A recent Wall Street Journal editorial (3/11/11) defended the Peter King hearings on Islamist terrorism against "our friends on the left [who] are busy portraying them as the McCarthy hearings and Palmer Raids rolled into one."

The editors argued that in fact, the focus on Muslims is justified based on the facts:

Since 9/11, there have been more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil. These include plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline. Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan's November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.

In a useful report published by the Rand Corporation last year, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins notes that the plotters were a "diverse group" that included Caucasians, African-Americans and Hispanics as well as immigrants (or their children) from about 20 countries. Yet all but two of the plotters were Muslim, and those two sought to offer their services to al Qaeda.

So much, then, for the notion that it is bigoted for Mr. King to focus on Muslim radicalization. This is where the current threat lies.

This is a complete misrepresentation of the Rand report. The report is exclusively about Muslim radicalization and jihadism, not about domestic terrorism in general, as the WSJ would lead you to believe--if anything, it's surprising that there are any non-Muslim jihadist plotters. (The exceptions were two men who agreed for their own secular purposes to collaborate with undercover FBI informants purporting to work for al Qaeda.)

The vast majority of "homegrown" terrorist attackers--those of all ideologies who successfully carry out an attack--are not Muslim, the report finds: Of the "83 terrorist attacks in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three...were clearly connected with the jihadist cause." The other jihadist plots referred to by both the report and the WSJ were disrupted by authorities--quite often because those authorities themselves helped generate them.

One key point of the report, in fact, is to say that homegrown jihadism is not nearly as big a threat as it's made out to be--exactly the opposite of the argument that the WSJ is trying to make.

"Americans are entitled to an assessment of how serious a threat this is," wrote the WSJ editors. I agree: It's about time they and the rest of the King hearing supporters (that includes you, Bill O'Reilly) stop unjustly demonizing American Muslims and present the facts.

If you've tracked media coverage of nuclear power, you know that every few months or so nuclear power is about to enjoy a comeback. The "nuclear renaissance" has always been right around the corner, we've often been told.

Take the New York Times, for example:

-Few industries have enjoyed the kind of renaissance that nuclear power may be poised to undergo.
(5/23/01)

-After decades in the doghouse because of environmental, safety and cost concerns, nuclear power is enjoying a renaissance of expectations.
(editorial, 5/29/01)

-Energy shortages may be creating talk of a nuclear power renaissance.
(6/28/01)

-"Much Talk of a Nuclear Renaissance, but So Far Little Action"
(headline, 3/3/06)

-The continuing fight over Indian Point comes as nuclear power is anticipating a renaissance, mainly because of the high price of natural gas.
(6/7/06)

-One day this May, on a brisk morning so clear that I could see its cooling towers from 20 miles away, I visited Vogtle on one leg of a tour to assess what many in the energy industry are calling a nuclear renaissance.
(7/16/06-- a piece with the subhead "A Nuclear Renaissance?")

-major step toward actual construction after several years of speculation about a nuclear renaissance.
(8/14/06)

-As the chief executive of Constellation Energy, a utility holding company in Baltimore that already operates five nuclear reactors, Mr. Shattuck is convinced that nuclear power is on the verge of a renaissance, ready to provide reliable electricity at a competitive price.
(8/22/06)

-NEW REACTORS ACROSS THE GLOBE: A Nuclear Power Renaissance
(headline, 1/16/07)

-The senior member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission warned on Monday that the failure of Congress to pass a detailed budget for the current fiscal year could damage the nuclear renaissance that the government tried so hard to encourage with the energy bill of 2005.
(1/23/07)

-''To bring about the nuclear renaissance in the United States, it really is going to take the global nuclear industry,'' said Michael J. Wallace, a Constellation executive who will be chairman of the new entity. ''Vendors, suppliers, operators and investors like E.D.F. who understand and are comfortable with the technology -- we need them all.''
(7/21/07)

-''A nuclear renaissance is now gearing up everywhere in the world,'' said John B. Ritch III , a former American diplomat and director general of the World Nuclear Association, an industry group. ''It is occurring parallel to an enormous expansion in energy consumption.''
(11/27/07)

-Gregory B. Jaczko, one of the federal agency's three commissioners, said it might not have enough staff members to do now what it did in the 1970s and '80s -- supervise the construction of a couple of dozen types of reactors. The commission has been hiring rapidly to prepare for a nuclear renaissance, but officials there were counting on standardization, if not quite mass production, as a way to manage the workload.
(12/5/07)

-the so-called nuclear renaissance is moving slowly.
(8/6/08)

-Worries about carbon dioxide and galloping demand for electricity might seem to be setting the stage for a renaissance of nuclear power.
(9/24/08)

-More than 90 percent of Areva is held by the French government, which also could inject more money into the company at a time when nuclear power could be on the verge of a renaissance.
(1/27/09)

-Today, concern about climate change and desire for ''energy independence'' have driven former skeptics to take another look at nuclear power. Some even talk of a ''nuclear renaissance.''
(book review, 3/8/09)

-The massive power plant under construction on muddy terrain on this Finnish island was supposed to be the showpiece of a nuclear renaissance.
(5/29/09)

-But the companies are concerned that the credit crisis has dealt a critical blow to nuclear power in the United States, which had been perceived as undergoing a renaissance starting in 2004.
(11/1/09)

-David M. Ratcliffe, the chairman and chief executive of the Southern Company, said that a nuclear renaissance was in the wings and that ''we will get on with that at a more rapid pace now that we've made this first step.''
(2/17/10)

-Clarence Fenner, the work force development coordinator for the South Texas Project, a Bay City councilman and a former first sergeant in the Army. ''This nuclear renaissance is important for our community, our state and our country. It's not just a job.''
(4/22/10)

-Is this the long-awaited renaissance of the nuclear construction business, after years of being moribund?
(4/22/10)

-Tomas Kaberger, director general of the Swedish Energy Agency, said there was no certainty that any of the plants would be built, despite talk of a nuclear renaissance.
(7/2/10)

-The project had once been hailed as a cornerstone of a nuclear power renaissance.
(10/10/10)

-Over the last decade, Kazakhstan rapidly became the world's largest uranium producer, overtaking Canada with vast increases in production. According to World Nuclear Association figures, Kazakh production jumped 62 percent from 2008 to 2009. Overall global demand remained steady, however, because the long-promised nuclear renaissance was always just over the horizon.
(11/17/10)

-In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed giving the nuclear construction business a type of help it has never had, a role in a quota for clean energy. But recent setbacks in a hoped-for ''nuclear renaissance'' raise questions about how much of a role nuclear power can play.
(2/11/11)

The new Washington Post/ABC poll is on the front page of the paper today (3/15/11):

Nearly two-thirds of Americans now say the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting, the highest proportion yet opposed to the conflict, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

The Post's write-up includes a lot of strange language about the political situation for the White House:  "a growing challenge for President Obama,"  "a difficult political challenge,"  "an awkward issue for the president." A more direct way of putting it would be to say that Obama's war policy is massively unpopular.

A broader point: No matter how unpopular the Afghan War gets, it never quite seems like the right time to hear very many anti-war voices in the corporate media.

From Wednesday's NBC Nightly News (3/9/11), courtesy of reporter Lisa Myers:

We last saw O'Keefe wearing a fur coat and playing a pimp when he managed to take down the liberal group ACORN.

No we didn't.

As should be well-known by now, O'Keefe used footage of himself wearing a "pimp" costume in his ACORN videos--but didn't wear the ridiculous costume during his "undercover stings." Media accounts acted as though he did, though--it took a lot of effort to get the New York Times to finally admit its errors on this count.

If reporters don't know these facts, they're bound to get fooled by O'Keefe again.

There was a lot of chatter about editor Tina Brown and the "new" Newsweek, which debuted last week. None of it struck me as all that interesting--a column up front from Leslie Gelb warning about the threat of Arab democracy and an anti-Social Security harangue from Robert Samuelson made it feel very much like the "old" Newsweek.

One other piece stood out, and only more so this week--a warm profile of the executive in charge of France's nuclear power company, Areva. The subhead was "France's Most Powerful Businesswoman Believes Now Is the Time for the Next Atomic Boom." And the piece led with this:

The Middle East is in turmoil, oil prices have skyrocketed, the cost of gas is through the roof. All of which is good news--if you’re Anne Lauvergeon.

While Newsweek notes that the "world may still need convincing" about nuclear power, the magazine doesn't seem to be so conflicted:

To understand how nuclear energy has morphed in the public consciousness from apocalyptic villain to "clean, green" renewable energy, look no further than Lauvergeon.

Puff pieces about Areva aren't anything new--60 Minutes had one in 2007 that we took apart here. It's hard to beat this one for bad timing, though.

After his fraudulent ACORN videos, the lesson media should have learned about right-wing "citizen journalist" James O'Keefe is not to trust him. But they didn't, so here we are with his NPR stunt, which allegedly shows NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller saying mean things about the Tea Party in a meeting with phony Muslim Brotherhood-connected donors.

But it appears that, once again, O'Keefe's videos are not be what they seem. The first serious questions about them were raised on (I swear!) The Blaze, a Glenn Beck-affiliated website. Over there, Scott Baker pointed to a few problems (3/10/11). In one part of the video, NPR's Schiller seems to laugh about the phony Muslim group's position on Sharia law. Baker says it's out of context:

So after saying that the MEAC website advocates the "acceptance of Sharia," the video cuts to the NPR exec saying, "Really? That’s what they said?" The cadence is jovial and upbeat and the narration moves on.  The implication is that the NPR exec is aware and perhaps amused or approving of the MEAC mission statement. But when you look at the raw video, you realize he was actually recounting an unrelated and innocuous issue about confusion over names in the restaurant reservation.

But more important than that is the part of the video regarding Schiller's comments about the Tea Party--the words that generated much of the current controversy. According to Baker, elsewhere in the video Schiller talks fondly of his own Republican roots. As for the racist, xenophobic Tea Party stuff:

the clip in the edited video implies Schiller is giving simply his own analysis of the Tea Party. He does do that in part, but the raw video reveals that he is largely recounting the views expressed to him by two top Republicans, one a former ambassador, who admitted to him that they voted for Obama.

NPR has done at least two reports on the video (one here, the other here). It's not quite a Shirley Sherrod moment--where the right-wing video was edited to totally turn her message around--but it's clear that things aren't exactly what they first seemed. O'Keefe's history should give media outlets serious reservations about taking him at face value on anything.

On CNN's Reliable Sources (3/13/11) O'Keefe was asked what he thought of the media's coverage of the story:

HOWARD KURTZ: Do you think the media coverage has been fair to you and your organization in this NPR story?

O'KEEFE: I think it's been more fair. I think the mainstream media is certainly starting to have a little more respect for us.

He's right--which goes to show you that the argument that the media is tilted to the left remains totally unconvincing.

*NOTE: A small correction: The Blaze writer's name is Scott Baker-- not Scott Walker, who is someone else entirely.

Will the unfolding crisis in Japan lead to a debate over the safety of nuclear power in the United States? Initial signs are not encouraging.

NBC's Meet the Press (3/13/11) had an interview with Marvin Fertel of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Host Chuck Todd prefaced one question with, "I understand that you represent the industry's interests in this...."

Later on the show, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) was asked to weigh in--since he had been speaking out in favor of nuclear power, a position he doesn't appear to be abandoning:

Well, we're going to have to see what happens here. Obviously, it's still, still things are happening.  But the bottom line is, we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil.... So I'm still willing to look at nuclear. As I've always said, it has to be done safely and carefully.

 On the CBS program Face The Nation, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I.-Ct.) was on to say:

I've been a big supporter of nuclear power because it's domestic. It's ours and it's clean. And we've had a good safety safety with nuclear power plants here in the United States. But I think we've got to--I don't want to stop the building of nuclear power plants, but I think we've got to kind of quietly--quickly put the brakes on until we can absorb what has happened in Japan.

ABC's This Week, to its credit, had Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund. He also appeared on Fox News Sunday--which featured pro-nuke Sen. Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) right afterward.

In the New York Times today (3/14/11) we see the headline "U.S. Nuclear Industry Faces New Uncertainty." But the article only quotes proponents of  nuclear power.  The lead graph:

The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America's energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan's crippled nuclear reactors.

So we hear from a member of that "fragile" consensus (which never included "mainstream environmental groups," as the article claimed). Is the Times planning on running a separate piece detailing the concerns of critics of the nuclear power industry?

The Washington Post has a similar Reuters piece (3/14/11) headlined, "Some Nervously Eye U.S. Nuclear Plants." The lead sentence:

Anxiety over Japan's quake-crippled nuclear reactors has triggered calls from U.S. lawmakers and activists for a review of U.S. energy policy and for brakes on expansion of domestic nuclear power.

But the only quotes come from nuke boosters: Joe Lieberman, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute and a White House spokesperson. If there really is "anxiety" and calls from "activists," readers should hear them.

It was great to see this letter in the New York Times from Edward Said's widow (3/11/11):

To the Editor:

I smiled when I read "Huntington's Clash Revisited," by David Brooks (column, March 4).

Eighteen years after Samuel Huntington wrote his Foreign Affairs essay "The Clash of Civilizations," Mr. Brooks has arrived at a conclusion that so many Arabs and Arab-Americans arrived at very soon after its publication.

Mr. Huntington's essay and subsequent book, in which he asserted that the peoples of the Islamic world were incapable of developing societies rooted in freedom and democracy, which he perceived to be essentially "Western values," sparked an extensive debate in the Arab world and among Arab communities worldwide. The Arab media covered it extensively, and what they said and wrote was totally ignored or dismissed by their Western counterparts.

My late husband, Edward W. Said, was among the prominent voices in strong opposition to Mr. Huntington's thesis. He wrote and published in English for the Western world. Very few listened to him. It took revolutions to finally hear our voices.

Mariam C. Said
New York, March 4, 2011

He's back.

Right-wing activist James O'Keefe's latest "work" is an undercover video that shows representatives from a fake Muslim charity trying to make a $5 million donation to NPR. The "Muslim" donors-to-be meet with two NPR development officers. In the ensuing conversation, as all the media coverage explains, one of the two--Ron Schiller--expresses critical views of Republicans and the far-right Tea Party.

Schiller is an NPR fundraiser, with no journalistic role there. While it wasn't wise to share his personal views at a lunch, it is the sort of thing that people do all the time. So why does anyone care about this? Because O'Keefe--and countless other right-wing critics--want to show that NPR is a bastion of left-wing propaganda. They can't do that by studying the content of NPR's broadcasts, but they can get a fundraiser to make disparaging comments about Tea Party conservatism- and, in so doing, force out NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.

The political motivation behind the hidden camera sting is clear enough--to spark more discussion about NPR's supposed bias, at a time when Republican politicians are looking to eliminate funding for public media.  As an L.A. Times editorial put it (3/11/11):

National Public Radio long has attracted complaints from conservatives that it has a liberal tilt. By seeming to confirm that view, a senior NPR fundraising official has provided the network's critics with undreamed-of ammunition. More than ever, NPR needs to remember its obligation as a recipient of government funds to be balanced and nonpartisan.

This is exactly what O'Keefe and those like him want. But anyone writing about what the video "seems to confirm" should hold themselves to a higher standard. Do the conservative criticisms of NPR's "liberal tilt" have any evidence to back them up?

FAIR's 2004 study of NPR, which looked at 2,334 quoted sources in 804 stories on four leading programs, provides one such examination (Extra!, 5-6/04)--and found nothing like that:

Elite sources dominated NPR's guestlist. These sources--including government officials, professional experts and corporate representatives--accounted for 64 percent of all sources.

Current and former government officials constituted the largest group of elite voices, accounting for 28 percent of overall sources, an increase of 2 percentage points over 1993. Current and former military sources (a subset of governmental sources) were 3 percent of total sources.

Professional experts--including those from academia, journalism, think tanks, legal, medical and other professions--were the second largest elite group, accounting for 26 percent of all sources. Corporate representatives accounted for 6 percent of total sources.

And on partisanship:

Despite the commonness of such claims, little evidence has ever been presented for a left bias at NPR, and FAIR’s latest study gives it no support. Looking at partisan sources--including government officials, party officials, campaign workers and consultants--Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 3 to 2 (61 percent to 38 percent). A majority of Republican sources when the GOP controls the White House and Congress may not be surprising, but Republicans held a similar though slightly smaller edge (57 percent to 42 percent) in 1993, when Clinton was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And a lively race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to heat up at the time of the 2003 study.

If NPR's main news shows have a bias, it is toward the elite.

The hidden camera video dwells on NPR's coverage of Israel/Palestine, with the "Muslim" donors cheering "National Palestine Radio" for being critical of Israel. This is a common argument heard from conservatives. So what's the evidence? Seth Ackerman looked at coverage of deaths on either side of the conflict (Extra!, 11-12/01):

During the six-month period studied, NPR reported the deaths of 62 Israelis and 51 Palestinians. While on the surface that may not appear to be hugely lopsided, during the same time period 77 Israelis and 148 Palestinians were killed in the conflict. That means there was an 81 percent likelihood that an Israeli death would be reported on NPR, but only a 34 percent likelihood that a Palestinian death would be.

There are plenty of other examples that demonstrate NPR is not a left-wing outlet: Undercounting anti-war protests, a softball interview with Dick Cheney, distorted framing of the Mideast as being "calm" when only Palestinians are dying, a correspondent urging Israeli "retaliation" against Palestinians, hosting a "liberal media" discussion between conservatives Bernard Goldberg and William McGowan and two mainstream reporters, hosting healthcare "debates" between two former politicians who were both working for the health insurance industry, and allowing far-right bomb thrower David Horowitz to malign progressive historian Howard Zinn in an obituary piece. Just to name a few.

What about NPR's response to the controversy? Bill Moyers and Michael Winship write:

We agree with Joel Meares who, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, expressed the wish that NPR had stood up for themselves and released a statement close to the following:

"Ron Schiller was a fundraiser who no longer works for us. He had nothing to do with our editorial decision making process. And, frankly, our editorial integrity speaks for itself. We've got reporters stationed all over the world, we've won all sorts of prizes, we've got an ombudsman who is committed to examining our editorial operations. If you think our reporting is tainted, or unreliable, that's your opinion, and you're free to express it. And to look for the evidence. But we will not be intimidated by the elaborate undercover hackwork of vindictive political point-scorers who are determined to see NPR fail."

That's our cue. Come on, people: Speak up!

Some of NPR's most prominent reporters and hosts did speak out--and they sent a very different message. In "An Open Letter from Journalists at NPR News," they wrote:

we were appalled by the offensive comments made recently by NPR's now former senior vice president for development. His words violated the basic principles by which we live and work: accuracy and open-mindedness, fairness and respect.

The letter adds, "Those comments have done real damage to NPR."

That is beyond doubt. But the damage is made much worse by a media that treats O'Keefe's "scoop" as if it reveals anything important.

O'Keefe's big "get" is that a fundraiser will tell a prospective donor some of what he thinks he might want to hear. The fact that mainstream media have devoted so much attention to O'Keefe's sting is proof that the corporate media aren't that liberal at all.

While defending Rep. Peter King's (R.-N.Y.) congressional hearings on domestic Muslim extremism, Bill O'Reilly (3/9/11) scoffed at the notion that the biggest domestic terror threats in the U.S. come from the "radical right" and not from homegrown Muslims. After playing a clip of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok making that argument, O'Reilly responded:

Are you kidding me? The radical right? The last terror act assigned to them was the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.

In reality, acts of political violence connected to the far right are a regular occurrence. To make his claim, O'Reilly even had to overlook at least two domestic terror acts apparently inspired by his Fox News colleague Glenn Beck.

In July 2010 Beck devotee Byron Williams shot two California Highway Patrol officers when they stopped him on his way, as he later told police, to kill people at the Oakland California offices of the progressive Tides Foundation and the ACLU. Byron cited Beck, who journalist John Hamilton pointed out had aired anti-Tides commentaries on 29 separate editions of his Fox News show, as an inspiration.

Furthermore, the ADL reported that Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski--who was arrested after a shootout with police that left three officers dead--was so inspired by Beck's anti-government conspiracy theories he posted to a neo-Nazi website tape of Beck suggesting the government was building concentration camps for dissidents.

And how could O'Reilly forget Jim Adkisson, who shot and killed two people at a progressive Tennessee church in 2008? In his "manifesto," Adkisson wrote that he "wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book." (These days, Adkisson inspiration Bernard Goldberg is best known for his regular appearances on the O'Reilly Factor.)

But there's more. What about anti-abortion terrorist Eric Rudolph, who killed two and injured scores in bombings carried out between 1996 and 1998, including attacks at women's health clinics and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics?

And far-right racist and anti-Semite James von Brunn, who took a rifle to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. in June 2009, shooting  to death a security guard before he was stopped by police?

Perhaps O'Reilly doesn't consider Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion activist who murdered women's health provider Dr. George Tiller, a terrorist. After all, before his May 2009 murder, O'Reilly and his guests had demonized Tiller in 27 separate editions of his show, with the host dubbing Tiller a "killer" and accusing him of "Nazi stuff."

On January 17, city workers in Spokane, Washington, found a sophisticated bomb set to go off along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day march. Of course, there's a chance O'Reilly hasn't heard about this; the single mention O'Reilly's network has made of the crime was in a 100-word rip-and-read (Special Report, 1/18/11) the day after the march.

Then there's also the possibility that O'Reilly and his colleagues just don't care about right-wing domestic terrorism--especially when the news might undermine Muslim-bashing congressional hearings they do care about. On Wednesday, the day before King's congressional witch hunt began, federal officials arrested white supremacist Kevin William Harpham for  attempting to use a "weapon of mass destruction" in the Spokane terror crime. To this point, the arrest has not been mentioned on Fox News.

I wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1991 after they ran a piece by Fox Butterfield (4/17/91) that invaded the privacy (literally peering into her daughter's bedroom window) and scrutinized the personal life of a woman who accused a member of the Kennedy family of raping her. Clearly some people inside the paper were outraged as well, because they don't usually print letters that are this critical (4/21/91):

I read with growing disbelief the "profile" of the alleged victim in the Palm Beach, Florida, rape case. It seems you are borrowing not only your policies on naming rape victims from supermarket tabloids but also journalistic and ethical standards.

There has been a decades-long struggle by advocates for rape victims to convince the courts that details of a victim's personal life are simply not relevant to the crime committed against her. Yet you consider it appropriate to note that the alleged victim's mother was called a "longstanding girlfriend" in her stepfather's divorce case; that in ninth grade, she skipped classes in school; that when out on a date with a chef, she talked to other men.

When one looks at this information and tries to puzzle out why you thought it worth reporting, the conclusion seems inescapable: The lifestyle of a woman is a significant question in determining how sorry we should feel if she was raped.

The article shows contempt not only for the woman, but also for the intelligence of your readers, when you explain that "the matter of her privacy" was taken out of the hands of Times editors by NBC's April 16 nationwide broadcast. When NBC aired the woman's name (without irrelevant details of her social life), it justified its decision by pointing to the Globe, a supermarket tabloid; the Globe passed on responsibility to a tabloid in Britain.

Only the Times is responsible for maintaining journalistic and ethical standards in the Times, and by publishing this sensationalistic invasion of privacy, you have failed in that responsibility.

This shifting the blame in rape cases was a persistent problem at the Times; this is from a 1991 Extra! piece by Laura Flanders (3-4/91):

"After Rape Charge, Two Lives Hurt and One Destroyed" was the New York Times headline (11/12/90) above a story about a University of Rhode Island student who committed suicide before giving testimony to police about a rape he had witnessed. The story, by William Celes 3rd, presented the rape survivor and her attacker as equally "hurt," the real victim being the 20-year-old young man with "personal problems" who couldn't bear the memory of the assault he'd witnessed without trying to prevent. (Celes points out, however, that "some said the real victim was Mr. Lallymand," the man charged with the rape.)

This was 20 years ago, and it would be nice to believe that consciousnesses have been raised at the Times since then. Unfortunately, a piece by James McKinley Jr. that appeared in the Times yesterday (3/9/11), about a town in Texas where 18 men and boys were charged in the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl, suggests little progress has been made. (See MotherJones.com, 3/9/11.) McKinley reports that the East Texas town is asking itself "how could their young men have been drawn into such an act," and provides this as part of the answer:

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands--known as the Quarters--said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

There's no indication in the article that the reporter questions in any way the reaction of the town, which seems (to hear McKinley tell it) more concerned about the plight of "their young men" than about the 11-year-old victim.

Faced with widespread criticism of this report, the Times is digging in its heels: "The paper stands by the controversial piece," a spokesperson told Yahoo! News (3/10/11).

UPDATE: New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane (3/11/11) weighs in on the story, saying "the outrage is understandable."

Today the New York Times reports that an arrest has been made in connection with an attempted bombing at the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington. As we pointed out here, the case has generated relatively little media coverage--in contrast to attempted domestic terrorism attacks (or even alleged plots) connected to Muslims.

The suspect is Kevin Harpham--as the Times points out, he is linked to a white supremacist group:

Law enforcement officials would not say whether Mr. Harpham had links to extremist groups. But the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such groups, said that its research showed that Mr. Harpham was a member of the National Alliance as recently as 2004.

The Times story appears on page A20.

With a headline like "Public Workers Draining State, Local Pension Funds," I guess you know what to expect from Karen Tumulty's article in the Washington Post today (3/8/11). It appears the story's headline was changed somewhere along the way, but unfortunately the headline wasn't the only problem.

Her lead paragraph introduces an obviously unrepresentative case--a guy who somehow had 4 government jobs in one California town, and thus is enjoying a $500,000 pension. Tumulty writes:

Deals like the one he got rankle Californians at a time when the state's public employee pension plans are "dangerously underfunded, the result of overly generous benefit promises, wishful thinking and an unwillingness to plan prudently."

Down in the seventh paragraph, readers learn:

Fat pensions like Malkenhorst's are not typical, of course. AFSCME, which is the largest public-employee union, says that its average member earns less than $45,000 a year and receives an annual pension of roughly $19,000.

Oh, OF COURSE the lead example is not at all typical. That's Journalism 101!

Don't let those union numbers fool you--Tumulty gets word from a group to undermine the union's case:

But many retirees from state and local government jobs do much better than that. When the advocacy group California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility requested state retirement system records in 2009, it discovered that nearly 15,000 of the state's retired government employees were receiving pensions of more than $100,000 a year, with Malkenhorst topping the list.

Of course, there's a tremendous difference between the "average" pension and what "many retirees" are getting.

Tumulty then tries to claim that there's a broader sense of public outrage over pensions:

Fueling the backlash is the fact that the retirement system for government workers, especially on the state and local level, has become by many measures a significantly better deal than that available to most people who work for the private sector.

Again, there's been little evidence of this supposed "backlash."

Tumulty is absolutely right about one thing, though:

What makes headlines, however, are the stories of workers who exploit the loopholes.

The New York Times has a piece today (3/7/11) about the debate over U.S. military intervention in Libya. The paper reports that

there are persistent voices--in Congress and even inside the administration--arguing that Mr. Obama is moving too slowly.

Reporters David Sanger and Thom Shanker contend that there is too much concern about perceptions, and that the White House is too squeamish because of Iraq. And who are those persistent voices?

The most vocal camp, led by senators John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for president, and Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent and another hawk on Libyan intervention, say the central justification for establishing a no-fly zone over Libya is that the rebel leaders themselves are seeking military assistance to end decades of dictatorship.

As always, when it comes to calling for military force, John McCain is front and center in the  TV news debate, since he is apparently an "expert."

But the Times notes that there are others calling for a more aggressive response--including Sen. John Kerry. And that's a problem for the White House:

For the administration, Mr. Kerry's view is more troublesome, given that he is a normally a strong ally on foreign policy issues. He was a fierce critic of the war in Iraq, but he sees Libya as a different matter.

John Kerry was such a fierce critic of the Iraq War that he voted for it.