Eighteen-year-old Caster Semenya, a runner from South Africa, just blew away the competition in the women's 800-meter world championship race. But the news reports yesterday weren't about that--they were about whether she's "really" a woman or not. And supposedly serious outlets like the AP and CNN are sinking to tabloid levels of coverage on the issue.

The AP video of the controversy, posted on the L.A. Times website, kicks off: "Quick! Man--or woman?" The piece includes slow pans over Semenya's body, more tabloidy commentary ("She--and yes, SHE claims to be a woman"), and the offering of her voice as some sort of evidence that she's not what she claims to be. It's what you'd sadly expect to find on E! or some other tabloid show--not the AP, or the L.A. Times' website, for that matter.

CNN's Jack Cafferty's response to the news was: "Story creeps me out. It's weird. Do you think she's a man or a woman?" His colleague Campbell Brown teased the "bizarre story" and promised viewers "a whole lot more on this very strange case coming up a little bit later tonight." CNN's Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill called it "fascinating," "amazing" and "wild."

During her full story on the subject, Brown acknowledged one of the problems with the scrutiny: "I mean, this is a young woman, a young girl. It's a pretty cruel thing for this girl to have to go through emotionally, psychologically presuming it's not a scam." Yes indeed, scrutinizing someone's body and gender presentation (as well as your accomplishments) on television and calling it bizarre and creepy is pretty cruel, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, that sort of coverage of people with different gender presentations is not unusual--and awareness of that cruelty didn't stop Brown from feeding into it.

An AP story (6/7/09) previewing today's European Parliament election is headlined on MSNBC, "Europe Leans Right Ahead of Parliament Voting: Amid Economic Gloom, Conservatives Look Set to Win Big in Europe-Wide Poll." The article, by Michael Weissenstein and Robert Wielaard, begins:

Europe was leaning to the right ahead of European Parliament elections Sunday, with voters in many countries favoring conservative parties against a backdrop of economic crisis.

Opinion polling showed right-leaning governments with edges over their opposition in Germany, Italy and France. Conservative opposition parties were tied or ahead in Britain, Spain, and some smaller countries.

So how big is the right expected to win? In the 17th paragraph, after we've been told "the Europe-wide elections were most important as a snapshot of national political sentiment," we finally get some numbers:

An informal forecast by the political science website http://www.predict09.eu anticipated Conservatives winning 262 seats against 194 for the Socialists and 85 for the Liberals in 736-seat European Parliament, roughly the same proportions as in the last parliament.

And then the article notes that "right-leaning parties have taken up business regulation and social protection initiatives more traditionally associated with the left."

When you look at the site that AP references--which turns out to be a project of the PR group Burson-Marsteller--it turns out that its actual prediction is for slight gains for the left. (On the chart on the site's main page, the left parties are in red, pink and green; the centrist Liberal parties are in yellow; the conservative parties are in blue and light blue; and the far-right parties are in orange and gray.) The main change the PR group predicts is that the left parties will take a slightly larger slice of the pie and the Liberal parties will have a slightly smaller one.

Of course, it's the actual voting results that matter, not the predictions, and it's certainly possible that the European right actually will make major gains. But when the AP takes forecasts that Conservatives will do about as well as they did last time after moving their platforms to the left, and depicts that as evidence of "Europe...leaning to the right," that would seem to say more about the news service's political sentiments than about Europe's.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/19/09, ad-viewing required) "gives the lie to the collective national claim that we learned our lesson and are now regretful about the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism":

Republicans are right about the fact that while it was Bush officials who led the way in implementing these radical and lawless policies, most of the country's institutions--particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the media--acquiesced to it, endorsed it, and enabled it. And they still do.

Nothing has produced as much media praise for Obama as his embrace of what [the New Republic's Jack] Goldsmith calls the "essential elements" of "the Bush approach to counterterrorism policy." That's because--contrary to the ceremonial displays of regret and denouncements of Bush--the dominant media view is this: the Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism was right; those policies are "centrist"; Obama is acting commendably by embracing them; most of the country wants those policies; and only the far left opposes the Bush/Cheney approach.

Anyone who doubts that should consider this most extraordinary paragraph from Associated Press' Liz Sidoti:

Increasingly, President Barack Obama and Democrats who run Congress are being pulled between the competing interests of party liberals and the rest of the country on Bush-era wartime matters of torture, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Beyond quoting Sidoti having "described Obama's embrace of Bush's policies as 'governing from the center,'" Greenwald goes on to note that "her AP colleague Tom Raum said virtually the same thing today":

Internationally, Obama reversed course and is seeking to block the court-ordered release of detainee-abuse photos, revived military trials for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and is markedly increasing the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan....

Still, even though Obama may be irritating liberal purists on both national security and domestic policy, he has no real choice but to move toward the middle.

Greenwald quips that "apparently, Bush/Cheney terrorism policies are Centrist. Who knew?"

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent at last weekend's Summit of the Americas, the corporate media appeared to be caught off guard.

In its initial report, CNN (Newsroom, 4/18/09) appeared to be completely unaware of Galeano's classic 1971 treatise on the history of European and U.S. imperialism in Latin America, failing to correct Obama's initial mistaken belief that the book was penned by Chavez himself.

Both CNN (CNN Newsroom, 4/18/09) and AP (4/19/09) contrasted the immediate surge in the book's sales on Amazon with its previous "obscurity":

It's gone from obscurity to bestseller overnight. In just hours, it zoomed to No. 14 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, and on Friday, it was ranked number 60,280, making its way to the top of the list very fast.--CNN, 4/18/09

The publicity about the gift of the Galeano book helped propel it from relative obscurity to No. 13 on the Amazon.com list of bestsellers by Saturday night.--AP, 4/19/09

The book may not have ranked highly a month ago on Amazon, but it can hardly be described as "obscure." A classic Latin American history text that was banned by several military dictatorships, with its author "forced into exile as the book grew in popularity," according to the New Yorker, the book boasts more than 50 Spanish editions, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. As demonstrated by Chavez's choice, it still has currency with Latin American political leaders.

This AP "fact check" (2/24/09) of President Barack Obama's speech is, as usual, a sad effort. You really need to have some threshold for calling "gotcha," and some of these--maybe all of these--really don't measure up.

Obama says, "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market," and AP's Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn retort, "This may be so, but it isn't only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries."

But Obama didn't say--or suggest--that they were. Nor is he the sort of politician who routinely pretends that his party can do no wrong, and all problems are the other guys' fault. To falsely attribute a sentiment to someone so you can "debunk" is simply unethical journalism; it's much more misleading than anything AP found in Obama's speech.

Obama says, "It's a plan that won't help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values." And AP says: "If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money does not go to home buyers who used bad judgment, it hasn't announced it."

Well, actually, there will be requirements in the mortgage bailout plan that attempt to target it at more diligent borrowers. AP could have described how this would work, and people could have decided for themselves how effective those tests would be at screening out irresponsible borrowers. Or AP could have made an argument that the rules would be inadequate to achieve Obama's stated goals. Either of those would have been informative.

But instead the wire service rejects Obama's statement on almost philosophical grounds, since no public policy is ever going to make fine moral distinctions perfectly. That's not really a very helpful observation to make about a policy.

Obama says, "We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade." AP comes back with, "Obama only has a real say on spending during the four years of his term." Really? So the decisions made by George W. Bush in 2001 have no impact on the choices Obama will have in his first two years? And Clinton's 1993 actions didn't affect what Bush could do? That's not how the federal government works--in reality, budget and revenue choices have consequences for years to come.

Sometimes Woodward and Kuhnhenn seem to be calling for qualifications that would appear absurd in any politician's speech. For example, after Obama lists the goals he says his budget will achieve, AP all but snorts: "First, his budget does not accomplish any of that. It only proposes those steps." As if Obama should have followed with: "Of course, that may not happen. Congress may vote down my budget and reject my programs, and we may accomplish nothing." Does AP seriously expect any politician to talk like that?

I edit a magazine of media criticism for a living; it's pretty common for our articles to include examples of media figures saying something that we say isn't true. None of the examples from Obama's speech that AP cites would be strong enough to make it into Extra!--except maybe the catch about where the automobile was invented.

Media Matters (2/24/09) catches AP reporter Liz Sidoti garbling Barack Obama's position on entitlements:

He called the long-term solvency of Social Security "the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far" and said reforming healthcare, including burgeoning entitlement programs, was a huge priority.

What Obama actually said was:

In the coming years, we'll be forced to make more tough choices and do much more to address our long-term challenges, from the rising cost of healthcare that Peter [Orszag, Office of Management and Budget director] described, which is the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far, to the long-term solvency of Social Security.

In other words, healthcare is by far the single most pressing fiscal challenge--not Social Security.

What's surprising is not that a reporter would misunderstand a speech--Obama's phrasing could be a little bit confusing, I guess--but that anyone who follows politics for a living wouldn't know that healthcare is a bigger problem than Social Security. Maybe they should pay less attention to corporate media.

We noted recently Fox News' peculiar understanding of the Fair Use doctrine, which allows writers, artists and others to make reasonable use of copyrighted material so long as they don't infringe on the copyright owners' commercial rights; Fox interprets this to mean that critics should only be allowed to make use of Fox video if Fox is allowed to sell ads to run alongside the criticism.

Now another corporate media company is making strange claims against Fair Use.  The Associated Press is claiming that the well-known "HOPE" poster of Barack Obama violates its copyright, because artist Shepard Fairey used an AP photo as a model for the image.

Here's a question for AP: If a cartoonist wanted to make reference to the famous "Dewey Defeats Truman" image--which is also a copyrighted AP photo--would they have to get your permission first? That's the implication of their claim about the Obama image. And the end result would be a world where artists can't talk about the images of our political leaders, because those images come to us via for-profit media--a strange position for a democracy to find itself in.

Well aware that "from the aftermath of the 2003 'shock and awe' bombing campaign all the way through Thanksgiving Day 2008, major U.S. news outlets have nearly uniformly blacked out or downplayed reports of the Iraqi death toll," critic Brad Jacobson notes (MediaBloodhound, 11/30/08)
that "a recent Associated Press article reveals the depths to which these outlets are still willing to delve to censor this information":

In the November 27 article "Iraqi Parliament OKs U.S. Troops for 3 More Years," by Christopher Torchia and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP editors approved the following characterization of Iraqi deaths suffered since the US invasion: "The war has claimed more than 4,200 American lives and killed a far greater, untold number of Iraqis."...

How's that for a statistically rigorous accounting? With the exactitude of a third-grader's book report cribbed from a novel's dust jacket copy, the AP--America's No. 1 wire news service--blankets U.S. news outlets with a quantification of Iraqi casualties that would've made Stalin proud.

While the AP completely giving up on estimating Iraqi deaths at all may appear outrageous to any American with a conscience, Jacobson sees precedent in the fact that

last April, when Opinion Research Business... released its January 2008 follow-up report estimating over 1 million Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion--which both reconfirmed its September 2007 estimate as well as supported prior findings of the 2006 John Hopkins study published in the British medical journal Lancet (650,000 deaths)--a LexisNexis search showed no U.S. mainstream news outlet carried the story.

See FAIR's recent Action Alert: "The Washington Post Undercounts Iraq Deaths: Paper's Feature Low-Balls Iraqi Casualties (10/27/08)

The Associated Press (10/29/08) does its usual sad job trying to fact-check candidate statements--this time working a hefty dose of neo-Hooverism into the mix.

AP's Calvin Woodward charges that

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.

For instance, Woodward responds to Obama outlining his economic proposals by noting: "His proposals--the tax cuts, the low-cost loans, the $15 billion a year he promises for alternative energy, and more--cost money, and the country could be facing a record $1 trillion deficit next year." The unspoken assumption here is that because the country is in the midst of a financial crisis that has incurred huge bailout costs, the federal government will need to cut spending or raise taxes in order to reduce the deficit.

This economic analysis is quite controversial, to say the least--economist Dean Baker (10/9/08) says this approach "make[s] about as much sense for the economy as nuking Silicon Valley." If Baker is too progressive for your economic tastes, here's conservative Martin Feldstein arguing that "the only way to prevent a deepening recession will be a temporary program of increased government spending." Yet AP presents deficit-cutting in the midst of a recession as it-goes-without-saying common sense.

The only support that Woodward provides for his claim that Obama's failure to offer an austerity program as a response to the economic crisis means that he is being "less than upfront" with the voters is this passage:

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, whose other findings have been quoted approvingly by the Obama campaign, says... "Neither candidate's plan would significantly increase economic growth unless offset by spending cuts or tax increases that the campaigns have not specified."

The Tax Policy Center report in question (9/15/08) provides no elaboration on this rather peculiar economic advice. The conventional wisdom is that tax cuts and spending increases stimulate the economy, whereas tax increases and spending cuts tend to slow it down; if AP has discovered evidence to the contrary, that should be the headline--it's bigger news than a mere Obama infomercial.