A headline in today's Los Angeles Times (11/20/09): "Democrats Risk Taxing the Wealthy for Healthcare."

The paper explains:

Embracing the progressive--and sometimes politically risky--principle that the cost of carrying out public policies should fall to the well-off more than the disadvantaged, both the House and Senate bills would place new taxes on the wealthy to help pay for expanded insurance coverage.

Since mostly people aren't "well-off," and raising taxes on the wealthy tends to be rather popular with most people, what exactly is the political risk here? Surely the article will tell us. Oh, here it is:

In a recent Associated Press poll, 57 percent of those surveyed favored taxing people who earn more than $250,000 a year to pay for the healthcare overhaul. Of a variety of financing options tested in the survey, that tax was the only idea supported by a majority.

In other words, the not-very-risky idea of raising taxes on the wealthy.

New York Times on the pending trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed ( 11/15/09--emphasis added):

Mr. Mohammed's initial defiance toward his captors set off an interrogation plan that would turn him into the central figure in the roiling debate over the C.I.A's interrogation methods. He was subjected 183 times to the near-drowning technique called waterboarding, treatment that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has called torture. But advocates of the C.I.A's methods, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have said that the interrogation methods produced a trove of information that helped dismantle Al-Qaeda and disrupt potential terrorism attacks.

Apparently Holder's views need to be balanced by Dick Cheney's.

More to the point, what Eric Holder thinks is torture is mostly irrelevant: If something is torture, then it should be called torture. The Times has failed on this question before; in 2004, the paper's public editor Daniel Okrent wrote this response to a FAIR Action Alert (6/10/04):

But just as a terrorist is sometimes, in fact, a terrorist, torture is inescapably torture. The reader who moved me out of the muddled center on this did it with a simple question: "If the same things [that happened at Abu Ghraib] had been done to American prisoners by Iraqi authorities, would the Times have hesitated to use ‘torture’ over and over again?"

Over the past five years, the paper has used the word to describe the actions of authorities in Iraq, China, Mexico, Turkey, Chad and elsewhere, including a precinct house in Brooklyn, in the Abner Louima case. In each case, I believe, there was a sense that the torturers were characterized, in part, by their otherness--other nationalities, other political systems, or in the Louima instance other, depraved moral codes.

In Iraq, the perpetrators of the prison horrors were our representatives--ordinary Americans whose behavior may have been altered by circumstances, but who in their origins and histories are as familiar to us as our neighbors and co-workers.

[New York Times standards editor Allan] Siegal, who notes that the Times has no policy on the use of "torture," cautioned me in an e-mail that his sense of the word (and of "abuse") was "impressionistic rather than researched," but I buy what he ended up with: "Torture occurs when a prisoner is physically or psychologically maltreated during the process of interrogation, or as punishment for some activity or political position. Abuse occurs when the prisoner’s jailers maltreat her or him separately from the interrogation process."

Siegal also acknowledges that there's a continuum that has to be measured. If, for instance, a man is kept hooded for an hour, is that in itself torture? What about five hours? What about 24? If the headline language has in fact been delicate, maybe that's because the distinctions are delicate. But as good reporting brings us greater knowledge of what has gone in prisons and detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinctions become firm enough to be indisputable.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas (11/14/09) on Washington gridlock and partisanship:

Diehard right-wing congressmen do not deserve all the blame. Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn't try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left. Obama seems reduced to fencing with Fox News, which won't get him very far or earn him a place in the history books.

I'm not sure how much more ground Obama (or Democrats in general) is supposed to give. They added a bunch of non-stimulative tax cuts into their stimulus package in order to attract Republican support (which didn't work). They took the most progressive ideas off the table in the health care debate (single-payer and a robust public option), and in the House adopted the "Stupak amendment" limiting abortion rights. The White House almost immediately sent almost 20,000 troops to Afghanistan, and seems ready to send more.

If the notion is that the Democrats (in Congress or the White House) have pushed hard-left policies, I'd like to see some evidence. Thomas (like Doyle McManus in the L.A. Times last week) points to the White House's criticism of Fox News Channel as an example of their partisanship--perhaps because there aren't many other actual examples.

So what, exactly, is the point of all this "Obama isn't bipartisan enough" chatter? Here we go--presidents move to the right to be successful:

The two greatest postwar presidents understood this. Dwight Eisenhower governed in the 1950s by deftly uniting center and right, and Ronald Reagan did the same in the 1980s.

And:

Since taking office, Obama has so far failed to win the battle for the center. The post-election polls show that the country is, if anything, drifting to the right. Obama needs to win some of those drifters back if he wants to get things done.

A Democrat needs to go further right--somehow you just knew that would be the advice from the corporate media.

From ABC World News, 11/11/09:

CHARLIE GIBSON: We understand he's raising new questions about a number of plans that are in front of him. What new questions are there to be asked after all this time?

MARTHA RADDATZ: Well, you would think he'd be through with the questions, Charlie.

Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (11/15/09):

Barack Obama is in danger of giving deliberation a bad name.

David Broder, Washington Post (11/16/09-- headline: "Enough Afghan Debate")

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.

O'Reilly interviewing John Stossel, who left ABC for Fox Business Network (11/3/09):

O'REILLY: You committed the cardinal sin of all time. You left a liberal network, and you went to a traditional right-leaning network. So you're never, ever going to be liked again by anyone. Does that make you sad?

STOSSEL: Well, I live with these people. They all live in my neighborhood. So that makes me sad.

O'REILLY: Move out to Long Island where I live, because I live with the folks.

STOSSEL: I like taking the subway to work.

O'REILLY: You're a pansy. Come out to Long Island. All right?

For anyone keeping score, you can find aerial maps of what is purportedly O'Reilly's humble Long Island home. Man of the people, indeed.

Once you've given up trying to defend the idea that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan can be understood as anything other than irony, the fallback position is generally that everyone else is just as biased.  Or as the headline over John Harwood's piece in the New York Times (11/2/09) puts it, "If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone."

To back up this assertion, Harwood--who's the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC--relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels.  These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the "partisan fragmentation" of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what--CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC's are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn't provide the most recent data for Fox's audience).

A mirror image, right?  Well, maybe a funhouse mirror.  What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public  identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent.  You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.

Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats--about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there's no comparison to the slant of Fox's audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.  Look at it this way: If each channel's current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there's a "missing" Democrat.

In other words--Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood's efforts to pretend that it is.

Today's Washington Post (11/2/09) notes the White House's apparent softening towards the Israeli side in Mideast negotiations (the headline is "Israel Putting Forth 'Unprecedented' Concessions, Clinton Says," a good indication of the current administration stance). The Post tells us that the Palestinian position "appears to have hardened in recent days," with "little room to negotiate on the key demand for a settlement freeze."

But the paper's summary of the Palestinian position does little to explain this "key demand":

The Palestinians regard the land occupied by about 300,000 West Bank settlers as part of a future Palestinian state, and consider continued settlement activity an effort to influence negotiations.

Israel promised to halt settlements under previous international agreements, and Palestinian officials say they want those promises fulfilled.

The primary Palestinian objection to Israeli settlements is not that they are "an effort to influence negotiations," or because Israel has "promised" to do something about them. These settlements, as colonies established in the wake of a military occupation, are violations of international law; any attempts to obscure that reality misinform readers.

When Fox News Channel was developing Sean Hannity's TV show, it was known as Hannity & Liberal To Be Determined. That liberal turned out to be Alan Colmes, who would eventually leave the gig after doing his part by playing the Washington Generals to Hannity's Harlem Globetrotters. It hardly mattered who sat in the "left" chair--they were there to get roughed up by the home team.

Until recently, professor Jane Hall was a regular guest on the O'Reilly Factor, debating conservative Bernie Goldberg. She's left Fox, and as she explained to CNN's Howard Kurtz (10/25/09), she never considered herself a liberal anyway:

KURTZ: When you appeared regularly on O'Reilly, were you there as a token from the dreaded MSM?

HALL: Well, I was there as a defender of the MSM. And you wouldn't believe how many famous journalists I talked to, who said better you than me. Let me tell you my side of the story. They didn't want to come on. It is hard to do, because it was like, when did you quit beating your wife? That was usually the question. But I felt it was worth doing.

KURTZ: Do you consider yourself a liberal?

HALL: No.

KURTZ: You were paired with Bernie Goldberg, the conservative point of view, who wrote a book about the media's slobbering love affair with Barack Obama?

HALL: Right.

KURTZ: So was that a fair pairing, to have someone who has that point of view, and you? You consider yourself a journalist.

HALL: I consider myself a journalist. I'm now able to say opinions because I'm a professor. I consider myself a moderate. In that universe, I was probably considered a wacky professor by O'Reilly. He would sort of pat me on the head and say, now, Jane, I know you liberals feel this way. And I'd say, I'm not really a liberal. So, yes, there's not necessarily a left/right comparison on there.

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt writes today (10/26/09) on the fear that the public option is a backdoor effort to bring a single-payer system to the United States:

Private companies would have to raise their rates, so more people would choose the public plan, so private rates would rise further--and we could end up with only the public option and no competition at all. Single-payer national health insurance may be the best outcome, but we should get there after an honest debate, not through the back door.

Post columnist Robert Samuelson on the same theme, also today:

Many would say: Whoopee! Get rid of the sinister insurers. Bring on a single-payer system. But if that's the agenda, why not debate it directly? It's not insurers that cause high health costs; they're simply the middlemen. It's the fragmented delivery system and open-ended reimbursement. Would strict regulation of doctors, hospitals and patients under a single-payer system provide control? Or would genuine competition among health plans over price and quality work better?

That's the debate we need, but in truth, doctors, hospitals and patients don't want to be limited, whether by government or markets. Congress reflects public opinion. Fearing a real debate, we fake it.

Well, this is good news. One of these guys should speak to an editor at the paper to encourage more op-eds on single payer, which has faced a virtual blackout in the corporate media debate (FAIR Media Advisory, 3/6/09). Maybe Fred Hiatt could speak to the person who runs the opinion pages at the Washington Post; after all, what better place to encourage a Washington debate?

Wait--isn't that Hiatt's job?

CNN host Lou Dobbs presented some big news on--wait for it--immigration last night (10/22/09):

New evidence that the American public wants action on the illegal immigration crisis in this country. A new CNN poll finds the vast majority of the American public wants illegal immigration stopped and most want illegal immigrants now in the country to leave--Lisa Sylvester with our report.

The CNN poll is odd; the main question is, "Would you like to see the number of illegal immigrants currently in this country increased, decreased, or remain the same?" 73 percent chose "decreased." They asked a follow-up to find out if people want the numbers decreased "a little," "a lot" or if they'd like to seem all of them removed immediately. Thirty-seven percent of the total sample chose the latter option; if that's what Dobbs meant by "most" people, that's just inaccurate reporting of his own network's poll.

Dobbs' reporter Lisa Sylvester uses the poll to make a bigger political point:

SYLVESTER: But Mark Krikorian with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher immigration law, says if anything, these polling numbers show that comprehensive immigration reform is going to be a tough sell.

MARK KRIKORIAN: Clearly, it's not happening any time soon and these poll results really just underline that reality.

SYLVESTER: But President Obama still is insisting and committed to signing a comprehensive immigration bill.

The idea that responses to this poll reveal people's feelings towards "reform" is a giant leap, since the CNN poll does not seem to have asked about that. Other polls have, though, like an April 9 ABC/Washington Post survey:

Would you support or oppose a program giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and meet other requirements?

Support: 61 percent

Oppose: 31 percent

A CBS/New York Times poll (4/22-26/09) gave three options for dealing with undocumented immigrants:

Stay, Apply for Citizenship: 44 percent

Stay as Guest Workers: 21 percent

Leave: 30 percent

Since all three groups could describe themselves as wanting to see illegal immigration "decreased," there's no reason to believe that CNN's poll tells us much of anything about the immigration debate. It does, however, give Lou Dobbs something to talk about.

John K. Wilson (Obamapolitics, 10/16/09) on Rush Limbaugh and fake quotes:

When it came to people repeating false quotes about Limbaugh that Limbaugh himself had never bothered to deny, Limbaugh was outraged: "we are in the process behind the scenes working to get apologies and retractions with the force of legal action against every journalist who has published these entirely fabricated quotes about me, slavery, and James Earl Ray."

But when it came to his own false quotes, Limbaugh has been entirely indifferent to fake quotes.

In one of his books, Limbaugh claimed to be quoting James Madison: "We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." The quote was a fake. Limbaugh admitted: "The quote is not Madison's. But the misattribution of this statement (an error, not 'a lie') has been made by many over the years."

Ah, so when Limbaugh was publishing fake quotes, it was "an error, not 'a lie,'" and it was excused because the mistake was made "by many over the years."

On April 27, 1995, Limbaugh read examples of "liberal hate speech" by Pacifica radio host Julianne Malveaux and CBS reporter Eric Engberg from the right-wing Media Research Center's newsletter, unaware that he was reading fake quotes from the April Fool's edition published almost a month earlier. The next day (4/28/95), Limbaugh admitted the quotes were false, but he heroically refused to apologize to the journalists he had falsely smeared: "Given some of the things liberals actually do say, it's not too tough to believe they would say the things Bozell makes up." Limbaugh's error was even more amazing because he had made the exact same mistake of reading the newsletter’s fake quotes as if they were real one year before (Extra!, 7-8/94).

Living up to the ridiculous notion that every right-wing slam on ACORN demands coverage in the "liberal media," the Washington Post ("Duo Release Another Video of Their Meeting With ACORN Worker," 10/22/09)  runs a story on the latest from the right-wing activists whose undercover videos shot at local ACORN offices got all the attention in the first place.

So what's the news? Well, apparently the duo appeared at the National Press Club to unveil a video of themselves at a Philadelphia ACORN office, where nothing much happened. The video they presented did not include any of the audio from ACORN workers--they removed those responses, allegedly for fear of being sued. And the pair refused to take questions from the press after their (sort of) press conference. Apparently the point of the whole exercise was to show that they spent 32 minutes at the office--and were thus not told to leave immediately.  How, exactly, does this qualify as  news?

Fans of Freakonomics economist Steven Levitt (and his journalistic partner, Stephen Dubner) might well have been surprised to hear about Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm's devastating debunking (10/12/09) of the climate change nonsense in the duo's new book, Superfreakonomics. Romm points out wacky assertions in the bestselling authors' sequel, like this passage they quote approvingly from former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold:

The problem with solar cells is that they're black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat--which contributed to global warming.

It's as if the premise of solar panels is that they don't absorb as much heat from the Sun as coal-burning plants, and Myhrvold has discovered that because they're black (actually, they're usually blue) this won't work. In reality, of course, the actual advantage of solar panels over coal-burning plants is that they don't burn coal.

That's a kooky thing to put in a book. But even worse is Levitt and Dubner's misrepresentation of actual climate scientist Ken Caldeira, of whom the authors say, "His research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight" (against global warming). Caldeira actually calls for outlawing devices that release carbon into the atmosphere, saying: "I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies.... It is wrong to mug little old ladies and wrong to emit carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero."

It's surprising that bestselling authors who have written regularly for the New York Times Magazine would get a story so ridiculously wrong--but maybe it shouldn't be. When the original Freakonomics came out, University of Michigan economist John DiNardo wrote a review (American Law and Economics Review, Fall/06) that pointed out that the book misrepresented a study that was cited as substantiation for one of Levitt's more controversial claims: that legalizing abortion led to lower crime rates. Citing a study by Cristian Pop-Eleches of children born after Romania banned abortion, Levitt and Dubner wrote:

Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals.

But in the actual study cited by Freakonomics, Pop-Eleches wrote:

On average, children born in 1967 just after abortions became illegal display better educational and labor market achievements than children born just prior to the change. This outcome can be explained by a change in the composition of women having children: urban, educated women were more likely to have abortions prior to the policy change, so a higher proportion of children were born into urban, educated households.

DiNardo has pointed out (though he does not do so in the version published in the American Law and Economics Review) that Pop-Eleches found that if you correct for demographic characteristics, children born after the abortion ban did less well than those born before, but this is very different from saying that the cohort did worse; DiNardo noted (quoting Pop-Eleches) that the study indicated that "the positive effect due to changes in the composition of mothers having children more than outweighs all the other negative effects that such a restriction might have had."

Levitt actually responded to diNardo's criticism in a snide blog post (Freakonomics blog, 2/6/08), which quoted Freakonomics' claim about the cohort doing worse, quoted Pop-Eleches' finding about outcomes after "controlling for...observable background variables," then deceptively concluded, "Sounds to me like Freakonomics and Pop-Eleches are saying the same thing"--ignoring the part where Pop-Eleches found that the cohort actually did better, thus giving readers no clue as to what DiNardo's actual complaint about Levitt's use of the paper was. ("C'mon, John, you're a top economist, and our book is 300 pages long. You must have better criticisms than that!" Levitt snarked. Well, yeah--most criticism sounds better when you actually explain it.)

This dishonest response to criticism foreshadowed Levitt's similarly slippery response (Freakonomics blog, 10/17/09) to Joe Romm's critique--see Climate Progress, 10/17/09. Maybe the climate change chapter from Superfreakonomics isn't an aberration--maybe people are just catching on to Levitt's smartest-guy-in-the-room act.

In a 2001 study, FAIR found that in its regular one-on-one interviews, Fox News' flagship news show Special Report With Brit Hume favored Republican guests over Democrats by a greater than 8-to-1 ratio. After the FAIR report, Hume told the New York Times (7/2/01) that if the data warranted, he  would rectify the bias: "If it is a reasonable question, and we find that there is some imbalance, then we’ll correct it." A 2002 follow-up study (Extra!, 7-8/02) showed some improvement--a mere 3-to-2 bias in favor of GOP over Democratic guests--but by 2004, FAIR showed, the ratio had crept back up to a 5-to-1 advantage for Republicans.

Last night, in an attempt to rebut White House communications director Anita Dunn's recent claim that Fox News "often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party," Fox News' Bill O’Reilly brought on Brit Hume as an expert on media bias (O'Reilly Factor, 10/12/09).

Hume claimed that Fox doesn’t feature "very many people who are down-the-line advocates for whatever the Republican party is up to," and that "the Republican party takes a fair amount of fairly sharp criticism on Fox News and has for a long time." Hume offered no evidence and ignored the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And, though it is beside the point of whether or not Fox News is an arm of the GOP, Hume wheeled out Fox's old attack on the rest of the corporate media. Citing his pre-Fox career at outlets like ABC News, Hume told O’Reilly: "It wasn't that I couldn't report the news in the way that I saw fit. It was that I often had to argue for doing it a different way than the headlines on the front page of the New York Times seemed to direct the network coverage."

With bias experts like Hume, one might wonder if Fox would feature the Unabomber as an expert on domestic terrorism. Certainly no one can say that Hume didn't get to report the news the way he "saw fit" at Fox.

Tom Edsall argues on the Columbia Journalism Review website (10/8/09) that the mainstream media should just own up to the fact that they're liberal. This comes as a response to the notion that the elite press missed out on the ACORN and Van Jones stories--a dubious premise. But Edsall doesn't make much of a case. He writes that before 1965,  "reporters were a mix of the working stiffs leavened by ne'er-do-well college grads unfit for corporate headquarters or divinity school." Since then, however, the elite press  "is composed in large part of 'new' or 'creative' class members of the liberal elite." Edsall's version of liberalism, then, is an elite strand focused mostly on certain social issues--his list is "abortion rights, women's rights, civil rights and gay rights."

Those seem like majority positions, but never mind. Edsall offers one concrete example:

In a UCLA study of media bias, reporters were found to be substantially more liberal and more Democratic than the public at large.

The study in question is the famous (and famously complicated) one that found that Fox News Channel's Special Report was centrist, and the Drudge Report leaned left. That should be enough to dismiss it on its face, but it's worth pointing out that that study did not tell us anything about "reporters" per se; they studied how often outlets cited particular think tanks, and ranked those think tanks on an ideological scale based on which politicians cited those groups (i.e., a liberal lawmaker drops the names of liberal think tanks; the frequency with which that think tank is cited in the media tells you how liberal the outlet is).

That the roundabout methodology of the study produced such bizarre conclusions is one reason not to cite it, but it also wasn't a study of what Edsall claimed it was--that is, of reporters' own political sentiments.  But there are such studies. In fact, FAIR released one in 1998, where journalists' views on important economic policy questions were compared with public opinion poll results on the same issues. Journalists were, it turns out, well to the right of the public on most issues; when asked to classify themselves, the majority were center-left on social issues, and center-right on economic issues. But the main finding was this:

On select issues from corporate power and trade to Social Security and Medicare to healthcare and taxes, journalists are actually more conservative than the general public.

In other words, the research that Edsall wants to cite exists; it just mostly contradicts his premise.