Arianna Huffington had an announcement (1/19/12) about a new section in her Huffington Post:

I'm delighted to announce the launch of Global Motherhood, a new section within HuffPost Impact dedicated to the health and well being of mothers and babies around the world, and sponsored by Johnson & Johnson.

It goes without saying that it's a bad idea in general to have a corporation in the health industry sponsoring health coverage; the potential for conflict of interest is obvious. But given that these kinds of special sections are typically created to meet an advertiser's need--an impression strengthened by the fact that the second paragraph of Huffington's announcement focuses on Johnson & Johnson's efforts to "use technology to improve the lives of mothers and babies"--one has to ask, why this section for this advertiser?

You don't have to dig very far back into the Huffington Post archives to get a clue. On November 1, HuffPost Parents posted this AP report:

The piece described a boycott launched against the Johnson & Johnson by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which "has unsuccessfully been urging the world's largest healthcare company for 2 1/2 years to remove the trace amounts of potentially cancer-causing chemicals--dioxane and a substance called quaternium-15 that releases formaldehyde--from Johnson's Baby Shampoo, one of its signature products."

After Johnson & Johnson reached an agreement with the campaign to phase out the chemicals in the U.S. market, HuffPost Healthy Living (12/28/11) ran this post by Samuel Epstein, an expert on cancer at the University of Illinois School of Public Health:

Epstein's post pointed out the geographically limited nature of the company's agreement and the fact that its shampoo contains a third chemical, nitrosamine, that is also a potential cancer risk.

To be sure, as Jezebel (1/20/12) pointed out, there are numerous health concerns with Johnson & Johnson products--from birth control patches to insulin pumps, from the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal to Tylenol and Motrin. But if your news outlet reveals that a product might be giving kids' cancer and then the makers of that product offer you a sponsorship deal, it's a good bet that they aren't doing so because they're grateful to you for keeping them on their toes.

It's an article of faith in mainstream media discussions of the budget: Social Security and Medicare are the "entitlements" driving our debt problems. That's not really true, but that's overwhelmingly the starting point for these discussions. Occasionally, perhaps by accident, someone questions that assumption.

That's what happened on NPR's Morning Edition on Monday (8/8/11), when Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) was interviewed by Steve Inskeep about, among other things, the entitlement burden.

Read what happened--or listen to the excerpt below:

INSKEEP: Congressman, if I can, we've just got a few seconds. You have mentioned defense spending. You've mentioned tax increases. Those are two areas of disagreement. The biggest part of the federal budget is entitlements...

FRANK: No, wrong. I'm sorry. The Defense budget is bigger than Medicare, and Social Security is, in fact, self-financing, still is.

INSKEEP: Let's stipulate for this conversation: a very, very, very, very, very big part of the budget is entitlements. Democrats are seen as resisting cuts. Is your side--in a couple of seconds--going to appoint people to the special committee who are ready to make a deal?

FRANK: I am not going to tell an 80-year-old woman living on $19,000 a year that she gets no cost-of-living, or that a man who has been doing physical labor all his life and is now at a 67-year-old retirement--which is where Social Security will be soon--that he has to work four or five more years.

But I disagree with you that in terms of draining on the budget, Social Security is largely as self-financed...

INSKEEP: OK.

FRANK: ...and the military budget is larger than Medicare. So demonizing entitlements and saying that--in fact, here's the deal...

INSKEEP: Congressman, I really have to cut you off there. But I do...

FRANK: Well, I wish you wouldn't ask these complicated questions with five seconds to go.

INSKEEP: We'll come back and bring you back for more. Always a pleasure to talk with you.

The story of Michele Bachmann's surging campaign momentum continues, this time courtesy of Beltway reporter Mark Halperin of Time magazine:

Why has Michele Bachmann suddenly become the It candidate?

With her impressive New Hampshire debate performance, Bachmann has gone from a conservative Sarah Palin-lite curiosity to a potential game changer. For two hours onstage with her GOP rivals, Bachmann appeared polished, serene and in command. Her smooth performance was partly the work of a top-shelf team of veteran advisers (manager Ed Rollins, pollster Ed Goeas, forensic coach Brett O’Donnell). They sanded down some of her rough edges but let Bachmann be Bachmann, complete with zinging anti-Obama applause lines and sunny-side-up conservatism.

Halperin gave some advice on what Bachmann needed to do to keep things going:

Most of all: avoid the kinds of gaffes, misstatements, self-promotional moments and wacky behavior that would cause the media and many traditional Republicans to--once again--write her off.

Huh. Remember that this was a debate where her economic plan boiled down to calling for certain government agencies to be abolished-- especially the Environmental Protection Agency, which she called the "Job Killing Organization of America." That didn't cause the media to write her off--or most voters, either, since they mostly didn't hear about it.

Or when she said:

The Congressional Budget Office has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?

This is, as you might expect, not true. But maybe it qualifies as "sunny-side-up conservatism."

It's not just Halperin, though. Time columnist Joe Klein writes:

Bachmann is often linked with Palin as a Tea Party pinup, but she is a different breed of cat: She knows her stuff. She actually gives factual, informed answers. She lacks Palin's bitter, solipsistic edge. She skillfully framed even her most extreme responses in an amenable way, smothering her opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest within a paean to the sanctity of life.

If you scan the debate transcript, Bachmann didn't give many factual answers to any of the questions. (This is probably not all that unusual in a debate.)  When she tried to--see above about the 800,000 lost jobs--her "fact" was totally inaccurate. As has been the pattern in the past with her--like when she claimed on CBS there was a study showing 30 percent of doctors were leaving the field due to the healthcare law. There is no such study. CBS viewers didn't know the truth, and it seems like journalists are unwilling to tell people that Michele Bachmann's not telling the truth.

The roundtable panel on ABC's This Week (5/29/11) spent some time talking about the politics of Medicare, specifically the idea that the recent Democratic victory in a special Congressional election in New York could mean that Paul Ryan's Medicare plan might be a tremendous liability for the GOP.

One of the most prevalent talking points from the Republican side is to complain that while Ryan's plan might have its flaws, at least they have something--unlike the Democrats. It was a point that ABC reporter Jonathan Karl passed along as fact:

[Bill Clinton] said that I hope Democrats don't use this as an excuse to do nothing. And that is exactly what Democrats are doing right now. There is no Democratic plan on reforming Medicare; we're waiting for the president to come out with a plan. The president's old budget lost 97-0 in a vote in the Senate, so, you know, I mean--Republicans are scared. They are definitely scared. But there is nothing coming from the other side.

Most people remember a big national debate over healthcare happened not too long ago. The law that passed--the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" to its GOP critics--included several provisions intended to control the cost of healthcare, including Medicare. This was part of the reason Republicans were screaming about "death panels."

The parts of the Affordable Care Act that pertain to shrinking the cost of Medicare have been pretty well-explained for a while now. A recent piece from the Kaiser Health News explains how the Independent Payment Advisory Board created by the law would work:

Q: What will IPAB do?

A: Beginning with fiscal 2015, if Medicare is projected to grow too quickly, the IPAB will make binding recommendations to reduce spending. Those recommendations will be sent to Capitol Hill at the beginning of each year, and if Congress doesn’t like them, it must pass alternative cuts--of the same size--by August. A supermajority of the Senate can also vote to amend the IPAB recommendations. If Congress fails to act, the secretary of Health and Human Services is required to implement the cuts by default.

This (and more) was explained in a Washington Post column by Ezra Klein in April. Igor Volsky at Think Progress wrote a post last year showing how Medicare cost containment will work. There's no shortage of information explaining how this will work now that it is law. One could argue that none of it will work, of course, but that's not the same as saying there is no plan but the Paul Ryan plan. That's what Republicans want people to believe--and reporters like Jonathan Karl are doing their best to help.

I saw a press release yesterday announcing that Rep. Jim McDermott (D.-Wash) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) were introducing a single-payer healthcare bill in both houses of Congress. Unless there was a drastic change in the corporate media, this news wasn't going to be, well, news.

And it hasn't been so far. There were mentions in independent outlets like Democracy Now!, GritTV and the Nation. But in the corporate media, next to nothing-- except for one brief mention on CNN, thanks to Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel:

VANDEN HEUVEL: The progressive caucus, which put out a people's budget which is fair, did not get attention because the media slighted it and marginalized it. That is a mainstream budget.

SPITZER: One second, you'll get your turn.

VANDEN HEUVEL: No, but I do think, when Bernie Sanders and McDermott put forth a Medicare-for-all, that is a majority position.

The single-payer bill and the People's Budget will likely suffer the same media fate--marginalized by the Beltway elites, despite the fact that they represent policies that are broadly popular.

Maybe media would behave differently if someone as serious, wonky and handsome as Paul Ryan was holding the press conference.

Elite media’s selective disdain for public activism is well known. Still, you’d think some things would garner a word or two. Like 300 disability rights activists, a couple hundred in wheelchairs, occupying the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. The May 2 demonstration was organized by the rights group ADAPT to protest Republican budget plans for Medicaid. Ninety-one people were arrested and carted off by Capitol police.

Yet days after the rotunda protest, and another action the next day in which 300 demonstrators gathered outside the Longworth House Office Building, many getting inside to Rep. Paul Ryan's second floor office where 10 were arrested, the country's big media have taken no notice. Accounts in Politico (5/2/11) and the Hill (5/3/11) were all a search turned up.

ADAPT organizer Mike Ervin explained that it’s not just the roughly 35 percent funding cuts to Medicaid in the GOP’s budget proposal that concern the disability community, but the plan to convert states' federal shares into block grants. Many people with disabilities rely on Medicaid “for the assistance we get every day to live in our communities," rather than institutions.

As for the claim, from Ryan's Roadmap Plan, that block granting "allows states maximum flexibility to tailor their Medicaid programs to the specific needs of their populations," Ervin says, "That's like saying Jim Crow laws give states more flexibility to decide who gets to drink at their water fountains. Flexibility is basically a code word for abandonment."

People with disabilities (one community that anyone can join at any moment) and their advocates are right to worry their concerns won't be heard by lawmakers, to the extent that that involves dealing with a press corps that, evidently, can't even see them.

The uncritical coverage of Paul Ryan's budget plan continues. In the new issue of Time magazine, Michael Crowley and Jay Newton-Small tell us that Ryan is "the new face of federal frugality":

Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a touch of Eagle Scout to him, the House Budget Committee chairman unveiled an ambitious package of huge budget cuts designed to dig the country out of its crippling debt crisis.  For Ryan, reining in spending is nothing less than an act of patriotic valor.

Valor. Eagle Scout. Great hair!

Ryan's critics have noted that his plan actually does very little about the "crippling debt crisis." Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo reports that the Congressional Budget Office's score of the plan "finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing."

The Time reporters add:

He may be a modern political star, but there's still something a little old-fashioned about Ryan, right down to his crow's-beak nose. Maybe it's the premature seriousness that comes from finding your father dead of a heart attack when you were 16 and then helping to care for a grandmother with Alzheimer's disease.

Now a married father of three, Ryan is a PowerPoint fanatic with an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents. "I love the field of economics," Ryan says. "I have a knack for numbers. And I've just delved into this issue for my adult life, basically."

Deep into the piece, after these tributes to Ryan's wonkery, comes this parenthetical:

(He's also been criticized for peddling fuzzy math and rosy projections. A Washington Post factcheck deemed his budget full of "dubious assertions, questionable assumptions and fishy figures.")

Huh. I thought he had "an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents"?

By placing the factcheck so deep into the piece, and in parentheses, Time is all but saying that it doesn't matter what the facts are about Paul Ryan's plan. What's more important is that he's a patriotic number-cruncher.

With great hair!

Dean Baker's Beat the Press is the best Early Warning Media Mythbuster. It's simple: You read it every morning before you read the papers (he is up before you are, trust me) and you're well prepared to deal with the economic nonsense you'll be subjected to.

Today (4/6/11) he proposes this headline for stories about Rep. Paul Ryan's budget blueprint:

Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Healthcare

Baker writes: "That is what headlines would look like if the United States had an independent press." He explains that the central idea in Ryan's plan--voucher-like "premium support" instead of Medicare--will leave people paying a lot for healthcare. It's a simple idea, but not one that is expressed so simply in many press accounts.

Take one Washington Post article today (4/6/11) by David A. Fahrenthold. It leads with this:

This is the essential question for Rep. Paul Ryan: Can this man really manage the hardest sales job in U.S. politics?

That might be "essential" for him, but it's of little importance to us. We need to know what the plan actually wants to do. But papers too often find space to run these kinds of man-in-the-news profiles at the expense of telling readers, as often as they should,  how policy ideas will affect them.

In the piece we learn that Ryan "is the lanky, wonky chairman of the House Budget Committee" and "an unlikely revolutionary." The Post tells us that "Ryan studied economics in college, and in Congress he has embraced the weedy issues of the federal budget." One source seems to think that "sticking to his wonky reputation would be a good idea."

Back to the sales job:

So far, the sales pitch appears to be classic Ryan. He will make his case with earnestness and a hope that a quiet explanation of budget math can swing the country in a way that previous politicians could not.

He's just trying to explain math! That's nice, since the Post article doesn't:

The vision also includes a change in the Medicare program, in which the federal government acts as a health insurer for seniors. In coming years--Ryan's plan does not apply to people who are already 55--he would shift the program so that seniors would choose a private health plan. The federal government would then provide "premium support" to help them pay for coverage.

The main math question is how much "support" seniors will get. The answer is not much, and certainly not enough to cover the skyrocketing cost of healthcare. Pointing this out should be part of every story--even ones that tell us that Paul Ryan's a "wonk."

Corporate media's preference for "centrism" can often translate into reporting that casts two sides of a debate as equally belligerent or unwilling to compromise.  ABC reporter Jonathan Karl's report yesterday on This Week (4/3/11) offers a perfect example of the absurdity of this worldview.

His focuses was on the battle over the federal budget. On one side are Tea Party activists who want deeper spending cuts.  Karl notes that this creates some friction between the activists and GOP leaders. Then there's the other side of the debate:

KARL: Democrats have their hot heads, too. One Obama administration official said the Republican bill, which cuts $5 billion from the Agency for International Development would kill kids. That's right. Kill kids.

RAJIV SHAH, USAID ADMINISTRATOR: We estimate, and I believe these are conservative, that HR 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying.

Karl then turns to former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean saying that Democrats could benefit from a government shutdown. Karl closes with a snide reference to the choice confronting lawmakers: "Compromise with extremists out to kill kids?"

Budget cuts have actual, real world consequences--especially when you're talking about health aid to the Third World. This is not in serious dispute. But apparently talking about those effects is a problem.

What Karl considers hot-headed extremism is Shah's claim that deaths will occur due to, among other things, cuts to USAID's anti-malaria programs. Others will die because they would lose access to life-saving medicines. Others will die at birth.

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman points out that many anti-poverty organizers have organized a fast to draw attention to the GOP budget cuts. He's joining them, and writes that some organizers are praying that God create a "circle of protection" around the world's poor and hungry.

What a bunch of hotheads.

Few pieces better illustrate the uselessness of so much corporate media political journalism than Kathleen Hennessey's piece in the L.A. Times (4/4/11) on Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's deficit reduction plan.

The piece is headlined "House Republican Budget Plan Would Revamp Medicare," and the lead explains that the GOP budget proposal outlined by Ryan "includes an overhaul of Medicare and Medicaid and would aim to chop at least $4 trillion from the federal deficit over the next decade.""Revamp," an "overhaul"--well, that sounds good, doesn't it? How does Ryan plan to do that, exactly?

Despite reporting that Ryan's "broad overview" offered "the clearest picture yet" of Republican deficit-reduction plans, the piece is far from clear: Hennessey reports that Ryan is suggesting "changes to entitlement programs"--"dramatic changes"--and is "addressing the rising costs of the program." Then, in the seventh paragraph, we get this:

Under the proposed rework of the Medicare program, seniors would chose from several federally subsidized health plans. The changes would take effect in 2021 and would not affect people who are 55 or older now, Ryan said.

Oh, OK--so how's that going to save $4 trillion? The piece doesn't say--that's the full description.

Then in the 26th paragraph, we get a quote from a partisan critic of Ryan's plan, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D.-Md.), who says that the plan cuts "health security for seniors." He's not allowed to get any more specific than that, but Ryan gets four paragraphs of rebuttal to Van Hollen's one paragraph of vague criticism, starting with:

Ryan described the Medicare plan as a version of a "premium support" system he crafted along with former Clinton administration budget director Alice Rivlin. He acknowledged the proposal would shift more of the burden for healthcare costs to seniors, saying the wealthiest seniors would bear the largest portion.

"More for the poor, more for people who are sick, and we don't give as much to the people who are wealthy," Ryan said. "This saves Medicare."

Whoa, whoa, wait a second--"shift more of the burden for healthcare costs to seniors"? Why is this the first we're hearing about this, in the 27th paragraph of a 31-paragraph article?

Ryan's plan is not very hard to explain: He wants to replace Medicare with a system where seniors would receive vouchers to buy health insurance. As the cost of health insurance rises every year, the value of the vouchers would rise by not as much. Eventually the difference between the value of the vouchers and the cost of buying health insurance, along with a similar scheme for cutting Medicaid reimbursements, would amount to $4 trillion--which would be the amount that would come out of the pockets of seniors and the poor, plus the amount of healthcare they would do without.

That's what the L.A. Times means by "revamping." But if the paper explained that to its readers, they would mostly think Ryan's idea was a terrible one. And that would be biased--so it's better to leave the readers not knowing any more than they did before they read the article.

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.

When I saw the headline (1/19/11), "Vocal Physicians Group Renews Health Law Fight," I thought maybe--just maybe--the New York Times might be talking about Physicians for a National Health Program, the group comprised of "18,000 physicians, medical students and health professionals who support single-payer national health insurance."

But no. The Times story is about the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a 3,000-member organization that is on the far right of the healthcare debate, and is garnering coverage now because they support repeal of the new healthcare law. How far? These excerpts from the Times piece should give you some idea:

Founded in 1943, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons opposed the creation of Medicaid and Medicare. A decade ago, it was among groups that unsuccessfully urged the United States Supreme Court to release post-mortem photographs of a former Clinton administration official, Vincent Foster. In its brief, the group argued that an independent inquiry was necessary to confirm that Mr. Foster, whose death was attributed to suicide, was not murdered.

And:

Its internal periodical has published studies arguing that abortion increases breast cancer risks, a tie rejected by an expert panel of the National Cancer Institute, as well as reports linking child vaccinations to autism, a discredited theory. Another report, "Illegal Aliens and American Medicine," contended that illegal immigrants not only brought disease into this country but benefited if their babies were born with disabilities.

"Anchor babies are valuable," that 2005 report stated, using a negative term for children born in America to illegal immigrants. "A disabled anchor baby is more valuable than a healthy one."

Now perhaps the angle here is that since repeal is in the news, this group deserves coverage. And citing their extremist positions on an array of subjects might be useful for readers who want to know what sorts of folks are backing repeal.

But in the broader debate over healthcare, single-payer advocates like PNHP are largely sidelined. A search of Times coverage in the Nexis news database shows that PNHP usually shows up only in the letters section. A June 11, 2009 article, "Doctors' Group Opposes Public Insurance Plan," focused on opposition to the public option from the likes of the American Medical Association; it included a passing reference to PNHP.

It makes sense for the healthcare debate to include the voices of doctors and other caregivers. But that discussion needs to include those who support single-payer.

Under the headline "Lawmakers Aiming to Increase Civility," the New York Times (1/17/11) reports from the front lines of the improved, post-Tucson political climate:

And the House speaker, John A. Boehner, used the phrase ''job-destroying'' instead of "job-killing'' in reference to the Democrats' healthcare overhaul in a speech to colleagues on Saturday--a subtle but pointed shift in tone, though not in substance.

Change is in the air!

On a serious note, this would suggest a shift from a mean-sounding, unsupported-by-the-facts attack on one's opponents to a slightly less mean-sounding, still fact-free attack on the Democrats and the Obama White House. As Dean Baker wrote at his Beat the Press blog today (1/18/11), many reports quote Republican politicians saying the new healthcare law is going to destroy jobs--without any suggestion that they should provide compelling evidence that this is in fact true.

Baker points to an AP "fact check" piece that does a good job of setting the evidence down--and showing that the Republicans have very little going for them. As he put it on Saturday:

In principle, reporters have the time to investigate allegations like the claim that the healthcare bill is costing jobs. Readers, on the other hand, do not. If the Republicans can make an untrue assertion and simply have it passed along as a credible statement because reporters do not do their jobs, then we should expect them to make even stronger statements. Perhaps we will soon be reading accusations from Republicans that President Obama and the Democrats are baby killers. After all, given the current practice of the national media, they would likely just pass the charge along as a reasonable statement about events in the world.

I always enjoy Andrew Tyndall's year-in-review report, which tallies the minutes each network newscast devoted to the important stories of the year. His 2010 report is worth a look. The most newsworthy woman of the year? GOP Senate hopeful and Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell from Delaware. Tyndall notes that the BP oil disaster was the most-covered story of the year, but that it "prompted no follow-up spike in coverage of energy policy, or global warming." Coverage of the economy stalled: "Unemployment may still be stubbornly high, yet the newshole for the economy has reverted to the mean. So apparently growth has resumed."

The differences between networks are somewhat interesting; NBC devoted substantially less time to covering the Afghan War: 91 minutes, versus 150 at ABC and 174 at CBS. They also lagged behind in their coverage of the debate over the healthcare law.

But they were way out in front on one story: the Winter Olympics. NBC gave the Games 84 minutes of coverage, versus 17 and 18 minutes for ABC and CBS. Of course, NBC was broadcasting the Olympics, and the company with those rights generally turns their newscast into a promotional vehicle.

Another way of looking at it: NBC talked more about the Olympics than about healthcare or unemployment; the Afghan War was just slightly more important to their newscast than the Olympic Games. And they wonder why people aren't watching the network newscasts like they used to....

One recently released WikiLeaks cable stated that Cuban officials had banned Michael Moore's healthcare documentary Sicko. Critics of Moore's work pounced, delighted that a film that spent time pointing out that Cuba's national system has some merits would be banned in that country.

The problem is that... well, it wasn't. Which is something that anyone could have known if they'd done a moment of factchecking. Like Michael Moore did (though, to be fair, he probably knew this stuff without having to check):

Sounds convincing, eh?! There's only one problem--Sicko had just been playing in Cuban theaters. Then the entire nation of Cuba was shown the film on national television on April 25, 2008! The Cubans embraced the film so much so it became one of those rare American movies that received a theatrical distribution in Cuba. I personally ensured that a 35mm print got to the Film Institute in Havana. Screenings of Sicko were set up in towns all across the country.

Moore slammed the Guardian's story (headlined, "WikiLeaks: Cuba Banned Sicko for Depicting 'Mythical' Healthcare System"). Other outlets were also guilty of taking the cable at face value. It shows--once again--that a lot of journalists have a strange relationship with these WikiLeaks cables. They don't like what WikiLeaks does, and they're pretty sure there's nothing explosive or newsworthy hidden in the cables. Unless, of course, there's something they find politically useful. Then it should be treated as a Top Secret Fact--no checking necessary.