07.07.09
Froomkin to move to Huffington Post
Very interesting column by Greenwald on the background of the move:
In yet another sign of how online media outlets are strengthening as their older establishment predecessors are struggling to survive, The Huffington Post has hired Dan Froomkin to be its Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger. Froomkin will oversee a staff of four reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post’s Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page. I learned last night of the hiring and spoke to both Arianna Huffington and Froomkin this morning.
Under still-unclear circumstances, which executives refuse to discuss even with their own Ombudsman, Froomkin was fired by The Washington Post a little more than two weeks ago after writing an online column for almost six years that was one of that newspaper’s most popular. Almost immediately upon the reporting of Froomkin’s firing, screenwriter Nora Ephron, an Editor-at-Large for The Huffington Post, emailed Huffington with a one-line note: "I hope we’re hiring him." Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week. That was just one of numerous overtures Froomkin received from various media outlets interested in hiring him (Salon was one such outlet expressing preliminary interest, but both Froomkin and Salon believed that much of what I do here already overlaps with much of the work he does).
Though the precise reasons for Froomkin’s firing by The Post remain unclear, there’s no question that his penchant for aggressively criticizing establishment media behavior escalated tensions. In recent months, The Post spiked columns of his that contained pointed media critiques. In the wake of his firing, Post defenders misleadingly focused on (and then rebutted) the obvious strawman argument that Froomkin was fired for being "liberal." But that, in fact, was something virtually nobody claimed. Instead, it was Froomkin’s practice of exposing the corrupt practices of establishment journalists (both by his words and deeds) that made him such a unique presence at The Post. Pioneering press critic Bob Somerby put it this way:
Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. . . . If there’s one thing you’ll never see [E.J.] Dionne or [Eugene] Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—the coven, the clan. . . But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press. That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them.
Indeed, nothing eliminates the possibility of establishment journalist jobs more quickly or decisively than criticizing the establishment media as being too sycophantic to political power, manipulated by the Right, and, in general, slothfully devoted to doing nothing other than uncritically repeating what "both sides" say (by stark contrast, the tired right-wing grievance about The Liberal Media is not just permitted but welcomed; Bill Kristol spent years depicting The New York Times as an anti-American, Terrorist-loving beacon of left-wing bias, only to be hired by them as a full-time columnist, while right-wing polemicists who voice similarly trite claims about the media — Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett — are routinely heard in the very venues they attack). As Brad DeLong documented in a thorough retrospective on Froomkin’s firing, the first attempt at The Post to remove Froomkin from his status as "reporter" was driven by right-wing complaints that the content of his column was inappropriate for a reporter.
Huffington says that it is Froomkin’s views on …
07.05.09
Washington Post: "The whorehouse on the Potomac"
Very interesting post by Paul Craig Roberts on several failings of the Washington Post, along with an explanation that the Iranian elections may not have been corrupted. Here’s that part:
… Even people who are regarded as Iran experts said, without any evidence, that the elections were stolen. One of their arguments is that three hours were not enough time to count all the votes, yet it was announced that Ahmajdinejad won. The ignorance of "experts" made theft a certainty for American TV audiences.
The "experts" who make this assertion are obviously ignorant of Iran’s electoral procedures. For the ignorant "experts" and the Americans deluded by them, here is the way it works:
There are more than 45,000 voting places, which means less than 1,000 votes per voting place, an easy number to count and report in three hours. At each voting place there are a dozen or more observers, including every candidates’ representatives, representatives of the Guardian Council, and the local police. The votes are counted in the presence of all, and all sign documents attesting to the count.
The vote totals are forwarded to a central office in the region that has representatives of the candidates and the Guardian Council, where they are verified by a dozen or a dozen and a half of witnesses. From here the vote count goes to the Minister of the Interior, where the vote is announced.
Unless these procedures were not followed, and no evidence has been provided that the procedures were not followed, it is impossible to steal an Iranian election. It is much easier to steal an American one, which happens routinely.
There are thousands, indeed tens of thousands of witnesses, perhaps hundreds of thousands of witnesses, to the Iranian vote. Yet, only Mousavi and his corrupt supporters among the high living Iranian elite, who are fighting for personal power in Iran, contest the vote. The kids in the street were the usual dupes. At this stage in history, how can anyone believe that there is a pure candidate that wants to bring freedom and justice to the people? Anywhere. In any country, the US included.
Ignorant "experts" made a great noise about the fact that 50 cities or towns had votes in excess of registered voters. Again, this is a demonstration of "Iranian experts" total ignorance. In Iran, voters can vote wherever they happen to be at the day of election. Vacationers, business people on travel, commuters, and the partial absence of distinct voting districts, can produce a vote count in excess of the local registered population.
The Guardian Council examined these differences, added them up, and noted that if every additional vote was fraudulent, the number was insufficient to affect the outcome.
The Guardian Council has agreed to post every vote count.
Did you, dear American, learn of these facts from Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, or from the CIA and Mossad bloggers? Of course not. Every time "your" media opens its mouth lies jump out that serve the US government’s hegemonic propaganda…
06.19.09
Why Dan Froomkin was so valued
The American establishment media in a nutshell:
"I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say ‘this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this,’ that we didn’t do our job. I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role" — NBC News’ David Gregory, thereafter promoted to host Meet the Press.
"Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .
"Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.
"It also resonates with readers and viewers a lot more than passionless stenography. I’m not sure why calling bullshit has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.
"If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.
"I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter – whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way" – Dan Froomkin, fired yesterday by The Washington Post.
* * * * *
The Washington Post’s firing of Dan Froomkin reveals much about the modern establishment media.
More self-pity from the Right
What a bunch of wimps. Greenwald:
"What’s really interesting, the president yesterday has said, he complained about FOX, and he said, I think accurately, that it is the one, only voice of opposition in the media.
And it makes us a lot like Caracas where all the media, except one, are state run, with the exception that in Hugo Chavez-land, you go after that one station with machetes. I haven’t seen any machetes around here, so I think we are at least safe for now" — oppressed victim Charles Krauthammer, Wednesday night on Fox News, decrying the persecution of conservative pundits.
This is what one finds — just from today — on the Op-Ed page of The Washington Post, which yesterday fired Dan Froomkin:
* Neocon Charles Krauthammer: attacking Obama for indifference to Freedom in Iran
* Neocon Paul Wolfowitz: attacking Obama for indifference to Freedom in Iran
* Establishment/CIA spokesman and war supporter David Ignatius: demanding that Obama do more to support Freedom in Iran and refuse to negotiate with the Iranian regime
* Bush CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden: warning that America will be in danger if CIA officials involved in torture continue to be criticized and questioned about what they did
On Monday, the Post hosted an online chat with Fox News’ Glenn Beck to promote his new book. Today, on its so-called "Post-Partisan" Opinions page, The Post features a column from neocon Bill Kristol, attacking Obama for indifference to Freedom in Iran; a column from right-wing polemicist Kathleen Parker, attacking Obama for indifference to Freedom in Iran; and Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, attacking PBS for banning sectarian programming. On Wednesday, it published an Op-Ed from neocon Robert Kagan accusing Obama of being "objectively" pro-Ahmedinejad (headline: "Obama, Siding with the Regime"). The Post hosts a permanent feature with National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, leading discussions about conservatism. And its Editorial Page, for years, was (and still is) the loudest cheerleaders for the neoconservative prongs of Bush’s foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq.
The Washington Post does more to advance neoconservative ideology than The Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute and Commentary combined. But Post columnist Charles Krauthammer — and so many like him — fantasize that they’re surrounded by a Liberal Media that oppresses, persecutes and silences them. Just ponder the levels of delusion and self-pity necessary to believe that…
06.18.09
Wow! Washington Post fires Dan Froomkin
I’m astonished. Dan Froomkin is their best columnist on the White House and politics in general. He bases his criticisms on facts and calls them as he sees them. He criticized Bush when Bush was president, and though he likes some of what Obama has done, he doesn’t like other things and doesn’t hesitate to criticize. Glenn Greenwald:
One of the rarest commodities in the establishment media is someone who was a vehement critic of George Bush and who now, applying their principles consistently, has become a regular critic of Barack Obama — i.e., someone who criticizes Obama from what is perceived as "the Left" rather than for being a Terrorist-Loving Socialist Muslim. It just got a lot rarer, as The Washington Post — at least according to Politico’s Patrick Gavin — just fired WashingtonPost.com columnist, long-time Bush critic and Obama watchdog (i.e., a real journalist) Dan Froomkin.
What makes this firing so bizarre and worthy of inquiry is that, as Calderone notes, Froomkin was easily one of the most linked-to and cited Post columnists. At a time when newspapers are relying more and more on online traffic, the Post just fired the person who, in 2007, wrote 3 out of the top 10 most-trafficked columns. In publishing that data, Media Bistro used this headline: "The Post’s Most Popular Opinions (Read: Froomkin)." Isn’t that an odd person to choose to get rid of?
Following the bottomless path of self-pity of the standard right-wing male — as epitomized by Pete Hoekstra’s comparison of House Republicans to Iranian protesters and yet another column by Pat Buchanan decrying the systematic victimization of the white male in America — Charles Krauthammer last night said that Obama critics on Fox News are "a lot like [Hugo Chavez'] Caracas where all the media, except one, are state run." But right-wing polemicists like Krauthammer are all over the media.
In addition to his Rupert Murdoch perch at Fox, Krauthammer remains as a regular columnist at the Post, alongside fellow right-wing Obama haters such as Bill Kristol, George Will, Jim Hoagland, Michael Gerson and Robert Kagan — as well as a whole bevy of typical, banal establishment spokespeople who are highly supportive of whatever the permanent Washington establishment favors (David Ignatius, Fred Hiatt, Ruth Marcus, David Broder, Richard Cohen, Howie Kurtz, etc. etc.). And that’s to say nothing of the regular Op-Ed appearances by typical Krauthammer-mimicking neoconservative voices such as John Bolton, Joe Lieberman, and Douglas Feith — and the Post Editorial Page itself. "Caracas" indeed.
Notably, Froomkin just recently had a somewhat acrimonious exchange with the oh-so-oppressed Krauthammer over torture, after Froomkin criticized Krauthammer’s explicit endorsement of torture and Krauthammer responded by calling Froomkin’s criticisms "stupid." And now — weeks later — Froomkin is fired by the Post while the persecuted Krauthammer, comparing himself to endangered journalists in Venezuela, remains at the Post, along with countless others there who think and write just like he does: i.e., standard neoconservative pablum. Froomkin was previously criticized for being "highly opinionated and liberal" by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell (even as she refused to criticize blatant right-wing journalists).
All of this underscores a critical and oft-overlooked point: …
06.05.09
Good analysis of a Krauthammer column
I have less and less patience with the grotesque posturing of the Right or of the Left (an example of the latter: Clinton’s remarkable talk about China’s faults in not laying bare its dark deeds, blogged below). Joe Klein describes an example from the reliably extreme Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for the Washington Post:
Charles Krauthammer has a misleading and evasive column about the Israeli settlements issue. He does not deal with the legality of these towns–he can’t, of course, because they are illegal under the fourth Geneva Convention, which provides rules for occupying powers. He does not deal with the illegality, and inhumanity, of building roads for the exclusive use of settlers, roads which simply take Palestinian property, separating Palestinian farmers from their fields in some cases. He does not deal with the most basic question–the not-so-subtle effort by the settler movement and its far-right sponsors to create a Palestinian swiss cheese, rather than a governable state, on the West Bank, by riddling the area with Jewish settlements. He does not deal, although it is implicit in his xenophobic argument and in the rantings of the extremists over at the Commentary blog, with the reality that this Israeli behavior is anachronistic, a vestige of the post-1967 dream of a Greater Israel. He does not deal with the fact that the last two Likud/Kadima Prime Ministers, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, came to the realization that demographic reality requires a viable Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza.
He rants, instead, about …
05.12.09
Torture: A National Guard officer responds to Krauthammer
Here is a note an Army National Guard lieutenant colonel I know sent to the columnist Charles Krauthammer, who didn’t respond:
Mr. Krauthammer,
I don’t usually make a point of responding to the talking-head proselytizers in my Sunday paper but your column prompted me to do so.
I’ll make this simple. There are NO circumstances under which torture is acceptable. Jack Bauer’s "24" makes for great TV but even in a ticking time bomb situation such behavior is inappropriate and illegal. Torture is counter to our moral code, a violation of the Geneva and Hague conventions to which we subscribe and perhaps least understood, but most significantly, counterproductive and ineffective. Nothing else really needs to be said, but if you want more details read on.
I have friends who have been to SERE and instructed SERE students and acted as interrogators. All agree that waterboarding and other such ‘enhanced’ techniques are good for training (in a strictly controlled environment) our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on what to expect in captivity. They also agree that it is torture to anyone outside that training environment. Finally, they all agree that torture rarely results in actionable intelligence, as the victim is willing to say most anything to end the torture.
So you must wonder, by what authority is this letter writer speaking? Well, as a Lieutenant Colonel and Combat Arms Battalion Commander in the Army I am responsible for the welfare, training, good order, and discipline of my soldiers. I am responsible for everything they do or fail to do. I am also responsible to follow and issue only those orders that are legal, ethical and moral. Torture of another human being is illegal, unethical and immoral, and I would be duty bound to disobey any such order…just as PFC Lynndie England and SPC Charles Graner (and their many counterparts, senior officers and NCOs at Abu Ghraib) should have done…just as any of my soldiers should disobey should I give such an order. We all have the lessons of Nuremburg to rely upon anytime such questions come to mind; "I was just following orders" is never justification for committing crimes against other human beings.
Before deploying to Iraq last year, I explained these things to my troopers. It is difficult to explain to young (practically) kids, with little experience, and poor knowledge of the world…but if you are caring and committed, and repeat yourself often enough they learn and understand. I told them the most important thing they needed to take away from all their preparations was that while it would be terrible to lose one of them or have one of them seriously physically injured, it would be worse to have them come home physically well and mentally broken because they had somehow lost their humanity. Torture destroys our humanity, and any equivocation (feel free to exercise the Kantian absolutist vs utilitarian argument to your heart’s content) on the matter is just bullshit.
. . . If captured I would honor our Armed Forces Code of Conduct to the best of my ability and go to whatever my fate, resolute in the knowledge that our nation remains a last bastion of what is right (or ought to be right) in the world. Torture has no place in America, and Americans have no reason to employ it. War ain’t fair, but we have to fight it while maintaining a level of dignity and humanity, jus in bello [law concerning acceptable conduct in war – LG]. This is rough work for people bound to a code of Duty, Honor, Country. Proselytizers, who say but do not act, need not apply.
To summarize: Those who endorse torture need to think twice about the effect it has on the moral and discipline of our troops. Also, think about his point that torture has two victims: the person suffering it, and the person inflicting it.
05.11.09
Five criminal referrals unreported by the Washington Post
Can I just say how relieved I am that a TradMed outlet has finally reported the details about how the CIA’s torture program exceeded guidelines that I noted three weeks ago, from the recognition that the CIA was using much more water in its waterboarding than OLC authorized to the description of that action as "poignant"? It’s high time someone [else] started reporting the evidence that the torture program was not legal, even according to the Bybee Memo, as news.
The new news in this piece, though, is that the SSCI is reviewing a 2005 CIA
IG[corrected] report on the torture tapes–a report that Jello Jay requested (to no avail) back when it was published.To assess whether interrogators complied with the department’s guidance, Senate intelligence committee investigators are interviewing those involved, examining hundreds of CIA e-mails and reviewing a classified 2005 study by the agency’s lawyers of dozens of interrogation videotapes, according to government officials who said they were not authorized to be quoted by name.
[snip]
The videotape study, which the Senate intelligence committee demanded to see in 2005 but did not receive until last year, assessed the legality of interrogations that occurred between April and December 2002.
I’ve said before that Jello Jay’s requests for this report and other information from the 2004 CIA IG report likely contributed as much to the CIA’s decision to destroy the torture tapes as all the other reasons. It’s nice to see that it only took him three years to get the document.
But there’s a claim reported in this story that seems to conflict with known information. It quotes two Bushies saying that the CIA never made any criminal referrals out of the [I think] 2004 CIA IG report.
But two Bush administration officials privy to its conclusions said it did not provoke a specific CIA "referral" to the department suggesting an investigation of potential criminal liability, and no such investigation was undertaken at the time.
Though it is not entirely clear, the context seems to suggest that "its" refers to the 2004 CIA IG report. Perhaps the two Bushies mean the conclusions of that report did not provoke a "specific CIA ‘referral’" to DOJ, even if the CIA IG referred specific cases before he reached his conclusion.
But we know from the DOJ IG report that the CIA IG referred five cases to DOJ: …
04.26.09
David S. Broder, a man whose time has passed
Broder long ago outlived whatever promise he once evidenced, and nowadays he’s nothing but an apologist for the elite. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent column today, from which I take this one paragraph:
To justify the absolute immunity he wants for government lawbreakers, Broder describes the Bush era as “one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.” But that’s easy to say now that the Bush presidency is over and the evidence of its criminality so undeniable. But Broder never said any such thing while it was all taking place, when it mattered. In fact, he did the opposite: he mocked those who tried to sound the alarm about how radical and “dark” the Bush presidency was and repeatedly defended what Bush officials were doing as perfectly normal, unalarming and well within the bounds of mainstream and legitimate policy.
Really, read the whole thing.
Well, one more paragraph:
What Broder states today as fact (that the Bush presidency is “one of the darkest chapters of American history”) is almost verbatim that which, when it mattered, when it was happening, he vehemently and repeatedly denied — and, of course, given that he works in the most accountability-free profession of all (establishment punditry), he does not even have the minimal honesty to acknowledge that. Like so many of his colleagues, Broder played a critical role in defending these crimes and insisting that they were not taking place.
One more—and this is the last, I promise:
More than anything else, Broder’s column illustrates the Central Creed of Beltway Culture, which should be memorialized on plaques throughout that city:
When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice.
When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.
04.13.09
Washington Post reporter admits he simply does stenography
By Jamison Foser in Media Matters:
Reporters tend to bristle when media critics refer to them as “stenographers.” But Paul Kane of the Washington Post provides a pretty clear illustration of where that criticism comes from. Here’s something Kane said during an online discussion Kane participated in today (the discussion carries tomorrow’s date, but tomorrow hasn’t occurred yet, so please believe me when I say it took place today):
Paul Kane: We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us.
Got that? Olympia Snowe said something, Paul Kane wrote it down, and he doesn’t know what more anyone could want from him.
Well, it isn’t very complicated: Context. That’s what people want. Like the fact that Olympia Snowe had previously voted to do exactly what Kane quotes her criticizing — that’s useful context.
And that’s the difference between “journalism” and “stenography.”
Here’s the full question-and-answer:
04.10.09
Joe Klein takes apart Charles Krauthammer
Excellent blog post by Joe Klein:
Charles Krauthammer, the ultimate bleating-heart neoconservative, is all atwitter over Barack Obama’s foreign trip. Where most rational observers saw a significant U.S. triumph, the beginning of our reconciliation with the rest of the world after eight years of stupid bellicosity, destructive threats and empty bluster, Krauthammer sees decline and weakness. Obama admitted past U.S. misbehavior! That is surely a sign of weakness… or maybe, perhaps, a sign of renewed strength? Or maybe, it’s just being honest, a quality the Bush Administration eschewed. The Euros chose not to play on Afghanistan? Perhaps that had something to do with the Bush Administration’s myopic avoidance of that theater of battle for the past seven years—the Euros, not the heartiest of allies when it comes to warmaking, were left to fend for themselves without any U.S. leadership or much U.S. support and they are aching to leave now. Over the next year, we’ll see what effect a renewed US good-faith effort in Afghanistan has when it comes to stiffening the spines of our allies. The Euros didn’t buy Obama’s plea for a stimulus plan? Perhaps that has something to do with the rampant corruption that has marked US-style capitalism during the Reagan-Bush era. Oh—and uh-oh—another sign of Obama’s embrace of weakness: he actually admitted that the US finance-thieves had been part of the problem.
And there was—oh. my. God.—the failed North Korean rocket launch. The Gates Defense budget is cutting anti-missile defense systems in Alaska. More Obama wimposity! Except that Gates has decided not to spend tens of billions on an anti-missile system (that doesn’t work) to counter a North Korean rockets (that don’t work) carrying North Korean atomic bombs (that have, so far, fizzled when tested). The real North Korean threat, created by George W. Bush’s first-term ineptness, is the nuclear fuel that was produced in the past six years—fuel that the wildly impoverished North Koreans could sell to terrorists or rogue states (as they sold their nuclear plant design to the Syrians). That is a threat that doesn’t yield easily to the empty bluster of neocons—indeed, it was accelerated by US bluster.
The point is …
04.08.09
Another example of journalistic laziness and ignorance
From the Center for American Progress:
On Feb. 15, Washington Post columnist George Will wrote an error-riddled, entirely misleading column denying the calamity of climate change. Yesterday, the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson confirmed another egregious error in the column: Will cited "the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center" to falsely claim that sea ice levels have not diminished — but no such center exists. "The Arctic climate is a research area of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s [UIUC] Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and the informal group of researchers does go by the label of the Polar Research Group," Johnson wrote. "However, ‘there is no such center at the University of Illinois,’ the UIUC’s Dr. John Walsh has informed me in electronic correspondence. ‘There is a group of scientists and students working on Arctic climate, but no formal center.’" Despite the numerous outlets that pointed out Will’s false claims in his original column, the Washington Post refused to run a correction. In fact, editor Fred Hiatt defended Will at the time, saying he was simply "drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject" and calling Will’s critics "irresponsible."
With an eye to Fred Hiatt, perhaps we should add "arrogance" as a defining characteristic of the modern typical journalist. It would explain why they can persist in laziness and ignorance.
04.06.09
The Washington Posts continues to fight Social Security
How a great newspaper has fallen. Dean Baker:
The Washington Post has long been a strong proponent of reducing Social Security benefits. While it frequently expresses this view in editorials and in the opeds it chooses to publish, it also pushes its editorial position in the news section.
In keeping with this practice, it headlined an article today, "Recession Puts a Major Strain On Social Security Trust Fund." The article refers to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now projects that annual tax revenue will be nearly in balance with benefit payments for the next several years. Previous projections had shown large surpluses.
While those seeking to cut Social Security benefits are highlighting these new projections, in reality they have very little significance for the program. Under the law, Social Security benefits are paid out of its trust fund. This trust fund has accumulated a surplus of almost $2.5 trillion. The lower projected surpluses for the next few years will have some impact (if the projections prove correct) on the date at which the fund is projected to be depleted, but the projected depletion date will almost certainly be beyond 2040, even after CBO adjusts its numbers for the downturn.
Remarkably, this piece alludes to plans to cut benefits without ever noting that older workers and retirees have just lost close to $15 trillion in wealth due to the collapse of the housing bubble and the plunge in the stock market Presumably this would be an important factor in any debate over reducing benefits.
Continue reading to see the comments, also interesting.
04.01.09
When is torture not torture?
When the US does it and the Washington Post (and NY Times and Associated Press) report it. Andrew Sullivan:
When The Washington Post Calls Waterboarding “Torture”
When it’s done by the Khmer Rouge:
His victims — most of whom were either disgraced members of the Khmer Rouge or their families — were tortured with electric shocks, waterboarding, or beating to extract a confession, which would implicate new victims… Among the four forms of torture he officially condoned, they said, was pouring water up victims’ noses.
Note also that repeated beatings are also put in the “torture” category, another technique that the Washington Post does not describe as torture when authorized by president Bush. It’s rare you see a leading newspaper reveal that it has one set of moral standards for non-Americans and another one for the people they socialize with.
Remember: we don’t torture. When Bush said that he meant: when we do it, it’s not torture. And the WaPo and the AP and the NYT’s news divisions agree.
03.22.09
Correcting George Will
George Will is a climate change denier (who also believes that FDR’s New Deal lengthened the Great Depression—see this post for a video of Paul Krugman trying to educate Will (it didn’t work)). He recently wrote a column about climate change in the Washington Post that was filled with errors, which the Post refused to correct. But now the Post has a column by Chris Mooney that does correct some of the errors. From Mooney’s column:
… Consider a few of Will’s claims from his Feb. 15 column, "Dark Green Doomsayers": In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that "emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then."
Yet there’s a bigger issue: It’s misleading to draw a parallel between "global cooling" concerns articulated in the 1970s and global warming concerns today. In the 1970s, the field of climate research was in a comparatively fledgling state, and scientific understanding of 20th-century temperature trends and their causes was far less settled. Today, in contrast, hundreds of scientists worldwide participate in assessments of the state of knowledge and have repeatedly ratified the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming — through the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific academies of various nations (including our own), and leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was "1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979." Again, though, there’s a bigger issue: Will’s focus on "global" sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it’s not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists’ expectations — according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.
Will also wrote that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of many respected scientific institutions that support the consensus that humans are driving global warming. Will probably meant that since 1998 was the warmest year on record according to the WMO — NASA, in contrast, believes that that honor goes to 2005 — we haven’t had any global warming since. Yet such sleight of hand would lead to the conclusion that "global cooling" sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive or the hotness of the years surrounding them. Climate scientists, knowing that any single year may trend warmer or cooler for a variety of reasons — 1998, for instance, featured an extremely strong El Niño — study globally averaged temperatures over time. To them, it’s far more relevant that out of the 10 warmest years on record, at least seven have occurred in the 2000s — again, according to the WMO…
I continue to get comments from readers who believe that climate change is not happening or, if it is, it has nothing to do with human activity. I try to point out the flaws in their reasoning, but it’s hopeless. Their usual advice to me is to do my own research (that is, get a PhD in climatology and then find a research position to review the literature). I’m a little old for that. I’ll just read the reports from current climatologists and base my ideas on that.
02.27.09
George Will must hate the blogosphere
Time was, George Will could rant and rave and get no pushback at all. (The editors at today’s Washington Post seem to be timorous lot.) But those days are over, and he hates it. From the Center for American Progress in an email:
Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to preempt criticism of the second round of blatant falsehoods from George Will on the subject of climate change, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt defended Will’s right to cite "data that most scientists reject" as factual. In his op-ed today, Will takes aim at the widespread criticism he received after his Feb.15 column. He maintains that he was accurate in using research from the Arctic Climate Research Center on the question of sea-ice levels, although the center put out a statement disavowing Will’s conclusions. In addition, he ignored a request from the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Media Matters for America to issue a correction based on his misrepresentation of the World Meteorological Organization’s position on global warming and his irresponsible rehashing of the "discredited myth that in the 1970s, there was broad scientific consensus that the Earth faced an imminent global cooling threat." After Will’s inaccurate column, the Washington Post assured the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson that Will’s column had been subject to a "multi-layer editing process" that "checks facts to the fullest extent possible."
02.21.09
What happens when reporters do their job
Very good article on how investigative reporting can actually work:
A Sacramento TV station is reporting that Chandra Levy’s parents received a call from authorities Friday afternoon notifying them that an arrest would be coming soon in the 2001 murder of their daughter.
A Washington, D.C., station says D.C. police "submitted evidence to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in an effort to get an arrest warrant" for Ingmar Guandique, identified in a 13-part Washington Post series as a suspect whose possible role in the crime was given less attention by law enforcement than the possible role of then-California representative Gary Condit.
In published notes about the series, the Post says, "The reporters discovered that the police investigation was overwhelmed with the white-hot media coverage fueled by the possible involvement of Rep. Gary Condit, a congressman from California."
Condit granted his first interview about the Chandra Levy case to Post reporters Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham for their series, published July 13-27, 2008.
The reporters also spoke with officials involved in the original investigation, two women attacked by Guandique, and Guandique himself.
In their Reporters’ Notebook, they list all the new information published in their series, including that as of July 27, "D.C. police and the prosecutors working on the Chandra Levy case have never interviewed the two women who were attacked in the park by Guandique."
The Washington Post reports that the investigation has recently focused on Guandique:
Continue reading. When reporters don’t simply accept and print "official views," their work can be very powerful.
02.14.09
Continuing lies from the Right
It’s like a low, constant sound of thunder in the distance: lie after lie after lie from the Right. I suppose that they have nothing else, since the truth hurts their cause so much. Here’s an example that Kevin Drum blogs:
Here’s the headline in today’s Washington Post:
Despite Pledges, Package Has Some Pork
And the evidence? $8 billion for high-speed rail, $2 billion for the lithium ion battery industry, $200 million for Filipino vets, and $100 million for small shipyards. And if that all sounds oddly non-porcine to you, you’re right:
None of the items in the sprawling $789 billion package are traditional earmarks — funding for a project inserted by a lawmaker bypassing the normal budgeting process — according to the White House and Democratic leaders….But many Republicans, anti-tax advocates and other critics argue that the final version of the bill is still larded with wasteful spending and dubious initiatives that will do little to create jobs or spur financial markets.
In other words, this isn’t pork at all. It’s just normal spending — and after all, if you’re going to have a stimulus bill you have to spend the money on something, don’t you? All this is, it turns out, is spending Republicans don’t like.
So why does the Post collude with the GOP to pretend instead that this is pork, when their story admits just the opposite? It is a mystery.
The Post colludes with the GOP because, as the GOP tells us, the media have a liberal bias. If that doesn’t make sense, then neither does the GOP.
01.27.09
Why I don’t read Richard Cohen
Glenn Greenwald shows in detail (through brief extracts) why Richard Cohen is not worth reading.
08.28.08
Are the mainstream media crazy? or stupid? or both?
Matthew Yglesias points out a particular example of a perennial problem: the mainstream press seems to be totally at sea with what is happening:
I wonder oftentimes how important newspaper columnists see their role. For example, Ruth Marcus writes this:
As issues become increasingly complex — voters can’t be expected to parse the technical differences between the candidates’ cap-and-trade emissions plans or the distributional effects of their tax cuts — biography, especially biography laced with conflict and resolution, becomes a proxy for providing assurance that the candidate can be counted on to get it right on the more difficult matters.
I could see Marcus’ column shifting in two plausible directions here. One would be to decide that she ought to try to use her skills as a writer, reporter, and analyst to explain the differences between the candidates’ climate plans or their tax policies. The different distributive impact of the candidates’ tax plans isn’t actually all that hard to explain. Obama’s plan would deliver lower taxes for 80 percent of Americans, but McCain’s plan would be better for the richest fifth of the population (wonder which group Marcus is in) while bringing in lower overall federal revenues. Another direction would be to use her skills as a writer, reporter, and analyst to say something substantive about the candidates’ biographies and whether or not those biographies give her confidence that the candidate can be counted on to get it right on the more difficult matters.
But she doesn’t do either of those things. Instead, she goes meta, dedicating her column to the proposition that “Obama needs to seem more familiar and approachable to voters, yes, but he also needs to convey — to use President Clinton’s famous phrasing — that he feels their pain.” This, even though her column cites numbers that indicate Obama is crushing McCain 49-36 “on the classic poll question about which candidate better understands the problems of people like you.” The Post’s website, meanwhile, gives the column the title “Obama’s Empathy Issue.” But what’s the issue? That he’s viewed as empathetic by way more people than his opponent?
