Washington Post critic Tom Shales (5/11/10) didn't think much of the debut of the PBS show Need to Know. Given the reactions from viewers at the Need to Know website, and those published by PBS ombud Michael Getler, he's not the only one who found the show a disappointment--or, as Shales put it, a "monstrosity" and "a specious wheeze."

But he seemed to save a special kind of scorn for co-host Alison Stewart. Responding to the show's fawning interview with Bill Clinton, Shales wrote that "she looked as though she would have been much more comfortable in Clinton's lap."

Uh huh.

When ABC announced that they had hired CNN's Christiane Amanpour to be host of the Sunday morning show This Week, Shales (3/23/10) seemed genuinely upset, balking that Amanpour lacked inside-the-Beltway credentials (I think he meant that as a criticism) and noting that some conservatives believe her to be too critical of Israel. Shales even insinuated that Amanpour's upbringing could be a problem: "Her family fled Tehran in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution, when she was college age. She has steadfastly rejected claims about her objectivity."

Shales went back for more in a Post Web chat, writing:

And neither you nor I has stooped to mentioning that hair of hers--yipe. What's the deal with that, as David Letterman might say.

The blog Jezebel headlined a roundup of his worst commentary, "WaPo TV Critic Tom Shales Has a Lady Problem."

Indeed.

The evidence Newsweek presents to back up the heading of a recent Web article--"Priests Commit No More Abuse Than Other Males" (4/8/10)--is remarkably unpersuasive.

Here's the main argument offered by reporter Pat Wingert:

The only hard data that has been made public by any denomination comes from John Jay College's study of Catholic priests, which was authorized and is being paid for by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops following the public outcry over the 2002 scandals. Limiting their study to plausible accusations made between 1950 and 1992, John Jay researchers reported that about 4 percent of the 110,000 priests active during those years had been accused of sexual misconduct involving children. Specifically, 4,392 complaints (ranging from "sexual talk" to rape) were made against priests by 10,667 victims....

Experts disagree on the rate of sexual abuse among the general American male population, but [National Center for Missing and Exploited Children president Ernie] Allen says a conservative estimate is one in 10. Margaret Leland Smith, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says her review of the numbers indicates it's closer to one in 5. But in either case, the rate of abuse by Catholic priests is not higher than these national estimates.... Even those numbers may be low; research suggests that only a third of abuse cases are ever reported (making it the most underreported crime).

So a study funded by the Catholic bishops found that there had been "plausible accusations" against 4 percent of priests active between 1950 and 1992.  That end date is convenient: Wingert notes later, by way of trying to explain why priests seem to molest more kids than they actually do, that two-thirds of complaints against priests have been made since 1992.  So a study that included all "plausible accusations" against priests since 1950 would likely produce a figure closer to 12 percent than 4 percent.

Wingert then compares this to estimates--including one by the person who did the bishop-funded study, though the reporter doesn't note this--that 10 to 20 percent of all U.S. males have sexually abused children. Regardless of how credible these figures seem, they're clearly not directly comparable to the John Jay number; there certainly have not been "plausible accusations" of pedophilia against 12 million to 24 million living American men. (Though Wingert seems to think that there might have been, writing that the 20 percent  figure "may be low" because "only a third of abuse cases are ever reported."  So 60 percent of  U.S. males may be secretly engaging in child sex abuse?)

For a more comparable figure, there were 60,749 perpetrators of child sexual abuse identified by the federal National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System in 2008; assuming these were all adult males, that works out to a rate of about 0.05 percent for that group. Now, that's one year, not 42, but even if there were no recidivism at all, it's still clear that the priests in the John Jay study were accused of molesting children at a considerably higher rate than that--and that's a study that leaves out the bulk of such accusations.

NPR ombud Alicia Shepard has posted an article (4/2/10) headlined "Where Are the Women?,"  a summary of a study of the gender diversity of high-profile NPR programs.

The most important findings:

With the aid of NPR librarian Hannah Sommers, we compiled a list of regular commentators, who are not NPR employees but are paid to appear on air. There are 12 outside commentators who appeared at least 20 times in the last 15 months. The only woman is former NPR staffer, Cokie Roberts (51 times), who is on ME [Morning Edition] most Mondays talking politics.

And:

We also looked at the number of people from outside NPR who were interviewed by NPR news shows, or whose voices appeared in reporters' stories. For this analysis, we examined 104 shows, using a "constructed week" sampling technique from April 13, 2009 to January 9, 2010.

Those figures are equally discouraging.

NPR listeners heard 2,502 male sources and 877 female sources on the shows we sampled. In other words, only 26 percent of the 3,379 voices were female, while 74 percent were male.

Shepard pointed out that women are much more prominent as reporters and hosts on NPR--close to 50-50.

The findings about NPR sources reflect only a slight improvement over the gender imbalance documented in previous FAIR studies of NPR programming: A study looking at shows from 1991 (Extra!, 4-5/93; press release, 3/29/93) found only 19 percent female sources, while a study of 2003 sources (Extra!, 5-6/04) turned up 21 percent. In terms of commentators, NPR might have been doing slightly better in 1991, when four of 27 commentators featured more than once were women.

Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep expresses his problems with the survey; he calls it "unsatisfying," though the same could be said for his criticism. He suggests, without offering evidence, that NPR's lengthier in-studio interviews are more often with female guests; when public broadcasters have offered similar rationalizations in response to FAIR criticism in the past, such objections haven't held up (Activism Update, 10/18/06).

The upshot is that NPR says it's trying hard to make improvements in this area, and they'll try even harder. But given the fact that 11 of the top 12 commentators on NPR are men, and that the only woman is Cokie Roberts, it looks like they're not trying hard enough. Kudos to Shepard for doing this work.

This week on CounterSpin: A new law in Utah says some women who miscarry should go to jail. You may have seen some coverage, but are journalists asking the right questions about the law's implications, and is there a bigger story here that's being missed? We'll hear from Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Also on CounterSpin this week: With a name like the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, you'd expect such a group is going to upset some big corporations. And they have, including launching a very successful campaign against media giant Disney. Well, maybe a little too successful; the group found itself evicted from its headquarters after Disney complained. We'll talk to Dr. Susan Linn from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood about that story.

Click to play to listen:

FAIR has long complained (Extra!, 7-8/95; Extra Update!, 12/98) about corporate media's avoidance of the word "terrorism" to describe the murder of doctors who perform abortions, even though it meets the standard definition: the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve a political purpose. But the term is still glaringly absent from the corporate media discussion of attacks like Scott Roeder's assassination of abortion provider George Tiller. (For an exception to the rule, see an Oregonian editorial, 1/29/10.)

The choice of terms makes a crucial difference in the way the issue of violence against women's health clinics is discussed. Take an AP piece that ran after Roeder was convicted, which ran under the headline "Conviction Angers Anti-Abortion Militants" (1/30/10):

Testifying in his own defense, a remorseless and resolute Roeder insisted he had committed a justified act for the defense of unborn children by killing Dr. George Tiller, one of the country's few physicians to offer late-term abortions. It was a bold legal strategy that, if successful, had the potential to radically alter the debate over abortion by reducing the price for committing such an act of violence.

When it failed, those who share Roeder's passionate, militant belief against abortion were outraged: One said they are getting tired of being treated as a "piece of dirt" unable to express the reasons for such acts in court. So while relieved at the outcome, abortion-rights advocates worry a verdict that should be a deterrent will instead further embolden those prone to violence.

It's hard to imagine AP publishing an article that treated the claim that "terrorism" was justifiable as a "bold legal strategy" with the "potential to radically alter the debate," or suggest that handing out a lesser sentence to a "terrorist" might avoid "emboldening" others in his movement.  That's because the word "terrorist" comes with an assumption that killing people to promote your cause is inherently illegitimate.  When the issue is abortion, however, it seems like the corporate media thinks the jury is still out.

Amanda Hess, a blogger for Washington City Paper, wrote a sharp deconstruction (11/30/09) of Chicago Tribune advice columnist Amy "Ask Amy" Dickinson's victim-blaming response (11/27/09) to  a woman who wanted to know whether she was a victim of rape:

Were you a victim? Yes.

First, you were a victim of your own awful judgment.

Hess points out Dickinson's disparate treatment of victim and perpetrator:

You don’t say whether the guy was also drunk. If so, his judgment was also impaired.

Or as Hess translates: "Your judgment was 'awful'; your rapist's judgment was merely 'impaired.'"

The most stunning part of the advice column, though, was when Dickinson urged the letter-writer to give the man who raped her a call:

You must involve the guy in question in order to determine what happened and because he absolutely must take responsibility and face the consequences for his actions, just as you are prepared to do.

Hess responds to this "destructive, dangerous, and negligent" advice:

Obviously, rapists should not be consulted on questions of consent. As this column makes clear, we should all probably refrain from consulting Ask Amy as well.

UPDATE: Those interested in asking Amy Dickinson to retract the advice in her November 27 column can sign a petition that does so here.

Thomas Rogers of Salon's Broadsheet (9/10/09, ad-viewing required) reports that world champion South African runner Caster Semenya recently "was tested (possibly without her consent) by the International Association of Athletics Federations" and "now the results of her gender testing have leaked, and, if the reports are to be believed, they show that she is, in fact, biologically intersex."

After an informative look at the real biological meaning of the test findings that "led some media outlets to call her a 'hermaphrodite' (and some even more inaccurately calling her 'a woman … and a man')," Rogers writes that, to him,

Caster's story, however, is particularly poignant. She's only 18 years old. She only recently asserted her girly side on the cover of a magazine. More tragically, though, it's likely she had no idea about her sexual condition before today. Many intersex people don't learn about their biological history until well into their life, and the discovery can be predictably traumatic if not destructive. To make things worse, in Semenya's case, her discovery is being played out on an international stage, under the microscope of an ill-informed and often predatory press, while she's being faced with the knowledge that her career is likely to end.

If there’s an upside to the story, it’s that it’s likely to put intersex issues into the spotlight in a way that they’ve rarely been before. Unlike transgendered people (who benefited from films like Transamerica), intersex people haven’t had many great breakthroughs into mainstream culture.

But that's a pretty big if, considering corporate media's record of unenlightened gender reporting; see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Transforming Coverage: Transgender Issues Get Greater Respect—but Anatomy Remains Destiny" (11–12/07) by Julie Hollar.

Intern Katy Kelleher at the Jezebel.com blog (9/9/09) has made a worthy attempt at "unpacking all the different levels of sexism and racism that are operating subtly behind the scenes" in recent coverage of professional women's tennis.

On the new stardom of relatively diminutive and white Melanie Oudin, Kelleher remarks that "her accomplishments are definitely praiseworthy, but there is something off about the way she is being celebrated":

She has been called the "darling" of the U.S. Open, America's "sweetheart," a "pint-sized, freckled-faced blonde from Georgia," the "tiny little savior of women's tennis," everything it seems, save tennis' "Great White Hope" (although given the media coverage of Oudin's win, it would probably be more like the "little, teeny-tiny, super cute White Hope").

Especially problematic was this article from the Daily Beast, which quoted ESPN sportscaster Michelle Beadle comparing Oudin to the Williams sisters. "From Day 1, I've never heard the Williams sisters referred to as sweethearts," she said, which prompted Jez commenter sympathyforthebasementcat to remark:

Yes, there's just something different about them. Americans just aren't quite to fully relate to them. They just don't seem like the type of girls that would live next door. Hmmm, what could it be?

Explaining how "every sportscaster reporting on Oudin feels the need to comment on how pretty she is" and "All-American," seems to "fail to recognize the racism that lurks behind these terms," Kelleher also looks at a New York Times column in which George Vecsey "says, unlike the Williams sisters, Oudin has fought her way up from the bottom": "The crowd always loves upsets, which is one reason Venus Williams and Serena Williams are not universally loved at the Open."

Kelleher's response is to quote yet another sharp-witted Jezebel commenter:

What a shame the Williams sisters don't have a rags-to-riches backstory. You know, like growing up in a poor neighborhood and being coached by a father who had zero experience of their sport, and fighting their way to success against the odds. Yep, that would have made a great story and endeared them to the public, right?

Eighteen-year-old Caster Semenya, a runner from South Africa, just blew away the competition in the women's 800-meter world championship race. But the news reports yesterday weren't about that--they were about whether she's "really" a woman or not. And supposedly serious outlets like the AP and CNN are sinking to tabloid levels of coverage on the issue.

The AP video of the controversy, posted on the L.A. Times website, kicks off: "Quick! Man--or woman?" The piece includes slow pans over Semenya's body, more tabloidy commentary ("She--and yes, SHE claims to be a woman"), and the offering of her voice as some sort of evidence that she's not what she claims to be. It's what you'd sadly expect to find on E! or some other tabloid show--not the AP, or the L.A. Times' website, for that matter.

CNN's Jack Cafferty's response to the news was: "Story creeps me out. It's weird. Do you think she's a man or a woman?" His colleague Campbell Brown teased the "bizarre story" and promised viewers "a whole lot more on this very strange case coming up a little bit later tonight." CNN's Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill called it "fascinating," "amazing" and "wild."

During her full story on the subject, Brown acknowledged one of the problems with the scrutiny: "I mean, this is a young woman, a young girl. It's a pretty cruel thing for this girl to have to go through emotionally, psychologically presuming it's not a scam." Yes indeed, scrutinizing someone's body and gender presentation (as well as your accomplishments) on television and calling it bizarre and creepy is pretty cruel, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, that sort of coverage of people with different gender presentations is not unusual--and awareness of that cruelty didn't stop Brown from feeding into it.

Women In Media & News has reposted Veronica Arreola's (8/15/09) elucidation of exactly "why women need to be at the freaking table, in the newsroom and holding the editor’s red pen." To her, "it's just as simple as women see things differently. Not better, not worse, just differently":

The latest example is the WaPo "Mouthpiece Theater" fiasco that ended with WaPo pulling the plug. Two men thought that calling the secretary of State a "bitch" was funny. Not only was it not funny, and not because the joke flopped, but it's old and tired. Seriously, guys, can’t you come up with something new? So some of us angry feminists wrote a letter demanding an apology. And gosh darn it, it freaking worked! OK, we didn't get two full apologies, but hey, no more crappy videos from WaPo…for now....

Of course, we can't be sure that if a random woman at WaPo had screened the video beforehand, [she] would have said, "Dude…we can't air that." Why? Because some women, I used to be one of them, know that there is power in being "one of the guys." You are constantly proving that you need to be where you are and you choose your battles. Is sticking up for Hillary Clinton worth it? Maybe? Maybe not.

"But," Arreola maintains, "women have different perspectives on things. We know that. And as I said before, it's different, not better, not worse."

When "journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling stepped back onto American soil after being detained in North Korea for over four months. Their safe return was covered widely in the American media, and rightfully so," writes Women In Media & News guest blogger Tristin Aaron (8/12/09), "yet their reason for traveling to North Korea has been all but forgotten in the media reports on Lee and Ling":

Euna Lee and Laura Ling were reporting on the trafficking of women from North Korea into China. As Ji-Yeon Yuh notes in, "What Were Laura Ling and Euna Lee Looking For in North Korea?": "Of North Korean women and girl refugees in China, an estimated 80 to 90 percent are victims of trafficking. This is likely the highest percentage of trafficking in a single population."...

Further, these victims of human trafficking are treated as criminals by North Korea, and as illegal immigrants in China. Writing for the Women’s Media Center, Ji-Yeon Yuh highlights a gap in the media's coverage not only of the story Euna Lee and Laura Ling were reporting, but of coverage of North Korea in general: "The wider world takes little notice of these victims, with mainstream media closely focused on the issue of North Korea’s nuclear weapons."

Read all of Ji-Yeon Yuh's story on the website for Aaron's Women’s Media Center. And listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "John Feffer on North Korea" (5/29/09).

Blogging at Jezebel, Sadie Stein (8/12/09) turns the spotlight on the New York Times' Cintra Wilson "in a remarkably nasty piece. Brace yourselves, kids":

In a paper often characterized by a tone as carefully bland as NPR's, she can be a breath of fresh air. But today's column, on Manhattan's first J.C. Penney, is a marvel of snobbery, cruelty and ugliness....

It took me a long time to find a size 2 among the racks. There are, however, abundant size 10s, 12s and 16s....

The petites section features a bounty of items for women nearly as wide as they are tall; the men's Big & Tall section has shirts that could house two or three Shaquilles.

Because, you see, there are apparently people who wear these laughable sizes and are reduced to these knock-off fashions....

This is, she concludes,

the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes.... To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It's like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of Roseanne.

Postulating that this may all be a misguided attempt by the Times "to draw on the snark of the blogosphere that the kids are supposedly so crazy about," Stein offers a response in the form of her own "little internet home-brew: FAIL. EPIC FAIL, even. I could add 'compassion fail' and 'humanity fail,' if I so chose. I'd say 'journalism fail,' but if you keep this up, I won't need to."

The Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition, along with the National Hispanic Media Coalition (8/11/09), "applauds" the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for being "the first elected body to take a stand against hate speech in media" by having

approved unanimously a resolution urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to conduct a comprehensive investigation on hate speech in media, allowing public participation via public hearings, and for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to update its 1993 report the "Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes."

The Supervisors responded to grassroots activists in the Bay Area who have organized to call attention to the alarming increase of patently false and hateful language in media. For the last three years, the Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition SF has organized annual protests held at Clear Channel Communications.

Clear Channel is specifically "selected as the protest site due to the corporation's record of promoting some of the most virulent purveyors of hate and intolerance, including Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, who denigrate communities, groups and individuals."

Read the resolution on the City of San Francisco's website.

Also check out the profiles of Savage, Beck and other media hatemongers on FAIR's Smearcasting.com site--and see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Hate Speech, Media Activism and the First Amendment: Putting a Spotlight on Dehumanizing Language" (5/09) by Candice O'Grady.

Johann Hari (ZNet, 8/6/09) has an in-depth write-up of "the story of Malalai Joya" that "turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out":

In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for. Here is a young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for girls under the Taliban and--when they were toppled--cast off the burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.

But she says: "Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. [That is] what your soldiers are dying for." Instead of being liberated, she is on the brink of being killed.

In short, Hari tells us, "the story of Joya is the story of another Afghanistan--the one behind the burka, and behind the propaganda." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Sonali Kolhatkar on Afghan Women and the War" (7/31/09).

Guest Women In Media & News blogger Adele M. Stan (8/5/09) has some more to say about the WashingtonPost.com's "now-infamous 'Mad Bitch' video":

Last Friday, Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler shone a light on a video produced by the Washington Post that featured one of the two columnists hosting the piece suggesting that, at a future White House beer summit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be given a brew called "Mad Bitch." Then all hell broke loose.

The Post apparently thought it could fix the problem by simply pulling the video. A note was posted above the hole where the video used to be, reading that the piece had been removed because it contained material that was "inappropriate" for the Post website. As if it had landed there from Mars. As if it hadn't been written and produced in the Washington Post building by Washington Post staffers.

Then, yesterday, the two columnists, Chris Cillizza and Dana Milbank, had the effrontery to post what amounts to a "screw-you" response video to the criticism they had received from bloggers.

Stan reports that, in the fallout, "the series has been canceled," but "Milbank remains pretty unrepentant, instead whining about the drubbing he took at the hands of blogosphere denizens."

Even after receiving a critical letter signed by Stan, Jennifer Pozman, Katha Pollitt and many others, Post executive editor Marcus "Brauchli, for his part, did not exactly apologize," and "it does not appear that there will be any disciplinary action."