The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses--that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime--are basically correct.

As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12):

The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers' editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington's red-versus-blue fetish from news content--as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa's small contest.

Just one example of the absurdity:  At least one of Rick Santorum's final campaign stops was so mobbed by reporters that some of actual residents of Iowa he was supposed to be talking to couldn't squeeze into the meetings, as noted by the Washington Post:

The evidence of Santorum's recent surge was obvious: The overwhelming crush of media members at the Polk City stop included reporters from Italy and Australia. Dozens of voters--who two weeks ago probably could have had the candidate to themselves--were pressed out of the restaurant and stood in the cold.

"I'm actually from Polk City," one said to another as he was unable to squeeze his way inside. "Yeah, we don't count," the other responded.

Of the storylines that have emerged so far, one is that Mitt Romney has yet to dominate the competition. This has been present in the campaign coverage for months, and continued in the papers this morning.  Susan Page in USA Today wrote:

By favoring a conservative, a moderate and a libertarian in nearly equal doses, visitors to the state's 1,774 precincts did little to clear up what has been a topsy-turvy contest to choose President Obama's opponent next fall.

In the New York Times, Jeff Zeleny writes that "Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum." And Zeleny added later,  "The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House."

Also in the Times, courtesy of Jim Rutenberg:

But more than anything else, the Iowa caucuses cast in electoral stone what has played out in the squishy world of polls and punditry for the last 12 months: The deep ideological divisions among Republicans continue to complicate their ability to focus wholly on defeating President Obama, and to impede Mr. Romney's efforts to overcome the internal strains and win the consent if not the heart of the party.

There is no reason in the world that voters in any state in the country should line up behind any single candidate. The fact that the voters in a particular party are split between different candidates who represent different factions of their party is a sign that people have different views about who they think should lead the country. Which is, after all, a good thing.

The alternative would be to deprive voters everywhere else a chance to have a say about who their party's nominee will be. There's a curious sort of tension at work. On the one hand, you get a sense that reporters want the primary season to continue for months, if only for the sake of giving them something to cover. On the other hand, they spend an awful lot of time puzzling over why Mitt Romney can't manage to wrap up the Republican nomination after one state has voted.

The front page of USA Today (9/19/11) tells us that Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is taking "the heat," but not to worry--he says he can handle it.

That's especially true with reporters like Susan Page on his side:

He's not worried, he said, because only one issue really matters to Americans in this election. It's the one he plans to ride first against his Republican rivals and then against President Obama.

Jobs.

"I'll be asked about a hundred different issues a thousand different ways," he said in the interview Friday, one of only a few he has done since announcing his candidacy last month. "But it is about who has the record, who has the vision to get Americans working again." That's what "Republicans, independents and even, I think, a number of Democrats … are looking for."

As he told those at a county GOP dinner in Jefferson, a coffeehouse crowd in Newton and workers at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Atlantic, he can cite job-creation statistics in Texas that are the envy of the nation's other 49 governors. The Lone Star State has accounted for 40 percent of the jobs created in the United States since June 2009.

We've been through this before (and we'll go through it many, many more times).

It's likely that a competent governor--and certainly a competent reporter--would be more concerned about the unemployment rate in a given state, which takes into account not only how many people have jobs but how many people need jobs. On that score, Texas is right in the middle of the pack. So there are plenty of governors who actually wouldn't envy Texas.

Page goes on:

Now Perry is pouncing on [Mitt] Romney with the brio of a rodeo cowboy lassoing a bull.

To every audience, he ridicules Romney's record on jobs when he was governor (Massachusetts ranked 47th nationwide)....

The unemployment rate in Massachusetts is more than a point lower than it is in Texas. Something Page could have found out even without a lasso.

At a press conference in 2009, Barack Obama said, "America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world toward peace and prosperity." He also proclaimed that America has core values that make it exceptional.

Based on those comments, right-wing pundits and politicians reached a conclusion: Barack Obama does not believe in "American exceptionalism." And since they say this all the time, reporters feel obligated to cover it as if it were an actual, serious argument.

Hence Susan Page's front-page article in USA Today (12/21/10):

Over White House objections, they're accusing him of not embracing the concept of American exceptionalism, saying he is pursuing an agenda on healthcare, the economy and foreign affairs that is at odds with fundamentals that distinguish the United States.

Obama "has clarified and personified secular socialization and a European view," says former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who is weighing a presidential bid in 2012. Obama, he says, made "disastrous" comments on the subject during his first trip overseas as president in an exchange that has become a cause célèbre among conservatives.

Page notes that this all comes down to one answer to one question at a 2009 press conference:

At a news conference in Strasbourg, France, in April 2009, a British reporter had asked the new president whether he subscribed to the idea that the United States is uniquely qualified to lead the world. "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism," Obama had replied.

That comment--which White House officials say critics have twisted and pulled out of context--led Gingrich, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and other prominent Republicans to question whether Obama believes that the USA has, by virtue of its heritage, a distinct and extraordinary role in world affairs.

He said, she said: Obama's defenders say they're misinterpreting the quote, Palin and company say they're not. If there was any "context" to this quote, USA Today didn't seem inclined to include it here--only the preface about the British and the Greeks.

But the paper did publish a sidebar article that included Obama's entire answer to this question about exceptionalism.

Now in a sane media world, we would acknowledge that Obama said this:

The United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

With that out of the way, we'd spend our time trying to figure out precisely how and why Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin willfully misinterpret his words. But we don't have that media system. We have the one where the sputterings from Sarah Palin are taken seriously as one side in a "debate."

A USA Today story by Susan Page (7/27/10), on the impact of the WikiLeaks revelations, reports that despite some erosion, "Most Americans continue to support the war in Afghanistan."

To back up this assertion, Page cites Gallup poll findings (7/8-11/10) that 58 percent of Americans think it was "not a mistake" for the U.S. to have sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001. Clearly, though, it's possible to believe that U.S. troops should have been sent to Afghanistan in 2001 without thinking that they should still be there almost nine years later.

Much more to the point was the July 11 ABC/Washington Post poll, where  just 42 percent of respondents said that the Afghan War was, in the present tense, "worth fighting"--with a majority, 55 percent, saying they did not think it was.  Or the CNN poll (5/29/10) that asked respondents if they favored or opposed the war, and found  56 percent opposed, with 42 percent in support.

And Americans could not  "continue" to support the war, because public opinion, as measured by polls that stick to the point, have found a majority of the American public opposing the Afghan War for most of the past two years. As Extra! reported in December 2009:

In three surveys since July, the AP/GfKpoll has reported that at least 53 percent of respondents say they oppose the Afghanistan War. In September, 51 percent told the Washington Post/ABC News poll (9/10–12/09) that the war was not "worth fighting."

USA Today's Susan Page has a front-page piece (7/20/10) headlined "Faith in Social Security Tanking: Most Expect Cuts or Lose Hope for Funds." The piece notes:

A USA Today/Gallup Poll finds that a majority of retirees say they expect their current benefits to be cut, a dramatic increase in the number who hold that view. And a record six of 10 non-retirees predict Social Security won't be able to pay them benefits when they stop working.

Page seems a bit puzzled about why the public holds these views, since they are "more dire than the calculations of Social Security's trustees." She points out that even if the trust fund were exhausted by 2037, the system "could finance about three-fourths of current benefits through the payroll tax." Page quotes one expert who points out that public misperceptions might be a result of "all the attacks on Social Security that we have this total crisis in the program."

True enough. Take, for example,  a USA Today front-page article from February of this year (2/8/10) that was headlined, "Social Security Races to 'Negative': Rash of Retirements Push Fund to Brink." That piece sounded the fear alarm by reporting that Social Security's "annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years." Read FAIR's February 9 alert for all the details.

Where do people get these wrong ideas about Social Security? They read them in the newspaper, and believe them.