Reporting truth, exposing lies: The New York Times and the responsibility of journalism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Arthur Brisbane, the Times's public editor, writes:

I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge "facts" that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had "misunderstood" a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife's earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas "misunderstood," and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches "apologizing for America," a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the "post-truth" stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

Well, I'm a reader, so here's my answer:

Do you even have to ask this question? Of course reporters at the Times, and every other "news" publication with any credibility at all, should call out lies. And not just because Republicans happen to lie a lot. The Times should expose the lies of Democrats as well -- in fact of anyone it wishes to quote, cite, or report on.

As Joe Romm puts it at ThinkProgress: "Obviously any paper, but most especially the New York Times, has little value to society if it knowingly prints lies — or if it fails to do the minimal investigative reporting and fact-checking needed to determine if a statement by a newsmaker or, say, a global warming denier, is false."

Sure, there may occasionally be good reasons for not doing this, such as the need to cultivate good sources (as Booman notes). But it's really just about being accurate, as Steve Benen says. And while "neutrality" might be a good idea in some utopia where everyone tells the truth or has equally credible opinions, it seems to me that the consumers of news (i.e., us) deserve more, and better:

If an article is supposed to provide news consumers with the something more meaningful — offering context, scrutiny, and analysis that helps make sense of the arguments, giving the public a sense, not only of what the arguments are, but whether they're accurate — then media professionals, including beat reporters and their editors, have a broader responsibility to help the public separate fact from fiction.

And more often than not, they don't even try.

This generally draws howls from the right, in part because Republicans seem to lie more frequently and shamelessly, and in part because reality has a well-known liberal bias. Indeed, the constant, baseless accusations about "the liberal media" helped create the forced-neutrality dynamic in the first place.

But the result is a media that fails the public. By publishing falsehoods without scrutiny, for fear of being accused of "bias," the media is effectively leaving news consumers with the impression that lies and the truth deserve equal footing, which is ultimately untenable.

There you go. Now, New York Times, if you have any self-respect at all, go out and do something about it. In a democracy especially, where the rulers (i.e., the people) must be able to make informed decisions, is it essential that the media function not as a mouthpiece for competing spin but as a vehicle for truth. And to do that, they must tell you who's lying.

Beck goes bonkers: Communism is coming to the U.S.

By Nicholas Wilbur

Glenn Beck is worried. Not quite trembling, and not yet so crazy that he's barking at squirrels, but worried. The uprising in Egypt marks the beginning of the end. Communists and Islamic extremists are mounting an offensive against the Western world.

As proof of this "communist revolt," Beck cited a story in The New York Times:

This is what I've been called nuts for for the last two weeks. And basically, it's on the front page story, "Wired and Shrewd, Young Egyptians Guide Revolt," and what it talks about is how the Islamic extremists have gotten together with socialists and communists and they have sown the seeds of revolt.

It goes without saying that people who watch Beck's show on Fox News aren't big fans of The New York Times. Probably many of his fans (literally, fanatics) were offended by Beck's reliance on the unpatriotic, anti-American, and undeniably traitorous manifesto as evidence of this "insurrection" heading to the United States.

In the interests of context, I have lifted the following passages from the above-referenced news article, which Beck cites as proof of a communist-socialist-Islamic extremist movement:

• They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless — very deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the secret police.

• In the process many have formed some unusual bonds that reflect the singularly non-ideological character of the Egyptian youth revolt, which encompasses liberals, socialists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

• Islam Lotfi, a lawyer who is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Youth, said his group used to enlist others from the tiny leftist parties to stand with them in calling for civil liberties, to make their cause seem more universal. Many are now allies in the revolt, including Zyad el-Elaimy, a 30-year-old lawyer who was then the leader of a communist group.

Mr. Elaimy, who was imprisoned four times and suffered multiple broken limbs from torture for his political work, now works as an assistant to Mohamed ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the International Atomic Energy Agency. In turn, his group built ties to other young organizers....

• Most of the group are liberals or leftists, and all, including the Brotherhood members among them, say they aspire to a Western-style constitutional democracy where civic institutions are stronger than individuals.

But they also acknowledge deep divides, especially over the role of Islam in public life. Mr. Lotfi points to pluralistic Turkey. On the question of alcohol — forbidden by Islam — he suggested that drinking was a private matter but that perhaps it should be forbidden in public.

Asked if he could imagine an Egyptian president who was a Christian woman, he paused. "If it is a government of institutions," he said, "I don't care if the president is a monkey."

Okay, so to be clear there are, as Beck professes, communists, socialists, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood behind the organized rallies that, as of February 11, 2010, successfully overthrew an oppressive and corrupt dictator in Egypt.

But as the article clearly shows, these are not anarchists, radicals, or extremist Muslims aspiring for some new world order run by a fundamentalist Caliphate, as Beck believes. They are college-educated professionals, "mostly doctors and lawyers" (one of whom is Wael Ghonim, "a Google executive who was detained for 12 days but emerged this week as the movement's most potent spokesman") who were "born roughly around the time that President Hosni Mubarak first came to power... and [who] all have spent their adult lives bridling at the restrictions of the Egyptian police state – some undergoing repeated arrests and torture for the cause." Their cause being "a Western-style constitutional democracy."

If, as Beck claims, there are "communist revolutionaries who are willing to band with anyone here in America" and who are ready to spread their "cause" across the world, then America better brace for its own revolution. "It will come to America," according to Beck.

Grab your tinfoil helmets, pull out your Bibles, and sharpen your bayonets, folks. A "Western-style constitutional democracy" is heading this way.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Why Nancy Pelosi should be House minority leader

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There's a movement afoot to give Nancy Pelosi the boot, to remove her as Democratic leader in the House. Even the Times has gotten in on the action, editorializing (somewhat persuasively):

Nancy Pelosi has been an extremely effective speaker of the House for four years, shepherding hundreds of important bills toward passage and withstanding solid Republican opposition. Her work in passing health care reform and strong ethics oversight achieved what many thought was legislatively impossible. But is she really the best the Democrats can come up with as their leader as they slip into the minority.

Ms. Pelosi announced on Friday that she would seek the post of House minority leader. That job is not a good match for her abilities in maneuvering legislation and trading votes, since Democrats will no longer be passing bills in the House. What they need is what Ms. Pelosi has been unable to provide: a clear and convincing voice to help Americans understand that Democratic policies are not bankrupting the country, advancing socialism or destroying freedom.

If Ms. Pelosi had been a more persuasive communicator, she could have batted away the ludicrous caricature of her painted by Republicans across the country as some kind of fur-hatted commissar jamming her diktats down the public's throat. Both Ms. Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, are inside players who seem to visibly shrink on camera when defending their policies, rarely connecting with the skeptical independent voters who raged so loudly on Tuesday.

With President Obama proving to be a surprisingly diffident salesman of his own work, Congressional Democrats need a new champion to stand against a tightly disciplined Republican insurgency.

I don't buy it. While Pelosi certainly deserves some of the blame for the Democrats' loss of the House, and is certainly not a great communicator, she shouldn't be held up as the scapegoat for a loss that was unavoidable given the state of the economy, widespread anti-incumbent sentiment, and Democrats having to defend many largely Republican districts after their '06 and '08 "wave" wins, among other factors.

Now, I realize that the Times is actually praising Pelosi as a legislator. Its argument is that she just isn't right to lead the opposition, which requires communications skills that she doesn't seem to possess.

But I'm not sure that's really what's needed of the House minority leader. After all, Democrats should be able to communicate their policies and principles, and to advance their own narratives, from the White House and the Senate -- yes, yes, lest we forget, given how the midterms are being spun far and wide as an unmitigated triumph for the GOP, that the Democrats were not only not obliterated ("shellacking" is the popular word) but are actually still in power.

On what is needed in the House, Greg Sargent, contra the Times, makes a great point:

[A]ll this seems to badly miss what one of the most important roles of the new minority leader will be: to draw a very sharp line against GOP efforts to roll back Obama's accomplishments.

This task could matter at least as much for the new minority leader as communications or presenting a new face for the party. And while Pelosi clearly has a negative and polarizing image, few would argue that she hasn't succeeded at building coalitions and maintaining unity at moments of extreme political stress -- exactly what she'll need to do if she's going to hold the line against repeal efforts. 

He continues:

The key thing to understand is that we're about to enter a period of bruising procedural wars -- precisely the type of thing that Pelosi has already excelled at. Republicans are already discussing ways to starve the new health-care law by, say, limiting funding to agencies that would implement portions of it or using spending bills to block federal insurance regulations they don't like. The next minority leader will have to be ruthless in her willingness to use procedural tactics to combat this kind of stuff.

So why not Pelosi, who has a strong record of standing up for liberal-progressive policies and principles and against the determined partisanship of those across the aisle?

The midterms, after all, were not a rejection of liberalism, nor of the Democrats' agenda -- even if this is what Republicans (and many in the media) would have us believe. On the issues, the Democrats remain popular, or at least their policies do. The Republicans have no mandate to govern, and Democrats certainly weren't given a mandate to move to the center. To the contrary, the poor performance of Blue Dogs suggests that the party should reject appeasement and commit itself to a liberal-progressive agenda that embraces what they've done so far, including health-care reform, and seeks to bring meaningful change to America.

In other words, there is simply no mandate for someone like Blue Dog Heath Shuler to take over the party in the House.

I've never been a huge Pelosi fan, but there's no denying the success she had as speaker, not least in keeping a rather disunited party together, and, with Republicans itching for a fight, she may just be the best person for the job.

Waterboarding is torture except when the U.S. government says it isn't and The New York Times and other major newspapers obediently stop calling it torture

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm a day late getting to this -- thanks, Canada Day! -- but an extremely important study was released the other day showing that the mainstream media, including large outlets like The New York Times, essentially caved in to the government, that is, to the Bush-Cheney administration, when it came to reporting on waterboarding as torture:

Is waterboarding torture? If you picked up a major U.S. newspaper before 2004, the answer would likely be yes, according to a new Harvard University study.

But in the post-9/11 world, when the practice of immobilizing and virtually drowning detainees became a politically charged issue, that straightforward definition grew murky. The study, conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, examined coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and found a noticeable shift in language concerning waterboarding.

"From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture," the study noted. But the study found that things changed in the years when "war on terror" became part of the American lexicon.

The New York Times defined waterboarding as torture, or effectively implied that it was, 81.5 percent of the time in articles until 2004, the study found. But during 2002-2008 — when the George W. Bush White House made a concerted effort to normalize harsh interrogation methods for use on terror detainees — the Times "called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles." That’s 1.4 percent of the time.

The study also noted a disparity in how newspapers defined waterboarding when the United States employed the practice versus its use by other nations — in the latter instance, newspapers more readily called the practice torture.

So much, it would seem, for journalistic independence and integrity -- to the extent that the media had much left anyway. Given how the media establishment operates, after all, this is hardly all that surprising.

Andrew Sullivan is justifiably furious: 

But it is not an opinion that waterboarding is torture; it is a fact, recognized by everyone on the planet as such - and by the NYT in its news pages as such - for centuries. What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to accommodate the Cheneyite right.

So their journalism is dictated by whatever any government says. In any dispute, their view is not: what is true? But: how can we preserve our access to the political right and not lose pro-torture readers? If you want a locus classicus for why the legacy media has collapsed, look no further.

*****

This is not editing. It is surrender. It is not journalism; it is acquiescence to propaganda. It strikes me as much more egregious a failing than, say, the Jayson Blair scandal. Because it reaches to the very top, was a conscious decision and reveals the empty moral center in the most important newspaper in the country.

When historians look back and try to understand how the US came to be a country that legitimizes torture, the New York Times will be seen to have played an important role in euphemizing it, enabling it, and entrenching it. The evidence shows conclusively that there is not a shred of argument behind the dramatic shift in 2002 - just plain cowardice.

In my view, the people who made that decision should resign. They have revealed that they are nothing but straws in the wind - in a time when moral clarity and courage were most needed.

Extremely well put. And I agree.

For more, see Steve Benen and, of course, Glenn Greenwald, who had a fantastic post on Wednesday responding to the study. As he correctly points out, such "compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary."

It's great, and essential to any liberal democracy, to have freedom of the press. But what if the press doesn't want to be free?

The New York Times to start charging for online content

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The New York Times is reporting that The New York Times "will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations." The New York Times is presumably in a good position to be "familiar with internal deliberations" at The New York Times. The decision of The New York Times to start charging for access to online content follows "a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper."

While I understand the need to "do anything we can to raise money," as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman put it, I suspect that, once the charging begins, I will have little to nothing to do with The New York Times online. And I hope that readers around the world send the same message.

After all, do we really need The New York Times in our lives? Is is really such an essential media outlet? And do we really need to pay for it? It is arrogance and delusion to think that The New York Times is so important that people will pay for it.

Perhaps declining readership will let the geniuses at The New York Times know that this is a terrible idea.

Ben Stein's money

By Capt. Fogg


I have to say I loathe Ben Stein, so I was pleased to hear that The New York Times has fired him for conflict of interest. Dispensing financial advice from the Sunday Business Section while being a spokesman for Freescore.com, which offers free monthly credit reports for only $359, seems reason enough, but of course there was the financial advice itself. Ben gets his prognostications from the same source on Neptune that Jim Cramer does:

I’m writing this on Aug. 13, 2007… the stock market is cheap on a price-earnings basis, profits are fabulous… and in the long run, both here and abroad, stocks are a lovely place to be. [emphasis mine]

That's classic Ben Stein bad advice and bad enough to suggest seppuku to a more honorable man. In fact, it closely mirrors the bad advice of his close friend Cramer and to the point where Stein was willing to tell us all that Jon Stewart had "yelled and cursed" at him when in fact, it was not true. That's classic Ben Stein projection -- or outright lie, if you prefer. I did mention that I loathe him, didn't I?

For anyone who still thinks Ben has ever had much to offer beyond the faux elitism, the wildly dishonest defense of creationism and enduring belief that Richard Nixon was not a crook, I will refer you to the Ben Stein Watch archives, about to close it's "doors" now that the mission has been accomplished. Let's hope it really has been.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Kristol channeling

By Mustang Bobby

When William Kristol left his job at the New York Times in January after a year of error-riddled and gobsmackingly goofy op-eds, he must have left the keys to that filing cabinet for Ross Douthat. His column today is so full of gross generalizations and just plain silly comparisons between Republican and Democratic states and what it portends for the Obama administration that you have to wonder if Mr. Kristol didn't sneak in to the editing room and have at it.

Mr. Douthat compares the status of two big states -- California and Texas -- and guess which one comes out smelling like a rose:

In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November. Fourteen states are facing 2010 budget gaps that exceed 20 percent of their G.D.P.; only two went for John McCain. (Strikingly, they’re McCain’s own Arizona and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.) Of the nine states that have raised taxes this year, closing deficits at the expense of growth, almost all are liberal bastions.

As long as we're making gross generalizations, let's throw in one more: California and Texas both have Republican governors. And if California truly was a "liberal bastion," it wouldn't have passed Prop 8. Just because a state voted for Obama last year doesn't make it a liberal bastion, either; North Carolina also went for Obama, as did Florida. California's budget woes go back a lot further than just the current recession, back through administrations of both parties. Meanwhile, Texas may have a balanced budget, but that also may be due to the fact that the state doesn't spend a whole lot of money on things like education, and it shows. He also throws in the knock on universal health care and points out that the president is pushing "a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts." What Mr. Douthat forgets -- or ignores -- is that the Massachusetts plan was promoted and signed by Mitt Romney, who is often mentioned as the leading contender as the GOP candidate in 2012.

To complete the Kristol-vision, he brings up the false-equivalency argument; the Republicans have their scandals with their mistresses and hikes along the Appalachian trail, but the Democrats are corrupt, too; look at Rod Blagojevich in Illinois and William Jefferson in New Orleans. Fine; no one said the Democrats were pure, but while Gov. Blagojevich has been impeached and removed from office and former Rep. Jefferson is awaiting the verdict, none of the GOP horn-dogs have resigned their offices or given any indication that they intend to. Holding up your opposition as being just as corrupt as you are is not a good place to start preaching about political purity.

Mr. Douthat concedes that "Obama is still broadly popular, and the public is still broadly sympathetic to his administration’s agenda. But the money has to come from somewhere. You can’t have a bold new liberal era without the growth to pay for it." Well, maybe if you hadn't stood silently by or cheered on the people who pissed the money away in the first place, we'd have it. And then you could complain about liberal agendas without sounding so much like a flaming hypocrite.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

On Gates arrest, Obama says Cambridge police "acted stupidly," conservatives freak out

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Bill "Krazy" Kristol -- as krazy, and as shamelessly partisan and neoconish, at the WaPo as he was at the NYT -- may think, spinning recklessly, that Obama was irresponsibly attacking the police when he asserted in his press conference last night that the Cambridge cops who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own house "acted stupidly," but the truth is that, even in 2009, it takes a black man in the Oval Office to point out the obvious.

Alas, the obvious is no longer obvious when filtered through the ideological prism -- see no evil, hear no evil, at least when it comes to race (unless it's the alleged reverse racism of minorities like Sotomayor, which white men across the land are oh-so-sensitive about, any threat to the privilege of their little establishment) -- of the likes of Bill Kristol.

**********

Obama has since defended his comments, and rightly so, saying that "everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed."

For more, including all the Kristol-like right-wing reaction, see Memeorandum.

**********

Most stupid of all, perhaps, Kristol claims in his post that Gates was likely to blame for the incident. And why? Simply because he's a Harvard professor -- who are all, it seems, stupid and arrogant.

This is why Kristol sides instinctually with the Cambridge cops.

Really? This sort of inane, instinctual commentary is what got Kristol a post at the WaPo after his dismissal from the NYT?

**********

The Boston Herald is reporting that the cop who stupidly arrested Gates tried valiantly to keep Celtics star Reggie Lewis alive.

And the point is what? That a good and noble act excuses all else? Forever?

Please.

**********

The NYT article linked above stupidly claims that "Obama has sought to transcend, if not avoid, the issue of race."

Really? Yes, I would agree that much of his rhetoric has been post-racial, but he has never avoided the issue.

What he has sought to do throughout his political career -- think back to his 2004 DNC keynote address -- is build bridges across America's deepest divides. In his brilliant speech on race during the primary campaign last year, partly a response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright conflagration, he emphasized that America's still-abundant racial divides pose an obstacle to the realization of the more perfect union that the Founders envisioned.

Just because he talks about overcoming these racial divides -- that is, about "transcendence" -- it doesn't mean he is oblivious to the realities of the present, nor that he wants to avoid race altogether.

Apparently, though, talking maturely about race and racism flies over the heads not just of conservatives but of reporters at the NYT.

The failures of Krazy Kristol; or, why he should be fired from the NYT

By Michael J.W. Stickings

At The New Yorker, George Packer makes a strong case for firing Krazy Bill Kristol from the Op-Ed page of The New York Times:

It's time for the newspaper to move on. For Pinch Sulzberger and Andy Rosenthal to renew Kristol's one-year contract, in 2009, would be for the Times to reward failure -- and look where that got Wall Street and General Motors. It's not just that Kristol isn't another Safire (although an absence of verbal playfulness and wit is a consistent hallmark of the Kristol prose style). It's not just that his views are utterly predictable (if that were firing grounds, close to half the Times columnists would lose their jobs). It's not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn't attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain's "suspension" of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell -- it was an unpredictable year.

The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn't take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp ("Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?") that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.

For what it's worth, I could not agree more. Most of my opposition to Kristol is political and philosophical, but, those differences aside, I have found his Times columns -- to the extent that I even bother to read them -- to be consistently poor. Simply put, he has been an embarrassment. If the Times really wants another conservative to pontificate alongside David Brooks, I'm sure there are far worthier choices out there. At least they can pick one who isn't a partisan hack.

YES THEY CAN! ... Yes Men Strike Again!

By J. Thomas Duffy

You may have heard about this today, or, perhaps seen it (maybe even have gotten a copy).


Those irascible gents from The Yes Men struck again.

Fake 'NYT' Distributed: War Ends! Tom Friedman Resigns!

Fake copies of the NYT, possibly a year in the making, were distributed in the city today, and apparently some commuters thought it was for real. The banner announces the end of the Iraq war and other stories reveal that Tom Friedman has resigned and so on. It's set in the future--next July.

Gawker is credited with tracking it back to The Yes Men.

How good was it?

Liberal Pranksters Hand Out Times Spoof

Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a co-author of “The Trust,” a history of the family that controls The Times, said in a telephone interview that the paper should be flattered by the spoof.

“I would say if you’ve got one, hold on to it,” Mr. Jones, a former Times reporter, said of the fake issue. “It will probably be a collector’s item. I’m just glad someone thinks The New York Times print edition is worthy of an elaborate hoax. A Web spoof would have been infinitely easier. But creating a print newspaper and handing it out at subway stations? That takes a lot of effort.”

He added, “I consider this a gigantic compliment to The Times.”

You can go HERE to visit the website of the spoof edition (and be patient, it's got some heavy traffic, so you may have to try a few times to get on).

And, if you are not hip to The Yes Men, whose motto, more or less, is "Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else."

Here's an example of one of their previous efforts:

Yes Men Strike Oil: Civil Disobedients Make Modest Flesh-to-Fuel Proposal

"Without oil, at least four billion people would starve. This spiral of trouble would make the oil infrastructure utterly useless" -- unless their bodies could be turned into fuel.

That was the satirical message delivered by two corporate ethics activists to the Gas and Oil Exposition 2007 in Calgary, Alberta. The activists, part of political trickster collective the Yes Men, used the Exposition to stage their latest theatre of corporate absurdity, with Exxon/Mobil and the Natural Petroleum Council playing the fools.

The prank, intended as a critique of the fossil fuel industry's influence on energy policy, caused confusion and consternation on the final day of the Exposition, one of the industry's largest gatherings.

After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to "huge global calamities" and disrupt oil supplies, Wolff told the audience "that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could "keep fuel flowing" by transforming the billions of people who die into oil," said a Yes Men press release.

Yes Man Mike Bonnano, posing as an Exxon representative named Florian Osenberg, added that "With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left."

More on The Yes Man website: "Exxon's Climate-Victim Candles."

Also this -- Halliburton solves global warming!

Hysterical stuff!

So, for a day, at least, the old Grey Lady, The New York Times, was "All The News Fit To Spoof."


(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

And the endorsements just keep rolling in for Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For example, from The New York Times, which provides a useful issue-by-issue endorsement: "This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities."

And also from former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan: "From the very beginning I have said I am going to support the candidate that has the best chance for changing the way Washington works and getting things done and I will be voting for Barack Obama and clapping." (And, you know, there was the big deal about his book a while back, the insider account of Bush and the Iraq War. I still think that was overblown. McClellan have have come around some, but he's still a gooey Republican-lite. It's one thing to want things done. What exactly does he want done, though?)

Actually, Obama is doing quite well with the Bush "coalition" generally. And he's way, way ahead with Jewish voters.

For more newspaper endorsements, see here.

Judy Miller and Fox News, made for each other

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Want another reason not to watch Fox News? And another reason not to take it seriously?

It has hired Judy Miller as an analyst.

That would be Judith Miller, former New York Times reporter, Scooter Libby buddy, Ahmed Chalabi confidante, and Iraq War cheerleader. As the WaPo's Howard Kurtz puts it, nicely, "she is nothing if not controversial":

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor's note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had "become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war."

Right, because (of course) she had nothing to do with any of it. She was just getting it all wrong, reporting in the NYT, as fact, willingly and eagerly, what she was being spoon-fed by Chalabi and the propagandists at the Iraqi National Congress. She wasn't a "lightning rod," she was part of the problem, a reporter who made up the news to suit her political positions and career ambitions. (For more on Miller's active role in spreading the lies, see the fantastic book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.)

Sure, she went to jail for a time for refusing to divulge her Plame leak sources -- and for playing along with Libby -- but she's hardly the First Amendment martyr she's making herself out to be. It's always been about her, not her supposed principles.

Basically, there's no reason to trust anything she has to say. Which makes her a perfect fit for Fox News.

Krazy Kristol and the Dominatrix: The neocon extraordinaire swoons before Sarah Palin

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm still feeling unwell today, and my fragile states of mind and body weren't helped when I made the mistake of reading Krazy Kristol's "column" in the Times this morning. I put quotation marks around column because it isn't really a column at all but rather, like so much of his blather, a self-serving, self-aggrandizing tripe. Kristol may or may not be an intelligent man -- I've met him a couple of times and spoken to him briefly on one occasion, and I would say he is, but he has let partisanship and self-advancement get the better of him -- but what he churns out for America's paper of record is embarrassingly bad (which is to say, the Times should be embarrassed to have him on their pages).

Today's "column" -- "The Wright Stuff" -- is about Palin, or rather his own infatuation with Palin, and the "advice" he gives her. What it reveals about him, with respect to her, is that he is both her teacher and her obedient slave. As is the case with other right-wing males, like Sean Hannity and Rich Lowry, the attraction is deeply sexual. He longs for her, or at least places her on a pedestal, acting the lustful sycophant eager to please. As Tom Perrotta wrote in Slate recently, Palin is "the sexy puritan," "a powerful new christian right archetype." She's an ideal, and Kristol, a Jew who supports a party that espouses Christian theocracy, is at her feet.

But of course he also has advice to impart, and his advice fits with where the McCain campaign is right now: Go negative, go nasty, smear Obama, now! Over the weekend, Palin herself accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists," specifically William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground. Needless to day, it's a false charge, but it's one she's continuing to make. This isn't enough for Kristol, though, who, in his "hard-hitting" phone conversation with Palin -- yes, this is what passes for the "new" Sarah Palin's engagement with the media -- suggests that she go after Obama over Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Hence the title of the column. This is what it's all about.) And Palin bites: "To tell you the truth, Bill, I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."

Why? Because it's done, over. Because Hillary exhausted the issue during the primaries. Because Obama gave a brilliant speech back in March distancing himself from and denouncing his former pastor -- and pointing the way forward on race. Because in April McCain himself criticized the North Carolina GOP over an ad linking Obama to Wright.

But times have changed. Obama is well ahead in the polls, the focus is on the economy, McCain's desperate, and Palin's playing the attack dog. What does she know about Wright or Ayers? Nothing. She's being fed smears and eagerly lapping them up and regurgitating them at every possible opportunity.

This is what the McCain campaign wants, to shift the race away from the economy, to turn it into a culture war in microcosm, a character clash, with McCain the war hero and POW (as we are constantly reminded, because he really does exploit his past for personal gain), along with Palin the all-American hockey mom, up against Obama the dangerous, uppity black guy with the imposing black wife and the Muslim middle name who hangs out with terrorists and hates America, along with Biden the consummate Washington insider. And, of course, the likes of Krazy Kristol are all-too-eager to help out.

No matter that Palin has her own problems, not least with the Alaska Independence Party and Thomas Muthee, not to mention with her long record of corruption and cronyism in Wasilla and Juneau. The facts don't count here, just the smears, and, with McCain clearly unable to win the election on the issues (because the people are against him on the issues), there will a concerted effort over the next four weeks to tear down Obama.

Expect much more of the same from Sarah Palin. And from Krazy Kristol.

Suicide-bombing headlines specify females, never males

By LindaBeth

I had this same criticism a month or so back, the last time I saw a newspaper headline about female bombers, but I didn’t write about it then. Today, in reading The New York Times, I read: "Female Suicide Bomber Kills 2 in Iraqi Province."

Now, it’s not that I don’t understand the significance of female suicide-bombers in particular. While this story doesn’t address it, past articles with similar headlines have at least mentioned:

Fifteen other women have carried out suicide bomb attacks in Diyala Province, according to General Rubaie. Islamic rules prevent men, including security officers conducting searches, from touching women. Compounding the predicament is a scarcity of female Iraqi police and soldiers who might otherwise fill the gap.

While I am somewhat annoyed when stories, such as today’s, mention a female bomber in the headline, but don’t discuss why that’s significant in the story, I take issue more with the persistent selective gender-naming. Male suicide bombers are reported in headlines as “suicide bombers”; female suicide bombers are “named” as such. I have blogged on this in the past in discussing ex-nomination, and Ashley guest blogging over at Feministe interestingly argues that women’s gender is specified when they perpetrate acts of violence to detract from the reality that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violent acts. The repetition of women’s gender in such reports works to mask violence as a gender-neutral activity. My issue is at a more basic linguistic level. Previously I wrote:

In conversation (your own and others’), watch how people are described. Typically, we use “identity” descriptors only with reference to women, gay men, lesbians, people of color, non-Western ethnicities, (and also non-Christian religions)… in other words, the default category for a “person” is a white, hetero, male. A person is only someone “other” than that when specified.

This is what’s referred to as “ex-nomination” (coined by the semiotician Roland Bathes) -- being ‘unnamed’. What is unnamed is what is seen as a ‘natural’ commonsensical category. Those of us who are not white heterosexual men become those with “marked bodies”-bodies who must be named to be identified. In other words, people who are women, or black are designated as such (as if identifying them according to said label adds particular meaning to who they are as a person), while white hetero men are simply “people,” and are thus permitted to establish meaningful identities in ways not shaped by said societal identity labels.

These headlines bother me for that reason: that it perpetuates the assumption that an individual is a (white, hetero) male unless specified otherwise.

It’s true that we also specify male for characteristics that are deemed “female” (a.k.a. “male nurse”), which could in part account for its usage in headlines–because we assume suicide bombers to be male. But Western assumptions are no excuse for the persistent usage of gendered terms by journalists. Would it really be so hard to say “suicide bomber” in the headline and then to discuss the gender and its implications, if necessary, in the body of the story? Or since gender is in fact an issue, use male and female descriptors in the headlines? Otherwise, we reinforce the notion of male as default.

UPDATE 8/15: Funny that this is a trend I have been seeing, and as soon as I write about it, the NYT changes its pattern: see today's "Bomber Kills 18 on Shiite Pilgrimage in Iraq." The "bomber" is actually a female! Now that's a first!

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)

NYT: women bloggers are sooo fashionable!

By LindaBeth

Yea for The New York Times reporting on BlogHer’s annual conference.

Boo for printing it in the Fashion and Style section, as woman-related stories routinely are.

It’s pretty pathetic that I should be so thrilled that the recent news about gender-parity in math scores was actually reported by the Times in the U.S./Education section. Yes, it’s awfully nice that the Times was actually able to put a story about females in its proper place in their paper. But actually doing their job doesn’t get them any cookies.

So, dear readers, I write letters:

Dear New York Times Editors:

Overall, I appreciate the quality of your paper and it is one of my primary sources for obtaining news. However, your history of inappropriately filing news items that involve women is obscene and, quite frankly, is unacceptable, especially for a new source of your report.

The most recent example is the coverage of the 2008 BlogHer conference, printed July 27, 2008 in the Fashion and Style section. Other articles about bloggers and blogging are printed in more substantial sections like the Technology or U.S. Politics sections. I understand that your placement often relates blogging to another topic (i.e. business, the election) but the “default” category for blogging (or any topic) women is not Fashion and Style. And since the article specifically addressed women blogging as a political act, it does not belong in the Fashion and Style section.

On July 13, 2008, you also ran the joint review of books by feminist author and blogger Jessia Valenti and journalist Kathleen Parker, which adressed contemporary gender-based political issues. It belongs in the Books section, not the Fashion and Style section.

Other female bloggers have written about your story misplacement when it comes to stories about women. May 13, 2008’s story about the lack of gender diversity in the sciences (obviously) belongs in the Science section, not the Fashion and Style section. And the list goes on.

It’s great that you’re writing about gender issues, exciting studies debunking harmful gender myths, feminist writers, and women’s activism. But putting these stories in Fashion and Style, rather than where they’d be put if they were about men, is nothing short of insulting and condescending, as if issues facing and addressed by women are somehow frivolous and irrelevent to society as a whole.

Issues and news related to women do not by default belong in the Fashion and Style section of your paper. Fashion and Style is not inherently a “female” topic and gender analyses are not periperal, light, fluffy, innocent, and inconsequential. Do not insult us and degrade us by treating women who are active in politics, do science, are participating in technology, and the like, as mere “style.”

Sincerely,

LindaBeth

author, don’t ya wish your girlfriend was smart like me?

And I encourage you all to do the same. No copyrights on my letter, either: steal away!

executive-editor@nytimes.com

managing-editor@nytimes.com

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)

(Stupid) Headline of the Day (NYT bratwurst edition)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Elisabeth Bumiller's article isn't terrible, but the headline -- and I assume her editors are at fault -- is incredibly stupid:

Hey, Obama: There's Bratwurst in Ohio, Too (but No Cheering Masses)

Right, because Obama's Berlin speech was just a substance-free photo-op. And because giving an inspirational and enlightening speech to 200,000 people is nothing next to eating at a sausage haus in Columbus? I know it's just a headline, but it feeds off of and into the larger media narrative that posits Obama as an out-of-touch elitist and opportunist next to the down-to-earth, straight-talkin' McCain.

And I, for one, would rather have the POTUS inspiring and enlightening and reaching out to and connecting with America's friends around the world than knocking back some bratwurst (at a politically calculated campaign stop -- come on, bratwurst at a German restaurant... what, to make Obama look bad for actually being in Germany?)

Thanks for lowering the bar again, New York Times, supposed "paper of record."

Hey, NYT: Gender politics are not a "lifestyle"

By LindaBeth

As much as it made me nauseous to read Kathleen Parker’s quotes in The New York Times‘ recent review of hers and Jessica Valenti’s new(ish) books, it made me even more ill to see that, yet again, gender politics have been relegated to the “Style”-”Fashion & Style” section. That section is also home to “Dining & Wine,” “Home & Garden,” “Weddings/Celebrations,” and “TMagazine.” The subheader to the review title “Endangered Species or Still the Enemy?” (because clearly gender is either akin to biological survival or war) is “Books of Style.”

Books of style? Gender issues have incredible political, economic, and social implications, and books discussing them are ‘books of style’? Seriously, WTF?! Or should I have expected this from a review that uses the antiquated and inaccurate term “battle of the sexes” to describe the problems that these books address.

I may be going out on a limb here, but shouldn’t this book review be in, um, books?

Dear New York Times,

Book about gender issues are books. They are neither style nor fashion, lifestyle nor ‘non-news.’ They are not frivolous, expendable, or irrelevant. Gender studies texts are important, provocative, meaningful, and essential books.

Please list them in the “Books” section.

Sincerely,

lindabeth

(Cross-posted to Smart Like Me.)