The country is on the brink of bankruptcy, Fox host Bill O'Reilly warned last night--all because Barack Obama is spending too much money. Drastic cuts are required, but "the far-left loons want to spend more."

And he's got the number to prove it:

In 2007, during the Bush administration, federal deficit spending was $161 billion, despite the Iraq and Afghan wars. Four years later under President Obama, the deficit spending is $1.3 trillion, eight times as much.

To be fair, the economy collapsed on Bush's watch, and both Republicans and Democrats committed almost a trillion dollars to prop up the economy. As we all know, the stimulus spending did not work very well.

But the Obama administration has not cut back. Today the feds are spending $9.8 billion every day. That breaks down to $410 million per hour. Tax revenue has actually gone up. It's 21 percent higher this year than last, but there's no way Americans can bring down the federal debt with their tax dollars. The spending is just too massive.

It would be surprising to find out that government tax receipts increased 21 percent. They didn't. O'Reilly is misreading the Wall Street Journal editorial where he got these number, which says that "federal receipts grew by 6.5 percent in fiscal 2011, including a 21.6 percent gain in individual income tax revenues."

Actually, the whole piece is unhelpful to his argument, since it argues that the rise in spending has actually been pretty modest over Obama's term;  it actually fell slightly from fiscal year 2009 to 2010. And the current deficit as a share of GDP--which is a better way to measure the deficit anyway--has dropped over the past two years.

And it's not clear why O'Reilly would choose the 2007 fiscal year to compare Bush's record to Obama's--unless the point is to make Obama look worse. The 2008 deficit was $459 billion.

O'Reilly says that he "is playing Paul Revere" here.  More like Chicken Little.

An article in the new issue of Newsweek (10/24/11)--"Obama's Big Green Mess: How the White House lost its Eco-Mojo"--presents White House policy as a series of failures.  It starts off with federal inspectors finding serious problems with various weatherization projects. That's just the tip of the iceberg--from Solyndra to stimulus, things aren't looking good. But writers Daniel Stone and Eleanor Clift seems to want to give White House critics an assist with things like this:

Overall, as the $787 billion economic stimulus--the primary engine for the green-energy agenda--came to an end September 30, it is clear that the program created far fewer jobs than promised. So-called green-collar jobs are notoriously hard to tally, but numerous estimates by gleeful Republicans put the taxpayer cost of each green-energy job created by the stimulus at more than $1 million.

OK, so it's really hard to figure out the numbers on this--but here's one that gleeful Republicans like to throw around?

In cases like this, it seems especially important to give readers a sense of the range of estimates. Robert Pollin from the University of Massachusetts estimates that you get 17 green jobs per $1 million of government expenditure. By comparison, the oil/gas industry produces five per million, the military about 11.

And at a House hearing on the White House and green jobs and stimulus funds last month, one Republican complained that the government was spending $80,000 per green job--that's 12.5 per million.

Newsweek is right to suggest that there are  debates over how to count green jobs, and how much the government should be investing in clean energy. But this article should have given readers more to work with than a scary-sounding number popular with Republicans.

Liberal writers are zeroing in on a new study from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism that found Barack Obama has been subjected to far more "negative" coverage than any of the Republican presidential candidates. The graphic accompanying the study is dramatic:

Slam dunk, right?

One of Eric Boehlert's blog items at Media Matters is headlined "So Much for the Liberal Media." In another post he acknowledges that there have been criticisms of the Pew methodology in the past, but the real issue here is how right-wing critics will react to the numbers.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly makes a similar point:

It's simply taken as a given in Republican circles that President Obama enjoys favorable coverage from major media outlets. This is generally pretty hard to believe among non-conservatives, but it's helpful to take this out of the realm of perception and into more quantifiable analysis.

If the point that liberals are making is that the liberal media conspiracy that exists in the minds of conservatives bears no resemblance to reality, they're right. But we didn't need a new study to confirm this.

A more important question (for media critics at least) is whether the study's methodology is sound. And this is where things get a little muddy.

Part of the  Pew study is attempting to measure "tone." This involves making some decisions about how you would measure that, as the study makes clear: "The unit of measure of tone is each assertion or statement contained in a story or blog post." Pew set up a computer algorithm to capture news content and code it accordingly.

The report gives an example of a Gannett story about Herman Cain's poll numbers. The report stated that he was making "good impressions," according to the poll's findings. Thus this would be coded as a "positive" assertion. A story that quoted someone speaking about Michele Bachmann's migraines is a "negative" assertion. The report explained, "A story that is entirely about a poll showing Mitt Romney ahead of the Republican field--and that his lead is growing, would be a good example to put in the 'positive' category."

It doesn't take long to spot the problem here. Candidates performing well are far more likely to rack up "positive" coverage, even if that coverage is, strictly speaking, unremarkable campaign reporting about fundraising, polls and so on. Newt Gingrich's campaign scores a lot of "negative" coverage. But given the state of his campaign, that is completely unsurprising--and does not reveal a media "bias" against Gingrich.

This would seem to be the main explanation for "negative" coverage of Obama. A number of Republican politicians are running to challenge him, and are thus likely to criticize his record. Those comments would be recorded as "negative" coverage. But so would coverage that simply relates bad news--Pew explains:

Even the week of May 2-8, immediately after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Obama’s coverage was overwhelmingly negative. One reason is that many of the references to his role in the hunt for bin Laden were matched by skepticism that he would receive any long-term political benefit from it. Another was that the bin Laden news was tempered with news about the nation's economy.

"A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the streets to wildly cheer President Barack Obama's announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decade-long manhunt," stated a May 2 AP story. "The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his re-election campaign."

They don't make it perfectly clear, but one can assume that a story like this would be coded as "negative"--because it mentions things like unemployment and partisanship.

The problem is that a study like this seems to confuse media bias with bad news. It's doubtful that Pew's point was to suggest that there is an overwhelming anti-Obama bias in the national media. But that's one conclusion people are likely to draw when a study talks about "positive" and "negative" media coverage.

It's hard to suggest with a straight face that politicians deserve coverage that is half friendly, half critical at all times. But without some non-arbitrary way to determine the tone of coverage a politician should be getting--and what would that look like, exactly?--it's hard to turn a count of "positive" and "negative" coverage into a gauge of media bias.

With all the chatter about the inevitability of Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination, it might be useful to recall the last time the media were sending the same message about an early favorite, at least according to the national polls:

Today the New York Times (1/18/11) reports a big scoop.

A "Tea Party commission" convened  by Freedom Works is set to announce its crowd-sourced $6 trillion debt reduction plan--"A copy of the preliminary findings was provided to the New York Times," Kate Zernike reports.

The story's second paragraph critiques the plan from the right for not doing enough about Social Security and Medicare, which Zernike asserts "are two of the biggest contributors to the nation's deficit." This is not true, especially when it comes to Social Security--but corporate media prefer to have discussions of the deficit that bash Social Security.

The larger problem is why this proposal is being covered at all. Even Zernike's account suggests that it doesn't really add up:

FreedomWorks says that repealing the healthcare legislation would cut $1.2 trillion, but the Congressional Budget Office has projected that repealing the legislation would actually increase the deficit by $210 billion over the next 10 years.

It's useful to recall how the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was treated by outlets like the New York Times. This was a serious plan put forward by legislators and endorsed by several high-profile economists.  And it couldn't get into the news section of the New York Times. But this thing can.

The New York Times has an interesting profile today (10/18/11) of a retired Wall Street trader named Robert Halper who, it turns out, made an early donation to Adbusters to help with the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Mr. Halper, who lives on the Upper West Side, had long been a supporter of the magazine, donating by his estimate $50,000 to $75,000 over the last 20 years since he was first attracted by the magazine's spoofs on corporate logos and advertisements. So he wrote a check for $20,000 and returned to his life in New York.

Interesting. But the Times clearly buried the lead here:

He recently gave $2,500 to Mitt Romney's campaign for president, after meeting him at a neighbor's fund-raiser.

Based on my understanding of conspiratorial chalkboard flowcharts, this must mean that Mitt Romney is funding Occupy Wall Street.

Someone tell Bill O'Reilly!

On his MSNBC show (10/15/11), Chris Hayes went through the NBC archives to look at Martin Luther King's appearances on Meet the Press. He was struck by the tone of the questions King was asked--and the show put together this clip reel (apologies for the ad you're likely to be forced to watch before the clips play; it's mercifully brief):

Fox's coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has often looked and sounded like Glenn Beck were still working there.

On Friday's broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor (10/14/11), Beck was there to show how wild conspiracy-mongering is done:

O'REILLY: What's the George Soros factor here?

BECK: George Soros is connected with this through the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation, his Open Society and Code Pink are involved in what is called the Wall Street Journal... Occupied Wall Street Journal. And it is a--it's a full color newspaper.

O'REILLY: Right.

BECK: You know what it costs to print a newspaper.

O'REILLY: Somebody is behind that.

BECK: Huge money. Huge money.

O'REILLY: Right, and what's the editorial bent of the newspaper?

BECK: Revolution.

O'REILLY: OK, overthrow?

BECK: Yes, I mean, you know, collapse the system.

Beck manages to names names. SEIU and the Working Families Party are involved in what is obviously a global Marxist revolution. (Some of the evidence has been erased from Craigslist, but Beck has it.)

And, Beck warns, it goes all the way to the White House. Barack Obama is a "street organizer.... He knows everything that's going on, he knows all the people that are involved." Beck went on to predict that there will be violence, and that Van Jones will emerge to reap the benefits.

To be fair, O'Reilly offered another take, one more sympathetic to the protests. That came courtesy of Geraldo Rivera.

Squint or you'll miss it--the Sunday front page of the Washington Post:

In case you're having trouble finding it, it's in the lower right-hand corner: a blurb approximately one column inch long, directing people to page A20 to find news about protests in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street in "more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa and Asia."

It wasn't just the Post that was having trouble finding the news in hundreds of protests around the world. NBC's Meet the Press featured Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, former Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty and Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote yesterday (10/16/11), "I do hope that the protesters have lofted the issue of inequality onto our national agenda to stay." Not if the people who set the national agenda have anything to say about it.

The new Time poll that found the public more favorably inclined towards Occupy Wall Street protesters than the Tea Party has been making the rounds. From the magazine's write-up of the poll:

A new Time/ABT SRBI poll finds 54 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the new protest movement, despite the images of bearded and shirtless youth playing bongo drums, rolling cigarettes and painting their bodies in Zuccotti Park.

Huh.  Perhaps when the public looks at a protest movement, it pays more attention to substance than the media, who are more focused on locating shirtless bongo players.

Last night's O'Reilly Factor (10/13/11), with guest Megyn Kelly, talking about how to deal with Iran:

BILL O'REILLY: What do we do?

MEGYN KELLY: It's a political question for President Obama and a military question for him, but it's not really much of a legal question because legally he can do it.

O'REILLY: OK.

KELLY: If he wants to do it....

O'REILLY: Let me stop you there. So there's no difference between killing bin Laden, Al-Awlaki with a drone? OK. Just today they killed another big terrorist guy in Pakistan with a drone. We could drop a drone right down Ahmadinejad's nose legally?

KELLY: We can go after Iran. We can start a military conflict with Iran. President Obama can do that tomorrow.

O'REILLY: With the drones. Boom.

KELLY: Just the same way...

O'REILLY: Ahmadinejad, ah.

KELLY: Look what we did in Libya. It's a lot more than what you are talking about right now. And he didn't seek congressional authority. Although he should have, technically, under the law. But even if he didn't, which he didn't, no one has ever gone after a president for doing this.

O'REILLY: OK. So legally, he could take the mullahs out. He could take Ahmadinejad out. He could send them a message, saying, "Look, you try to do this on our soil, here's what happens to you."

KELLY: The law is, technically, he's supposed to have an imminent threat against the homeland. Or....

O'REILLY: I think blowing up an embassy in Washington is an imminent threat. Do you?

KELLY: But that's been stopped. So technically....

O'REILLY: But the fact that it's been stopped doesn't really matter, because the threat is still there.

That might explain the piece the wire service ran today, under the headline, "Who's Behind the Wall Street Protests?"

Reporters Mark Egan and Michelle Nichols suggest that Glenn Beck's demented chalkboard scribbles might have actually been on the right track; the protests "may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men"-- George Soros.

They write:

One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests.

Readers learn than none other than Rush Limbaugh has been able to see the clear-as-day connection:

But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, "George Soros money is behind this."

Indeed, when one thinks of the grassroots activists occupying Wall Street, the first question is how on Earth they are bankrolling such a costly project.

Reuters eventually gets to the heart of the critique, and sure enough it involves the Tides Center--another Glenn Beck obsession. They report:

According to disclosure documents from 2007-2009, Soros' Open Society gave grants of $3.5 million to the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based group that acts almost like a clearing house for other donors, directing their contributions to liberal non-profit groups. Among others the Tides Center has partnered with are the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

That's actually a somewhat accurate description of what Tides does--which makes the connection to the demonstrations... what, exactly? Here we go:

Disclosure documents also show Tides, which declined comment, gave Adbusters grants of $185,000 from 2001-2010, including nearly $26,000 between 2007-2009.

So a philanthropic clearinghouse of sorts received money from a Soros charity. And Adbusters, over the years, has received money from that same clearinghouse. Couldn't be clearer!

The Reuters piece has been picked apart by, among others, Salon's Alex Pareene and Noreen Malone at New York magazine. And a Huffington Post story points out that it's been criticized by other Reuters journalists:

Several Reuters journalists also attacked the story. Business and media writer Felix Salmon called the article "ridiculous" and social media editor Anthony DeRosa said, "When I read 'Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation' I wanted to crawl under a rock."

UPDATE: According to the New York Observer, at some point Reuters switched to a story headlined "Soros: Not a Funder of Wall Street Protests."

The original story unsurprisingly found its way to Fox News Channel-- here's an exchange from last night's O'Reilly Factor with Margaret Hoover:

O'REILLY: I think these guys were organized by the George Soros-funded MoveOn operations. Reuters, by the way, has an article on that today that you have to read, Hoover, linking in the Soros money to these agitators.

HOOVER: And what that article actually said is that Soros money had funded the original group Adbusters.

O'REILLY: That's right.

HOOVER: But the last time Soros directly funded it was seven years ago. Although a lot of Soros money -- and this is the thing about Soros money, is that because it is...

O'REILLY: It's everywhere.

HOOVER: It's everywhere.

O'REILLY: It's everywhere.

HOOVER: And small amounts to all these progressive groups that are progressive groups. There's no way...

O'REILLY: You know what Soros money -- did you see "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," where if you went to sleep you became an alien? That's like Soros money. You go to sleep and they come.

Corporate media's incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called "free trade" deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable.

What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: "The production of shirts and sheets has shifted steadily from the United States to countries with lower-cost labor. Economists argue that this process strengthens the economy as companies and workers shift to more productive and lucrative kinds of work." Of course, if the Times has evidence of laid off textile workers' mass movement to more lucrative work, they're sitting on the scoop of the century.

Elite media's presentation of deals like those just passed with South Korea, Colombia and Panama consists of a barrage of unchecked claims: This time around, those featured funny numbers from proponents, who spoke of increased export growth without talking about imports--kind of like giving half a baseball score--and misleading context, like setting the deals within a storyline about jobs when there's no evidence such deals promote them.

Then you get a line, like that in the October 13 New York Times, once the deals have passed and been heralded as a "rare moment of bipartisan accord," that "the passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small."

Some would call that bait and switch. For the corporate press on trade deals, it's standard operating procedure.

Without further evidence, the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States is rather hard to believe. See Glenn Greenwald's take, for example, to appreciate the need for skepticism about U.S. claims--and the eagerness of many elite pundits to take the government story more or less at face value.

Jim Lobe's piece on how Iran experts are reacting is worth reading too.  Juan Cole's post has a provocative, almost unbelievable  headline--"Is an Iranian Drug Cartel Behind the Assassination Plot Against the Saudi Ambassador?"--but then again, the Official Story is pretty out there, too.

One can never underestimate the ways elite media can be spun by official sources, as this anonymous quote in the Washington Post today (10/12/11) demonstrates:

"There's a question of how high up did it go," said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House thinking. "The Iranian government has a responsibility to explain that."

Under normal circumstances, a government accusing another government of a criminal terrorism plot would have to demonstrate that it has the evidence--not the other way around. I guess I'd want to remain anonymous, too, if I was going to say something like that to a newspaper.

I think people are genuinely surprised by the corporate media's shift on Occupy Wall Street: Things went from apathy, scorn and derision to front-page news rather quickly.

USA Today's editorial today (10/12/11) is headlined "Five Good Reasons Why Wall Street Breeds Protesters." It has the usual caveats--"The protesters' rhetoric against capitalism and 'corporate greed' is over the top, and they seem devoid of remedies," the paper notes--but on balance, the message is that there's plenty to protest.

What's galling is the sense that USA Today's been outraged all along. As when they explain:

Through lobbyists and campaign contributions, the banking industry has long had its way in Washington. This was evident in the Clinton-era legislation that repealed a post-Depression safeguard and allowed banking behemoths to combine banking and brokerages under one roof.

Boy, was it "evident," right? Remember all of those USA Today editorials denouncing the Glass-Steagall repeal? Neither do I.

In fact, this (4/9/98) is what the paper had to say about the removal of that "post-Depression safeguard":

It is nevertheless clear that banking laws designed for an economy 65 years ago don't work as well now. The goal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act was to keep banks separate from insurance and securities firms as a way to protect banks.

But the law has weakened banks. They've lost ground at home and abroad to more flexible foreign financial firms.

Responding to this concern, the Federal Reserve Board over the past decade used its authority as regulator of bank holding companies to chip away slowly at the Glass-Steagall wall, giving banks more leeway to set up securities subsidiaries. The Fed has gone about as far as it can under the law. Congress has to tear down the rest of the wall.

As lawmakers remove obstacles to the brave new world of finance, they must take care not to leave the consumer behind.

About  a year later, the paper (11/18/99) wrote that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was one of the few accomplishments of that congressional session:

On the eve of adjournment, after nearly 11 months in session, incumbents can point to only one major accomplishment: passage of compromise legislation overhauling Depression-era restrictions on banks, insurance companies and the securities industry.

If only we had listened then to what USA Today is saying now.