All right, which newspaper posed this question about the Occupy protests today:

Is this an occupation or an infestation?

Has to be the New York Post, right? Nope--they wouldn't include a question mark.

That's the Washington Post, which went on to report that "recent news updates from Occupy protests read like a crime blotter."

And that Post's Eli Saslow and Colum Lynch explain that they're not the only ones who feel this way:

In the wake of so much controversy, the Occupy movement--which began as a populist uprising to represent all but the wealthiest 1 percent--has begun to lose some of its mainstream support. A Washington Post poll early this month showed that only 18 percent of responders "strongly supported" the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If you want to show a decline in support for the movement--or anything else--then you'd have to show that this number was down from a previous poll. But the Post doesn't appear to have ever asked a question before about whether people "strongly support" Occupy Wall Street. The Post's poll actually finds that 44 percent of Americans support Occupy Wall Street (when you combine those who  "strongly support" with "somewhat support" the movement).  One poll (not conducted by the Post) showed 36 percent support a few weeks ago--which was an increase from an earlier survey. And an AP poll conducted about a month ago registered 37 support.

Of course, news coverage that talks about the movement as a criminal "infestation" might change some minds.

The Michele Bachmann presidential campaign--formerly treated as atop-tier juggernaut by Beltway media--has been floundering for weeks. Which makes right now as good a time as any for them to grab some headlines by shouting about liberal media bias.

The Bachmann campaign was furious about email correspondence concerning a possible Bachmann appearance on a CBS Web show after the Saturday night debate.  The network's political director, John Dickerson, was lukewarm on the idea, mentioning that Bachmann's poll numbers are quite low and that she wasn't likely to be much of a factor in the debate.  Even though Dickerson is correct, these are generally not good reasons to exclude candidates, as FAIR has argued over the years.

The value to the Bachmann campaign was pretty clear, as the New York Times reported today:

"Last night, as Michele prepared her plans to debate on CBS, we received concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows--the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message," Keith Nahigian, Mrs. Bachmann's campaign manager, wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

Back in reality, Bachmann's message was still being suppressed on Sunday morning--as she appeared on NBC's Meet the Press to talk about her candidacy.

The truth is that the corporate media have been remarkably generous, granting Bachmann an extraordinary amount of coverage. And the CBS Sunday morning show Face the Nation, as FAIR noted here, has produced factcheck articles on its website after Bachmann has made appearances on the show--without ever telling its much larger viewing audience about her wildly inaccurate claims.

In case you missed it, Bachmann's Meet the Press appearance included, among other things, a call to make Iraq compensate the families of American servicemembers killed in the invasion of that country. A few million dollars would suffice.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (11/9/11) went to India in order to appreciate how the grassroots movement to stamp out political corruption there is superior to Occupy Wall Street.

Still, he sees a common thread:

The world's two biggest democracies, India and the United States, are going through remarkably similar bouts of introspection. Both countries are witnessing grassroots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal--a system requiring bribes at every level of governance to get anything done. And Americans are protesting what is legal--a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress, and both political parties, and thereby resist curbs on risk-taking.

Hear, hear! Wall Street has bought the political process. But what can save us? A magical centrist internet-based third-party presidential candidate, that's who!

What has brought millions of Indians into the streets to support the India Against Corruption movement and what seems to have triggered not only the Occupy Wall Street movement but also initiatives like AmericansElect.org--a centrist group planning to use the Internet to nominate an independent presidential candidate--is a sense that both countries have democratically elected governments that are so beholden to special interests that they can no longer deliver reform. Therefore, they both need shock therapy from outside.

Huh?

Americans Elect is the brainchild of a group of hedge-fund investors--or, as a columnist named Tom Friedman once reported, it is "financed with some serious hedge-fund money."

These are the people who are going to deliver a outsider shock to the system that will curb the influence of the financial services industry. Wall Street will save us from Wall Street?

Bonus irony: Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is the chief strategist for Americans Elect--the same Doug Schoen who was very recently proclaiming that Democrats should distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protests. As Jedd Legum pointed out, Schoen misrepresented that polling in a column for (where else?) the Wall Street Journal.

Richard Engel on NBC Nightly News (10/21/11), speaking about the end of the Iraq War:

The training wheels off, Iraq will have to succeed or fail without American troops on the ground to guide the way.

That's quite a metaphor--invading and occupying a country for eight years as "training wheels."

Engel's report includes this reference to the death toll:

Iraqi deaths, almost 150,000, but many Iraqis believe it's a million.

Of course it's not just Iraqis who believe this--the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB), which has worked for the BBC, the British Conservative Party and the International Republican Institute, conducted a survey that arrived at the 1 million estimate.  A survey published in the Lancet medical journal  (10/11/06) estimated that the war caused 600,000 violent deaths between March 2003 and June 2006.

The "almost 150,000" number that Engel puts forward as reality appears to be based on the Iraq Family Health Survey, a joint effort by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government, which actually estimated that there were 151,000 violent deaths (and some 400,000 total excess deaths--MedPage Today, 7/23/08) as a result of the war--between March 2003 and June 2006.

Apparently some Americans believe the war hasn't killed anyone in the last five years.

The New York Times has a fascinating new poll out today (10/26/11); too bad the paper doesn't emphasize the most newsworthy findings.

The headline is:

New Poll Finds a Deep Distrust of Government

That's based on the poll's finding that the public doesn't have much faith in government.  But paragraph four offers a more striking finding:

With nearly all Americans remaining fearful that the economy is stagnating or deteriorating further, two-thirds of the public said that wealth should be distributed more evenly in the country. Seven in 10 Americans think the policies of congressional Republicans favor the rich. Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and a similar number prefer increasing income taxes on millionaires.

So the public favors--by a substantial margin--greater income redistribution and higher taxes on the super-wealthy. And they oppose cutting taxes on corporations.

Perhaps the unwillingness of the government to do those things contributes to public distrust of that government.

With all the chatter about the inevitability of Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination, it might be useful to recall the last time the media were sending the same message about an early favorite, at least according to the national polls:

The new Time poll that found the public more favorably inclined towards Occupy Wall Street protesters than the Tea Party has been making the rounds. From the magazine's write-up of the poll:

A new Time/ABT SRBI poll finds 54 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the new protest movement, despite the images of bearded and shirtless youth playing bongo drums, rolling cigarettes and painting their bodies in Zuccotti Park.

Huh.  Perhaps when the public looks at a protest movement, it pays more attention to substance than the media, who are more focused on locating shirtless bongo players.

Leave it to the New York Times (10/7/11) to find a guy collecting unemployment who opposes the extension of unemployment benefits. He's "Dan Tolleson, a researcher and writer with a Ph.D. in politics...whose last good job was working for a group that aims to replace the income tax with a national sales tax."

But don't think reporter Shaila Dewan picked some unrepresentative oddball to highlight just to make a political point about "how divisive the question has become of providing a bigger safety net to the long-term jobless." Oh no--quite the contrary:

Even among those struggling to find work, Mr. Tolleson is not alone in his views. In a recent survey of the unemployed by Rutgers University, more than one in four respondents was opposed to renewing the current extended unemployment benefits. Three out of five said recipients should be required to take training courses.

But when you click on that link, you find that the Rutgers survey is not "of the unemployed"--the sample includes recently jobless people who are currently working, and of those respondents who are jobless right now, a large majority haven't gotten unemployment benefits in the past year. So how many people are like Donald Tolleson, collecting benefits that they don't the government should be giving them? Maybe none--the results aren't broken down that way.

Further, the survey asked about whether "longer and higher benefits from Unemployment Insurance" were a good idea in the context of "ideas that are being considered by government officials to help bring down high unemployment." So if you supported extending unemployment benefits because they would be good for the unemployed but didn't think they would help bring down unemployment, should you answer yes or no?

The question was asked in a more straightforward way by CNN the last time President Obama signed a bill extending benefits (12/17-19/10). Questioned whether they favored or opposed "an extension of unemployment benefits for workers who lose their jobs," 76 percent of a sample of adults nationwide were in favor, with only 22 percent opposed. Could it be that extending unemployment benefits is not as "divisive" as the New York Times would like you to think?

There is little reason to care about what the polls say right now about who's leading in the Republican presidential nomination. But the media obviously think otherwise, hence this headline in the Washington Post yesterday (8/25/11):

Romney Loses GOP Front-Runner Status

The "news" is that Rick Perry is leading in a new Gallup Poll. But read a little further:

The survey showed Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) at 13 percent and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) slipping to 10 percent. No other candidate registered in the double digits.

So this means Paul's in the "top tier" now, right?

This is a good time to issue a quick reminder about the hazards of paying too much attention to early polling:

In 2003, early polling of the following year's Democratic nominees (e.g., CBS News poll, 12/14-12/16/03) showed eventual nominee John Kerry in the middle of the pack, trailing Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman. An August 2003 USA Today/Gallup poll (8/25-8/26/03) showed front-runner Lieberman with a 10-point lead over Gephardt. As the dynamics of the nomination race shifted, so did the polls--but not in a way that would suggest the polling would predict the winner. By January 2004, Howard Dean was leading the pack, followed closely by Wesley Clark (1/2-5/04).

On the Republican side:

in the 2000 race, Bush's only serious competition came from Sen. John McCain, who was trailing far behind in the early polls--behind Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle and Steve Forbes (e.g., NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 1/99).

I noticed a few stories in today's USA Today (6/13/11) about supposed Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. There will be plenty more of this to come--horserace commentary based on polling that's being done in order to give journalists a reason to talk about one candidate more than another, which candidate has "momentum" and so on.

It's worth remembering that the polling at this stage of the race is useless. Actually, it's probably worse than that, since the political press corps obsesses over this trivia at the expense of doing any actually useful reporting about the candidates.

I wanted to find a story from around the same time frame in 2007 to illustrate how misguided this polling can be. It didn't take long. Here's the lead of a June 7, 2007 Washington Post article:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York holds a solid lead over her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, while the contest for the Republican nomination appears even more unsettled than it did when it began five months ago, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Clinton's lead remains steady over her two principal challengers, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and the poll contains troubling news for both. Obama's support has softened noticeably, highlighting the challenge he faces in turning high interest in his candidacy into votes. Edwards, meanwhile, has lost ground nationally over the past few months.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani remains the leader in the GOP race, but the poll suggests that the surge in support he received after declaring his candidacy has stalled and that his backing of abortion rights and gay rights has caused more Republicans to turn away from him.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona runs second in the GOP race, but the poll results raise questions about his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has spent millions on television ads already this year, has in some ways become an attractive alternative over the past few months, and former Sen. Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee shows the potential to quickly make the GOP contest a four-way battle.

The poll provides a revealing snapshot of the 2008 presidential race as the candidates gather this week for a pair of debates in New Hampshire, which will hold the first primary next year.

Today the Drudge Report (4/26/11) screams:

SHOCK POLL: ONLY 38% SAY OBAMA 'DEFINITELY' BORN IN USA

The all-caps headline links to a USA Today story that quotes that 38 percent figure, courtesy of a new Gallup poll.

For the record, the poll also asked respondents the same question about Donald Trump. Forty-three percent say they are definitely sure he was born in the United States.

Washington Post reporter Dan Balz (4/10/11)  presents the Obama/GOP budget deal as evidence that the White House was merely responding to public opinion:

Most important was showing the country that he could make Washington work. "Like any worthwhile agreement, both sides had to make tough decisions and give ground on issues that were important to them," he said.

At the same time, knowing that the public also favors reduced spending, Obama pointed to the size of the cuts in the new agreement while noting that his priorities had been preserved. The budget, he said, would "invest in our future."

Balz also notes that "the battle was fought on turf far more hospitable to Republicans, given the country's concerns about spending that contributed to the Democrats losing the House in November."

This was the conventional wisdom about the 2010 election, but it has very little to support it. Most public opinion polling shows far more concern about job creation than the deficit or national debt. As Jim Naureckas noted here, budget cuts will cost jobs, not create them. But in the minds of reporters like Balz, the public has lined up to back drastic spending cuts--and the media don't seem interested in talking much about the likely effects of such cuts.

In a mostly informative "news analysis" ("Ohio's Anti-Union Law Is Tougher Than Wisconsin's," New York Times, 4/1/11) comparing new anti-union laws that restrict collective bargaining rights in Ohio and Wisconsin, New York Times labor and workplace correspondent Steven Greenhouse seems at one point to adopt the framing and language of anti-labor politicians and pundits:

Moreover, at a time of huge budget deficits and of Republican dominance in many states, including states like Ohio and Wisconsin where unions once had swaggering power, the pendulum has swung toward the taxpayer instead of the government workers paid by the taxpayer.

Pitting "swaggering" unionized public workers against "taxpayers"--who are, in fact, mostly other workers--may be a tried-and-true strategy of anti-labor forces, but it doesn't accurately reflect the way the public see the issues. As the Times' own polling expert points out, Americans seem to be siding with public workers on the the issue of collective bargaining rights. 

Considering the fact that this isn't the only time the paper has pushed a false divide between government workers and nearly everybody else, perhaps Greenhouse would have more accurately portrayed the divisions had he written, "The pendulum has swung toward anti-labor activists and journalists, and away from public workers and the majority of the public who support them."

The new Washington Post/ABC poll is on the front page of the paper today (3/15/11):

Nearly two-thirds of Americans now say the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting, the highest proportion yet opposed to the conflict, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

The Post's write-up includes a lot of strange language about the political situation for the White House:  "a growing challenge for President Obama,"  "a difficult political challenge,"  "an awkward issue for the president." A more direct way of putting it would be to say that Obama's war policy is massively unpopular.

A broader point: No matter how unpopular the Afghan War gets, it never quite seems like the right time to hear very many anti-war voices in the corporate media.

"Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?" is the headline of a front-page New York Times piece today (3/3/11). The article by Trip Gabriel reports, "Education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters."

Politicians, sure, but what's the evidence that voters--i.e., the public--have been heaping scorn on teachers? Gabriel offers nothing to substantiate this claim other than references to "online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators"--quoting blog commenters as evidence of the national mood has got to stop, guys--and the assertion that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's teacher-bashing has made him a "national star." (I can't find any national polling on Christie, which in itself calls into question how much of a national star he is, but his poll numbers in his own state are unremarkably average.)

Apparently it's hard to find evidence of this anti-teacher wave because it's already receding. In the 14th paragraph, Gabriel writes:

There are signs of a backlash in favor of teachers. A New York Times poll taken last week found that by nearly two to one--60 to 33 percent--Americans opposed restricting collective bargaining for public employees. A similar majority--including more than half of Republicans--said the salaries and benefits of most public employees were "about right" or "too low."

Is that a "backlash in favor of teachers," though, or is that the way people have felt about teachers all along?

And those polls probably understate the support for teachers, since they're more popular than "public employees" in general. When CBS asked last year (1/6-10/10) about public school teachers' salaries, fully 66 percent said they were paid "too little"--while only 4 percent said they were paid "too much." And this is a long-held public attitude; when Gallup (8/24-26/99) asked in 1999 about public teacher salaries, 56 percent thought they were too low and 7 percent too high.

The New York Times piece is not unsympathetic to teachers, but by buying into the notion that there is a wave of anti-teacher sentiment sweeping the public, it only emboldens teacher-scapegoating politicians. The next time a journalist wants to write a piece about the scorn heaped on teachers, they might take a look at a Gallup poll (11/19-21/10) that asked how people viewed the "honesty and ethical standards" of various professions. Elementary school teachers' ethics were rated "very high" or "high" by 67 percent; for newspaper reporters, it's 22 percent.