The covers of Time magazine this week:

Niall Ferguson is undoubtedly an expert. As the bio on his Newsweek column points out, he's "a professor of history at Harvard University. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution." His latest column (1/23/12) is about the need to sell the public on the policies recommended by experts:

To the kind of people who spend their careers inside elite institutions, the technocratic turn is welcome. Decisions about economic policy, they reason, are too difficult to be entrusted to the people's elected representatives.... But there's a catch. The sacrifices we need to make are bound to be painful: just look what Greece and Italy are going through now. Yet people can tolerate job losses, spending cuts and tax hikes if they believe that a payoff will come in the foreseeable future. How to persuade them of that? The only way is through political leadership.

Ferguson's column concludes:

American voters want competent government. But they also need to be convinced to swallow the bitter medicine that competent government sometimes prescribes. In austerity-stricken Europe, too, the populists are waiting in the wings, ready to deliver rabble-rousing rants. Perhaps 2012 will turn out to be their year after all.

The problem with all this is that "painful" austerity policies are not actually "the sacrifices we need to make"; the decision to make people in Europe "swallow the bitter medicine" has actually made the situation there worse--as an IMF report acknowledged the day after Ferguson's column appeared (Economist, 1/24/12). The "bitter medicine" prescribed by the Conservative-led government in Ferguson's native Britain has recently succeeded in making the economic crisis there worse than the Great Depression--no small achievement.

That's the problem with technocratic government--you have to be careful which experts you listen to.

You may have heard last week that right-wing media critics were howling about this:

"Those liberals are calling us dumb!" seemed to be the feeling on the right--a strange reaction to a piece written by conservative Andrew Sullivan.

Newsweek is back on the case this week:

The response to conservative Sullivan comes from.... conservative writer David Frum. When will the liberal media give conservatives a fair shake, I ask you?

Time columnist Joe Klein jumped to Newt Gingrich's defense (12/19/11) when the Republican presidential candidate floated the idea that poor school children should work as janitors at their schools. Klein's endorsement (FAIR Blog, 12/9/11) earned him a coveted P.U. Litzer Prize. But apparently there's more to it.

As Klein explains in this week's issue of Time (in an article that bears a title "Racial Slant Aside, Newt's Poverty Plan Could Work"), "When you strip away the racial appeals, though, Gingrich proposes some very creative ways to address poverty and dependency."

He added:

And yes, as Newt suggested, that last idea did come from me--although I put a slightly different twist on it.

I first made the suggestion in 1991, after the New York City janitors negotiated a gaudy contract that required them to mop the cafeteria floor only once a week.

The difference, apparently, is that Klein wanted to see "students and their parents help keep the schools clean," and "not just poor students--all students, even those attending the city's elite high schools. It was a form of public service, intended to build a sense of responsibility and community in students of every income level."

Well, at least Gingrich was going to pay the kids.

How about expanding the idea further, though: Why not let high school students take turns writing a column for a national news magazine? It'd be a nice form of public service. And consider the benefit to Time readers.

The new issue of  Time magazine promises on its cover "Essential Info for the Year Ahead." One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome.

The report--written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a "hot military trend" this way:

Today's generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. In short, more drones that can tightly target terrorists, deliver larger payloads and are some of the best spies the U.S. has ever produced, even if they occasionally get captured in Iran or crash on landing at secret bases.

And also, you know, kill innocent civilians.

There's no time to dwell on that, because there are too many good things to say about our remote-control war. "Drones had a big year in 2011," Thompson writes, and 2012 will be even bigger. As Time readers learn, "Unlike humans, these weapons don't need sleep."

And best of all, apparently, the military aren't the only ones doing the killing:

America's arsenal has become so small and lethal, you don't need the U.S. Army--or any military service at all, in fact--to field and wield them. The CIA, which used to be limited to derringers and exploding cigars, is now not very secretly flying drones. With little public acknowledgment and minimal congressional oversight, these clandestine warriors have killed some 2,000 people identified as terrorists lurking in shadows around the globe since 9/11.

The British Bureau of Investigative Journalism's investigation of the CIA drone program in Pakistan (8/10/11) stressed less of the gee-whiz and more the real-life consequences of the attacks. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 390 to 780-- including almost 200 children. U.S. officials, for the record, were once making absurd claims that no innocents were killed.

As for the apparent enthusiasm for waging a war where "you don't need the U.S. Army" at all--that is precisely one of the criticisms of the drone program; some legal experts argue that non-military personnel are not legal combatants, and therefore killing every one of those 2,000 "people identified as terrorists" was a war crime. Others point out that employing drones outside an active combat zone could also violate international law. But none of that is "Essential Info" for 2012.

"Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Not So Much" was the headline on a National Journal post yesterday (12/21/11). "The Texan's campaign has raised millions of dollars to combat the alleged media conspiracy that, they claim, is out to destroy the candidate the media fears most," the Journal's Sarah Mimms reported. "There is just one problem: The Ron Paul revolution is being televised."

By Mimms' count, "since announcing his campaign on May 13, Paul has made 87 appearances on cable television and Sunday news programs. That's more than any other candidate currently running for president." She stresses that "he has appeared on Fox News 63 times since June 1, more than any of his primary rivals."

It's true that Fox News is an important outlet for GOP candidates. If Paul's been on Fox 63 times, though, that means he's been on other TV outlets at most 24 times; how that compares with other GOP candidates, Mimms doesn't say. (Note: Of course, this doesn't include Paul's CNN appearance yesterday, when he walked off an interview with Gloria Borger about the racist newsletters he was publishing in the 1980s and 1990s.) She does acknowledge later down that on broader measures of media exposure, Paul is doing very poorly:

Paul is mentioned on air far less frequently than most of his rivals, including Bachmann and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, both of whom trail him in national and state-level polls. And when pundits talk about him, they frequently do so in a far more negative tone.

It is also true, as his campaign has asserted, that Paul gets less time to air his views in debates.

Here's a graph from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism (10/21/11) that gives a more informative impression of the relative attention paid to the various leading GOP candidates:

A more accurate headline for the National Journal piece? "Ron Paul Ignored by the Media? Pretty Much."

The fact that Time magazine named "The Protester" its Person of the Year was maybe a little surprising. Totally unsurprising, though, was the choice of a runners-up: Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a hero to many in the corporate media for his bold calls to slash government spending on the poor.

It's hard to know where to start with reporter David Von Drehle's tribute. But let's try here:

Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.

Dealing with the rising debt. Remember that idea.

He goes on:

The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe. Did he deliver a perfect plan? Not even he claims that. But Ryan, 41, offered a budget that began to convey the scale of change necessary to defuse the American debt bomb: Sweeping tax reform. Unprecedented spending freezes. Most important, a thorough reinvention of federal entitlements.

Ryan's plan isn't perfect? And he admitted this?  What a guy! Ryan's heroic stance, readers learn, caused fury in both parties. Republicans were forced to make  difficult choices, while "Democrats howled at the sacrilege and Ryan's refusal to raise income tax rates on the wealthy."

Ryan's is a "tough budget"  that "brought President Obama down from his cloud of happy talk about windmills and high-speed trains to acknowledge that America has a plateful of peas to choke down after its binge at the dessert bar." That's right--massive cuts in social spending are good for you, just like eating your veggies.

The crux of the whole piece comes down to this:

Ryan's dramatic proposal would not have gained any traction if it did not address a widely acknowledged problem: Over the next two generations, the U.S. government is on track to spend many tens of trillions of dollars more than it plans to raise. Unless changes are made, that will force so much borrowing that interest payments alone will sink the federal budget.

Thankfully, Time tells us, Paul Ryan has "the courage to look the future in the eye. It is a seer's work to glimpse around the corner and sound an alarm."

The piece closes by noting that this brave bold plan "wouldn't balance the federal budget until 2040. The prophet of 2011 will be 70 years old."

Wait a second. I thought this was a bold deficit-reducing roadmap to deal with the debt?

The secret to the Ryan plan--the thing media don't talk about much--is that it doesn't do the thing they say they like about it-- namely, reduce the deficit. As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times, the projected deficit in 2020 under the Ryan plan would be

about the same as the budget office's estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration's plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible--which you shouldn't--the Roadmap wouldn't reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

Or as James Horney of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities wrote of Ryan (4/8/11):

Despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history--two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes--the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That's because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.

Dean Baker writes that "Representative Ryan's program would imply a massive upward redistribution to the one percent." Maybe that explains why he's a Time runner-up. If "The Protester" is the Person of the Year, journalistic "balance" requires saying nice things about the One Percent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherman argues:

In the new issue of Time (12/12/11), Fareed Zakaria writes in the first sentence of his column:

It is difficult to find a country on the planet that is more anti-American than Pakistan. In a Pew survey this year, only 12 percent of Pakistanis expressed a favorable view of the U.S.

It's not that difficult. The same survey of seven countries found one of them, Turkey, with an even lower 10 percent favorable opinion of the U.S., and Jordan just a hair above at 13 percent.

More important is Zakaria's conclusion:

There is a fundamental tension in U.S. policy toward Pakistan. We want a more democratic country, but we also want a government that can deliver cooperation on the ground. In practice, we always choose the latter, which means we cozy up to the military and overlook its destruction of democracy.

To be clear, he thinks siding with the military over democracy is a bad thing.

But he also thinks the United States "always" choose repression over democracy. This is notable, in that as of this summer he was writing that "all American presidents have supported and should support the spread of democracy." As we pointed out then, this does not square with the record.

And in March 2007, Zakaria wrote critically of the Bush record of intervening in Latin American countries, which he saw as a break with a Reaganesque policy of democracy promotion:

American foreign policy toward Latin America had been on the right track for two decades. Ronald Reagan orchestrated an extraordinary turnaround, supporting human rights, democracy and free trade in several countries.

As FAIR noted, this was a remarkable whitewash of the Reagan record.

And then there was the time Zakaria attempted to argue that U.S. policy towards Haiti was one long attempt to promote democracy:

Consider, for example, Haiti, where the United States has attempted to foster democracy on and off for almost a century--with almost no success. Why? Surely Haitians yearn to be free. But there are aspects of its politics, economics and culture that have made it very difficult to establish liberal democracy.

As FAIR pointed out, this period included U.S. military occupation along with support for a coup against Haiti's democratically elected government.

I suppose there's a chance that Zakaria's views towards U.S. power are becoming more critical. But if he's really reaching this conclusion, why talk about the "tension" between supporting democracy and working against democracy? Maybe he's just having trouble remembering which side of the argument he's on.

Conservative David Frum writes in the new issue of New York:

Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day. For sport, I’d always answer, "I'm available--but does your senior producer know you’ve called me?" An hour later, I'd receive an embarrassed second call: "We've decided to go in a different direction."

This is interesting. Up to this point we've only been familiar with progressives--including FAIR staffers--who have been invited, and then promptly uninvited, to appear on Fox. There have also been reports about journalists who were critical of Fox who are barred from appearing.

In other Fox-related news, Bill O'Reilly last night proved that irony is alive and well, announcing that he'd be doing a segment on what the cable news networks should do when people "lie on the air." Naturally, the lie he wants corrected is about something someone said about Bill O'Reilly. Later on, he told guest Bernie Goldberg:

I mean, on this program, if a guest says something that is untrue on this program, I will correct it as soon as we know it's untrue. And I think all the networks should have that rule in place. You have to do that.

Totally in agreement. But what about when the untruths come from the host?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Halperin has a feature in Time magazine every week called "The Big Questions."

For a process-obsessed campaign reporter, this means a weekly who's up, who's down scorecard, in an easy to follow Q-&-A format.

This week's questions:

Is Sarah Palin in or out?

What could hold her back?

When does she have to decide?

Part of his answer to question one: "Palin remains more interesting to listen to than any other candidate."  Coming from a guy who once said, "I'm ready to cancel my vacation to go cover Rick Perry," maybe this isn't surprising. It is worth pointing out that Sarah Palin isn't, you know, a candidate for anything.

After praising her "maverick appeal" and "pox-on-both-parties, anti-Establishment message," Halperin notes that "as always, the media can't get enough of her."

Well, he's right about that.

From Time magazine's Rick Perry cover story (9/26/11):

When you look at Perry, it's easy to picture him in an old Western. His late arrival in the primary field in August certainly felt like that moment when the big stranger steps through the swinging saloon doors and all heads pivot and the plinky-plunk piano dies away.

Wait-- there's more!

Moreover, Perry doesn't mind kicking over idols in the high church of conventional wisdom, a favorite Tea Party pastime. He's the one who calls Social Security a "monstrous lie," throwing in "Ponzi scheme" for good measure. Social Security is called the third rail of American politics, which is, of course, a reference to the electrified portion of a subway track. Touch it and you die. But there aren't any subways where Rick Perry comes from.