One of the peculiar things about the Fox News Channel is that they actually do invite progressive guests onto some of the shows. Last night on the O'Reilly Factor (3/22/11), we saw Code Pink's Medea Benjamin talking about Libya. Of course, there's a political point O'Reilly is trying to make; in this case, he was contrasting Benjamin's anti-war position to the pro-war positions expressed by some Obama-friendly MSNBC hosts.

O'Reilly's got a point there. (This is not something I'm used to saying.) But never fear--he's still perfectly capable of making his own completely absurd arguments. Like this:

O'REILLY: They have succeeded in stopping a slaughter that would have happened had they not started the bombing. Correct?

BENJAMIN: Well, we don't know what would have happened. You can't tell.

O'REILLY: Well, come on, Medea, you've got to do the math. You know? You've got to do the math.

BENJAMIN: How you can know what would have happened?

O'REILLY: Based on history. Based on what had happened in the past.

BENJAMIN: Look what happened when we were going to overthrow another terrible dictator, Saddam Hussein.

O'REILLY: Yes. Look what happened? He couldn't kill anybody. We got him out of there.

BENJAMIN: We have Iraqis that....

O'REILLY: OK, that war didn't turn out well, but it did -- it did neutralize Saddam Hussein, and he couldn't murder anybody else. And that's why this action was taken.

BENJAMIN: And Iraqis now say they're worse off, with millions of them having fled the country. We unleashed...

O'REILLY: They're better off now than they were. Medea, they're much better off.

BENJAMIN: I don't think they are.

O'REILLY: You can go to Iraq and walk around. OK? You couldn't do that under Saddam Hussein.

BENJAMIN: You can't walk around very much right now.

O'REILLY: Let's get back to Libya.

If I were Bill O'Reilly, I think I'd probably want to avoid bringing up the Iraq War as a model for the Libya bombings.

USA Today (3/23/11):

WASHINGTON--The top commander of the allied air war to protect civilians in besieged Libyan cities said the forces of Moammar Gadhafi must pull out or face attack, a task analysts say is complicated by the risk of bombing in populated areas.

The "war to protect civilians" could be "complicated" by the killing of civilians.

The radioactive plume from Japan wafting from west to east across the U.S. is absolutely nothing to worry about, writes William J. Broad in a New York Times report today ("Radiation Over U.S. Is Harmless, Officials Say," 3/22/11) about the radiation threats posed by the Japanese nuclear plant disaster. Broad writes:

Health experts said that the plume's radiation had been diluted enormously in its journey of thousands of miles and that--at least for now, with concentrations so low--its presence will have no health consequences in the United States. In a similar way, faint radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spread around the globe and reached the West Coast in 10 days, its levels detectable but minuscule.

There are two things wrong with Broad's report:

One, he doesn't quote or even name any health experts in the piece. When he later elaborates on the claim that radiation from Fukushima will have no health consequences in the United States, he cites the Department of Energy--better known for its promotion of nuclear power than for its health expertise.

Two, in saying that small amounts of radiation are safe, Broad seems to be embracing the industry-favored threshold model of radiation risks. That view holds that below a certain level of radiation exposure, no health danger is posed.

But this is at odds with the National Academy of Sciences and several other science associations that hold there is no such threshold, and that any exposure poses some additional risk of cancer: the greater the exposure, the greater the risk. The linear, no threshold model isn't universally embraced, but is the prevailing view in scientific circles.

At the very least, if Broad is going to cite an industry-favored way of viewing radiation dangers, one that downplays the threat, isn't he obliged to explain that that is what it is, and that it is contradicted by much of the scientific establishment?

On September 17, 2001, Fox host Bill O'Reilly gave his list of countries the United States should attack, including Libya:

Target three is Libya and Qaddafi. Again, he either quits and goes into exile or we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mind the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out.

We also destroy all the airports in Libya. Let them eat sand.

A decade later, O'Reilly supports the airstrikes on Libya because Qaddafi is attacking civilians (3/21/11):

O'REILLY: But Qaddafi's carpet bombing guys who are driving around in old Chevys with pistols, he's killing them. You know he's going to wipe out the opposition. So you're not willing to go in even on that basis and stop Qaddafi from doing that?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Our intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a disaster. This intervention in Libya is not going to turn out the way you think it will. It'll be another disaster. We have to stop spending the treasure of the United States in these military adventures and start taking care of things here at home, Bill.

O'REILLY: So you are willing to be--to sit by and watch Qaddafi slaughter his opposition and you know he would.

So Qaddafi has killed people--and could have killed other people--that O'Reilly wanted to starve a decade ago.

U.S. airstrikes in Libya have brought renewed focus on the 1988 explosion of  Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Some are making the argument that the U.S. could--and should--be getting revenge for this act a mere 22 years later.

Last night (3/21/11), one cable news host said this:

Given the fact Americans died on that 747 over Lockerbie, I'm all for this mission.... I'm an American. You're an American. We all have opinions. I have always believed that Qaddafi was a terrorist. Let's look at the tape again of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Do you need any more evidence? Has Qaddafi ever proven his innocence?

Another one said this:

President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986 over a terrorist incident in Berlin where two American soldiers were killed. Two years later the Pan Am plane was blown up. So the USA owes Qaddafi payback. And you don't kill Americans and get away with it, as President Reagan said.

The first quote came from liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz, the second from Fox's Bill O'Reilly.

It is a little odd for Schultz to say he supports the Libya airstrikes "as an American" because Qaddafi hasn't "proven his innocence." Our justice system tends to see things a little differently.

As for Libya and Lockerbie, the U.S. position has long been that Qaddafi was responsible. And former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi was found guilty in a Scottish trial in 2001. Questions have long lingered over the fairness of the trial and the evidence against Megrahi.

And as Ed Herman noted in Extra! (10/09), initial reporting and speculation centered on Iran as the most likely culprit, acting in response to a U.S. attack on an Iranian airliner:

The Lockerbie case arguably begins on July 3, 1988, with the shooting down over the Persian Gulf of Iranian Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser that was in that neighborhood helping Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.

Although 290 civilians were killed in that shootdown, the United States suffered no international sanctions or even reprimands, and Vincennes Captain Will Rogers was greeted as a hero on his return to the U.S. some months later ("Crew of Cruiser That Downed Iranian Airliner Gets a Warm Homecoming" was the New York Times headline--10/25/88). Rogers was even awarded a Legion of Merit, one of the highest military honors, for "exceptionally meritorious conduct." The shootdown was treated very benignly by the U.S. corporate media (Extra!, 7–8/88).

The bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie followed the destruction of the Iranian plane by only five and a half months, and officials and experts quickly saw Iranian vengeance as a possible motive.

Iran, of course, hasn't "proven its innocence" in the Pan Am 103 case. Would Schultz have the U.S. bomb Iran in retaliation for Lockerbie as well?

Washington Post Dana Milbank (3/19/11) skewers the Republicans for their "emergency meeting" to defund NPR:

This particular emergency involved the lower end of the FM radio dial. Republicans, in an urgent budget-cutting maneuver, were voting to cut off funding for National Public Radio. All $5 million of it--or one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the federal budget.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers and calculated the impact this emergency measure would have on government spending: "No effect."

One of the rules of corporate media balance is that if you criticize Republicans, you have to find an example of similar buffoonery on the other side. Milbank finds that in an effort to end the nine-year-old Afghan War, which nearly two-thirds of Americans now say is not worth fighting:

Democrats would have been in a good position to point out the Republicans' lack of seriousness, except they were engaged in their own trivial pursuit. On Thursday, the same day the Republicans were doing battle with Diane Rehm, the House was also debating a bill by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ordering full withdrawal from Afghanistan by year’s end.

Milbank explains: "Neither a vindictive slap at public broadcasting nor a pell-mell pullout from Afghanistan would be good policy," though in the end he gives the Democrats more credit for opposing majority opinion on the war:

In the end, the Democrats proved somewhat more adult in restraining impulses. Party leaders opposed Kucinich's Afghanistan pullout plan as irresponsible, and most Democrats voted against it.

Well, thank goodness someone in Washington is being a grown up.

The desire to not debate the Afghan War seems to be a popular one at the Post. Today Fred Hiatt (3/21/11) cheers the fact that David Petraeus' Congressional appearances on the Afghan War were free of rancor--unlike his 2007 testimony on the Iraq War:

At a time when our political system is said to be incapable of rising above poisonous partisanship to promote the national interest, Gen. David Petraeus’s visit to Capitol Hill last week was instructive.

Hiatt adds:

Obama's escalation, when 73 percent of Americans want substantial numbers of troops brought home, would seem to open fertile ground to Republicans. But from their leaders on down, they haven't sought to plow there. In this instance at least, politics really has stopped at the water's edge.

For the Post, it seems, democracy is supposed to stop at the water's edge.

How can you tell that your country has gone to war again? Here are at least two signs.

--The same military official is on every Sunday morning chat show:  Yesterday  Joint Chiefs chair Mike Mullen was on CBS's Face the Nation, NBC's Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday and ABC's This Week.

--You can watch TV reports about the astonishing accuracy of your weapons: On CNN last night, courtesy of Pentagon correspondent Chris Lawrence:

American Tomahawk missiles can be reprogrammed in flight. If there was a risk of civilian casualties, operators could change the target after launch. But the Navy did not use that ability, confident it was aiming at military targets. Moammar Gadhafi says the strikes killed civilians. But a defense official told us if you don't have to reprogram your missile, you're very confident in what you're hitting.

At a time when the Japanese prime minister is describing his country's nuclear crisis and the growing threat of radiation exposure as "very grave," it must have been comforting for Fox News watchers to turn on the O'Reilly Factor last night (3/17/11) to see Ann Coulter telling them that radiation is actually good for you.

Yes, Coulter told O'Reilly viewers, the evidence was right there in the media, including in the newspaper she'd once hoped would be targeted with a terror attack:

I'm citing a stunning number of physicists and from the New York Times and the Times of London, there is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer.

The New York Times science section, for example, a few years ago reported on a study from Canada where all these women who had had tuberculosis got an inordinate number of chest X-rays. Their breast cancer rate was lower than the general population.

There were apartments put up in Taiwan in 1993 that accidentally contained an inordinate amount of cobalt-60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years 10,000 occupants of these buildings, being hit with five times what the government says is the minimum amount you should be hit with, the number of cancer cases they had about 10,000 occupants was only five cases.

Now, for the general population in that same age group, a group of 10,000 Taiwanese should have gotten about 170 cases of cancer.

I'm sure you'll be surprised to find that it takes minutes to debunk Coulter's scientific declarations on radiation. That "pro-radiation" Times science piece (11/27/01), for instance, does cite research finding that low-dose radiation can have beneficial effects-- only to note that it has been generally dismissed by scientists as flawed:

Now, some scientists even say low radiation doses may be beneficial. They theorize that these doses protect against cancer by activating cells' natural defense mechanisms. As evidence, they cite studies, like one in Canada of tuberculosis patients who had multiple chest X-rays and one of nuclear workers in the United States. The tuberculosis patients, some analyses said, had fewer cases of breast cancer than would be expected and the nuclear workers had a lower mortality rate than would be expected.

Dr. Boice said these studies were flawed by statistical pitfalls, and when a committee of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement evaluated this and other studies on beneficial effects, it was not convinced. The group, headed by Dr. Upton of New Jersey, wrote that the data ''do not exclude'' the hypothesis. But, it added, ''the prevailing evidence has generally been interpreted as insufficient to support this view.''

And that Taiwan study demonstrating that radioactive cobalt-60 built into an Taiwan apartment building protected the inhabitants from cancer? It contained a "major flaw" in that it failed to control for age--where a subsequent study that did control for age found an  increased incidence of cancer associated to the apartment building. As a summary of the literature on Wikipedia puts it:

In popular treatments of radiation hormesis, a study of the inhabitants of apartment buildings in Taiwan has received prominent attention. The building materials had been accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 but the study found cancer mortality rates 96.4 percent lower than in the population as a whole. However, this study compared the relatively young irradiated population with the much older general population of Taiwan, which is a major flaw. A subsequent study by Hwang et al. (2006) found a significant exposure-dependent increase in cancer in the irradiated population, particularly leukemia in men and thyroid cancer in women, though this trend is only detected amongst those who were first exposed before the age of 30.

So as an increasingly critical situation in Japan demands more accurate and useful information about radiation, the Fox News Channel's biggest show featured the ignorance of Ann Coulter. Just another reason why studies have found Fox News watchers more misinformed on the issues of the day than consumers of other corporate media outlets.

Here is Michel Martelly, one of the two conservative candidates vying to be next president of Haiti, courtesy of Kim Ives in an Institute for Public Accuracy release:

In the years following Aristide's restoration to power in 1994, Martelly became obsessed with hatred for the man. In a video from not too long ago, which can be seen on YouTube, the candidate threatens a patron in a bar where he has performed. "All those shits were Aristide's faggots," he says. "I would kill Aristide to stick a dick up your ass."... [Video]

The New York Times has a profile today (3/18/11) of Martelly which alludes to this video--while omitting the worst part. The piece is headlined "A Roguish Candidate Taps Haitians' Discontent."  The Times' take on the video is that Martelly "describes a sex act he would perform on a former president whose politics he disliked." The piece goes on to refer to Martelly's opinion of Aristide as "the popular former priest and two-time president he so obscenely dismissed."

He said he wanted to kill him--that's more than an obscene dismissal.

In another Times piece on Haiti, the paper calls Aristide a "former firebrand priest beloved by the poor but dismissed by others as corrupt," before drawing this equivalence:

He will be the second polarizing figure in Haitian politics to return in recent months: Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator known as Baby Doc, suddenly returned from exile in January and is living quietly here while courts iron out pending human rights and corruption charges related to his government.

As we pointed out before, comparing Aristide's human-rights record to Duvalier's bloody reign is obscene.

This is an ad for some sort of Time magazine web feature, grabbed today from the magazine's homepage:

Time is a little late to the table; this has been the media line since shortly after Obama was elected (FAIR Action Alert, 2/3/09) and has been going strong ever since (Extra!, 1/11).

This Saturday I'll be on a panel at Left Forum titled "Racism and Resistance in the Immigration Debate," with former FAIR communications director Isabel Macdonald, Monica Novoa of Drop the I-Word, Sonia Guinansaca of the New York State Youth Leadership Council and Esther Kaplan of the Nation Institute, moderated by my former Paper Tiger colleague Denisse Andrade.

Below is the description. I'll be talking about my recent article, "Time to 'Drop and Leave' Loaded Language," among other things. If you're in the New York area, stop by for what should be a very interesting conversation.

Racist, dehumanizing terms such as "illegal" play a crucial role in generating and reinforcing racial animus toward immigrants. This harmful and colonizing language, which is too often granted an unchallenged platform in the media, underpins policies that violate human rights, and hurt immigrants and all communities of color. On this panel, media activists, organizers and journalists discuss strategies of resistance and reflect on the lessons of their own work at the front-lines of the immigration debate. From the movement of "Dreamers"--the immigrant youth who have "come out as undocumented, unafraid and unapologetic" in the media, especially during the Dream Act campaign; to the Nation's expose of immigrant-bashing former CNN host Lou Dobbs’s reliance on undocumented labor; to a new campaign calling on journalists to "drop the I-word" (illegal) in their coverage of immigrants.

The New York Times (3/17/11) presents a look at the Japanese government's lack of candor about the Fukushima nuclear disaster. At first we're given the impression that this is something cultural: "The less-than-straight talk is rooted in a conflict-averse culture that avoids direct references to unpleasantness." We don't have that problem, I guess.

Then, we're told, Japanese media are to blame: 

Left-leaning news outlets have long been skeptical of nuclear power and of its backers, and the mutual mistrust led power companies and their regulators to tightly control the flow of information about nuclear operations so as not to inflame a spectrum of opponents that includes pacifists and environmentalists.

So the too-critical media helped create this crisis of  "mutual mistrust"? The Times had previously led me to believe that the problem with Japanese media was that it was too cozy with powerful institutions.  Now I'm being told they're too critical, which makes them part of the problem.

Finally we come to this:

The close links between politicians and business executives have further complicated the management of the nuclear crisis.

Powerful bureaucrats retire to better-paid jobs in the very industries they once oversaw, in a practice known as "amakudari." Perhaps no sector had closer relations with regulators than the country’s utilities; regulators and the regulated worked hand in hand to promote nuclear energy, since both were keen to reduce Japan’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels.

Now hold on a second. They live in a country where there is a revolving door between corporations and the regulators who oversee their industries?

I'm glad the Times gives us the  Japanese word for this, since most U.S. readers have no frame of reference with which to comprehend such a bizarre practice.

On the release of CIA agent Raymond Davis, who was held in Pakistan on charges of killing two Pakistani men on a street in Lahore, the Times explains the reaction (3/17/11)

The Davis episode was particularly sensitive because of the resentment among Pakistanis who believe that a growing American security contingent roams the country with relative impunity.

The Davis incident would seem to confirm this "belief," wouldn't it?

The New York Times has a piece today (3/17/11) about new White House press secretary Jay Carney and how his background suits him for the job.

Carney was previously a reporter for Time magazine, and was apparently not much of a partisan--he "complained privately" that the magazine's coverage of the 2008 campaign "was too lopsided toward Barack Obama."

Carney's friends say he's good at making powerful people like him--a talent he apparently used to great effect as a journalist:

Mr. Carney, they said, always seemed comfortable around people in power and exuded a certain confidence that endeared him to some of the biggest players in politics.

And:

"He's able to put people at ease," said Eli Attie, a close friend of Mr. Carney's and a former political operative who now writes television scripts. He recalled the time he introduced his friend to Richard A. Gephardt, his former boss. Not long after, Time sent Mr. Carney on a trip with Mr. Gephardt, a former Democratic congressman from Missouri. The day of the trip, Mr. Attie's phone rang. "The two of them called me from the tarmac. Just to say hi," Mr. Attie said. "He already had a close enough rapport with the guy."

When Mr. Carney’s editors at Time gave a party to celebrate his promotion to Washington bureau chief in 2005, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York insisted on delivering a toast. A Carney friend who is a close associate of the mayor had introduced them, and they quickly hit it off. And when Mr. Carney grew restless in his job at Time, an old friend introduced him to the newly elected vice president, who was looking for the right communications director. They, too, quickly clicked.

I have no idea whether Jay Carney has the right personality for his current job as a government spokesperson. But he does seem to have a knack for making powerful people feel "at ease." And that's apparently very helpful if you want to make it in Beltway journalism.

USA Today has a long piece (3/17/11) by Martha Moore about video hoax artist James O'Keefe's NPR project. The article does a pretty good job of running down the deceptions in O'Keefe's video. That's good. This, however, is not:

The video follows a long, if not always honorable, tradition of muckraking exposés. It also is a stepchild to the political tactic of tracking an opponent with video until a gaffe occurs, then capitalizing on it. The sting's impact was magnified by the quick dissemination-without-scrutiny that is a hallmark of Internet-driven media.

O'Keefe's video has nothing to do with muckraking. And please don't blame the Internet for the fact that journalists apparently can't be bothered to care whether a source is reliable.

That's annoying. But this part is at least somewhat amusing:

O'Keefe's tactics combine "the guerrilla of Borat, the gotcha of Dateline…and the gonzo approach of Hunter S. Thompson," O'Keefe said in an interview.

I hope if I'm ever profiled by USA Today, I'll get to sing my own praises like that.