One strand of conventional wisdom among elite D.C. reporters is that losing the midterm elections would be a good thing for the White House. Hence New York Times reporter Peter Baker (10/24/10):

WASHINGTON — Let there be no mistake: President Obama wants the Democrats to win next week's midterm elections. His voice has gone hoarse telling every audience that from Delaware to Oregon. But let's also acknowledge this: Although he will not say so, there is at least a plausible argument that he might be better off if they lose.

The reality of presidential politics is that it helps to have an enemy.

I have to think that people who don't live in the Beltway bubble, but who do nonetheless follow politics pretty closely, would find it strange to think that the Republican minority does not currently fill the role of Obama's "enemy." Though Baker's notion of an enemy is pretty flexible; he suggests that Obama might be able to "forge agreements with Republicans on issues like the economy, energy and education" after the Democrats lose--i.e., moving far enough to the right that he would be pursuing policies that Republicans would be likely to support.

This suggestion is taken to the extreme by the Dean of the D.C. Press, the Washington Post's David Broder, who wrote a whole column (10/24/10) admiring the deep austerity measures being adopted in Britain. Massive spending cuts and the slashing of government payroll? If only it could happen here! And the surest route would be for Republicans to win big next Tuesday, which would bring us some sort of bipartisan Nirvana:

The American political system virtually precludes the possibility of a coalition government. But the midterm elections provide the opportunity for a similar breakthrough.

If Republicans emerge next month with sufficient leverage in the House and Senate to approach Obama with a proposition, they could insist that he "do a Cameron" when it comes to federal spending: a radical rollback now in the welfare state in return for a two-year truce on such policy questions as repeal of the healthcare law.

The vehicle could well be Obama's strong endorsement of the December 1 report from his fiscal responsibility commission, which is expected to emphasize spending discipline over raising revenue. This would offer major gains to both parties, and set the stage for another experiment in the British model.

By the accounts of credible economists (New York Times, 10/22/10; Guardian, 10/25/10), Britain's plan to slash spending and raise taxes in the midst of a deep downturn is a recipe for economic disaster. If the U.S. political system makes it difficult to follow in British footsteps, that's one thing to be said for the U.S. political system.

I clicked on the Washington Post website on Sunday and saw this:

We Overreact to Prejudice Instead of Airing It Out

By Kathleen Parker

Only someone who's pondered Barack Obama's "fullbloodedness" and Elena Kagan's distance from "mainstream" America (hint: She's Jewish, and from New York!) can do this. Parker also wrote a memorable column about Barack Obama being too "girly," then explained in a follow-up that, unlike African-Americans, she has the "luxury of seeing people without the lens of race."

Kathleen Parker is indeed an expert in "airing out" prejudice.

The L.A. Times has an interesting piece (10/22/10) about KCET, the local PBS affiliate that is bolting from PBS because it says it can't afford to pay the fees PBS wants to charge them. What happened is that KCET, for a little while at least, was very good at raising corporate money; the PBS fee formula required them to pay more as a result, even though that corporate underwriting was supposed to be used for producing programming.

Who did the money come from? Oil giant BP. So much money that, as the Times noted, "in gratitude KCET bosses renamed their historic Sunset Boulevard soundstage BP Studios." But that funding dried up (BP has other, bigger problems to deal with), and the station is stuck with a rather unfortunate association with a reviled multinational corporation:

Meanwhile, the BP Studios sign became an embarrassment on the KCET lot. "Several of our TV show guests began to ask about that sign and it was becoming a real problem for us from a PR standpoint," said Neal Kendall, executive producer of Tavis Smiley, the talkshow taped on the KCET lot that airs on 200 PBS stations nationwide.

Earlier this year, KCET officials discreetly covered up the sign. Station management says the move is only temporary.

It seems to me that debating Juan Williams' firing from NPR in terms of the role of "opinion" and "objectivity" in journalism is missing the point. Williams has expressed his opinions on Fox News countless times. Other NPR employees frequently express opinions, too, as when Scott Simon wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal (10/11/01) comparing opponents of the invasion of Afghanistan to Hitler appeasers; it didn't seem to set back Simon's career any.

The reason that Williams' discussion with Bill O'Reilly (O'Reilly Factor, 10/18/10) got him fired, it seems clear to me, is that he sounded like he was declaring himself to be a bigot--even as he announced that he wasn't one:

I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Now, I remember also that when the Times Square bomber was at court, I think this was just last week. He said the war with Muslims, America's war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don't think there's any way to get away from these facts.

Now, it's clear that Williams is describing an irrational prejudice here: Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols together represented a larger percentage of American conservatives than the 19 September 11 hijackers did of worldwide Muslims, so panicking when you see a Muslim get on a plane with you makes a little less sense than worrying that the passenger reading the Wall Street Journal might have a bomb.

Was Williams justifying his prejudice or criticizing it? That's a little harder to say. As you can see in the quote, he immediately links it with a bomber's statement about America's "war with Muslims...just beginning" as "facts" you can't get away from--suggesting that he did not think he was just describing the psychodrama inside his own head. On the other hand, he does go on in his conversation with O'Reilly to suggest that all Muslims shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of extremists: "If you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don’t say first and foremost, we got a problem with Christians. That’s crazy."

On the third hand, he did begin his appearance by appearing to endorse O'Reilly's thesis that "there is a Muslim problem in the world": "I think you’re right," Williams began. "I think, look, political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality." When O'Reilly concluded the segment by saying, "to diminish the whole thing as the left wants to do [would be] very dangerous"--apparently meaning the whole Muslim thing--Williams seems to agree: "That would be hypocrisy."

So you have to do some parsing of words to determine what exactly Williams was trying to say. (My best guess: People are right to be afraid of Muslims, but they shouldn't get carried away about it.) But that was also true of Rick Sanchez's comments that got him fired from CNN, and Helen Thomas' remarks that ended her 67-year career. In those cases, though, the speaker's lack of clarity did not keep outlets from drawing conclusions and acting accordingly. Many of the people now condemning NPR for firing Williams took the opposite position when it came to Thomas, but the media principle ought to be the same: Bigotry is not just another opinion.

There are  plenty of opinions flying around about NPR's decision to fire Juan Williams. The Washington Post editorialized against NPR's decision, arguing in part that Williams "undoubtedly spoke for many Americans who are wrestling with similar feelings" about seeing Muslims in airports. (Williams was worried primarily about those in "Muslim garb.") Former Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, now at the  Daily Beast website, called it a "blunder of enormous proportions."

What I found most puzzling, though, was this passage from Williams' commentary that appeared on FoxNews.com:

Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR commentator who died earlier this year, used to talk about the initial shock of finding himself on President Nixon’s enemies list. I can only imagine Dan’s revulsion to realize that today NPR treats a journalist who has worked for them for 10 years with less regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and embrace of real debate across political lines, than Nixon ever displayed.

I don't know what Schorr might have said to Williams, but I suspect he may have pointed out that in the most infamous case, Nixon had CIA agents trailing Jack Anderson, a reporter he despised, and they were plotting ways they might kill him. (Mark Feldstein's recent book explaining the history was excerpted on NPR's website.) That seems worse to me. A lot worse.

FAIR's exposé of PBS's prominent news and public affairs shows demonstrated that public television is failing to fulfill its mission--to "provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard," to serve as "a forum for controversy and debate," and broadcast programs that "help us see America whole, in all its diversity."

Now, which PBS canceled without explanation and replaced with Need to Know (co-hosted by corporate media fixture Jon Meacham), lived up to that mission admirably. Need to Know does not. Join FAIR in telling PBS to bring back Now: Sign the petition today.

Rep. Paul Ryan is the Republican leader most often touted as a serious policy wonk.  His plan to "fix" Social Security was recently evaluated by the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration. As the Washington Post notes in an article today (10/21/10), Ryan's plan "would slice initial benefits by about a quarter for middle-income Americans who turn 65 in 2050."

So why is the Post's headline "Republican Rep. Ryan's Social Security Plan Would Cut Benefits for High Earners"? While it is true that the wealthy would see benefit cuts, it would seem more important to note how his plan would affect most people.

Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 10/21/10) further points out that by comparing benefits under Ryan's plan in 2050 with benefits today--rather than with the benefits retirees are currently scheduled to get in 2050, which are 48 percent larger than today's--the Post is greatly understating the scale of the cuts. And Ryan's proposal to raise the retirement age to 70 will cut everyone's benefits, not just "high earners"--however you define them.

According to the Post article, by Lori Montgomery, "With congressional elections less than two weeks away, the Ryan plan has been a frequent target for Democrats accusing the GOP of plotting to gut Social Security." The Post seems determined to disguise the fact that these accusations have a great deal of truth to them.

NewsCorp upped the ante, as Stelter reports, by blocking Cablevision customers from accessing Fox shows on the popular streaming video site Hulu. While that maneuver didn't last long, it did represent a pretty clear example of what a major media company can do to violate  net neutrality.

These fights (as Megan Tady of Free Press noted in a piece in Extra! in March) are about giant media companies fighting amongst themselves over money, with the public mostly powerless to intervene.

But when I see Fox getting involved in these fights, I can't help but imagine a battle over the carriage fees that cable companies pay for the Fox News Channel--costs that are passed on to you, the consumer, whether or not you watch Fox News. By some counts you pay three times more for Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity than you do for, say,  MSNBC.

So what if a cable company decided that was too much? And what if Fox retaliated by pulling Fox News Channel from your cable system?  Somehow I think we'd all manage to get through the day.

Or, even more drastically, what if customers could choose whether or not they wanted to pay for Fox News Channel in the first place, through an ala carte cable menu? Fox rakes in millions of dollars every year from viewers and non-viewers alike; it seems like a decent media system would give people the right to not contribute to Murdoch's empire.

Rush Limbaugh (10/18/10), holding a photo montage from Drudge up to the "Dittocam," went off on a bizarre rant that suggested that Obama was possessed by supernatural evil (Mediaite, 10/19/10):

Folks, these pictures, they look demonic. And I don't say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look. It is strange that these pictures would be released.... It's very, very, very strange. An American president has never had facial expressions like this. At least we've never seen photos of an American president with facial expressions like this.

It's not the first time that Limbaugh has literally demonized a Democratic politician; in 2001 (FAIR Press Release, 11/22/02), he gave Senate majority leader Tom Daschle the nickname "El Diablo," going on at length (7/20/01) about his diabolical tendencies: "How many different versions of Satan, the devil, have you seen in your life?... We've seen the comic devil of TV shows. We've even seen the smooth, tempting devil in Hollywood movies. Is Tom Daschle simply another way to portray a devil?"

When Daschle complained that after such attacks, "the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that's very disconcerting," Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz (WashingtonPost.com, 11/21/02) stuck up for Limbaugh, saying, "Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy."

In 2010, it's hard to deny that hate-filled rhetoric can move unstable individuals to violence--though Limbaugh seems to be playing catch-up here with his rival on the right, Glenn Beck. Both hosts know full well that there's a large segment of their audience for whom demons and devils are not Halloween costumes but all too real supernatural threats.

In the coverage of French retirement protests, you often hear U.S. reporters state the debate is over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. As Dean Baker has pointed out (as did Amitabh Pal from the Progressive, when he appeared on CounterSpin) this is incorrect; the retirement age for most French workers is 65; they are pushing to raise it to 67. Early retirement for some workers would shift from 60 to 62.

Last night (10/19/10) the PBS NewsHour had two discussions on this topic, and both made the same error. A live report by Channel 4 reporter Jonathan Rugman included this John Stosselesque exchange:

RUGMAN: In England, I have to work until 65.

WOMAN: Yes?

RUGMAN: Why shouldn't you in France work until 62?

WOMAN: It's not because Europe has a system, that we have to have the same system. We are not OK with that.

RUGMAN: The French are the French.

WOMAN: France is France.

In a discussion segment,  GlobalPost journalist Mildrade Cherfils said, "But the majority of French people do understand that the retirement age has to change. It has to go from 60 to 62."  With polls showing that the French public overwhelmingly back the protests, one might conclude that the public isn't exactly embracing this "change."

Monday's front-page New York Times piece, "'Culture of Poverty,' Long an Academic Slur, Makes a Comeback," is about how it's okay again for scholars to talk about the "culture of poverty" and to study "cultural" aspects of the subject.

It's a trend reporter Patricia Cohen suggests vindicates Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who popularized the term in the mid-'60s when he infamously wrote that much of black America was caught up in a "tangle of pathology" resulting from "the weakness of the [black] family structure," which he called "the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate, the cycle of poverty and deprivation."

But Cohen cites no one defending the term "culture of poverty," though the headline suggests as much. And some of the studies cited as being part of a vindication of "cultural" studies of poverty are things that few sociologists--who, of course, routinely study "culture" as a matter of course--would ever have objected to. Exactly who, for instance, would object to a study of the effects of community violence on the ability of children to learn?

And, as Cohen explains, at least two of the studies cited in her report (including one that looks at what makes parents with kids in daycare more likely to develop networks of support) don't track with income or ethnicity, making them examples more suitable for inclusion in an article other than the one she wrote.

One of Cohen's problems seems to be in her narrow definition of  "culture," which buys into the the right-wing view that culture, in this context, denotes such issues as marriage, "illegitimacy" and so on. In other words, largely Moynihan's view of things.

Unless I am imagining things, scholars have been studying for decades how cultural factors such as educational and economic opportunity, violence and even nutrition affect poverty and poor communities.

In the end, Cohen's suggestion that Moynihan's racist views are back in academic vogue amount to little more than Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey saying Moynihan has been  "maligned" (without explaining how), a gratuitous mention of comedian Bill Cosby's more Moynihanian sociological conjectures, and the Times' devout wish to see the great man vindicated.

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift has a new piece headlined "Math Lessons: How Did a Concept as Unsexy and Complicated as the National Deficit Become the Galvanizing Political Issue of the Day?"

She asks: "Why is the deficit the top issue in voters' minds?"

If she eliminated the word "why," you'd be left with a good question to ponder.  The answer would be no, and the piece could end there.

 But instead of writing that piece, Clift wrote this:

 The deficit is really a symbol for the anger that people feel about the amount of money that has been poured into the economy, without any tangible returns that they can see in their own pocketbooks. "The American people are not Keynesians," says Brookings scholar Tom Mann. "In tough economic times, they spend less, and they think government should do the same."

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that people actually want the government to spend more money in order to create jobs. But in the corporate media's worldview, people care a whole lot about the deficit--but not, apparently, what actually caused the deficit.

I was struck by Sen. Sherrod Brown's op-ed in the New York Times today (10/18/10):

For Our China Trade Emergency, Dial Section 301
By SHERROD BROWN
Washington

TEN years ago this fall the Senate sold out American manufacturing. By a vote of 83 to 15, it established so-called permanent normal trade relations with China, paving the way for that country to join the World Trade Organization. As a result, Chinese imports to the United States fell under the same low tariffs and high quotas as those from countries like Canada and Britain.

Today, though, our trade relations with China are anything but normal. The 2000 agreement's proponents insisted it would enable a billion Chinese consumers to buy American products. Instead, our bilateral trade deficit has increased 170 percent, largely because China has undermined free-market competition through illegal subsidies and currency manipulation.

It reminded me of this FAIR Action Alert at the time of that, uhh, debate:

On Eve of China Vote, Nightline Airs Only One Side

5/24/00

On the night before Congress was to vote on Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) for China--the most important trade vote of the year--ABC's Nightline devoted its broadcast to a discussion of that issue. That discussion, unfortunately, was one-sidedly partisan: All three of Nightline's guests were Republican proponents of PNTR.

Nightline's response was basically to say some things don't need to be debated--or, as they put it, they "never intended to have a debate on the pending legislation."

Readers of  Saturday's New York Times may have noticed this this piece (10/16/10):

Despite Image, Union Leader Backs School Change
By TRIP GABRIEL

In "Waiting for Superman," the new education documentary, the union leader Randi Weingarten is portrayed, in the words of Variety, as "a foaming satanic beast."

At a two-day education summit hosted by NBC News recently, the lopsided panels often featured Ms. Weingarten on one side, facing a murderer's row of charter school founders and urban superintendents. Even Tom Brokaw piled on.

The article actually does a pretty good of explaining how Weingarten and others in the union movement have, contrary to the message of Davis Guggenheim's hit documentary, pushed for real reform efforts across the country. The article even points out that one union-backed charter school in New York was left out of the film:

Yet one scene that the director filmed, but left on the cutting-room floor, showed Ms. Weingarten signing a contract on behalf of teachers at Green Dot, which has had impressive results since it opened in 2008.

Steve Barr, who founded the Green Dot charter school network, lamented that the film ignored examples of charters and unions working together. "It doesn’t help to take the one true open-minded union leader and bash her," he said.

All in all, it's a pretty helpful article for understanding some of the nuances of the "reform" debate. But a better headline (though a totally unlikely one) would have been "Despite Message of Biased Media Coverage, Union Leader Backs School Change." The truth is that it's fairly routine for the press to bash teachers unions, as FAIR documented in this article.

"Even Tom Brokaw piled on" makes you think there's something surprising about a major media figure bashing a teachers' union. In reality, it's pretty common.

The emerging hero of the Chilean miners' story--in Latin America and elsewhere, if not in the U.S.--is Luis Urzúa, a topographer who took a job at the San José mines as a shift foreman while awaiting the start of new a job in his field.  NASA officials working on the rescue called Urzúa "a natural leader," but his most important accomplishment was getting the 33 miners through the first 17 days of their crisis, when all they had was enough food for two days, dirty water and no idea if a rescue effort was even underway.

Besides implementing food rationing and a 24-hour watch to listen for rescuers, Urzúa is credited with unifying the men and mediating conflicts in the desperate situation. As a topographer, Urzúa also had technical expertise useful to the rescue team. He was the last miner to be brought up because of his value to the effort.

Urzúa, whose father was a Communist leader murdered by the Pinochet regime, and whose stepfather, a Socialist mining union leader, was in turn killed by anti-left government violence, explained his leadership approach to London's Guardian:

Speaking from a hospital bed at the San José mine, shift foreman Luis Urzúa--the man who kept the Chilean miners alive for two months--said his secret for keeping the men bonded and focused on survival was majority decision-making.

"You just have to speak the truth and believe in democracy," said Urzúa, his eyes hidden behind black glasses.... "Everything was voted on.... We were 33 men, so 16 plus one was a majority."

So the hero of our story, a mine foreman, says he discarded corporate, top-down decision-making in favor of workplace democracy.

As we pointed out earlier, Daniel Henninger's Wall Street Journal column, "Capitalism Saved Miners," forgot to mention that a reckless capitalist company put the miners in their predicament in the first place, and that government played a far larger role in their rescue than did capitalism.

Urzúa's story further detracts from Henninger's thesis, for unless capitalism and its anti-democratic decision-making processes have radically changed in the last two months, Henninger's hallowed system played no role in getting the miners through the toughest  part of their ordeal.