Meet the Press announced that its show this Sunday will feature two conservative Republican guests, Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.). Well, that's only natural, because the GOP did so well on Tuesday, winning back the House.... Right?

Oh wait.... Here's Meet the Press's then-host Tim Russert on November 12, 2006:

Our issues this Sunday: The voters send a loud and clear message to the White House, and give the Democrats control of the House and the Senate for the first time in 12 years. What now for the Republicans? We'll ask a man who is positioned to seek the GOP nomination for president in 2008: Sen. John McCain of Arizona. What now for the Democrats? We'll ask a man who lost a Democratic primary, but was just re-elected as an independent: Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.

New York Times columnist David Brooks is a regular on TV talk shows--including his weekly appearance on the PBS NewsHour (allowing the public to hear regularly from a widely syndicated columnist and commercial TV pundit, just as public TV was intended to do!).

On a NewsHour midterm election post-mortem discussion (11/3/10), Brooks made this point about the supposed economic ignorance of some voters:

If you looked at the exit polls, the independents were more likely than other voters to really be alarmed about the deficits. They were also more likely than other voters to want to protect Social Security, Medicare and all the things that create the deficits. If the American people are not willing to square that circle, then how can you expect elected leaders to do that?

If David Brooks believes that Social Security--a government program that at present has amassed a $2 trillion surplus-- is "creating" the deficit, he either doesn't know what he's talking about, or says things that he knows are false because he feels like they make his arguments sound more appealing.

A decent program would either feature another panelist to refute this nonsense--Mark Shields, the show's regular liberal, did not--or have a host who would set the record straight--which didn't happen.

New York Times political analyst Matt Bai writes in a post-election piece (11/4/10):

A powerful force in the party, Ms. [Sarah] Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixon’s Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal government with tyranny and anti-Americanism.

Matt Bai was born in 1968--perhaps not coincidentally, the year Nixon was elected president, and a year before he gave his "Silent Majority" speech that Palin's politics "go back to." But angry right-wing populism has been a major strand in American politics even before Bai was born--or before Nixon was born, for that matter--linking together the Know Nothings of the pre-Civil War era and the Ku Klux Klan in the war's aftermath, the followers of Father Coughlin in the Great Depression, Joe McCarthy in the era that bears his name and the John Birch Society soon after.

Not that all of this needs to be mentioned in an article speculating about Sarah Palin's response to the '10 midterms--but it would be nice if you got the sense that New York Times political analysts understood that history started before they were born.

Back in June, a study by Harvard students (echoing earlier work in Extra!--5-6/08) found that media outlets like the New York Times consistently called things like waterboarding torture when they reported on them--that is, until the Bush administration's torture came to light. The study sparked a lot of discussion, with the Times responding that it didn't refer to waterboarding as torture because it wanted to avoid "taking sides in a political dispute."

In today's New York Times (11/3/10), a review of George W. Bush's new book shows that the Times is sticking with that formula:

He likewise defends his decision to authorize harsh interrogation techniques on captured terror suspects. When the CIA asked him if they could subject Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the September 11 mastermind, to a form of simulated drowning called waterboarding, he writes that he said, "Damn right." The interrogations, he adds, "saved lives."

So Bush's admittedly cavalier attitude towards torture is still not a reason to call it torture.

Here's the sentence that sums up what was wrong with election coverage '10, courtesy of the New York Times' Peter Baker (11/3/10):

Was this the natural and unavoidable backlash in a time of historic economic distress, or was it a repudiation of a big-spending activist government?

Clearly, the economy was the main thing on the minds of American citizens, and we needed the media to lead a serious discussion of what to do about it. Instead, we got a bogus debate in which the left-wing pole was that nothing could be done to improve the situation--when the actual progressive view was that a great deal more could have been done--and the right offered an attack on federal spending but was never required to offer a coherent explanation of how this eliminated jobs.  This is a framing that the right could not help but win by default.

Wrapping up a panel discussion (10/31/10) on Barack Obama's post-midterm political challenges, NBC reporter Chuck Todd raised the possibility that the Beltway debate on Afghanistan might change:

On Afghanistan, the Democratic caucus that will be left, you brought this up, is going to be a very liberal caucus, very anti-war caucus. This is going to be a political challenge for him like no other.  And by the way, a lot of these Tea Party conservatives have all talked about "We don't want to be there forever" in these debates.... They're all like, "I don't want to be nation builders." There may be a bipartisan majority on Afghanistan in Congress, but it may be to start speeding up by the fall.

I find it rather unlikely that there will be many Republicans who will support troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. But let's say they did. Would this affect how Meet the Press covers the Afghan War debate?  NBC's Sunday show has tilted strongly in favor of war supporters, even as public support for the war has dropped considerably. It's not a stretch to think that, no matter what happens in the elections today, Meet the Press will still mostly want to hear from the hawks--and only the hawks.

It's probably better for American political leaders that we forget the U.S. bombing of Cambodia.  "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves," was how Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it in 1970 (NY Times, 5/27/04), reflecting Richard Nixon's concern that the large-scale aerial bombing wasn't doing enough damage.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton released Air Force records on the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan wrote (Walrus, 10/06):

The still-incomplete database (it has several "dark" periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.

Estimates of Cambodian casualties as a result of the U.S. bombing vary; in 1975, the Washington Post (4/24/75) estimated 450,000 dead and wounded.

So now the current secretary of state visited the country that the United States so ruthlessly bombed in the not-so-distant past. According to the report of the visit in the New York Times (11/2/10), Hillary Clinton expressed support for justice for the victims--that is, the victims of the horrific violence perpetrated by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which rose to power in the wake of the U.S. assault on the country.  As the Times put it:

Mrs. Clinton repeated an argument that has been used by proponents of the trials, saying that "a country that is able to confront its past is a country that can overcome it."

Clinton's attitude stands in contrast to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who readers are told believes the country should "dig a hole and bury the past." Clinton also said: "Countries that are held prisoner to their past can never break those chains and build the kind of future that their children deserve.... Although I am well aware the work of the tribunal is painful, it is necessary to ensure a lasting peace."

It is a remarkable testimony to the strength of our propaganda system that the Newspaper of Record can run a story like this with a straight face, with a top U.S. official urging accountability for atrocities in a country where the U.S. government committed so many. Those atrocities, apparently, have long ago been given the Hun Sen treatment.

And bonus irony: A few weeks ago Clinton introduced Kissinger before his address at a State Department conference on the U.S. war on Indochina (AlterNet, 9/28/10). Presumably she was equally concerned with the need to hold Kissinger accountable for his crimes, and is seeking a tribunal that will do the "painful" work necessary to build a future our children deserve.

CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer (10/31/10) explained on Sunday that he hates the way college football's Bowl Championship Series works--mostly because the computer model doesn't give smaller schools a chance to compete for a national championship. Fair enough--criticism of the BCS system is plentiful. But Schieffer bizarrely went on to argue that our political system doesn't work that way: "Aren't you glad that even though our system isn't perfect, we still finish our elections the right way? We vote."

He goes on to explain other ways our politics are nothing at all like college football:

What the BCS really is, of course, is all about money. It's controlled by the big schools who want only the big schools in the bowl games because they believe they'll get the biggest TV ratings.

You're asking now, why is he off on this rant? Well, it's very simple. I went to TCU, a smaller school with a very good team this year, and we want to play the big guys. But even if we go undefeated, we may not get that chance. The computers will decide our fate.

If we did our politics like that, computers would decide who wins our elections, maybe based on the strength of their opponents or their positions. And maybe there would be style points for the best yard signs. But we don't do it that way, thank goodness.

Yes, thank goodness we don't have a political system that's all about money, that discourages the participation of small parties and obsesses over trivia like yard signs. That would be horrible.

The ubiquitous CNN pundit on Larry King last night:

KING: Could the pundits be wrong?

DAVID GERGEN: Absolutely. Absolutely. It was a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal this last week by Josh Lerner. He was a really interesting young man who went back to a lot of political science and said more often than not, pundits are wrong.

You know, we have a worse record than if you just did it randomly in terms of predicting the--you just flip a coin and you would come out with better predictions.

Take his advice, please.

But seriously: Dean Baker from CEPR has one of the best short takes on elections and media coverage over at the Politico, which is worth posting in full:

There is a serious problem with our political culture and is centered on the news media. The media take no responsibility for informing the public on the issues that will affect their lives.

Rather they focus almost exclusively on trivia and quirks. Of course the candidates respond to this, knowing that any effort at dealing with issues in a substantive way will be ignored. Instead of talking about real issues, they jump full force go along with the focus on nonsense.

How many people know that Social Security will be fully solvent for decades into the future, according to all projections? How many people know that the per person cost of healthcare in the United States is close to twice as much as in countries like England and France, both of which enjoy much longer life expectancies? How many people know that the projections of huge long-term deficits are entirely the result of our broken healthcare system? If our healthcare costs were like those in any country with a longer life expectancy, then the U.S. projections would show huge surpluses.

It is the media's job to give this information to the public. They don't have time to do the research on their own. If we evaluated the media by the same standard as we evaluate teachers (i.e., are the students learning?), we would have to fire almost every last reporter in the United States, because the public is not learning.

The effort by rich business interests to buy campaigns would also be considerably less effective if the media reported on what was taking place. For example, BP, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs may consider big contributions to a candidate to be a much worse investment if they knew that their contributions would lead to a major article that explained that BP, Citigroup or Goldman was giving money to candidate Smith because they know that Smith will let them wreck the Gulf without paying compensation and will take everyone's money and give it to the Wall Street banks.

Unfortunately, we don't get much real news. We get stories about witchcraft and Aqua Buddha. Until we get better media, we will not get better politics.

Washington Post columnist David Broder sees one way for Barack Obama to demonstrate leadership after the midterms--push for war with Iran. Lest one be accused of misrepresenting his argument, this is what he wrote in his October 31 column, which starts out talking about the how a president can influence the economy:

What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

"I am not suggesting" inciting war with Iran, Broder insists. He's just saying it will bring the country together, fix the economy and make Obama one of the greatest presidents of all time.

New York Times reporter Matt Bai had a long piece Sunday (10/31/10) that argued that Tea Partiers are really the right-wing version of Bush-era MoveOn activists and bloggers (the "netroots"). Bai writes of "the larger forces that unify many self-styled activists on both the left and right," and suggests that "the recent uprisings on both ends of the ideological spectrum shouldn't be viewed as opposing trends, but rather as points on the same cultural continuum."

The only way to pull this off with a straight face is to decide that political beliefs that motivate both groups are not worth inspecting or critiquing. Thus  activists who coalesced around opposing the war in Iraq are basically no different than Tea Party activists who believe Barack Obama is a socialist. (As the Tea Party activist Bai profiles puts it: "He's a socialist.... There's no question. He's a statist.")

In a more rational media system, one would point out that one group was motivated by an actual policy decision--one that  killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The other group believes Barack Obama adheres to a political philosophy that he most certainly does not.

The ability to see these two political movements as being roughly comparable requires the suspension of critical judgment--an example of media "false balance" of the most extreme variety.  At one point Bai writes: "Ideology, of course, presents an unbridgeable chasm between the progressives and Tea Partiers." So does reality. Journalism that seeks to muddy up this inescapable truth does a great disservice.