The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza's curious take on the Mark Halperin affair:

The truth of the Halperin matter is that all reporters (or others) who go on television frequently are forever in a “there but for the grace of God go I” situation.... We know of what we speak, having found ourselves tongue-tied or worse on any number of occasions while staring into a camera. And in an ill-fated 2009 video venture known as “Mouthpiece Theater,” The Fix had to live down an inappropriate reference to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

For those who might be unaware, he's referring to the skit where he and Post colleague Dana Milbank likened Hillary Clinton to a "mad bitch." This was a scripted satirical video; the "bitch" reference came in the form of an image, which would suggest they'd thought about it well in advance. There's something utterly predictable-- and pathetic-- about reporters who react to these scandals by suggesting that if you talk into a microphone often enough you're bound to say something stupid.

The Washington Post reports today on a one day walkout by public sector workers:

The strikes are the first major uprising over the Conservative-led government’s ambitious plans to slash $128 billion in spending over the next four years.

I don't know how one defines "major uprising," but on March 26 hundreds of thousands hit the streets to protest the government's austerity plans.  The Post didn't find them terribly newsworthy when they happened, running a brief item alongside other international news.

The headline in today's Post, previewing Obama's speech tonight:

Obama’s challenge: Leaving, but not too quickly

Funny how it's not the other way around-- leaving too slowly would seem to be a larger political problem, given the state of public opinion.

The Post reports:

President Obama will face a stiff political challenge Wednesday in presenting his plan for a gradual end to the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. His prime-time address must remind a skeptical electorate and a concerned Congress that the country’s longest war remains worth fighting — and funding — for several more years.

Why is it that Obama must "remind" the public that the war is worth fighting--and not convince? You can't really remind people of something they disagree with.

The Washington Post had a report on Sunday (6/19/11) from the left-liberal Netroots Nation conference. Actually, it's a report from two conferences: The Netroots event and a smaller right-wing affair which schedules its conference to coincide with the larger, liberal get-together--for a reason:

RightOnline’s conference is smaller (about 1,200 people to Netroots’ 2,500) and more focused on strategy than policy. RightOnline always makes sure to be in the same city, so the get-together is guaranteed more media attention.

Mission accomplished.

Actual Washington Post headline today (3/11/10):

Rise in Washington Area Unemployment Seen as Good Sign for Economy's Recovery

Reporter V. Dion Hayes tries to explain:

Rising unemployment as a positive sign may sound counterintuitive, but economists explain it this way: The increase suggests that long-term unemployed people in the D.C. area who had given up looking for work have restarted their job hunt, perhaps because they see evidence that the region's economy is improving and that employers are beginning to hire again. On the other hand, the declining national rate indicates that discouraged workers elsewhere have remained out of the labor force because they do not see any reason to look for work.

There are actually other measurements of unemployment put out by the federal government that don't force editors to come up with such ridiculous headlines--and might help readers understand what's going on better. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the number of people who have given up looking for work but want a job ("marginally attached" people), as well as those who are working part time but want to be working full time; those numbers are publicly available, yet journalists rarely use them. (For more on such media malpractices, see Veronica Cassidy's article, "Misleading Indicators," in the January 2009 issue of Extra!.)

Sometimes the words journalists choose are revealing. Take the lead of a story in the Washington Post today (3/9/10) about congressional debate on the Afghanistan War:

Liberals in the House, who have spent much of the past year complaining that other congressional Democrats and the White House are insufficiently progressive, will get a chance this week to vent about one of their biggest concerns: the war in Afghanistan.

To say that lawmakers are "venting" is a short way of saying that they're wasting time with pointless complaining.

And what are they whining about, anyway? Nothing special--just whether or not the war complies with the law.

The resolution will invoke the 1973 War Powers Act, which Congress passed in protest of the escalation of the Vietnam War by a series of presidents without formal congressional authorization. It requires congressional approval for a president to put troops in a military conflict for more than 90 days. Congress passed a resolution authorizing military force in Afghanistan in 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, and some congressional scholars doubt Congress can invoke the act now to force changes to President Obama's war policy.

As Robert Naiman wrote: "The Pentagon doesn't want Congress to debate Afghanistan. The Pentagon wants Congress to fork over $33 billion more to pay for the current military escalation, no questions asked, no restrictions imposed for a withdrawal timetable or an exit strategy."

The media don't seem to want to have a debate over Afghanistan either.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has always been a controversial figure--famously profane and short-tempered, and politically speaking a center-right Clinton Democrat. As of late, though, there's been a strange effort--particularly in the Washington Post--to present Emanuel as the confidant whose political advice Barack Obama has too often ignored and who offers a clear path to political rehabilitation. This only makes sense in a Beltway media that views Obama as too far to the left, and in need of Emanuel's pragmatic centrism to pull him back to the middle.

This campaign was kicked off by a February 21 Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post, headlined "Why Obama Needs Rahm at the Top." Milbank wrote: "Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter." What advice would that be? Milbank says:

For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig's effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn't politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn't met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

As Matthew Yglesias has noted, the odd thing about this argument is the fact that Obama's foreign policies--whatever you might think of them--are generally more popular than Obama's domestic efforts. So why should we think that not taking Emanuel's advice on security issues is the cause of Obama's political woes?

Milbank also writes that Emanuel was against the public option in the healthcare bill, but Obama listened to "Capitol Hill liberals," with disastrous results. Again, the public option remains relatively popular with the public--despite consistent demonization from the right--so it's not clear why one would think Obama would have fared better without it.

Milbank noted that Emanuel "has set up his own small press operation and outreach function"--leading to some speculation that Emanuel is either directly or indirectly the originator of this if-only-he'd-listened-to-Rahm storyline (Huffington Post, 2/21/10).

And the story lives on in today's front-page Post article (3/2/10), "Hotheaded Emanuel May Be White House Voice of Reason." According to the piece, despite Emanuel's reputation for being loud and obnoxious, "a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: healthcare reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts."

Yes, that "narrative" is "emerging"--in the Washington Post. And it's being seconded by the likes of right-wing columnist Jonah Golberg. Debates are raging about who fed the story to Milbank, but that misses the real point: The press always counsel Democrats to move to the right.

In a February 28 piece headlined, "Obama Ready to Move Forward on Healthcare Reform," the Washington Post's Anne Kornblut closed on a rather odd note:

Republicans have expressed growing confidence heading into the midterm elections, with healthcare as a potential campaign tool. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele took the argument a step further, saying after the Thursday summit that it had been "a death panel for Obama-care."

"If that wasn't enough, when you come out of this thing and you're looking at the reconciliation fight that may loom ahead of us, it certainly will have represented a death panel for the Democrats this fall," Steele said on CNN.

Death panels became part of the debate last summer, after prominent Republicans, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, claimed the government would set them up to decide who could live or die.

Is the assumption here that everyone knows that there were never any death panels in any healthcare bill? When the leader of a major party is still making references to them, it deserves some sort of corrective from a journalist.  The Post reminds readers where the lie came from--but not that it's a lie.

This Washington Post headline (2/13/10) caught my eye:

2008 Habeas Ruling May Pose Snag as U.S. Weighs Indefinite Guantanamo Detentions

You have to read the piece somewhat closely to understand what they're taking about. The terrorism case against one Guantanamo detainee was "ironclad" until a federal judge deemed it "too weak"--because some of the statements against the defendant had been "coerced." This has happened repeatedly--judges "'have gutted allegations and questioned the reliability of statements by the prisoners during interrogations and by the informants." This is bad news, we're told; "the government is likely to suffer further losses" in court.

You have to read almost to the end of the piece before you get a more direct view of things:

The government also relied on Hatim's interrogations and his testimony at military hearings, during which he is said to have admitted to training at an Al-Qaeda military camp. Judges have been skeptical of such statements unless the government provides evidence that the men were not seriously mistreated. In Hatim's case, the Justice Department did not dispute his contention that he was tortured in U.S. custody and that he made those admissions to avoid further mistreatment.

The government is trying to justify holding prisoners indefinitely based on evidence gleaned from torture. That is the "snag" referenced in the headline.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank thinks it's pretty silly for Republicans and climate change deniers to say that the recent snowstorms mean that climate change is phony.

BUT.... don't think for a second that Milbank's going to let "greens" off the hook that easy. No way. As he put it on Sunday (2/14/10): "There's some rough justice in the conservatives' cheap shots. In Washington's blizzards, the greens were hoist by their own petard."

How so?  Climate activists "have argued by anecdote to make their case," especially Al Gore, who has warned of  a whole menu of negative consequences from climate change. Milbank writes: "It's not that Gore is wrong about these things. The problem is that his storm stories have conditioned people to expect an endless worldwide heatwave, when in fact the changes so far are subtle."

Milbank has more:

Scientific arguments, too, are problematic. In a conference call arranged Thursday by the liberal Center for American Progress to refute the snow antics of Inhofe et al., the center's Joe Romm made the well-worn statements that "the overwhelming weight of the scientific literature" points to human-caused warming and that doubters "don't understand the science."

The science is overwhelming--but not definitive. Romm's claim was inadvertently shot down by his partner on the call, the Weather Underground's Jeff Masters, who confessed that "there's a huge amount of natural variability in the climate system" and not enough years of measurements to know exactly what's going on. "Unfortunately we don't have that data so we are forced to make decisions based on inadequate data."

Aside from lamenting Romm's comments for being so "well-worn," did Jeff Masters really "shoot down" climate analyst Romm? That's not what Masters says happened; he has a response on his site, where he writes, "I agree with Dr. Romm's statement." Milbank's storyline--both sides are exaggerating--is a familiar one, but it's also entirely misleading. As is his drive-by summary of the whole "Climategate" scandal:

The scientific case has been further undermined by high-profile screw-ups. First there were the hacked e-mails of a British research center that suggested the scientists were stacking the deck to overstate the threat. Now comes word of numerous errors in a 2007 report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear in 25 years.

There is no credible evidence that climate scientists were "stacking the deck." It is hard to figure out what he means by "numerous" errors in the 2007 report; there are two prominent allegations, including the aforementioned glaciers error. The New York Times determined that the complaints have amounted to "half-truths." Milbank's assertion, then, that the "scientific case has been further undermined" is specious. But the point of climate change denial is to manufacture a political scandal--which is what journalism like this does well.

The Washington Post's Eli Saslow (2/3/10) on Obama:

He is a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it.

It's true that very few presidents come from the middle class--except for Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding and Woodrow Wilson, it's hard to think of a single example from the last hundred years.

Yesterday's Washington Post (12/16/09) reports that the public isn't sold on healthcare reform. As the headline puts it:

Public Cooling to Healthcare Reform as Debate Drags On, Poll Finds

The story by Dan Balz and Jon Cohen explains that "there is minimal public enthusiasm for the kind of comprehensive changes in healthcare now under consideration." Now, how "comprehensive" the reforms under consideration are is certainly debatable, but these conclusions seem to be drawn from questions about costs and Barack Obama's handling of the issue.

But the Post did ask other, more interesting questions--and then buried the results. Deep into the article we learn that "more than six in 10 favor expanding Medicare to people ages 55 to 64 who lack insurance--a proposal included in one Senate compromise effort that appears unlikely to survive final negotiations." In the next graph, readers are told:

On the issue of whether and how to expand coverage to those who do not have it, 36 percent favor a government plan to compete with private insurers, 30 percent prefer private plans coordinated by the government and 30 percent want the system to remain intact.

As with the so-called Medicare "buy-in," this finding of strong support for a public option suggests that the public is much more supportive of fundamental health care changes than the Congress or White House. In other words, the public isn't really "cooling" to health care reform;  they want more than the politicians are likely to deliver.

The Israeli government's near-total blockade of the Gaza Strip has been roundly criticized by international human rights groups as a harsh form of collective punishment. Some U.N. investigations have labeled it much worse--that Israel's actions amount to crimes against humanity.

Back in medialand, the Washington Post's Howard Schneider has a story today (12/15/09) comparing life in Gaza with the West Bank. While the latter is still under Israeli occupation, its economy is (predictably enough) much stronger, and its standard of living relatively higher. This is a somewhat familiar theme in the press--noting that while Hamas' rule in Gaza is a disaster, the West Bank's more moderate political leadership is getting results. (Tom Friedman wrote two columns about this in August.)

The Post 's examination offers only glancing mentions of the Israeli blockade. The piece employs unusually soft language in the fifth paragraph in describing "Israeli policies that restrict travel into and out of the Gaza Strip and limit its economic growth in a bid to undercut support for the area's ruling Islamist Hamas movement." Near the end of the article, we read that "Israel's rules have choked off the economy in Gaza, increasing poverty and despair among its 1.5 million people." Somewhat better, but buried.

If one is going to compare Gaza to the West Bank- or to anywhere else, for that matter--one would have to point out the punishing effects of this blockade. And if one were to do that, you might want to come up with a word other than "rules" to describe what some see as potential crimes.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (12/6/09) thinks there's something wrong with left-wing critics of Barack Obama. As his lead put it:

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.

 Milbank starts with Michael Moore, who wrote an open letter urging Obama not to escalate the Afghanistan war. This makes no sense to Milbank, since Obama never said he'd withdraw troops. Well, yes. I suspect many of Obama's critics--maybe even Michael Moore--are aware of that.  Moore also supports single-payer healthcare, and wishes Obama would too. Does that mean that continuing that advocacy with Obama in the White House is a waste of time? Or is the idea that no one should ever advocate for any political cause that upsets the power structure?

Maybe that'd be OK with Dana Milbank. As he put it,  Obama is an "incrementalist....  His Afghanistan policy, likewise, is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy." Opposing that policy, then, is ideological and anti-pragmatic.

Milbank closes with this:

You'd think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they're using words such as "O'Bomber" to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy "puts into question his whole leadership."

Moveon's petition is not  "against the policy"--their petition, if anything, supports it, since it only calls on Congress "to push the Obama administration to outline firm benchmarks and a binding timeline."

Code Pink is against the war; the fact that they're still against is a sign of their consistency.  Milbank might see the process by which Obama decided to escalate the war "thoughtful," but if resulting policy is one you oppose, you continue to oppose it. 

Arianna Huffington, likewise, is saying she opposes Obama's decision, based on a variety of factors. Milbank's point, at face value, is that these people should have all been clear-eyed about Obama's position. That's obviously true--and some of them were. But one gets the sense that his real point is that those to the left of Obama should just leave him alone.

Washington Times, the paper of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, has announced it will be going to free distribution and laying off at least 40 percent of its staff. Which positions won't make the cut? Well, one that's been mentioned is that of editor.

That's right; former editor John Solomon resigned last month after less than a year at the Times, and the company's new president and publisher, Jonathan Slevin, told the Washington Post that "there is no search for a Solomon successor and that his job may not be filled under a reorganization." Who, exactly, will be in charge of news content in the absence of an editor is unclear.

Over at the Dallas Morning News, meanwhile, who will be in charge of news content was made painfully clear to several section editors on Wednesday: the sales department. In a memo to staff at the News and A.H. Belo's other papers, editor Bob Mong and senior vice president of sales Cyndy Carr told editors of departments ranging from sports and entertainment to health and education that they would be reporting to sales managers instead of the editor, as part of the paper's "bold new strategies" of "business/news integration."

As Robert Wilonsky of the Dallas Observer commented (Unfair Park, 12/3/09), "In short, those who sell ads for A.H. Belo's products will now dictate content within A.H. Belo's products, which is a radical departure from the way newspapers have been run since, oh, forever."

It's not entirely radical, given that the vaunted wall between the news and business ends of newspapers have been steadily eroding over the years. (See Extra!'s annual Fear & Favor reports.) But at a certain point, it seems like you have to stop calling yourself a news outlet and admit you're just an advertising supplement.