I checked out a post from the Web-based publication Capital (9/28/11) about media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest because CJR (9/29/11) told me it was a "smart post" that "crunched the numbers" and showed "how there really is no media blackout." I have to say I would have thought CJR would have higher standards when it came to crunching media numbers.

Capital's Joe Pompeo states his thesis early on:

The idea that there is a media blackout has gained appeal on the left with support from Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, who said on the September 21 edition of his primetime show on Current TV: "The majority of the media is ignoring the public uprising."

In fact, an (admittedly unscientific) survey of news organizations suggests the protest, despite lacking any clear goal or purpose (that's by design), has been making headlines since it began on September 17.

OK, so Pompeo is trying to show that Olbermann was wrong when he said on September 21 that "the majority of the media" was ignoring the protest. (Michael Moore made a similar statement on the Rachel Maddow Show on September 19.) He does this by doing Nexis and Google searches that include a full week of additional coverage:

A Nexis query for "Occupy Wall Street" yielded 428 results as of press time [i.e, September 28], including 248 items that appeared on blogs, 71 in newspapers, 63 on the wires, 31 in "Web-based publications," 18 as news transcripts, nine as "aggregate news sources," one in the industry trade press and one in a legal news publication. Google News has indexed more than 2,000 articles between September 17 and today.

That is "admittedly unscientific"--not to mention patently unfair.

How much coverage had Occupy Wall Street actually gotten when Olbermann made his claim? Well, Nexis gives me 17 articles from September 16 through September 21 in the "Newspaper Stories, Combined Articles" database with the words "Occupy Wall Street" in them.  Of these, 10 are from overseas papers--from Britain, Australia, Canada, China and Pakistan. Another four are from the St. Joseph News Press, a Missouri paper that reprints tiny items from CNN's wire service. So when Olbermann made his comment, there had been three actual U.S. newspaper stories during five days of demonstrations in the heart of the nation's media capital--the New York Daily News (9/17/11),  Newark Star Ledger (9/18/11) and New York Newsday (9/19/11)--that are at least in-depth enough to mention the name of the event. That's a grand total of 1,047 words.

That Newsday piece, by the way, was headlined "Protests Close Wall Street Second Day." Nothing to see here--move along!

From a Q&A with NPR ombud Alicia Shepard (CJR, 4/11/11):

I also got a call last week from Ralph Nader. He was saying how NPR is really just a corporate toady, and that they don't have enough progressive voices on, and I hear that quite a bit. I hear that more from people who actually listen to NPR.

Funny how that works.

Last month CJR blogger Curtis Brainard (1/29/10) complained that the media were not giving enough attention to some complaints--mostly from climate change deniers--about the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and complaints about IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. Jim Naureckas suggested right here that this was a bad idea, but today the New York Times (2/9/10) seemed to take CJR's advice.

The headline ("U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege") and second paragraph suggest something important:

But Dr. Pachauri and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now under intense scrutiny, facing accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest from climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, called for Dr. Pachauri's resignation last week.

So what's the status of these charges? You have to read a few more paragraphs until you're told that "several of the recent accusations have proved to be half-truths," and that the "general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions." Well, shouldn't that be made clear from the start?

There are two scientific criticisms made about the last IPCC report--one has been found baseless, while the other was an actual mistake, though the magnitude of the error seems to have been overstated. But that's apparently good enough to craft a whole story around the "IPCC Under Siege" theme, and to collect quotes from the likes of leading denier Christopher Monckton: "The chair is an Indian railroad engineer with very substantial direct and indirect financial vested interests in the matters covered in the climate panel’s report. What on earth is he doing there?"

Monckton is, among other things, "the chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute"-- a climate change denying think tank that apparently does not disclose its funders (SpinProfiles). Yet apparently the Times sees Monckton as a credible source for critiquing the head of the IPCC for failing to disclose his financial ties.

Curtis Brainard of CJR's Observatory blog (1/29/10) complains about the lack of coverage of what he calls "Glaciergate":

Almost two weeks ago, the Sunday Times, a British newspaper, "broke" the story that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had made significant errors in its 2007 report on the impacts of global warming....

The report stated that there was a very high likelihood that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Three days after the Times published its article, the IPCC essentially admitted that this was an error (while glaciers in the region are melting, they are unlikely to vanish that quickly) and apologized (pdf) for the "poorly substantiated" claim.

In the days after the story first broke, the New York Times and the Washington Post each ran one print article about the Himalayan glaciers error. The Christian Science Monitor, now published online, produced one piece, and the Associated Press and Bloomberg sent a couple of articles over the wire.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Meanwhile, outlets in the U.K., India and Australia have been eating the American media's lunch, churning out reams of commentary and analysis. Journalists in the U.S. should take immediate steps to redress that oversight.

But the New York Times never reported the IPCC's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 before publishing the debunking article. The Washington Post mentioned it in a story (11/22/09) that focused on the Indian environmental minister's rejection of the claim. The Christian Science Monitor had one piece (11/5/99) on melting Himalayan glaciers that quoted a source saying "the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high"--but this was not a quote from the IPCC report, which wouldn't appear for another eight years, but from the International Commission on Snow and Ice, which was part of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences.

None of these papers, then, thought that the IPCC's statement that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 was in itself worth mentioning, let alone basing a story around. So how much effort should the same papers spend reporting on the withdrawal of this claim? That depends on whether you think melting glaciers, or scientific misstatements about melting glaciers, are the bigger threat to humanity.

You see the same emphasis on science process trivia over the actual phenomena scientists are studying in a British Guardian story headlined "Leaked Climate Change Emails Scientist 'Hid' Data Flaws" (2/1/10), which is no doubt getting a lot of U.S. traffic today via a link from Drudge. In the fifth paragraph, the story reveals that contrary to the implication of the headline and subhead ("Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures"), the story actually has no bearing on the reality of climate change:

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

And how do they do that, exactly?

Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.

So essentially this story reveals that before a scientist was cleared of suspicions of scientific wrongdoing, he was suspected of scientific wrongdoing. Stop the presses!

That a respectable paper like the Guardian would trumpet this as an important scoop--and that a media watchdog like CJR would be calling for more in this vein--is a testimony to how deeply the "Climategate" hackers have distorted the discussion over the most important environmental issue of our lifetimes. See the brand-new issue of Extra!: "'Climategate' Overshadows Copenhagen: Media Regress to the Bad Old Days of False Balance" (2/10) by Julie Hollar.

New York Times' climate change reporter Andrew Revkin is taking a buyout from his employer after a tough year, the Columbia Journalism Review's website (12/14/09) reports. Revkin, whom CJR's Christine Russell describes as "one of the most influential and respected reporters on the environment," says that 2009 "has been the hardest year I’ve experienced on this beat"--in part because

Revkin has increasingly found himself--and his paper’s coverage--the target of critics on both the right and the left, particularly in the often vitriolic blogosphere. He described himself as "an advocate for scientific reality," not for either side of the debate.

"The right," in this sense, means people who dispute the idea that humans are causing global climate change, whereas "the left" means people who affirm that we are--in other words, people who believe in scientific reality. Revkin's willingness to pretend that science is not on one side of the debate explains a lot of the criticism he's taken lately from pro-science bloggers.

Tom Edsall argues on the Columbia Journalism Review website (10/8/09) that the mainstream media should just own up to the fact that they're liberal. This comes as a response to the notion that the elite press missed out on the ACORN and Van Jones stories--a dubious premise. But Edsall doesn't make much of a case. He writes that before 1965,  "reporters were a mix of the working stiffs leavened by ne'er-do-well college grads unfit for corporate headquarters or divinity school." Since then, however, the elite press  "is composed in large part of 'new' or 'creative' class members of the liberal elite." Edsall's version of liberalism, then, is an elite strand focused mostly on certain social issues--his list is "abortion rights, women's rights, civil rights and gay rights."

Those seem like majority positions, but never mind. Edsall offers one concrete example:

In a UCLA study of media bias, reporters were found to be substantially more liberal and more Democratic than the public at large.

The study in question is the famous (and famously complicated) one that found that Fox News Channel's Special Report was centrist, and the Drudge Report leaned left. That should be enough to dismiss it on its face, but it's worth pointing out that that study did not tell us anything about "reporters" per se; they studied how often outlets cited particular think tanks, and ranked those think tanks on an ideological scale based on which politicians cited those groups (i.e., a liberal lawmaker drops the names of liberal think tanks; the frequency with which that think tank is cited in the media tells you how liberal the outlet is).

That the roundabout methodology of the study produced such bizarre conclusions is one reason not to cite it, but it also wasn't a study of what Edsall claimed it was--that is, of reporters' own political sentiments.  But there are such studies. In fact, FAIR released one in 1998, where journalists' views on important economic policy questions were compared with public opinion poll results on the same issues. Journalists were, it turns out, well to the right of the public on most issues; when asked to classify themselves, the majority were center-left on social issues, and center-right on economic issues. But the main finding was this:

On select issues from corporate power and trade to Social Security and Medicare to healthcare and taxes, journalists are actually more conservative than the general public.

In other words, the research that Edsall wants to cite exists; it just mostly contradicts his premise.

By now it's old news to any reasonably critical observer that corporate outlets' "business reporters failed to see the crisis in the mortgage and credit markets as it brewed and bubbled," as former City Limits editor Alyssa Katz puts it (CJR.org, 9/14/09), but Katz also gives props to others who noticed how "evidence of its unsustainability was plain to see for those who chose to look":

The fact is, and as immodest as it may seem to say, independents were repeatedly ahead of the curve on covering the mortgage and real estate bubble and in connecting the dots between vital elements of the bigger story—especially the links between predatory and lending and the metastasizing mortgage-backed securities market.

In 2002, the Nation warned that the mortgage-backed securities market’s bottomless appetite for subprime mortgages was financing an epidemic of destructive lending. In 2003, Southern Exposure exhaustively documented Citigroup’s move into the mass production of high-interest loans designed to drain borrowers' meager wealth. In 2005, Mother Jones assigned me to find out why the streets of Cleveland were lined with vacant houses. A reasonable question, and I found the answers on the Wall Street credit securities market. Indeed, all through this period, alt-weeklies told tales found in living rooms and legal services offices of homeowners who had believed a mortgage broker’s misleading sales pitch and wound up facing foreclosure.

Examining "the fact" that "independent journalists exposed the dimensions of the problem with a depth and timeliness that mainstream news organizations simply and regrettably did not match," Katz thinks "it's not about being better journalists; it is about being tuned to a different audience and set of interests." Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11–12/08) by Veronica Cassidy.

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).

I give Peter Osnos credit for not being as nutty as Richard Posner or as self-pitying as Dana Milbank; his piece from CJR on "What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?" (7-8/09) is the most reasonable version I've seen of the news industry's case against the search engine company. Still, I can't help but think that he's missing the point in a fundamental way.

One of Osnos' key examples of the unfairness of Google involves Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com, and a story it ran (2/7/09) on pitcher Alex Rodriguez testing positive for steroids. Osnos relates SI.com's grievance: Though it broke the story, other websites got as much or more traffic from it:

Most galling was that the Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.

From a journalist's perspective, this is patently unfair: SI.com got the scoop, and ought to get the reward. But is that the right perspective to look at what Google does?  Journalists are not, after all, in the business of creating information; they're in the business of conveying information.  Sports Illustrated's reporters did not create Rodriguez's failing steroid test results; Major League Baseball did that. People with access to the test information passed it on to SI, and SI put it up on the Web.

But that's not where the process of information transmission stops. People can't check every website that might break a news story of interest to them every day, so they rely on news gathering institutions to bring information together for them--that's what newspapers do, that's what AP does, and, yes, that's what Huffington Post does too.

Osnos attributes the Google results to the fact that "Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines." And it may well be that the folks at HuffPo are better at that stuff than SI is--though you'd think with the $84 billion entity of Time Warner behind them, the sports mag could afford to figure it out.

More important for HuffPo's search results, however, is the fact that people who use the Web have gotten used to looking for breaking news there, and so when they link to a story they find interesting they link to it there. Google's methodology, looking for links as a surrogate for how people use the Web, finds more of them going to Huffington Post than to SI.com--and that's why HuffPo came out on top.

Osnos says that "human help" needs to be incorporated into Google's algorithm--given that the search engine last year announced that it had indexed more than 1 trillion urls, this suggestion would seem to be rather impractical. But it's not clear that the human-free algorithm is making the wrong choice by directing Web surfers to the sites people most often go to when looking for information.

Noticing how PBS's Gwen Ifill has a penchant for "filling her Washington Week program with journalists who almost invariably agree with each other instead of actually debating the issues of the week," critic Charles Kaiser decided to contact her (CJR.org, 5/8/09) about a recent "discussion of torture in which the only issue the panelists identified was how the Obama administration should deal with the political fallout from the demands for a full-scale investigation and/or prosecution of the officials responsible for American torture."

Kaiser's question of whether it would "ruin the discussion to have one person who believes that a full investigation of American torture and prosecutions of those responsible for it are the only way to rescue the honor of America" received a curt reply from Ifill: "Opinion? You were watching the wrong program if that's what you were looking for."

Aside from its snide tone, Kaiser spells out for Ifill exactly what's wrong with this view:

Gwen,

Everyone at that table obviously believed that investigating and/or prosecuting torture was a political problem for the Obama administration, and nothing more.

That is an opinion, Gwen. The fact that all of you shared it doesn't make it anything else. It does mean you were incapable of acknowledging any other point of view.

This is why we call it "the Washington bubble."

To top it off, after Ifill's subsequent offer to "feel free to call me during working hours. You know how," Kaiser reports that "after three more e-mail requests for an interview, and four voicemails left for Ifill and her two producers over two weeks, the anchorwoman never managed to return any of our phone calls."

During coverage of the Obama administration's 100-day mark, MSNBC had war reporter Richard Engel and anchor Tamron Hall interview MSNBC analyst Barry McCaffrey, who CJR.org's Clint Hendler (4/29/09) calls "the retired army general whose many conflicts of interest have been analyzed by David Barstow's now-Pulitzer Prize winning reporting for the New York Times." When asked by Engel about attempts to "draw away the Taliban's source of funding by cutting down the opium crop or burning it or whatever," McCaffrey was emphatic: "I think we’ve got to take it on. But, you know, the lead agent can't be U.S. combat troops. It's got to be Afghans chopping down opium poppy." Hendler thinks he knows the source of McCaffrey's enthusiasm, even if the MSNBCers don't (or at least aren't saying):

Neither Hall, Engel nor McCaffrey made mention of DynCorp, a major military contractor that's doing exactly that--training Afghans to eradicate poppies.

Nor did they mention that McCaffrey sits on DynCorp's board, which according to federal contracting records, garnered contracts in 2008 and 2009 worth over $323 million dollars with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, including its work in Afghanistan.

Read more on media treatment of Barry McCaffrey and his Pentagon brethren in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Network News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits" (6/08) by Isabel Macdonald.

As "the American foreign policy community worked itself into something resembling a frenzy over the appointment of Charles W. 'Chas' Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council"--because "at stake was, if not a direct policy battle of huge consequence, a real struggle over the range of viewpoints that will be permitted in an official government position"--Greg Marx says (CJR.org, 3/13/09) that "if you get your news from the New York Times, you were totally oblivious to this story as it unfolded":

To recap: On February 19, Laura Rozen reported on Foreign Policy's website that Freeman, who is known for his realist foreign policy views and colorful character, had been appointed by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to head the NIC. Within hours, Steve Rosen, formerly of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, had sounded the alarm on the grounds that Freeman is too sympathetic to Saudi Arabia and too hostile to Israel. Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, Freeman's critics pressed their case, adding to the complaints about his views on the Middle East allegations that he is unduly accommodating to China's leadership. Along the way, an inspector general began an investigation of Freeman's financial ties to foreign governments, and Freeman's supporters launched a counteroffensive. And, on Tuesday, as the campaign against him was gaining traction on Capitol Hill, Freeman withdrew from the position, blasting the "Israel Lobby" on his way out the door.

That's a lot of information, almost all of it from blogs or other Web publications. The Times did not address the controversy once until after Freeman withdrew, publishing a brief article by Mark Mazzetti in Wednesday's paper, and a front-page follow-up by Mazzetti and Helene Cooper on Thursday. The reticence of major newspapers--and especially the Times--about the story while it was unfolding was noticed, and criticized, by both pro- and anti-Freeman advocates.

Marx additionally notes that the Washington Post, being "the Times's big legacy-media competition on foreign policy stories, was also slow to cover the story, though it jumped in a day earlier than the Times--i.e., before Freeman withdrew."

Jane Kim of CJR.org (3/9/09) quotes some of the reactions to a New York Times reporter asking Barack Obama if he is "a socialist as some people have suggested": Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post cracks that "the New York Times was THAT CLOSE to a journalistic coup!" and American Prospect's Ezra Klein wants to know, "Did they really think he would slip and admit that his stimulus plan was cadged from a footnote in Das Kapital?"

NYT reporter Peter Baker defended the question to Greg Sargent: "We were…interested in exploring how a new president defines his political philosophy, something that has been the subject of intense debate." That would explain, to some extent, why the Times also chose to ask Obama: "Is there one word name for your philosophy? If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?"

If it’s one-word, yes/no answers that we're looking for, I've got a question that might elicit one: Is the discussion of whether Obama's economic policies signify a shift in our country's guiding political framework at all advanced by a simplistic "So, are ya?" query from the New York Times?

Admitting that "being direct can be effective sometimes," Kim still thinks "it's a shame that the Times chose to employ the Are you this? Are you that? questioning technique," because "in this case... the questions weren't nuanced enough to lift the discussion up and away from political ass-covering."