Last night by many reports the police crackdown on the Occupy Oakland encampment was severe: Tear gas and flash-bang grenades were used to disperse a crowd trying to retake the park.

Reading about the events in the nation's capital, though, and you got a different impression. The Washington Post--no stranger to minimizing the Occupy protests--ran a short AP dispatch under the headline "Protesters Wearing Out Their Welcome Nationwide."

As if that weren't dismissive enough, take a look at the photo the Post ran:

Yesterday's AP "factcheck" (9/20/11) of Barack Obama's speech about raising taxes on the super-wealthy cleverly debunked an argument that Obama didn't make. No one is saying that all millionaires pay a lower rate than their secretaries--Warren Buffett drew attention because he said he did, and there are undoubtedly other multi-millionaires in the same boat. As Dean Baker observed at Beat the Press today (9/21/11):

President Obama made a simple and true statement in his speech on the budget Monday. He said that there were millionaires and billionaires who pay tax at a lower rate than middle income families.

Many news outlets went to town to point out that on average millionaires and billionaires pay tax at a higher rate than middle income families. Of course this is not what Obama said. He was pointing out that some of the richest people in the country (Warren Buffet was his model) get most or all of their income as capital gains and therefore only pay taxes at the 15 percent capital gains rate.

Baker recommends a piece in today's New York Times (9/21/11) that was more factual than AP's factcheck:

In 2009, 238,000 households filed returns with adjusted gross incomes of at least $1 million. One-quarter of them paid an effective federal income tax rate of less than 15 percent, the data shows, and 1,470 paid no federal income tax at all....

Though the group is small, the dollars are large. For the top 400 taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate has dropped from 29 percent in 1993 to 18 percent in 2008. The average adjusted gross income of those 400 households was $271 million. By comparison, households with $50,000 to $75,000 in income paid an effective rate of 15 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But the AP piece has legs--a Slate article noted: "But as a general point, Buffett is wrong: In aggregate, richer earners do pay higher rates." The link goes to the AP factcheck. Again--Buffett was talking about himself and others like him. It would not seem to be a hard concept to grasp, but for whatever reason there are reporters who seem interested in protected the super-wealthy.

In other tax news: Fox's Bill O'Reilly has apparently threatened to quit working if his taxes go up. Let's hope Congress considers the enormously positive political and social effects this could have on American life.

Yesterday Barack Obama made a speech outlining his deficit reduction plan--focusing attention on a variety of spending cuts and tax increases. The Associated Press, as is their habit, issued a "factcheck" piece by Stephen Ohlemacher that managed to bungle the issues involved, making it sound as if Obama was wrong about the taxes that wealthy people pay.

Here's how it started:

President Barack Obama makes it sound as if there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

"Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," Obama said Monday. "That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that."

The data tell a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

If that's what you get from "the data,"  AP doesn't do a good job of showing it. The piece points out early on that about 1,400 millionaires paid no income tax at all--that's a small number of tax avoiders, they explain, though clearly this would be part of what Obama is talking about.

But then they zero in on what seems to be their best case:

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes and payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.

Well, that sounds like a slam dunk, right? The rich pay twice as much as middle class earners. Or maybe not:

Obama's claim hinges on the fact that, for high-income families and individuals, investment income is often taxed at a lower rate than wages. The top tax rate for dividends and capital gains is 15 percent. The top marginal tax rate for wages is 35 percent, though that is reserved for taxable income above $379,150.

So what if much of a really wealthy person's income is investment income? AP doesn't get into that; it moves on to discussing the fact that a lot of poor people pay no income tax.

It's useful to recall that Warren Buffett--supposedly the inspiration for this plan--was saying that he made $46 million but only paid 17 percent in taxes. His secretary, he said, paid more--relative to what she earned.  Is Buffett the only one who's figured out how to do this? One recent report from the Citizens for Tax Justice showed:

The IRS report shows that in 2008 (the latest year for which data are available), the 400 richest income tax filers paid just 18.1 percent of their adjusted gross income (AGI) in federal income taxes.

That is down from 22.3 percent in 2000.

And this post from the Tax Policy Center tries to explain further:

The lower taxes on investment income mean that many high-income taxpayers face a lower ETR [effective tax rate] than middle- and upper-middle-income people who get almost all of their income from working. People in the top 0.1 percent--those with income over $2.18 million in 2011--who get more than two-thirds of their income from gains and dividends face an ETR of just 12 percent, compared with 16 percent for people in the fourth quintile who get less than 10 percent of their income from investments.

It's worth recalling that Obama's actual point was this:

They should have to defend that unfairness--explain why somebody who’s making $50 million a year in the financial markets should be paying 15 percent on their taxes, when a teacher making $50,000 a year is paying more than that--paying a higher rate.

It is difficult to see what is wrong with that statement. The Associated Press took  a seemingly uncontroversial point and, by magic of its "factchecking" machine, turned into an inaccuracy.

"Iran arming Iraq insurgents" was last month's story. Today's papers are telling a different story; the new line being pushed by U.S. officials is that Iran is supporting Al-Qaeda.

Today's Washington Post:

Iran Allows Money, Recruits

to Reach Al-Qaeda, U.S. Says

'Secret deal' allegedly supports activities of terrorists in Pakistan

In the New York Times:

Treasury Accuses Iran

of Aiding Al-Qaeda

Associated Press:

U.S. Accuses Iran

of 'Secret Deal' With Al-Qaeda

The Post calls this "the most serious U.S. allegation to date of Iranian aid to the terrorist group"-- though it later notes that "U.S. officials have repeatedly accused Iran of assisting Al-Qaeda, links between the two have been difficult to prove." This time around the charge is that a Syrian middleman operating from Iran transfers money and recruits to Al-Qaeda leaders based in Pakistan.  Iran denies any role in this alleged scheme, and the evidence offered in the stories amounts to statements from U.S. officials asserting that this is happening.

The notion that Shi'ite Iran would be working closely with Sunni fundamentalist Al-Qaeda is a leap, as some of this coverage suggests.

But the Times account, by Helene Cooper, seems to go the furthest in helping to shore up the U.S. case,  making the bizarre argument that the existence of U.S. allegations and the Treasury Department sanctions against individuals in the supposed network mean the case against Iran is solid:

The officials said the sanctions were nonetheless meaningful because they would serve to demonstrate that Iran was working with Al-Qaeda.

That's like saying that the fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq to destroy its WMDs means Iraq must have WMDs.

When not providing justification in its own voice, the Times allows U.S. officials to anonymously push their argument further:

Indeed, one senior administration said the action sought to expose both "a key funding facilitation network for Al-Qaeda and a key aspect for Iranian support for international terrorism."

"Our sense is this network is operating through Iranian territory with the knowledge and at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities," the official said in a conference call with reporters.

Of course, if Iranian officials were really allowing this to happen, U.S. officials would probably say so on the record.

Floating allegations about an Iran/Al-Qaeda connection isn't new. For a good dissenting take on media coverage from last month, you can read this piece from Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.

And it's worth pointing out that the other Iran story, which alleges that Iran is shipping arms into Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers, isn't going away either.

In a piece today, the Washington Post's Greg Miller reports on a CIA base that will be used to conduct drone strikes in Yemen:

The agency is building a desert airstrip so that it can begin flying armed drones over Yemen. The facility, which is scheduled to be completed in September, is designed to shield the CIA's aircraft, and their sophisticated surveillance equipment, from observers at busier regional military hubs such as Djibouti, where the JSOC drones are based.

The Washington Post is withholding the specific location of the CIA facility at the administration's request.

The existence of the base has been reported elsewhere--the New York Times noted on June 15 that an "American official would not disclose the country where the CIA base was being built." The Times pointed out that the shift to CIA control was important, since with "the operations under CIA control, they could be carried out as a 'covert action,' which can be undertaken without the support of the host government." Meaning the U.S. could bomb Yemen without the approval of Yemen's government, in the event that the current government were to fall.

The story seemed to have been broken by the Associated Press (6/14/11), which, like the Post, is not telling readers what it knows about the base:  "The Associated Press has withheld the exact location at the request of U.S. officials."

This is reminiscent of the Post's decision in 2005 to report on CIA secret prisons ("black sites") in Eastern Europe--without disclosing the location of those sites, where terrorism suspects were taken to be interrogated (Extra! Update, 12/05).

It obviously makes senses for any White House to want to keep its secret programs under wraps--particularly when there's a chance that laws are being broken, or civilians are being killed. (Recall that the U.S. Navy launched a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs into Yemen in 2009, reportedly killing 41 civilians.)

It does not make sense, however, for news outlets to assist them in these efforts.

On February 5 the Associated Press ran a story about a case in Cuba:

Prosecutors are charging jailed U.S. contractor Alan Gross with "acts against the integrity and independence" of Cuba and requesting a 20-year prison term, state news media reported Friday, dimming hopes he would be allowed to go home soon.

Further down, as one would expect, is a response from the United States:

Gloria Berbena, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which Washington maintains instead of an embassy, said his "imprisonment without charges for more than a year is contrary to all international human-rights obligations."

Now that is rich. A news outlet might want to point out the well-known fact that elsewhere on Cuba, the United States has built a detention facility to do precisely that to prisoners under U.S. control. But the AP is not that impolite.

(h/t JJ, who spotted the piece in his local paper)

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.

If you listen to CounterSpin this week (and you should be downloading the podcast EVERY WEEK), you'll hear this item:

USA Today ran a version of an AP story September 29 about the outrageous and depressing fact that not a penny of the $1.5 billion the U.S. pledged to Haiti for rebuilding after the devastating earthquake nearly nine months ago has actually been delivered. It's the sort of news that might make readers sad, but it should make them angry. Trouble is, you have to get to paragraph 10 of the 12 paragraph piece before you learn why the money hasn't moved: Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who is holding up the authorization bill on purpose because he believes it includes one unnecessary staff position. One, as his spokesperson unashamedly declares.

Part of the strategy behind these Senate holds is that you can sort of get away with it without anyone noticing that you're being a creep. Of course, this works even better if the press plays along.

I mention this mainly because last night, after recording this week's CounterSpin, I tuned in to the Daily Show to see Jon Stewart had a very similar take. (His was, I should say, funnier.)  And it featured Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman. Watch it here..

An AP piece published across the Web today (9/16/10) carries this headline: AP-GfK Poll: Nearly Half Oppose Tax Hikes for Rich.

Well, that's one way of looking at it--just like you could report the results of the 1988 election by saying that Michael Dukakis got "nearly half" of the popular vote. The more logical way of putting it would be that more than half support letting tax cuts expire for the rich: 54 percent to 44 percent. But framing it instead around the minority position lets them focus on how Democrats might worry about "provoking the 44 percent who say the reductions should include the wealthy," as opposed to worrying about provoking the majority who don't feel that way.

And that majority is particularly strong among Democratic voters (three quarters), who are presumably the ones Democratic lawmakers need to be most worried about, particularly given the sharp drop in enthusiasm among those voters.

It's also worth pointing out that this poll seems to be a bit of an outlier, according to the data available on PollingReport.com: A recent Pew poll conducted at basically the same time (9/9-12/10) put support for keeping tax cuts for the super rich at only 29 percent (16 percent among Democrats), a National Journal poll (8/27-30/10) put it at 35 percent, and a USA Today/Gallup poll (8/27-30/10) had it at 37 percent. A media outlet's write-up of its own poll doesn't often include such information about other polls, but it certainly would be helpful to readers trying to make sense of the numbers.

Reporting on Andrew Breitbart's latest bit of deceit--using a selectively edited video to paint a low-level USDA official Shirley Sherrod as a racist--has given the media a chance to resurrect one of their favorite myths: Breitbart's triumphant takedown of the community-organizing group ACORN.

In September 2009, Breitbart's website BigGovernment.com posted videos, made by conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, supposedly showing ACORN employees counseling the pair--ostensibly pretending to be a prostitute and a pimp--on how to avoid paying taxes and other illegal activities.  The videos were later found to be completely misleading. Among other things, it was revealed that O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp in ACORN's offices, and in many cases he pretended to be Giles concerned boyfriend protecting her from abuse.

In covering the Shirley Sherrod story, many outlets have mentioned the videos--not as an example of Breitbart's established incredibility, but rather as a vindication of his heroic muckraking track record.

Answering for viewers the question, "Just who is Andrew Breitbart?," CNN American Morning anchors Kiran Chetry and John Roberts (7/21/10) said Breitbart "built a brand around his 'big' websites, and that includes BigGovernment.com, the site that first posted the video of Sherrod. There is also BigHollywood.com, BigJournalism.com, BigPeace.com." Roberts then reminded viewers that BigGovernment.com "was also the first site to post those undercover ACORN videos featuring the pimp and prostitute."

In their initial report on the Sherrod story, AP's Ben Evans and Mary Clare Jalonick (7/20/10) applauded BigGovernment.com as the site that "gained fame after releasing video of workers for the community organizing group ACORN counseling actors posing as a pimp and prostitute." Later versions of the story were changed to read "prostitute and her boyfriend." However, in a more recent article (7/21/10), Evans and Jalonick reverted to the less accurate "prostitute and her pimp."

Slate (7/22/10) even saw Breitbart's latest smear as reason to "recycle" Christopher Beam's fawning profile of Breitbart, where he praises him as the one who posted "the now-famous videos that showed two young conservatives, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, entering several offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, posing as a pimp and a prostitute looking to open a brothel for underage, illegal immigrant girls."  This statement is made even stranger by the fact that, much further down in the profile, Beam quietly relents that O'Keefe was actually wearing "business casual" clothing. Beam also repeats the lie that Giles and O'Keefe "had been instructed to, among other things, bury their sex money in a tin in their back yard."

Again, O'Keefe never wore his ludicrous "pimp" out fit in the ACORN offices. Most times he was asking employees how to protect his girlfriend from an abusive pimp. The "tin in the backyard" suggestion was in response to a question from Giles on how to hide her money from the same fictitious pimp.  Also, it is now clear the videos were heavily edited to make employees appear to be answering questions in more sinister ways. In fact, Juan Carlos Vera, a San Diego ACORN employee who was fired as a result of the videos, was found to have called his cousin, a police detective, after the pair left to report their activities. Furthermore, ACORN has now been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing by three separate independent investigations.

All of this has been noted numerous times by FAIR (Action Alert, 3/11/10) and others (Brad Blog, 3/3/10). But considering the pervasiveness of this myth within the corporate media, it apparently needs to be pointed out again.