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.

Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz (5/3/09) seemed startled when the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza argued that "just because Bush or some previous president didn't garner as much coverage as Michelle and Barack Obama did doesn't tell you anything about press bias one way or another."

"Are you kidding?" Kurtz exclaimed.

He didn't express any similar surprise when CNN in-house conservative Amy Holmes came up with this "little-known fact":

The Washington Times reported this last week.... Actually, at this point in his presidency, Barack Obama is the fourth least popular of the past five presidents. You wouldn't know that from the press coverage, and you wouldn't know that George Bush...at this point in his presidency, in 2001, after having had the recount, not even winning the popular vote, in fact had higher Gallup approvals than Barack Obama does right now.

Well, no, you wouldn't know those things, because they aren't true. At the 100-day mark, Gallup found a job approval rating for Obama of 65 percent--three percentage points higher than the 62 percent that George W. Bush had at the same point in his first term. Gallup's polling found that Obama had a higher 100th-day approval rating than Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon as well. Of the last seven presidents, only Ronald Reagan, at 68 percent, had a higher job-approval rating--and Reagan, as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert pointed out (4/29/09), had just survived an assassination attempt in March 2001.

So how could the Washington Times have gotten it so wrong? A commenter on Media Matters' website traced this right-wing talking point back to a blog post by Judith Apter Klinghoffer on the History News Network (3/24/09). Klinghoffer declared that "Obama's Poll Numbers Trail Those of W."--a conclusion she reached by comparing Bush's job-approval rating to a number she calculated by combining the ratings of "excellent" and "good" received by Obama when people were asked what kind of job they thought he was doing.

Needless to say, you can't directly compare the answers to two different polling questions--particularly not when you can compare the results of the same question being asked. But the apples-to-oranges comparison produced results that were appealing to the right, so you soon saw James Pinkerton citing this bogus finding on Fox News Channel (4/25/09): "Judith Klinghoffer, writing for the History News Network, made the point that Obama ranked seventh out of the last nine presidents in Gallup poll opinion ratings. So seventh out of nine is not so good." Three days later, the Washington Times was making the same argument--and then it ends up on the not-so-well-named Reliable Sources.

Kurtz did take issue, sort of, with Holmes' claim, which ran counter to a wealth of polling data on Obama's approval ratings: "Although his numbers, we have to say, are pretty good." But when Holmes retorted: "They're pretty good, but comparatively. You're asking comparatively, how does the press treat these politicians different, and they do," Kurtz conceded: "OK. Fair enough."

Actually, that doesn't seem very fair at all.

Anthony DiMaggio finds (ZNet, 10/19/08) "the massive attention surrounding ACORN" as much evidence of "media racism as it is their class prejudice":

In danger of losing its eight year hold on the Presidency, the Republican Party has become increasingly desperate in its attacks on poor and minority groups, who have registered in increasingly large numbers this election year. The attacks on ACORN must be understood within the context of this enfranchisement of dispossessed groups....

Media discussions of ACORN have predictably followed the talking points issued by Republican Party leaders to Fox News and right-wing radio.... The uniformity of conservative attacks on ACORN has been rather impressive, although hardly intellectual or informative. The editors at the Washington Times lambasted ACORN for being "either co-opted by an outside group bent on committing massive voter fraud to rig this election."... Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer draws attention to "Barack Obama's long-standing relationship with the left-wing vote-fraud specialist ACORN."... Radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager and Michael Medved and Fox News commentators such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have relentlessly emphasized the ACORN issue in their programs.

Aside from the fact that "there's only one problem with this narrative--none of it's true," DiMaggio is impressed that "the right-wing foot soldiers in the media, who couldn't have cared less what ACORN was doing months ago let alone describe what the acronym stood for, have now become independent experts on the organization's negligence and duplicity in destroying democracy."

Listen to FAIR's latest radio show CounterSpin: Lori Minnite on ACORN and Vote Fraud (10/17/08)