Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn "is the Wall Street Journal's 'Microtrend'-spotting columnist" and "also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller," Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that "only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter."

Alas, "Scumbag spotted!" is Nolan's cry when writing that

Penn's latest (old, and none too insightful) "Microtrend" column is about "glamping"--glamorous camping. It ran last weekend. By Monday, according to an internal email obtained by Gawker, Burson was already trying to recruit companies from the industry featured in the column as clients.

Nolan goes on to remind us that "Penn was canned as Hillary Clinton's campaign strategist after it emerged that his firm was trying to get a contract to do PR work for the nation of Colombia—work that went against Clinton's own political position." It's particularly interesting to recall that scandal as "a story that the WSJ broke," considering how, as Nolan puts it, "moonlighting from his PR career has already screwed a politician," but "now he's screwing a newspaper the same way."

The problem with Rupert Murdoch's proposal to create an online news consortium, in which major publishers would all band together to put their news content behind pay walls (L.A. Times, 8/21/09), is that it's not illegal to discuss news events online.  And you don't want to make it illegal to discuss news events online.

And yet, absent a law forbidding such discussions, there's nothing to stop someone from buying subscriptions to the various pay news sites and starting a website (like this one, but more so) in which they write about what they've learned from them--thus offering for free what the Murdoch's news trust would be trying to get people to pay for.  You can't copyright facts, and any attempt to change the law to allow publishers to do so would run straight into the shoals of the First Amendment and the concept of democracy itself.

Let's say you could keep the "tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet" (as a Murdoch editor memorably calls them) from passing along the news for free.  According to the L.A. Times piece, News Corp points to the Wall Street Journal as a success story with its website's 1 million paying customers, and has encouraged the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co. to follow its lead. Imagine that each of those publishers was as successful, and that the paying readers they attracted did not significantly overlap (both rather unrealistic assumptions, it strikes me)--that would be great news for publishers but something of a disaster for democracy, with the news generated by these leading (and not-so-leading) outlets confined to an elite audience of 5 million--or roughly 1-2 percent of the citizenry.

It's not like we have a particularly well-informed electorate as it is; if Murdoch's plan for an online news cartel is at all successful, though, today's voters may seem like Encyclopedia Brown.

OpEd News has published an open letter from attorney Dana Jill Simpson (8/20/09) to "Mr. Murdoch and all the editors at the Wall Street Journal," in which she expresses her wish to "thank you from the very bottom of my heart for running Karl Rove's delusional article, 'Closing In on Rove,' on August 20, 2009":

The reason I want to thank you is that Mr. Rove has clearly lied about me in this article. You have captured and printed it without even checking to see if it is so or not. The lie he has told is and I quote, "Judiciary Democrats didn't get testimony from either Mr. Siegelman or Dana Jill Simpson, the eccentric Alabama lawyer, who drew attention by publicly supporting the allegations." In case you are unaware, I testified on September 14, 2007, before the House Judiciary Committee lawyers that were selected to question me. I most definitely gave sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Democrats. In fact, I gave over 143 pages of testimony before the Judiciary Democratic and Republican lawyers. It is unfortunate that your paper does not give a rip about the truth or you would have checked out the bold-faced lie that Karl Rove put in his article before you printed it.

The OpEd News mini-bio of Simpson notes that she "has appeared on 60 Minutes and Dan Abrams MSNBC," and that "stories were written in Time magazine, Harper's magazine, and the New York Times about her being a witness in the Don Siegelman case on corruption at the Justice Department."

Still, in closing, Simpson tells the Journal she's actually "happy today to call Mr. Rove a liar and you have provided the cold hard proof. You, Mr. Murdoch, gave me that opportunity. I am thankful that you run a paper that apparently does not check for the truth."

WashingtonMonthly.com blogger Steve Benen (Political Animal, 8/12/09) has words for corporate pundits lambasting Barack Obama's "Attention to Detail" as "going "into the weeds":

A few weeks ago, MSNBC's First Read had an item questioning whether President Obama "knows too much" about healthcare policy. The piece complained that the president is willing to offer Americans details about reform....

The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman raised a similar concern today, arguing that Obama cares too much about policy details....

This, apparently, is criticism, not praise. The president who inherited a devastating economic crisis is interested in U6 numbers--a measure that includes the unemployed, those who are working part-time but want full-time employment, and those who've simply given up--and this, we're told, is somehow evidence of excessive interest in detail.

Benen thinks that too-skeptical-for-the-Washington Post Dan Froomkin "has this just right" when writing that "there are all sorts of legitimate reasons to be concerned about Obama's approach to governing" but "intellectual curiosity is one thing journalists in particular should celebrate, not sneer at."

In Benen's closing thoughts he really "can't help but wonder if" reporters might simply "prefer a more superficial president because they have a more superficial perspective?"

Furthering the story of "Washington Post executives--reeling...over a flier promoting a 'salon' for lobbyists to mingle with prominent newsmakers," Politico reporters Michael Calderone and Andy Barr (7/4/09) think the suits at the Post might reasonably ask "Why us?":

The fact is the Post's clumsy effort to make money on its brand name and market its access to the powerful was a belated effort to follow in the steps of at least two other prominent news organizations: The Wall Street Journal and the Economist magazine.

The Journal, for instance, is charging a $7,500 for its two-day CEO Council in November, an elite gathering that will include the paper's top editors and high-profile speakers like Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. And for a few thousand dollars, the Economist can open the door to intimate off-the-record meet-and-greets with world leaders.

These events illustrate how the basic transaction--charging big fees to special interests to arrange private, special-access encounters with powerful people--that caused the Post this week to be excoriated is a more endemic practice than many people in political and media circles realize. Some watchdogs hope this week's Post scandal will help put an end to a hard-to-defend practice by revenue-hungry news organizations.

The quote from one such watchdog, Pew Project director Tom Rosenstiel, makes it totally clear: "He said, news organizations are 'encouraging the notion in the reader's mind that [they're] part of some insider establishment that it considers more important than public knowledge'"--now where would we ever get that idea?

Posting on Canada's Centre for Research on Globalization website (6/29/09), economic historian Michael Hudson notices that "Happy-face media reporting of economic news is providing the usual upbeat spin on Friday's debt-deflation statistics. The Commerce Department’s National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) for May show that U.S. 'savings' are now absorbing 6.9 percent of income":

I put the word "savings" in quotation marks because this 6.9 percent is not what most people think of as savings. It is not money in the bank to draw out on the "rainy day" when one is laid off as unemployment rates rise. The statistic means that 6.9 percent of national income is being earmarked to pay down debt--the highest saving rate in 15 years, up from actually negative rates (living on borrowed credit) just a few years ago. The only way in which these savings are "money in the bank" is that they are being paid by consumers to their banks and credit card companies.

Explaining how "income paid to reduce debt is not available for spending on goods and services," Hudson says "it therefore shrinks the economy, aggravating the depression"--leading back to his main question: "So why is the jump in 'saving' good news?":

It certainly is a good idea for consumers to get out of debt. But the media are treating this diversion of income as if it were a sign of confidence that the recession may be ending and Mr. Obama's "stimulus" plan working. The Wall Street Journal reported that Social Security recipients of one-time government payments "seem unwilling to spend right away," while The New York Times wrote that "many people were putting that money away instead of spending it."

For more on stimulus misreporting, see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Stimulus Snake Oil: Media Promote Nonsensical GOP Talking Points" (3/09) by Peter Hart.

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib wrote a piece today (5/20/09--subscription required) that offers California as a model for understanding the difficulties in overhauling the healthcare system:

California's experience, in fact, represented a kind of trial run for the healthcare overhaul the president and Congress are about to attempt on the national level, offering useful lessons as well as warning signs about the potholes ahead.

Well, yes and no. Seib writes that the "California example showed the importance of securing at least some bipartisan support, the need to reassure those who have insurance as well as those who don't, and the imperative of showing the public that healthcare costs can be tamed." But there's another layer to this story, one that Seib mostly avoids: the support for a single-payer system in the state.

Seib writes that "California's effort was launched by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in early 2007." That would leave out the nine years of single-payer legislative action prior to that year; in fact, in 2006 the single-payer bill SB 840 passed the state legislature, only to be vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It was reintroduced the following year, and thanks to a massive organizing effort (aided by Michael Moore's film SiCKO) it once again passed the state legislature--and was once again vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It has been reintroduced this year.

Different lessons can be drawn from this experience, of course. But in Seib's version of California history, we get only a glancing mention of this: "Some liberals pushed a government-run health plan." The corporate media (along with various politicians) are determined to keep single-payer "off the table" in the current national debate; Seib seenms to want to erase it from the past, too.

In the wake of the release of the U.S. military's own figures showing a record number of bombs were dropped by U.S. warplanes in Afghanistan during April, newspapers are reporting today on a particularly deadly bombing attack on Monday that killed over 100 civilians, according to Afghan officials and witnesses.

Anonymous U.S. military officials of course vigorously denied that they were responsible, instead blaming the deaths on Taliban grenades. As one anonymous offiical put it in an interview with the Washington Post, "the Taliban went to a concerted effort to make it look like the U.S. airstrikes caused this;" however the Post noted that "The official did not offer evidence to support the claim, and could not say what had caused the deaths."

If the more than 100 dead are confirmed, the New York Times notes, Monday's bombing "will almost certainly be the worst in terms of civilian deaths since the American intervention began in 2001."

Yet the fact of the U.S.-authored civilian deaths themselves is not what the Times found to be the most newsworthy aspect of the story, as expressed by the headline it chose for its front page story about the attack: "Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War"

To the Times,  as well as to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, there is clearly a far more significant cost to this deadly U.S. attack than the reported killing of a hundred Afghans. As the Times remarked, "Civilian deaths — more than 2,000 Afghans were killed last year alone, the United Nations says — have been a decisive factor in souring many Afghans on the war." And, as the Washington Post noted, "The allegations came at a particularly sensitive time for the U.S. military and the Obama administration, which is pushing more than 21,000 additional American troops into the country and shifting strategy."

And the Wall Street Journal's headline took the prize for callousness: "Claim of Afghan Civilian Deaths Clouds U.S. Talks."

One has to wonder about the values of a press where U.S. taxpayer-funded slaughter of civilians elicits journalists' concern not about victims, but about the war's popularity with the population having record numbers of bombs dropped on them and how that might hamper U.S. strategic goals.

Reading Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Fields' "point that a family making slightly over $250,000 doesn’t necessarily feel all that 'rich' when it comes to facing a tax hike from Barack Obama," Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress, 4/17/09) dubs his story "The Not-So-Compelling Plight of the Somewhat Rich" and notes that "what the story doesn't do is put this issue in the appropriate context of what an increase in the marginal rate really implies":

If you raise taxes on "people making over $250,000," that means an increase only in the 250,001st dollar and onward. It's not, in other words, as if a guy earning $249,999 and a guy earning $250,001 will be paying radically different amounts of taxes. In other words, though if you're earning $5 million a year, Obama's plan really will saddle you with a big tax increase, a person who's earning $260,000 and feels that he's facing a basically middle-class economic situation is only going to be facing a very small tax increase. And however much our $260,000 a year guy may feel not so rich, surely he can agree that $260,000 is a lot more than $130,000 or $65,000 so it's hardly absurd that he might pay a slightly higher rate.

After writing that, "even if you grant the premise of the story there's no actual problem here," Yglesias goes on to suggest ideas no career-minded corporate reporter would dare print:

That said, I wouldn't have a problem with launching a new, slightly higher rate, starting at $500,000 and a higher one starting at $1 million and another at $2 million another at $4 million another at $8 million and another at $16 million. I don’t see any reason to think that the progressivity of the scale should max out at $250,000 when obviously there's a huge difference between someone earning that much money and someone earning 10 times that amount.

While big media generally are terrified at the thought of such policies, a Gallup poll from this April 6-9 has 60 percent of respondents considering that "Upper-income people" are "paying too little" federal taxes. (Fully 67 percent said the same of "Corporations.")

For more on corporate media having difficulty with the concept of marginal tax rates, see FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Cheats on Tax Coverage" (9/22/08).

Editorializing in the Wall Street Journal (3/18/09) on how "Financial Journalists Fail Upward," Wrecking Crew author Thomas Frank sees the "world of financial infotainment" as its own "market where accountability does not seem to exist" and in which "the old order discredits itself, but the old order persists nevertheless":

This needs to be repeated every time someone pleads, "Who could have known?" Plenty of people did see the disaster coming. Most of them were marginalized, however, laboring at out-of-the-way econ departments, blogs and B-list think tanks. They were excluded and even ridiculed because their larger understanding of the economy was not one that fit well with the sort of Wall Street worship preached by the likes of CNBC....

The reasons the financial-entertainment biz failed us are many and complex, but they ultimately come down to this: In the marketplace to describe the marketplace itself, there is precious little competition. There is a single, standard product that comes in packaging that is alternately sultry, energetic or fun--bitter, brainy or Cramer "crazy"--but which rarely strays beyond certain ideological boundaries.

At such outlets, "Adversarial voices are few. Criticism is sacrificed for access. Advice sometimes shades over into simple propaganda." For some analysis of the current flavor of just such propaganda, listen to the new edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Earmarks" (3/13/09).

Writing that someone needs to "Tell the WSJ: Workers Can Already Unionize Without a Secret Ballot Election" (Beat the Press, 3/10/09), Dean Baker details how big media still gets this wrong:

Okay, let's see if we can teach the Wall Street Journal something this morning. In an article reporting on the prospects for the Employee Free Choice Act in the Senate, the WSJ told readers that "the bill would allow unions to organize workers without a secret ballot, giving employees the power to organize by simply signing cards agreeing to join."

Wrong! The current law already allows workers to organize by majority sign-up. They can also have a union de-certified by majority sign-up. The difference is that under current law it is the employer's option to accept majority sign-up or to demand an NLRB election. Employers who wish to prevent unionization can demand an election. They can then delay the actual election for several years. They can use time to require workers to attend mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions. They can also fire the key organizers, thereby undermining the organizing drive and intimidating workers.

Summing up that "the main change in the law" is that "under the Employee Free Choice Act is that workers, not employers, would decide the method for union certification," Baker insists "the WSJ should be able to get this one right"--or are these misrepresentations willful? Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (2/09) by Janine Jackson

Writing about the Employee Free Choice Act, Melanie Trottman and Brody Mullins of the Wall Street Journal write (3/10/09):

At least six Senators who have voted to move forward with the so-called card-check proposal, including one Republican, now say they are opposed or not sure--an indication that Senate Democratic leaders are short of the 60 votes they need for approval.

It really is worth being specific on this: It does not take 60 votes to pass an ordinary bill in the Senate; it takes a majority of the senators voting. If everyone is present, it takes 51 votes, or 50 votes if the vice president votes to break the tie. Under the current rules of the Senate--which can be altered by a majority vote--it takes 60 votes to proceed to a vote on a bill when some senators want to continue debate forever, or filibuster.

It has not traditionally been the custom that every bill gets a filibuster and so requires 60 votes in order to pass; plenty of bills in the past have passed the Senate with fewer than 60 votes. In recent years, the filibuster has changed from an occasional gambit to a more routine part of the process. Since  the Democrats took back the Senate after the 2006 elections, it has become almost a matter of course that a bill opposed by most of the minority party will have to overcome a filibuster in order to pass.

But that doesn't mean that a bill needs 60 votes to be approved; it means 41 senators can keep a bill from being voted on.  The distinction is worth making, particularly since the ability of the minority to obstruct is dependent on the willingness of the majority to be obstructed.

The Wall Street Journal has named right-winger Gerard Baker (formerly at the Times of London) its new deputy editor-in-chief. This reaction I find somewhat puzzling:

It would be one thing for Baker to move to the conservative editorial page, but the self-described "right-wing curmudgeon" will have a role overseeing news coverage, a move that surprised some staffers because of his strong, right-wing political views.

Wait a second. You mean to tell me that Rupert Murdoch is going to use one of his media platforms to promote his right-wing politics!?