Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, though not to office.  Unfortunately, press accounts still manage to mangle the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to explain what happened. In today's New York Times (9/22/09):

At the time of his removal, Mr. Zelaya was planning a nonbinding referendum that his opponents said would have been the first step toward allowing him to run for another term in office, which is forbidden under the Honduran constitution. Mr. Zelaya has denied any attempt to run for re-election.

An Associated Press report appearing in today's USA Today (9/22/09) was much worse:

The legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and tried to alter the nation's constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran Constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office.

This is inaccurate, not to mention strange (ousted for a Chavez "alliance"?).  As economist Mark Weisbrot put it shortly after the coup (7/8/09), these pro-coup arguments makes no sense--and the media should say so. By the way, the example he cites is also from the New York Times....

Unfortunately much of the major media's reporting has aided this effort by reporting such statements as "Critics feared he intended to extend his rule past January, when he would have been required to step down."

In fact, there was no way for Zelaya to "extend his rule" even if the referendum had been held and passed, and even if he had then gone on to win a binding referendum on the November ballot. The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country's constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis -- although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.

Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp (9/4/09) has an update on U.S. papers' "mixed reaction to the controversial Associated Press photo distributed today of a Marine who died in combat in Afghanistan last month."

The picture's inclusion in "a group of images taken by AP photographer Julie Jacobson" predictably was "blasted" by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, whose censure came via "a formal letter of complaint."

Strupp reports that

the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times ran the photo on its website with an AP story about the images, while the Commercial Appeal in Memphis provided an online photo gallery of all of Jacobson's images from the coverage. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin also carried the photo.

The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., also ran the image, with a lengthy editorial explaining why. It said, in part: "Not all news outlets will choose to publish the picture, distributed by the Associated Press. We feel we owe it to our readers to explain why we have decided to use the image."

While the Intelligencer also felt the need to declare themselves "entirely in support of the war against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq," Strupp's list of those entirely "withholding the shot of [Lance Cpl. Joshua] Bernard being fatally wounded" is long--including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Boston Herald, Stars and Stripes and the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, which further ingratiated itself with Robert Gates' propaganda machine by condemning such evidence of the reality of war as "in poor taste."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Self-Censorship to Official Censorship: Ban on Images of Wounded GIs Raises No Media Objections" (3–4/07) by Pat Arnow.

In his latest "Dispatch from the Bolivarian Revolution", blogger Eric Wingerter (BoRev.net, 7/18/09) asks, "Man oh man, how bad does AP reporting have to get before a group of Latin American studies professors from top U.S. universities decides they need to take out a FULL-PAGE AD in the Columbia Journalism Review to respond?"

His answer is "Bad bad"--as illustrated in the ad's text:

The Associated Press has breached basic journalistic principles with these false reports:

[Hugo] Chávez initially suggested the synagogue attack might have been carried out by Jews eager to portray his government as anti-Semitic.

—AP February 8, 2009

Only five months after urging world leaders to back their armed struggle, he [Chávez] said that armed guerrilla movements are "history."

—AP June 10, 2008

THESE STATEMENTS ARE FALSE, and on both occasions, the AP has admitted that they are false.

Saying that Chávez "never called on anyone to support the armed struggle of the FARC—rather, he had called on the FARC to abandon armed struggle," the ad goes on to explain how, "far from blaming Jews from an attack on a synagogue, he denounced the attack as anti-Semitic and took prompt action to find and arrest the attackers."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Corrupt Data: Taking On the Claim that Chávez Is On the Take" (11–12/06) by Gregory Wilpert.

Also listen to letter signatory NYU history professor Greg Grandin on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup" (7/3/09).

As news comes of "yet another horrific mass shooting by yet another disaffected man armed with ammo and a deep hatred of women"--this time "killing three women and injuring nine more" at a Pennsylvania health club--Jennifer Pozner (Women In Media & News, 8/5/09) notices that "the gunman's stated intention to target only women is eerily similar to the Montreal Massacre of 1989, in which a man opened fire on students after screaming: 'You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists'":

Perhaps it takes this level of hit-us-over-the-head bluntness for media to notice that a mass murder is also a hate crime, when the victims of that crime are solely women. In contrast to many other shootings in which similar motivations have gone unreported over the past two decades, the Associated Press (and several other news outlets picking up [their] story) have chosen to discuss the extremely relevant role of misogyny as the root cause of the bloody tragedy in Collier County.

According to the Editor & Publisher blog, [Pennsylvania shooter George] Sodini’s website also contained slams against "the liberal media," Obama, the election of "The Black Man," and jokes about black men and white women. E&P notes that the AP and other outlets have omitted these details. Had Sodini aimed his guns specifically and only at people of color, ignoring information about his bigotry would not only be racist, it would also deprive the public of a full understanding of the nature of his crime. But while his racist webpages certainly add a fuller picture to this disturbed killer's mindset, in this case the AP discussed the part of the website most relevant to the crime: Sodini's anger at being sexually rejected, his deep-seated resentment toward women and his stated plans to kill women.

Calling this "an important step forward in media understanding of and coverage of this sort of crime," Pozner is glad that "finally, a gender-based hate crime is being reported (at least by the AP, at least for now) within the context of the killer’s actual anti-woman agenda." However, "if the press’s previous track record is any indicator, Sodini’s misogyny could potentially fall out of the frame of follow-up reporting."

Reporting for Associated Press (7/3/09), David Bauder has an update on CNN's insistence on "standing behind" Lou Dobbs, who has "become a publicity nightmare for CNN, embarrassed his boss and...on top of all that, his ratings are slipping."

Bauder asks outright: "How does Lou Dobbs keep his job" while plugging the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama "wasn't born in the United States despite convincing evidence to the contrary"?

Dobbs' work has been so unpopular that even Ann Coulter has criticized him.

Dobbs has acknowledged that he believes Obama was born in Hawaii. But he gives airtime to disbelievers, and has said the president should try to put questions fully to rest by releasing a long version of his birth certificate. He's twice done stories on his show after the public leak of a memo from CNN U.S. president Jon Klein saying that "it seems this story is dead."

To be clear, "Klein said those stories were OK because they were about the controversy and weren't actually questioning the facts."

But Bauder reports that "critics suggest Klein is parsing words, that even raising the issue lends it credence"--such criticism even coming from "the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes: It 'explains their upcoming documentary: "The World: Flat. We Report—You Decide."'"

In another example of how the racist record of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's top Republican questioner has gone down the memory hole, Associated Press had a whole story (7/19/09) about Sen. Jeff Sessions' assertions that Sotomayor was too prejudiced to get his vote without mentioning that the Senate Judiciary Committee had rejected Sessions when he was up for a federal judgeship precisely because of his long pro-discrimination history.

On MSNBC, the subhead of the story was "Top GOP Member of Senate Committee Still Concerned About Her Objectivity." And AP reporter Douglass Daniel would tell you, I expect, that "objectivity" required him to leave out the context of Sessions' racist background.

Washington Monthly's Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (7/16/09) has observed that on July 15, "the Associated Press reported that the House Democratic healthcare plan cost '$1.5 trillion,'" and "by the afternoon, the AP reporting didn't attribute the price tag to anyone; it just stated the figure as fact."

Even though "the day before the AP blasted the $1.5 trillion figure to the world, the Congressional Budget Office pointed to a roughly $1 trillion cost over 10 years," Benen notes how "the AP not only went with the much higher figure, it made no reference to the CBO score."

Considering this, he writes that he had

hoped the AP would at least notice the criticism, and clarify the issue in the future. No such luck--this AP report ran about a half-hour ago: "Votes were planned Thursday in the Education and Labor and Ways and Means committees on a $1.5 trillion plan that majority House Democrats presented this week."

No source, no reference to the CBO figure released Tuesday, and no mention of the fact that House Democrats reject the "$1.5 trillion" figure.

Naturally, others are picking up on the AP's reporting, and relaying the disputed figure. Time's Mark Halperin noted this morning that House committees are expected to vote today "on the Democrats' $1.5 trillion plan."

I don't mean to sound picky, but reporting like this not only misinforms news consumers, it also has the potential to adversely affect the larger policy debate. If the AP is intent on using the $1.5 trillion figure, it could at least add some language to reflect the concerns, such as "a number Democratic leaders dispute," or, "though the CBO puts the figure closer to $1 trillion." Something.

Acknowledging that "the exact price of the proposal is unclear at this point" and "it's possible the final figure may exceed, or not, the current figures," Benen insists that, "in light of the published CBO score, the AP's reporting is sloppy and incomplete, and runs the risk of undermining reform efforts."

In other "undermining reform efforts" news, watch Barack Obama's 22-year personal physician tell how ABC uninvited him from their healthcare forum two days before the prime-time event, where he was planning to ask about single-payer healthcare.

Editor & Publisher is running a wire item (Associated Press, 7/16/09) on the Richmond Times-Dispatch's recent front-page editorial and website video "expressing regret for supporting the state's fight to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s."

The paper's confession of its "central role in the 'dreadful doctrine' of Massive Resistance--a systematic campaign by Virginia's white political leaders to block school desegregation"--functions as testament to both their current integrity and one of the darkest episodes of U.S. journalism. Here's an except:

Fifty years ago Virginia had a rendezvous with destiny and came up wanting. It scorned human rights and the promise of the Declaration of Independence....

Throughout the episode, [parent company] Richmond Newspapers played a central role--but not a centering one. The hour was ignoble. Editorials in the [pre-merger] News Leader relentlessly championed Massive Resistance and the dubious constitutional arguments justifying its unworthy cause. Although not so intimately engaged, the Times-Dispatch was complicit. The record fills us with regret....

Words have consequences. Artful paragraphs promoted ugly things. Stylish sentences salted wounds. Euphemism was profligate. As members of the Fourth Estate, these pages did not keep a proper distance, either....

Yesteryear's words cannot be revoked. They endure on newsprint yellow and brittle, on microfilm, and in the computer files into which they have been translated. They belong to history, and history lives. It is well and good that the words be remembered, as a warning perhaps best.

Investigative reporter Gareth Porter's careful reading (Dissident Voice, 6/28/09) of "the official military investigation into the disastrous May 4 airstrike in Farah province" of Afghanistan, which "omitted key details" and "gave no explanation" for reasserting "that only about 26 civilians had been killed"--"well-documented reports by the government and by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission [showed] that between 97 and 147 people were killed"--yields a "central contradiction between the report and the U.S. military's 'human shields' argument" that "was allowed to pass unnoticed in the extremely low-key news media coverage of the report." In fact,

news coverage of the report has focused either on the official estimate of only 26 civilian deaths and the much larger number of Taliban casualties or on the absence of blame on the part of U.S. military personnel found by the investigators.

The Associated Press reported that the United States had "accidentally killed an estimated 26 Afghan civilians last month when a warplane did not strictly adhere to rules for bombing."

The New York Times led with the fact that the investigation had called for "additional training" of U.S. air crews and ground forces but did hold any personnel "culpable" for failing to follow the existing rules of engagement.

Contributing to these outlets' dissembling on behalf of U.S. troops' bloody actions, Porter found that "none of the news media reporting on the highly expurgated version of the investigation pointed out that it had confirmed, in effect, the version of the event that had been put forward by residents of the bombed villages." Listen to more about Afghanistan deceptions in U.S. media on the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Gareth Porter on the Afghanistan Surge" (4/3/09).

"If media reports are to be believed," Gabriel Arana of the Nation writes (5/27/09), "an Armageddon-like rash of drug-related violence--unlike any seen since 'Miami Vice years of the 1980s'--has crossed from Mexico into the United States, 'just as government officials had feared.'" But that's a pretty big if, even though "in the national media, it's become a foregone conclusion that Mexican drug violence has penetrated the United States":

But the numbers tell a different story. According to crime statistics for American cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and major U.S. metro areas along drug routes, violent crimes, including robberies, have either decreased in the first part of 2009 or remained relatively stable. This is not to say that the increased violence in Mexico has had no impact in the United States or that no violence in the United States can be traced to the conflict in Mexico. Rather, the drive not to get "scooped" by competitors has led media outlets to conclude prematurely--based on hearsay and isolated incidents--that a wave of drug-related violence is upon us....

Among the earliest reports that potential violence had become actual violence was an AP story that credited unnamed "authorities" with the news. Tellingly, the story did not contain a single direct quote stating either that violence had increased or that it was linked to the drug trade. Rather, it juxtaposed its broad claims against gruesome descriptions of drug violence in Mexico or wildly speculative quotes about what could happen here.

"Nevertheless," Arana tells us, "within weeks the New York Times jumped on the story: "Wave of Drug Violence Is Creeping Into Arizona From Mexico, Officials Say." See, from the three-part cover story, "Media Patrol the Border," in the currently print-only edition of Extra: "Does Violence 'Spill Over' or Come Home to Roost?" (6/09) by Daniel Hernandez

This Associated Press story ("Debate Over Who Sotomayor Is a Sensitive One," 5/29/09) sure is confused. Luckily reporter Sharon Thiemer makes at least that much clear from the very start:

There are two sides to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor: a Latina from a blue-collar family and a wealthy member of America's power elite.

The White House portrays Sotomayor as a living image of the American dream, though its telling of the rags-to-riches story emphasizes the rags, a more politically appealing narrative, and plays down the riches.

Yes, somehow the White House picked her despite the fact that she is no longer poor--and still pretended that she was the "living image of the American dream," which as we all know is to remain poor one's entire life.

That's not the end of it.  The AP also writes:

On ethnicity, Sotomayor herself has recognized--and contributed to--the dichotomy. She proudly highlights her Puerto Rican roots but hasn't always liked it when others have.

The evidence:

Yet years ago, during a recruiting dinner in law school at Yale, Sotomayor objected when a law firm partner asked whether she would have been admitted to the school if she weren't Puerto Rican, and whether law firms did a disservice by hiring minority students the firms know are unqualified and will ultimately be fired.

So she's proud of being Puerto Rican and she takes offense at the notion that she couldn't have gotten into Yale if she weren't? What a "dichotomy." The AP goes on to note that Sotomayor "won a formal apology from the firm."

We do learn, as well, that her brother is a doctor "whose practice doesn't accept Medicaid or Medicare-- programs for the poor and elderly--according to its website." Great--now her sibling isn't poor anymore, either?

The Associated Press' Shawn Pogatchnik (5/12/09) has the incredible and deeply alarming story of Dublin sociology student Shane Fitzgerald having "posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia" just as the world's reporters were writing up the March 18 death of composer Maurice Jarre. Intended for "testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news," Fitzgerald's fib "flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper websites in Britain, Australia and India"--in short, "Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked."

"They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first"--and from there it only gets more embarrassing:

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began....

So far, the [London] Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version--or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source--and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.

Not only did the Guardian honestly own up to its mistake, but readers' editor Siobhain Butterworth got "the moral of this story" right in her May 4 column on the episode: It's "not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source." For his part, Fitzgerald himself now is "100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," and in doing so "would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."

The North American Congress on Latin America has published (NACLA Magazine, 5-6/09) Dan Beeton's account of how, following Evo Morales' huge win in the Bolivian presidential referendum of last August, his opponents instigated "riots, economic sabotage and the massacre of more than 20 indigenous"--during which Bolivia threw out the U.S. ambassador for attempted spying and allegedly providing "funding for violent opposition groups." Yet, Beeton tells us, "save for one Washington Post article, the [subsequent U.S.] Morales visit garnered no full-length reports in major U.S. papers."

This could arguably be a good thing, considering the results of what little attention was paid to Morales having solicited Sen. Richard Lugar's "remarkable statement implicitly acknowledging that the United States had made a mistake in failing to condemn the September violence":

Only the Associated Press and the Washington Post even mentioned it, and the AP initially misrepresented the statement completely, reporting that Lugar had said "the United States rejects any suggestion that it did not respect Bolivia's sovereignty or the legitimacy of its government." (A correction was never issued. A subsequent AP article in December cited Lugar's statement correctly and reported Morales' encouraging response.)

Although Lugar's statement was handed directly to the Post, neither the meeting with Lugar nor Lugar's statement made it into the print edition of the paper's article on Morales' visit. This is a striking omission in a 700-word article, since it was arguably the most newsworthy event of the visit. A Web version of the article did mention the Lugar meeting, but only in the 13th paragraph.

Hear of similarly shoddy press treatment of the other great official U.S. enemy of Latin America on FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: "Dan Beeton on Venezuela" (2/13/09).

Associated Press reporter Calvin Woodward has a history of straining to catch Barack Obama in factual errors. But today's review of last night's Obama press conference may have hit a new low in absurdity.

In the piece, headlined "Fact Check: Obama Disowns Deficit He Helped Shape," Woodward takes issue with Obama's statement: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me." Woodward's criticism: "It actually was him--and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years--who shaped a budget so out of balance.... Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator."

Well, if an Illinois senator bears more responsibility for the federal budget than the president, than why is Woodward wasting his time covering what President Obama has to say about the budget? Shouldn't he be interviewing Roland Burris instead?

Voter turnout in last weekend's Haitian Senate elections was very low; observers cited in a Reuters report, "Haitians Largely Boycott Senate Election,” estimated it at less than 10 percent, which an Al Jazeera report attributed in part to "resentment over the banning of a popular party"--Fanmi Lavalas--as well as disenchantment with the ruling government and poverty. A short Associated Press report published in the New York Times (4/20/09) about the vote had an odd spin on these issues:

The success of Sunday's election was threatened by voter apathy and opposition from the Fanmi Lavalas Party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The party's candidates were disqualified by Haiti's provisional electoral council.

So the election's "success" was threatened by a popular political party's "opposition" to its own exclusion from the democratic process? It's a rather peculiar idea of what constitutes a threat to democracy--especially as the Times article makes no mention of the fact that Aristide, Haiti's twice-elected former president, remains in exile in South Africa, effectively barred from returning to Haiti after being overthrown five years ago in a U.S.-backed coup.