The day after George W. Bush nominated John Bolton as the new American envoy to the United Nations, the headline in the New York Times (3/8/05) was “Bush Nominates Weapons Expert as Envoy to U.N.” But calling him an “expert” might need a little explanation--and the Times should know this as well as anyone.

In September 2003, Bolton was set to testify before Congress about various weapons threats around the world. The Times' Judith Miller wrote a story in advance (9/16/03), noting that Bolton was worried about Syria's chemical weapons systems, and claiming that Bolton's take was backed up by the CIA. But that's not true: According to the Times’ own reporting from a few months earlier (7/18/03), “the CIA and other agencies raised strong objections” to Bolton’s planned testimony, believing he was exaggerating the Syrian threat.

In 2002, moreover, the Times (5/14/02) reported that Bolton made unsubstantiated claims about a bioweapons program in Cuba. But the paper’s coverage of Bolton when he was picked for the U.N. post ignored this history, focusing instead on his "blunt-spoken" anti-U.N. comments over the years. Bolton's problem isn't that he's too honest, it's that he's got a record of inaccuracy and exaggeration—and it's too bad the New York Times couldn't be more blunt-spoken about it.

CBS Evening News has presented two segments in recent weeks (2/9/05, 3/4/05) that purport to show how typical American workers would fare under George W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. But the segments rely on stock market projections that, if true, would make any "crisis" in Social Security almost impossible.

CBS reporter Jim Axelrod first profiled (2/9/05) Jama Whitesell, a 28-year-old receptionist making $32,000 a year. Axelrod went to a financial planner who predicted that a private account would be a safe bet for this worker--based on a projected 8 percent return on the private account. Why did CBS choose this figure? Axelrod claimed that is "an assumption based on how the market's done the last 80 years," though he did add that "in the next 40, Jama could do worse. Of course, she could do better."

Axelrod returned to this theme more recently (3/4/05), profiling a 48-year-old worker earning $98,000 a year who would also benefit from a private account--again, relying on an 8 percent return on his private account. Axelrod again pointed out that "nothing's guaranteed, certainly not an 8 percent return." (Interestingly, an earlier CBS Evening News report--2/5/05--estimated a 9 percent return on a private account).

It's true that stock prices in the past have fluctuated markedly; looking at 35-year spans, which is the length of a typical working life, stock returns over the past 100 years have fluctuated between 3 and 10 percent (Center for American Progress, 2/10/05). Including a range of results would give viewers a better sense of the range of potential outcomes.

When Dan Rather stepped down from the CBS Evening News this week, right-wing media critics ought to have been among those most sorry to see him go. Rather has long served as their "liberal media" bogeyman, personifying the nightly news' supposed tendency to skewer Republicans and coddle Democrats. But given the central role Rather plays in the conservative critique of the media, the evidence for his alleged liberalism is remarkably flimsy.

If Rather's unguarded comments over the years indicate any kind of bias, it's a fondness for power and an unwavering support for American military action. During the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Rather professed support for illegal attacks on that country's electrical supply (at a National Press Club appearance, 6/25/99): "When U.S. pilots in U.S. aircraft turn off the lights, for me, it's 'we.' And about that I have no apology." Rather has made similar comments about the Iraq war, acknowledging (CNN’s Larry King Live, 4/14/03) that his reporting would reflect his view that "when my country is at war, I want my country to win."

But perhaps more distressing was Rather's explanation of the near-absence of media skepticism prior to the Iraq invasion (at a Harvard University forum on the media, 7/25/04): "Look, when a president of the United States, any president, Republican or Democrat, says these are the facts, there is heavy prejudice, including my own, to give him the benefit of any doubt, and for that I do not apologize."

George W. Bush's February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But little attention was paid to Negroponte's role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.

From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, a country that served as the main staging ground for the CIA-created and -backed Contra armies, who attacked civilians in a terrorist campaign against Nicaragua. Negroponte was a key player in organizing training for the Contras and procuring weapons for the U.S. effort to topple the socialist Nicaraguan government (Extra!, 9-10/01).

Negroponte's ambassadorship was marked by another human rights scandal: the Honduran army's Battalion 316, which operated as a death squad that tortured, killed or disappeared "subversive" Hondurans--and at least one U.S. citizen, Catholic priest James Carney. Despite regular coverage of such crimes in the Honduran press, the human rights reports sent by Negroponte's embassy consistently failed to raise these issues. Critics contend that this was no accident: If such crimes had been acknowledged, U.S. aid to the country's military would have come under scrutiny, which could have jeopardized the Contra operations.

Curiouser and Curiouser

"Once one side of an ideological conflict has seized control of a word, it no longer has a meaning of its own; opting for one or the other would be a declaration that doesn't belong in the news reports."
--New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent (3/6/05), explaining why the Times should use "private" and "personal" interchangeably in the Social Security debate

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'"
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Centrist Fantasies

Making the tired argument that if the press is attacked by both left and right, it must be doing a pretty good job, Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank (3/20/05) points to a study suggesting that Fox News viewers are particularly misinformed about the Iraq War (PIPA, 10/2/03), then asserts that the left has similar "fantasies that they consider fact"--such as the notion that "Bush...was coached during one of the presidential debates via a transmitter between his shoulder blades." Apparently all those who thought they saw a device clearly visible under Bush's jacket on the cover of the January/February issue of Extra! were suffering from a mass hallucination.

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