In today's Washington Post (12/13/11), Jerry Markon reports on the news that the White House "will wade into the increasingly divisive national debate over new voting laws." But the article's explanation of the concept of "voter fraud"--the ostensible rationale for these Republican efforts to restrict voting--leaves a lot to be desired.

Markon writes that

liberal and civil rights groups have been raising alarms about the remaining laws, calling them an "assault on democracy" and an attempt to depress minority voter turnout.

Supporters of the tighter laws say they are needed to combat voter fraud.

That's the usual (and frustrating) on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach you see in a lot of corporate journalism about contentious issues.

What's a little different is that this piece goes on to try to claim that Republican claims about the problem of voter fraud may have some validity:

When it comes to voting fraud, some conservatives have long argued that it is a serious problem, although others say the number of such cases is relatively low. Studies of the issue have reached different conclusions on the extent of the problem.

That struck me as odd, since most of what I've ever read on this subject concludes that there is basically no fraud problem to speak of.

So what's the Post talking about?

In an email, Markon cited a report by the U.S. Electoral Assistance Commission, which attempted to evaluate the available research on voter fraud. That report was released in December 2006, and seemed to conclude that there was some debate over the extent of the fraud problem. But a few months after that report was released, the New York Times (4/11/07) and USA Today (10/11/06) were both reporting that the original report had come to a very different conclusion. As the Times reported (noted by Brad Blog, 4/11/07):

A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by the New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The politicization of this report was covered in the Post as well. One news story (5/14/07) reported:

A draft report last year by the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan government panel that conducts election research, said that "there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling-place fraud."

That conclusion was played down in the panel's final report, which said only that the seriousness of the problem was debatable.

Indeed one of the authors of the report in question--Tova Andrea Wang--wrote about the misrepresentation of her findings on the Post op-ed page (8/30/07):

Yet, after sitting on the draft for six months, the EAC publicly released a report--citing it as based on work by me and my co-author--that completely stood our own work on its head.

Wang continued:

We said that our preliminary research found widespread agreement among administrators, academics and election experts from all points on the political spectrum that allegations of fraud through voter impersonation at polling places were greatly exaggerated. We noted that this position was supported by existing research and an analysis of several years of news articles. The commission chose instead to state that the issue was a matter of considerable debate.

The issue of "voter fraud" is being used by some states to pass laws that in effect make it more difficult to cast a legitimate vote--essentially using a virtually non-existent "problem" to create a real one. This is easier when journalism gives credibility to "both sides" in a dispute, no matter what reality might say.

Three moments, actually:

--NBC's Chuck Todd yesterday on Meet the Press (12/10/11), commenting on Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich:

Well, first of all, those are a couple of nimble debaters. They are pretty good.  I think we have seen it.  This is the final two.

I'm old enough to remember when Todd had the campaign narrowed down to a Top Three, way back in August:  "We have a top tier. It is Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann."

--ABC host Diane Sawyer, asked to describe (This Week, 12/11/11) the most revealing lesson she learned about the candidates after she moderated a debate this weekend:

The vitality on the stage. We said at the beginning the marathon run it is to run for president. But I have to tell you, first of all, they have great immune systems.... They came out strapping, they came out ready.... I think you can't always experience on television just the sheer physical vitality of all these candidates.

--The New York Times reports (12/11/11) that a story about Newt Gingrich featured an anonymous source rebutting criticisms of him. Turns out that source was... Newt Gingrich.

Even though Mr. Gingrich publicly insists that he will take the high road with a positive campaign that does not criticize other Republicans, he recently strayed from that vow, offering himself as an anonymous source in a New Hampshire newspaper last week to reply to criticism by John H. Sununu, a former aide to President George H.W. Bush who, as a Romney surrogate, has called Mr. Gingrich "untrustworthy and unprincipled."

Mr. Sununu told the newspaper, the Union Leader, that Mr. Gingrich supported a tax increase deal that the first President Bush made with Democrats in 1990, then reversed himself. The newspaper, quoting a source identified as "a senior aide in the Gingrich campaign," elaborately rebutted this account.

[Gingrich spokesman R.C] Hammond said the source was actually Mr. Gingrich, who did not want to be identified to avoid the impression he was getting into a fight with the Romney camp.

The Washington Post launched a series of Republican presidential candidate profiles on Sunday (12/11/11). First up was Mitt Romney, and right away you sense there's something a little off here.

Here's the headline and subhead:

The Problem Solver

Mitt Romney doesn't want to talk about feeling voters' pain. He just wants to get to work relieving it.

Reporter Ann Gerhart's piece begins:

The mind of Mitt Romney is a supremely rational place.

The article is full of quotes from Romney supporters, alongside nods of approval from the reporter:

He is a man with a prodigious intellect who has been married to his high school sweetheart for 42 years, donates 10 percent of his money to his church (a considerable sum, as his self-made fortune is upward of $250 million) and, those close to him to say, acts generously, earns the loyalty of his staff and drives himself relentlessly to get the job done, whatever it is.

For good measure, readers learn that "Romney is Dudley Do-Right in a Kim Kardashian world." Yes, that's a real quote.

It's not all puffery, mind you; at one point Romney faces comes in for some harsh criticism:

He seems too perfect and tidy, his trim hair and waistline in keeping with his disciplined mien and his formidable multi-state operation. His fastidiousness can border on the fussy.

And Romney's stint in the private sector apparently went like this:

With his characteristic work ethic, after investing in a company as head of Bain Capital, Romney would roll up his sleeves, learn the business like an insider and re-envision it--with the imperative of increasing profitability as the guiding principle.

The piece closes with Romney's brother explaining that he has an "overriding philosophy about caring for people," which Gerhart used to sum up:

And in service of these goals, Romney’s flip-floppery could be interpreted as a flexibility of thinking that might help him bust through warring ideologies in Washington--an asset, not a deficit--and fix his biggest set of problems yet.

Will every candidate get this kind of treatment? It's too early to tell. But today (12/12/11) the Post profiles Rick Perry, and his piece opens with this:

He has always had it, an ease and a charm that only the naturals possess, a confidence that bears the stamp of a man aware of his gifts.

The next part-- "Few can match Texas Gov. Rick Perry's allure...."-- isn't much better, but the piece overall takes a much more critical tone, perhaps due to the state of Perry's presidential campaign.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claims he was accosted by a "screaming" man "armed with a cell phone camera" on December 7 while walking to a media party at the White House in Washington, D.C. On his show the next night (O'Reilly Factor, 12/8/11), O'Reilly explained,

I told the guy to get lost, but he came closer and closer, armed with a cell phone camera. When he was about a foot away, I turned to shield myself and my assistant with an umbrella. At this point, we were just a few feet away from the White House gate.

According to O'Reilly, at the White House gate he tried to get the Secret Service and the D.C. police to arrest the man, but was told by a police officer that according to the law, no assault had occurred. Claiming the police had also told him that his tormenter was a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Fox News host concluded his commentary with an attack on OWS:

Ironically, a few nights ago, I told you bad things were going to happen because these occupy protesters are becoming increasingly aggressive. But I never thought it was going to happen to me. However, these anarchists are now everywhere.

The problem with O’Reilly's account is…just about everything. As the videotape posted by interviewer Branden Lane shows, he was not screaming, he was much more than a foot away when O'Reilly opened his umbrella at him (apparently hitting his camera in the process), and did not appear threatening as he straightforwardly asked O'Reilly if he was returning from a fundraiser for Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.

One could argue that the man was less threatening and intrusive, and more professional, than the video teams O'Reilly sends to ambush subjects while they are at their homes or on vacation or when they are with their young children. In fact, O'Reilly's producers have actually physically interfered with subjects on some of their ambush stakeouts.

We know by now that Newt Gingrich thinks he's smart. And we know there are plenty of people in the corporate media who believe the same thing.  How do they show their love for the brainy Republican presidential candidate? Time's Joe Klein shows the way in this week's issue (12/19/11) of the magazine. He doesn't think Gingrich should be president, but he does think Gingrich is full of interesting ideas.

Well, what about that plan to have kids work as janitors cleaning their schools? Klein's problem with it is that it doesn't go far enough:

I've known him for 25 years. I've had more creative policy conversations with him than with any other elected politician (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton). He is one Republican who is legitimately interested in improving the lives of the poor--although his ideas, which almost always involve market incentives, are quite different from the suffocating paternalism that many Democrats favored until Clinton came along. As early as 1990, Gingrich was paying poor children in Atlanta $2 for every book they read. He also proposed paying foreign-language-speaking students to tutor their English-speaking classmates in their native languages. He also proposed giving every literate child in the poorest neighborhoods a laptop. His recent idea of paying poor kids to help clean their schools--which has been the subject of a shrill, silly gust of liberal ire--is more of the same. It's a good idea, which would be much better if it were expanded to all public middle and high schools, with the work seen as an unpaid form of public service, a way to build community spirit and teach civic responsibility.

It calls to mind Paul Krugman's line about Gingrich--that he's "a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."-- A.J. Liebling

Rob Davis of VoiceofSanDiego.org reports on the new owner of his local daily:

Doug Manchester, the new owner and publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, wants his new media outlet to be a booster.

The newspaper's new CEO, John Lynch, made that clear in an interview with me after Manchester bought the paper November 17. Lynch said he wanted the newspaper's sports page to advocate for a new Chargers stadium and call out opponents as obstructionists. He's since revisited those remarks, telling a Union-Tribune reporter that he was "acutely aware" of the importance of an independent newsroom.

Lynch's original comments are in line with how many media owners have viewed local sports, as Neil deMause reported in Extra! in 1999. And as FAIR noted in 2001, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was editorially opposed to building a new baseball stadium--that is, until their parent company got a stake in the team. Why go to the trouble of owning a newspaper if you don't use it to advance other business interests?

Over on Twitter, Glenn Greenwald recommended this USA Today profile of Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich, who has been one of the most prolific and incisive critics of U.S. foreign policy in recent years.

Greenwald called it "surprisingly good," which is right. But one thing about the piece really bothered me--how it dealt with the death of Bacevich's son in Iraq. Reporter Rick Hampson tells that story via the classroom:

The students knew that Bacevich had always opposed the war in Iraq. They may have known that his only son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was an Army officer there. They did not know that the day before he had been killed there.

That awful irony--a son follows his father into the military and dies in a war the father fought to end--has helped make Bacevich one of the most prominent and credible critics of U.S. foreign policy.

I doubt that USA Today really means to say that the death of Bacevich's son "helped" make Bacevich's critique more "credible," but that's certainly what comes across here. As a politically conservative critic of Clinton, Bush and now Obama policies, one would hope that his record speaks for itself.

Bacevich doesn't speak publicly much about his son's death--I recall that from an interview he did with Bill Moyers in 2008. And Bacevich says much the same later on in the USA Today article:

Bacevich says his son's loss does not affect his analysis and should not affect how it is received. "I've never said, 'You need to listen to me because my son died in Iraq.'"

Again, this is one troubling aspect to an otherwise interesting piece about an important voice in our national debate. But that passage was a little off.

Dean Baker (12/9/11) flagged this NPR Morning Edition report today (12/9/11), and it's well worth a positivity.

In the debate over the payroll tax cut, Democrats want to pay for extending the tax break with a surtax on the wealthy. Republicans claim--usually without being challenged by reporters--that a surtax on millionaires would be an attack on job-creating small-business owners.

So NPR decided to go to GOP officials and ask to speak with these small-business-owning, millionaire job-creators. Turned out there was trouble finding any:

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.

They did find a few wealthy business owners willing to talk--and they said their personal tax rate wasn't a factor in their hiring decisions.

Imagine if journalists did this kind of thing all the time?

PBS has a website called MediaShift, billed as "Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution." Based on an alarming post this week headlined "Tear Down the Wall Between Business and Editorial!" (12/7/11), the revolution looks rather revolting.

The piece is written by Dorian Benkoil, who "handles marketing and sales strategies for MediaShift, and is the business columnist for the site"--a job description that suggests that PBS has already torn down the wall between business and editorial, since those responsibilities would seem to put you in a constant position of conflict of interest. (He earlier worked as "a liaison between the sales and editorial sides" at ABCNews.com.)

The piece is a primer on "how to blur the lines in an intelligent and ethical way," in the words of MediaShift managing editor Courtney Lowery Cowgill. It offers such tips as "If Sales Influences Editorial, It's OK," and insights like:

It's easy to demean "link bait" such as "Top 10" or "How To" lists, but if your users like and share them, and they generate profitable page views, is there really harm? If there's sponsor interest, all the better.

To be sure, the piece includes caveats, like: "You do need core principles that can't be bent--even if that means the business doesn't meet payroll." But it seems completely oblivious to the dangers of basing your business model on giving the sponsors what they want. It's hard to maintain a line in the sand when you've started out with the intention of blurring that line--ethically, intelligently or otherwise.

The most striking thing about the column is its celebration of profit-making as a liberating force:

Profit is what lets you not only continue another day, but also gives you the freedom to determine your own mission.... The more profit your company makes, the more leeway it has to do its work, to remain independent of government or other interference, and the more freedom to do good work.

Well, no. The point of a for-profit business is to make money, not "to do good work"; the more profit your company makes, the more it will strive to make in the future, so it can show stockholders an ever-expanding return on their investment. The pressure this puts on journalists to warp their copy is why the wall between business and editorial was made one of journalism's "core principles that can't be bent."

And the difficulty of maintaining such principles in the face of the profit imperative is why PBS was set up in the first place, to provide a home for journalism free from the obligation to please sponsors. But when PBS has sales and marketing directors who also double as business columnists, I guess that kind of journalism needs to find a new home.

The New York Times today (12/8/11), reporting on the CIA drone that went down in Iran, refers in passing to the

recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon.

Of course, the assumption here is that Iran is making "progress towards a nuclear weapon." That is what some political elites and many in the media say, but that doesn't make it true. And there is no evidence to support that assertion. And basing a debate around an assumption that might be entirely false is, of course, a problem. (Consider the run-up to the Iraq invasion, 2002-03.)

Today's piece also includes what some might read as justification for the secretive surveillance program over Iran:

In Iran, among other missions, it is looking for tunnels, underground facilities or other places where Iran could be building centrifuge parts or enrichment facilities. One such site, outside Qum, was revealed by President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain in 2009, though it appears that Israel played a major role in detecting that site.

This is a strange assertion, since many accounts have suggested that the facility was revealed by Iran. In fact, that's how the Times reported it last month (11/9/11):

Iran told the nuclear agency about that facility days before President Obama and European leaders reported its existence two years ago, and Iran has recently said it is moving some of its nuclear activity to that underground facility, at a well-defended military base.

Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won't have much to say about Obama's foreign policy (partly because it doesn't much differ from what a Republican president might be doing).

The New York  Times' Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, "Republican Candidates Aim at Obama Foreign Policy."

So what exactly is the Republican case against Obama's foreign policy? That it's too soft on the Hezbollah menace on our southern border.
Seriously.

Oppel writes:

A small but revealing episode unfolded in the closing minutes of the last Republican presidential debate. After the candidates were asked to name the national security issue they most worry about, which had not yet been discussed, Rick Santorum cited radical Islamists in Central and South America.

Mitt Romney agreed, saying that Hezbollah, a militant Shiite group in Lebanon that is backed by Iran and Syria, was working in Mexico, Venezuela and throughout Latin America, posing an "imminent threat." Earlier in the night, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas warned that Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization that controls Gaza, also were working in Mexico.

That the candidates would cite the same threat--one denied by the Mexican government, and which seemed to contrast with a State Department report that there are no Hezbollah-related operational cells in this hemisphere--was not a coincidence.

Oppel adds that  "a major thrust of the Republican foreign-policy argument" will include this kind of rhetoric about Obama being "too soft" on the likes of "Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians."

If a journalist is looking to inform voters, it might help to give them a sense of whether what these candidates are saying is grounded in reality. PolitiFact judged  Romney's Hezbollah comments "Mostly False," pointing out that the claim appears to come from a paper by former Bush assistant secretary of state Roger Noriega--and that the paper argues that most of the activity in Latin America is related to fundraising--criminal activity that funnels money back to Lebanon.

The Times judges the accuracy of the Republican charges in passing--the candidates' claims "seemed to contrast with a State Department report." ` The piece is far more concerned with the political strategy at work, and how Republicans might be trying to appeal to some Jewish voters with a message about Obama being soft on Islamic terrorists. It's a strategy that will likely be a lot more successful if reporters aren't going to call them out.

The Republican Party is in something of a bind. Many oppose White House efforts to extend--and perhaps increase--a Social Security payroll tax cut next year. This might sound strange, since if conservatives are supposed to be fond of anything, it's tax cuts.

So they have some explaining to do. They're given a valuable assist when journalists, thanks to the conventions of corporate media, will print their words with little in the way of critical analysis. Take this from today's Washington Post (12/7/11) by Rosalind Helderman:

A Republican Party that has for decades benefited from a commitment to lower taxes is now finding itself on the defensive on the issue, as members face a deep split over a Democratic plan to extend a payroll tax reduction.

What might normally be a no-brainer for most congressional Republicans is being resisted by many tea-party-conscious members who oppose what they consider a short-term gimmick that would worsen the federal deficit and siphon money from Social Security.

These Tea Party Republicans are concerned about the effects of a tax cut on the deficit? For real? It's the kind of thing that a reporter might challenge by, say, quoting a critic who would point out this absurdity. But the piece gives readers an array of Republican and conservative quotes, with one comment from Democratic Sen. Harry Reid.

Then again, the claims of the  politicians actually quoted could stand to be factchecked too. Like this one:

"The president’s suggesting we raise taxes on small-business folks to give a temporary one-year tax holiday and make job creators pay it off over the next 10 years," said freshman Rep. Tim Huels­kamp (R-Kan.). "That's not the way you grow this economy."

That "tax on small business owners" line refers to the White House plan to pay for the payroll tax break with a surtax on millionaires. Republicans claim that this would devastate small business owners don't stand up to scrutiny, something the New York Times pointed out yesterday:

But Jenni R. LeCompte, a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, said the proposed surtax "would affect only a very, very small number of small-business owners."

"Only 1 percent of all small-business owners have adjusted gross income over $1 million and would be affected by this surcharge," Ms. LeCompte said, citing a new study by Treasury’s Office of Tax Analysis.

USA Today's Rick Hampson has a piece today (12/7/11) on Occupy Wall Street's Occupy Our Homes actions, which include efforts to move families into vacant housing. This coverage is a good sign if you think there is still something happening with this movement after the evictions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

But why does the article include commentary from right-wing scam artist Andrew Breitbart? The paper reports:

Conservative online publisher and commentator Andrew Breitbart said the movement's new focus demonstrates that Occupy Wall Street is not "an authentic grassroots movement" but a political maneuver backed by organized labor and remnants of the ACORN community-organizing group aimed at boosting President Obama's re-election campaign.

"This is AstroTurf" rather than grassroots, he said. "This isn't about helping little old ladies.… This is about fomenting civil unrest, fomenting class warfare."

Breitbart's work is totally unreliable. He's been sounding the ACORN/SEIU alarms about Occupy Wall Street almost from the beginning--just like (at least) one Fox News host. The point is to try and link the movement to an array of progressive institutions and, apparently, the Obama campaign. It's nonsensical paranoia. Is he included for the sake of "balance"?

Imagine that the company founded by the frontrunning Republican presidential candidate also owned a massive radio company--say, the largest one in the country.

And imagine that said company announced, right as the election season started, that it was ditching its progressive talk format in a major city for a mostly conservative lineup.

Stop imagining--Brad Friedman reports that this is reality:

The only progressive AM radio talk station, Green960-KKGN, in one of the nation's most liberal cities, San Francisco, is being taken off the AM dial by radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications, Inc.--a media conglomerate now owned by Mitt Romney's Bain Capital, LLC--at the beginning of the 2012 presidential election year.

Left-of-center hosts Stephanie Miller and Thom Hartmann will be replaced by the likes of Glenn Beck, John Gibson and right-leaning financial/money guy Dave Ramsey. The Clear Channel press release announcing the changes speaks of an effort to "expand our footprint... as we head into an election year and a population increasingly engaged in local, state and national events and activism." Well, some kinds of activism.

Is Fox News Channel going soft? In an election year? Some media figures seem to think the hard-right channel is going to the "middle," but this seems to be a figment of the centrist imagination.

New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is that  Fox granted backstage access at its recent Republican debate to a New York Times reporter--as Sherman put it, "Fox's decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person." That sounds rather aggressive, and Sherman sees this as some sort of political shift:

That "sweating" session was a debate moderated by three Republican attorneys general, who are in some ways to the right of some of the candidates--particularly Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Given that the conservative base of the Republican party seems to have questions about the ideological commitment of these two--especially Romney--the fact that Fox convened a debate where the candidates had to field questions from the right doesn't really seem like playing to the "center."

Sherman argues: