In this week's cover story, Newsweek's Sharon Begley seems to think Al Gore's new book is good--but he's still too wonky:

To anyone with bad memories of how Gore's fact-filled debate performances against George W. Bush in 2000 failed to connect with voters, it may come as no surprise that Our Choice has a graphic on "how a wind turbine works," and a long section that begins: "Conventional hydrothermal plants are built according to one of three different designs. The steam can be taken directly through the turbine and then recondensed...."

A wind turbine GRAPHIC! In a book about green energy!? What on Earth was he thinking.

As to our memories of those 2000 debates, maybe Begley meant to type "reporters" instead of "voters." As Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has been doggedly remembering for years now,  actual voters seemed to think Gore did pretty well in those debates--"instant polls of viewers credited Gore with a rather decisive win." The media created a different narrative--one of a petulant and sighing Gore who couldn't behave himself. And that's the way that they want everyone else to remember it.

Under the charming headline "Eliminate the Parasites," Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (9/12/09) advances another brilliant scheme to save corporate media from the menace of Google.

Lyons likes the idea put forward by billionaire Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban:

Cuban's advice: declare war on the "aggregator" Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators--sites like Drudge Report, Newser and countless others--don't create much original material. They mostly just synopsize stuff from mainstream newspapers and magazines, and provide a link to the original....

He says the media companies should kill off these parasites by using a little piece of software that blocks incoming links from aggregators. If the aggregators can't link to other people's stories, they die. With a few lines of code, the old-media guys could snuff them out.

Great idea--except that aggregator sites don't actually have to link to the original articles--they could just synopsize the news they find and leave searching for the original article as an exercise for the reader.  As Cuban himself notes, "very few readers actually click through to the original story," so they can't be the main attraction of the aggregators. Apparently, people go to them because they are a quick way to learn the news of the day--and they're going to keep being that, unless you make it a crime to tell people what the news is. I don't think we want to do that.

The links are mainly there as a courtesy to the content-producer, and they ought to appreciate that courtesy, because more important than the traffic that such links generate directly (though this can be quite attractive, as evidenced by outlets' relentless pursuit of Drudge links) is the fact that they boost your search-engine visibility, particularly on Google. If you stopped people from linking to you, you'd be basically invisible online. And this would be good for corporate media how?

Rather than coming up with a scheme for how to get back at Google, Huffington Post or whomever, corporate media would be better off thinking about why people use aggregator sites. When people are looking for a roundup of all the news in the world, why don't they turn to a newspaper?  And when they do click on your sites, why doesn't that make you more money? Corporate media is, after all, the business of selling audiences to advertisers--if they can't do that as well as Google does, then they just aren't very good at their jobs.

Mac Margolis, who wrote recently about the "selective zeal for democracy" of those who condemned the Honduran coup, wrote another little piece on Latin America for Newsweek this week: "Latin America Rights Itself" (print only). He argues that "the region now looks on the brink of a rightward shift," pointing to upcoming elections in Chile, Brazil and Uruguay in which the more liberal incumbent party is projected to lose, contrasting that with the great popularity of Colombia's president Uribe, "who enraged the left by befriending the Bush administration." Margolis suggests that "pragmatism is trumping charisma" and concludes: "Castigating the gringo devil may still make pulses race, but when it comes to casting ballots, Latin America looks likely to go for the middle ground."

Ok, except Lula's approval ratings are neck and neck with Uribe's, and Bachelet's have been on the rise and are pretty close--a main reason her party's candidate is looking weak is because there's a challenger to his left who's peeling off a hefty chunk of votes. Lula's party's candidate isn't all that well-known; once he starts campaigning for her (the election isn't until next year), observers expect her to jump in the polls. And a majority of Uruguayans want Uruguay's Vazquez to run for president again, even though a second consecutive term is barred by the constitution. All of which makes Margolis's argument about "pragmatism" (defined here as "shifting right") and the "middle ground" basically nonsensical.

Newsweek has a rather curious take this week (7/20/09) on the Honduras coup in a short piece headlined "The World Goes Bananas Over Honduras":

Poor, hot and fractious, Honduras--the original banana republic--rarely draws a second look from the global community. But on June 28, when President Manuel Zelaya was yanked out of bed by the military and bundled into exile, the world took notice. International leaders unanimously decried the "assault on democracy." The Organization of American States expelled Honduras, the only nation since Cuba to be so disgraced. Venezuela even threatened to send in troops to reinstate Zelaya. But in the rush to judgment, heads of state showed selective zeal for democracy, at best. "It's odd that world leaders have determined that coups can only be committed against presidents, [but] not against Congress or the courts," says Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan diplomat. In recent years, executives in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have stacked their benches and legislatures with yes men and muzzled the media--while international leaders looked the other way. And unlike those aspiring autocrats, the Honduran military could reasonably argue that it was acting in good faith by ejecting a leader hellbent on seeking re-election--despite an ironclad constitutional clause preventing such a move. Of course, it's a good thing when world leaders stand up for the people. But if it's going to mean much, they should try to be consistent.

Actually, it's not odd at all that world leaders are condemning Honduras as a coup but not Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador or Nicaragua; generally, coups are state takeovers by a small group with military/police backing, which hasn't happened anywhere in Latin America besides Honduras since...oh right, the anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela by folks on Arria's side.

And the Honduran military can't justify its coup by saying the leader they ejected was "hellbent on seeking re-election" for a number of reasons. First of all, it's clear that Zelaya wasn't even seeking re-election, since the actual advisory vote on amending the constitution was to happen in the same fall election that would choose Zelaya's successor. But the very word "election" in that excuse should give you a hint that perhaps there's something wrong with the logic involved. Asking voters if they want to vote on whether to change the constitution can hardly be considered such a threat to democracy that the military has to suspend that democracy in order to defend it.

It's notable that all the countries Newsweek listed have leftist governments aligned with Venezuela, while right-wing Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who not long ago engineered a change to his country's constitution in order enable his re-election, didn't merit a mention--or much coverage at all when it happened, for that matter--nor did Venezuela's anti-Chavez coup, which U.S. media heartily endorsed. Perhaps the issue Newsweek ought to be probing is U.S. media's "selective zeal" for Latin American democracy.

The website Gawker (6/9/09) caught Newsweek making some sneaky changes in an online article--changes that were ordered by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, and which just happened to favor the host of a show that Meacham appears on regularly.

On the afternoon of Friday, June 5, Newsweek's website put up an interview with Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of MSNBC's Morning Joe program.  The introduction pointed out that Scarborough had once been the defense attorney for an anti-abortion terrorist who murdered a doctor, and noted that the host had been criticized for giving insufficient attention to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, which occurred less than a week before the interview appeared.

By Friday night, though, the introduction to the interview had been completely rewritten.  Gone was any reference in the lead to abortion shootings, replaced instead by rather bland observations about "the rise of partisan media outlets" and "how conservatives lost their way."  What happened?  Jon Meacham happened, that's what. The Newsweek editor, a frequent guest on Morning Joe, told Gawker he was contacted about the interview by "a member of Scarborough's team," and after looking at the item he decided that "it was better to include that material in the flow of the interview."

Journalists don't usually think it's "better" to make the lead of a story less newsworthy by taking out references to current events.  But then newsworthiness might not be the first thing you think of when you're editing a story about your friend--especially a friend who routinely gives you valuable national TV exposure.  Which is why the better thing to do would have been for Meacham to tell the member of Scarborough's team that he couldn't second-guess the Web editor's decision-making.

Even though "James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis first told the world about waterboarding in May 2004," Dan Froomkin (WashingtonPost.com, 5/4/09) is having to argue that "that doesn't mean that the rest of us are as guilty as the people who committed the crimes--or that those who ordered those crimes should avoid accountability." While Newsweek's Jacob Weisberg and the Post's own Michael Kinsley are among those "arguing that the nation's collective guilt for torture is so great that prosecution is a cop-out," Froomkin has some "big problems with this argument":

While it's true that the public's outrage over torture has been a long time coming, one reason for that is the media's sporadic and listless coverage of the issue. Yes, there were some extraordinary examples of investigative reporting we can point to, but other news outlets generally didn't pick up these exclusives. Nobody set up a torture beat, to hammer away daily at what history I think will show was one of the major stories of the decade. Heck, as Weisberg himself points out, some of his colleagues were actually cheerleaders for torture. By failing to return to the story again and again--with palpable outrage--I think the media actually normalized torture.

Looking at journalists' "obligation to shout this story from the rooftops, day and night," Froomkin finds that, "instead we lulled the public into complacency."

The Daily Howler's Bob Somerby has a look (4/27/09) at how Newsweek bigshot Fareed Zakaria "pandered and fawned in dragging out yesterday's panel" on his CNN show

Zakaria: As I was thinking about the smartest people I could gather to talk about the first stage of Barack Obama’s presidency, I thought of that wonderful quotation from Oscar Wilde: "Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."

So today, I'll be talking with a panel of geniuses. Each of them has books and accomplishments too numerous to mention. I'll talk about a few. The others will be on the screen.

With a set up like that you must be on the edge of your seat, right? Well here's the full roster of Zakaria's "panel of geniuses": Jon Meacham, Walter Isaacson and Peggy Noonan. Click on each of those names for a look at the real nature of their intellects. And click here to read of Zakaria's--Extra!: "Fareed Zakaria, Spokesperson for the Global Elite: Newsweek Pundit Presents Pro-Corporate Views as the Poor’s Perspective" (7-8/08) by Roger Bybee.

Quoting Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter's strong words on the Keith Olbermann show about how "it's important, historically, to look at the context of" the "effort in these OLC memos to try to dress [torture] up as something else," Hullabaloo blogger digby takes issue (4/24/09) with his statement that "Dick Cheney stands almost alone" in still publicly defending the memos:

Yes, Dick Cheney is forlorn and all alone. Many of the people who advocated taking the gloves off are leaving him out there hanging today. And one of them is Jonathan Alter.

See, he forgot to mention--and Keith apparently didn't know--that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 this torture talk didn't come out of nowhere or even from the dark recesses of Cheney's evil mind. Jonathan Alter himself was one of the people who brought it up almost instantly: "Time to Think About Torture" By Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, November 5, 2001.

Clearly, the Pentagon wasn't alone in advocating torture from the moment 9/11 happened. It was being advocated in the pages of major newsmagazines by so-called liberal columnists who are now commenting on what "Cheney did" as if they weren't even in the country at the time.

Read FAIR's review of such craven commentators at the time Extra!: "Pro-Pain Pundits: Torture Advocates Defy U.S., International Law" (1-2/02) by Steve Rendall

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria is giving Obama high marks on his first 100 days in office in the magazine's May 4 issue. What's interesting, though, is when Zakaria explains why. He writes that while the country is more liberal than its been in 20 years, he (predictably enough) zeroes in on Obama's genius in charting a "middle course": no changes to NAFTA, no serious challenge to corporate power ("the old Democratic hostility to big business doesn't resonate so strongly anymore"), no real challenge to Wall Street ("he has steered a careful middle course on the bank bailouts") and no accountability for Bush-era torture ("he does not want to criminalize a policy disagreement") . It's just the sort of thing pundits like Zakaria love to see.

Washington Post/Newsweek economics columnist Robert Samuelson was recently out plugging his new book at an event recorded by C-SPAN. Samuelson began his remarks (watch the video here, at the 4:20 mark) by saying:

I am not an economist. I'm a journalist. And so that anything I say that seems contradictory to what a freshman in college would learn in your basic Principles of Economics course, I should be absolved of any sin for that, because as I say I am not a card-carrying member of the fraternity.

No one is asking Samuelson to be an economist. But it sounds like what he's saying is that not being one frees him to write about things like trade, inequality or Social Security without the burden of knowing much about the issues.

Samuelson is one of the few mainstream pundits who still doubts the science on climate change. The problem there isn't that he's not a climate scientist, but that he doesn't believe they know what they're talking about.

It's to self-described "establishment" journalist Evan Thomas' credit that he calls attention (Newsweek, 4/6/09) to economist Paul Krugman's progressive criticism of the Obama administration's financial bailout plan; corporate media generally pay much more attention to critics from the right.

But the same shallowness that renders most media policy discussions virtually useless infects Thomas' article, which seems more interested in analyzing Krugman's personality than his economics. "A lot of what he says is wrong and not considered," asserts George Mason economist Daniel Klein. Such as? Thomas doesn't say (nor does he allude to Klein's right-wing politics). "In areas outside his expertise he sometimes gets his facts wrong," Thomas asserts--without offering examples.

In a rare glimpse of substance, Thomas cites some unnamed administration officials' specific criticisms of Krugman's bank-nationalization proposals. Thomas' summary of the economist's counter-argument: "Krugman swats away these arguments, though he acknowledges he's not a 'detail' man."

One suspects that Krugman had more to say than that, and including his response might have helped readers determine whose policies might better address the economic crisis. But Thomas needed to save room to describe his subject's "lovely custom-built wood, stone and glass house by a brook in bucolic Princeton."

Real-life socialist Paul Street (ZNet, 3/5/09) takes issue with a Newsweek cover story "about the Obama administration's economic recovery and bailout plan... that '...has already--under a conservative Republican administration--effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries.'" Though the piece bore "the remarkable title 'We are All Socialists Now,'" Street lists "four key things missing from this remarkable Newsweek report":

1. Any remotely accurate understanding of socialism as it is grasped and advanced by its modern-day adherents: democratic workers' and peoples' control of economic and political life in the interests of social use, equality, and the common good instead of private gain and social hierarchy....

2. Any survey or other opinion data showing that most Americans think of themselves as "socialists." No such data exists, thanks in part to U.S. cultural and ideological authorities' longstanding success in identifying left-democratic and libertarian ideals with the arch-authoritarian, fake-socialist tyranny of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like.

3. Discussion with a single solitary actual U.S socialist to get his or her take on whether or not the broad mass of Americans have now suddenly embraced a socialist worldview and program.

4. Any reasonable understanding of the fact that capitalism and capitalists have long relied on state protection, subsidy and regulation--that supposedly "free market" capitalism has always been state capitalism.

Wondering "why on Earth they would advance" such a strange and "transparently false" claim, Street comes back to old motivations: "Part of the explanation, I suspect, is simply that they wanted to sell issues with a spectacular title" that "strike[s] a chord amidst the deepening capitalist economic crisis and in light of the Republican Party and right-wing media's hysterical neo-McCarthyite claims that the Obama administration is introducing, well, 'socialism.'"

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)

"Pointing out how often pundits' predictions are not only wrong but egregiously wrong" is, in Newsweek science columnist Sharon Begley's view (2/14/09), "like shooting fish in a barrel, except in this case the fish refuse to die. No matter how often they miss the mark, pundits just won't shut up." Citing "the fact that being chronically, 180-degrees wrong does not disqualify pundits is in large part the media's fault: Cable news, talk radio and the blogosphere need all the punditry they can rustle up, track records be damned," Begley looks at Stanford psychologist Philip Tetlock's methodical attempt to "identify those more likely to have an accurate crystal ball" using "something psychologists call cognitive style":

At first, Tetlock's ongoing study of 82,361 predictions by 284 pundits (most but not all of them American) came up empty. He initially looked at whether accuracy was related to having a Ph.D., being an economist or political scientist rather than a blowhard journalist, having policy experience or access to classified information, or being a realist or neocon, liberal or conservative. The answers were no on all counts. The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit's accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock's first clue. The media's preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced.

Begley explains how the dominant news media format reinforces this harmful predilection: "Bold, decisive assertions make better sound bites; bombast, swagger and certainty make for better TV. As a result, the marketplace of ideas does not punish poor punditry."

Survey some recent disastrous results in the FAIR magazine cover story Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy

Newsweek's current cover declares, "We Are All Socialists Now." But it's actually another story from the magazine that pushes the notion that Obama is likely heading the country in a (gasp!) European direction.

Michael Freedman's piece certainly doesn't start off on the right foot:

Have you noticed that Barack Obama sounds more like the president of France every day?

Newsweek laments the "distinctly continental sniff" of Obama's economic rhetoric, which apparently evokes "business bashing and protectionism"  that was, until recently, "largely relegated to the far left." The real problem, though, is what it's going to do to us Americans:

Slow growth could kill rugged American individualism, too. Healthcare in the U.S. is for the most part tied to employment, so if job numbers continue to look dismal, or get even worse, an ever-greater number of people will start looking to the government for support.... It's very easy to imagine a chorus of former American individualists demanding cushy French-style pensions and free British-style healthcare if their private stock funds fail to recover and unemployment inches upward toward 10 percent and remains there.

Pensions and healthcare for all-- this is worse than we thought!