A recent broadcast of the NewsHour (6/8/11) had two segments about the debate over the Afghan War--the first a news report covering the Senate nomination hearings for Ryan Crocker, Obama's nominee to be ambassador to Afghanistan. Quoted in the piece were senators Jim Webb (D.-Va.) and Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.), Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Barack Obama.

The discussion segment that accompanied it featured two more senators: Republican Saxby Chambliss  of Georgia and New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez. Chambliss is a supporter of the war, with some reservations, while Menendez wants to continue the war with a different strategy: 

I think you could do more of a counterterrorism effort, where you are striking at Al-Qaeda and along the Afghan/Pakistan border, even striking at the Taliban to just to continue destabilize them.

As FAIR pointed out in our most recent study of the NewsHour, actual opponents of the war are hard to find.

On June 7, the NewsHour had a discussion about the state of the economy, and what the White House might be able to do to turn things around. Again, the guestlist was disappointing. Here's Gwen Ifill's introduction:

We explore that now with Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wells Fargo in Charlotte, N.C., and Tom Binnings, senior partner at Summit Economics in Colorado.

A Beltway political reporter for a mainstream daily, an economist for a bank and a partner at an economic forecasting firm. The banker expressed a view common in corporate America--that there's too much government regulation. ("It seems that regulation has increased.... Companies are really kind of put off by the amount of regulations that are hitting them all at once.")

There was little challenge to that sentiment--a predictable outcome, given the guests that the show booked to talk about the issue. The NewsHour should do better.

Now, how it looks to two former U.S. senators, Democrat Gary Hart of Colorado and Republican Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Senator Hart is now a scholar in residence at the University of Colorado and chair of the Defense Department's Threat Reduction Advisory Council. Senator Coleman is CEO of the American Action Network, an issue advocacy organization that supports Republican candidates and policies.

The same broadcast featured an interview with Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough.

Monday's broadcast featured this segment:

JIM LEHRER: Now some perspective on the Mideast turmoil from two former U.S. national security advisers. Zbigniew Brzezinski held that post for President Carter. He's now a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Brent Scowcroft had that same job during the George H.W. Bush administration. He now has his own consulting firm.

And also this one:

GWEN IFILL: Now, for a closer look at the situation in Libya, we turn to retired Maj. Gen. Dutch Remkes. He spent 32 years in the Air Force, including service -- service as a top commander of Operation Northern Watch, the no-fly zone over Iraq. And Robert Malley, he served as director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. He's now Middle East and North Africa program director at the International Crisis Group.

That's a lot of Official Voices--exactly the sorts of folks well represented everywhere else in the media. PBS exists (in theory at least) to bring us something more. Unfortunately, this sort of coverage is par for the course on the NewsHour.

UPDATE: Last night's NewsHour:

JEFFREY BROWN: And we assess the military campaign in Libya now.

 For that, we're joined by retired Army Gen. Jack Keane. He was Army vice chief of staff when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. He now has his own consulting firm. And Frederic Wehrey is a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. As an Air Force Reserve officer, he served as a military attache in Libya in 2009 and then earlier this year.

 Keane favors putting U.S. Special Forces on the ground in Libya. Wehrey, on the other hand, agrees with that idea.

The first guest was Republican Glenn Hubbard, who Ifill told viewers "was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, and he helped to design those cuts." Not surprisingly, he is a big supporter of extending the tax cuts, and gave the usual laundry list of reasons why, and criticized Obama for creating uncertainty in the markets and so on.

So who else will they feature in this series? One clue came at the end of the show:

JUDY WOODRUFF: In our next conversation, we will hear from Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who once testified in favor of the Bush tax cuts. He now argues, it's time to let them lapse.

Greenspan, it should be noted, is a conservative Republican, elevated to the Fed by Ronald Reagan, and a lifelong devotee of Ayn Rand. If the point of the series is to explore the tax debate among conservatives, the NewsHour is off to a great start.

Ifill has previously despaired at the partisanship of this debate--Republicans say one thing, Democrats say something else, which led her to wonder: "Is there any real way to sort that out, or is it in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain?"

Sorting it out is the job of journalists. NewsHour can't do that without finding some independent experts to talk about the issue.

The politics of the tax debate is well-known; most Democrats want to extend them for all but the top brackets, while the Republicans want to renew the cuts that affect only the wealthiest taxpayers (which could cost the government an additional $700 billion in lost revenue over the next decade). The Republican argument is that allowing the tax cuts to expire on families earning more than $250,000 would hurt "small businesses."

So here's how host Gwen Ifill and Wall Street Journal reporter Naftali Bendavid summed things up:

GWEN IFILL: But when it comes right down to it--and we've debated this endlessly on this program, exactly about who is right about this. But when the president says it's a $700 billion bill to do it the way the Republicans want, and the Republicans say you're raising the taxes on people who are the engines of the economy, is there any real way to sort that out, or is it in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain?

NAFTALI BENDAVID: Well, my sense is that it's in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain. There are compromises that are being floated. You know, there's a proposal out there to only raise taxes on people making a million or more, so it would really be the high-end earners. But my sense is that this is much more about both parties having a position than about reaching some sort of compromise.

Of course political parties disagree; that's a given. But that disagreement doesn't make things "uncertain." Reporters can--and obviously should--evaluate the strength of the arguments coming from politicians, and not merely relay contradictory claims; that's the real way to sort things out that Ifill is looking for.

So when Republicans say that a tax increase on the wealthy is a small-business-harming job-killer, reporters should tell people whether there's any reason to believe that. (Hint: There isn't.) When journalists refuse to do their jobs, and are content to sit neutrally by while politicians posture endlessly, the debate goes from bad to worse.