Time magazine's Mark Halperin called Barack Obama a dick on MSNBC this morning. The video clip is posted all over the web today, and Halperin and MSNBC have both apologized.

Forget about that for a second, and ponder why Halperin said it. The media line on Obama's press conference is that he was unusually feisty, partisan and/or populist. These are qualities the media tend to abhor in Democratic politicians, who are constantly counseled to work with Republicans or stay in the media-defined "center" in order to succeed (and remember that their "center" is often off to the right, politically speaking).

It would seem that Halperin's outburst came in that context-- see this transcript from Mediaite:

Joe Scarborough: Mark Halperin, what was the president’s strategy? We are coming up on a deadline and the president decided to please his base, push back against the Republicans. I guess the question is, we know a deal has to be done. Is this showmanship? A lot of times you go up there and both sides and they act tough so their base will be appeased, then they quietly work the deal behind the scenes.

Mark Halperin: Are we on the seven second delay?

Mika Brzezinski: Lordy.

Halperin: I wanted to characterize how the president behaved.

Scarborough: We have it. We can use it. Go for it. Let’s see what happens.

Brzezinski: We’re behind you, you fall down and we catch you.

Halperin: I thought he was a dick yesterday.

Scarborough: Delay that. delay that. what are you doing? I can’t believe — I was joking. Don’t do that. Did we delay that?

Halperin: I said it. I hope it worked.

The Washington Post's Juan Forero comments today (6/30/11) on how Hugo Chavez's illness means that he's off television:

Chavez governs like the host of a reality show, cameras always rolling as he presides over summits, hectors opponents and warns of diabolical American plots to unseat him.

Wherever would he get such ridiculous ideas.

FAIR has a new action alert about CBS Face the Nation and Michele Bachmann. Read it here, and if you write a letter to CBS please post it in the comments section below.

That's not my opinion-- that's what I learned reading the New York Times today (6/27/11). Jeremy Peters profiles the right-wing scam artist, telling readers (emphasis added):

Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of ACORN workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to ACORN, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

That wasn't the lesson of the ACORN videos at all. After  a long battle, the Times admitted that much of its coverage of the Breitbart/James O'Keefe videos was misleading. The paper told readers that O'Keefe actually went into ACORN offices dressed in a ridiculous "pimp" get-up. He did not.

What the Times would not concede, though, was that the actual videos show very little in the way of tax evasion and prostitution advice. But that's the story Breitbart and O'Keefe were pushing; watching the actual videos doesn't provide much, if any, support for those claims. But they're still being made in the New York Times--which might be Breitbart's greatest triumph.

Peters goes on:

The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his websites--which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood--tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don't, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

This is absurd.

If you think that Breitbart distorts the facts, that's because HE DOES. To suggest otherwise is to assert that there's no way to ever know the truth about anything.  Is that the standard in "objective" journalism?

"Tea Party Plans Its Own Debt Panel" reads a headline in today's New York Times (6/27/11), where reporter Kate Zernike described efforts by the well-financed right-wing lobbying group FreedomWorks to organize a debt commission that will come up with yet another right-wing fiscal blueprint.

They don't have a plan yet--they're merely talking about having meetings that would produce a plan: "It aims to have proposals ready by January, when the presidential campaign will draw even more attention to economic proposals."

Well, they're off to a good start in the Drawing Attention department. Remember, the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was never covered in a hard news story in the Times (Extra!, 6/11).

Apparently there is a need for another Paul Ryan-type budget plan. Just talking about organizing to come up with one is good enough to score a New York Times story.

The paper didn't cover the People's Budget when it came out--which was, you know, an actual thing, not a series of committee meetings that might produce something someday.

USA Today has a piece today headlined "Drawdown's effects debated"-- meaning the timetable for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.

The article starts with critical comments from U.S. military officials David Petraeus and Mike Mullen, who say they think the troop withdrawals are too much, too soon.  And on the other side of this debate? USA Today explains: "Critics however say the drawdown risks reversing hard-won gains against the Taliban." In other words, critics who question the wisdom of the troop withdrawal.

The piece quotes a litany of such pro-war voices: Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Danielle Pletka from the right wing American Enterprise Institute and former Bush UN ambassador John Bolton.

The piece finally includes one expert-- Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations-- who stresses that there will still be plenty of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. I guess he would qualify as the dove.

Don't debates  usually involve people who have different opinions?

On last night's Fox show (6/23/11), O'Reilly gave viewers a lesson in... well, something:

So why is this happening? Well, it all boils down to political philosophy. President Obama is a liberal guy who believes the feds should run the economic show, and he hired advisers who believe that as well. The administration then set out to fight the recession by spending government money, the so-called stimulus, and that ran up trillions of dollars of debt.

Historically, the way out of recessions is to give the private sector lower tax rates and reward businesses for hiring people. But the Obama administration has resisted that.

Even by Bill O'Reilly standards this is remarkably off-base. Obama's liberalism aside (this is the guy who declared, "I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."), who are his left-wing economic advisers? Larry Summers? Most assessments of the Obama team were that his picks were not "ideological"-- which was intended to reassure anyone worried about any drift to the left.

The stimulus package-- a mix of spending and tax cuts-- cost around $787 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates its 10-year cost to be slightly higher than that ($821 billion), which is still miles away from "trillions." The deficit/debt problems that O'Reilly is concerned with are due primarily to the Bush tax cuts, the recession and the Iraq/Afghan wars. The spending associated with economic recovery plays a small role.

It is unclear where O'Reilly would get the idea that history tells us that lower corporate tax rates and slashing spending is the way out of a recession. I mean, it's been tried, but I think the consensus is that the results weren't all that great.

An analysis in USA Today (6/23/11) by Richard Wolf claims:

President Obama's decision to remove 10,000 troops from Afghanistan this year and a total of 33,000 by next September was deemed a step in the right direction Wednesday by a growing, and bipartisan, anti-war movement.

Really? I'm not aware of many people in the "anti-war movement" who have expressed that sentiment. And neither is USA Today, judging by the quotes that are included in the article. The piece notes that "Many Democrats called for a faster drawdown" and "Many liberal Democrats demanded more troops home sooner"-- naming Sen. Carl Levin, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dick Durbin, and Sen. Patty Murray as expressing such sentiments.

The paper goes on to note that the "most liberal Democrats' patience are the least satisfied with Obama's timetable, " and then quotes Moveon.org and the Campaign for America's Future.  It's good to see the paper reporting on the dissatisfaction that exists among those to the left of Obama-- but there's no reason to suggest that such folks consider his policies a "step in the right direction."

When you see a headline like "Public Unions Take On Boss to Win Big Pensions,"  you know what you're going to get-- more scaremongering about runaway public employee pensions. The New York Times delivers, with a lengthy front-page piece by Charles Duhigg that mostly takes the side of the Republican lawmakers trying to cut benefits in the name of fiscal discipline.

The article is largely based around Jim Righeimer, a conservative activist turned city council member in Costa Mesa, California, whose become something of a national star on the right. He can rattle off the anecdotes about sky-high pensions:

The city was on the road to insolvency, he warned, because public employee unions had pressured politicians into handing over generous salaries and pensions. The police chief received $298,000 a year in total compensation, Mr. Righeimer noted. The deputy fire chief had retired with a pension of more than $182,000 a year.

How typical is a $182K pension? The Times doesn't really explain, but they do suggest that this particular town's situation is typical for the state-- which is in terrible shape:

Costa Mesa, population 110,000, is California in miniature. For years, public employee unions across the state have often used their influence — sometimes behind the scenes but occasionally with public, hardball campaigns — to push for improved worker pay and benefits.

The Times could have mentioned that not everyone agrees with Righeimer's alarmist view. According to one report (Bloomberg, 4/8/11)  the city's budget officer says the pension estimates being used do not include union givebacks or changes in the state pension contribution rates. And it's worth pointing out that at one point the city stopped making pension fund contributions ten years ago, when the system was overfunded.

You have to go a ways in the Times before getting a dissenting view:

Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note. A public worker enrolled in the state’s largest pension fund who retired in 2008 with more than 30 years of service received a pension of $66,828 a year, on average, and a retiree with 20 to 25 years of service received around $34,872. Public workers who retire with fewer years on the job receive even less.

So you lead with anecdotes about six-figure pensions-- and then give readers some sense of a more typical retirement later on.

As we've pointed out before, there are serious debates about the scale of the pension problems across the country; many see the shortfall estimates as overly pessimistic.  But The Times seems to have picked its side:

But no matter what steps are taken, the cost of public pensions will most likely preoccupy many states for years. In California, New Jersey and Illinois, lawmakers may eventually need to increase taxes more than 17 percent or cut government services to pay public retirees’ benefits, according to a nonpartisan study. In some states, no matter how much the economy rebounds, pension funds may not be able to meet their obligations without significant government support.

And later:

In some states, including California, a study found that pension fund managers needed to earn a 12 percent return each year for the next three decades to meet obligations. Such prolonged returns are far higher than historical norms. (Calpers, in a statement, said it expected to earn double-digit returns this year, and disagreed with the 12 percent estimate.)

It's not clear what studies they're referring to, but it should be pointed out that not every analyst takes such a pessimistic view. The Times does  report--deep into the piece--that the main California pension plan reports that they're doing fairly well:

Calpers says its retirement fund is healthy, having earned back more than $70 billion of the value lost since 2007.... “The costs of Calpers pensions for the state represents 2.2 percent of total general fund expenditures,” the agency wrote. “To suggest that pension costs are the cause of layoffs, degradation of our schools or the California economy would be irresponsible.”

So in the Times' voice, pension shortfalls are going to "preoccupy" states, and might require massive tax increases.  Dissenters may exist-- but they're not likely to convince the New York Times.

The piece closes at the Costa Mesa city council, with an ominous sounding show of force:

In the audience sat three local firemen wearing Costa Mesa Fire Department T-shirts, all of whom declined to give their names.

“I’m not here on anything official,” one said. “We just like the council to know that we’re watching them.”

The headline in today's Post, previewing Obama's speech tonight:

Obama’s challenge: Leaving, but not too quickly

Funny how it's not the other way around-- leaving too slowly would seem to be a larger political problem, given the state of public opinion.

The Post reports:

President Obama will face a stiff political challenge Wednesday in presenting his plan for a gradual end to the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. His prime-time address must remind a skeptical electorate and a concerned Congress that the country’s longest war remains worth fighting — and funding — for several more years.

Why is it that Obama must "remind" the public that the war is worth fighting--and not convince? You can't really remind people of something they disagree with.

I stumbled upon this ABC report not too long ago, and it seems especially timely given Huntsman's announcement today.

It's not to say that ABC was uniquely off the mark. The point is that much of what passes for political coverage-- the handicapping, the horserace, the insider chatter-- is useless.

ABC News Transcript
WORLD NEWS SATURDAY
May 16, 2009 Saturday

SURPRISE PICK; A POLITICAL MASTER STROKE

DAVID MUIR (ABC NEWS):  President Barack Obama made a surprise appointment today that has both parties in Washington buzzing tonight. The President had pledged to reach across the aisle, and today, he did just that. Naming a rising star of the Republican Party to be the next ambassador to China. Utah Governor Jon Huntsman not only brings his experience to the job, he takes away a potential political threat to the Democrats. And so we begin with ABC's Jonathan Karl tonight.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): It's a political master stroke.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (UNITED STATES): I know that Jon is the kind of leader who always puts country ahead of party.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): President Obama has taken a rising Republican star and named him US ambassador to China. Utah's Jon Huntsman is one the most popular governors in America, just reelected in November with nearly 80% of the vote.

GOVERNOR JON HUNTSMAN (REPUBLICAN) : I stand here in my final term as governor with plenty to do. I wasn't looking for a new job in life, but a call from the President changed that. A McCain/Palin presidency.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): Huntsman was a co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign, but he has staked out moderate stands on immigration, climate change and gay rights. He has also warned fellow Republicans that they have to do more than just oppose Obama.

GOVERNOR JON HUNTSMAN (REPUBLICAN): You can't just say no. You can't just obstruct or obfuscate. You've got to kind of come up with some bold real solutions.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS) Governor Huntsman had been frequently mentioned as a potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate.

CLIP FROM "MEET THE PRESS"
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (REPUBLICAN): I think we've got some very good candidates, Jon Huntsman.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): Obama's 2008 campaign manager agrees. He recently called Huntsman the one person out there who could take on Obama. But now, Huntsman will be a world away. Politics aside, Huntsman has real qualifications for the job. He served as US ambassador to Singapore, Deputy US Trade Representative, and was a top Commerce Department official for East Asia. He also has an adopted daughter from China, and speaks the language fluently.

GOVERNOR JON HUNTSMAN (REPUBLICAN): I'm reminded of my favorite Chinese aphorism, it goes something like this. (Speaking in foreign language), together we work, together we progress.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): Going to China almost certainly takes Huntsman out of the running for the 2012 campaign, but it does not necessarily mean an end to his political ambitions. George Herbert Walker Bush served as ambassador to China during the 1970s, and that was a post that turned out to be a pretty good stepping stone on his way to the White House. David?

DAVID MUIR (ABC NEWS): ABC's Jonathan Karl starting us off at the White House tonight. Jon, thank you.

We wanna turn now to our chief Washington correspondent and host of This Week, George Stephanopoulos. And George, many people see this governor as the former head of the McCain campaign. But behind this, are people viewing it in Washington as a clever move?

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS): Oh, they definitely are. Jon Karl hit it right. Political master stroke. A win for President Obama. He gets one of the Republican rising stars, evidently qualified for this job to be his ambassador to one of the most important countries in the world. It is a win for Huntsman. This is, he is uniquely qualified for this job. And even though he was looking at a run in 2012, this gets him out of this internal fight in the Republican Party and out of a race that was gonna be an uphill fight for him. He'll be able to come back in 2016. And it's a blow, at least in the short term, to the Republican Party. One more sign that this is a party where the reformers, the moderates, are looking for an exit.

USA Today's Fredreka Schouten reports (6/20/11) on states adopting photo ID laws to crack down on the nearly non-existent problem of voter fraud. Schouten lays out the argument:

Proponents say the measures prevent vote fraud. Opponents say they are designed to stifle turnout among students, poor people and minorities, who are more likely to vote for Democrats but might lack government-issued IDs, such as driver's licenses and passports.

Actually most opponents tend to point out that there is no voter fraud problem. Any decent report on this subject would point this out-- otherwise readers are left with the impression that Republicans want to maintain the integrity of the vote, and Democrats are upset that they'll lose some of their supporters.

"I mean, we are a profit-driven industry. And if you want the most eyeballs, you have to go with the thing that people are most talking about. But if you're trying to do a quality program, then maybe you have got to go with Iraq and Iran."

--Politico's Julie Mason, explaining the amount of coverage of Anthony Weiner (CNN, 6/19/11)

UPDATE:

Jim Romenesko reports that Gannett will be laying off 700 employees:

That’s about 2 percent of the workforce, according to Gannett US Community Publishing division president Bob Dickey. “The economic recovery is not happening as quickly or favorably as we had hoped and continues to impact our U.S. community media organizations,” he says in a memo that’s posted below. “Publishers will notify people today and we will make every effort to reach everyone by end of day.” In March it was disclosed that Gannett CEO Craig Dubow received a $1.25 million cash bonus and had his salary doubled.

The item about those executive salaries is headlined:

Gannett paid CEO Dubow $9.4 million in 2010 – double his 2009 pay

And the others aren't doing too bad either:

* Chief Financial Officer Paul Saleh: $2.9 million; includes a $225,000 bonus, after joining GCI last November.
* U.S. newspapers president Bob Dickey: $3.4 million, including $600,000 bonus. (His total 2009 pay: $1.9 million.)
* USA Today Publisher Dave Hunke: $2.5 million, including $375,000 bonus. (Total 2009: $1.9 million.)
* Broadcasting President Dave Lougee: $2.2 million, including $450,000 bonus. (Total 2009: $1.3 million.)

There is growing Congressional opposition to the Libya war. Two House votes this month sought to challenge the White House policy-- one of which passed by a wide margin.  On Saturday (6/18/11) Charlie Savage reported in the New York Times that the Office of Legal Counsel's advice to Obama was that he needed to comply with the War Powers Act. Obama rejected their advice, which as Savage reported is "extraordinarily rare."

Congress will be taking up more Libya debates this week, with a potential vote scheduled to stop the funding of the war. And the recent Republican presidential debate showed that many candidates are speaking out against the Libya policy.

That's a lot to work with for the Sunday shows. But they mostly skipped the chance to present serious criticism of the White House. On NBC's Meet the Press (6/19/11), viewers heard from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who wants a more aggressive war:

The War Powers Act is unconstitutional, not worth the paper it's written on.... The president's done a lousy job of communicating and managing our involvement in Libya, but I will be no part of an effort to defund Libya or to try to cut off our efforts to bring Gadhafi down.  If we fail against Gadhafi, that's the end of NATO.  Egypt's going to be overrun and the 'Mad Dog of the Mideast,' what Ronald Reagan called Gadhafi, if he survives this, you're going to have double the price of oil that you have today because he will take the whole region and put it in, into chaos.... So from my Republican point of view, the president needs to step up his game in Libya, but Congress should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi.

And the Democratic view, courtesy of Senator Dick Durbin:

The president's doing the right thing.  What we have here, this would be 'Butcher of Benghazi,' Gadhafi, needs to be stopped so he doesn't kill innocent people.  The president brought together the Arab League, the United Nations, and NATO and said we are going to play a supportive rule--role, no ground troops.  We're going to have a limited duration conflict to stop Gadhafi.  That was the right thing.  But I think that the War Powers Act and Constitution make it clear that hostilities by remote control are still hostilities.... What we should do is act on a timely basis to pass congressional authorization under the War Powers Act.  I reject the Republican approach, which has been suggested by Speaker Boehner and others to cut off the troops.  It would give solace to Gadhafi.  It would undermine the people who are resisting him in that nation, and I agree completely with Lindsey Graham.  It would call into question the future of NATO.

So while they differ on War Powers Act-- and on which nickname to use for Gadhafi-- they both support the war.

As did NBC reporter Richard Engel, who said this during the program's roundtable segment:

I just came from Libya before I came here, and the fact of the matter is the war in Libya right now is not very serious, that NATO is not doing a terribly good job.  The rebels need a lot more help.  The bombing campaign in Tripoli barely exists.  Every once in a while there's a few bombs on mostly empty compounds, and people go about their lives more or less unaffected.  It's not the kind of thing that's going to drive Gadhafi from power.  And a, a lot of European nations who are now trying to lead this, this fight, which--and are, and are struggling to do it, are looking at this debate in--within the--in the United States to end the U.S. support for NATO.  If the U.S. ended its support for NATO in Libya, NATO really is dead.

It's rather odd for a reporter to offer policy advice like that. One has to wonder if NBC would be pleased if Engel were speaking out against the war.

It wasn't just Meet the Press, though. Fox News Sunday featured outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who defended the war (and the White House's legal explanation for it). And ABC's This Week took the  apparent upswing in antiwar sentiment to interview pro-war Senator John McCain. A short comment from Libya War critic George Will could be heard during the roundtable.

One of the chief criticisms of the Sunday show is that they're way too obsessed with Beltway posturing and politics. That's obviously true, but in this case there would seem to be a lot happening in that world to push back against the war-- and the shows seem to think their role is to man the ramparts.

Elizabeth Jensen has an interesting piece in the New York Times today (6/20/11) about Los Angeles public television station KCET. After deciding to cut its ties to PBS, the channel is experimenting with different programming options, including Al Jazeera English.

And the results so far, according to one station official:

Mr. Marcus said he had been braced for some criticism from viewers about Al Jazeera English’s point of view, but “most people think it’s been very even-handed.” He praised the scope of coverage, noting that last week the program carried reports from Argentina, China and Sri Lanka. “I would guess those are all stories you would not see on a domestic newscast,” he said.

Perhaps one way to improve public television is to get away from PBS.