Last week, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz explained that Newt Gingrich was "an idea-spewing machine" and a "one-man think tank"--even warning that "a keen intellect can also translate into the appearance of intellectual superiority." Well OK.

A few days in Balz's paper, readers learned that in a recent speech Gingrich called Barack Obama a "food stamp president." Which I think must be some wonky think tank rhetoric.

Matthew Yglesias also noted that in the same appearance, Gingrich advocated a return to Jim Crow-era voting laws, saying: "But maybe we should also have a voting standard that says to vote, as a native born American, you should have to learn American history."

Well, he's definitely spewing something.

Washington Post reporter Dan Balz has a front-page piece about Newt Gingrich's announcement that he's running for president. Balz calls Gingrich's Twitter declaration a "milestone in presidential politics," adding that Gingrich "is an idea-spewing machine," a "one-man think tank" and "someone who has remained in the forefront of the public policy debate over a span of decades" with his "devotion to the intersection of ideas and politics": Gingrich has "kept himself in the middle of public policy debates on healthcare, education, energy and foreign affairs."

One possible downside, Balz warns: "A keen intellect can also translate into the appearance of intellectual superiority." Goodness, will the rest of us even be able to understand his abstruse campaign platform?

Not all media coverage is so bad. The New York Times editorial page reminds readers of some Gingrich's actual positions:

The Democrats who won in 2008, including President Obama, are "left-wing radicals" who lead a "secular socialist machine," he wrote in his 2010 book, To Save America. He accused them of producing "the greatest political corruption ever seen in modern America." And then the inevitable historical coup de grâce: "The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."

The slurs don't stop there. He compared the Muslims who wanted to open an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan to the German Reich, saying it "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum." He is promoting the fringe idea that "jihadis" are intent on imposing Islamic law on every American village and farm.

Last year, he called for a federal law to stop the (nonexistent) onslaught of Sharia on American jurisprudence and accused the left of refusing to acknowledge its "mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it." This nuanced grasp of world affairs was reinforced when he said that Mr. Obama displayed "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior."

In his world, advocates for gay rights are imposing a "gay and secular fascism" using violence and harassment, blacks have little entrepreneurial tradition, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court is a "Latina woman racist." (He kind of took back that last slur.)

"Intellectual superiority" would not appear to be something  Gingrich has to worry about.

In today's edition of the Washington Post (5/2/11), Dan Balz puts forth what is probably going to be a popular theme in the coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden:  that catching the Al-Qaeda leader was a top concern of both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Bush put down the marker not long after the September 11 attacks, saying he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." That was taken as a sign of cowboy swagger by a Texan president by some of his critics, but it was a reflection of the absolute importance that he and much of the nation attached to bringing to justice the man responsible for the worst terrorist attack on the homeland in the history of the nation....

Bin Laden eluded Bush and his team, to their regret, but not for lack of trying. Bush's persistence was palpable and set the tone for the intelligence community tasked with bringing bin Laden to justice. Obama picked up on that commitment when he came into office and redoubled efforts to defeat Al-Qaeda and kill bin Laden.

To cite just one memorable moment that this account overlooks, Bush declared in March 2002:

Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not. We haven't heard from him in a long time. The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. He's just a person who's been marginalized.... I don't know where he is. I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly gathers the rest of the evidence of the Bush administration's less than "palpable" pursuit, including:

In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.

In September 2006, Bush told Fred Barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an "emphasis on bin Laden doesn't fit with the administration's strategy for combating terrorism."

Some mystical power forces the corporate media to cover Donald Trump.

In the New York Times today:

But White House officials concluded about a month ago that the falsehoods had moved from "the nether regions of the Internet" into the mainstream political arena, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mr. Trump, the real estate developer and reality television host who has used the issue as a media magnet.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post elaborated on the PBS NewsHour:

I mean, I think that the press probably does bear some responsibility for this but there's no question that what Donald Trump had done over the last month, in bringing this issue back to the forefront, at a time when I think most people thought it had been pretty well settled politically, not that--not that there wasn't still some controversy, but that, for the most part, this wasn't a live issue.

But Donald Trump helped to make it a live issue. And all the press coverage attendant to that, some of it aimed at debunking what Donald Trump was saying, nonetheless contributed to this atmosphere.

"Issues" are not brought "to the forefront" and made a "live issue" by some series of accidents, or the physical properties of magnets. Media outlets make decisions about what to cover.  In Balz's world, Trump started talking and the press simply had to cover it. Trump didn't make anything a "live issue"--people who have television stations and newspapers decided to treat him as if he is a serious person.

The first role of the corporate press in an election cycle is to weed out candidates who they deem nonviable. This usually means choosing not to cover candidates whose ideas that fall outside the Beltway conventional wisdom (e.g., Dennis Kucinich), or those who reporters decide  have no real chance of winning the nomination.

The speculation that reality TV star/mogul Donald Trump might run in 2012 flips the narrative around--and demonstrates the fact that the media can change the "rules" whenever they want. Trump is extremely unlikely to actually run, and his "ideas" mostly revolve around a long-debunked conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born where he was born. So by any normal standard he would get no coverage. But he's perhaps the dominant feature of the early campaign coverage, making a string of television appearances that a supposedly marginal candidate would never enjoy.

What gives? Some reporters have tried to find ways to explain why this is so, or at least justify the attention. Take Dan Balz in the Washington Post (4/24/11):

The New York businessman has grabbed headlines with his provocative remarks on President Obama's birthplace. He continues to question whether the president was born in Hawaii, despite ample evidence that he was. But what he has had to say about real issues deserves as much attention as his "birther" comments.

I wish he were saying that since Trump's birtherism deserves no coverage,  his thoughts about "real issues" deserve the same.

But Balz seems to be arguing that since Trump's nutty conspiracy-mongering  makes news, his other ideas deserve to make news too.  All this coming from a guy no one seems to think has any intention of actually mounting a serious campaign. This is an extremely odd justification, at odds with the normal rules of Beltway journalism.

Amidst this backdrop, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas will apparently announce his intention today to run in 2012. He was a candidate in 2008 that media mostly left out of their campaign coverage, despite the fact that he had a core of dedicated volunteers and an impressive ability to raise money (one of the things that media normally treat as very important).

Ron Paul is, in other words, was an actual candidate, and is likely to be one again. But will he enjoy even a tiny fraction of the coverage given to Donald Trump? Don't bet on it.

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.

Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that "both sides" are responsible for toxic political rhetoric:

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: It's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Rep. Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the GOP.

...Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you'll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won't hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly, and you will.

Unfortunately, that false balance is not just coming from the right, but appears all across the media. On Meet the Press (1/9/11), NBC's David Gregory rounded up examples of demonizing rhetoric:

Let's be honest, there is a demonization.  It happens amongst all of you, it happens in the public, it happens in the polarized aspects of the press, a demonization of the other side.  Whether it's a congressman saying, "You lie," from the House floor, whether it's a Democrat who literally shoots the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign advertisement.  Or your former colleague, Alan Grayson from Florida, compared Republicans to the Taliban.  I mean, this kind of vitriol on both sides does contribute to that, that demonization.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post (1/10/11):

Politicians in both parties have said this is not a time for one side to try to score political points against the other over who bears responsibility for these conditions, though there is plenty of finger-pointing in the blogosphere and on Twitter. The reality is everyone bears some responsibility, from politicians to political operatives to the media to ordinary Americans.

New York Times (1/10/11):

Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence.

New York Times' Matt Bai leads off with examples from "both sides," and in so doing equates one of the most prominent national figures in the Republican Party (and a regular contributor to the GOP house organ Fox News Channel) with some unnamed diarist from Arizona who didn't support a recent Gifford vote:

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords', with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to me" after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

To his credit, Bai spends significant time recounting violent rhetoric from Republican and conservative leaders--likely because there is just a lot more of that to write about. But he offers an excuse for their behavior:

It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they're not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that--like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater--they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

Bai adds:

None of this began last year, or even with Mr. Obama or with the Tea Party; there were constant intimations during George W. Bush's presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

Yes, there are people who called Bush a "modern Hitler," or believed he had some role in the 9/11 attacks. Those people are generally not given talkshows, and cannot be found in positions of power in the Democratic Party.

Sunday's Washington Post (10/10/10) featured a story by Jon Cohen and Dan Balz that led with this claim:

If there is an overarching theme of election 2010, it is the question of how big the government should be and how far it should reach into people's lives.

The piece is actually an explanation of the results of a new poll conducted by the Post along with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. As Dean Baker noted (10/10/10), "There is absolutely nothing in this article that supports this assertion." He is correct. The Post's report deals with the supposedly conflicted nature of public opinion, where people complain about the performance of the federal government but then also express strong support for certain government programs. Even this seems a tad oversold; one can very easily think highly of Social Security and believe in additional government spending to spur the economy while also having little confidence "in the government's ability to solve problems."

So why is there this "big government" framing of the issue, then?  Baker points out that certain politicians benefit from it:

There are no candidates anywhere in the country who are running in support of "big government," there are candidates who are running in support of programs which have varying degrees of support. There are many candidates (virtually all Republicans) who are running against "big government." While this position has nothing to do with the world (we all oppose waste, fraud and abuse; the question is always the status of specific programs), it is certainly helpful to the Republicans to have the election framed in this way.

And in his column today (New York Times, 10/11/10) , Paul Krugman helpfully pushes back against this entire theme:

Here's the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can't create jobs.

Here's what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: We never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Yesterday's Washington Post (12/16/09) reports that the public isn't sold on healthcare reform. As the headline puts it:

Public Cooling to Healthcare Reform as Debate Drags On, Poll Finds

The story by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen explains that "there is minimal public enthusiasm for the kind of comprehensive changes in healthcare now under consideration." Now, how "comprehensive" the reforms under consideration are is certainly debatable, but these conclusions seem to be drawn from questions about costs and Barack Obama's handling of the issue.

But the Post did ask other, more interesting questions--and then buried the results. Deep into the article we learn that "more than six in 10 favor expanding Medicare to people ages 55 to 64 who lack insurance--a proposal included in one Senate compromise effort that appears unlikely to survive final negotiations." In the next graph, readers are told:

On the issue of whether and how to expand coverage to those who do not have it, 36 percent favor a government plan to compete with private insurers, 30 percent prefer private plans coordinated by the government and 30 percent want the system to remain intact.

As with the so-called Medicare "buy-in," this finding of strong support for a public option suggests that the public is much more supportive of fundamental health care changes than the Congress or White House. In other words, the public isn't really "cooling" to health care reform;  they want more than the politicians are likely to deliver.

In the Washington Post (10/25/09), reporter Dan Balz has a piece about the "resurrection" of the public option in the Senate negotiations over healthcare reform. But like the Post's trumpeting of its recent poll on the issue, Balz's rationale doesn't make much sense. As he sees it, Senate Democrats "reevaluated the politics of the public option" in part because support was on the rise:

Then last week, new polls, one from the Washington Post and ABC News and the other from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, found clear majority support (57 percent) for a public option. The Post/ABC News poll showed support had risen five percentage points since August. The new numbers emboldened public-option supporters to press harder, even though the same polls continued to show the public divided over the overall shape of healthcare legislation.

As we pointed out already, the Post's numbers weren't all that revelatory; the public option was popular before (with as much as 62 percent support in a June 18-21 Post/ABC poll) and continues to be popular. As for the Kaiser numbers Balz singles out, that poll did find 57 percent support this month; however, the month before (9/11-18/09), Kaiser found the public option supported by 59 percent.

Figuring out why the press is pushing this "public option comeback" storyline is difficult to fathom, but it's undeniable that it is being sold with misleading citations of public opinion.

The big news in the health reform debate is that the White House seems to be willing to give up on the "public option," a government insurance program that would compete with private insurers. Everyone sees this as a big story, but there's something revealing about the way the Washington Post's Ceci Conolly led her piece:

Racing to regain control of the health-care debate, two top administration officials signaled Sunday that the White House may be willing to jettison a controversial government-run insurance plan favored by liberals.

In Beltay mediaspeak, "regain control" must mean doing something that right-wing Democrats and Republicans want. The Post's Dan Balz already made this recommendation about the public option, writing on August 12, "Some of his staunchest allies believe that course would be prudent and might change the dynamic of the debate in the administration's favor." And on the roundtable segment on ABC's This Week on August 9, host George Stephanopoulos wondered if Obama would accept a watered-down bill in order to break with the "Howard Dean wing of the party." This notion was seconded by panelist Cokie Roberts, with right-wing columnist Peggy Noonan chiming in to say, "Maybe it would be good for the President if the left got absolutely furious about something."

So the health reform debate has shifted even further to the right--exactly where the corporate media wanted it.