New York Times columnist Tom Friedman attempts to offer up some measure of support for WikiLeaks today (12/15/10)

I read many WikiLeaks and learned some useful things. But their release also raises some troubling questions. I don't want to live in a country where they throw whistleblowers in jail. That's China. But I also don't want to live in a country where any individual feels entitled to just dump out all the internal communications of a government or a bank in a way that undermines the ability to have private, confidential communications that are vital to the functioning of any society. That's anarchy.

Two things:

• There is, of course, an alleged whistleblower here. His name is Bradley Manning. If you're interested in the circumstances of his imprisonment--which isn't happening in China--read Glenn Greenwald's account in Salon today.

• The idea that it is wrong to "just dump out all the internal communications of a government or a bank"  would be a lot more convincing if WikiLeaks had actually done this. They've released very few of the State Department cables, and have apparently been mindful about making redactions and the like.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported--and the Drudge Report heavily promoted--the idea that Richard Holbrooke's final words were, "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." Well, maybe not--at least according to Obama officials who have challenged that account. The Washington Post serves up a follow-up today, under the headline "Holbrooke's War Remark Called Banter, Not Entreaty," which apparently offers "a fuller account of the tone and contents of his remarks."

The upshot of the piece is that this was a joke--one that some readers apparently took seriously:

Holbrooke's statement was seized upon quickly by critics of the Afghan war debate, some of whom interpreted it as a clarion call to end the conflict. Others viewed his comment as a last-breath disavowal of the Obama administration's war policy, which has involved a troop surge--which Holbrooke publicly supported--to combat the Taliban.

Yes, they "seized upon" something that was reported in the Post. I guess they should be more careful next time around.

The bigger point: We've now seen an allegedly bogus call for ending the Afghan War get much more press attention than actual calls for ending the Afghan War.

Apparently Richard Holbrooke's final words were, "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." This is being highlighted in a big way on the Drudge Report, which means media people will be talking about it.

Revealing, in an entirely different way, was this part of a Washington Post story (12/14/10) about the state of the Afghan War post-Holbrooke:

Holbrooke's death is the latest complication in an effort plagued by unreliable partners, reluctant allies and an increasingly skeptical American public.

The war, in other words, is "plagued" by the public's disapproval of it. For a government to carry out a war that its citizens don't support is rather complicated.

For more on Holbrooke, recall his reaction to probing questions from independent journalist Allan Nairn, or check the Institute for Public Accuracy's round-up of critical assessments.

On yesterday's Chris Matthews show on NBC, the assembled journalists all seem to agree that Barack Obama's decision to cut a tax deal with Republicans and come out swinging against the left was great news. Time's Mike Duffy: "These liberals may scream, but they've been screaming about Barack Obama since the beginning. This isn't anything new."

Chris Matthews and NBC's Andrea Mitchell went back and forth about whether this was an actual "Sister Souljah moment" or a "mini moment." But Helene Cooper of the New York Times summed up the conventional wisdom best:

I think President Obama just had a really good week. If you just look at the trajectory of how this week started, on Monday and Tuesday everybody is writing, everybody's talking about he caved in to Republicans. By Wednesday he's out there, he's gone and done this press conference and he's looking very much as if he's standing up to his own party. He's moved towards the independents. He's being, you know, he's very much appealing to the independents that he's going to need in 2012. And now he sees he--we're writing about him standing up to Democrats. And for him that's exactly the place that he wants to be right now at this stage in his presidency.

One of the more annoying corporate media storylines since the midterms dwells on whether or not Barack Obama will move to the "center" in order to have better luck in the 2012 elections. The conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton did this after terrible losses in the 1994 midterms, and his "triangulation" proved once and for all that successful Democrats move to the right.

There are several reasons this is nonsense--Clinton was more or less the original DLC "New Democrat," so he was consciously and conspicuously to the right of the party base all along. The press wanted to nudge him even further to the right. The idea that Obama should finally break with the left is equally nonsensical, since he's been happy to cross the base for two years.

It's telling that some of the strongest support for Obama's tax compromise has come from right-wing columnists and Guardians of the Political Center like David Broder. Broder's Post colleague Dana Milbank joined that crowd over the weekend, writing (12/12/10):

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of President Obama.

I'm not particularly proud of the tax-cut deal he and the Republicans negotiated. But I'm proud that he has finally stood firm against the likes of Peter DeFazio.

It's not the policy, then--it's the fact that Obama stood up to a "hard-core liberal." Apparently Obama has been letting such Democrats control his policy decisions so far, "to his peril over the past two years." This was what doomed the healthcare debate, according to Milbank--Obama let liberals waste time supporting the public option. Paul Krugman responds:

The debate over the public option wasn't what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican "moderates" weren't negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.

So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day.

That media mythology is deep. This weekend, NBC Meet the Press anchor David Gregory wondered:

You know, Harold, the question was, was this a Sister Souljah moment, to go back to the Clinton era, for President Obama, standing up to the base?

Clinton's "Sister Souljah moment" came before he was even president--a poor example of a chastened president moving to the "middle."  But that timeline is mostly forgotten--as are Clinton's other moves to the right, many of which came before the 1994 midterms.

Even stories that try to knock down the Clinton/Obama comparison-- like Peter Baker's Week in Review article in the New York Times (12/12/10)--wind up having to play along with the storyline. As Baker noted about Clinton's surprise appearance at a White House press conference:

Equally riveting and astonishing, Mr. Clinton's blast-from-the-past performance in the White House briefing room on Friday afternoon reinforced the impression of political déjà vu, the sense that once again a Democratic president humbled by midterm elections was pivoting to the center at the expense of his own supporters.

Baker goes on to explain why the comparison misses the mark, but it's telling that this history lesson is the exception in the media and not the rule. Apparently there is something irresistible about moving Democrats even further to the right.

The Dean is happy.

Washington Post columnist and "dean" of the Beltway press corps David Broder was one of the few people (not counting Republicans) who stood up to applaud Barack Obama's tax deal. Under the I-am-not-making-this-up headline "Centrist on the Rise," Broder (12/9/10) congratulated Obama, who has "separated himself from the left of his own party and staked a strong claim to the territory where national elections are fought and won: the independent center."

Obama has "begun to regain focus as the pragmatic liberal that he is--not the hard-line socialist Republicans make him out to be but a president far more practical and down to earth than his critics on the liberal flank of the Democratic Party. "

Reclaiming  the "center," of course, mostly means trouncing your base--and that's what Broder is cheering:

When their constituents see the fatter paychecks, Democratic members of Congress will have a hard time sustaining their carping about the lost opportunity to engage the GOP in an old-fashioned campaign against the fat cats.

Obama's move "wasn't a Sister Souljah moment," Broder warns, but this move to the right  has given Obama a chance "to define himself, more clearly than ever before, as a raging moderate." His conclusion: "This was the best showing for Obama in many months."

But wait a second. How exactly does a deficit hawk like Broder--who recently called for a drastic, British-style austerity program (FAIR Blog, 10/25/10)--reconcile Obama's base-bashing tax cuts with the hundreds of billions it will add to the federal debt? Apparently bashing liberals is a higher short-term priority; in the long-term, this will all somehow make slashing government spending easier:

Also, the $900 billion this deal will add to the national debt increases the pressure on Obama and Congress to undertake the kind of tough-love budgetary changes outlined by the presidential commission on deficits.

So the rich get tax cuts now, and the rest of us get "tough love" for the foreseeable future. That's "centrism," David Broder-style.

The big news in the U.S.-guided Israel/Palestine talks is that a renewal of a so-called "settlement freeze" in the West Bank is basically dead. Ethan Bronner has a post-mortem of sorts in the New York Times (12/9/10), where he describes the backdrop for the previous round of negotiations:

The Israelis had insisted that the only way forward was through direct talks. Yet when those talks began in September, the Israelis engaged in little substance. The Palestinians had insisted that there could be no direct talks without a settlement freeze, yet they waited nine months into the last such freeze before agreeing to negotiate.

Bronner added that a "second settlement freeze was viewed as unnecessary and politically painful to achieve."

But the first "freeze" wasn't a freeze at all--though it was often portrayed that way.  I have an article in the new issue of Extra! that lays out the case. (Subscribe today and you can read the piece.)

What's especially interesting is the fact that Bronner once wrote one of the few pieces explaining that the freeze was mostly fiction. As he explained back in July:

an examination of the freeze after more than seven months suggests that it amounts to something less significant, at least on the ground. In many West Bank settlements, building is proceeding apace. Dozens of construction sites with scores of Palestinian workers are active.

To be able to write these facts once, and then somehow forget them, takes a special kind of talent.

In AlterNet's article "Is Amazon Evil?" (12/8/10)--reprinted from the Boston Review (11-12/10)--the description of the economics of e-books is seriously dubious. Reporter Onnesha Roychoudhuri writes:

If Amazon had asked publishers what they thought about locking in e-book prices at $9.99, it would have been subjected to a chorus of outrage. That’s because the math behind publishing is seldom in a publishers’ favor. The sale of a $20 hardcover nets a large publisher about $10. Royalties run the publisher about $3, and the costs of printing, binding, and paper are a further $2 (more for low-volume titles). Take $1.20 for distribution, $2 for marketing, and that leaves a publisher with roughly $1.80 to cover rent, editing, and any other costs. A smaller publisher might keep closer to a dollar per book.

The New York Times (3/1/10) did a similar exercise, basing its analysis on a $26 hardcover rather than $20--out of which the publisher keeps $13 instead of $10. (The Times' reporter, Motoko Rich, sources these figures to "interviews with executives at several major houses''; she's by no means anti-publisher--see FAIR Blog, 3/2/10, 3/18/10.) The costs cited by the Times are similar--$3.90 for the author's royalty, $3.25 for printing, storage and shipping (vs. the Review's $3.20 for printing plus distribution), $1 (rather than $2) for marketing. The Times breaks out editing, design and typesetting as its own item, listing it as 80 cents. This leaves $4.05 for the publisher as profit before overhead--math that is considerably more in the publisher's favor.

When it comes to contrasting the hardcover economics with ebooks, the Review piece becomes very vague:

E-books reduce the cost of printing, binding and paper, but royalties tend to run higher, and all other costs are largely unchanged. Publishers account for these costs when they slap a price tag on a book, so Amazon's decision to set the price irrespective of them set off a wave of anxiety.

Actually, according to the Times, royalties run lower in electronic publishing--$1.75-2.50 on a $9.99 ebook. Books published electronically, of course, eliminate rather than "reduce" the costs of printing. Other costs go down, because your sales volume goes up when you reduce the price to the consumer by more than 60 percent. And the retailer--the evil Amazon--gets less of a take from each sale, so the publisher winds up--according to the Times, which, again, is quite sympathetic to the publishing industry--with about as much profit on each copy sold: $3.51 to $4.26, depending on how the author's royalty is calculated.

What actually set the big publishers off was not worry that they could not make as much money selling electronic books at Amazon's price, but worry that they would lose out on the opportunity for windfall profits that comes with a new technology (FAIR Blog, 7/23/10).  Is that evil? No, that's capitalism. Or, if you prefer, "Yes, that's capitalism." There's certainly not a lot to prefer about the publishers' business model, either from the reader's or the writer's point of view.

The Review's website blurbs the piece, "What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?" That's what's most misleading about the article: the suggestion that corporate publishers are not profit-maximizing enterprises in the same way that Amazon is. This would surely come as news to News Corporation (i.e., HarperCollins), CBS (Simon & Schuster), Bertelsmann (Random House), Reed Elsevier (Houghton Mifflin) et al.

P.S. Daniel Ellsberg makes a stronger case for the evil of Amazon here.

CNBC's Erin Burnett discussing the tax deal on the Today show yesterday (12/7/10): "With capital gains and dividend taxes staying low, the half of Americans that own stocks get a benefit there as well."

Oh, really? Here's some figures from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (1/30/06):

Over half--54 percent--of all capital gains and dividend income flows to the 0.2 percent of households with annual incomes over $1 million. More than three-quarters--78 percent--of this income goes to those households with income over $200,000, which account for about 3 percent of all households.

In contrast, only 11 percent of capital gains and dividend income goes to the 86 percent of households with incomes of less than $100,000. Only 4 percent of this income flows to the 64 percent of households that have income of less than $50,000.

Internal problems at CNN have jumped from the gossip pages to the New York Times. Brian Stelter reports today (12/8/10) on behind-the-scenes clashes at the new program Parker Spitzer, which is co-hosted by liberal-leaning former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. Stelter writes:

The ratings for CNN's latest experiment are stagnant. The show has been troubled by backstage tensions that have spilled out in gossip columns and have given rise to speculation--and some wishful thinking among his supporters--that CNN could make Mr. Spitzer the sole host.

CNN executives and the co-hosts flatly ruled out that outcome in interviews last week. Disappointment with the ratings was evident, even as they emphasized that the show was just starting to get its footing.

The reports adds that the show

pairs Mr. Spitzer, a liberal with a prosecutor’s bent, and Ms. Parker, who calls herself a rational conservative. "We wanted very much to bring a nonpartisan alternative to television viewers," Ms. Parker said, a wink at the red- and blue-hued shows on Fox News and MSNBC.

Much of the gossip concerns Spitzer's apparent domination of the show. This is not terribly surprising; up to this point he'd been making pretty regular appearances on various MSNBC programs, and came across as forceful and reasonably telegenic.

The problem here seems to me to be with CNN's self-concept as a the news channel that doesn't take sides--what supposedly makes it different from its more successful competitors at Fox and MSNBC. If someone wanted to give Eliot Spitzer a show, they could have done that. But to the "take-no-sides" management at CNN, this would have been seen as being overly partisan. Instead, they thought it wise to pair Spitzer with a conservative, so as not to be guilty of the offense of giving a liberal a show. The fact that this hasn't drawn a lot of viewers doesn't seem like a tremendous surprise.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas visited Germany recently, and came away thinking the United States is headed for some serious trouble. The country is falling apart--polarized, susceptible to populist demagoguery and so on. Forces on both sides are to blame; they're not all bad ("I think the Tea Partiers, despite their contradictions, are not all wrong about Big Government," he writes), but some should be singled out for criticism:

Cable-TV and talk-radio personalities and bloggers have risen up to speak for the people. But as they pander for clicks and ratings, their standards of factual accuracy are often low. This is not by any means just a right-wing phenomenon. As my friend Charles Krauthammer points out, it was an article of faith on the left that George W. Bush deliberately lied about WMD to get us into the Iraq War. Never mind a complete absence of evidence.

Wait--did he just cite Charles Krauthammer in an appeal for rigorous factual analysis? Because that would be funny!

The idea that Bush never "lied" requires one to adhere to a weird definition of lying. By any reasonable standard, Bush made an array of charges about Iraq that were false;  some he should have known were false, since the administration was rejecting intelligence that did not conform to its desired conclusion. And the Downing Street memo revealed that the British thought the Bush administration was determined to go to war no matter what: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," as the memo put it.  But that's not a lie, right?

Thomas thinks that what is needed is less of this Internet-fueled inaccuracy and more old-fashioned, Evan Thomas-style journalism--though he worries it may be too late:

But the old and weary (and increasingly cowed) mainstream media, of which I have been a charter member for more than 30 years, may not be as successful as it used to be at exposing the sort of distortions that can fuel mindless rage. Whether those distortions come from the far right or far left, the consequences could be disastrous: a protectionist who sets out to shield workers from foreign competition and wrecks the free-trade regimen that has made America prosper; a law-and-order vigilante who comes to office after a terrorist attack with a program to suspend cherished individual liberties to keep America “safe”; a soak-the-rich populist who kills economic growth in the name of helping the little guy.

Set aside for a minute the idea that a "protectionist" who critiques "free trade" agreements or a populist who raises taxes on the wealthy are disasters in the making (unless the media summon the power to stop such creeps). Let's talk about something already happened--like, say, the Iraq War. A reckless administration, determined to invade another country no matter what, cited false intelligence; surely old-fashioned reporters like Evan Thomas rose to stop this madness? Nope. They wrote things like this:

Saddam could decide to take Baghdad with him. One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of "the green mushroom" over Baghdad--the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time.

Well, at least he's not a blogger accusing Bush of lying. That'd be really irresponsible.

One gets the impression, reading the New York Times' coverage of the WikiLeaks cables, that the paper is particularly interested in documents that portray the State Department in a good light, struggling to do good in a world that continually resists its efforts. Take today's front-page piece (12/7/10), "America Prods and Protests But Can't Halt Arms Trade."

The piece, by Michael Gordon and Andrew Lehren, details "the United States' efforts to prevent buildups of arms...in some of the world's tensest regions." The piece does include an acknowledgment that "the United States is the world's largest arms supplier, and with Russia, dominates trade in the developing world"; the U.S. is, in fact, the seller in 40 percent of global arms deals, and delivers arms to some of the most repressive and war-torn countries in the world (Extra!, 5/10).  Gordon and Lehren go on to note, "Its role as a purveyor of weapons to certain allies--including Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states--has drawn criticism that it has fueled an arms race."

But aside from these two sentences of context, the rest of the article overwhelmingly presents the contradictory case that, as the Times' Web headline has it, the "U.S. Strains to Stop Arms Flow."

A Washington Post editorial (12/3/10) on the film Fair Game complains that "the film's reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored." Talk about lack of self-awareness.

The film dramatizes the story of Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who blew the whistle on the Bush administration's intelligence manipulation, and his spouse Valerie Plame Wilson, who was outed by the administration as a covert CIA officer in retaliation for her husband's criticism. The Post editorialists have been grinding their axes on the Wilsons' case for a long time now, and the film version gives them an opportunity to do so anew.

FAIR's Peter Hart documented in Extra! (5-6/06) how Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt cherry-picked evidence to turn reality upside-down, making the Bush administration the victim of Joseph Wilson's intelligence manipulation. I wrote another piece (Extra!, 9-10/06) on the Post editorial page's efforts to dismiss the campaign to destroy Valerie Wilson's career as nothing but "gossip." (The Post's case rested on the idea that Richard Armitage, who first leaked Plame Wilson's name, was an official of unquestionable integrity--this is a guy who once served as a character witness for a Vietnamese mobster.

Fair Game is a devastating portrayal of an establishment media used as a weapon against dissidents--no wonder the Post didn't enjoy watching it.

Update: Eli Stephens of Left I on the News writes in comments:

It's interesting what passes for proof at the Post. The editorial asserts categorically: "The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as the Post's Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification."

But the article by Pincus and Leiby says no such thing. Here: "It's true that Valerie Plame Wilson was working with one of the CIA's teams trying to gather intelligence on Iraq WMD operations, but she evidently did not play the central role that the film puts her in. She was not directly part of the scientist program, according to agency officials."

And, as to whether the program was shut down, Pincus and Leiby offer this "definitive" evidence: "Although the film suggests that the blowing of Valerie's cover led directly to the shutdown of the Iraqi scientist exfiltration, an intelligence insider told us: "Something like this, if it was going on, wouldn't have been canceled for this reason.""

So, since Plame continues to maintain her responsibility to not talk about her role, we are to rely on unnamed "agency officials" using couched language "not 'directly part' of the scientist program" to conclude in no uncertain terms that this is "simply false," and the opinion of one "insider" (not even an "agency official") who offers his or her opinion on what "would or wouldn't" have happened. "Simply false" my eye.

As you may have heard, the White House-backed deficit commission failed to gain a supermajority vote to support a proposal from co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Their suggestions came under sharp criticism from liberal and progressive critics.

But the December 3 broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, a short report on that failure was tilted heavily in favor of supporters of the plan. Quoted in the piece were Bowles, Simpson and their ally Sen. Kent Conrad. Former SEIU chief Andy Stern, who voted against the plan, was the only no vote who was heard from.

On December 1, the NewsHour had interviewed Bowles and Simpson as they continued to make their pitch for their plan. (When asked how he would respond to critics who say the deficit panic is mostly hype, and that other problems are more pressing, Simpson said: " I will tell them to kind of sober up, and the fact that the tectonic plate has shifted in America.").

And the December 3 broadcast included a discussion with conservative David Brooks--who supports the Bowles/Simpson plan--paired with "liberal" Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, who also supports it, praising it for being an "adult" approach to the problem.

If only the debt commission had considered opening the voting to the media--they would have received near-unanimous support.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly warned viewers on December 3 about "a disturbing development at the FCC": Commissioner Michael Copps has been criticizing the failure of the media to provide citizens with substantive political information and discussion.

O'Reilly zeroed in on these comments Copps made in a BBC interview (12/1/10):

I think American media has a bad case of substance abuse right now. We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct a civic dialogue. We are not producing as much news as we did five years, 10 years, 15 years ago. We have to reverse that trend or I think we are going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions.

As O'Reilly put it, "The key words from Copps are: 'We have to reverse that trend.'" O'Reilly wondered if this was a government takeover plot: "Are you going to begin calling shots here on the Factor?" Of course, FCC rules govern broadcasting, not cable news--so O'Reilly will remain free to mislead his audience for as long as Rupert Murdoch allows.

But O'Reilly allowed for one exception:

Finally, this broadcast will fight any intrusion on the media by the federal government, unless, of course, they want to put Bill Moyers in jail.

I know, I know--he's joking. But it says something about how O'Reilly's brain works that he'd invent a government intrusion on freedom of the press, and then find it amusing to crack about jailing a television journalist who isn't even on TV anymore.