Why So Few Major Takeouts From The Big News Orgs On Detained AP Photog Bilal Hussein?
(December 21, 2007 -- 1:12 PM EDT // link // )

Over at Romenesko we find that Editor and Publisher's Joe Strupp has compiled a list of his top ten picks for best newspaper-oriented stories of 2006. One of his picks quite properly is the saga of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who has been held by the U.S. military in Iraq for many months now without charges:

10. Bilal Hussein

The Associated Press photographer, first detained by U.S. and Iraqi military in 2006 for undefined terror-related crimes, spent the entire year in jail and recently went to court to face charges that remain unclear. The Iraqi snapper, whose gripping photo of insurgents on the attack helped the news cooperative win a 2005 Pulitzer, drew international attention and support for his cause with several organizations demanding his release and one group collecting 2,200 names on an online petition.

This gives me a chance to ask: Why have few if any of the major news orgs done big takeouts on this story? To the best of my knowledge, this story has basically been covered mainly by the Associated Press, with little stories done here and there by other news orgs on incremental developments in the case.

But this is a riveting tale that deserves major play. It's an international drama with a whole cast of characters -- Hussein himself, U.S. military officials, human rights advocates, the wingnut bloggers who are campaigning against Hussein's right to any sort of legal representation, etc. The story also raises a host of difficult questions involving wartime press freedoms, the reliance of news orgs on Iraqis for help covering the war, the impact of imagery on popular wartime morale, and the murky alliance that's emerged between military officials and the right-wing opinion machine on stories with potential to heavily impact wartime public opinion.

So why no major magazine pieces in the newsweeklies and highbrow mags? Why no network specials? Why -- aside from this, perhaps -- no major newspaper takeouts? It seems like a natural for this sort of treatment. Plus, it's kind of important, too.

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This Day In Bush Stenography, Courtesy Of CNN
(December 20, 2007 -- 5:43 PM EDT // link // )

Okay. This is not complicated. Today President Bush held a press conference. He blasted the Dem-controlled Congress for adding billions in earmarks to the big spending bill that just passed. He scolded Dem Congressional leaders for this, hitting them for not doing enough to rein in this kind of spending. With me?

Here's what happened next. The Democrats responded to this. They pointed out that a recent study found that Democrats had actually slashed such spending by 25% from 2006, when the Repubs controlled Congress. They also pointed out that the study also concluded that the two earmark kings in the Senate are Republicans.

Naturally, if you were doing a story on the former (Bush's scolding of the Dems over earmarks), then you'd include the latter (the Dem response and the key context). Right?

Well, you would if you were the Associated Press or Bloomberg News. Both these news orgs included key elements of the Dem push-back in their stories.

But if you were CNN, you wouldn't do this. The network reported on Bush's attack on Dem leaders today, but its online piece, as well as a major on-air segment, failed to mention a word about the Dem response:

The Associated Press piece was actually quite good. It used the words "GOP Pork Projects" in its headline. It also pointed out -- gasp! -- that the fact that Repubs are criticizing earmarks while doing it themselves is "hypocritical." Every story on this stuff should look like this.

Yet CNN couldn't even bring itself to take the elementary step of including this key info and context about what the Repubs are really up to. Anyone relying on CNN here to learn about this issue would only know about Bush's attack on Dems and would come away with absolutely no clue as to what's really happening.

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Poll: More Than Eighty Percent Don't Know Obama Is A Christian
(December 20, 2007 -- 12:15 PM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Here's something that gives you a sense of what's at stake in fights like the big dust-up with The Washington Post over their now-notorious piece front-paging the Obama Muslim rumors without declaring them false.

Via Ben Smith, check out this interesting number buried in the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll suggesting that a huge majority don't know that Obama is a Christian:

On a similar open-ended question, just 17% correctly identified Obama as being a Protestant (Church of Christ), 2% said he’s Catholic, 8% said he’s a Muslim, and a whopping 70% said they weren’t sure or refused to answer.

While the eight percent who have this wrong and believe Obama is a Muslim isn't a huge number, the 70% who say they don't know Obama's religion is a massive amount. When you consider that only 17% got it right, that means that over 80% don't know Obama's a Christian.

That's bad, because the "rumor" that Obama is a Muslim is "out there," and presumably at least some of the people in the 80+% category are susceptible to believing it. This would be particularly true if Obama were to win the nomination, since if this happened there's little doubt that the "rumor" would suddenly be getting circulated a lot more aggressively than it is now. And of course there will also be plenty of people who are inclined towards believing this.

The point is that the startling level of public ignorance on this question drives home very vividly just what's at stake when readers demand that news orgs aggressively call out this rumor as false, as they've started to do. If one media outlet calls the rumors false, then another one does, and another, and so on. And with a little luck, you end up with an electorate that's semi-informed on this question.

Okay, maybe that's a bit optimistic. But we can push for it anyway.

Update: A reader rightly points out that since only 17% actually got Obama's religion right, that actually means that more than 80% don't know it. I've edited the above to reflect this.

Separately, MSNBC misstated Obama's church here: It's actually the United Church of Christ.

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Krugman Disputes Rumor That He Has A Son Who Works For Hillary*
(December 20, 2007 -- 9:22 AM EDT // link // )

As noted here yesterday, Paul Krugman is being dogged by a rumor that he has a son who works for Hillary. People who are upset with Krugman for his criticism of Obama are spreading the rumor in the comments section to this post and elsewhere.

Well, now Krugman is disputing the rumor, claiming that he doesn't even have a son. He claims not to have a daughter, either.

Well, maybe Krugman has a son, and maybe he doesn't. But even if he continues to dispute this rumor, he will continue to be dogged by it anyway for the foreseeable future. And there's nothing he can do about it. Sorry.

*Editor's note: As I hope is very obvious, this headline and post, and yesterday's, are intended as jokes -- as spoofs of the big dust-up over the Washington Post piece about how Obama is being dogged by rumors that he's a Muslim even though he's disputing them.

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Krugman Dogged By Rumor That His Son Works For Hillary
(December 19, 2007 -- 5:40 PM EDT // link // )

Regular readers of this site will recognize that this headline is a tongue-in-cheek one, I hope. But as it happens, Krugman is being dogged by such a rumor, though it happens to be false.

Over at Election Central, I've just posted a new interview I did with Krugman today, in which he ramps up the case he's been making against Obama of late. Several readers have now floated the rumor about his son and Hillary in the comments section to the post, suggesting that this is the real reason why Krugman is criticizing Obama. This explanation has also popped up elsewhere of late.

I haven't been able to reach Krugman about this. And there's startlingly little info about it online that I can find. But here's what a Boston Globe profile of him had to say on Dec. 23, 1999:

Krugman, who has no children, is married to Robin Wells, an economist hired by MIT in 1996 as part of a package deal that brought Krugman back east from Stanford. His first marriage, to Robin Bergman, a clothing designer, ended in divorce.

So, it appears that Krugman doesn't have a son and that the rumor is completely false -- unless Krugman has had a son since 1999 who is remarkably precocious and has been hired by the Hillary campaign despite being under the age of eight years old.

This factual state of affairs, however, doesn't mean Krugman isn't being dogged by the rumor that his son works for Hillary. He is being dogged by this rumor, and it isn't going to go away anytime soon.

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Sorry, Wingers: A New Study Confirms That The Press Doesn't Report Just Violence And Bad News From Iraq
(December 19, 2007 -- 11:25 AM EDT // link // )

So is the conservative critique of war coverage true? Has American public opinion on the war has been skewed by the media's tendency to only report violence and bad news from Iraq?

A new study has an answer to the question: Not so much.

Nearly half the stories Americans read and saw about Iraq through most of the year were about the daily violence there, but journalists appeared sensitive to how much that dominated coverage, a new report said.

Although violence made up 47 out of every 100 stories covered on television and in newspapers, it took up only 27 percent of the air time or print space through the end of October, according to an analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

That meant news organizations didn't give the stories inordinate play, explained Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director.

"They appear to be very sensitive to the notion that 'all you cover is bad news,'" he said.

Though the study's conclusions are somewhat nuanced, it clearly concludes that barely more than a fourth of airtime and print space for the period in question was devoted to violence. And one number leaps out as very telling:

Stories that tried to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of U.S. policy were mixed, the report said. Four in 10 concluded things were mixed, a third were pessimistic in tone and a quarter saw things were improving, the study said.

This kind of analysis obviously has its limitations when it comes to reaching overall conclusions, but nonetheless, I think these numbers make the conservative critique awfully difficult to sustain. Only a third of stories assessed U.S. strategy pessimistically, a number that's significantly lower than the percentage of the American public that has this view.

Meanwhile, there is one number buried in the study that conservatives can -- and probably will -- cherry-pick to make their case: Only three percent of stories filed were about the lives of ordinary citizens. Of course, the study also notes that reporters say that the low number reflects the fact that the violence in the country prevents them from doing such stories. But wingers can just leave that inconvenient fact out if they feel like it.

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Note To Dowd And Other Media Figures: Could Hillary's Public Guardedness Be Because Of ... You?
(December 19, 2007 -- 8:35 AM EDT // link // )

Normally Maureen Dowd is not worth the bother, but today's column is worth a look, because it neatly showcases one of the stranger facets of anti-Clinton irrationality: The refusal or inability of many pundits to draw a link between their profession's deep-seated hostility to Hillary and her consequent aloofness and guardedness in public.

Dowd's effort concerns the fact that Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh have been ridiculing Hillary for looking wrinkled and old in that photo of her that I blogged about below. Dowd quite reasonably is critical of this attack for much of the column. But then she suddenly feels compelled to veer into this:

Hillary doesn’t have to worry about her face. She has to worry about her mask. Back in the ’92 race, Clinton pollsters devised strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal. Fifteen years later, her campaign is devising strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal.

The public still has no idea of what part of her is stage-managed and focus-grouped, and what part is legit. It’s pretty pathetic, at this stage of her career, that she has to wage a major offensive, by helicopter and Web testimonials, to make herself appear warm-blooded.

Right, right -- Hillary is cold and calculating and doesn't reveal her true self in public. But surely this is partly because of the very thing the rest of Dowd's column reflects -- the fact that the media, which is to say, people like Rush and Maureen, have been unremittingly hostile to her for years, and years and years, heaping contempt and derision on her every public utterance, on her laugh, and now, on her wrinkles.

Now, I don't know what came first, Hillary's public guardedness -- her decision to wear a "mask" -- or the media and punditry's entrenched hostility towards her. But quite clearly these two chicken-and-egg phenomena are linked to one another. As this column reflects, however, Dowd and her cohorts won't acknowledge this link -- because to do so would be to take an honest look at their own conduct. Which they'll never, ever do.

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Republican Operative: Drudge And Limbaugh's Attacks On Hillary's Age Help Her With Republican Women
(December 18, 2007 -- 6:49 PM EDT // link // )

I was all set to do another Drudge-is-a-slimeball post based on the fact that he's kept a despicable photo up on his site for literally days now that shows Hillary in, shall we say, less than tip-top form...

...when a Republican operative I know called me and actually complained about what Drudge is doing.

The photo -- which I'm not linking to or reproducing here -- shows Hillary looking just a tad more mature than usual. When I said to this GOP operative that surely some Republicans would be turned off by such attacks, he said: "Yeah -- they're called Republican women."

Much to this operative's chagrin, Rush Limbaugh has reproduced Drudge's photo on his site (not linking to that, either) and has launched a whole attack on Hillary's age. Rush asked the following tasteful, chivalrous and thoroughly relevant question:

Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?

Here's what the GOP operative had to say about this: "How the f--k is it helpful to have a fat, middle-aged guy sitting there yukking it up about how old she looks? This'll only make Republican women like her more."

For my part, I tend to think that such stuff from Rush and Drudge is having less of an impact than ever in the real world, but this is certainly an interesting take. At the very least, it certainly isn't what Drudge and Rush have in mind. Might be worth remembering this dynamic, should she become the nominee.

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MSNBC Analyst Blames Hillary For Not Talking About Vince Foster's Death
(December 18, 2007 -- 12:32 PM EDT // link // )

Media figures often make themselves look very silly when defending themselves against criticism, but I think I've found the most absurd and self-parodic example of this genre that's ever been produced.

Fittingly, it comes to us from MSNBC, which has done some of the most absolutely God-awful commentary on Campaign 2008 that's been done anywhere. Media analyst Steve Adubato hits Bill Clinton for blaming the media for unfair coverage of his wife, writing:

What’s really ironic about Clinton’s argument is that it has been the Clinton campaign that has been exceedingly secretive about disclosing the former First Lady’s records when she was in the White House. Bill and Hillary want the media to focus on are only the positive aspects of her experience but won’t say a word about such topics as “Travelgate;” “Whitewater;” exactly how Vince Foster died; missing billing records; or Hillary’s role as architect of the failed effort for universal healthcare.

You have to be seriously lacking in self awareness to criticize Hillary for not talking about Vince Foster's death in the same article that claims that the media is being fair to Hillary. Also, part of this happens to be factually false: Hillary actually talks on the stump about her health care failure. You may not like what she says or think she goes into enough detail, but she does talk about it.

Just to be clear, I'm not defending all of Bill's media criticism here, and Camp Hillary of course bears blame for its own screw-ups. Still, Bill's basic underlying point -- that the records of the contenders get too little attention while poll numbers, haircuts, and cackles get too much, frequently at Hillary's expense -- is glaringly apparent to everyone except for the pundits and commentators who spend all their time talking about such things.

Anyway, this might not have been worth bothering with if weren't a reminder that this sort of recurrent nonsense, combined with the duo of Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson, has made MSNBC truly unbearable this campaign season -- worse even than Fox, if that's possible. And this blog's coverage of Campaign 2008 wouldn't be complete without giving the above honorable mention as easily the most ridiculous media self-defense we've seen yet.

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CNN Discusses Obama And His "Drug Rumors"
(December 17, 2007 -- 6:11 PM EDT // link // )

It really seems like some of the folks at the big news orgs who were writing headlines about Barack Obama today did so while heavily indulging in some of those same illegal substances the Illinois Senator partook of back in his youth. CNN, for instance, has this:

The headline accompanies an opinion piece that's supposed to be favorable to Obama, but also includes this odd line:

Last week, Billy Shaheen, Clinton's co-chairman in New Hampshire, resigned from the campaign after floating the rumor that Obama, in his youth, may have been not just a drug user but a drug dealer.

Wait -- Shaheen "floated a rumor" that Obama was a drug-dealer? That's not what happened, though. Shaheen mentioned the possibility that Republicans might try to ask whether he'd ever dealt drugs in order to smear him. But Shaheen didn't float any "rumor" that Obama might have been a drug dealer. There is no such rumor, CNN.

Meanwhile, today's Boston Globe takes an Associated Press story that originally described the Muslim rumors as "false" in its headline, and runs the story with a new headline that doesn't contain the word false:

Okay. Maybe it's time for an industry-wide seminar on the meaning of the word "rumor." A rumor is not something that someone might say in the future about someone, as per CNN. Nor is it something that folks will automatically presume to be false, and hence doesn't need to be identified as such, as per The Globe.

Rather, a rumor is an assertion that someone made that might either be true or be false. It is an assertion that hasn't yet been verified. The point is, no one knows whether it's true or not -- that's what makes it a rumor in the first place.

Really, now. Let's get this one right. You guys are making fools of yourselves at this point.

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About Hillary, Those "National Security Democrats" And Their "Willingness To Use Force"
(December 17, 2007 -- 3:02 PM EDT // link // )

There are few media formulations more loathsome than the phrase "national security Democrat," and I just want to go on record sharing Atrios' annoyance with the fact that top Hillary supporter Richard Holbrooke feels compelled to define her in these terms:

“She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband,” says Richard Holbrooke, the former envoy for Bill Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is a classic national-security Democrat. She is better at framing national-security issues for the current era than her husband was at a common point in his career.”

As reprehensible as the phrase is, to me the more irksome thing here is Holbrooke's description here of Hillary as being "more willing to use force," than her husband, and presumably her rivals. Presumably Holbrooke intends this as a blanket compliment.

But if there's one thing that the past five years should have taught us, what's actually needed is a President who is not willing to use force when so doing is a bad idea that will ultimately weaken our national security. The key question is, Which of the Dems believes that he or she has the political breathing room, and political skills, to not use force in a situation where many in the media and political establishment are trumpeting the argument that not using force is synonymous with weakness?

In other words, which of the Dems has enough faith in his or her own abilities -- which Dem has, yes, the strength -- to believe that he or she can win an argument against the use of force in our media environment, and hence might be willing to give it a go? Unless I'm getting completely duped by Barack Obama's sales pitch, it seems obvious that he would have the confidence to undertake such a daring maneuver. Ditto Edwards. But when the likes of Holbrooke feels compelled to make the case for her in the media in terms such as these, he only succeeds in making it that much harder to believe the same of Hillary.

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New York Times Does Whole Article On Blogger's Mean Attack On WaPo Obama Muslim Piece Reporter -- But Devotes One Sentence To Actual Criticism Of Piece
(December 17, 2007 -- 10:00 AM EDT // link // )

Okay, this is just bizarre. Today The New York Times did an article covering the dust-up over the Washington Post Obama Muslim story. And guess what the focus of the entire piece was?

The fact that a blogger/professor said some nasty things about the WaPo reporter who did the piece, Perry Bacon, Jr., sparking a battle between journalistic worthies over on Romenesko.

Meanwhile, guess how much ink The Times devoted to the actual criticism of the piece? A grand total of one sentence.

These are some odd priorities on the part of The Times. The fact that one blogger got some journalists mad by saying some mean things about a WaPo reporter was deemed more newsworthy by the paper than the fact that multiple editors at one of the most influential broadsheets in the country, including WaPo executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., signed off on an article that recycled rumors about a major political figure without declaring them false.

It gets worse. The Times reporter who wrote the story, Maria Aspan, interviewed Downie for her article -- and judging by her piece, she didn't ask him a single question about the piece itself or about the substance of the criticism of it.

As Will Bunch observed the other day, one thing this episode revealed very clearly is the "circle the wagons" mentality that prevails in journalism, in which journalists' instinct to defend one another against outside criticism tends to produce more passion than the core journalistic questions that such criticism raises at times. As Bunch asked:

Wouldn't be amazing to see a day where Downie, Nagourney, Tumulty and the rest showed up on Romenesko with such forceful opinions -- about the state of campaign journalism in 2008?

Wouldn't it have been nice if The Times deemed this whole episode worthy of attention before a blogger said something mean about an establishment journalist? It's certainly not a stretch to imagine that if this blogger hadn't said nasty stuff about Bacon, The Times wouldn't have seen the episode as newsworthy at all.

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Associated Press Does The Impossible: Uses The Word "False"
(December 17, 2007 -- 8:53 AM EDT // link // )

Memo to Washington Post executive editor Len Downie, who has yet to give any indication that he thinks his paper did anything amiss in recycling the Obama Muslim rumors on the front page without declaring them false: Please read this.

Obama Describes Faith Amid False Rumors

By The ASSOCIATED PRESS

MASON CITY, Iowa (AP) -- Democrat Barack Obama on Sunday confronted one of the persistent falsehoods circulating about him on the Internet.

He went to church.

His attendance here at the First Congregational United Church of Christ, with the news media in tow, was as much an observation of faith as it was a rejoinder to baseless e-mailed rumors that he is a Muslim and poses a threat to the security of the United States.

Really, Len -- there's nothing to it. If the AP can do it, you can, too!

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Political Pundits And Commentators: "We" Know What Our Failings Are, But We Aren't Ever Going To Change Them. Sorry.
(December 16, 2007 -- 11:55 AM EDT // link // )

Over at Media Matters, Jamison Foser has a terrific column today in which he quotes a number of influential journalists over the years talking about their own addiction to imposing narratives of their own collective choosing on their coverage of politics.

Take a look at these doozies:

Anne Kornblut: I have to say we in the media are spoiling for a fight. Usually we are biased in favor of a good tussle at about this point. ... I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere between now and January 3, now that we know that's when the Iowa caucuses are going to be, to see some kind of reverse, some kind of Obama surge or an Edwards surge. Something that is going to knock Hillary down a few pegs. Whether it's a media creation, or something that actually happens on the ground. I would be shocked if there were nothing like that. [10/26/07]

And:

Gloria Borger: "We take people to the top of the mountain and then once we get them to the top of the mountain, it's our job to knock them down." [9/10/06]

And:

Brian Williams: "[I]t does seem true over the years that the news media almost reserve the right to build up and tear down and change their minds and like an underdog." [9/21/00]

And:

Howard Fineman: "We want a race, I suppose. If we have a bias of any kind, it's that we like to see a contest, and we like to see it down the end if we can. And I think that's partly the psychology at play here." [9/21/00]

As Foser rightly notes, the political media is again imposing such narratives of its own choosing on the coverage of the Dem Primary as it enters its final stretch. But I'd like to point out something else that's truly bizarre about this, something you see popping up again and again.

Specifically, I'm talking about the fact that pundits and commentators have a strange and widespread tendency to talk about their profession's collective failings -- but without displaying any desire to change them, without showing any awareness that these failings could be changed with a little effort, and even without betraying any awareness or concern that they themselves might be contributing to the problem.

Here, for instance, is NBC political director Chuck Todd in October, predicting in advance that he and his pundit peers would be overly kind to Fred Thompson's political skills because of their own arbitrary decision to lower expectations for him:

TODD: ... for Thompson is that the expectation bar is below the floor for him. I mean, if he just shows up and doesn`t drool, we`re going to say, Well, you know, that`s a better performance than I thought.

We will do this, we will do that. We shouldn't do it, but we will do it, anyway.

Does anything like this happen in other professions? Imagine if lawyers routinely said, "we really shouldn't counsel our clients to lie on the witness stand," and continued to do so anyway.Or imagine if doctors said, "you know, we constantly amputate people's legs when they don't need it," and continued to do so anyway.

Such behavior would be plainly absurd in other lines of work. Yet "we" in the political media do this all the time, and have done so for years and years and years.

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