28/10) defended Lemonick's article but criticized the magazine's Web poll. Salon's Andrew Leonard (10/27/10) also criticized the poll.

A guest post by Frances Cerra Whittelsey, Extra! contributor and journalism scholar:

Whether or not Juan Williams is truly a liberal or just playing the role to give Fox an appearance of balance begs the question of whether his comment about fearing Muslims on airplanes justified his firing by NPR. Williams is waving the free speech flag to defend his "honest statement of feeling," as he put it in a statement published online by Fox. He insists he has not shown himself to be a bigot by admitting that fear grips him when he sees Muslims in Muslim garb getting on an airplane with him.

As I teach in my media ethics class at Hofstra University, telling the truth is the highest value journalists can hold. But that virtue applies to reporting the truth about what we find out as reporters, having the courage to report the reality we perceive regardless of who might be offended or what it might cost us. But our opinions? Journalists are under no ethical obligation to tell their opinions at all, and news organizations like NPR actually require journalists to keep their opinions to themselves. NPR's ethics code states, "In appearing on TV or other media including electronic Web-based forums, NPR journalists should not express views they would not air in their role as an NPR journalist." And that means, says the code, separating "our personal opinions--such as an individual's religious beliefs or political ideology--from the subjects we are covering."

In fact, a journalist's value to the public is in acting as the stand-in for people too busy with their other jobs and obligations to cover the news. It is a privilege that comes with an obligation to always be conscious of our special role, but Williams seems to have forgotten this. There was nothing reportorial about his statement about his fear. He apparently felt the need to voice his own fears in order to show Bill O'Reilly that he shared his gut mistrust of Muslims. Fine. But he cannot then defend his statement as journalistic truth-telling.

In addition, deciding if any behavior is ethical doesn't stop with an expression of one's values, noble or not. To understand an ethical dilemma, journalists need to sort out their loyalties, to ask how they arose and then to rank them in importance. Journalists also have ethical duties and one duty is to avoid conflicts of interest that cause the public to question our fairness. The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics puts it plainly, urging journalists to "remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility."

NPR had already tried to distance itself from Williams before this incident by removing him as a staff employee. Williams accepted this arrangement, and now puts the onus on NPR for continuing to employ him at all. Williams himself might have considered his duty to NPR, as well as his loyalty to a long-term employer--before continuing his enthusiastic employment with Fox. He could have made a choice long ago between the two organizations, but did not. Where was his concern about his own integrity and his duty to the public?

Finally, Williams needs to take a hard look at his comment about his fear of Muslims. If you feel fear every time you see someone getting on a plane in Muslim garb, then you have an irrational prejudice. Your worry about Muslim terrorists has extended to all Muslims in the same way that Americans during World War II distrusted all Japanese. Furthermore, it is irrational to believe that a Muslim terrorist would board an airplane looking Muslim at all.

Williams is prejudiced against Muslims, and just can't see it. It doesn't matter that he went on to say that he's against any statements that would incite violence against Muslims. He's prejudiced and his comment offended Muslims.

And yes, in this country, he does have the right to express that prejudice. But he doesn't have the right to turn around and accuse NPR of restricting his speech. His boss could have handled the firing better, but NPR had every right to fire him for having a conflict of interest and for ignoring his duties and loyalties to NPR and the public.

Has Scientific American jumped the shark on climate change? That's the contention of Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm (10/26/10), who accuses the magazine of treating human-caused global climate change as an open question.

Romm points to an article by Michael Lemonick (11/10) about Judith Curry, a climate scientist whose critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are often cited by non-climate scientists who (unlike Curry herself) deny that people are dangerously warming the Earth. The articles seems to leave the impression that the truth on climate change is somewhere in the middle:

Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt, and in that charged environment, what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason--especially since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along. But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance. They feel they have all been lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments.

So there are "worthy...arguments" against the idea that human alteration of the atmosphere is causing the planet to warm up? If so, Scientific American is sitting on the scientific scoop of the decade.

Perhaps worse, the article was accompanied by an online poll to determine, in Lemonick's words, whether Curry is "a heroic whistle-blower, speaking the truth when others can't or won't," or someone who has "gone off the scientific deep end, hurling baseless charges at a group of scientists who are doing their best to understand the complexities of Earth's climate." Among the specific questions the Web poll asks is,  "What is causing climate change?"

There's something strange about any kind of poll on questions of science, as if the laws of nature responded to public opinion. But the adjective often used alongside of Web polls--which record the opinions of a non-random selection of Web surfers--is "unscientific." So why is Scientific American using one to gauge opinion on climate questions?

Stranger still, the magazine's website also features an "Energy Poll" conducted "in association with" the Shell oil company. It's hard to say whether this is an ad disguised as content or content that is underwritten and influenced by a self-interested advertiser--but either way, Scientific American has a major ethical problem.  Simply taking money for science journalism from a company with a critical interest in denying science is inherently problematic--just as it's dubious for Nova, the closest equivalent to Scientific American on TV, to be dependent on funding from climate change deniers (FAIR Blog, 9/14/10).

Scientific American has a proud tradition, and signs that it's falling short on the most critical scientific issue of our time are distressing. I've been concerned about the magazine's take on climate since last year's article, "Another Century of Oil? Getting More From Current Reserves" (10/09), which discussed techniques for pumping ever more oil without ever mentioning climate change. It was written by oil company executive Leonardo Maugeri.

CIA whistleblower Phil Agee's papers are headed to a library at New York University. A Washington Post article by Jeff Stein (10/27/10) notes that Agee, who died in 2008, revealed information that was "arguably more damaging than anything WikiLeaks has produced."

But Stein, an intelligence blogger for the Post, devotes some time to critiquing the library's press release, since it "made no mention of the renegade agent's KGB and Cuban intelligence connections." Actually, Agee always denied working with the KGB; he did get help from Cuban intelligence files while writing his expose of his CIA activities in Latin America, but rejected accusations that he was on the Cuban payroll.

Stein continues with his critique of the library, in the process giving a lesson in how a journalist can abuse anonymity:

But it did maintain that "for the rest of his life Agee was a target of CIA assassination threats."

In response to a query, Michael Nash, the library's associate curator, said, "This information came from the Agee book On the Run, and it is supported by some CIA documents that Agee received as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request."

A CIA spokesperson, speaking on the condition of anonymity, dismissed the allegation as "not only wrong, but ludicrous."

So the library cites CIA documents. The Washington Post, meanwhile, asks the agency that is accused of targeting Agee, and they tell him, ANONYMOUSLY, that this is "ludicrous." Huh.

An August 2, 1987 New York Times review of Agee's book On the Run by Thomas Powers helps provide some details:

Did Mr. Agee's activity hurt the agency? You bet it hurt. The best evidence of how much can be found in his careful account of CIA efforts to convince him he had been neither forgiven nor forgotten--following him on his travels, spreading rumors about his alleged connection with the KGB and DGI, surrounding him with agents, tapping his telephone and even providing him with an elaborately wired typewriter in order to monitor what he was putting down on paper. Most difficult of all was a two-year period in the mid-1970s, when the agency, with high-level help, managed to bar him from residence in Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands, apparently hoping to hound him until he was forced to take up residence in the Soviet bloc, where his true allegiance (from the agency's point of view) would no longer be in doubt.

Mr. Agee's account of how he finally won a residency permit in West Germany is one of the best parts of his book, an artful blend of law and clandestine strategem. The man is not without ability. Tough as that period was, Mr. Agee suspects still darker plots, a phony drug bust in Spain perhaps, or even an attempt to kill him. He may be right; a Federal judge refused to release secret documents describing ''illegal acts'' targeted on Mr. Agee on the grounds of national security.

This is where the United States Constitution comes in. Mr. Agee would certainly seem to be a prime candidate for prosecution under the espionage laws if it weren't for the legal tangle the agency had created for itself when it planned or carried out ''illegal acts'' against him.

Amy Gardner's recent reporting on the Tea Party in the Washington Post has been very insightful. Today's piece (10/27/10) deals with the activists' views of the media. There's a standard right-wing whine about mainstream media neglect, but actual Tea Party activists see things differently:

Most local tea party organizers interviewed in an extensive canvass this month by the Washington Post said media coverage of their groups has been fair, suggesting that perceptions of antagonism between the tea party and traditional news media are overstated.

Seventy-six percent of local organizers said that coverage of their groups is either very fair or somewhat fair. Only 8 percent said coverage has been very unfair; 15 percent said somewhat unfair.

It's difficult to imagine many progressive activists could say the same thing. The truth is that Tea Party activism has received an abundance of press coverage. But Gardner tries to make the case that this wasn't so, at least early on:

Media coverage of the tea party has evolved markedly since the groups first began forming in February 2009.

Major news outlets paid little attention to the first wave of tax-day protests in April 2009 and even a large march the following September in Washington.

Those April 2009 anti-tax protests were actually well-covered by the media; as FAIR noted at the time, they were featured prominently on every network newscast, which is a pretty good indication that an event has been deemed important by the press. The idea that these events escaped the media's notice is a popular one, but there's no good evidence to back it up.

As for other Tea Party coverage, Gardner cites the September 2009 event in Washington, which happened around the same time as a gay rights National Equality march. The events were of comparable size, but as Julie Hollar noted (Extra!, 12/09), one was considered far more newsworthy:

In major newspapers, the Washington Post and L.A. Times ran articles about the Tea Party on the front page (9/13/09), and the New York Times (9/13/09) published a front-page photo (teasing an article inside); a month later, only the Post (10/12/09) put the gay march on A1. (USA Today didn’t cover either rally.)

Across the handful of segments on network TV news, conservative protesters got twice as many quotes as gay rights protesters, 32 to 16. (CBS was even with eight apiece.)

It's good to know that Tea Party activists realize that they're not being ignored by the media. But it's odd to see journalists try to argue that the movement was ever neglected; if anything, it's hard to imagine a Tea Party movement would exist at all without the constant press attention it's been getting all along.

On today's front page, under the headline "Deficit Divisions Likely to Grow After Election," New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes writes this lead:

WASHINGTON -- A midterm campaign that has turned heavily on the issue of the mounting federal debt is likely to yield a government even more split over what to do about it, people in both parties say, with diminished Democrats and reinforced Republicans confronting internal divisions even as they dig in against the other side.

It is difficult to know what to make of this; the Times recently noted that the public doesn't spend much time thinking about the deficit. ("The deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries," was how the paper put it.)  It's hard to figure how a non-issue could be so important to the campaigns--other than as a useful talking point for some Republican politicians.

Calmes goes on to talk about possible spending cuts post-election, referencing the "unsustainable combination of fast-growing entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and inadequate tax revenues."

Reporters often lump Social Security and Medicare together as unaffordable entitlements. But the programs face very different budgetary pressures.  Graphs that plot the estimated costs of both show that Social Security's expansion over the next several decades (measured as a share of the total economy) is modest compared to Medicare, which is poised to grow substantially (and thus is the far more important story by any standard). But many in the corporate media dwell on Social Security instead, often presenting it as a test of Democrats' political courage:

Democrats are also split on fixing Social Security's long-term solvency. Mr. Obama had wanted to tackle the issue early, and he created the debt commission by executive order--after Senate Republicans blocked legislation--partly in the hope that it would propose future benefit and payroll tax changes he could embrace. Some Democrats say he will have all the more reason to lead that charge after the elections, to signal a more centrist, fiscally conservative course. Yet liberal groups have already formed a big coalition to lobby against any such move.

That would have been the right place to quote someone who would explain that "fixing Social Security's long-term solvency" is at best a minor issue.

After being fired by NPR, Juan Williams made an appearance with Fox host Bill O'Reilly (10/21/10) where he explained that he wasn't likely to get support from prominent African-American leaders like Al Sharpton because "I'm not a predictable black liberal."

It's not totally clear what he means by that, but Williams does a pretty good job as a Fox News Liberal-- i.e., someone willing to attack left-liberal groups and leaders while doing very little to promote an actual left-leaning perspective. This point was echoed in a column penned by Newsmax's Ronald Kessler (10/25/10), who wrote that he's known Williams since the 1970s and "the fact is, Williams is no liberal." He adds:

If you doubt that, read his book Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It. The book attacks Democrats and black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for promoting a "culture of failure" among blacks.

In an interview after the book was published, Williams told me that the Democratic Party "has not delivered in terms of protecting the poor, minorities in the country, on basic items, like education for your children, safety in our streets, making sure that you have the opportunity to have an economic foothold on the ladder of upward mobility."

That is why "there’s a need for a strong Republican voice among minorities, that’s why you need competition of ideas,” he said. "The one-party system has failed the poor and minority in this country."

Kessler adds this:

I once asked him why he comes across as a liberal in discussions on Fox News when I know him as leaning more to the conservative side. He said, in effect, that someone has to do it, meaning he is simply being a good commentator.

A reminder of what that pretend-left commentary amounts to came on yesterday's broadcast of Fox's Special Report program (10/25/10), where Williams responded when asked about the recent WikiLeaks disclosures from the Iraq War:

Well, you know what strikes me is that there's no big revelation. I think everybody sitting on this panel, everybody in America who's interested in the story, knew that, in fact, Iran was involved in Iraq. So I don't think that's it.

What this is, is trouble-making for the ability of the Maliki government to form a coalition of government, to try--you know, we're trying to move forward in Iraq at this moment. There is nothing in these documents that would suggest the U.S. military or the U.S. civilian leadership behaved wrongly, improperly. There's no great scandal here.

There's no reason to put out these documents. This is not the Pentagon Papers. This, in fact, is just trouble-making for people who are now trying to make the best of what has been a difficult situation that's been on the uptick. So it seems just mischievous and unnecessary.

I guess it's worth $2 million for Fox News to keep a "liberal" around who will say such things. One can only hope that NPR listeners will  learn to live without this caliber of analysis.

Fox News must be a funny place to work. The biggest star there is constantly talking about how the Obama administration is leading us toward tyranny, slavery and dictatorship. Meanwhile, on the FoxNews.com website (10/25/10), you've got "frequent contributor" and Bush State Department alum Christian Whiton (you couldn't make these names up) complaining bitterly that Obama hasn't declared the WikiLeaks team to be "enemy combatants" and taken them out via "non-judicial actions."

It's hard to think of another country where the opposition news media complains that the government hasn't assassinated enough journalists.

USA Today typically pairs an editorial today with an opposing view--as it did with its recent editorials on redistricting and NFL rules.

When it editorialized yesterday (10/25/10) on the need for the United States to adopt austerity measures similar to those of France and Britain, however, only one view was allowed: "The French are addressing their problems. So are the British. American leaders are not."

It's not that other credible views aren't out there--see Mark Weisbrot (Huffington Post, 10/21/10) questioning the need for France's retirement rollbacks, and Dean Baker (Guardian, 10/25/10) and Paul Krugman (New York Times, 10/22/10) on the economic foolishness of the British cutbacks. If an opposing voice had been allowed in, they might have pointed out the twisted reasoning behind USA Today's call for Social Security benefit cuts:

Social Security is projected to get better once the economy recovers, but only temporarily. The system is forecast to go into the red again in 2015 and then get steadily worse. That means more borrowing until U.S. politicians acquire the courage--so far lacking--to make benefits match payroll tax revenues at the risk of French-like protests. The argument that the system can simply spend its huge trust fund is nonsense, unfortunately. The trust fund's cash was spent long ago. It is a moral and political obligation, but the money still has to come from somewhere else.

One more time: Social Security is "in the red" exactly the way you would be in the red if you loaned money to a wealthy friend and expected it to be paid back. If your friend said, "That cash was spent long ago," you'd be unlikely to find that a satisfactory answer; money that is lent, after all, is rarely placed in a vault waiting for the time that it's due to be paid back. As to where the money might come from: When it was originally lent it was used to lower tax rates for the rich, so the obvious answer as to where it would come from would be to raise them back up again.

That's an answer, apparently, that USA Today didn't want its readers to hear.

On the October 22 broadcast of ABC World News With Diane Sawyer, the anchor weighed in on the WikiLeaks Iraq War documents by noting, "Arab television is already trumpeting the revelations." Not exactly a promising start, but the correspondent Martha Raddatz did a pretty good job of conveying the findings:  hundreds of Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints, thousands of unreported civilian deaths and torture of detainees.

Then the report went back to Sawyer for a follow-up question:

"I know there's a lot of outrage about this again tonight, Martha. But tell me, anything more about prosecuting the WikiLeaks group?"

I was struck by this New York Times headline on Saturday (10/23/10): "Effort to Rehabilitate Suharto's Reputation Grows in Indonesia." (The headline seems to have been changed somewhere along the way.)

The piece led with this:

JAKARTA, Indonesia — To millions, Suharto, the military strongman who ruled Indonesia for 32 years, was a tyrant, a thief and a murderer.

But more than 12 years after his fall from power in a popular uprising, and two years after his death at age 86, an effort is under way to redefine his legacy: as a national hero.

Coming from the New York Times, this is rich. In the waning days of his rule, the paper (3/8/98) reassured readers that "Suharto is no Saddam." As FAIR's Jim Naureckas (In These Times, 4/19/98) asked at the time:

How so? The Indonesian dictator's rule is no less autocratic than Saddam Hussein's. Like Hussein, Suharto has attempted to annex a smaller neighbor--in fact, his ongoing occupation of East Timor has been far bloodier than Hussein's assault on Kuwait. While Hussein's rule has been brutally repressive, Suharto is directly responsible for one of the greatest acts of mass murder in post-World War II history: the genocide that accompanied his rise to power in 1965....

Suharto immediately organized a systematic slaughter of the ethnic Chinese minority, which was believed to be the main base of support for the Communist Party. Conservative estimates of the death toll are in the hundreds of thousands; a 1977 Amnesty International report cited a tally of "many more than one million."

And Ed Herman noted in Extra! (9-10/98) after Suharto's death:

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

It is interesting to see how the same reporters move between Pol Pot and Suharto, indignant at the former's killings, somehow unconcerned by the killings of the good genocidist. Seth Mydans, the New York Times principal reporter on the two leaders during the past two years, called Pol Pot (4/19/98) "one of the century's great mass killers...who drove Cambodia to ruin, causing the deaths of more than a million people," and who "launched one of the world's most terrifying attempts at utopia" (4/13/98). But in reference to Suharto, this same Mydans (4/8/98) said that "more than 500,000 Indonesians are estimated to have died in a purge of leftists in 1965, the year Mr. Suharto came to power." Note that Suharto is not even the killer, let alone a "great mass killer," and this "purge"--not "murder" or "slaughter"--was not "terrifying," and was not allocated to any particular agent.

The use of the passive voice is common in dealing with Suharto's victims: They "died" instead of being killed ("the violence left a reported 500,000 people dead"--New York Times, 1/15/98), or "were killed" without reference to the author of the killings (e.g., Washington Post, 2/23/98, 5/26/98). In referring to East Timor, Mydans (New York Times, 7/28/96) spoke of protesters shouting grievances about "the suppression of opposition in East Timor and Irian Jaya." Is "suppression of opposition" the proper description of an invasion and occupation that eliminated 200,000 out of 700,000 people?

Just as important, the Times was remarkably supportive in real time of Suharto's early, bloody rise to power (Extra!, 7-8/90):

A clue might be found in the Times' reporting on Indonesia at the time of the massacre. While some of its coverage did invoke the horror of the massive killing (as early as 1/16/66), in general the Times' commentary and analysis viewed the destruction of the Communist party quite favorably. "A Gleam of Light in Asia" was the headline of a James Reston column (6/19/66). "Almost everyone is pleased by the changes being wrought," C.L. Sulzberger commented (4/8/66). The Times itself editorialized (4/5/66) that the Indonesian military was "rightly playing its part with utmost caution."

But perhaps the most enthusiastic of all the Times' writers was Max Frankel, then Washington correspondent, now executive editor. "U.S. Is Heartened by Red Setback in Indonesia Coup," one Frankel dispatch was tagged (10/11/65). "The Johnson administration believes that a dramatic new opportunity has developed both for anti-Communist Indonesians and for United States policies" in Indonesia, Frankel wrote. "Officials... believe the army will cripple and perhaps destroy the Communists as a significant political force."

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

Some Indonesians view Suharto as a hero? Maybe they're longtime readers of the New York Times.