I finally managed to get all the way through Richard Stengel's fawning cover story about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At a moment when incumbents around the world are being shunted aside, he is triumphant. With his bullet-proof majority, he has a chance to turn himself into the historic figure he has always yearned to be. And it traces what it says is Netanyahu's appeal to U.S. audiences: He appeared regularly on Nightline and became the Israeli-American It boy–confident, handsome, fearsomely articulate in virtually accentless English. Every suburban Jewish mother had a crush on him. "Bibi was the streetwise local [...]
May
15
2012
Time Ignores Climate Change to Paint a 'Golden Age' of Fracking
By 23 Comments
You have to wonder: Do journalists covering energy issues imagine they and their loved ones are going to be living on another planet in the not-too-distant future? That seems like the only reason you would write a piece about the world discovering ways to extract and burn vast new quantities of hydrocarbons without mentioning one word about climate change. That's what Bryan Walsh gave us in the May 21 issue of Time magazine–an article about fracking that doesn't mention the technology's powerful contribution to global warming. The headline over this article: "The Golden Age." Walsh does refer to fracking's ecological [...]
May
14
2012
Newsweek Enables Colin Powell's Iraq War Revisionism
By 26 Comments
Right before the United States invaded Iraq, Newsweek magazine published a remarkable story. Reporter John Barry revealed that former Iraqi weapons chief Hussein Kamel had told UN inspectors in 1995 that the country had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. As FAIR pointed out at the time, this was a remarkable discovery, especially considering that Kamel's words had be used so often by U.S. officials to serve the opposite point–that Iraq still posed a dire threat. As FAIR pointed out: According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in August 1995. If that is true, [...]
May
01
2012
Romney's the Right Kind of Flipflopper
By 16 Comments
As we've written before, some political flipflops are better than others. The ones that Mitt Romney commits, or might commit in the future, are often seen as being the good kind. That argument was advanced once more this Sunday (4/29/12) on the Chris Matthews Show, by Time editor Rick Stengel and the host himself, who were engaged in a familiar Beltway media discussion where journalists pretend to be campaign strategists. In this case, the question was whether the Obama campaign should push the idea that Romney is a flipflopper, or the idea that he's very conservative. STENGEL: The thing that [...]
Apr
16
2012
Arabs and Democracy: A Question for Fareed Zakaria
By 14 Comments
Fareed Zakaria wrote in Time magazine (4/16/12) that "the Arab Spring is looking less appealing by the week." The problem is a "messier reality," and he zeroes in on Egypt: And now, as Egypt's presidential election approaches, we see the rise of two candidates from Islamic parties, Khairat al-Shater and Hazem Salah Abu Ismail. The former is often described as a moderate, the latter as a radical. Much of what we're seeing might well be the tumult that accompanies the end of decades of tyranny and the rise of long-suppressed forces, but it raises the question, Why does it seem [...]
Apr
03
2012
Joe Klein on Trayvon Martin: Democrats Are Bad Too
By 43 Comments
Time columnist Joe Klein has harsh words for the right. His new column uses the Trayvon Martin tragedy to talk broadly about the right and racism. Klein points out that some of the Republican presidential candidates are desperate men playing on the ignorance and racist bigotry of their audiences. Those of us who cover campaigns and watched the Tea Party grow have notebooks full of hateful quotes from that distinct minority of militants who believe that nonwhites are "taking over" the country and that Shari'a looms and that the President is somehow egging this on. This is a relatively tiny [...]
Mar
09
2012
Time's Iran Nuke Assumptions
By 17 Comments
There are plenty of problems with coverage of Iran right now. The most important issue to understand is that there is no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon. Since this is the basis for the current "crisis" narrative, it's important for journalism to try to clearly differentiate what is known and what is speculation. On that score, Time magazine's big piece this week on U.S./Israeli relations fails. Massimo Calabresi and Jay Newton-Small write: Despite their history of distrust, Obama and [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu must cooperate if they are to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. [...]
Mar
06
2012
The Iran Non-Debate, Continued…
By 13 Comments
Glenn Greenwald wrote recently of the extraordinarily limited media debate on Iran, which seems to consist of U.S. and Israeli officials making threats–attack now or attack later–alongside clinical discussions of the difficulties of bombing Iran. There is plenty missing–actual Iranians talking about what war would mean in human terms,legal experts discussing how preventive war (or even the threat of one) violates international law, and so on. Today's New York Times editorial (3/6/12) offers another illustration of just how limited this media discussion is. The paper states: Iran's nuclear appetites are undeniable, as is its malign intent toward Israel, toward America, [...]
Feb
22
2012
Media's Weird Ethics: Pretending to Be Someone Else Is Worse Than Facilitating Global Catastrophe
By 56 Comments
There's a popular verb in headlines about climate researcher Peter Gleick's admission that he used trickery to get damning documents out of the climate change-denialist group the Heartland Institute: "Activist Says He Lied to Obtain Climate Papers" (New York Times, 2/21/12); "Scientist Peter Gleick Admits He Lied to Get Climate Documents" (L.A. Times, 2/21/12); "Climate Researcher Says He Lied to Obtain Heartland Documents" (WashingtonPost.com, 2/21/12). What you wouldn't gather from all these pants-on-fire condemnations is that there is a long and honorable tradition, from Nellie Bly feigning madness to expose mistreatment of the mentally ill to the Chicago Sun-Times' Mirage [...]
Feb
22
2012
James Traub Bids a Fond Farewell to an Era of Constant Warfare
By 5 Comments
James Traub seemed a little bummed in a Sunday New York Times op-ed ("The End of American Intervention?," 2/18/10), that military cuts and changing priorities will mean fewer humanitarian interventions in America's future. So we must accept, if uneasily, the future which now seems to lie before us: We will do less good in the world, but also less harm. A leading advocate of "humanitarian intervention," Traub doesn't waste many words on the "harm" produced the by two decades of them, but he seems pretty sure about the "good." For instance, he writes that the post-Cold War period "raised the [...]
Feb
17
2012
Corporate Pundits Waiting for a Palestinian Gandhi? Meet Khader Adnan
By 15 Comments
For years prominent corporate media pundits have told us that the world–and the media–would embrace a dramatic, non-violent Palestinian resistance movement. If only such a movement–perhaps led by a Gandhi-like figure–were to finally emerge, we are told, the media coverage will come, and sympathy from across the world will strengthen support for the Palestinian cause. This is nonsense–there has been non-violent Palestinian resistance for years. But that fact hasn't stopped pundits like Time's Joe Klein, as recently as last year, from wondering why Palestinians haven't found their Gandhi. Or New York Times columnist Tom Friedman from writing a column (5/24/11) [...]
Feb
15
2012
Newsweek and the 'War on Christians'
By 71 Comments
A cover that declares a "War on Christians" is bound to get some attention. Writing in the February 12 issue of Newsweek, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's argument is just as blunt. Enough with all this talk "about Muslims as victims of abuse," because really it's the other way around: A wholly different kind of war is underway–an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm. To suggest that a genocide is underway is, of course, a serious charge. And [...]
