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?

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.

Fareed Zakaria cheers the Libya War in Time magazine this week for not following the Iraq model:

It has been prosecuted with the memory of the Iraq war firmly in mind. Only this time the approach has been to view the last war as a negative example. The international coalition--and even the Libyan opposition--is doing pretty much the opposite of what was done in Iraq.

Zakaria explains that Obama "was clearly trying to avoid the mistakes of Iraq." Among the mistakes the Bush administration made:

Had UN weapons inspectors been given more time in the spring of 2003, the UN Security Council might well have endorsed the plan. Countries like India were seriously considering sending tens of thousands of peacekeeping troops, but only if there was a UN-blessed operation with a U.S. commander who also wore a UN hat (as was the case in Bosnia). But these were seen as petty, legalistic annoyances, and the operation felt like an American one from start to finish.

Zakaria can write these things because his message during the run-up to the Iraq War was, "Let the inspections do their work!"

Not exactly.

In the December 2, 2002 Newsweek, Zakaria warned that the inspectors weren't likely to find weapons because Iraq had gotten so good at hiding their WMDs:

Having gotten the inspectors back into Iraq with unfettered access, the Bush administration had better brace itself for the most likely outcome--they will find nothing. Don't get me wrong. Iraq is surely producing weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations and the United States have accumulated powerful evidence of this over the past decade, including testimony from Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, about Iraq's biological weapons. But Iraq has become increasingly expert at dispersing and hiding these facilities, which are often small enough to fit into a bathroom or a van.

Zakaria explained that "the administration must force a crisis"--using the inspections as a way to force the war to begin:

Washington's hope is that in one of these many tests, Iraq will reveal that it is not cooperating and thus pave the way for military action. The inspectors will not find weapons but they might well find noncompliance.

Time is short. If events do not come to a head soon after December 8, the pressure for action will dissipate and the weather will make conflict impossible until next fall. And you cannot replay this movie.

A few weeks later (2/17/03), Zakaria was worried that the United States might lose face. He asked Newsweek readers to imagine what kind of world it would be if inspections were allowed to drag on just because some other countries demanded solid evidence:

But right now with Iraq, the need to maintain resolve seems obvious. Whatever one's initial views about taking on Iraq--and I have been for it--I cannot see how America can back down without damaging its, well, credibility.

Imagine the situation. A week from now, pressured by France, Germany and Russia, the United States decides to give the inspectors more time. It announces that, come to think of it, Saddam isn't that much of a threat. Though the president of the United States has said repeatedly that he would have "zero tolerance" for Iraqi deception, he didn't really mean it. When Colin Powell persuaded the United Nations to pass a resolution telling Saddam that he had a "final" opportunity to disarm or face "serious consequences," it was a bluff. (The "serious consequences" turn out to be that the United Nations sends in a few dozen more inspectors.) What would happen the next time the United States makes threats?

Luckily for people like Zakaria, damaged credibility isn't a concern for them. He'll still be considered an A-list foreign affairs pundit, no matter how wrong he's been about things that really matter.

Newsweek has a feature called "My Favorite Mistake," where a famous person talks about something they've done wrong.http://www.fair.org/blog/wp-admin/edit.php

This week (7/24/11) it's former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The mistake she cited was when she wore the wrong pin to a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and then said something critical about his Chechnya policy. (The best mistakes are the most self-serving ones, apparently.)

When I saw the headline, I was half-wondering if she'd talk about her famous defense of killing Iraqi children on 60 Minutes (5/12/96):

Leslie Stahl asks Albright: "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

To which Albright replies: "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price--we think the price is worth it."

Iraq did come up in the Newsweek piece, when Albright wrote, "We had sanctions on Iraq then, and I was instructed to keep saying terrible things about Saddam Hussein."

I would agree that she said something terrible.

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.

Newsweek (7/17/11) begins a piece on David Petraeus becoming CIA director with an account of how he got the "short-term job done" after he was named commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan:

Now, after 13 months, the 58-year-old Petraeus is coming home to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Since that day in the Oval Office, hopeful signs have begun appearing that he may have performed the seemingly impossible task of stabilizing the Afghan battlefield.

The article, by reporter John Barry, doesn't provide much detail on what these "hopeful signs" are, but Afghan civilian deaths are up 15 percent in the first half of 2011 vs. the first half of 2010.  (Maybe that's why an Afghan media executive cited in the piece contends that "not everyone in Afghanistan fully appreciates what Petraeus has achieved in his year there.")

As for U.S. troops and their non-Afghan allies, 705 of them were killed in the 13 months Petraeus was in charge of Afghanistan--as opposed to 725 in the 13 months before that. Other than that, I'm sure he had a great war.

Will the outrages ever stop?

Newsweek's "I Can Win" cover story about Sarah Palin is awful.

But Palin fans will have a hard time trying to figure out how to square this puff piece with the notion that the mainstream media is out to get Palin.

The premise is that Palin could run for president--and win. Because, well, that's what she says.  That's sort of the theme for the whole article, as it is full of quotes and observations from Palin family members and associates who are trying to 'set the record straight' about her political career. Like how she was actually a quite moderate governor with a commendable record. But on the national stage, something changed as soon as she stepped into the 2008 campaign:

Palin's eagerness for the fray lifted a dispirited Republican base and instigated an outsize response from liberal critics.

That's about the closest the article comes to Palin criticism--noting comments from overreacting liberals. But the press was guilty of getting down in the sewer and going after her family:

The press's fascination with this picturesque brood quickly turned so darkly speculative that candidate Barack Obama threatened to fire anyone in his campaign found participating in the conjectures.

This was one of Palin's first disingenuous attacks on the media. There was never much, if any, coverage of these theories that her baby wasn't really hers. But there was chatter on the Internet, which Palin turned into an attack on the press.

But the best part might be when reporter Peter Boyer tried to substantiate the claim from Palin advisers that she's actually really up to speed on the issues.

Palin has also become conversant on the subject of quantitative easing, the inflationary effects of which she illustrated with a personal anecdote. "I was ticked off at Todd yesterday" she said. "He walks into a gas station as we’re driving over from Minnesota. He buys a Slim Jim--we’re always eating that jerky stuff--for $2.69. I said, 'Todd, those used to be 99 cents, just recently!' And he says, 'Man, the dollar's worth nothing anymore.' A jug of milk and a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs--every time I walk into that grocery store, a couple of pennies more."

Newsweek is suggesting that Palin's jerky tale offers a serious insight into the Fed's policy of quantitative easing, which involves buying Treasury securities to bring down long-term interest rates and stimulate the economy. Republicans and conservatives insist this will cause disastrous inflation, but there's no evidence that this is happening; David Leonhardt's New York Times piece a few months ago (3/30/11) actually showed that core inflation is remarkably low right now, especially compared to the 1980s. (Over the last 12 months, core inflation was 1.5 percent.)

So, contrary to what Newsweek would have you believe, Palin's monitoring of Slim Jim prices do not provide particularly useful insight into the inflationary impact of Federal Reserve policy--or any evidence of Palin's supposed mastery of policy wonkery.

Here's the headline and subhead in a Newsweek piece (7/10/11) about the Egyptian presidential election:

Egypt's Rising Power Player

Amr Moussa is on track to succeed Mubarak. And that spells danger for Israel.

Reporter Dan Ephron characterizes Moussa like this:

"long and vocal history of anti-Israel diatribes"

"his anger against Israel"

"one of Israel’s most relentless detractors in Egypt"

"He confronted Israelis at conferences and attacked them in television interviews"

"His tirades even made him the subject of a hit song"

"his longstanding dislike of Israel"

"anger at Israel is genuine"

This would be a lot more convincing if there was some rhetoric or record from Moussa that would suggest an obsessive dislike of Israel. Instead, we get one quote from him saying the peace plan was "just [an Israeli] trick to continue talking and make the cameras flash ... but there's no substance. We shall not engage in such a thing anymore."

It would be hard to argue, whatever your position, that this "peace process" has led to much in the way of peace.

Newsweek goes on on to note that opposition to the current "peace plan" is common in Egypt. That suggests Egyptians don't believe that their views were reflected by the foreign policy of their country's previous dictatorship--one that Moussa served for a decade. But readers get less a sense of that fact, and plenty of discussion of the supposed anti-Israel obsession of a leading presidential candidate.

If you feel like there hasn't been enough attention paid to the fact that the democratic movements in the Arab world are undermining the power of U.S. elites to have troublemakers tortured and/or killed, rest assured that Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has you covered this week (6/12/11):

Among American spies there’s more than a little nostalgia for the bad old days. You know, back before dictators started toppling in the Middle East; back when suspected bad guys could be snatched off a street somewhere and delivered to the not-so-tender mercies of interrogators in their home countries; back when thuggish tyrants, however ugly, were at least predictable.

It’s not a philosophical thing, just a practical one. Confronted by the cold realities of this year's Arab Spring, many intelligence and counterterrorism professionals now see major dangers looming near at hand, while the good news--a freer, fairer, more equitable and stable Arab world--remains somewhere over the horizon. "All this celebration of democracy is just bullshit," says one senior intelligence officer who's spent decades fighting terrorism and finds his job getting harder, not easier, because of recent developments. "You take the lid off and you don’t know what's going to happen. I think disaster is lurking."

Dickey uses Egypt as one example, explaining that at one point dictator Hosni Mubarak was making plans to hand over power to feared intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. The U.S. supported that idea, but Egyptians weren't especially keen on handing over power to Mubarak's torture chief. Losing this vital link is apparently bad news for U.S. policymakers--though Dickey undercuts the point when he recalls this history:

Newsweek has a new piece wondering why it is that the United States doesn't seem to muster protest movements like we're seeing in Europe and in a number of Arab countries.

The headline and image on their website:

If you read that caption you see that protest happened on March 12* May 12-- one of several mass mobilizations that have attracted almost no corporate media attention--a subject we discussed on CounterSpin last week with journalist Allison Kilkenny, who's been covering them for a variety of independent outlets.

Yes, there could certainly be a sensible discussion about why the political system in the United States discourages citizen activism. But there's something strange about using an image from a rather sizable demonstration in New York City to accompany a story about why there are so few sizable demonstrations in this country.

*Date corrected-- the Newsweek caption had it wrong, and I repeated their error.

The argument that the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden shows that George W. Bush's torture policies were justified got another rehearsal in Newsweek from Yale professor Stephen Carter (5/5/11):

In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source of this vital clue? The intelligence apparently came from detainees imprisoned in secret facilities overseas and subjected to what has been euphemistically called "enhanced" interrogation....

So the information from the detainees was crucial, and we face an uncomfortable irony, both political and ethical. The finest moment of Barack Obama's presidency to this point came about precisely because of the detention system against which he railed during his campaign. Indeed, the only slip in what was otherwise an exemplary performance on May 1 was the president's failure to credit his predecessor, who established the controversial mechanism that likely led us to bin Laden's door. If we are cheering bin Laden's death, then we are also cheering, whether we like it or not, the methods that brought it about.

Three cheers for torture--because the "vital clue" that "led us to bin Laden's door" was that he "communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers"? So without this "crucial" information, the U.S. government wouldn't have been looking for bin Laden's couriers? Or if it had found them, it wouldn't have realized they were important? Maybe it would have wasted time looking for couriers who were only children. "Bin Laden's door" it isn't.

Newsweek's rationale for cheering terrorism is no more convincing than the one advanced by Time (FAIR Blog, 5/6/11), which argued that the fact that detainees didn't give up any information about the courier under torture was key evidence that the courier was important.

One gets the sense that people who participated in torture, or helped to justify it--as Carter did in his book The Violence of Peace--recognize on some level that this was a horrible thing to do, and are desperate to assert that their moral collapse was not in vain.

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.

There was a lot of chatter about editor Tina Brown and the "new" Newsweek, which debuted last week. None of it struck me as all that interesting--a column up front from Leslie Gelb warning about the threat of Arab democracy and an anti-Social Security harangue from Robert Samuelson made it feel very much like the "old" Newsweek.

One other piece stood out, and only more so this week--a warm profile of the executive in charge of France's nuclear power company, Areva. The subhead was "France's Most Powerful Businesswoman Believes Now Is the Time for the Next Atomic Boom." And the piece led with this:

The Middle East is in turmoil, oil prices have skyrocketed, the cost of gas is through the roof. All of which is good news--if you’re Anne Lauvergeon.

While Newsweek notes that the "world may still need convincing" about nuclear power, the magazine doesn't seem to be so conflicted:

To understand how nuclear energy has morphed in the public consciousness from apocalyptic villain to "clean, green" renewable energy, look no further than Lauvergeon.

Puff pieces about Areva aren't anything new--60 Minutes had one in 2007 that we took apart here. It's hard to beat this one for bad timing, though.

A Newsweek report (2/21/11) looks at the CIA's aerial drone assassination program through the agency's eyes--leaving questions about civilian deaths and the effort's dubious legality for a couple of brief paragraphs at the end. To encourage Newsweek to take critics of the drone program seriously, see FAIR's new Action Alert. Please leave copies of your messages--or comments on the alert--in the comments thread here.