On Sunday (12/18/11), ABC's This Week presented an installment of what it's calling "The Great American Debates." What it really was, though, was a perfect example of how corporate media adopt right-wing assumptions when framing a discussion.

In this case, it was a debate over Big Government. The show's opening sounded like a Tea Party rally:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: This week, a special program on the defining issue of 2012. Has Uncle Sam become too big, too powerful? A bailout bonanza, a welfare state? A tax-and-spend Goliath crushing the entrepreneurial spirit when America can't afford to fall behind? That's the rallying cry of the Tea Party, the mantra of Republican candidates everywhere.

GOV. RICK PERRY, R-TEXAS: Washington doesn't need a new coat of paint. It needs a complete overall.

AMANPOUR: At the heart of Ronald Reagan's famous declaration.

RONALD REAGAN: The government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.

AMANPOUR: Today, ABC News and the Miller Center of the University of Virginia present The Great American Debate. Facing off here in Washington, the intellectual heavyweights of both parties. For the right, Congressman Paul Ryan and ABC's own George Will. And from the left, Congressman Barney Frank and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

About all you can say about this is that it's relatively balanced in terms of  ideology.

But all the rhetoric about a "welfare state" and a "tax-and-spend Goliath" are staples of right-wing talk radio. Has the government gone on a spending binge in the Obama years? Not really, as Paul Krugman has explained a few times. Government spending as a share of GDP has gone up, but there are reasonable explanations--a massive recession, the cost of unemployment insurance--that have nothing to do with enterpreneur-crushing Big Government.

Reich tried to point out the flaws in the framing of this discussion at least once: "The idea of big government as a framing device in terms of a debate such as this inevitably sets it up kind of in favor of the side that doesn't want big government."

To suggest this is the "defining issue" of 2012 is rather remarkable. Most people think there's a jobs crisis, and understand that government spending might be the most efficient way to fix the problem. But I don't expect ABC to convene a "Great Debate" that is premised on a question like, "Why isn't the government spending enough money to create jobs?"

ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/6/11) kicked the show off with a pretty funny joke:

Clash of the titans in Texas last night, as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich met for the first of a series of one-on-one Lincoln/Douglas-style debates.

Less funny was the show's very imbalanced roundtable discussion:

So let's bring in our roundtable: George Will, the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington, former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, and historian and Newsweek columnist Niall Ferguson, author of the new book Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Three conservatives and the left-liberal Huffington.

But if anything, ABC's panel was teetering leftward.  On NBC's Meet the Press:

Finally, our roundtable will discuss if the state of the Republican race in flux now that the front-runner is engulfed in controversy. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kim Strassel, author of the new book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero and host of MSNBC's Hardball Chris Matthews, and Politico senior political writer Maggie Haberman give their views.

Two conservatives, a Beltway reporter and Matthews, who described himself recently as a George W. Bush-voting pragmatist.

And on CBS's Face the Nation:

The guests are Ed Gillespie, former Republican National Committee Chair; Ed Rollins, former Bachmann campaign manager; Ken Blackwell, Perry supporter, Liz Cheney, Republican consultant and John Dickerson, CBS news political analyst.

So four conservatives and a reporter.

ABC's This Week (10/10/11) had a normally tilted panel on Sunday talking about, among other things,  Occupy Wall Street. The show had three different types of conservatives (former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, fixture George Will and columnist Peggy Noonan) along with Democratic pundit Donna Brazile.

But then host Christiane Amanpour actually interviewed someone involved with Occupy Wall Street--DailyKos blogger Jesse LaGreca. He is perhaps best know as the guy who was interviewed by Fox News Channel at the protest--and took the chance to bash Fox News Channel.

And he did media criticism on This Week too:

LAGRECA: I mean, the reality is, I'm the only working-class person you're going to see on Sunday news, political news maybe ever. And I think that's very indicative of the failures of our media to report on the news that matter most to working-class people.

AMANPOUR: We are trying our best, Jesse.

LAGRECA: And I thank you.

Points to the show for actually having him on, but is ABC really trying its best? That would be sad.

ABC This Week (9/25/11):

CHRISTINE AMANPOUR: And coming up, Rick Perry on the ropes.

PERRY: Yep, there may be slicker candidates and there may be smoother debaters, but I know what I believe in, and I'm going to stand on that belief every day. I will guide this country with a deep, deep rudder.

AMANPOUR: Can the new frontrunner come back from a shaky debate performance? Or is Chris Christie waiting in the wings to steal his thunder?

New York Times (9/26/11):

After Perry's Debate Showing, Eyes Turn Toward Christie

Washington Post (9/26/11):

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's recent stumbles--his rambling attempt at last week's GOP presidential debate to attack former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's flip-flopping is a prime example--have renewed speculation that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie might rethink his "no go" decision on the 2012 race.

Reporter Jose Antonio Vargas wrote a moving piece for the New York Times magazine about his status as an undocumented immigrant. One hope is that his story might improve the tone and substance of media coverage of immigration; Vargas has suggested as much, at one point tweeting this message:

Undocumented Immigrant trending. So let's drop "Illegal" and "Alien." No person is illegal or an alien.

His story has received a tremendous amount of media attention. But as Monica Novoa pointed out at ColorLines, too much coverage has dwelt on Vargas' "illegal" status:

Vargas’ story has drawn enormous media attention and drove "undocumented immigrant" up to a top-trending term on Twitter yesterday. But it’s a shame that in the dissection and retelling of his story, a fine point has been lost on many of Vargas’ colleagues: He came out specifically as an undocumented immigrant and not as “illegal.” The distinction is a central part of his story. He is rejecting a legally inaccurate, dehumanizing and racist label that helps to prop up an ignorant and limited immigration debate, along with all of the violence and unconstitutionality the concept of an “illegal” human being engenders.

That brings us to his Sunday appearance on ABC's This Week.  Check out their headline:

There is growing Congressional opposition to the Libya war. Two House votes this month sought to challenge the White House policy-- one of which passed by a wide margin.  On Saturday (6/18/11) Charlie Savage reported in the New York Times that the Office of Legal Counsel's advice to Obama was that he needed to comply with the War Powers Act. Obama rejected their advice, which as Savage reported is "extraordinarily rare."

Congress will be taking up more Libya debates this week, with a potential vote scheduled to stop the funding of the war. And the recent Republican presidential debate showed that many candidates are speaking out against the Libya policy.

That's a lot to work with for the Sunday shows. But they mostly skipped the chance to present serious criticism of the White House. On NBC's Meet the Press (6/19/11), viewers heard from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who wants a more aggressive war:

The War Powers Act is unconstitutional, not worth the paper it's written on.... The president's done a lousy job of communicating and managing our involvement in Libya, but I will be no part of an effort to defund Libya or to try to cut off our efforts to bring Gadhafi down.  If we fail against Gadhafi, that's the end of NATO.  Egypt's going to be overrun and the 'Mad Dog of the Mideast,' what Ronald Reagan called Gadhafi, if he survives this, you're going to have double the price of oil that you have today because he will take the whole region and put it in, into chaos.... So from my Republican point of view, the president needs to step up his game in Libya, but Congress should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi.

And the Democratic view, courtesy of Senator Dick Durbin:

The president's doing the right thing.  What we have here, this would be 'Butcher of Benghazi,' Gadhafi, needs to be stopped so he doesn't kill innocent people.  The president brought together the Arab League, the United Nations, and NATO and said we are going to play a supportive rule--role, no ground troops.  We're going to have a limited duration conflict to stop Gadhafi.  That was the right thing.  But I think that the War Powers Act and Constitution make it clear that hostilities by remote control are still hostilities.... What we should do is act on a timely basis to pass congressional authorization under the War Powers Act.  I reject the Republican approach, which has been suggested by Speaker Boehner and others to cut off the troops.  It would give solace to Gadhafi.  It would undermine the people who are resisting him in that nation, and I agree completely with Lindsey Graham.  It would call into question the future of NATO.

So while they differ on War Powers Act-- and on which nickname to use for Gadhafi-- they both support the war.

As did NBC reporter Richard Engel, who said this during the program's roundtable segment:

I just came from Libya before I came here, and the fact of the matter is the war in Libya right now is not very serious, that NATO is not doing a terribly good job.  The rebels need a lot more help.  The bombing campaign in Tripoli barely exists.  Every once in a while there's a few bombs on mostly empty compounds, and people go about their lives more or less unaffected.  It's not the kind of thing that's going to drive Gadhafi from power.  And a, a lot of European nations who are now trying to lead this, this fight, which--and are, and are struggling to do it, are looking at this debate in--within the--in the United States to end the U.S. support for NATO.  If the U.S. ended its support for NATO in Libya, NATO really is dead.

It's rather odd for a reporter to offer policy advice like that. One has to wonder if NBC would be pleased if Engel were speaking out against the war.

It wasn't just Meet the Press, though. Fox News Sunday featured outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who defended the war (and the White House's legal explanation for it). And ABC's This Week took the  apparent upswing in antiwar sentiment to interview pro-war Senator John McCain. A short comment from Libya War critic George Will could be heard during the roundtable.

One of the chief criticisms of the Sunday show is that they're way too obsessed with Beltway posturing and politics. That's obviously true, but in this case there would seem to be a lot happening in that world to push back against the war-- and the shows seem to think their role is to man the ramparts.

Corporate media's preference for "centrism" can often translate into reporting that casts two sides of a debate as equally belligerent or unwilling to compromise.  ABC reporter Jonathan Karl's report yesterday on This Week (4/3/11) offers a perfect example of the absurdity of this worldview.

His focuses was on the battle over the federal budget. On one side are Tea Party activists who want deeper spending cuts.  Karl notes that this creates some friction between the activists and GOP leaders. Then there's the other side of the debate:

KARL: Democrats have their hot heads, too. One Obama administration official said the Republican bill, which cuts $5 billion from the Agency for International Development would kill kids. That's right. Kill kids.

RAJIV SHAH, USAID ADMINISTRATOR: We estimate, and I believe these are conservative, that HR 1 would lead to 70,000 kids dying.

Karl then turns to former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean saying that Democrats could benefit from a government shutdown. Karl closes with a snide reference to the choice confronting lawmakers: "Compromise with extremists out to kill kids?"

Budget cuts have actual, real world consequences--especially when you're talking about health aid to the Third World. This is not in serious dispute. But apparently talking about those effects is a problem.

What Karl considers hot-headed extremism is Shah's claim that deaths will occur due to, among other things, cuts to USAID's anti-malaria programs. Others will die because they would lose access to life-saving medicines. Others will die at birth.

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman points out that many anti-poverty organizers have organized a fast to draw attention to the GOP budget cuts. He's joining them, and writes that some organizers are praying that God create a "circle of protection" around the world's poor and hungry.

What a bunch of hotheads.

A new study of the guest lists for the Sunday morning chat shows finds that the networks prefer lawmaker guests who are white, male, older and Republican. The study was published by the George Mason University School of Law's Green Bag Journal, and got a brief write-up in the New York Times today (9/13/10).

And that means we got to hear excuses from the shows about why this is the case. Meet the Press executive producer Betsy Fischer spoke about how they are "committed to having a diverse group of voices on the program whose opinions and expertise reflect the cultural, economic and political landscape of our country." (The war in Afghanistan is just one area where they seem less interested in diverse voices.)

ABC's This Week offered another defense:

"We are always looking to represent diverse views on our program, but This Week is a news program and so our bookings are dictated by the news and newsmakers," said Ian Cameron, the executive producer of This Week on ABC.

The period covered by the study in 2009 was "dominated by three issues in Congress: healthcare, the economy and Afghanistan," Mr. Cameron said. "If you take a look at the committees who were most involved in these issues, most of the members both in the House and the Senate with the most seniority were white and mostly men."

At the risk of completely questioning the premise of the Sunday show format, maybe hosting weekly chats with  prominent politicians is not a particularly great way of illuminating the vital issues of the day.  It does give the major parties a platform from which to spout their talking points, which is really what the the producers are defending here as their way of doing journalism.

Speaking of Sunday shows, don't miss FAIR's study of the partisan guests on these programs, which appears in the new issue of Extra!. Using the VoteView scores of lawmaker guests, FAIR found that the Republicans who most frequently appear on the networks tend to be from the conservative wing of their party; the Democrats invited on the same shows are closer the middle.

Every Sunday on ABC's This Week there is a feature that names the U.S. servicemembers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan the previous week. Christiane Amanpour is the new host of the show, and the segment continues. But her critics see something sinister at work.

This is how previous host Jake Tapper generally introduced the list:

This week, the Pentagon released the names of 16 soldiers and marines killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Sunday, this is what Amanpour said:

We remember all of those who died in war this week, and the Pentagon released the names of 11 U.S. servicemembers killed in Afghanistan.

Washington Post critic Tom Shales, still apparently enraged that Amanpour got the job in the first place, slammed this performance:

Perhaps in keeping with the newly globalized program, the commendable "In Memoriam" segment ended with a tribute not to American men and women who died in combat during the preceding week but rather, said Amanpour in her narration, in remembrance of "all of those who died in war" in that period. Did she mean to suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?

That got a plug from NewsBusters, the blog affiliated with the right-wing Media Research Center. The MRC's Brent Baker had already weighed in, slamming Amanpour on Sunday for "phraseology which put the U.S. deaths second to all the wars around the world."

Meanwhile, back in reality, Amanpour's debut featured an interview with Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that focused on the threat to the Afghanistan war effort posed by the WikiLeaks disclosures. In her other interview, Amanpour brandished a copy of the new issue of Time magazine and asked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, "Is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan again?"

And Amanpour tried to put the best spin  on the war:

What I think a lot of people maybe don't get is that the Afghan people still want the American forces there. In the latest ABC poll, it shows that 68 percent of the Afghan people actually want the American forces still there. Do you think that there has been an opportunity missed or should there be an opportunity seized by yourself, maybe by the president, to go out and speak to the American people more about Afghanistan, about the strategy, about why it's important?

Spoken like a true Taliban sympathizer.

The Afghanistan documents posted by WikiLeaks were obviously the big story of the week. So how did the network Sunday shows react to these disclosures, which have the potential to open up a real debate about the Afghan War?

NBC's Meet the Press interviewed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen.

ABC's This Week featured an interview with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

On CBS, Face The Nation had Mike Mullen.

What would state broadcasting look like again?

CBS also had an interview with Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations (formerly of the Bush administration), who urged the U.S. to wage a more traditional counterterrorism war, "where we use drones, we use cruise missiles. We use covert operatives, we use Special Forces."

That would seem to be the kind of criticism of the Afghanistan War that is allowable.

It's worth noting that the new PBS program Need to Know discussed WikiLeaks on Friday. As co-host Alison Stewart put it at the top of the show: "Much ado about nothing or putting lives at risk? The effects of the WikiLeaks on the war in Afghanistan."

Those are the only choices? Need to Knows' guest was Joshua Foust, a blogger/writer who is a critic of WikiLeaks and is generally skeptical that there's much of value in the leaked reports.

When ABC announced that CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour would take over as host of their Sunday chat show This Week, there were rumblings about how different things would be. Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote a nasty hit piece on Amanpour in which he worried that the show focuses on "inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour is widely considered to be deficient." He seemed to mean that was a bad thing. ABC president David Westin, meanwhile, wrote in a memo to ABC staffers, "With Christiane we have the opportunity to provide our audiences with something different on Sunday mornings."

Something different, something not so Beltway-oriented. Sounds good.

Oh, the show starts this weekend. And they've announced the guests: Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Not exactly strangers to inside-the-Beltway palaver.

Well, will the pundit roundtable change, then? Not according to this recent interview with Amanpour (TVNewser, 3/18/10), where she calls George Will a "national treasure."

Back in May FAIR wrote about the problems with a new factchecking project, where the PolitiFact website evaluates ABC's This Week. As we said then, this is theoretically a fine idea; the problem is that, in practice, what PolitiFact decides to analyze is almost as important as what is said on the show.  A completely uncontroversial comment from Bill Clinton, for instance, was determined to be "true," though no one would suggest that it wasn't. Defense Secretary Bob Gates' somewhat tendentious criticism of Wikileaks (for releasing a video of civilians being killed in Iraq by U.S. forces) was determined "Mostly True," though their reasoning was pretty unconvincing.

The right-wing Media Research Center has tallied up PolitiFact's scorecard so far, and they are pleased with the results:

After nearly three months, the results show far more Democrats and liberals earning a "False" rating, with most of the "True" ratings going to Republicans and conservatives. The discrepancy remains even if you take into account that about two-thirds of the evaluated statements came from Democrats in the first place.

From April 11 through June 20, PolitiFact has handed out seven "False" statements--six to Democrats/liberals, one to a Republican. During that same time, seven "True" labels were handed out--four for Republicans/conservatives, just two for Democrats (one, ironically, going to former President Bill Clinton). 

If I were a right-wing media critic, this couldn't be better news: According to a non-partisan study of one Sunday show, liberal and Democrats are more often telling whoppers.

Of course, this only points to the problems inherit in PolitiFact's approach. As FAIR noted in May, George Will has made claims that demand some sort of fact-checking--but the site, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to show much interest in evaluating the statements of one of the show's regular panelists.

As Arianna Huffington recently pointed out (7/5/10), during one of her This Week appearances  she declared that Halliburton had "defrauded the American taxpayer"--a comment that right-wing panelist Liz Cheney strongly (and unsurprisingly) found objectionable: "Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on, but it's not facts." PolitiFact decided that this was worth a look. After a relatively thorough accounting of Halliburton's problems with overbilling and underperforming on its military contracts, they determined that Huffington's statement was "Half True." The reason? Apparently Huffington was not fair to the company, which may have merely overcharged the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars due to "waste and inefficiency."

"I think the best journalism in America is business journalism precisely because they deal with real metrics. You can actually--they know things."
--George Will, ABC's This Week, 3/15/09

It's possible that Will actually believes this. Read Dean Starkman's piece in Mother Jones, "How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?," for another take. Or this piece from Extra!.

Or recall that, not too long ago, Will was lecturing us on how the economy was doing just fine, in spite of the gloomy message the media was delivering:

Conservative pundit George Will (ABC's This Week, 12/4/05) blamed media coverage for the public's failure to understand that "the economy is booming," attributing this misapprehension to "Will's two laws of economic journalism," one of which mandates that "there's no such thing as good news."

For the record, this was how Will described his "two laws of economic journalism:"

First law, all news is economic news. That is, all news either is a cause or a consequence of economic developments and can be given an economic spin. Second law, all economic news is bad. All economic news is bad. Housing prices go up. Housing bubble. Housing prices come down, slump in housing. Unemployment goes up. That's bad, 'cause unemployment is bad. Unemployment comes down, the labor market is overheating and inflation is coming back. There's no such thing as good news.