The Washington Post had another "Topic A" feature on August 31, headlined "Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?" A crucial debate, to be sure; the Post found one person (Andrew Bacevich) to argue that it is not, which is probably a position close to the majority view of the American public. That position is "balanced" by four contributors who argue the war is worth fighting, in different ways or for different reasons. This imbalance echoes the Post's previous presentation of the Afghanistan debate, showing once again that the paper seems to believe that a public that increasingly sees the war as a lost cause needs to be talked out of that position.

It's worth noting that conservative Post columnist George Will has written today against escalating the war (9/1/09)-- under the headline "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." While Will calls the idea of a long occupation with increased troop levels "inconceivable," it's worth noting what he's actually for:

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

More bombing, drones and cruise missiles. That's the Post's peacenik.

The school voucher program in Washington, D.C., has been the subject of serious research, with opponents and supporters of vouchers using at as a test for whether the idea works in practice. Conservatives tend to insist that it's been a success, though the studies of the program don't seem to bear that out.

Washington Post columnist George Will (4/23/09), though, sees a new Education Department study bolstering the case for vouchers, which means the White House's decision to curtail the program is a horrible blow to children in the struggling D.C. schools:

After Congress debated the program, the Education Department released--on a Friday afternoon, a news cemetery--a congressionally mandated study showing that, measured by student improvement and parental satisfaction, the District's program works. The department could not suppress the Heritage Foundation's report that 38 percent of members of Congress sent or are sending their children to private schools.

Huh. Given all the attention paid to the D.C. voucher experiment, it's striking that this apparently significant news would pass with so little comment. But if you go to the Department of Education website to find this report proving that the "District's program works," you find this summary of the research (OSP stands for Opportunity Scholarship Program):

The evaluation found that the OSP improved reading, but not math, achievement overall and for 5 of 10 subgroups of students examined. The group designated as the highest priority by Congress--students applying from "schools in need of improvement" (SINI)--did not experience achievement impacts. Students offered scholarships did not report being more satisfied or feeling safer than those who were not offered scholarships, however the OSP did have a positive impact on parent satisfaction and perceptions of school safety. This same pattern of findings holds when the analysis is conducted to determine the impact of using a scholarship rather than being offered a scholarship.

So improved reading scores, but not math, and no discernable positive impact on the students most in need.  Maybe these results, which are in keeping with previous studies of the D.C. system, didn't get much attention because they actually aren't helpful to conservatives pushing to expand school vouchers--no matter what George Will seems to think.

Is it possible for the Washington Post to be embarrassed by George Will? After a series of erroneous claims in a column about climate change, Will is at it again today (4/2/09), laughing off the use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs as a poor fix for a nonexistent problem:

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

Sigh.

This has been explained before; Will cherry picks the hottest year among other relatively hot years as his starting point. The 11 hottest years in the past century and half have all occurred in the last 13 years--but 1998 was the hottest year so far, so there's no such thing as global warming.

What's perhaps most interesting is that the Post ran a long letter (3/21/09) from the secretary General of the World Meteorological Association, spelling this out and explaining that Will just doesn't know what he's talking about:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record -- as was done in a recent Post column ["Dark Green Doomsayers," George F. Will, op-ed, February 15] -- and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit.

At this point it's obvious that George Will is not going to let a bunch of scientists tell him about climate science.  The real question is why the Post continues to print this stuff-- and give him cover when critics point out his inaccuracies.

The paper, it should be noted, did run a recent op-ed from Chris Mooney debunking some of Will's climate misinformation. But Will will still have his regular platform to write whatever he wants to write about climate science--no matter how wrong he is.

"I think the best journalism in America is business journalism precisely because they deal with real metrics. You can actually--they know things."
--George Will, ABC's This Week, 3/15/09

It's possible that Will actually believes this. Read Dean Starkman's piece in Mother Jones, "How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?," for another take. Or this piece from Extra!.

Or recall that, not too long ago, Will was lecturing us on how the economy was doing just fine, in spite of the gloomy message the media was delivering:

Conservative pundit George Will (ABC's This Week, 12/4/05) blamed media coverage for the public's failure to understand that "the economy is booming," attributing this misapprehension to "Will's two laws of economic journalism," one of which mandates that "there's no such thing as good news."

For the record, this was how Will described his "two laws of economic journalism:"

First law, all news is economic news. That is, all news either is a cause or a consequence of economic developments and can be given an economic spin. Second law, all economic news is bad. All economic news is bad. Housing prices go up. Housing bubble. Housing prices come down, slump in housing. Unemployment goes up. That's bad, 'cause unemployment is bad. Unemployment comes down, the labor market is overheating and inflation is coming back. There's no such thing as good news.

Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for "standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is"--and then spreads some of the blame around:

Meanwhile, one of the Post's main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false-equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will's sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore's sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in the New York Times. Hm.

See Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff.

After eight years of George W. Bush's rule, popular disapproval of policies that had come to be regarded as grave mistakes--from the invasion of Iraq to the response to the economic crisis--drove the Republicans from power.

Unfortunately, the media system has no such built-in check on powerful pundits, as the unchallenged reign of another George W. with a long record of mistakes can attest.

The ongoing controversy over a recent error-plagued climate change column penned by George Will--a Washington Post syndicated columnist whose record of error spans decades--offers a good case study in the impunity of the punditocracy.

As bloggers, media activists and environmentalists were quick to point out, Will made three significant errors in his climate change column, which was published in the Post (2/15/09) and scores of daily newspapers nationwide last week. First, he misrepresented scientific research from the 1970s, claiming that global cooling was then the prevailing concern. Second, he claimed the University of Illinois had found global sea ice was increasing, when in fact the school's researchers found the opposite. Finally, he claimed that U.N. climate researchers have found "no recorded global warming for more than a decade."

In the wake of widespread refutations on blogs, and action alerts by FAIR and Media Matters, the Washington Post received floods of emails complaining about the inaccuracies in Will's column, and the Post's ombud Andy Alexander soon issued a response to a blogger at Think Progress.

Claiming that Will's column had been subject to multiple fact-checks, Alexander addressed only critics' concern about Will's misrepresentation of the University of Illinois's sea ice research, defending Will by citing a University of Illinois statement that, in fact, actually refuted Will's claim.

Given that the position of ombud (a person responsible for responding to reader complaints and upholding accuracy at a media outlet) is the closest thing to a system of accountability that exists at newspapers, the Post ombud's response aptly illustrated the bankruptcy of what passes for accountability at a leading newspaper.

Unfortunately, the erroneous climate change column is not a blip on Will's record. On the issue of climate change alone, FAIR's magazine Extra! documents that Will's history of misquoting data to distort the debate goes back nearly two decades. As FAIR's senior analyst Steve Rendall recently noted on the FAIR Blog, in 1992, Will so grossly misrepresented a Gallup poll on scientists' views on climate change that Gallup took the rare step of issuing a written correction to Will's column.  A decade before that, Will made such a glaring factual error in a column published in Newsweek that the magazine took the unusual step of agreeing to publish a letter by Noam Chomsky (Will managed to block the letter's publication by throwing a temper tantrum.)

And yet this serial distorter of the facts continues to published by more newspapers than any other columnist. In addition to the Post, 367 newspapers publish his column. Why? This is a question newspaper editors should have to answer.

As blogger Jonathan Schwarz recently pointed out, the internet has profoundly changed the landscape of pundit impunity since Will's 1982 temper tantrum. The Washington Post ombud's role in protecting Will's work from the facts may be highly reminiscent of Newsweek's decision to spike Chomsky's letter. However, with the proliferation of blogs devoted to correcting the media record, and the advent of online media activism campaigns that can in a matter of hours generate thousands of reader complaints to editors, concerned members of the public have more tools than ever before to publicly debunk media errors and to push for greater accountability.

In this context, the Post ombud's inadequate response simply added fuel to the campaigns challenging the Post on Will's climate distortions. Yesterday, the presidents of leading environmental groups joined Media Matters in issuing a letter to the newspaper, and FAIR issued a new call for its supporters to contact the Post's ombud (ombudsman@washpost.com)

And given that it is not just the Post but some 368 newspapers nationwide that carry Will's column, the challenge of holding Will accountable is one in which people across the nation have to play a vital role in writing to any newspapers in their own local communities that published Will's error-plagued climate change column.

Given the abundance of online media activism resources, it is not hard to take action to push for greater accountability in one's local newspaper. (Media Matters has a useful application on its website that allows users to easily find out if George Will's column is carried in their local newspaper, and tips on writing letters to the editor can be found in FAIR's media activism kit.)

Given that the corporate media have granted Will impunity for decades now, this accountability is long overdue.

George Will's history of misquoting data to distort the climate change debate goes back nearly two decades--that we know of. As Extra! reported in 2003, in 1992 Will trashed Al Gore (Washington Post, 9/3/92) for being "cavalier with the truth" in his "wastebasket worthy" book Earth in the Balance. More from Extra!:

Will confronted Gore on the issue of global warming: "Gore knows, or should know before pontificating, that a recent Gallup Poll of scientists concerned with global climate research shows that 53 percent do not believe warming has occurred, and another 30 percent are uncertain."

It was Will, however, who should have read the poll more carefully "before pontificating." Gallup actually reported that 66 percent of the scientists said that human-induced global warming was occurring, with only 10 percent disagreeing and the rest undecided. Gallup took the unusual step of issuing a written correction to Will's column (San Francisco Chronicle, 9/27/92): "Most scientists involved in research in this area believe that human-induced global warming is occurring now." Will never noted the error in his column.

Considering Will's history of distortion on climate change and his refusal to correct his errors, it may be time to stop blaming Will, who doesn't seem able to help himself, and to put the blame on his Washington Post enablers, who have their own history of covering for Will's disinformation binges.

In a blog post about how it must have been "So Much Nicer To Be George Will Before The Internet" (2/17/09), A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz looks back over how "on Sunday George Will made things up so he can claim global warming isn't happening" to "a funny story of Noam Chomsky's from the book Understanding Power about a column Will wrote in 1982":

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called "Mideast Truth and Falsehood," about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: He said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek--you know, four lines--in which I said, "Will has one statement of fact, it's false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down." Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek "Letters" column. She said: "We're kind of interested in your letter; where did you get those facts?" So I told her, "Well, they're published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971" --which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, "Yeah, you're right, we found it there; okay, we'll run your letter." An hour later she called again and said, "Gee, I'm sorry, but we can't run the letter." I said, "What's the problem?" She said, "Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he's having a tantrum; they decided they can't run it." Well, okay.

Theorizing that these days "it must be hard for Will to get used to bluggs, because he's spent his entire career with total impunity," Schwarz doesn't spare those people responsible for publishing Will's damaging claptrap either: "Two days later, Will and Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post op-ed page, still won't explain their behavior." See the newest FAIR Action Alert: "Does the Post Fact-Check George Will?: Columnist's Climate Change Denial Distorts Reality" (2/18/09)

In the wake of a George Will column (Washington Post, 2/15/08) attempting to refute the reality of climate change with a string of inaccurate claims, FAIR has an action alert calling on media activists to write to the Washington Post asking them to retract the falsehoods and explain their fact-checking procedures for columnists.

You can post copies of your letters to the Washington Post in the comments section below. Please remember that letters that maintain a civil tone are most effective.

On Monday (1/19/09), Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz took a look at the health of Time and Newsweek, and almost immediately rendered a political judgment:

The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more elite audience, in print and on the Web, abandoning the old Henry Luce notion of catering to the masses. It is nothing less than a survival strategy.

Hmm. Maybe those magazine editors are "loath to admit" they publish liberal magazines because, well, they don't? Kurtz sure doesn't offer much evidence to that effect. Here is how he makes his case:

One answer is to jettison the old straddle-the-center formula in which the newsweeklies spoke with an institutional voice rather than publish bylines. Each magazine's lead columnist -- Time's Joe Klein, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter -- is liberal. Newsweek has been running columns by Jacob Weisberg, the liberal editor of Slate, another Post Co. property. Newsweek also ran a controversial cover last month headlined "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage" -- "one of the last great civil rights issues," Meacham says. And its top writers appear regularly on liberal talkshows on MSNBC, with which it has a news partnership.

Time's Joe Klein is not what one would consider a liberal. Alter might be, though he's clearly of the torture-approving, bash-the-teachers-unions, move-the-Democrats-to-the-right model. Newsweek also publishes regular pieces from the likes of Fareed Zakaria, George Will and Robert Samuelson--none of whom could be called liberal.

Kurtz played up the recent pro-gay marriage cover story, but later recalled that the magazine also turned in cover stories about Obama's supposed elitism and the (misguided) notion that the United States remained a center-right nation even after Obama's victory. Kurtz could have also mentioned the magazine's recent attempt to rehabilitate Dick Cheney and torture.

About Time, Kurtz wrote:

Time ran a column last week by liberal academic Jeffrey Sachs titled "The Case for Bigger Government." This week's issue features Obama, Time's Person of the Year, yet again, and the cover headline "Great Expectations," plus a piece on his wife as "America's Next Top Model."

Wait--Time put Obama on its cover? This week? Well, that is curious news judgment.

Kurtz adds:

Stengel's ideal staffer is Mark Halperin, whom he hired from ABC. Halperin created the political tip sheet the Page for Time.com and the magazine, and often appears on television. Both newsweeklies now realize they are competing on the Web as much as on the newsstand.

Halperin is well-known for attacking supposed liberal bias in the media, denounced the supposed pro-Obama media bias as "disgusting,"  and even advocated getting liberals out of newsrooms. This guy is the "ideal staffer" at a magazine Kurtz sees as moving left? Please explain.