It's not to say that ABC was uniquely off the mark. The point is that much of what passes for political coverage-- the handicapping, the horserace, the insider chatter-- is useless.

ABC News Transcript
WORLD NEWS SATURDAY
May 16, 2009 Saturday

SURPRISE PICK; A POLITICAL MASTER STROKE

DAVID MUIR (ABC NEWS):  President Barack Obama made a surprise appointment today that has both parties in Washington buzzing tonight. The President had pledged to reach across the aisle, and today, he did just that. Naming a rising star of the Republican Party to be the next ambassador to China. Utah Governor Jon Huntsman not only brings his experience to the job, he takes away a potential political threat to the Democrats. And so we begin with ABC's Jonathan Karl tonight.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): It's a political master stroke.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (UNITED STATES): I know that Jon is the kind of leader who always puts country ahead of party.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): President Obama has taken a rising Republican star and named him US ambassador to China. Utah's Jon Huntsman is one the most popular governors in America, just reelected in November with nearly 80% of the vote.

GOVERNOR JON HUNTSMAN (REPUBLICAN) : I stand here in my final term as governor with plenty to do. I wasn't looking for a new job in life, but a call from the President changed that. A McCain/Palin presidency.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): Huntsman was a co-chair of John McCain's presidential campaign, but he has staked out moderate stands on immigration, climate change and gay rights. He has also warned fellow Republicans that they have to do more than just oppose Obama.

GOVERNOR JON HUNTSMAN (REPUBLICAN): You can't just say no. You can't just obstruct or obfuscate. You've got to kind of come up with some bold real solutions.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS) Governor Huntsman had been frequently mentioned as a potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate.

CLIP FROM "MEET THE PRESS"
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (REPUBLICAN): I think we've got some very good candidates, Jon Huntsman.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): Obama's 2008 campaign manager agrees. He recently called Huntsman the one person out there who could take on Obama. But now, Huntsman will be a world away. Politics aside, Huntsman has real qualifications for the job. He served as US ambassador to Singapore, Deputy US Trade Representative, and was a top Commerce Department official for East Asia. He also has an adopted daughter from China, and speaks the language fluently.

GOVERNOR JON HUNTSMAN (REPUBLICAN): I'm reminded of my favorite Chinese aphorism, it goes something like this. (Speaking in foreign language), together we work, together we progress.

JONATHAN KARL (ABC NEWS): Going to China almost certainly takes Huntsman out of the running for the 2012 campaign, but it does not necessarily mean an end to his political ambitions. George Herbert Walker Bush served as ambassador to China during the 1970s, and that was a post that turned out to be a pretty good stepping stone on his way to the White House. David?

DAVID MUIR (ABC NEWS): ABC's Jonathan Karl starting us off at the White House tonight. Jon, thank you.

We wanna turn now to our chief Washington correspondent and host of This Week, George Stephanopoulos. And George, many people see this governor as the former head of the McCain campaign. But behind this, are people viewing it in Washington as a clever move?

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS): Oh, they definitely are. Jon Karl hit it right. Political master stroke. A win for President Obama. He gets one of the Republican rising stars, evidently qualified for this job to be his ambassador to one of the most important countries in the world. It is a win for Huntsman. This is, he is uniquely qualified for this job. And even though he was looking at a run in 2012, this gets him out of this internal fight in the Republican Party and out of a race that was gonna be an uphill fight for him. He'll be able to come back in 2016. And it's a blow, at least in the short term, to the Republican Party. One more sign that this is a party where the reformers, the moderates, are looking for an exit.

whether pensions and other benefits for public workers are to blame for the crippling budget shortfalls in Wisconsin and other states. Tonight Barbara Pinto has a reality check.

What a relief-- this is something that surely screams out for clarification.

The report starts with a quote from Republican Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. ABC's Pinto weighed in on his side:

Part of that problem, pension plans for America's public workers that are under funded by at least a trillion dollars. Finance professor Joshua Rauh thinks the debt could be at least three times as much.

So the problem is a (nationwide) trillion dollar deficit, or maybe it's three trillion. What's the other side of this discussion? ABC doesn't seem to think there is one. They speak to a "state worker set to retire in December." Said worker is asked to respond to the Republican complaint that "state workers like you are bankrupting them."

Pinto mentions that ten years ago most states were in fine shape, but then by 2008 things changed considerably. Governor Walker "wants to control those costs, fixing the budget by breaking the unions' power to negotiate over benefits."

A reality check could have pointed out, as the New York Times did (2/19/11), that Wisconsin's "pension fund is considered one of the healthiest in the nation, and it is not suffering from the huge shortfalls that other states are facing."

So do those trillion dollar figures make any sense? And if everything was fine until 2008, maybe something happened around that time that would explain the current crisis?

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy & Research provides some helpful context-- the kind of information you would appreciate in a news report purporting to be a "reality check."

Baker writes:

There have been numerous media accounts in recent months warning of large shortfalls in public pension funds. Conventional estimates have placed the shortfall at around $1 trillion, while some analyses have put the shortfall as high as $3.2 trillion using a discount rate that implies pension funds will only earn the risk-free rate of return (Novy-Marx and Rauh, 2009). While there are important measurement issues in determining the size of the shortfall, it is also important that the number be placed in some context. Most people, including those involved in policy debates, will not have a good basis for assessing the meaning of a shortfall measured in the trillions of dollars that must be filled over an indefinite period in the future. The relevant context is the size of the projected shortfalls relative to the size of the state economies.

Before going through this exercise, it is worth noting that the size of the shortfall in many of these funds has likely already been reduced as a result of the fact that the stock market has continued to recover from its downturn in 2008 and 2009. On July 1, 2010, the S&P 500 was already more than 11 percent higher than its July 1, 2009 level (from 987 on July 1, 2009 to 1101 on July 1, 2010). Most funds use the stock market’s closing value at the end of the fiscal year as the basis for determining the valuation of their assets. Of course they also use an average, so the valuation would not simply reflect the market value at the end of the fiscal year. However, with the market having already risen substantially from its low (the S&P 500 had risen another 19 percent to 1293 by January 10, 2011), it is likely that pension valuations based on current and future market levels will show smaller shortfalls. In other words, a substantial portion of the shortfalls that were reported based on 2009 valuations have likely already been eliminated by the rise in the market.

Here's how host George Stephanopoulos set up the segment:

James O'Keefe became a media sensation after he and a friend posed as a pimp and prostitute and secretly recoded ACORN workers giving them advice on how to cheat on their taxes.

As FAIR noted in an action alert to the New York Times, O'Keefe didn't "pose" as a pimp--he didn't wear his absurd "pimp" get-up when he went in to ACORN offices, and in almost every case he presented himself as a concerned boyfriend trying to get his girlfriend away from an abusive pimp. And he didn't get any advice on how to "cheat" on his taxes. (Brad Friedman did the most thorough debunkings of these videos, and was on the case after the ABC interview).

What O'Keefe claimed happened during his visits to ACORN was not what actually happened--for instance, he videotaped himself wearing his garish "pimp" costume outside of ACORN offices in order to feed those misimpressions. But he never wore the get-up inside the ACORN facilities he targeted.

Stephanopoulos later alluded to "critics" who argue that O'Keefe "revised reality for political gain." The ABC host, on the other hand, said: "I have to give you credit for this, on ACORN, you did expose people doing things they shouldn't do."

Stephanopoulos was interrupted by Breitbart:  "Is it legal to help set up a prostitution ring in every single office?"

That is also false.

But instead of challenging these inaccuracies, Stephanopoulos defended his own record: "I was one of the few, if not the only journalist, who actually asked President Obama about the ACORN case, so I hold no brief."

Letters from FAIR and others eventually convinced the New York Times that treating O'Keefe and Breitbart as if they were actual journalists whose work could be trusted was a mistake. The paper issued a half-hearted correction, but the paper's subsequent ACORN reporting was very different. Here's how they put it on May 27: "In at least one video, ACORN workers advised a conservative activist who was posing as a prostitute how to conceal her criminal activities in the course of trying to buy a house."

The Times had previously written about the case in much more inflammatory--and inaccurate--language: "Their travels in the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of ACORN, the national community organizing group, caught its low-level employees in five cities sounding eager to assist with tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution."

It took a long time for the Times to admit even some of its errors. Public editor Clark Hoyt explained that part of the problem was that when O'Keefe appeared on television wearing a pimp costume to promote his videos, the Fox News hosts interviewing him said that he had worn the same outfit to ACORN offices--a claim O'Keefe did not correct. In other words, O'Keefe's work should be fact-checked by O'Keefe.

O'Keefe's ACORN hoax lives on only because journalists like Stephanopoulos fail to challenge him.

See Extra!: "Falling for the ACORN Hoax: The Strange Journalism of James O'Keefe" (4/10) by Veronica Cassidy.

But upon leaving corporate TV's criticism-free zone, where such lies as Rockefeller's statement that "Medicare is gonna start going broke in 2017, which is like the day after tomorrow," pass completely unchallenged, they each were questioned by real-life journalist Sam Husseini of WashingtonStakeout.com (9/15/09).

Compare the treatment described above with Husseini's calm but determined questioning of the pols:

Sam Husseini: Health insurance mandates--don't they end up being a subsidy for the insurance companies, because you're mandating that people go out and buy their product?

Mary Landrieu: ...I'm not carrying water for the insurance companies....

SH: You say you're not carrying water, but your No. 1 contributor is JP Morgan Chase, PACs and individuals associated.... And you've precluded the Medicare-for-all type option. Why shouldn't somebody conclude that you are doing the bidding of the financial industry?

And to Rockefeller's platitude, "Don't worry about the insurance companies. Believe me, we're going to take care of them," Husseini responds in a most un-Stephanopoulos manner:

You say not to worry about the insurance companies, but even though you obviously come from a very wealthy family, you've raised money for your campaigns--the No. 1 sector, according to Open Secrets, is finance and insurance. Why shouldn't it be seen that a lot of people in Congress are in effect doing the bidding of the insurance companies?