Under the headline "Va., N.J. Give GOP Reason to Celebrate," USA Today's front-page election report (11/4/09) featured this quote from GOP strategist Frank Donatelli:

The warning is that if you're in a moderate district, or you're in a moderate-to-conservative state, you should think twice before you rubberstamp Obama's agenda.

Well, there were two districts choosing representatives and two states picking governors yesterday. Both the districts, including the one generally described as "moderate," went for the Democratic candidate, so it's not clear what warning that sends about Obama's agenda.

In both states, the Democrat lost the governor's race, and one of them, New Jersey incumbent Jon Corzine, can fairly be described as politically close to Obama. But New Jersey, which has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, is not a "moderate-to-conservative" state;  Corzine lost the race based on local issues involving corruption and property taxes.

In the state that can be described as moderate-to-conservative, Virginia, Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds went out of his way not to "rubberstamp Obama's agenda"--coming out against allowing "card check" union certification, suggesting he would opt-out from a "public option" health insurance program, running ads touting his opposition to Obama's climate change proposals, and declaring in the final debate of the campaign, "I'm not afraid of going against my fellow Democrats when they're wrong."

So of the four top electoral contests, only one fit Donatelli's model of Democrats getting a warning about how they should appeal to moderate or conservative voters; in that race, the Democrat took Donatelli's advice--and was soundly trounced, based on the Obama voters from 2008 staying home in 2009.

One is tempted to ask whether a source's claims have to make any kind of logical sense to appear on the front page of USA Today. But given that "move to the right" is always the corporate media's advice to Democrats after an election--whether they win or lose--it's a safe bet that they thought Donatelli was making sense.

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.

USA Today 's left/right op-ed feature today is a doozy-- a "debate" on escalating the Afghan War between regulars Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel. The headline gives it away:

Time to Dig In, Not Bail Out

Forget left or right. Forget politics. Think "war on terror." Bob and Cal agree that now is not the time to abandon the war in Afghanistan.

The back and forth between arch-conservative Thomas and TV leftist Beckel ends with this exchange:

Bob: As much as my liberal instincts want us out of this war, I have to agree with you that it's time to stay and fight. The more dangerous path would be to retreat.

Cal: Among the many things I admire about you, Bob, is that you are often able to overcome your instincts when facts get in the way. Your party was once a keeper of freedom's flame when it came to engaging and defeating Communism. Now we have a new enemy. Nothing would benefit America more than to see Democrats and Republicans unite to defeat this enemy.

The thing that Cal Thomas admires about his liberal sparring partner--his inability to be an actual advocate for the left--is exactly the same quality that the corporate media look for in liberal pundits. It earns you a pat on the head from Cal Thomas, and a regular gig as a TV leftist.

Conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana unveiled his long-awaited health reform proposal yesterday, the results of weeks of negotiations among the Senate Finance Committee's so-called "Gang of Six"--three Democrats from the right-wing of their party and three moderate-to-conservative Republicans. The bill (unsurprisingly) does not include a public option and could end up leaving middle-income Americans paying too much for health insurance (Think Progress, 9/15/09). At the same time, no Republican--including those in the Baucus' Gang--has indicated that they intend to vote for this bill.

But some of the early media coverage seems to find it encouraging that the Baucus bill pleases almost no one. The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly presents that view today ("From Finance Chief, a Bill That May Weather the Blows"), with the lead: "On the surface, it appears that no one is happy with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.)--and that may be the best news President Obama has had in months."

What exactly is the good news? Connolly explains that liberals unions "fumed," but more importantly, "the fragile coalition of major industry leaders and interest groups central to refashioning the nation's $2.5 trillion health-care system remains intact." These "influential players" have not found "reasons to kill the effort." Quite the opposite: "Most enticing was the prospect of 30 million new customers." Well, that is good news--if you happen to believe that pleasing health insurance companies is the key to passing meaningful reform of that industry. Here you see the worldview of the Washington Post in action.

Meanwhile, USA Today's front page headline in the print edition (9/17/09) is "Bill Seen as Step in the 'Right Direction.'" This is a strange conclusion to reach about a bill that no one seems to like. The "right direction" comment was made by Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican included in Baucus' Gang of Six, who the paper tells us isn't even sure she'll support the Baucus plan anyway. On their website USA Today has changed the headline to read, "Bill Elates Few but Seen as Progress"-- an improvement, but still a strange way to describe the state of the debate. Unless, of course, one sees Max Baucus, Olympia Snowe or the insurance industry as the most important voices in that debate.

Former PR agent Wendell Potter's stories of how he helped the health insurance's industry's campaign "to discredit Michael Moore and his film Sicko" calls to mind just how successful that campaign was. Corporate media coverage of the debate raised by the film's expose of the for-profit insurance system went out of its way to demonize Moore. USA Today ran an editorial tied to the film against a single-payer healthcare plan, which was paired with an "Opposing View" from an insurance executive that denounced single-payer even more harshly. CBS News' Jeff Greenfield distinguished himself with his (inaccurate) claim that the U.S. doesn't have public funding for healthcare because "Americans are just different." And reviewing CNN's report on Sicko can only make one relieved that Sanjay Gupta turned down the job of surgeon general.

If you'd like to see an end to this kind of insurance industry PR masquerading as journalism, you can sign FAIR's petition calling for the inclusion of the single-payer option in coverage of the healthcare reform debate.

Looking at last week's "whole series of bad reports on the state of the economy," Dean Baker of Beat the Press and the Center for Economic and Policy Research tells readers of London's Guardian (6/1/09) if they think "these reports might have led to gloomy news stories," such assessments are to be found "not in the U.S. media": "The folks who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble are still determined to find the silver lining in even the worst economic news":

For example, National Public Radio told listeners that the new home sales figure reported for April was up from the March level. While this was true, the April figure was only 1,000 higher than a March level that had just been revised down by 5,000. April new home sales were 4,000 below the sales level that had originally been reported for March. USA Today touted a "surge" in durable goods orders, which was also based on a sharp downward revision to the prior month's data.

The media have obviously abandoned economic reporting and instead have adopted the role of cheerleader, touting whatever good news it can find and inventing good news when none can be found. This leaves the responsibility of reporting on the economy to others.

Predicting that "at some point it will be impossible to conceal the bad news, and Congress' attention will return to stimulus," for now Baker notes that "media's reality defying happy talk on the economy is delaying this moment." Read the recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Stimulus Snake Oil: Media Promote Nonsensical GOP Talking Points (3/09) by Peter Hart.

USA Today had a remarkable headline (4/29/09) on a story about Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter switching from the Republican to the Democratic Party:

Leaving GOP, Specter Gives Dems a Boost in Stifling Dissent

The headline writer does not seem to understand the meaning of the word "dissent," which is the expression of opposition to reigning policies, not the ability to prevent policies from being enacted even when they're supported by a majority of elected representatives.

This same misunderstanding is found in the article itself, which reports, "As a minority in the House and without the votes to filibuster the Senate, Republicans would find it harder to block Democratic initiatives or even be heard." Actually, each side does get a chance to debate in the Senate, even if there is no filibuster; if corporate media won't cover the views of elected critics who don't have the power to block legislation, that would seem to be a problem of--well, of a media that doesn't understand what "dissent" means.

We're not in the habit of linking to Accuracy In Media--and here's an Extra! article that explains why--but I thought this piece, by the apparent though unacknowledged daughter of USA Today founder Al Neuharth, deserved an exception.

Writing in response to a USA Today column by Neuharth (3/20/09) celebrating his six adopted children, Rosamunda Neuharth-Ozgo writes:

My mother, Betty Moore, met Mr. Neuharth in St Paul, Minn., in 1962, at an Associated Press convention. At the time, he was a young editor with the Detroit Free Press and my mother was a Paris-based translator in town on business. I am the result of their affair which continued for more than a year.

With Mr. Neuharth reneging on his paternal responsibilities and my mother unable to care for me, I spent the first few years of my life in a foster home under auspices of the New York City Department of Welfare.

Al Neuharth paid child support to my mother for 21 years, per a 1963 New York City Family Court agreement, but over the years he has gone to great lengths to hide my existence from the world. Despite the overwhelming evidence--which also includes a striking physical resemblance and the fact that his name is listed on my birth certificate--he has steadfastly refused to acknowledge that I am his daughter or to have anything to do with me.

Neuharth-Ozgo recounts various steps that Neuharth has taken over the years to keep her story out of the public eye--including scuttling an authorized biography by Mike Gartner when the former NBC News chief decided he would include a chapter on Neuharth-Ozgo.

Obviously, if Neuharth is really Neuharth-Ozgo's father, it's grotesque for him to be quoting his (third) wife talking about how "what you do for children who need help means more than anything else in your life."

But even taking at face value his claim that he is not her father, and only paid child support to her mother to avoid publicity--is it really so hard to imagine that a person who grew up with your name on her birth certificate might believe that she's related to you? While as Neuharth-Ozgo notes, there weren't DNA tests when she was born, there certainly are now, and the compassionate thing would be for Neuharth to take a paternity test and put her mind at ease one way or another.

People dislike the Afghan war more than ever, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll; 42 percent of Americans now think invading that country was a mistake.

For some reason, the paper's front page write-up of the poll (3/17/09) quotes two experts: John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security and Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute. Both of them support sending additional troops to Afghanistan. USA Today is showing, once again, that it's very difficult for them to entertain debate over the Afghanistan war in their news pages.

That's what USA Today seems to think--and it's a message that CNN anchor Lou Dobbs unsurprisingly latched on to as well.

The factoid was born at the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, which released a report saying that 300,000 construction jobs created by the stimulus package would go to undocumented immigrants. That report found its way to USA Today on March 9 ("Illegal Immigrants Might Get Stimulus Jobs, Experts Say"). The paper made it seem like this conclusion was not at all controversial-- "experts on both sides of the issue" agree. But that seemed a stretch: The pro-immigrant source, Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, "said it is impossible to predict with certainty" how many construction jobs would be done by undocumented workers.

And the Center's numbers are certainly subject to debate. The Immigration Policy Center, for example, argued that the group is making some questionable assumptions. For starters,  they rely on jobs projections from the Federal Highway Administration for highway projects--which may not be the best way to predict job creation in the construction industry overall.  And they estimate the undocumented share of the construction workforce from 2005--when the building industry was in much better shape than it is now, which would have attracted more undocumented laborers.

Of course, the underlying premise of the Center's report--that you ought to be able to stimulate the economy without benefiting unauthorized immigrants--is silly. If the stimulus works, any worker in the country, legally or otherwise, is going to find it easier to get a job.  Hoping that no undocumented worker gets a job as a result of the stimulus is hoping that that the stimulus doesn't create any jobs, period.

USA Today's "Obama's War" cover story today (2/18/09) is long by that paper's usual standards, but can't seem to find any space for critics of the plan to send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Quoted in the piece:
--Barack Obama
--Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution
--political scientist Richard Eichenberg of Tufts University
--White House press secretary Robert Gibbs
-- Joe Biden
--Robert Gates, Pentagon
--Sen. Joe Lieberman, "a leading hawk on both wars."
--Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan
--Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic & International Studies
--U.S./NATO commander David McKiernan

USA Today does note, however, that public opinion is more mixed:

Those surveyed split evenly, however, when asked whether the U.S. should keep troops in Afghanistan until things get better, even if that takes years, or set a timetable for removing them regardless of what's going on there at that time.

Other polls suggest the public isn't crazy about an escalation either. When will those voices be heard in the media?

Two newspaper stories today provide a false account of the context of the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The Washington Post:

Hamas and its allies have fired thousands of rockets into Israel in the past eight years. The pace accelerated after the Islamist movement, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, routed forces loyal to the rival Fatah party in June 2007 and seized control of the narrow coastal strip. Since then, Israel has implemented a crushing economic blockade and carried out regular military raids that it has said were a response to rocket fire.

This is an extremely selective history. The Post's claim that Hamas "accelerated" its rocket attacks after 2007 ignores the fact that a cease-fire agreement for much of the second half of 2008 drastically curtailed rocket fire into Israel (an agreement that largely fell apart after an Israeli attack in November).

Meanwhile, in USA Today:

Israel wants to ensure that Hamas cannot rearm itself. Before the offensive, Hamas militants fired up to 80 mortar shells and rockets a day at Israel. The number of attacks has declined to less than 20 a day, the Israeli army says.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "before the offensive." During the cease-fire period last year, rocket fire into Israel was well below the 80 a day figure the paper cites. In fact, it was much lower than the 20 a day figure too; it was around a dozen a month. USA Today wants to advance the argument that Israel's violence has 'worked'-- but to do so you must erase certain inconvenient facts.

One might not expect much from a USA Today editorial headlined "How to Turn Obama's Success Into Gains for Black Boys," but it's hard to get past the first two graphs without feeling ill:

You can see the message on brick wall murals in inner cities: Yes we can. You can hear it in the music of Black Eyed Peas' frontman will.i.am: Yes we can.

You can imagine hearing it pass the lips of thousands of black mothers, perhaps after awakening their sons early to complete homework before they head off to school, just as President-elect Barack Obama's mother did: Yes you can.

Huh.  I guess if one tries REALLY, REALLY hard, you can almost imagine a black mother encouraging her son, just like Obama's white mother did. Unsurprisingly, the paper manages to turn the piece into an endorsement of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law:

Most important, Obama has resisted calls from the teachers' unions to dismantle President Bush's No Child Left Behind school-reform law. Whatever the law's shortcomings, No Child's relentless emphasis on data forces school districts to come clean about the poor job they have done with black boys.

Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel are, by mainstream media standards, ideological opposites. Thomas is a far-right pundit, and Beckel is what you might call a Fox News Democrat.

They spar in the pages of USA Today from time to time, though the point generally seems to be finding "common ground." The headline of today's installment (12/11/08) captures the essence of their relationship:

Centrist in Chief?
Cal and Bob like what they see and hear--so far--from President-elect Obama. A good sign: the left-wingers aren't getting their way.

More interesting, though, is Beckel's actual analysis:

I am amazed how many conservatives are praising Obama's transition and how many on the left are suddenly worried that they helped elect a moderate. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and any special interest groups are going to have decidedly less influence on Obama than you on the right predicted.

And:

It is politics, which at its most practical is about seeking consensus and common ground. That means a president will, at times, disagree with his base, which is akin to jilting a lover. The scorn is deep and unforgiving. Perfect example: the reaction of the left's Netroots folks--Daily Kos, MoveOn.org and the like--to Obama's Cabinet choices. You don't have to look very hard to find indignant bile. But Obama isn't in awe, or fearful, of these folks because he has built his own Netroots machine. These left-wing blatherers don't own him.

And:

Obama is wisely embracing the idea of uniting people--rather than MoveOn's tactic of dividing them.

And:

We on the left need to own up to our contribution to the dependency class. In hindsight, despite our best intentions, many of the poverty programs of the '60s and '70s did breed a generation or more of people dependent on government.

Bash the Democratic base, bash the left, bash the poor--that is how you get a gig as a TV leftist. Hannity and Beckel, anyone?

The media trope that presidents-elect ought to break progressive campaign promises really displays the anti-democratic and pro-corporate biases of the press at their most glaring. Who cares what you told the voters? Here's what the interests that really matter want you to do.

The latest instance in this sad series is a USA Today editorial (12/2/08), which eagerly spots a silver lining in the economic crisis:

During his campaign...Obama endorsed a number of smaller bore ideas more for the sake of their political appeal than for their economic usefulness. The financial crisis gives the incoming president a compelling rationale to make a few modest course corrections.

The paper then offers three of its own "modest" proposals for how Obama should best rewrite his platform in a more big business-friendly direction. One is to drop the idea of a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, arguing that "windfall profits taxes...aren't a very reliable or stable source of revenue." Since windfall profits are by definition sudden and unexpected, that seems like a rather peculiar objection--like saying that receiving emergency aid isn't something you can count on every year.

Another way that USA Today hopes that Obama will betray the people who voted for him is by dropping the idea of renegotiating NAFTA. "Outside of a handful of heavily unionized states where the trade pact with Canada and Mexico has become a scapegoat for job losses, NAFTA is not seen as such a bad thing," the editorial claims--which ignores not only national polling but the fact that the entire country expressed its opinion by voting by a substantial margin for a candidate who promised to reopen the deal in no uncertain terms.

USA Today went on to assert that "the addition of 18 million jobs in the decade following [NAFTA's] enactment suggests that it produced more winners than losers." Actually, since the total U.S. population grew by an estimated 35 million between 1994 and 2004, adding 18 million new jobs is not particularly impressive. A more relevant statistic is that the U.S. trade deficit grew from $150 billion in 1994 to $650 billion in 2004, suggesting that U.S. trade policies during this period resulted in the transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth overseas.

Finally, echoing other corporate media pleas for Obama to abandon his progressive campaign pledges, USA Today singles out Obama's long-standing support of card-check union certification as a promise to break, saying, "It is hard to see how ending the secret ballot would do much besides initiating campaigns of subtle, and not so subtle, intimidation as workers contemplate their decisions."

The argument turns reality on its head: The current system, which treats worker organization as a matter to be contested with the employer rather than decided on by the workers themselves, allows those employers to intimidate workers in ways that are not subtle at all--a study by CEPR (1/07) based on NRLB data concluded that as many as one in five union organizers are illegally fired during the course of a typical union certification campaign.

The paper concludes that "pushing this idea through Congress would position Obama less as an agent of change and more as a pal of Big Labor." It's corporate media's Orwellian notion of change in action: Changing the Bush administration's hostile attitude toward labor--big or otherwise--would not be change; continuing that attitude would be change.