Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz (5/3/09) seemed startled when the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza argued that "just because Bush or some previous president didn't garner as much coverage as Michelle and Barack Obama did doesn't tell you anything about press bias one way or another."

"Are you kidding?" Kurtz exclaimed.

He didn't express any similar surprise when CNN in-house conservative Amy Holmes came up with this "little-known fact":

The Washington Times reported this last week.... Actually, at this point in his presidency, Barack Obama is the fourth least popular of the past five presidents. You wouldn't know that from the press coverage, and you wouldn't know that George Bush...at this point in his presidency, in 2001, after having had the recount, not even winning the popular vote, in fact had higher Gallup approvals than Barack Obama does right now.

Well, no, you wouldn't know those things, because they aren't true. At the 100-day mark, Gallup found a job approval rating for Obama of 65 percent--three percentage points higher than the 62 percent that George W. Bush had at the same point in his first term. Gallup's polling found that Obama had a higher 100th-day approval rating than Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon as well. Of the last seven presidents, only Ronald Reagan, at 68 percent, had a higher job-approval rating--and Reagan, as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert pointed out (4/29/09), had just survived an assassination attempt in March 2001.

So how could the Washington Times have gotten it so wrong? A commenter on Media Matters' website traced this right-wing talking point back to a blog post by Judith Apter Klinghoffer on the History News Network (3/24/09). Klinghoffer declared that "Obama's Poll Numbers Trail Those of W."--a conclusion she reached by comparing Bush's job-approval rating to a number she calculated by combining the ratings of "excellent" and "good" received by Obama when people were asked what kind of job they thought he was doing.

Needless to say, you can't directly compare the answers to two different polling questions--particularly not when you can compare the results of the same question being asked. But the apples-to-oranges comparison produced results that were appealing to the right, so you soon saw James Pinkerton citing this bogus finding on Fox News Channel (4/25/09): "Judith Klinghoffer, writing for the History News Network, made the point that Obama ranked seventh out of the last nine presidents in Gallup poll opinion ratings. So seventh out of nine is not so good." Three days later, the Washington Times was making the same argument--and then it ends up on the not-so-well-named Reliable Sources.

Kurtz did take issue, sort of, with Holmes' claim, which ran counter to a wealth of polling data on Obama's approval ratings: "Although his numbers, we have to say, are pretty good." But when Holmes retorted: "They're pretty good, but comparatively. You're asking comparatively, how does the press treat these politicians different, and they do," Kurtz conceded: "OK. Fair enough."

Actually, that doesn't seem very fair at all.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly has been passionately defending Bush-era torture for some time. But on April 23 he went further; not only does torture "work," but it is actually broadly popular, too:

According to a new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll, most Americans want tough interrogations of top terror killers. When asked if they would support using torture on Osama bin Laden to get information, 56 percent say they favor doing that, including 42 percent of the Democrats polled. Thirty-nine percent oppose.

So there is little doubt that most Americans believe, in rare cases, tough interrogation is necessary.

A poll that asks whether Americans support torture Osama bin Laden wouldn't seem to tell us much; you might as well ask if people support torturing Satan.

But did Fox really just ask about torturing bin Laden? No. But O'Reilly had to cite that response, because the other responses from the same poll undermine his case. (It would appear to be the only relevant Fox poll on their site; it's a few months old, but the figures are the same as those cited by O'Reilly.) In reality, the Fox poll found the public far more ambivalent about torture than Man-of-the-People Bill O'Reilly:

Opinions on the use of torture are sharply divided. Forty-three percent of Americans favor allowing the CIA to use torture in extreme circumstances to obtain information from prisoners that "might protect the United States from terrorist attacks" and 48 percent oppose it. These results are consistent with findings from polling conducted in 2003 and 2002.

The number in favor of allowing the use of torture increases to 56 percent when the suspect in custody is Osama bin Laden.

So do most Americans favor torture captured "top terror killers?" Apparently not:

17. Do you favor or oppose allowing the CIA, in extreme circumstances, to use enhanced interrogation techniques, even torture, to obtain information from prisoners that might protect the United States from terrorist attacks?

Favor 43%
Oppose 48%
(Depends) 7%
(Don't know) 3%

With Fox News Channel relentlessly promoting--and MSNBC mostly mocking-- the right-wing "tea party" demonstrations around the country today, middle-of-the-road media critics are making a typically middle-of-the-road complaint: Yes, Fox shouldn't be sponsoring such events, but the rest of the corporate media shouldn't just ignore these allegedly newsworthy events.

As Howard Kurtz put it in the Washington Post today:

Some Fox News hosts have been pushing the tea party protests slated for hundreds of cities today, almost to the point that they seem to be the ringmasters of the event.  "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go!" Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney said the other day.

But there's another side to this saga. Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.

The New York Times has run zero stories. (The only mention was Times columnist Paul Krugman taking a brief swipe at the parties.) The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4. The Chicago Tribune ran a 300-word story and an item on postal workers mistaking tea for a hazardous substance. The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today. The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party, nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday (followed by a piece by me on the coverage). MSNBC's coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the "teabagging" until Chris Matthews held a more serious debate on Monday.

I must say I'm struck by this new standard for coverage of citizen activism--papers should cover small protests, some of which haven't happened? Was this the standard for, say, anti-war protests in 2002 and early 2003?

The pressure to treat these events seriously seems to be having some effect. Moments ago CNN had a long introduction to its live report from the Boston tea party, explaining that the protests have spread across the country, stoked by plain old citizen passion. The correspondent on the scene in Boston then explained that there were perhaps a few dozen attendees on hand. I guess Howard Kurtz will be pleased.

Do you remember when Fox News Channel thought comparisons between the U.S. government and Nazi Germany were insane and reprehensible? This was the channel's reaction when a couple of entries to a video contest sponsored by the progressive activist group MoveOn used Hitler analogies to criticize George W. Bush (FAIR Action Alert, 1/16/04):

News Corp's Fox News Channel started the controversy on January 4, airing Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie's complaint about the Bush/Hitler comparison. "That's the kind of tactics we're seeing on the left today in support of these Democratic presidential candidates," Gillespie charged, calling such tactics "despicable."

The whole next day (1/5/04), this was a major story on Fox News Channel. John Gibson asked, "What about the hating Bush movement, the MoveOn.org and George Soros sponsoring these ads that compare Bush to Hitler?"--before being corrected that the ads were not sponsored by MoveOn (or Soros, a funder of the group), and were taken down in response to complaints.

Sean Hannity accused a guest: "You guys on the left are going so far over the cliff. You're making comparisons to the president and Adolf Hitler." Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway said on Hannity's show, "This is the hateful, vitriolic rhetoric that has become the Howard Dean Democratic Party." Bill O'Reilly cited the ads as evidence that "right now in America the Democratic party is being held captive by the far, far left."

That was then, of course, and this is now. Here's Fox News star Glenn Beck on April 1 (Think Progress, 4/1/09):

Our government is ... marching us to a non-violent fascism. Or to put it another way, they're marching us to 1984. Big Brother.... Like it or not, fascism is on the rise.

Beck's rant came complete with footage of marching jackbooted Nazis. No word yet from Fox News on how "hateful" and "despicable" such comparisons are.

The ultimate irony is that Beck (FAIR Action Alert, 12/5/06) has threatened Muslim Americans with concentration camps--"the razor wire will be coming," was how he put it (CNN Headline News, 9/5/06)--if the "good Muslims" don't start "lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head." When it comes to fascism, Glenn Beck is not the kind of expert you want.

Upon seeing that, "on her show Tuesday night, Fox News' Greta Van Susteren devoted an entire segment to criticizing David Letterman" for having "made jokes about Sarah Palin and her family," Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (3/19/09) notices that

there seems to be a pattern here. In fact, it's hard not to notice that Van Susteren seems to enjoy closer ties to Palin than most media professionals. Matt Corley explained, for example, "In September, she hosted a one-hour 'documentary' on the GOP vice presidential candidate, titled Governor Sarah Palin--An American Woman.... After the election ended, Palin chose Van Susteren for her first national television interview. Since then, Greta has consistently covered Palin, keeping an eye out for any potential sleights of the governor and gushing over her popularity."

As it turns out, there's a reason that helps explain why Fox News' Van Susteren has taken on the role of media publicist for the Alaska governor--Van Susteren's husband helps guide Palin's political image.

[John] Coale, a well-known Washington lawyer and the husband of Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren... in an interview with the Fix, described himself simply as a "friend" of the Alaska governor but acknowledged that he suggested she start a leadership PAC and helped her navigate through some of the questions surrounding her family that lingered after the campaign. Others familiar with Palin's political team insist that Coale has far more power than he is letting on--essentially helping to run Sarah PAC.

Benen quite reasonably asks, "Doesn't this seem like the kind of thing Van Susteren might want to disclose to her viewers?" See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Sarah Palin: Maverick Feminist?" (12/08) by Candice O'Grady

Jon Stewart (3/17/09) has found Glenn Beck expressing his philosophy in what may be its purest form:

Believe in something!  Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!

On this morning's Fox & Friends, the hosts were having a laugh about Mauricio Funes, the new president of El Salvador. Funes won as the candidate of the FMLN, the political party of the former guerrilla group--and he was once a freelancer for CNN. Ergo, Fox could make jokes about CNN's "communist" ties.

One of the hosts (a substitute) tried to show that this was actually no laughing matter, since the FMLN "allegedly has ties to strongman Cesar Chavez." It takes the other hosts a little while to figure out that he means Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez--not the labor organizer regular host Steve Doocy refers to as "the lettuce guy."

Sigh.

Watch:

Steve Benen of Political Animal points out a couple of strange questions posed by corporate journalists--one to each of last year's major presidential candidates. In this post, Benen quotes an unnamed New York Times reporter (apparently either Sheryl Gay Stolberg or Steven Lee Meyers) basically red-baiting Barack Obama: "The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?" The same reporter, or maybe a different one--I guess they were speaking ex cathedra--later pressed Obama: "If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal?"

In a later post, Benen ponders Fox News' Chris Wallace asking John McCain, "You ever feel like saying 'I told you so'?" (McCain declined to do so, though he said, "I'm sure that would be a pleasant feeling.") As Benen notes, it's not clear what McCain told us, or what in the first six weeks of the Obama administration would cause us to reevaluate it. But as he says, the implication is clear: "Looking back at the presidential campaign, McCain was right about...something."

Fox sometimes points to Wallace to show that they're not out of the mainstream of corporate media.  The scary thing is that they might have a point.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly tries to nail Obama on a "no more earmarks" flip-flop in his "talking points" commentary (3/4/09):

O'REILLY: We begin with this:

BARACK OBAMA: We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review.

O'REILLY: That's President Obama pledging last January to end earmarks in federal spending. But now the House has passed a new spending bill full of earmark pork, and if the Senate OKs the $400+ billion spending bonanza this week, Mr. Obama is expected to sign it into law.

Actually, that was Obama talking about the stimulus package--which is not the same as the budget, which is what passed the House and is currently tied up in the Senate. And the stimulus bill didn't (technically at least) have "earmarks."

Prefacing a Daily Show segment (3/4/09) with his version of current big-media reporting: "Recent opinion polls indicate that six weeks into Barack Obama's administration, the American public thinks they approve of his performance--but it turns out they're wrong," Jon Stewart runs clips of celebrity news figures like Fox's Sean Hannity asking, "How did the market react to this latest liberal spending spree? Well, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped almost 400 points," and of Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto asking, "The Dow is down more than 1,500 points, nearly 3,000 since Election Day, now is this a vote of no confidence in this administration?" Mocking this common media canard, Stewart even calls the Dow

a real-time cause-and-effect precision barometer of how the president is doing. It's been that way for years. For example--little-known fact--Wall Street hated Ronald Reagan: Look at the numbers the day he got inaugurated. And they hated it when Truman announced we'd won World War II. And, to give you an idea of what a finely tuned measure of America's national mood the Dow is, when the Titanic sunk? Through the roof!

Stewart's take-away moral: "So what seems to be being suggested here is that opinion polls don't matter; the stock market is the only rational, objective indicator of a commander in chief's performance." Read the contrary evidence in FAIR's new Media Advisory: "What the Dow Isn't: Stocks Misused As 'Scorecard' of White House Policy" (3/5/09).

Noting that "Republicans and their adjunct outlets have been touting one specific lie above all others lately"--that of a fictitious "$8 billion earmark in the stimulus package to build a high-speed rail connector between Las Vegas and Disneyland"--Political Animal blogger Steve Benen reports (WashingtonMonthly.com, 3/3/09) that "yesterday, Fox News gave the story a twist, changing the details of the already-bogus claim to make a brand new lie":

Check out this exchange between Fox News's Megyn Kelly and Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) on the omnibus spending bill pending in the Senate:

Kelly: It's a super railroad, of sorts--a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney, we kid you not, to the doorstep of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. I say, to the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. So should your tax dollars be paying for these kinds of projects?

Note that the brothel in question is outside of Carson City, Nevada--more than 300 miles away from Las Vegas, where the imaginary earmark was previously delivering Disneyland visitors. Presumably this particular brothel was chosen by Fox because it includes the name of an animal, and the first rule of budget reporting is that animals are funny.

Benen particularly "love[s] the way Megyn Kelly adds 'we kid you not' while blatantly lying to a national television audience" and sees "an apparent attempt to win some kind of irony award" in Kelly's request that Rep. Franks "hold lawmakers accountable for made-up earmarks that don't exist outside Republican talking points and the GOP's cable news channel."

Bill O'Reilly explains the diversity of viewpoints available on the Fox News Channel (2/27/09):

The Fox News Channel features a variety of opinions. We parade in scores of guests each week with all kinds of views. Glenn Beck believes the nation is in crisis. Alan Colmes believes Obama could be the next FDR. Sean Hannity believes the Republican Party has the right formula. And I believe both parties need an overhaul. They need to start looking out for the folks. So you get a wide range of views, while our hard news people deliver solid facts.

Huh. Three right-wingers and Alan Colmes--who lost his show on Fox two months ago.

Keeping tabs on the "Fair and Balanced" network, Mark Howard (News Corpse, 3/2/09) details how

last year, prior to the election, Fox News was already fortifying its right flank. New multimillion dollar contracts were handed out to Roger Ailes, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Hannity's show shed the dead weight of alleged liberal Alan Colmes. Glenn Beck was brought in to shore up the daytime crowd. Neil Cavuto, a bully who is every bit as obnoxious as O'Reilly poisons the economic news, and he is also managing editor of Murdoch's Fox Business News. And just this week Bill Sammon, author of a shelf full of bitterly partisan books, was promoted to VP and Washington editor for the network.

The result is a full-court press of some of the dirtiest political assaults ever waged by what is advertised as a "news" network. Fox News is shamelessly pushing a campaign to characterize Obama as a socialist--a committed opponent of America and its values--from 6:00 am with the crew of Fox & Friends, to after midnight with broadcasts and repeats of their primetime neanderthal shoutcasters.

Howard even reminds us that, as usual, "they get their marching orders directly from Rupert Murdoch who last September said that… "[Obama's] policy is really very, very naive, old fashioned, 1960s socialist."

Noting that "news organizations often encourage their journalists to appear on other platforms for promotional purposes," former TVNewser Brian Stelter reports (New York Times, 2/15/09) that, "when the National Public Radio analyst Juan Williams speaks on the Fox News Channel's highest-rated program, the radio network doesn't want any attention":

Mr. Williams, a longtime political analyst and author, is a paid contributor to both NPR and Fox News. His voice is a prominent one at Fox; he was a panelist for the network's coverage of election night and Inauguration Day. When he appears on the cable channel, he is regularly described as a "senior correspondent for NPR." While that title is accurate, NPR has asked Mr. Williams to ask Fox not to identify him that way when he appears on the O'Reilly Factor, the network's 8 p.m. opinion program.

The request was made after Mr. Williams said on the Factor that Michelle Obama has "got this Stokely-Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going." The allusion to Mr. Carmichael, a leader of the black power movement of the 1960s, spurred dozens of angry e-mail messages to Alicia C. Shepard, the NPR ombudswoman, and resulted in conversations between Mr. Williams and the radio network's editors.

Shepard's response was one of concern that Williams "tends to speak one way on NPR and another on Fox"--while Fox itself took a condescending shot at NPR when announcing it would happily deceive its own viewers: "Fox swiftly said that it would drop the radio references--not only on the Factor, but on all the network's hours of programming. 'We were doing NPR a favor by even plugging them.'"

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Field Guide to TV's Lukewarm Liberals: How to Spot Centrist Pundits Served Up As the 'Left'" (7-8/98)

At a screening of the film Frost/Nixon, Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace defends George W. Bush against the assertion--which doesn't seem to have been made by anyone present--that Bush's crimes were worse than Richard Nixon's (Salon, 12/2/08):

It trivializes Nixon's crimes and completely misrepresents what George W. Bush did. Whatever George W. Bush did was after the savage attack of 9/11, in which 3,000 Americans were killed, it was done in service of trying to protect this country. I'm not saying that you have to agree with everything he did, but it was all done in the service of trying to protect this country and keep us safe. And the fact is that we sit here so comfortably, and the country has not been attacked again since 9/11.

Of course, Nixon would have argued that everything he did was in the service of trying to protect America from enemies. (In fact, if I remember correctly, he does make this argument in the theatrical version of Frost/Nixon, which draws heavily from transcripts of actual interviews.) The enemies the U.S. faced then were much better armed than the ones it faces now--and they never attacked us, so, hey, Watergate must have worked!