Three weeks ago, under the headline "Activists Seize Control of Politics," Politico (5/19/10) was reporting that U.S. politics may have changed forever:

The 2010 electorate has swallowed an emetic--disgorging in a series of
retching convulsions officeholders in both parties who seem to embody
conventional Washington politics.

The anti-establishment, anti-incumbent fevers on display Tuesday are not
new.... What's now clear, in a way that wasn't before, is that these results reflect
a genuine national phenomenon, not simply isolated spasms in response to
single issues or local circumstances....

This is a stark and potentially durable change in politics. The old
structures that protected incumbent power are weakening. New structures,
from partisan news outlets to online social networks, are giving
anti-establishment politicians access to two essential elements of effective
campaigns: publicity and financial support. In effect, the
anti-institutional forces that coalesced in recent years now look like an
institutional force of their own.

These epochal changes, Politico reports today (6/9/10), lasted for approximately three weeks:

On the biggest primary night of the year so far, the wild 2010 plotline took a turn for the familiar: The political center--and the conventional politicians that gravitate there--showed some enduring power.

In his editor's note in the current edition of Newsweek, Jon Meacham surveys the failures of the past decade or so and comes to a completely unsurprising conclusion: the right and left both failed.

From the financial sector to the Roman Catholic Church, it has been a bad couple of years for--to borrow a phrase from a BP chieftain--"big, important" players in global life. Going only a bit further back in the decade, the occupation of Iraq and the response to Katrina seem to mark the beginning of an era in which apparently competent institutions have all too often proved incompetent. The history of these years fails to fit neatly into the ideological categories of left or right, for both public and private enterprises have managed to miss the mark in hours of crisis. Government is not the root of all evil; neither are corporations.

The pull quote in the print edition reads, "Recent debacles do not fit into the categories of left or right, for both public and private enterprises have failed spectacularly."

Huh. Actually, I think most of those examples do fit pretty nicely into one category: The left opposed the Iraq War, opposed financial deregulation and sounded warnings about the housing bubble. Meacham also cited the BP oil spill; the left has long opposed offshore drilling.  Meacham's trying to say that when "government" fails, it's evidence that the left is mistaken in putting so  much faith in government. But that would require one to attribute Bush's disastrous Iraq War to the "left."

If you stick to the examples Meacham offers, it would seem more logical to conclude that the left was right, and the right was mostly wrong. Unless, that is, Katrina and Catholic priest sexual abuse were ideas of the left.

Jon Meacham, who's the co-host of PBS's new Need to Know public affairs program, lives in a world where the answers are always found in the center-right part of the political spectrum. You really have to twist yourself in knots in order to try and get this to make any sense, though.

The New York Times is being criticized for selective editing in its reporting on Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's misleading accounts of his military record--the paper posted on its website a clip of a speech where the Democratic Senate candidate makes his most direct claim to have served in Vietnam, but it edited that clip to leave out a nearby passage where he accurately depicts himself as serving "during the Vietnam War." The Times rejected the criticism in a response to Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent:

The New York Times in its reporting uncovered Mr. Blumenthal's long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service, which he acknowledged in an interview with the Times.  Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.

It is commendable to hold misleading politicians to account.  Our question is how universal this concern is at the New York Times. Political mavens may recall Ronald Reagan as one of the more striking examples of an elected official promoting fantasies about his military record; Reagan's claims to have personally witnessed the Holocaust as part of a government film crew at the end of World War II were first reported by the Washington Post's Lou Cannon in 1984 (3/5/84):

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir visited the White House last November 29, he was impressed by a previously undisclosed remembrance of President Reagan about the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. Repeating it to his Israeli Cabinet five days later, Shamir said Reagan had told him that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps.

Shamir said Reagan also informed him that he had saved a copy of the film because he believed that, in time, people would question what had happened....

Shamir's account appeared December 6 in the Israeli newspaper Maariv. It was confirmed last week to Edward Walsh, the Washington Post correspondent in Jerusalem, by Israeli Cabinet secretary Dan Meridor.

On Feb. 15, famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal met with Reagan in the White House and heard a similar story. Wiesenthal told Washington Post reporter Joanne Omang that he and Reagan had held "a very nice meeting," during which the president related "some of his personal remarks from the end of the war."

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, also was present. He told Omang that Reagan said he was "a member of the Signal Corps taking pictures of the camps" and that he had saved a copy of the film and shown it a year later to a person who thought the reports were exaggerated.

Reagan, in fact, never left the United States during World War II, when he worked for the military in Hollywood making propaganda films.  His footage of the death camps was a fantasy.

Now, this is not a case of a candidate for the Senate padding his resume; this is a sitting president offering an elaborate fabrication to another world leader. Yet the New York Times seems to have completely ignored the Post's scoop.  A thorough search of the Times' archives via Nexis turns up a solitary mention, in Reagan's obituary (6/6/04), and a remarkably rosy framing at that:

His flights of imagination remained equally vivid when he went to the White House. In 1983 he told Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel that as part of his war duties he had been assigned to film the Nazi death camps.

Apparently some politicians mislead, while others have vivid flights of imagination.

The Washington Post has a story today (5/19/10) that leads with this:

With voters up in arms over the mounting federal debt, congressional Democrats are growing increasingly queasy about adding to the nation's tab, with some arguing that additional spending to prop up the economy and help the unemployed should be paid for or abandoned.

The headline--"Democrats Queasy About Deficit Spending"--seems true enough, in the sense that reporter Lori Montgomery quotes some Democrats saying as much. But are voters really "up in arms" over the debt? That's not borne out by polls of voters' concerns. If you check the recent surveys at Polling Report, the debt/deficit ranks well behind jobs and the economy when people are asked to rank the top problem facing the country. The spread is 49-5 percent from CBS/NYTimes, 47-15 from Fox and 35-20 from NBC/WSJ.

Some of the spending that apparently makes some Democrats "queasy" is focused, as the Post acknowledges, on jobs. It would be a very different article if it pointed out that dealing with this problems is the voters' chief concern.

As a U.S. political columnist, the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum ("Britain's Spot of Tea Party," 4/27/10) might be excused for calling the Liberal Democratic Party "Britain's historically insignificant third party"; historically speaking, it was actually one of Britain's two major parties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's Applebaum's misunderstanding of the politics of her own country that's harder to forgive.

Applebaum's column asks, "What would the Tea Party movement look like if it were British"--and the answer is, like the Liberal Democrats, as embodied by candidate Nick Clegg. Presumably it's not his support for immigration or his mixed ethnic background--two things the Tea Parties are not notably enthusiastic about--that makes her see a resemblance.

So apparently the similarity she's talking about is in Clegg's third-party message: "Instead of ideology, he offers an option: If you are sick of Labor, if you can't bring yourself to vote Conservative, if you are bored of the two-party system itself--then vote for me." Applebaum concludes her column by saying that the ordinary British voter, "like his Tea-Partying colleagues across the Atlantic, is perfectly happy to vote for the end of politics as we know it. The faster the better, please."

But Tea Party activists are not particularly interested in third parties, nor are they equally disenchanted with each of the two major ones.  According to a New York Times/CBS News survey (4/5-12/10),  Tea Party supporters are 6 percentage points less likely than all respondents to support a new third party (40 percent vs. 46 percent).  Sixty-six percent of Tea Partiers usually or always vote Republican; 6 percent usually or always vote Democratic. Applebaum seems, like many journalists, to believe that the Tea Party protesters are pretty much like Perot voters; as political scientist Ron Rapoport told the FiveThirtyEight blog (4/19/10), "The major difference is that Perot movement was a total rejection of both parties, while the tea party movement is a total rejection of only one party--the Democrats."

Applebaum also claims that "Britain, like the United States, has 'first past the post' voting: a two-party system and, usually, a one-party government--albeit Britain's has far fewer checks and balances than that of the United States." Actually, since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, divided government has been more the rule than the exception in the U.S.--with different parties controlling the White House and at least one house of Congress in 30 of the last 42 years.

The cover of Newsweek (4/26/10) proclaims: "Don't Mess With Texas: What Governor Rick Perry's Hard-Right Creed Tells Us About America."

I can't say I learned much about America, but I guess I learned something about Newsweek:  They really like Rick Perry.

The story, by Evan Thomas and Arian Campo-Flores, begins with the observation, "The myth of the once and future king is as old as Camelot, as ancient as the Bible." Perry, it seems, is a living example of such a "redeemer":

In Texas, his name is Rick Perry. Raised in a ranch house with no running water in the West Texas town of Paint Creek, yell leader at Texas A&M, Air Force pilot, longest serving governor in Texas history. Ruggedly handsome in a Marlboro Man sort of way, with a rich mane of brown hair, slightly tinged with silver gray. Perry, 60, stands for less government and more growth, for freedom and against bureaucracy, for Texas and against Washington. It's a message that has made him a very popular politician in Texas, particularly among conservative white males. As the Tea Party movement gains momentum, as more Americans are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, Perry is their kind of hero.

Newsweek goes on to wonder if Perry might really be "the second coming of Ronald Reagan, the plain-spoken man from the West who presided over a new 'Morning in America' by cutting taxes, reducing government (well, promising to) and standing tall against the nation's enemies?"

Well, gee, maybe they should just skip the election? Would anyone be foolish enough to run against this handsome savior? Yes, it turns out--an uninspiring bald guy:

Perry's Democratic opponent in November will be Bill White, the popular three-term mayor of Houston. White couldn't be more different from Perry. He went to Harvard. He speaks fluent Spanish. He's pasty white, with a bald pate and big ears. He talks in an even, slow monotone and refrains from gunslinging rhetoric. He's kind of like President Obama without the good looks and charisma--a cerebral man who craves consensus and relishes tackling problems by gathering a roomful of smart people with diverse views to hash things out.

What a bore.

After the story's fourth paragraph tells us that under Perry, "Texas somehow avoided the worst of the Great Recession," the second-to-last sentence discloses that the Texas economic miracle might turn sour in a hurry:  "Economic experts are predicting a shortfall of at least $15 billion in the coming year." This after the state got $16 billion in stimulus money from the federal government last year. (Perry, you see, thinks Obama "is hellbent on taking America towards a socialist country.")

And you wouldn't know this from reading Newsweek's puff piece, but Perry and his pasty, uncharismatic Democratic challenger are in a pretty tight race, with Perry holding a four-point lead. Newsweek doesn't have time to mess with such nuance.

The New York Times' Jackie Calmes has a report today (4/15/10) about the brewing fight over the Bush tax cuts, which were passed for limited time period and will phase out if Congress does not pass legislation to extend them. The Obama White House will ask lawmakers to renew most of the tax cuts, but let those for wealthy taxpayers expire. This obviously does not sit well with Republicans, and they have a plan, which the Times describes in the third paragraph of the story:

For all of the talk from President Obama and his party of ending the Bush tax cuts, letting that happen could be harder for some Democratic lawmakers from Republican-leaning districts or states. Republicans already are reviving what has sometimes proven an effective, if disputed, argument in the past: that rich taxpayers include many small businesses whose owners pay income taxes as individuals.

So Republicans will say that small business will be hurt if the tax cuts expire as the law stipulates. This argument is "disputed." How, and by whom? Well, if you want to know that, you have to read all the way to the final two paragraphs of the article (emphasis added):

 Democrats express confidence that Republicans will not kill a bill that benefits most Americans. But some worry that Republicans could delay action by pressing the argument that it would increase taxes for small businesses, discomfiting Democrats with re-election troubles and requiring some Republican votes for a supermajority.

Already Democrats are countering that most small businesses would not be affected; government data show that 97 percent of individual tax returns with business income would not be hit by the top rates. But, some Democrats acknowledge, the Republicans’ argument has proven politically potent in the past.

So now, after reading to the very end of the article, we know the answer--that this GOP talking point is bogus. Why not put that at the top, where the claim about hurting small businesses actually appears?

The reason these arguments are "politically potent" might have something to do with the media's reticence to call them what they are.

New York Times media reporter David Carr wrote the other day (4/5/10) about Sarah Palin's wide-ranging appeal:

Ms. Palin still gets a session in the media spanking machine every time she does anything, but the disapproval seems to further cement the support of her loyalists. Ms. Palin may or may not be qualified to represent America around the world, but she certainly represents vast swaths of the American public and has a lucrative new career to show for it.

If we don’t see why, then maybe we deserve the "lamestream media" label she likes to give us.

Mark Halperin of Time (3/29/10) expressed a similar hurts-so-good enthusiasm for Palin's attacks on the press:

Quippy and tart, she mocked the "lamestream media," and offered her usual punch of charm and charisma, something the public and the press have hungered for since she mostly limited her exposure to Facebook updates, Twitter tweets and calculated appearances on Fox News, her new employer.

Indeed, by carefully controlling her own visibility--and refusing to be challenged or held accountable by adversaries or the press--she has become even more irresistible as programming and copy.

There are few, if any, political figures who are treated this way by corporate media. She launches regular attacks on them, almost entirely without merit, and their response is, "Huh, she must be on to something there." There is no way one could imagine a figure on the left being treated this way. When Dennis Kucinich chided Koppel in a presidential debate for asking silly questions, ABC's response was to stop covering his campaign (Action Alert, 12/11/03). When Stephen Colbert nailed the press for its pro-Bush reporting, they sneered at him (Extra! Update, 6/06).

As for Sarah Palin's "appeal," her rating in the latest Washington Post poll (3/23-26/10) is 37 percent favorable, vs. 55 percent unfavorable.

Hillary Clinton's latest poll figures (AP-GfK, 3/3-8/10), by contrast, are 66 percent favorable, 31 percent unfavorable.

When's the last time you heard corporate media claiming that Clinton "certainly represents vast swaths of the American public"?

FAIR has a new action alert out about the New York Times' snubbing the U.S. Senate candidate Jonathan Tasini. While the paper has given intensive coverage to numerous New Yorkers who thought about challenging appointed incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand--but in the end decided not to run--the Times has ignored Gillibrand's most prominent actual rival in the Democratic primary, aside from one rather snarky profile that appeared in January. Click here to send a message to the Times--which you can post a copy of in the comments thread below.

FAIR's Jim Naureckas appeared on GritTV yesterday to discuss media coverage of ACORN:

Washington Post columnists Dana Milbank and David Broder are both committed guardians of the establishment center, but they don't always interpret their role in the same way.

Milbank led the cheers for White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as chief dragger to the right (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10), whereas Broder saw his blame-the-boss disloyalty as unseemly (3/4/10); on the other hand, it was Broder who thrilled recently to the "pitch-perfect populism" of Sarah Palin (2/11/10), while Milbank's column today (3/16/10) finds a similar spiel by Dick Armey to be as worthy of ridicule as, say, single-payer advocates (FAIR Blog, 6/12/09).

While Milbank's take-down of Armey's speech was amusing ("He asked if people 'agree with, with uh, with uh, help me out, uh, the great prime minister, English prime minister--Churchill'"), it was about as lo-cal as his more typical mockery of the left.  He quotes Armey's assertion:

Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.

To which Milbank retorts: "Who knew they had socialists in 1607?" But Milbank doesn't recall that Jamestown was in actuality a for-profit enterprise--a project of the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company. Perhaps that would have been too pointed a punchline for Milbank's ideological tastes.

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has not had a chance yet to respond to questions about his commentary on the ACORN hoax (FAIR Action Alert, 3/11/10), instead devoting his Sunday column (3/14/10) to a discussion of political labeling. It included this question:

Why is the American Enterprise Institute almost always called "conservative" in the Times, while the Brookings Institution seldom gets a label, although it has been described as a Democratic government in exile during Republican regimes?

First off, the right-wing AEI (Extra!, 3-4/99) is not "almost always called 'conservative' in the Times"; a Nexis search of the paper over the past year turns up 77 references to the think tank, of which 18 have the word "conservative" in the vicinity.  Twenty-three percent of the time is not "almost always."

And Brookings "has been described as a Democratic government in exile"--who, exactly, has described it thus? The only previous time that Brookings was described as a "government in exile" in the New York Times, it was a column (9/29/89) that said the think tank served as such for Democratic and Republican economists alike.

It would certainly be an odd shadow government for Democrats that provided a home for so many Republicans. While its current president, Strobe Talbott, was a deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, his predecessor, Michael Armacost, was an undersecretary of state under Reagan (Extra!, 11-12/98); the president before that, Bruce MacLaury, worked for Nixon's Treasury Department (Extra!, 5/91). Brookings' current roster of experts includes George W. Bush administration alumni like Ted Gayer, Mark McClellan and Ron Haskins--not to mention prominent Iraq War hawks Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack (Extra! Update, 10/07).

The Los Angeles Times reports (3/12/10) on a new study of local news from the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism's Norman Lear Center. The findings are hardly surprising: There is almost no local political coverage on TV news.  As the Times notes, "An average half-hour newscast devoted just 22 seconds to government issues, including city budgets, healthcare, layoffs and law enforcement." Coverage of local politics works out to just under 2 percent of the "news hole"; on the other hand, crime stories make up closer to three minutes of a given newscast.

While that's terrible, the L.A. Times waits until the end of the piece to tell us that the L.A. Times does just a little better:

A companion study also examined local coverage by the Los Angeles Times during the same 14-day period. The report found that while TV stations used 1.9 percent of its news hole (minus ads and teasers) for coverage of local government, the Times used 3.3 percent of its news hole (minus ads and teasers) for coverage of local government.

Yesterday (3/10/10) there was  a House floor debate on Rep. Dennis Kucinich's push to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.  Kucinich's bill--which is based on the War Powers Act--was defeated, but it sparked hours of rare discussion of the White House's war policy ( in spite of the Washington Post's efforts to minimize the discussion as left-wing "venting").

The most dramatic moment came when Rep. Patrick Kennedy chastised the press corps for skipping out on the discussion:  "There's two press people in this gallery.... We're talking about Eric Massa 24-7 on the TV, we're talking about war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives and no press? No press."

He added: "The press of the United States is not covering the most significant issue of national importance and that's the laying of lives down in the nation for the service of our country. It's despicable, the national press corps right now."

Watch the video:

If you're a politics buff, you probably remember the way National Journal's ratings were used in the 2004 and 2008 elections to establish that the Democratic candidate was the "most liberal voting record in the Senate"--first John Kerry (Extra! Update, 6/04), then Barack Obama (CounterSpin, 3/28/08). FAIR pointed out the flawed methodology that the magazine was using, but the headline-grabbing findings still had a profound--and profoundly misleading--impact on both races.

Now National Journal has released its rankings for 20098 (2/28/1009), and they reveal that Dennis Kucinich is one of the more conservative members of the Democratic caucus--he's the 240th most conservative representative out of 416 ranked by the Journal. He's more conservative, according to the Journal rankings, than Blue Dog Democrats like Mike Arcuri (No. 243), Dennis Cardoza (No. 245) and Robert Marion Berry (No. 248).

Virtually any political observer will tell you that Kucinich is one of the most if not the most progressive member of Congress. Either none of them understand the political spectrum, or the National Journal's rankings are useless--take your pick.

Update: As reader Matt points out, the rankings linked to above are for 2008, not 2009. In the rankings for 2009, which are accessible only to National Journal subscribers at this point, Kucinich is a little farther to the left--270th most conservative out of 435 members--but is still grouped with "The Centrists," part of the "ideological center of the House of Representatives" according to the Journal's dubious rating system.