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.

In citing how Talking Points Memo creator Josh Marshall "has talked many times about the ways in which the Washington establishment is 'wired for the GOP,'" Steve Benen (Political Animal, 9/13/09) notes that "the Washington Post offers a helpful example today"--as posted on Media Matters: "Behold the media's glaring double standard. Today, the Post puts the 'tens of thousands' of Obama-hating tea bagger protesters on A1; makes it the lead story as a matter of fact."

Compare and contrast.

And just so there's no doubt in people's mind, the blanket coverage the mini-mobs are lapping up (i.e., the mobs are hugely important!) stands in stark contrast to the way the press often did its best to ignore liberal protesters who spoke out against the war in Iraq.

For instance, in October 2002, when more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., to oppose the war, the Washington Post put the story not on the front page, but in the Metro section with, as the paper's ombudsman later lamented, "a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest's fringe elements."

Not that crowd size is the be-all, end-all of an event's significance, but it's worth remembering that no credible count of yesterday's right-wing protest puts it in the 100,000 range. (And the anti-war protesters didn't have the advantage of a highly-rated cable network promoting their event every day for months.)...

But I still think it gets back to the fact that D.C. is just "wired" for Republicans. Anti-war protesters, the thinking goes, were liberal hippies out of step with the mainstream. After all, there was a Republican president and Republican House in 2002, and polls showed reasonably strong support for the war in Iraq. Why pretend the liberal protesters are important?

In contrast, seven years later, Tea Baggers have to be considered a major political movement. There's a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress in 2009, and polls show reasonably strong support for the administration's economic agenda, but the right-wing cries can't be relegated to a few throw-away paragraphs in the Metro section.

Benen further quotes Barack Obama's 60 Minutes statement that "in the era of 24-hour cable news cycles, the loudest shrillest voices get the attention," but explains "that's only partially true--it depends on what the shrill voices are saying and from what perspective." See the FAIR Action Alert: "Fox Hunting Trumps Peace Activism at Washington Post & NYT" (9/30/02).

The Washington Post had another "Topic A" feature on August 31, headlined "Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?" A crucial debate, to be sure; the Post found one person (Andrew Bacevich) to argue that it is not, which is probably a position close to the majority view of the American public. That position is "balanced" by four contributors who argue the war is worth fighting, in different ways or for different reasons. This imbalance echoes the Post's previous presentation of the Afghanistan debate, showing once again that the paper seems to believe that a public that increasingly sees the war as a lost cause needs to be talked out of that position.

It's worth noting that conservative Post columnist George Will has written today against escalating the war (9/1/09)-- under the headline "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." While Will calls the idea of a long occupation with increased troop levels "inconceivable," it's worth noting what he's actually for:

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

More bombing, drones and cruise missiles. That's the Post's peacenik.

"Robert Samuelson Doesn't Like Trains" is what Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/24/09) takes to be "the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high-speed rail do not make a lot of sense."

In his August 24 broadside against what he dubs Barack Obama's "Rail Boondoggle," Samuelson trots out the tired argument against "almost $35 billion in subsidies into Amtrak" that "the federal government has poured" in the last four decades--with the usual corporate pundit omissions, like the fact that, as long ago as 1994 it was determined that "hidden subsidies for drivers amount to well over $2 for every gallon of gasoline sold."

Beyond that, "Samuelson tries to tell us that trains might be useful in Japan and Europe, but they won't work in the United States":

He tells readers that:

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it's 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile.

The density for the United States as a whole would be relevant if the plans were to build a train network going from Florida to Alaska, but that is not what is on the agenda. Instead, the issue is about deepening and improving the network in relatively densely populated parts of the country, like Ohio (277 people per square mile), New York (402) and New Jersey (1,134). The population densities of much of the United States are very comparable to the regions in Europe through which high-speed rails travel.

Baker then tells how "Samuelson also bizarrely compares long-distance train with the 140 million daily trips to work each day," even though "most people do not travel between cities every day, so it's not clear what the point of the comparison is."

Recapping, Baker writes that "Robert Samuelson doesn't like trains. He told us that this morning in his column." However, "he didn't tell us anything else."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Railroading of Amtrak: Trains, Planes and Automobiles Held to Different Standards" (7–8/02) by Christopher Ott.

Longtime friend of FAIR Sam Husseini (Husseini.org, 8/21/09) has a new blog post responding to Robert Kuttner's recent Washington Post column, in which the American Prospect magazine editor "asks 'Where are the liberal protesters?'":

It seems like a good question. Until one considers the source of the complaint--and that rather helps answer the question.

Maybe the "liberal protests" are where the American Prospect's cover story of the "Baucus 13" is.Or the where the American Prospect's lengthy piece on Linda Allision's exchange with Obama is.

Since clicking on the above links yields absolutely zero results in the American Prospect coverage, Husseini urges you to "read up on the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison's questioning of Obama" while asking, "If 'liberal' mags like the American Prospect were serious about reform, wouldn't they have relentlessly plugged the 'Baucus 13' and Linda Allison?"

Columnist Rick Perlstein has a new analysis of "Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage" in the Washington Post (8/16/09).

In it, he tells why "liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage,"

and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. ... Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justifiable political claim.

"If 1963 were 2009," Perlstein asserts, "the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself." And "that, not the paranoia itself," according to Perlstein, "makes our present moment uniquely disturbing."

The big news in the health reform debate is that the White House seems to be willing to give up on the "public option," a government insurance program that would compete with private insurers. Everyone sees this as a big story, but there's something revealing about the way the Washington Post's Ceci Conolly led her piece:

Racing to regain control of the health-care debate, two top administration officials signaled Sunday that the White House may be willing to jettison a controversial government-run insurance plan favored by liberals.

In Beltay mediaspeak, "regain control" must mean doing something that right-wing Democrats and Republicans want. The Post's Dan Balz already made this recommendation about the public option, writing on August 12, "Some of his staunchest allies believe that course would be prudent and might change the dynamic of the debate in the administration's favor." And on the roundtable segment on ABC's This Week on August 9, host George Stephanopoulos wondered if Obama would accept a watered-down bill in order to break with the "Howard Dean wing of the party." This notion was seconded by panelist Cokie Roberts, with right-wing columnist Peggy Noonan chiming in to say, "Maybe it would be good for the President if the left got absolutely furious about something."

So the health reform debate has shifted even further to the right--exactly where the corporate media wanted it.

The escalation of the Afghanistan war is the "Topic A" discussion on the Washington Post op-ed page on Sunday (it's a regular feature where they ask a panel of Important People to weigh in on an issue of the day).

The title was "How Many Troops for Afghanistan?"--one can already spot the problem with that--but the panel they assembled left  a lot to be desired. On the one hand, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (a strong critic of escalation) was given space to make his argument. But his presenced was 'balanced' by four others, three of whom are definitely pro-escalation (they quibble over the details, perhaps) and one pollster who addressed the public opinion problems--i.e., the Afghanistan war isn't popular.

So besides Kucinich, the Post gave readers former Bush and Reagan aide Ed Rogers (escalation "is necessary to avoid the political and security debacle that would arise from an American failure there"), Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center ("The public opinion climate for sending more troops is difficult--but not impossible"), Harvard professor--and former special assistant to George W. Bush--Meghan Sullivan (Obama "should reject three arguments currently made against accepting a recommendation for more troops"), and Georgetown professor Andrew Natsios (stability in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan "can not be achieved without substantially more U.S. and allied troops conducting a classic counterinsurgency campaign to take and hold territory and protect the civilian population.")

Some debate.

Women In Media & News has reposted Veronica Arreola's (8/15/09) elucidation of exactly "why women need to be at the freaking table, in the newsroom and holding the editor’s red pen." To her, "it's just as simple as women see things differently. Not better, not worse, just differently":

The latest example is the WaPo "Mouthpiece Theater" fiasco that ended with WaPo pulling the plug. Two men thought that calling the secretary of State a "bitch" was funny. Not only was it not funny, and not because the joke flopped, but it's old and tired. Seriously, guys, can’t you come up with something new? So some of us angry feminists wrote a letter demanding an apology. And gosh darn it, it freaking worked! OK, we didn't get two full apologies, but hey, no more crappy videos from WaPo…for now....

Of course, we can't be sure that if a random woman at WaPo had screened the video beforehand, [she] would have said, "Dude…we can't air that." Why? Because some women, I used to be one of them, know that there is power in being "one of the guys." You are constantly proving that you need to be where you are and you choose your battles. Is sticking up for Hillary Clinton worth it? Maybe? Maybe not.

"But," Arreola maintains, "women have different perspectives on things. We know that. And as I said before, it's different, not better, not worse."

Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/9/09) sees the Washington Post as simply "keeping with its strict editorial policy of only letting others tell readers what 'populists' think," when publishing its August 9 "front-page article on setting executive compensation at banks receiving bailout money"--one which "never presented the views of an actual populist."

Instead, Baker writes "readers got to see the comment of Robert Profusek, a lawyer at Jones Day who is identified as having advised major banks on compensation matters," and Linda Rappaport, "head of the executive compensation practice at the firm Shearman & Sterling"--both of whom unsurprisingly argue for maintaining high executive pay in order to attract "talent" that will "make the money for the shareholders."

Baker voices the unspoken aspects of this assertion:

If the Post had solicited the views of a populist, or an economist, they might have told readers that much of what the banks earn comes directly at the expense of consumers and businesses....
The public has no obvious interest in subsidizing traders to speculate in financial markets. If the speculators win, then the loans that Goldman and the others receive will be repaid, but this repayment will only be a portion of the higher prices paid by consumers and lower profits earned by producers as a result of Goldman's speculation.

And, "moving beyond the world of speculation," Baker doubts that "if most of these individuals were replaced by the person next in line...the bank's profits would suffer in any big way." Which means that "these high salaries are just a drain on the bank, its shareholders and the taxpayers. But you won't see this argument presented in the Post."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Robert Johnson on AIG Bonuses" (3/20/09).

Guest Women In Media & News blogger Adele M. Stan (8/5/09) has some more to say about the WashingtonPost.com's "now-infamous 'Mad Bitch' video":

Last Friday, Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler shone a light on a video produced by the Washington Post that featured one of the two columnists hosting the piece suggesting that, at a future White House beer summit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be given a brew called "Mad Bitch." Then all hell broke loose.

The Post apparently thought it could fix the problem by simply pulling the video. A note was posted above the hole where the video used to be, reading that the piece had been removed because it contained material that was "inappropriate" for the Post website. As if it had landed there from Mars. As if it hadn't been written and produced in the Washington Post building by Washington Post staffers.

Then, yesterday, the two columnists, Chris Cillizza and Dana Milbank, had the effrontery to post what amounts to a "screw-you" response video to the criticism they had received from bloggers.

Stan reports that, in the fallout, "the series has been canceled," but "Milbank remains pretty unrepentant, instead whining about the drubbing he took at the hands of blogosphere denizens."

Even after receiving a critical letter signed by Stan, Jennifer Pozman, Katha Pollitt and many others, Post executive editor Marcus "Brauchli, for his part, did not exactly apologize," and "it does not appear that there will be any disciplinary action."

Howard Kurtz recently offered fellow Washington Post reporters Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza a chance to apologize for having, in an online Post feature, "implied Hillary Clinton was a 'bitch.'"

But American Prospect's Tapped blogger Adam Serwer (8/5/09) has a question regarding Milbank's aside that "it's a brutal world out there in the blogosphere.... I'm often surprised by the ferocity out there, but I probably shouldn't be":

What's the sound of a million hands facepalming? No one who goes around using obscenities to describe other reporters and administration officials should be complaining about the "ferocity" of blogs--if Milbank is bothered by it, he might start by admitting his own complicity in creating that kind of discourse.

Serwer's reiteration that "Milbank's unique place in the journalism world entails him making fun of people for a living" yields a simple maxim: "If you can't take it, don't dish it."

Today's Washington Post offers a helpful lesson on the media's notion of centrism; see the headline and subhead:

Senators Closer to Health Package: Bipartisan Talks on Reform Move Toward Center

The "talks" refer to the plan coming out of the Senate Finance Committee--a plan that "seeks middle ground" and could provide media-friendly " bipartisan agreement."  One of the principle features of this "centrist" plan would be scuttling the "public option" favored by many Democrats-- and, coincidentally, supported by a majority of the public. Apparently it is "centrist" and "middle ground" to discard popular policy proposals. It makes sense in the corporate media, somehow.

Quipping that "usually newspapers are big defenders of free speech, but not the Washington Post," economic reporting critic Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/2/09) takes down the paper's recent piece giving over "nearly 2,000 words to complain that a website had ripped off" one reporter's story.

Careful to say that "the problem was not that the website had plagiarized the piece"--indeed, the "story was credited and even linked to by the website, which was a major source of readers for the original article"--Baker tells us that the Post "is upset that the website may have made money off his work, because it sells ads based on viewership."

The Post "wants 'news organizations' to have the right to sue others that use their work without permission and profit from it"--even though, as Baker writes, "if people opt to read the piece on another website rather than the Post, then there must be some reason. Obviously they prefer something about this alternative venue":

If the protectionist measure advocated in this piece succeeded in shutting down the competition, then there would be a clear loss to readers. This loss would likely dwarf the loss to consumers that the Post routinely whines about so loudly when anyone suggests a tariff on imports or any other barrier to trade. After all, those forms of protection rarely add more than 10–15 percent to the price of a product. In this case, the Post's proposal may make the product unavailable altogether. Yet again, we see that protectionism is just fine with "free traders." The only issue is who is being protected.

Finally, let's consider what the enforcement of the Post's measure looks like. First, who is a "news organization?" Is this a title that one registers for with the government? Does the Post get the title but not its website competitors? I suppose those big bucks dinners with lobbyists and policymakers really are worth something.

As a practical matter, it would be an incredible affront to the First Amendment if the Post and other major newspapers and established news outlets were given any special ability to sue under such an act, compared to websites, or for that matter think tanks.

Going with his usual inclination to "think this one through for a moment," Baker finds the whole argument somewhat moot, considering how the paper's reporter "does not even know that he was harmed by the website piece." In fact, "it is entirely possible that more people viewed his piece on the Post's site as a result of the version appearing on the website."

Read lots of related content in the special Future of Journalism issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Did Google Kill the Newspaper Star?" (7/09) by Peter Hart.

Presenting yet another example of corporate media failure to grasp the concept of "Adjusted for Inflation," Kevin Drum (MotherJones.com, 7/26/09) has written up a Washington Post piece in which "David Brown says that as treatment for heart attacks has gotten better, it's also gotten more expensive":

"Over the same period, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $5,700 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007 (without adjusting for inflation)."

I continue not to understand why anyone would write this. Why not this instead?

"Over the same period, adjusted for inflation, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $20,000 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007."

Technically, Brown's wording is correct. But it's not helpful, since most people don't have even a vague notion of how much cumulative inflation there's been since 1977. The revised wording, however, is helpful: It gives people a correct impression of how much more we spend treating heart attacks these days. Namely, two to three times as much as 30 years ago.

And Drum maintains "this wasn't just a slip of the keyboard. Brown and his editor obviously made a deliberate decision to use nominal figures even though this doesn't give the average reader a very good idea of how much costs have actually risen."