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!

There are two major conflicts in Africa that receive U.S. media attention. In Congo, it is estimated that 5 million people have died in a conflict that has raged for about 12 years. In the Darfur region of Sudan, estimates can range from 200,000 to 400,000. The Darfur conflict, though, has received much more press attention than Congo-- which serves to explain why Newsweek magazine would run a (short) article about Congo under the headline "Africa’s Other Holocaust."