In his New York Times column, David Brooks cheers the rise of suburban independent voters in this week's midterms elections, crediting them with Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. Brooks has made a career out of singing the praises of suburban Americans, all the while suggesting that they are somewhat ignored. While liberals and conservatives have their own media machines and think tanks, Brooks writes:

Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don't have any of this. They don't have institutional affiliations. They don't look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren't many commentators who come from an independent perspective.

If he's talking about centrists, it doesn't make much sense; actually, middle-of-the-road think tanks tend to dominate the media discussion.  (Perhaps Brooks has heard of Brookings?) But he tries to explain their significance this way:

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

While that does sound suspiciously like a think tank catering to, well, those think tank-less independents, are those numbers very alarming? An Ipsos/Reuters survey from June found that 80 percent of Americans knew someone who lost a job. A July Marist poll on New York state residents found that "82 percent of city voters and 79 percent of those in the suburbs" knew someone who'd lost a job in the past six months. Maybe Brooks' suburbs aren't so special after all.

On November 1, New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin has a look back at her experience as a war correspondent in Iraq. It's mostly interesting, though when she gets to the part where she draws the big lessons, things turn for the worse:

In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide" to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.

"Americans, too" committed violence in Iraq? Well, yes.  And "among the worst they did was wishful thinking"? Well, that's one way to put it.

Once you've given up trying to defend the idea that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan can be understood as anything other than irony, the fallback position is generally that everyone else is just as biased.  Or as the headline over John Harwood's piece in the New York Times (11/2/09) puts it, "If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone."

To back up this assertion, Harwood--who's the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC--relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels.  These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the "partisan fragmentation" of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what--CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC's are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn't provide the most recent data for Fox's audience).

A mirror image, right?  Well, maybe a funhouse mirror.  What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public  identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent.  You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.

Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats--about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there's no comparison to the slant of Fox's audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.  Look at it this way: If each channel's current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there's a "missing" Democrat.

In other words--Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood's efforts to pretend that it is.

The White House's beef with Fox News Channel continues, as do the right-wing cable channel's bizarre attempts to defend their journalistic integrity. Take this example from today's New York Times (10/22/09). Obviously the White House is most offended by the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck; this is unfair, according to Fox:

But Michael Clemente, senior vice president for news and editorial programming at Fox, said the White House was conflating the network’s commentary with its news coverage. That, Mr. Clemente said, "would be like Fox News blaming the White House senior staff for the Washington Redskins' losing record."

Last time I checked, there were no White House staffers moonlighting in the Redskins' front office. Beck and Hannity, on the other hand, actually work at Fox News Channel--and were put there by Fox bosses. The analogy makes no sense, but then again it's hard to imagine a better defense for Fox's behavior.

In today's New York Times article, "Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow," there's some Green Revolution mythology propagated about how the policies "staved off famines affecting millions." As has been pointed out, though food production did increase, hunger actually increased as well just about everywhere affected by the Green Revolution; the reason the overall numbers showed hunger down was because China, as part of its own revolution including land reform, managed to reduce hunger dramatically. But the overall framing of the article is what bothers me more--the idea that it's "scientists and development experts" who are responsible for "feeding the world's growing population."

There are hints at the real problem, as when reporter Neil MacFarquhar notes that "the conundrum is whether the food can be grown in the developing world where the hungry can actually get it, at prices they can afford." He also notes legitimate concerns like the effect of climate change, which is worsening droughts in some areas, and the growth of biofuels, which gobble up available farmland. But he quickly returns to the main angle, explaining, "The track record of failing to feed the hungry haunts the effort." He quotes one official who explains the current problem in terms of a lack of aid money from the West: "Nobody has 20 billion and spare change in their sock drawer."

As Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé pointed out in Extra! (11-12/08), the problem is extreme inequality and lack of power for poor farmers; the hungry don't need experts and the G-8 to "feed" them, they need the opportunity to feed themselves, whether that be in the form of more equitable land reform, the ability to adopt their own sustainable agricultural methods, or freedom from the market distortions created by those very G-8 countries and experts. Even the climate change and biofuel concerns are primarily the result of damaging first-world energy policies that remain unaddressed--by those countries as well as by MacFarquhar. But it's no surprise those root causes go missing in a hunger story whose hook is a meeting of "development experts" and every source but one is either a government or aid official.

Isabel Kershner writes a piece in the New York Times (10/9/09) that starts out as a profile of an Israeli artist who makes flowers out of Qassam rocket pieces. The main point, though, is to discuss the changed reality in southern Israel, thanks to the invasion of the Gaza Strip late last year that killed over 1,000 Palestinians:

Israel said its three-week offensive was intended to change the reality in the south. Since January, when the military campaign ended, the rocket fire has significantly fallen off and residents here are trying to accustom themselves to a kind of normalcy amid the lingering uncertainty and fear.

This recycles the myth that rocket fire was a constant barrage until the war changed all that-- a point Kershner makes more explicitly later:

According to the Israeli military, some 3,300 rockets and mortar shells were launched from Gaza at southern Israel in 2008, compared with fewer than 300 since the end of the war.

This is highly misleading; much of that rocket fire came at the end of the year-- after the invasion and bombing of Gaza was underway. In fact, a  negotiated peace prevailed for much of the middle of 2008--which is something that you would have learned if you were a careful reader of the New York Times. Right before the invasion, the paper (12/19/08) reported that much of 2008 was quiet:

Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

Rocket fire increased significantly in November after Israel attacked a Hamas tunnel and killed six militants. For a graphic understanding of the rate of rocket/mortar fire, see this (which is based on Israeli figures).

The more natural lesson to draw is that negotiations work better than violence. This is apparently not what the New York Times wants you to believe,  though they did once report that reality. Perhaps it was an accident.

Kudos to the New York Times for publishing a front-page article (10/8/09) about the U.S. advisers and lobbyists who have been working (in one form or another) on behalf of the coup government in Honduras. But the piece glosses over the U.S. history in the region. Reporters Ginger Thompson and Ron Nixon write that the coup government "has also drawn support from several former high-ranking officials who were responsible for setting United States policy in Central America in the 1980s and '90s, when the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies that defined the cold war."

When "the region was struggling to break with the military dictatorships and guerrilla insurgencies"? A little more clarity is needed there. The U.S.--to take two examples--supported a thuggish military government in El Salvador and created a "guerrilla insurgency" to try and defeat a left-wing government in Nicaragua. In other words, while "the region" may have wanted one thing, U.S. foreign policy sought to bolster violent, anti-democratic force. Stating these facts clearly would give readers a better sense of of the context--and demonstrate that people like Otto Reich and Roger Noriega are still on the wrong side.

If you want a lesson in how right-wing pressure on corporate media works, look no further than the ACORN story. Right-wing talkshow hosts have targeted the community organizing group for years, primarily on charges of vote fraud. Then two conservative activists produced some embarrassing videos of ACORN workers at some local offices giving tax advice advice to a couple passing themselves off as a pimp and a prostitute. From there, the story turned to right-wing gloating—and complaints about the media being too slow (and of course too liberal) to pick up on the right's anti-ACORN crusade.

And some in the media agreed. Washington Post ombud Andrew Alexander (9/20/09) criticized his paper for running just two early stories about the recent scandals involving the group. The problem was that the paper apparently doesn't pay enough attention to the concerns of the right--a feeling shared by the paper's executive editor, who called for more coverage of the group.

Over at the New York Times, public editor Clark Hoyt reached a similar conclusion (9/27/09), writing that when the paper misses such stories, it can "wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself." The Times was clueless, apparently, because they ran just one story about the anti-ACORN campaign, a piece that upset conservatives because it looked at the issue as a political matter--explaining that the videos and talk radio brouhaha was a way for the right to try and do harm to a group it opposes, and to try and connect ACORN to the Obama White House.  This is undoubtedly true. But editors at the Times, like the folks at the Post, offered the same self-criticism: We don't pay enough attention to the complaining of conservatives.

Sure enough, only a few days later, readers would see how this was changing. On October 6, the Post ran a piece on Republicans going after the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, for their ties to ACORN. The union has paid ACORN for various services over the years. A nearly identical story appeared in the next day's New York Times (10/7/09). So the completely-blown-out-of-proportion case against ACORN has now become a drive against SEIU, with no apparent news hook other than the fact that right-wing Republicans are trying to make this non-story into a story--and succeeding.

I guess editors at the Times and Post can rest easy knowing that they're not ignoring the whining of the right-wing.

The New York Times reported (10/6/09)  that the Federal Trade Commission was planning to establish new rules for bloggers:

The FTC said that beginning on December 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently....

For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of an unimpeded flow of giveaways may be over. More broadly, the move suggests that the government is intent on bringing to bear on the Internet the same sorts of regulations that have governed other forms of media, like television or print.

"It crushes the idea that the Internet is separate from the kinds of concerns that have been attached to previous media," said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University.

The strange thing here is the idea that such disclosure rules are "the same sorts of regulations that have governed other forms of media, like television or print." When's the last time you saw a print or TV book or music review that mentioned that the reviewer didn't pay for the book or album under consideration? Such freebies aren't even considered unethical--unlike the practice of restaurant critics getting free food, or travel writers getting free trips, though such deals happen often and are generally not disclosed when they do. One would think that Tim Arango, the author of the Times piece, would be more familiar with how print journalism operates.

Wired.com has more on the general kookiness of the proposed regulation.  Apparently amateur bloggers will have to disclose freebies, while professional websites--and traditional media outlets--won't. The logic, if you can call it that, is that if you can afford to pay for it yourself, then you don't have to.

In a story about the Senate Finance Committee voting down two amendments that would have added a public option to the committee's healthcare bill, New York Times reporters Robert Pear and Jackie Calmes (9/29/09) write, "The votes vindicated the middle-of-the-road approach taken by the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana."

The Times just had a poll that found 65 percent of respondents were in favor of a public option, with just 26 percent opposed.  To call the approach favored by the rightmost one-quarter of public opinion "middle-of-the-road"--well, maybe someone ought to take away Pear and Calmes' car keys and call them a cab.

Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, though not to office.  Unfortunately, press accounts still manage to mangle the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to explain what happened. In today's New York Times (9/22/09):

At the time of his removal, Mr. Zelaya was planning a nonbinding referendum that his opponents said would have been the first step toward allowing him to run for another term in office, which is forbidden under the Honduran constitution. Mr. Zelaya has denied any attempt to run for re-election.

An Associated Press report appearing in today's USA Today (9/22/09) was much worse:

The legislature ousted Zelaya after he formed an alliance with leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and tried to alter the nation's constitution. Zelaya was arrested on orders of the Supreme Court on charges of treason for ignoring court orders against holding a referendum to extend his term. The Honduran Constitution forbids a president from trying to obtain another term in office.

This is inaccurate, not to mention strange (ousted for a Chavez "alliance"?).  As economist Mark Weisbrot put it shortly after the coup (7/8/09), these pro-coup arguments makes no sense--and the media should say so. By the way, the example he cites is also from the New York Times....

Unfortunately much of the major media's reporting has aided this effort by reporting such statements as "Critics feared he intended to extend his rule past January, when he would have been required to step down."

In fact, there was no way for Zelaya to "extend his rule" even if the referendum had been held and passed, and even if he had then gone on to win a binding referendum on the November ballot. The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country's constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis -- although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.

The New York Times (9/13/09) attempted to fact check a Barack Obama speech on healthcare. By all appearances, this is in the regular, non-satirical edition of the paper:

Mr. Obama opened his 40-minute speech with what he called "disturbing news": a report from the Treasury Department that, he said, "found that nearly half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next 10 years” and that “more than one-third will go without coverage for longer than one year."

In fact, that is not precisely what the department found when it analyzed data from a University of Michigan survey that tracked the health insurance status of more than 17,000 Americans from 1997 to 2006.

The survey found that 47.7 percent had lost coverage at some point during those 10 years for one month or more, and that 36 percent lacked coverage for at least one year during that time, though not necessarily 12 months consecutively. Mr. Obama extrapolated those statistics to predict what might happen in the future.

Critics say that the president, who has deplored the "scare tactics" of his opponents, is now employing scare tactics of his own.

Huh. In case you didn't follow that: Obama cited a study with some striking numbers on workers losing their health insurance. That's indeed what the study found....  BUT, explains the Times, his presentation is misleading because the future could be radically different from the very recent past. Or as Dean Baker put it, "President Obama was making extrapolations about the future based on the past. Next thing he'll be telling us that black is white and night is day. This is why we need an independent media."

"It is difficult to overstate President Obama's unpopularity in most of Louisiana," writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article  (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off.

Robertson continues: "He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)" Fourteen percent? Wow, that is unpopular! But given that black and other non-white people have been able to vote in Louisiana for several decades now, wouldn't it make sense to give the actual share of the vote Obama received? That would be 40 percent, which is a pretty disappointing electoral result, but Obama did worse in six other states--and McCain did as bad or worse in 12 states. Yet it would be pretty easy, I would think, to overstate McCain's unpopularity in, say, Maine.

The problem here is treating white opinion as representative of the opinions of the public at large. ("In Louisiana, Tainted Senator Rides Anti-Obama Sentiment" is the print headline.) It's a subtler form of the crude analysis Chris Matthews used to do when Obama was running for the Democratic nomination: "How's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community?"

The Times piece is mainly about the re-election prospects of Sen. David Vitter, but it takes time out for a look back at a recent special election race for a Louisiana State Senate seat. The lone Republican in the three-way race bashed his opponents with a flier--which accompanies the story as a graphic--featuring a smiling hippie and the text, "You might be a liberal if you...voted for Barack Obama." But the punchline of the story is that one of the Democrats beat the Republican in the runoff election, 54 percent to 46 percent, which would seem to undercut the story's contention that Obama is to Louisiana voters as garlic is to vampires. But the next line in Robertson's story is, "So given Louisiana's increasingly reddish hue, the prevailing political wisdom is that a real threat to Mr. Vitter would come from his right." Illustrating the old journalism adage: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Intern Katy Kelleher at the Jezebel.com blog (9/9/09) has made a worthy attempt at "unpacking all the different levels of sexism and racism that are operating subtly behind the scenes" in recent coverage of professional women's tennis.

On the new stardom of relatively diminutive and white Melanie Oudin, Kelleher remarks that "her accomplishments are definitely praiseworthy, but there is something off about the way she is being celebrated":

She has been called the "darling" of the U.S. Open, America's "sweetheart," a "pint-sized, freckled-faced blonde from Georgia," the "tiny little savior of women's tennis," everything it seems, save tennis' "Great White Hope" (although given the media coverage of Oudin's win, it would probably be more like the "little, teeny-tiny, super cute White Hope").

Especially problematic was this article from the Daily Beast, which quoted ESPN sportscaster Michelle Beadle comparing Oudin to the Williams sisters. "From Day 1, I've never heard the Williams sisters referred to as sweethearts," she said, which prompted Jez commenter sympathyforthebasementcat to remark:

Yes, there's just something different about them. Americans just aren't quite to fully relate to them. They just don't seem like the type of girls that would live next door. Hmmm, what could it be?

Explaining how "every sportscaster reporting on Oudin feels the need to comment on how pretty she is" and "All-American," seems to "fail to recognize the racism that lurks behind these terms," Kelleher also looks at a New York Times column in which George Vecsey "says, unlike the Williams sisters, Oudin has fought her way up from the bottom": "The crowd always loves upsets, which is one reason Venus Williams and Serena Williams are not universally loved at the Open."

Kelleher's response is to quote yet another sharp-witted Jezebel commenter:

What a shame the Williams sisters don't have a rags-to-riches backstory. You know, like growing up in a poor neighborhood and being coached by a father who had zero experience of their sport, and fighting their way to success against the odds. Yep, that would have made a great story and endeared them to the public, right?

Printing a letter to the editor from Leila McDowell (8/26/09), the New York Times has "Another Look at Obama's Speech to the NAACP"--from the group's on vice president of communications.

McDowell starts with the fact that the "Times distinguished itself from most major media by virtually ignoring the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, which was started in New York"--and then, "when the Times finally did send a reporter...the resulting article ("Obama Gives Fiery Address at NAACP," July 17) focused on personal responsibility," even though "that was the least prominent part of Mr. Obama's speech":

What was noteworthy was his discussion of racial disparities, the barriers facing African-Americans and the policies to redress social gaps.

This is a theme President Obama has rarely spoken about with such depth.

Urging personal responsibility in our communities is as traditional as shouting "Amen!" to the preacher's sermon in black churches and civic organizations.

What is new is the president's forceful articulation of the disparities we fight every day. Personal responsibility will not remove the barriers that a legacy of racism and exclusion has left for millions of African-Americans.

"The familiar refrain of personal responsibility," though "an important issue... articulated by black preachers long before Mr. Obama," is, McDowell writes, "an old story and standard fare." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dedrick Muhammad on Obama's NAACP Speech and 'Tough Love'" (7/31/09).