It was inevitable that Fox host Bill O'Reilly would weigh in on the Planned Parenthood/Komen Foundation controversy. And perhaps just as inevitable that he'd mangle the facts along the way.

Here he is, on Friday night (2/3/12):

Last year the Komen Foundation gave Planned Parenthood $680,000. Now, that is the source of controversy because as you know, Planned Parenthood is primarily in business to provide abortions, more than 300,000 each year.

Later he added:

Planned Parenthood does not give women who visit its clinics the other side of the abortion story because again PP is in business for abortion.

Here is Planned Parenthood's breakdown of medical services (h/t Ezra Klein):

O'Reilly was fortunate enough to book an opposing guest--talk radio host Leslie Marshall--who wasn't prepared to argue this point:

O'REILLY: OK their big business, Planned Parenthood is abortion. And lobbying for abortion, would you concede that?

MARSHALL: I would concede that they perform abortions and they are politically --

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: No the largest part of their business, the most things that they get involved in concerns abortion, would you concede that.

MARSHALL: I can't because I've heard a good argument on both sides and information on both sides.

(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: OK, well, all right, there is no good argument. The absolute truth is PP is in business for abortion; 300,000 a year and they make tons of money from it.

Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid who has accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn,  is now speaking out publicly--weeks after press coverage took a turn against her, based on the notion that something about her made her allegations less credible.

"Strauss-Kahn Prosecution Said to Be Near Collapse" was the July 1 New York Times headline. One of the strongest bits of evidence was the claim that Diallo spoke to a friend, in prison on a drug charge, about Strauss-Kahn's wealth--the implication was that she and a criminal associate were plotting out how to profit from the assault.

Newsweek's cover story this week is based on an interview with her is a compelling read. The magazine points out that one part of the Times' account might not be what the paper suggested it was:

On July 1, the New York Times reported the existence of a taped conversation between Diallo and Tarawally. The article said they talked the day after the incident at the Sofitel and quoted a "well-placed law enforcement official": "She says words to the effect of: 'Don't worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.'" But at the time, prosecutors did not have a full transcript of the call, which had been conducted in a dialect of Fulani, Diallo’s language. The quote was a paraphrase from a translator’s summary of the tape, and the actual words are somewhat different, sources told Newsweek.

In July, Newsweek talked to Tarawally in Arizona. He insisted that the quotation must refer to a later conversation and in any case was taken out of context. Diallo said she no longer talks to Tarawally. He used her bank account to move tens of thousands of dollars around the country without informing her, she said. She denied he ever gave her money to spend. "Like I say, he was my friend," Diallo told us. "I used to trust him."

Strauss-Kahn has millions of dollars to defend himself against serious criminal charges. Part of how one does that is by discrediting one's accusers, and one of the best tools to do that is the press. To take negative information about Diallo appearing in news articles at face value-- even when that information is said to be coming from the prosecution's side-- would be naive in the extreme.

MSNBC host Ed Schultz has been suspended without pay for a week for calling right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut" on his radio show. Schultz apologized on MSNBC last night, calling his words "terribly vile."

This is not a new thing at MSNBC.  In 2006, Keith Olbermann did a bit about Paris Hilton being assaulted--joking that she has "had worse things happen to her face."  The on-screen graphic was "A Slut and Battery." In 2009 he called right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

Newsweek's cover story this week is on the plight of college-educated white men aged 35-64. The magazine laments that "this hitherto privileged demo isn't just on its knees, it's flat on on its face." The subhead of the piece asks, "Can manhood survive the lost decade?"

Now, I have much sympathy for all who are struggling with unemployment. But are middle-aged, college-educated white males flat on their face and worthy of a trend cover story? It's hard to square that with the piece's own admission that their jobless rate is just above 5 percent. Most demographic groups would give anything for that kind of unemployment rate; black male college grads last year had an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent, and for blacks as a whole it was a whopping 16 percent. (Notice, too, that the subhead assumes manhood is white.) A search of the Nexis database turns up no Newsweek cover stories on the epidemic of black male unemployment in the last five years.

I would also point out to Newsweek that single white men have a median wealth of nearly $44,000, and married white households have a median wealth of $167,500.  Black married households, by comparison, stand at $31,500, single black men at $7,900, and single black women at $100 (Extra!, 6/10).  When their Beached White Males lose their jobs, they have much more of a safety net to fall back on than pretty much any other demographic. No doubt Newsweek is at least vaguely aware of this--though they're probably more acutely aware that Beached White Males and their employed counterparts also have more money to waste on magazines that feed into their anxieties.

ABC reporter Jonathan Karl clarifies the budget stalemate that nearly shut down the federal government (ABC World News, 4/7/11):

KARL: And believe it or not, the issue of abortion could be what causes the government to shut down.

GRAPHICS: DEMOCRATS CLAIM

KARL: Democrats say Republicans are trying to use the funding bill to force new restrictions on abortion rights.

GRAPHICS: REPUBLICANS CLAIM

KARL: But Republicans say they are simply trying to restrict public funding of abortion.

"Democrats say, Republicans say." ABC could save money and program a computer to do this.

Later Karl said this:

Today, House Republicans did pass a bill that could keep the government funded for the next week and fund the Pentagon for the rest of the year. But Democrats say that they will oppose it. Again, Diane, because it includes restrictions on public funding of abortion.

As plenty of people have noted--see Katha Pollitt-- federal money does not go to Planned Parenthood to pay for abortion services, which constitute a very small part of the group's work. Though the Republicans would like to say that abortion is what they're fighting over, the debate is actually about funding Planned Parenthood, period.

So Jonathan Karl manages to do useless "he said, she said" reporting, and then goes on to mislead viewers about the actual issue being debated. A computer program might actually do a better job.

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."

In late 2009 and early 2010, right-wing activist James O'Keefe concocted a story that got widespread media coverage. The tall tale went like this: O'Keefe and his associate went to offices affiliated with the community organizing group ACORN in order to solicit advice on running a brothel and evading taxes. The problem was that nothing much like that actually happened. As FAIR summarized  (Action Alert, 3/11/10):

O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a "pimp," and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not "tax evasion"). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.

The upshot: O'Keefe misrepresented his exploits, released selectively edited videos, and the press fell for it. In fact, the ombud at the Washington Post and the public editor at the New York Times chided their respective papers for not giving the bogus "scandal" more attention. (Eventually, the Times would admit some of its ACORN errors, thanks to FAIR activists and blogger Brad Friedman.)

So it felt a little odd to see this headline in the New York Times today (2/2/11):

Group Releases Hidden Tapes of Planned Parenthood

The lead:

An anti-abortion group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released an undercover video on Tuesday that appears to show a clinic manager advising a sex trafficker how to get medical care for prostitutes as young as 14.

So this raises the question: Will these outlets learn to treat right-wing hidden camera exploits more skeptically--or maybe decide that they're not news at all? This Times account suggests that they have already forgotten what they learned last time:

The video resembles those made in 2009 by a conservative activist, James O'Keefe, in which employees of the community group Acorn appeared to advise a prostitution ring how to avoid taxes.

At the Washington Post, under the headline "Anti-Abortion Group Releases Planned Parenthood Sting Video," readers are told:

A group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released a video Tuesday that depicts two hired actors posing as a pimp and a prostitute seeking services at a New Jersey clinic, in an operation resembling one that helped take down a liberal anti-poverty group two years ago.

If by "resembles," the Post means  that this current video is getting more attention than it deserves, then, yes, there is a distinct similarity. A more reasonable write-up of the current "sting" came courtesy of Alex Pareene at Salon.com (2/1/11), who wrote that the plan

didn't really work, because Planned Parenthood quickly caught on and alerted the FBI. (BigJournalism.com exclusive: Planned Parenthood alerts the authorities when confronted by self-proclaimed human traffickers!) Planned Parenthood suspected that the hoaxer had ties to Live Action, an antiabortion activist group run by Lila Rose, a sometime O'Keefe partner-in-undercover-stinging. And Live Action confirmed its involvement by posting the sad results of its exhaustive video investigation today. It caught one staffer possibly advising a make-believe pimp to send a make-believe underage prostitute somewhere where her abortion would not be reported. (It is obviously impossible to tell what actually happened without the unedited video.) (And also this Planned Parenthood alerted the authorities about the weird visit.)

Pareene points out:

These conservative undercover "hoaxes" are best understood as an attempt to make their fantasies real. In order to make animate the world that they feverishly imagine, they must themselves become the unsavory characters with bad motivations that they enjoy thinking populate these hotbeds of degenerate liberal activity.

The corporate media problem here is quite serious, since there is a deep-seated feeling that what right-wing activists do should get more coverage, to make up for the nonexistent liberal bias in the mainstream media. This sensibility creates the media "appetite" for the ACORN hoax, the Shirley Sherrod hoax, and on and on.

At this point, it's not a question of media "falling" for this stuff, but being eager to act as a megaphone for these right-wing fantasies.

New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney has a long piece (10/29/10) about California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for Senate. Both are expected to lose on Tuesday, which leaves Nagourney wondering why women aren't more eager to support female politicians. The piece poses a lot of big questions--the fact that both are struggling "raising questions about money, gender and Americans' views of candidates who come out of corporate boardrooms." It is surprising that they are trailing Democrats who are "symbols of liberal policies and nearly as old as talking pictures."

Nagourney gets to gender:

And all this flows into the question of gender. California, of all states, has shown little reluctance to vote for women: Both of its senators are women, Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Democratic primary for president here in 2008 and this is the state that sends Nancy Pelosi to Congress.

So why not Whitman and Fiorina, then?  We're told that they exemplify "this new breed of tough female corporate executives looking to shift into public office. This has not always proved to be the best pedigree for a male candidate, and some pollsters and analysts suggested, that it might prove even more complicated for a woman as gender roles continued to evolve."

In the last paragraph, Nagourney finally arrives at the most logical conclusion: Women tend to support Democratic politicians, and perhaps even more so in California, a Democratic-leaning state:

And in a state that might have pioneered the notion of identity politics, these races show that women are the last voters that Ms. Whitman and Ms. Fiorina should be counting on. Women here are much more likely to vote ideology and issues than gender. In Thursday's poll, the last Field Poll that will be done before the election, Mr. Brown led Ms. Whitman among women by 51 percent to 35 percent.

In other words, women vote on the issues, and these candidates--who happen to be women--don't support the kinds of policies most women support. So, yeah, it's kind of a mystery why they're not ahead in the polls.

You may remember James O'Keefe as the video hoaxter who fooled media into thinking ACORN gave tax advice to a man wearing a pimp costume (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10). Or as the miscreant whose attempts to interfere with Sen. Mary Landrieu's office phones got him arrested (Extra!, 4/10).

Now O'Keefe has a new claim to fame as the guy who tried to turn sexual harassment into reality TV.

CNN is reporting today (9/29/10) that one of its reporters, Abbie Boudreau, was the target of a bizarre, misogynistic scheme by O'Keefe's video production team--"Project Veritas"--to lure her on to a boat where she would be videotaped as O'Keefe attempted to seduce her amidst sexual paraphernalia. Boudreau was alerted to the plan at the last minute by one of O'Keefe's colleagues who recognized that "the idea is incredibly bad" with "the potential for unnecessary backlash."

The whistleblower, Izzy Santa, described the harassment plan in a note to one of Veritas' backers:

Today, James is meeting with a CNN correspondent today on his boat. She is doing a piece on the movement of young conservative filmmakers.

She doesn't know she is getting on a boat but rather James' office. James has staged the boat to be a palace of pleasure with all sorts of props, wants to have a bizarre sexual conversation with her. He wants to gag CNN.

According to a written plan, the "equipment needed" for the stunt included "hidden cams on the boat," a "tripod and overt recorder near the bed, an obvious sex tape machine," as well as a "condom jar, dildos, posters and paintings of naked women, fuzzy handcuffs" and a blindfold.

The blueprint included a script for O'Keefe to read, apparently written by O'Keefe associate Ben Wetmore:

My name is James. I work in video activism and journalism. I've been approached by CNN for an interview where I know what their angle is: They want to portray me and my friends as crazies, as non-journalists, as unprofessional and likely as homophobes, racists or bigots of some sort....

Instead, I've decided to have a little fun. Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath.

Please sit back and enjoy the show.

The document, labeled "CNN Caper," tried to anticipate how the cable network would respond and planned a counterreaction:

If they pursue this as you are a creep, you should play it up with them initially only to reveal that the tape was made beforehand confirming this was a gag.... If they [CNN] admit it was a gag, you should release the footage and focus on the fact they got punked, and make sure to emphasize Abbie's name and overall status to help burden her career with this video, incident and her bad judgment in pursuing you so aggressively....

If they go on the attack, you should point out the hypocrisy in CNN using the inherent sexuality of these women to sell viewers and for ratings, passing up more esteemed and respectable journalists who aren't bubble-headed bleach blondes and keep the focus on CNN.

Trying to figure out what to do if O'Keefe came out of this looking like a creep was perhaps the one good idea that went into the planning of this operation.

Media Matters' Jamison Foser (9/29/10) pointed out that when O'Keefe was running his ACORN hoax, the ombuds for both the New York Times and Washington Post wrote columns complaining that their papers weren't taking him seriously enough. Maybe there ought to be some soul-searching at these outlets over why they gave him as much credence as they did.

Follow Jim Naureckas on Twitter @JNaureckas.

There's a push for the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act before Congress adjourns for the season, which has sparked some pushback from right-wingers given prominent platforms in the corporate media. The Act, which already passed the House, would help enforce and close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963; under the law, women would actually be able to find out how much their male colleagues make without either of them facing retaliation. A September 22 New York Times op-ed by Christina Hoff Sommers of AEI and an October 4 George Will Newsweek column both attack it as unnecessary--in Will's words, "It is ludicrous to argue that women should be regarded as victims in patriarchal, phallocentric America and must be wards of government."

Sommers says the law "overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women," while Will--relying heavily on Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the conservative Hudson Institute--argues that "pay disparities largely reflect women's choices." As an example, Will says women hold so few science and technology jobs and faculty position because they just don't want those jobs--after all, hardly any women who go to all-women's colleges, where they're surely not discriminated against, study those things. At Bryn Mawr, for instance, only 4 percent major in chemistry and 2 percent in computer science. (Will also makes liberal use of irrelevant factoids, such as the fact that women live longer than men, now receive more doctoral degrees than men and may soon be a majority of the workforce.)

Heather Boushey has a good take-down of Sommers' op-ed on Slate--most of which applies to the Will column as well--in which she makes clear that "Sommers is the one overlooking mountains of research that demonstrate just the opposite." Both Sommers and Will compare groups of women who are better educated to groups of men who are less educated to "prove" that women sometimes even earn more than men. In an earlier critique, Boushey explained that

there are two ways to look at the gender pay gap. The first way is to ask whether equally skilled men and women in comparable jobs are paid the same. That's the way to gauge workplace fairness. Do women with similar credentials in similar jobs earn as much as the men they work with? It's in this context that the answer remains no.

Ten years out of college, women who went to the same kind of college, got the same kinds of grades, held the same kinds of jobs and made the same choices about marriage and number of kids as their male peers earn 12 percent less than those men. Boushey also cites a Cornell study that 40 percent of the total gender pay gap couldn't be explained by women's choices, the only culprit Sommers or Will blame.

As for Will's claim about the sciences, Bryn Mawr chemistry professor Michelle Francl points out in the comments section that nationally less than 1 percent of all students major in the physical sciences, and only 0.66 percent of women study chemistry--so Bryn Mawr''s 4 percent is actually astonishingly high: "I can do the math (and enjoy it, too)--women at Bryn Mawr are six times as likely to major in chem than in the population as a whole. Still think there's not a difference?"

A recent FAIR study (Extra!, 8/10) looked at politically themed books reviewed by the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN show After Words and concluded that both outlets heavily favored white male authors and reviewers. The Times came off particularly badly in the study, which revealed 95 percent of the U.S. authors reviewed, and 96 percent of the reviewers, were white.

As far as gender was concerned, women--who obviously make up roughly 50 percent of the population--accounted for just 13 percent of the authors and 12 percent of the critics.

Today, Slate weighed in on the New York Times Book Review's biases. Picking up on a controversy sparked by author Jodi Picoult's charges of gender bias at the review, Slate published a study showing that 62 percent of the the fiction book's reviewed by the section were written by men, and the subset that were also reviewed in the daily paper were 71 percent male-authored.

Are New York Times book reviews a white male ghetto in an otherwise more diverse newspaper? Well, no. On gender, numerous byline studies have shown the paper heavily favoring male reporters, particularly on the front page. One such study conducted for FAIR (Extra!, 8/04) found that 88 percent of the Times front-page articles were written by men.

Now a new study has emerged showing that the Times runs more than six times as many obituaries on men as they do on women. According to the website NYTPicker (8/29/10), so far in 2010, 85 percent of the paper's obituaries have been about men, with men's obits out pacing women's 606 to 92.

So the Times' male bias prevails, even in death.

The New York Times' Susan Dominus, writing an article (8/24/10) entirely about a congressional candidate's footwear, makes an attempt at self-inoculation:

I know. We, the news media, are not supposed to ask female candidates about their hairstyle or their choice of pantsuits over skirts or their shoes. It is irrelevant. It is trivializing. It is sexist. "You would never write about Chuck Schumer's shoes," Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand said in a New York magazine article in response to a question about her flats.

So why write this article that is irrelevant, trivializing and sexist? Because, as it turns out, the shoes worn by Reshma Saujani, who is challenging Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney to represent New York's 14th District, are not very unusual:

But the Kate Spade wedge heels are not just one candidate's shoes. They seem to be the shoes of a circle of younger women aspiring to power or already in it, women directly and indirectly passing on to one another ways of navigating the particular challenges of being a woman in the public eye.

This might be the first time that a reporter has attempted to justify covering a non-newsworthy topic on the grounds that it is not particularly newsworthy.

Aside from the fact that Saujani is wearing a style of shoe that is typically worn by female politicians, Dominus makes a case for paying attention to Saujani's footwear by pointing out that such attention could hurt her candidacy: "Those hip heels run the risk of undercutting Ms. Saujani's credibility with the people she needs to convince of her gravitas." You could wear clown shoes and not do more to undermine your credibility than the Times did by publishing this pointless, admittedly sexist piece.

As France's lower house of parliament approved a ban on wearing full-face Islamic veils such as the burqa or niqab, many U.S. news outlets left out a key voice in their reports: the Muslim women in France who are actually affected by the ban.

Several major outlets, including the New York Times (7/14/10), Washington Post (7/14/10) and the Los Angeles Times (7/14/10), have managed to cover the story without seeking commentary from a single Muslim woman. Out of 11 named sources used by these newspapers in their July 14 reports, only two were Muslim--both men, one a rector and one leader of a government council, each of whom discourage women from wearing the burqa.

Furthermore, 10 out of the 11 sources on the issue came from French government officials, most of whom unsurprisingly (since the ban passed 335 to 1) echoed the sentiment of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that these veils "could be a threat to women's dignity and freedom" (Chicago Tribune, 6/24/10). While the New York Times (7/14/10) quoted Daniel Garrigue, the one parliament member who opposed the ban, and another anti-ban official,  it followed up with five rebuttals, along with a poll that showed French voters as a whole--most of whom are little affected by the law--support the ban.

On CNN (7/13/10), Republican strategist Mary Matalin and journalist Roland Martin discussed the ban with no debate:

MATALIN: You know what, the vote was 336 to 1 [sic] in the lower house of the parliament, and it's a good vote. The assimilation there of Muslims, who are the largest percentage in European countries are in France. Assimilation is tough when you have a full-face burqa. And it's also oppressive to women. No woman chooses to wear that full-face burqa. So I say to France, tres bien, good vote.

MARTIN: And I will say this, I mean, you do have to understand the cultural issues there. I think what this really says though is about freedom for women, in terms of French saying, look, they perceive that as being oppressive to women. And then if you want to operate in this country, this is how we are going to operate here. And so I understand that.

But I do think we have to be careful to recognize that there are cultural things that happen, more different cultures we also have to respect.

MATALIN: That is--I completely agree with that. The veil is a beautiful thing. All of my Muslim girlfriends say it's great. It's not only respectful and mindful of their religion, it's great for bad hair days. So we get that. But the full-face burqa, nyet.

MARTIN: Right, absolutely.

MATALIN: Tres bien, Francois.

But despite Matalin’s assertion, not everyone agrees that the burqa is exclusively a tool of repression, or that banning the burqa is the best way to promote women’s equality--and many of the dissenters happen to be Muslim women. USA Today and NBC News both interviewed Kenza Drider, who was born and raised in France and has worn the burqa for 11 years, who said (NBC Nightly News, 7/7/10): "I'm a feminist. I wear this by choice, and I submit to no man, only God." The Huffington Post (7/13/10) quoted an Islamic scholar, Abdelmotie Bayoumi, who has written books that include modern testimonies about the full-face veil: "A Muslim woman wears the niqab not because of religious duty, but as a personal freedom." Sahar (Nuseiba.wordpress.com, 7/4/10), a Muslim blogger, said that though she isn't personally fond of the burqa, she believes that "a woman's right to choose how to express her religion... or her culture as she sees fit is fundamental to her dignity and should be protected."

In covering a law targeting Muslim women, it is essential to include such perspectives, instead of simply packing the views of powerful leaders and Western ideology into a report.

No, that's not a typo: Only 1.6 percent of sports coverage on L.A.'s three major network affiliates went to women's sports. On ESPN Sportscenter, it's 1.4 percent. It's just slightly higher when you add in ticker-tape coverage. And it's getting worse, not better: Those numbers are down from about 5 percent in 1989. And a major part of that drop, according to study co-author Michael Messner of the University of Southern California, is because of a drop in "insulting or trivialization or humorous sexualization of women athletes, like a nude bungee jumper or leering court reports on tennis players like Anna Kournikova or later Maria Sharapova."

Messner explained:

When you see that kind of coverage disappear, what also disappears is coverage of women's sports at all. I think part of this has to do with the fact that a lot of these sports reporters, on the evening news especially, are the same guys, basically, who we saw in 1989 and 1993: Fred Rogan at KNBC, Jim Hill at KCBS, it's the same reporters and they are doing the same stuff. I think one of the keys to this when thinking about Sportscenter and the evening news is it's kind of a men's club, though Sportscenter does include a couple of women reporters, but the news shows really don't. It's been really interesting this week since our report came out: Only women reporters have seen fit to cover this as a story. I think there is some reason to think if we could desegregate the sports desk on newspapers and in TV news and so forth, you might get a little bit more respectful coverage of women's sports....

I think they make conscious decisions about what they cover every day, but I think there is a tremendous amount of inertia as well. And only a part of it has to do with the fact it's men making most of these decisions. Men are capable of doing really good sports reporting on women's sports, and a lot of men really like women's sports. But I think there is a fear on a lot of their parts if they don't stay with the big three sports. About three-fourths of all the news coverage we saw was of men's football, men's basketball and men's baseball. So it is important that we recognize that it's not just women's sports that are getting edged out of this, it's a whole lot of the other men's sports as well.

It's not that women's sports are unpopular. As Messner points out, more than 11 million people attended NCAA women's basketball games in 2009-10, and Title IX has helped foster an explosion in girls' participation in sports in recent decades. But with male-heavy newsrooms and intense bottom-line pressures from the bosses, there's just no room in corporate reporting for the female half of sports news.

Read Dave Zirin's interview with Messner at TheNation.com (7/6/10).

TV Sports Coverage Graph

Correspondent Pete Williams last night on NBC Nightly News (5/10/10) gave viewers the scoop on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's record as dean of Harvard law school: "She diversified the faculty, hiring prominent conservatives."

Kagan also hired almost no people of color and very few women, in a historically white and male faculty. It's an interesting definition of "diversify."