New York Times TV reporter Alessandra Stanley (2/2/11) had a piece discussing why you can't watch Al Jazeera English on your television. After noting that "demand was pretty low" for the channel until recently (unlike, I don't know, Fox Business Channel, which must have dozens of die-hard fans), Stanley warned that

zeal sometimes outstrips the thirst for accuracy. The channel reported on Tuesday that 2 million protesters defied a curfew to gather in Tahrir Square; most Western news organizations put the number in the hundreds of thousands.

Seriously--the New York Times is going to lecture other media outlets on the proper way to report on the size of the crowd at a massive demonstration? And the person to do this is Alessandra Stanley, a reporter whose record of inaccuracy led Gawker to wonder, "How Many Corrections Does It Take to Get Fired at the Times?"

Come on now.

Start with USA Today's headline (2/3/11):

Mubarak Supporters Weigh In: Anti-Government Rallies Shaken by Rival Protesters

The forces attacking the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square were not "rival protesters"; they were government agents, complete in many cases with police ID cards that were confiscated when violent provocateurs were apprehended by activists (Al Jazeera English, 2/2/11). As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (2/3/11)  put it in his firsthand report from the square:

The events were sometimes presented by the news media as "clashes" between rival factions, but that’s a bit misleading. This was an organized government crackdown, but it relied on armed hoodlums, not on police or army troops.

The USA Today piece, by Jim Michaels and Theodore May, was a prime example of the kind of deceptive coverage Kristof was talking about. In USA Today's version, the thugs bringing violence to heretofore peaceful demonstrations were civic-minded individuals "worried that groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood would take over if free elections are held" and "saving Egypt from the Islamic extremism that has infected the Middle East." The piece even quoted Egyptian state TV as explaining that the camel-riding goons running down protesters were actually "pyramid workers who were protesting the negative economic impact of the crisis."

Contrary to other eyewitness accounts, in USA Today's world both sides are equally responsible for violence, as "protesters took chunks of concrete from the street to use as ammunition and occasionally tossed Molotov cocktails at each other."

Michaels has a history of deceptive, credulous reporting from the Middle East and Afghanistan (FAIR Blog, 7/1/10, 8/6/10, 8/27/10; Extra!, 9-10/08). But this report is a poor effort even for him.

In late 2009 and early 2010, right-wing activist James O'Keefe concocted a story that got widespread media coverage. The tall tale went like this: O'Keefe and his associate went to offices affiliated with the community organizing group ACORN in order to solicit advice on running a brothel and evading taxes. The problem was that nothing much like that actually happened. As FAIR summarized  (Action Alert, 3/11/10):

O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a "pimp," and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not "tax evasion"). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.

The upshot: O'Keefe misrepresented his exploits, released selectively edited videos, and the press fell for it. In fact, the ombud at the Washington Post and the public editor at the New York Times chided their respective papers for not giving the bogus "scandal" more attention. (Eventually, the Times would admit some of its ACORN errors, thanks to FAIR activists and blogger Brad Friedman.)

So it felt a little odd to see this headline in the New York Times today (2/2/11):

Group Releases Hidden Tapes of Planned Parenthood

The lead:

An anti-abortion group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released an undercover video on Tuesday that appears to show a clinic manager advising a sex trafficker how to get medical care for prostitutes as young as 14.

So this raises the question: Will these outlets learn to treat right-wing hidden camera exploits more skeptically--or maybe decide that they're not news at all? This Times account suggests that they have already forgotten what they learned last time:

The video resembles those made in 2009 by a conservative activist, James O'Keefe, in which employees of the community group Acorn appeared to advise a prostitution ring how to avoid taxes.

At the Washington Post, under the headline "Anti-Abortion Group Releases Planned Parenthood Sting Video," readers are told:

A group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released a video Tuesday that depicts two hired actors posing as a pimp and a prostitute seeking services at a New Jersey clinic, in an operation resembling one that helped take down a liberal anti-poverty group two years ago.

If by "resembles," the Post means  that this current video is getting more attention than it deserves, then, yes, there is a distinct similarity. A more reasonable write-up of the current "sting" came courtesy of Alex Pareene at Salon.com (2/1/11), who wrote that the plan

didn't really work, because Planned Parenthood quickly caught on and alerted the FBI. (BigJournalism.com exclusive: Planned Parenthood alerts the authorities when confronted by self-proclaimed human traffickers!) Planned Parenthood suspected that the hoaxer had ties to Live Action, an antiabortion activist group run by Lila Rose, a sometime O'Keefe partner-in-undercover-stinging. And Live Action confirmed its involvement by posting the sad results of its exhaustive video investigation today. It caught one staffer possibly advising a make-believe pimp to send a make-believe underage prostitute somewhere where her abortion would not be reported. (It is obviously impossible to tell what actually happened without the unedited video.) (And also this Planned Parenthood alerted the authorities about the weird visit.)

Pareene points out:

These conservative undercover "hoaxes" are best understood as an attempt to make their fantasies real. In order to make animate the world that they feverishly imagine, they must themselves become the unsavory characters with bad motivations that they enjoy thinking populate these hotbeds of degenerate liberal activity.

The corporate media problem here is quite serious, since there is a deep-seated feeling that what right-wing activists do should get more coverage, to make up for the nonexistent liberal bias in the mainstream media. This sensibility creates the media "appetite" for the ACORN hoax, the Shirley Sherrod hoax, and on and on.

At this point, it's not a question of media "falling" for this stuff, but being eager to act as a megaphone for these right-wing fantasies.

NBC Nightly News reporter Richard Engel held up a tear gas canister on the air to show that it was stamped "Made in the USA."  But something else he said on the January 28, 2011 newscast struck me:

But what's scattered on the streets of Cairo right now are these little canisters. These were the tear gas canisters that were fired by all those riot police today. And if you look at them closely, they say clearly in English, "Made in the USA." Egyptians have been picking them up, they've been looking them over. And from an Egyptian perspective, it does seem like Mubarak and the United States are working together. So the U.S. is walking a fine line here.

Strange perspective they've got over there.

An accidentally revealing moment from Rachel Maddow's interview with Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution last night (MSNBC, 1/31/11):

MADDOW: Well, let me ask you about one tactical question in this diplomatic dance, I guess. Are American officials making appearances on Arabic language TV channels at this point? Should they be prioritizing doing that right now?

INDYK: Probably. I don't think they are doing a lot of that at the moment, partly because the Arab interviewers are likely to be a lot more pressing than polite people like you.

MADDOW: I think that is a great insult, thank you.

INDYK: No, that was meant as a compliment.