New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane has a new column wondering if the readers of the Paper of Record want to know if the politicians the paper covers are telling the truth.

Seriously. It's right here.

He writes:

I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge "facts" that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

He even has a pretty good example:

on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches "apologizing for America," a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the "post-truth" stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: Should news reporters do the same?

I don't think Brisbane's trying to be cute here, though he might want to know that Krugman for a time was actually not allowed call a lie a lie: During the 2000 presidential election season, Krugman said the Times "barred him from using the word 'lying'" when writing about George W. Bush (Washington Post, 1/22/03).

Nonetheless, Brisbane even offers some language that a reporter might insert into a story about Romney's false assertion:

"The president has never used the word 'apologize' in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words."

This would be an improvement over nothing, but it's still pretty tame--if Romney's making this up in order to generate a campaign rally applause line, is it really a "misleading interpretation" of Obama's actual words?

The fact that this question is even being asked tells you something pretty profound about the state of corporate media--at least when it comes to politics, that is.

I don't think sports reporters would be so baffled by the idea that facts matter. Let's say New York Knicks star forward Amar'e Stoudemire declared after a game that he was proud of scoring 40 points, and went on to brag that this was much better than the measly eight points that Boston Celtics forward Kevin Garnett scored, who sat much of the second half due to foul trouble.

Reporters who watched the game and looked at the box score would notice that Garnett wasn't in foul trouble, had actually scored 20 points, and that Stoudemire hadn't actually scored 40 points.

I suspect that his odd, wildly inaccurate boasting would find its way into the paper--and that a reporter wouldn't talk about how Stoudemire had "misleadingly interpreted" the box score.

Of course political arguments aren't always so clear-cut (though the Romney example is pretty straightforward). But it is very easy to imagine a kind of journalism that demands powerful figures document questionable assertions--and note when they are unable to do so.

George Will's January 1 column in the Washington Post was a laundry list of familiar criticisms of progressives and Democrats--they worry too much about climate change, for instance.

Another non-problem, in Will's world, is student loan debt:

Political logic suggests that this year Obama will try to rekindle the love of young voters with some forgiveness of student debts. But one-third of students do not borrow to pay college tuition. The average debt for those who do borrow to attend a four-year public institution is $22,000, and the average difference between the per-year earnings of college graduates and those with only a high school diploma is . . . $22,000.

I guess one lesson is that 2/3 of college students should either get themselves full scholarships or wealthier parents. But in the event that this isn't possible, never fear--you'll make enough money in a hurry to pay off your debt.

The more important question might be how this level of debt has changed over time. According to this item from the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog (8/15/11), "There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25 percent from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008."

And as the Project on Student Debt reports, the average debt load doubled from 1996 to 2008:

Last night (12/15/11), MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes were impressed by a new Pew poll--flagged by Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent--showing that a vast majority of the public believes that corporations and the wealthy have too much power.

The picture one gets from the poll is pretty dramatic:

The question that seemed most important to Maddow and Hayes was why Republican politicians aren't shifting their policies in response to this apparent surge in anti-corporate populism:

MADDOW: The national sentiment right now being expressed to pollsters is that the people at the top are getting way too much of the spoils of both our economy and our political system and I resent it, and I think that even if I'm a Republican.

HAYES: Majority of Republicans say that wealthy people--corporations and people with money--have too much power in this country, a majority of Republicans in the poll.

MADDOW: Are you seeing politicians behave in a way that reflects a desire to meet that concern?

HAYES: What's amazing to me is how unresponsive Republican state level officials are and how much they're responsive to all of their ideological priors, all of the interests that they promised fealty to before they got into office, and how little trimming of the sails they've done.

I mean, Rick Scott just seems to be perfectly happy to plow along at 25 percent, doing all these things that are wildly unpopular. And I think there's a different set of incentive structures on the right, partly because of the way the money works over there, partly because of the ideological cohesiveness of the base.

But what we have not seen largely are course corrections.

MADDOW: Yes.

Of course, MSNBC is likely to focus more on what Republicans are doing wrong, or not doing at all; that's their bread and butter. But setting up a political discussion along these lines presents some problems.

If you're wondering why Republican politicians haven't become more anti-corporate, what about the Democratic Party? Democrats in the poll are far more critical of corporate power than Republicans. Does their party seem politically responsive to this?

(Of course, the first question to ask is whether you really believe politicians are actually sensitive to public opinion at all--read about Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics for another take.)

The most important thing to know is that this new populism isn't new. ABC's been polling on this for a while (results are posted on PollingReport.com):

And FAIR took note of this in 1998 (press release, 6/1/98)  when we compared public opinion to a survey of elite media:

The general public is more critical of the concentration of corporate power in the United States than are journalists. When asked whether they felt "too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies," 57 percent of the journalists agreed, while 43 percent felt they did not have too much power. The numbers were quite different, though, when the Times Mirror Center asked the same question of the general public in October 1995. A full 77 percent of the public felt that corporations had too much power, with only 18 percent feeling that they did not.

There's an old joke about how the pundit spectrum in corporate media debates goes from GE all the way to GM. On Sunday's Meet the Press, viewers got a chance to see that joke come to life.

On the panel was conservative former GE CEO Jack Welch, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell. The left end of the spectrum must have been former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr., best known for his time leading the center-right Democratic Leadership Council. Nowadays Ford is a TV pundit (the "liberal" who advises Democrats to move further right) and works as a managing director at Morgan Stanley--a move from his previous gig at Bank of America.

As for the actual debate, Welch praised Herman Cain's tax plan, called for more domestic oil drilling and complained about the White House's anti-business regulatory policies. Ford, as the TV liberal, pointed out that the administration thankfully did not pursue progressive policy goals like card check, and that the White House deserves credit for reining in some EPA regulation. Ford also included a slam of Occupy Wall Street:

We Democrats can't criticize Republicans for catering to the Tea Party and not say to our Democratic Party you got to look beyond Occupy and be willing to do what's in the best interest of the country.

Given his current job, this is not surprising--though NBC viewers may have wanted to know that the "liberal" in the debate has been working for several banks. Or maybe David Brooks was the liberal here...

It is very unusual to see such direct criticism of the New York Times in the Times itself (9/27/11)--this is something to celebrate.

To the Editor:

Anyone who has spent a few days--or nights--in occupied Zuccotti Park near Wall Street this past week would have trouble recognizing what they’ve seen in "Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim," by Ginia Bellafante (Big City column, September 25).

The protesters' numbers have been growing, not "dwindling," both in New York and in related occupations around the country. Though their views are diverse, what exactly unites them is anything but "impossible to decipher": the rampant corruption of the country's politics by a wealthy few.

At the symbolic heart of that corruption, protesters are making decisions and organizing themselves through a purposely leaderless, consensus-based process based on people, not money. For many Americans, nonviolent direct action like this is the best hope for having a political voice, and it deserves to be taken seriously by those of us in the press.

NATHAN SCHNEIDER
New York, September 25, 2011
The writer is editor of WagingNonviolence.org.

There's a piece at the CBS website (9/21/11) by Robert Hendin marking Bob Schieffer's 20 years hosting the network's Sunday morning show Face the Nation. Hendin, a senior producer for the show, writes:

From the get go, Bob made his plans known. "Our aim is to going to be very simple here: to find interesting people from all segments of American life who have something to say and give them a chance to say it," he said that morning.

The piece goes on to reveal--likely by accident--a lot about what they mean by "all segments of American life."

So to celebrate Bob's 20th Anniversary, we went through the files and looked at exactly who he's had on the broadcast. Here's a look at Bob Schieffer's 20 years at Face the Nation by the numbers:

Bob has interviewed:

Three presidents of the United States, four vice presidents, seven secretaries of state, six secretaries of Defense and 45 different cabinet members. He's also interviewed 123 senators and 109 different representatives.

Of those, a few notable names come up more frequently than others: Vice President Joe Biden has been interviewed by Bob on Face the Nation 46 times. House Speaker John Boehner, seven times. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been on the broadcast 16 times, including this past Sunday's program. By far though, the number one guest of Bob's tenure as host of Face the Nation is none other than Senator John McCain, who has been on the program 76 times.

All segments of American life.  When did they give up on that idea?

The right is apparently up in arms over this photo of Michele Bachmann that appears on the cover of this week's Newsweek:

If someone wants to say this is an unflattering picture, fine.

But Bachmann's supporters are unlikely to find much in Lois Romano's article to complain about. On the campaign trail, Bachmann's "simple, black-and-white distillations of complex problems are cheered as refreshing and tough." A campaign speech is a "folksy assault on a bloated federal government."

Explaining Bachmann's apparent surge, Romano writes:

Just months ago, Bachmann was the butt of jokes on late-night TV for her flawed grasp of U.S. history. But all that changed one night this spring when she took the stage at the first major GOP presidential debate with the middle-aged, drab men running for the nomination, and set herself apart with poise and precision. When others meandered or waffled, she shot back with answers that reduced Washington's dysfunctional gridlock to understandable soundbites.

I'm not sure comedians have stopped writing jokes about her-- or that her "grasp" of U.S. history has changed much since the spring. So much of the corporate media's enthusiasm for Bachmann comes down to cheering her performance at that one debate. People who watched it, or read the transcript afterwards, might have a hard time reconciling the upbeat characterizations of Bachmann's performance with the actual words she spoke from the stage.

As we pointed out, her  answer on jobs, the biggest political question of the moment, was a call to close down the Environmental Protection Agency, which she said should be called  the "Job-Killing Organization of America." Was that "poise and precision?"

But it's not just Newsweek. In the Washington Post, former Bush adviser Nicolle Wallace wrote that at the debate, "Bachmann's answers were crisp, strategic and smoothly delivered."

The press have set the bar for Bachmann somewhere near the floor--which means she'll almost always be exceeding expectations. This is one of the defining features of the coverage of her presidential campaign.

NBC (Nightly News, 7/19/11) did some polling to see what the public thinks about the Republican and Democratic positions on the budget and debt ceiling :

CHUCK TODD: Now, look, any sort of deal is putting pressure on the bases of both parties. For Republicans, a large majority of the country is telling Republicans get off the no new taxes pledge and compromise, 62 percent.

TEXT:

NBC News/The Wall Street Journal

Should Republicans Compromise?

Agree to Raise Taxes

Yes 62%

No 27%

TODD: But inside those numbers, tea party supporters, 65 percent of them say to Republicans, "No. Stick to your guns and stick to that pledge."

As for Democrats and entitlement reform, look at this one. A majority, 52 percent of everybody we tested, said to Democrats, "Stick to your guns and don't allow cuts in Medicare and Social Security for deficit reduction."

TEXT:

NBC News/The Wall Street Journal

Should Democrats Compromise?

Cuts to Social Security & Medicare

Yes 38%

No 52%

TODD: So as you can see, it's a mixed political bag for both parties, but particularly for Republicans.

So 62 percent of those polled said Republicans should compromise, while the opposite proportion--38 percent--said Democrats should do the same. That translates into a "mixed bag" for both parties--that is, if corporate media are doing the mixing.

Some in the press still seem to have trouble defining whatever it is that motivates the Tea Party movement. I noticed this in an L.A. Times piece last week (6/5/11):

Americans possess a long-standing wariness of power and its potential as a corrupting influence, especially in the hands of large institutions. That instinct bred our government system of checks and balances and, more recently, led members of the "tea party" to embrace the nation's founders (repackaged as a band of small-government crusaders) as the guiding lights of their movement.

So "wariness of power" and the "corrupting influence" of "large institutions" is what this is about. Huh. Then came New York Times columnist David Brooks (6/14/11), who wrote:

The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country.

So that is what the Koch brothers are fighting for?

Seriously, another one of these?

Like last year, maybe some of the reporters involved find it valuable for the people they cover to get to know them on a more personal level, away from all the tough questions and dogged investigations.

"Senators, congressmen and even President Obama have misquoted the Founding Fathers in recent years," writes Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold in a June 7 piece suggesting that there is a bipartisan trend of misquotation and misrepresentation of historical events. After citing Sarah Palin's recent botched account of Paul Revere's revolutionary ride, Fahrenthold implies that historical distortion comes from a variety of political quarters:

But in Washington, nobody should feel too smug, as Palin is hardly the only politician with a habit of helpfully twisting the historical record, accidentally or not, and sometimes with politically handy consequences.

If Fahrenthold means to give the impression that there is no partisan pattern to the way politicians distort history, that's not what his assembled facts indicate.

The Washington Post reporter cites eight Republicans for  "twisting the historical record": Six--Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.); Rep. Louie Gohmert (Texas);  Rep. Virginia Foxx (N.C.);  Rep. Marlin A. Stutzman (Ind.); Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah) and Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.)--are cited for misquoting founders, while two, Palin and Rep. Michelle Bachman (Minn.), are cited for distorting Revolutionary War history.

And Democrats?  Fahrenthold cites only Barack Obama, for dropping the words "by their creator" from a speech he gave quoting the Declaration of Independence. (Fahrenthold reports that the White House insists that the president has accurately quoted the passage "countless times." If he really thinks Obama left out that phrase because he doesn't like its religious content, I've got a scoop for him involving birth certificates.)

So Fahrenthold's report is little more than false equivalence--an attempt to attribute a fault that resides largely in one political party and movement to both sides of the political aisle. This is particularly clear when taken in context with a long-term conservative campaign to force history to conform to their views on subjects ranging from religion to the economy.

Last night (6/6/11), Fox News host Sean Hannity was talking with WorldNetDaily's  Joe Farah:

FARAH: Charles Rangel is still in the House. Barney Frank is still in the House. Bill Clinton is getting awards. Gerry Studds got a standing ovation from House Democrats. This is a guy who had sex with a congressional page, correct?

HANNITY: But what about--you know, you think back when Republican scandals come up, they all bail out. I can't think of one that ever stayed, can you?

He's got a point. Except for Republican Sen. David Vitter (prostitution scandal, still in office). And Republican Sen. John Ensign (extramarital affair, investigation over payments and favors for his lover's spouse), who stuck around for two years after his scandal surfaced.  Oh, and there's Republican Sen. Larry Craig, who was arrested for lewd conduct in a bathroom in June 2007 and finished out his term. And also Republican South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, whose extramarital affair made headlines in mid-2009 when he disappeared from public life to visit his girlfriend. (Remember his cover story about hiking the Appalachian Trail?)

Then there's Fox favorite Rudy Giuliani, who literally paraded his then-girlfriend Judith Nathan around town in 2000, announcing his intention to file for divorce in a televised press conference.

In the non-politician realm, Hannity needn't look far for other examples. Bill O'Reilly, anyone?

On Sunday's episode of NBC's Chris Matthews Show (4/3/11), the panel actually talked about criticism of the mainstream media, with some citing the media's Iraq War debacle as a major factor in the rise of blogosphere-based media criticism.

The discussion got somewhat confused along the way, as this segued into a discussion of the entirely unrelated phenomenon of Republican political candidates who do not like to speak to journalists.

Then the Washington Post's Bob Woodward weighed in with a solution. He explained that you can get in good with politicians--I mean, do investigative journalism--if you follow his simple advice: Tell your subjects exactly what you're going to ask them ahead of time, giving them time to come up with answers, and then print their answers.

WOODWARD: I think the survival of the so-called mainstream media has to do with quality. And if you assemble a bunch of questions and go to a candidate and say, "Look, I'm serious. I really want to ask about this," and you take them as seriously as they take themselves--and believe me, they all take themselves seriously.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

WOODWARD: And you've done your homework, they--and you're fair minded and neutral, they are going to engage. When I've done these books on Bush and Obama, I send in--I hate to disclose trade craft here--20-page memos saying this is what I want to ask about.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

WOODWARD: People say, well, you're telling them--you're tipping them off. And I say, yes. I want them to do some homework themselves. I want them to be fully engaged. And I think you can do that with lots of work. And--but if it's just we like to come in and chat about the news of the day, we'll get stiffed.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, they don't need--it's too wild, it's too crazy.

WOODWARD: Yeah.

Today the Washington Post published a tribute to David Broder that featured a few former politicians recalling how Broder was remarkably interested in talking to them. All agreed that Broder was the kind of reporter who wanted to know what they were thinking.

That's a great way to make friends with powerful people. Whether it produces good journalism is another matter entirely. The same can be said of Woodward's advice, which is particularly strange coming after a discussion of the media's Iraq failures. Getting too close to official sources was exactly the problem then; it's unlikely to be the key to the corporate media's "survival." But it's worked wonders for Bob Woodward.

Few pieces better illustrate the uselessness of so much corporate media political journalism than Kathleen Hennessey's piece in the L.A. Times (4/4/11) on Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's deficit reduction plan.

The piece is headlined "House Republican Budget Plan Would Revamp Medicare," and the lead explains that the GOP budget proposal outlined by Ryan "includes an overhaul of Medicare and Medicaid and would aim to chop at least $4 trillion from the federal deficit over the next decade.""Revamp," an "overhaul"--well, that sounds good, doesn't it? How does Ryan plan to do that, exactly?

Despite reporting that Ryan's "broad overview" offered "the clearest picture yet" of Republican deficit-reduction plans, the piece is far from clear: Hennessey reports that Ryan is suggesting "changes to entitlement programs"--"dramatic changes"--and is "addressing the rising costs of the program." Then, in the seventh paragraph, we get this:

Under the proposed rework of the Medicare program, seniors would chose from several federally subsidized health plans. The changes would take effect in 2021 and would not affect people who are 55 or older now, Ryan said.

Oh, OK--so how's that going to save $4 trillion? The piece doesn't say--that's the full description.

Then in the 26th paragraph, we get a quote from a partisan critic of Ryan's plan, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D.-Md.), who says that the plan cuts "health security for seniors." He's not allowed to get any more specific than that, but Ryan gets four paragraphs of rebuttal to Van Hollen's one paragraph of vague criticism, starting with:

Ryan described the Medicare plan as a version of a "premium support" system he crafted along with former Clinton administration budget director Alice Rivlin. He acknowledged the proposal would shift more of the burden for healthcare costs to seniors, saying the wealthiest seniors would bear the largest portion.

"More for the poor, more for people who are sick, and we don't give as much to the people who are wealthy," Ryan said. "This saves Medicare."

Whoa, whoa, wait a second--"shift more of the burden for healthcare costs to seniors"? Why is this the first we're hearing about this, in the 27th paragraph of a 31-paragraph article?

Ryan's plan is not very hard to explain: He wants to replace Medicare with a system where seniors would receive vouchers to buy health insurance. As the cost of health insurance rises every year, the value of the vouchers would rise by not as much. Eventually the difference between the value of the vouchers and the cost of buying health insurance, along with a similar scheme for cutting Medicaid reimbursements, would amount to $4 trillion--which would be the amount that would come out of the pockets of seniors and the poor, plus the amount of healthcare they would do without.

That's what the L.A. Times means by "revamping." But if the paper explained that to its readers, they would mostly think Ryan's idea was a terrible one. And that would be biased--so it's better to leave the readers not knowing any more than they did before they read the article.

Washington Post Dana Milbank (3/19/11) skewers the Republicans for their "emergency meeting" to defund NPR:

This particular emergency involved the lower end of the FM radio dial. Republicans, in an urgent budget-cutting maneuver, were voting to cut off funding for National Public Radio. All $5 million of it--or one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the federal budget.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office ran the numbers and calculated the impact this emergency measure would have on government spending: "No effect."

One of the rules of corporate media balance is that if you criticize Republicans, you have to find an example of similar buffoonery on the other side. Milbank finds that in an effort to end the nine-year-old Afghan War, which nearly two-thirds of Americans now say is not worth fighting:

Democrats would have been in a good position to point out the Republicans' lack of seriousness, except they were engaged in their own trivial pursuit. On Thursday, the same day the Republicans were doing battle with Diane Rehm, the House was also debating a bill by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ordering full withdrawal from Afghanistan by year’s end.

Milbank explains: "Neither a vindictive slap at public broadcasting nor a pell-mell pullout from Afghanistan would be good policy," though in the end he gives the Democrats more credit for opposing majority opinion on the war:

In the end, the Democrats proved somewhat more adult in restraining impulses. Party leaders opposed Kucinich's Afghanistan pullout plan as irresponsible, and most Democrats voted against it.

Well, thank goodness someone in Washington is being a grown up.

The desire to not debate the Afghan War seems to be a popular one at the Post. Today Fred Hiatt (3/21/11) cheers the fact that David Petraeus' Congressional appearances on the Afghan War were free of rancor--unlike his 2007 testimony on the Iraq War:

At a time when our political system is said to be incapable of rising above poisonous partisanship to promote the national interest, Gen. David Petraeus’s visit to Capitol Hill last week was instructive.

Hiatt adds:

Obama's escalation, when 73 percent of Americans want substantial numbers of troops brought home, would seem to open fertile ground to Republicans. But from their leaders on down, they haven't sought to plow there. In this instance at least, politics really has stopped at the water's edge.

For the Post, it seems, democracy is supposed to stop at the water's edge.