Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli worried "that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view" -- a concern echoed by his deputies and Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander.

At The New York Times, managing editor Jill Abramson said the Times suffered from "insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio" and that the paper would assign an editor to monitor such media. Public editor Clark Hoyt criticized the Times for being too slow to pick up the ACORN allegations, fretting that the delay made the Times look "partisan." And Hoyt took the Times to task for what he thought was too great an emphasis on the political motivations behind the attacks on ACORN:

By stressing the politics, the article irritated more readers. "A suspicious person might see an attempt to deflect criticism of Acorn by highlighting how those pesky conservatives are at it again," said Albert Smith of Chatham, N.J.

I thought politics was emphasized too much, at the expense of questions about an organization whose employees in city after city participated in outlandish conversations about illegal and immoral activities. (Acorn suggested some videos were doctored but fired or suspended many of the employees.)

Hoyt went on to criticize the Times article for omitting mention of a video of, and allegations about, ACORN workers in Brooklyn.

The hand-wringing at the Post and the Times about being insufficiently attuned to conservative arguments should ring false to any fair-minded person who remembers the role those papers played in the relentless hyping of Clinton-era non-scandals, their heavily slanted coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, or their disastrously inadequate coverage of the Bush administration's march to war. (Alexander and the Post editors have ducked requests that they reconcile the paper's coverage of those events with their statements that the Post needs to be more responsive to conservatives.)

But even worse than the myopic view of their treatment of conservatives over the years was the misguided premise that the media should pay attention to certain people simply because they are ideologically conservative -- as if a person's ideology, rather than the accuracy and honesty and importance of his claims, determines whether he should be taken seriously.

That's dangerously wrong. It's the kind of thinking that leads the media to grant equal weight to scientists who say the Earth is warming and politicians who respond by pointing out the continued existence of snow.

And, indeed, the conservative media have spent the last several months proving again and again that they simply do not deserve to be taken seriously.

Take, for example, the ACORN tapes that the Post and Times apologized for not covering sooner. Turns out the right-wing activists behind them were badly misrepresenting what they showed (we're still waiting for the Times to correct its false claim that James O'Keefe was dressed in an outlandish pimp costume while meeting with the ACORN employees). And the Brooklyn district attorney has reportedly found that the tapes were misleadingly edited:

The video that unleashed a firestorm of criticism on the activist group ACORN was a "heavily edited" splice job that only made it appear as though the organization's workers were advising a pimp and prostitute on how to get a mortgage, sources said yesterday.

The findings by the Brooklyn DA, following a 5½-month probe into the video, secretly recorded by conservative provocateurs James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, means that no charges will be filed.

Many of the seemingly crime-encouraging answers were taken out of context so as to appear more sinister, sources said.

Remember: Times public editor Clark Hoyt criticized his paper for not covering that Brooklyn tape. And he complained that the paper's coverage of the ACORN allegations focused too much on the political motives of the accusers. Think maybe he'd like to have that one back?

Or consider The Weekly Standard's comically inept attempts to create scandal out of whole cloth, which involve inventing a totally baseless allegation of vote-buying, then rapidly back-tracking once they're called on the improbability of their claims.

Then there's the absurd-on-its-face conspiracy theory that President Obama wants to ban fishing. Believing such a thing requires tinfoil-hat-level paranoia and inability to reason -- and yet Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and several right-wing bloggers eagerly peddled that nonsense. Stupid, or dishonest? It doesn't matter -- either way, it's further evidence that nobody should take anything they say seriously.

And how about Beck's claim that an alternative measure of the poverty level proposed by the Obama administration would classify him as "in poverty," despite his millions of dollars in annual earnings. That's obviously false -- yet Glenn Beck said it. How can you trust anything said by someone who is willing to say things that are obviously false? On Fox & Friends, the hosts assert that Democrats "want Americans to pay 70% of their income in taxes." Is that true? Of course not! So why do they say it? Because they have no hesitation whatsoever when it comes to lying.

And yet The New York Times and The Washington Post think they should pay extra attention to claims that come from the right-wing media; that they should be quicker to repeat the nonsense churned out every day by this pack of professional liars, simply because they are conservatives. But the decades-long track record suggests the opposite: The fact that Fox News or The Weekly Standard is promoting some story is pretty good reason to assume it isn't newsworthy.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Unfortunately, that obsession has not actually resulted in reporters consistently getting the story right. Basic facts that should be central to the debate over the propriety of reconciliation have gotten lost in the mix. First, nobody is talking about passing the entire health care reform package via reconciliation -- the Senate has already passed its bill, and did so by overcoming a filibuster. Reconciliation would, instead, be used to pass a much smaller package of changes to that legislation via majority vote. Second, there is nothing hasty or debate-stifling about using reconciliation in this case: Congress has been considering health care reform for more than a year. Finally, reconciliation isn't all that unusual, having been used in connection with some of the highest-profile legislation in recent decades, including President Bush's tax cuts and the welfare reform bill President Clinton signed. Those are facts, and they are not in dispute.

And yet the media are referring to reconciliation as the "nuclear option" and portraying it as an obscure procedural gimmick being considered in an attempt to circumvent Senate rules and "ram" health care legislation through Congress. The conservative media are going so far as to claim that use of reconciliation would be "unprecedented."

Funny, I don't remember this level of media outrage in 2003, when Republicans passed President Bush's tax cut legislation via reconciliation.

But what's really striking about the media's approach to reconciliation is how much it differs from the way they treated the Republicans' use of reconciliation to pass President Bush's 2003 tax cut legislation. Only two Democrats voted for that bill -- one of whom, Georgia Sen. Zell Miller, doesn't really count, as he was a de facto Republican -- and Vice President Dick Cheney had to break a 50-50 tie. (Three Senate Republicans joined 46 Democrats and one independent in voting against the bill, which these days would be described as "bipartisan opposition.")

And yet, in the weeks leading up to the reconciliation vote, the media didn't portray the Republicans as ramming tax cuts through Congress via unprecedented use of an obscure procedural gimmick to circumvent Senate rules. In fact, they didn't say much of anything at all about reconciliation.

The Senate reconciliation vote occurred on May 23, 2003. In the month of May, only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation for the tax cuts -- a May 13, 2003, article that devoted a few paragraphs to wrangling over whether Senate Republicans could assign the bill number they wanted (S.2) to a bill approved via reconciliation. The Times also used the word "reconciliation" in a May 9, 2003, editorial, but gave no indication whatsoever of what it meant.

And that's more attention than most news outlets gave to the use of reconciliation that month. The Washington Post didn't run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words "reconciliation" and "senate." Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent.

Cable news didn't care, either. CNN ran a quote by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the substance of the tax cuts in which he used the word "reconciliation" in passing -- but that was it. Fox News aired two interviews in which Republican members of Congress referred to the reconciliation process in order to explain why the tax cuts would be temporary, but neither they nor the reporters interviewing them treated reconciliation as a controversial tactic.

And ABC, CBS, NBC? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Even the insider publications that tend to cover legislative minutia paid little attention to the Republicans' use of reconciliation. National Journal made passing mentions on May 3 and May 10, 2003, neither of which so much as hinted that reconciliation was unusual, inappropriate, or controversial. And Roll Call mentioned reconciliation exactly once: a May 14, 2003, article about Republican angst over having committed a "procedural snafu" that delayed their use of reconciliation. The article quoted Grassley saying of Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin: "He could be technically right. ... But there's no need to have a strict interpretation of the rules like that." And, Roll Call noted, "Some GOP aides even hinted that Frumin's position as parliamentarian could be in danger if he continued to make rulings that disadvantaged their political goals."

You'd think that if reconciliation was really the controversial and heavy-handed tactic the media is currently portraying it as, there would have been a ton of media coverage of Senate Republican aides suggesting the parliamentarian would be fired if he didn't let the GOP handle reconciliation however they wanted. Particularly in light of the fact that Frumin was elevated to his post by the Senate Republican leadership in 2001 -- after they fired his predecessor for issuing rulings that complicated their efforts to use reconciliation for that year's round of tax cuts.

But there wasn't even a blip -- not a single mention in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or on ABC, CBS, NBC, or CNN. Well, that's not quite true: The Times did mention GOP unhappiness with Frumin on May 31, 2003, -- more than a week after the reconciliation vote took place.

Even if you look at the five months preceding the May 23, 2003, reconciliation vote, you find very little major media attention paid to the process. And when reconciliation was mentioned, it was only in passing, without any indication it was controversial. Like the March 14, 2003, Washington Post article that simply stated, "Parliamentary -- or 'reconciliation' -- language in both the Senate and House budget resolutions ... would ensure that a $ 726 billion tax package would need only 51 votes for Senate passage rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster blocking a floor vote." Or Tim Russert's matter-of-fact statement on January 7, 2003: "[T]he Republicans are going to use a technique called reconciliation. It's a budget process where they would in effect take away the right of the Democrats to filibuster, which means you would only need 51 votes to pass this legislation." And that's about it: The Times, Post, the three broadcast networks and CNN combined for fewer than a half-dozen other mentions of the process over the course of five months, none of which portrayed it as controversial.

The current hyperventilation about the use of reconciliation is completely inconsistent with the way the media covered reconciliation in 2003. Back then, they didn't treat reconciliation as an unusual or controversial tactic -- in fact, they barely noticed it, even when Republicans made noises about firing the parliamentarian they elevated when they fired the previous parliamentarian.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Cook's Illustrated's success in charging for online content is remarkable when you consider just how easy it is to find free recipes on the Internet. From the Food Network's Web page to Epicurious.com to countless amateur gourmets, you can quickly find a recipe for just about anything from meatloaf to chateaubriand with a port reduction sauce.

But Cook's Illustrated has one big thing going for it: trust. Subscribers trust the magazine's recipes and equipment recommendations because of the dozens of tests that go into each one. And unlike most magazines, Cook's Illustrated doesn't run ads, so readers don't have to wonder if the magazine is recommending an OXO garlic press on Page 13 because there's an ad for an OXO salad spinner on Page 21.

There are lessons here for news organizations like The New York Times that want to charge for online content. People may pay for things they don't necessarily need, or that don't give them everything they want -- but it's doubtful they'll pay for things they don't trust. Granted, it is almost certainly not plausible for the Times to forgo ad revenue, but that just means the paper has to be careful to maintaining its readers' trust in other ways.

Unfortunately, the Times seems to be doing very little to give readers a reason to trust its journalism.

The two most basic things a news organization needs to do in order to earn trust: Make as few mistakes as possible, and quickly and clearly correct the mistakes that do occur (as some inevitably will). The Times itself has made clear the importance of those two things. In 2005, a New York Times "Credibility Group" prepared a report (PDF) for executive editor Bill Keller on steps the paper had "taken to increase readers' confidence in The Times." Among the Credibility Group's recommendations:

Nytimes.com should improve its electronic posting and archiving of corrections.

Corrections should be posted as promptly as possible, even before they appear in the paper. A correction should appear in the text of the online article, with a note appended to inform readers of the change.

Nytimes.com should stop its current practice of keeping outdated and possibly inaccurate multiple versions of news reports posted for several days. The final New York print version, when it becomes available, should supersede all others.

In response (PDF) to the Credibility Group's report, Keller wrote:

It's amazing that some people at this paper believe fact-checking is someone else's responsibility. It is not. Accuracy is everyone's responsibility.

[...]

Mistakes that are not corrected live on in the archives, and get repeated in subsequent stories.

[...]

I have asked Al [Siegal] to consult with Len Apcar to make sure that corrections are posted as promptly as possible on Web versions of our stories, and that the website make a routine practice of promptly substituting the final New York print version of news stories in place of earlier versions.

Unfortunately, that's just talk. When it comes to actually fact-checking and posting corrections when necessary, the Times' track record in recent years has been abysmal. 

Let's begin with the most clear-cut example imaginable: A factual error The New York Times has already acknowledged, but refuses to correct on the Web.

On March 18, 1994, the Times published an article by Jeff Gerth that falsely reported that during Bill Clinton's tenure as governor of Arkansas, Tyson Foods "benefited from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans." The article suggested that Tyson won such benefits because of its lawyer's personal and financial relationship with the Clintons. Over the next few weeks, two more Times articles and an editorial mentioned the $9 million in loans Tyson received from Clinton's state government. But those loans never happened, and on April 20, 1994 -- more than a month after the initial false report -- The New York Times ran a correction stating, "Tyson did not receive $9 million in loans from the state."

In May 2007, Media Matters discovered that the articles were available on the Times' Web page, with the original false claim about $9 million in loans, and without a correction appended. Even after Media Matters pointed out the articles, the Times did nothing for months, as I explained in a September 2007 column: 

In four different places, a visitor to the Times' website can read that Tyson benefited from $9 million in government loans while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. It isn't true, and The New York Times has admitted it isn't true, yet they leave the false claim on their site, without appending a correction, even after it has been publicly brought to their attention multiple times.

This is really very simple: if The New York Times cares about the truth at all, they'll append a correction to these three articles and this editorial.

Then, on October 17, 2007, the Times posted the following under the header "Correction: For the Record":

An article on July 5, 1994, about James B. Blair, then the general counsel for the Tyson Foods company and a longtime confidant and personal emissary for Bill and Hillary Clinton, misstated benefits that Tyson received from the state of Arkansas while Mr. Clinton was governor. Although the company did benefit from at least $7 million in state tax credits, it did not receive $9 million in loans from the state. (The error appeared in three other articles and in an editorial in 1994, all of which were corrected on April 20 of that year. The correction should have been appended then in The Times's archives to those articles: one on the front page on March 18 about Mrs. Clinton's commodity trades in the late 1970s; a March 19 article about President Clinton's defense of Mrs. Clinton's investments; a March 30 article about the White House's disclosure of the amount Mrs. Clinton invested in commodities trades, and a March 31 editorial.)

The error in the July 5 article was discovered during research after the watchdog group Media Matters twice pointed out that the 1994 correction had not been appended to the other articles. 

Well, it took several months and a great deal of prodding, but at least the Times solved the problem, right? Wrong. To this very day -- nearly two and a half years later -- those articles are still available on the Times site. They still contain the false claim about the $9 million in loans. And the necessary correction still is not appended. See for yourself here, here, here, and here. Even after the Times admitted it had failed to append the correction to the articles, it still didn't append the correction!

Remember, back in 2005, the Times' Credibility Group wrote: "A correction should appear in the text of the online article, with a note appended to inform readers of the change." Executive Editor Bill Keller responded by instructing two staffers "to make sure that corrections are posted as promptly as possible on Web versions of our stories." It seems there remain some glitches in the system.

The best you can say for the Times' failure to correct those 1994 articles is that the paper has been shockingly negligent. The current controversy over the paper's coverage of conservative activist James O'Keefe's ACORN videos cannot be characterized in such charitable terms.

As Media Matters' Eric Boehlert and Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog have documented, the Times reported that O'Keefe visited ACORN offices dressed "in the gaudy guise of pimp" and "so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risqué high school play." But it turns out that there is no evidence that O'Keefe actually wore his "outlandish" costume in his dealings with ACORN employees. (What's the difference? O'Keefe's costume was so over-the-top that anybody who took him seriously while he was wearing it would look absurd, which is presumably why O'Keefe wanted the Times and other media to believe he wore the getup into ACORN's offices.)

According to Friedman, when contacted about the Times' baseless reporting that O'Keefe was dressed in the gaudy costume while meeting with ACORN employees, New York Times "Senior Editor/Standards" Greg Brock responded:

Our article included that description because Mr. O'Keefe himself explained how he was dressed --- and appeared on a live Fox show wearing what HE said was the same exact costume he wore to ACORN's offices. ... If there is a correction to be made, it seems it would start with Mr. O'Keefe himself. We believe him. Therefore there is nothing for us to correct.

That would be a reasonable response -- if the Times had reported that O'Keefe said he visited the offices dressed in the costume. But that isn't what the Times reported: The paper reported that O'Keefe did visit the offices dressed in the costume. Brock's suggestion that the Times was right to state that as independent, verified fact based on nothing more than O'Keefe's word is simply stunning. But it only got worse when New York Times public editor (that's what the Times calls its ombudsman) Clark Hoyt got involved. According to Friedman, Hoyt told him:

Under the circumstances, I am recommending to Times editors that they avoid language that says or suggests that O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp when he captured the ACORN employees on camera. I still don't see that a correction is in order, because that would require conclusive evidence that The Times was wrong, which I haven't seen.

That is an absolutely amazing statement. Hoyt clearly agrees that there is no evidence that O'Keefe "was dressed as a pimp" when he filmed the ACORN employees, otherwise he wouldn't recommend that the Times avoid using such language. But he doesn't think the Times owes its readers a correction, because he hasn't seen "conclusive evidence" the paper was wrong. That's ridiculous: The Times could (and should) easily append a correction stating that there is no evidence O'Keefe was wearing the costume -- that doesn't require "conclusive evidence that the Times was wrong," it simply requires acknowledging that the Times made an assertion without evidence and retracting the assertion.

Hoyt essentially said The New York Times has -- and should have -- higher standards of evidence for running retractions than for making assertions in the first place. That is exactly the opposite of the way a trustworthy news organization would behave.

And it fits a pattern of behavior in which the Times seems to look for any excuse not to correct faulty reporting. Last year, Los Angeles Times reporter Jim Rainey wrote a devastating piece about an "egregiously error-ridden tribute to Walter Cronkite" by The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley. Rainey quoted Hoyt describing Stanley's piece as the product of "a television critic with a history of errors [who] wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant [but] were not." Rainey also noted that in 2005, former public editor Byron Calame wrote about "what he said was a cut-and-dried inaccuracy, in which Stanley accused Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera of grandstanding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. ... Rather than agree to a correction, however, Times Editor Bill Keller defended Stanley."

None of this is meant to deny that the Times is capable of producing quality journalism or that it often does so. The problem is that when the Times stubbornly refuses to correct glaring errors of fact, it undermines that journalism by making it impossible for readers to trust the paper. The Times' reluctance to run necessary corrections presumably stems from a concern that its credibility would be damaged if it is seen as mistake-prone. But the paper's credibility stands to suffer far more if it is seen as refusing to correct mistakes. As Keller told Rainey: "One thing that sets a serious newspaper apart from most other institutions in our society is that we own up to our mistakes with corrections, editor's notes and other accountability devices, including the public editor's column."

If the Times wants to be a newspaper worth paying for, it needs to live up to Keller's description of a serious newspaper.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

The Daily Beast and Forbes magazine have both named Hiatt one of America's five most influential liberal journalists -- though the Daily Beast acknowledged that many liberals would question that assessment given Hiatt's "near-neocon" views on foreign policy, while asserting "there is no doubt at all that he is a traditional liberal in all matters domestic."

The assertion that a neocon -- near or otherwise -- is the nation's fifth most influential liberal is self-evidently absurd. But that bizarre assessment isn't limited to Tunku Varadarajan, the Scaife-funded Hoover Institution fellow who compiled both lists. NewsBusters' Warner Todd Huston has called Hiatt a "socialist" -- a kinder assessment than that of his colleague, Matthew Sheffield, who thinks the Post's editorial page is merely "liberal." Fellow NewsBuster Noel Sheppard expresses surprise when the Post publishes an op-ed that is "counter to leftwing economic dogma." Tim Russert described the Post in 2006 as "hardly an organ for Republican views."

Even the Post's own media critic, Howard Kurtz, says that the paper's editorial page is "left-leaning" and that "liberals are pretty well represented on the Post op-ed page" by, among others, Richard Cohen. For his part, Hiatt has insisted that the Post has "a pretty good balance on the oped page."

So, the idea that the Post's opinion operation is liberal is pretty well-entrenched, if not unanimously held. But is it true?

Let's start with the Iraq war -- that's kind of a big thing, being a war and all. A few years ago, I took a look at the reaction in the Post's opinion pages to Colin Powell's deeply flawed presentation to the United Nations:

Powell's U.N. address occurred on February 5, 2003. A look at the editorials and columns that appeared in the next day's edition of The Washington Post makes clear how quickly the media ran to Powell's side.

The Post itself led things off with an editorial headlined -- what else? -- "Irrefutable" that declared, "AFTER SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. ... Mr. Powell's evidence ... was overwhelming."

The Post's columnists took it from there. Four Washington Post columnists wrote on February 6 about Powell's presentation the day before. All four were positively glowing.

[...]

Not only did all four buy what Powell was selling, they did so without an examination of the goods. The salesman's smile, his voice -- and his impeccable credentials as an "old trooper" -- were enough.

Worse, three of the four directly attacked anyone who would dare disagree with Powell. You'd have to be a "fool" or a "Frenchman" to disagree with Powell's assertions, according to [Richard] Cohen. [George] Will added that such foolishness would require the closed mind of a conspiracy theorist. [Jim] Hoagland concluded that skeptics were guilty of "enduring bad faith" and seemed to speak for the entire punditocracy when he observed that to remain skeptical of the Bush administration's case required the belief "that Colin Powell lied." And that, of course, was unthinkable.

Yes, that's the same Richard Cohen who Howard Kurtz claims represents the liberal point of view in the Post's opinion pages. But we'll come back to Cohen and the Post's columnists later.

That unanimous praise for Powell's presentation -- and sneering contempt for anyone who would dare question the great man -- set the tone for years of Washington Post cheerleading for the Iraq war, the enthusiasm of which was matched only by its lack of fidelity to the truth.

A 2004 Post editorial actually defended Dick Cheney's statements linking Iraq and September 11. In 2007, an editorial conflated -- as the Bush administration had done -- the Sunni insurgent group "Al Qaeda in Iraq" with the Osama bin Laden-led group behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, Post editorials lavished praise on war supporters and attacked critics of the war, with a disingenuousness typically associated with a political campaign rather than a newspaper editorial board. John McCain was a staunch supporter of the war, so he was praised for his prewar "foresight" in an editorial that conveniently overlooked his repeated assertions that U.S. troops would be greeted as "liberators." On the other hand, Democrats Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were critical of the war during the Democratic presidential primary campaign -- so the Post blasted them for a "troubling" "refusal ... to acknowledge the indisputable military progress of the past year." In fact, the candidates had acknowledged such progress, but that didn't stand in the way of the Post's dishonest demagoguery.

The Post editorial board's rabid, Rovian willingness to do whatever it took to support the war effort and discredit its critics was most vividly illustrated by its attacks on Joe Wilson, and its defense of the Bush administration's attacks on him.  

An April 9, 2006, Post editorial titled "A Good Leak," for example, bashed Wilson and defended President Bush's reported authorization of Scooter Libby to disclose selected classified portions of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program. In its zeal to defend the leak, the Post went so far as to claim there was nothing "particularly unusual" about the leak -- a claim not even Libby was willing to make. As Media Matters detailed at the time, the editorial "echoed numerous falsehoods also promoted by conservative media figures and Republican activists" and "seemingly ignored its own paper's past reporting on the CIA leak scandal, which has thoroughly debunked the false claims made by conservative and Republican figures and echoed in the April 9 Post editorial." Later that year, a Post editorial falsely asserted that the notion of a coordinated White House effort to discredit Wilson had been disproved -- a claim immediately echoed by several Fox News anchors and commentators.

The Post's stable of opinion columnists also defended Libby and attacked special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the outting of Joe Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Merely banging the drums for war -- and smearing those who got in the way -- isn't enough at "near-neocon" Fred Hiatt's Washington Post, which has resolutely opposed efforts to bring those responsible for Bush administration torture policies to account, even as it professes its opposition to those policies.

But The Daily Beast's assessment of Hiatt acknowledged he is a "near-neocon" on foreign policy. Perhaps we should move on to domestic matters, and see weather the claim that "there is no doubt at all that he is a traditional liberal in all matters domestic" holds water.

First, a reminder of the Post editorial board's treatment of the two most immediate past presidents: When the Post did get around to editorializing against the Bush administration's "lawlessness" -- their word, not mine -- they still couldn't bring themselves to call for a special counsel to investigate the wrongdoing. Those with long memories may remember that the Post called for such an investigation of President Clinton's real estate history -- even as it acknowledged there was "no credible charge" the Clintons had done anything wrong. That's your "liberal" Washington Post: demanding investigations of a Democratic president despite a lack of credible charges, then refusing to call for such an investigation of a "lawless" Republican president. (It should be noted that Fred Hiatt joined the editorial board in 1996 and took over as editor in 2000, so he is not responsible for the absurd call for a Whitewater special counsel.)

And that pretty much sums up the relative interest in Bush and Clinton scandals among the Post editorial board, which obsessed over the Whitewater non-scandal, then ignored the paper's own reporting in order to defend the Bush administration's controversial purging of U.S. Attorneys. The paper demanded investigations when it didn't see any "credible charge" of wrongdoing by the Clintons, and refused to do so when it thought the Bush administration was breaking the law left and right.

That isn't the only example of the Post blatantly holding Democrats and Republicans to different standards. Despite having called for Teresa Heinz Kerry to release her taxes when John Kerry was running for president, the Post's editorial board suddenly lost interest in the tax records of wealthy spouses when John McCain ran for president. And in April 2008, Media Matters found that the Post had published 20 times as many editorials and opinion pieces that mentioned Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright as mentioned John McCain and John Hagee.

OK, how about issues? Social Security is kind of a big one, no? Surely an editorial page run by someone who is "a traditional liberal in all matters domestic" must be strongly against dismantling Social Security with a privatization scheme, right?  But what do we have here? It's a column on Dick Armey's FreedomWorks web site, written in 2004 by conservative icon Jack Kemp, and it is headlined "On Social Security: The Washington Post Gets It." Interesting:

[O]n August 14th, 2004, the Post editorialized that, "Mr. Bush's sympathizers are right that Social Security privatization could reduce long-term deficits, and right that the nation should not be deterred by the transition costs." The Post also discarded the class-warfare mantra that has consumed Democratic candidates and party loyalists for so long by reasoning that: "Privatization could also stimulate economic growth, boosting tax revenues and so strengthening the nation's fiscal prospects via a second route." They continued, "Private accounts would boost national savings" thus "savings would become more plentiful," which, in turn, would "stimulate extra corporate investment and growth."

The Washington Post editorial writers realize that Social Security, as it currently stands, is the "risky scheme."

Well, that doesn't sound like the work of a "traditional liberal in all matters domestic," does it? But there's more: When Republicans decided that "personal accounts" polled better than "private accounts," the Post editorial page shifted its terminology. And a 2006 Post editorial peddled the disingenuous spin that Bush's Social Security scheme wasn't actually privatization and blasted Democrats for "cynicism" in opposing it. Much more has been written about the Post's hostility to Social Security -- but it's all pretty much what you'd expect once you know that the Post's editorial board relied on analysis of privatization that was conducted by an investment firm that would benefit from it.

Speaking of dubiously sourced Post editorials, here's a fun one: The Post praised No Child Left Behind, citing a study that specifically warned that "it is difficult to say whether or how much the No Child Left Behind law is driving the achievement gains." 

Then there's the paper's editorials praising John McCain for an immigration stance he had already backed away from and campaign finance promises he had already hedged on and saluting him for being a "champion" of reform just a few weeks after acknowledging that his decision to "deriv[e] some benefit from the matching funds system and then abandon[] it when that was to his advantage" was "not Mr. McCain's proudest moment as a reformer."

And who could forget the Post's startlingly naive editorial endorsements of John Roberts and Samuel Alito?

At this point, you might want to get up, stretch your legs, walk around the block -- so far, we've just taken a quick look at the Post's editorials; the paper's columnists are up next.

Let's start with David Broder -- he is, after all, the much-lauded "dean" of the Washington press corps, and frequently described as a liberal. In the context of the Post's roster of opinion writers, he may be one. But from his 1969 complaint that nasty anti-war activists were out to "break" an unfairly maligned president Nixon to his 2006 description of anti-war activists as "elitists" and his Cheney-esque 2007 slur that Democrats have little "sympathy for" the military, David Broder has made clear that he is no liberal.

I've previously laid out at some length the case against David Broder's sterling reputation. This is a man who thought that President Clinton should have resigned because he "may have" lied about an affair, but who didn't think President Bush should have done so after he lied his way into a war. Not even when he declared Bush "lawless and reckless" did he think resignation was in order. And, having piously insisted that he and his beltway buddies don't like being lied to when Bill Clinton wasn't telling the truth about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Broder lavishes praise upon Sarah Palin, a politician who only lies when she speaks. And when she writes.

In his 2006 column declaring Bush "lawless and reckless," Broder seemed more upset with the "vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left" and gratuitously slammed Al Gore and John Kerry for a "know-it-all arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself" (no surprise, really: During the 2000 campaign, Broder bashed Gore for the sin of offering too many details about "what he wants to do as president.")

In 2005, Broder blamed congressional Democrats -- who were in the minority -- for a failure to conduct oversight hearings; in 2007, when Democrats were in charge, he bashed them for doing so. He's against investigating torture, and he was against investigating the outing of a CIA agent. But he's in favor of investigating the Clintons' marriage (not the marriages of Republicans, though!).

Anyway: there's much more here, including the fact that David Broder praised President Bush's response to Katrina. What more do you need to know?

At least Broder seems to recognize that torture is bad, even if he doesn't want to do anything about it. The same cannot be said for Post columnist Richard Cohen, the so-called liberal who sneeringly dismissed Iraq war skeptics as fools and Frenchmen and who wrote that opponents of the war did not "feel compelled to prove a case or stick to the facts." The easily-scared Cohen just loves torture. No, no, "loves" isn't strong enough. He lurves torture. And he defends a rapist (only he calls the rape a "seduction"). And defends Monica Goodling. And downplays the "crappy little crime" of outing a CIA agent (a defense that involved spreading falsehoods about the victims).

Cohen has accused "leftists" of thinking "America is usually at fault in war" -- the kind of sentiment that makes one want to check to see if Karl Rove's lips move when Cohen speaks. And the torture-loving, rapist-defending Cohen even bashed Barack Obama for a lack of "moral clarity" because -- get this -- Obama bowed towards the Japanese emperor. He sided with President Bush during the controversy over the deal to allow a company owned by the government of Dubai to take control of six U.S. ports, inaccurately blasting critics of the deal as bigots.

He defends financial company executives and the business media, and attacks comedians who suggest the media should have done a better of covering the financial crisis. That wasn't his only attack on a comedian: He also blasted Stephen Colbert's "rude" skit at a White House Correspondents Association dinner, but didn't expressed any concern over a skit two years earlier in which George Bush made light of the lack of WMD in Iraq.

Cohen opposes affirmative action with the well-off white man's certainty that "everyone knows" race "has become supremely irrelevant." He peddles the bogus right-wing myth that "being pro-choice is a litmus test for all Democrats" (accusing in the process Democrats, but not Republicans, of "counter[ing] reasonable questions and qualms with slogans").

During the 2000 campaign, he caricatured Gore as dishonest even after acknowledging that portrayal was baseless -- then, years later, criticized his colleagues for doing the same thing. During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Cohen trashed Hillary Clinton for "incessant exaggerations," "cheap shots," and "flights into hallucinatory history" -- then, a few months later, denounced the "calumny, a libel and a ferocious mugging" Clinton was forced to endure, as though he had played no role in it. He joined David Broder in declaring McCain principled and credible while ignoring voluminous examples to the contrary. And Cohen touted McCain's "visceral hostility" towards lobbyists, ignoring the fact that McCain was busily surrounding himself with them.

And when liberals criticize him, Cohen whines that they "would have been great communists" if they had been born earlier -- which, I suppose, means Cohen would have made a great McCarthy had he been born earlier.

Ruth Marcus has called the Obama administration's criticism of Fox News "Nixonian," which might be a reasonable point if the Obama folks were bugging Fox's phones and auditing their taxes, or if they were plotting to kill Chris Wallace. But as it is: Not so much. She ignored key evidence against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in a column defending him from allegations that he may have perjured himself. She has argued against investigating Bush administration torture and domestic spying -- bizarrely suggesting that doing so is inconsistent with "ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated" -- and insisted that Berkeley must not fire John Yoo in wake of the release of memos Yoo wrote justifying torture. And Marcus frequently (and sometimes misleadingly) bangs the Social-Security-is-in-crisis drum -- which seems to be something of a requirement for Post columnists -- and has written approvingly of a "reform" plan that includes privatization.

Dana Milbank shifts seamlessly between calling the secretary of state a "bitch" and lecturing others on civility, calls the AFL-CIO and NAACP the "far left," draws inane equivalences between Democrats and Republicans, mocked Democrats' concern over the Downing Street Memo indications that Bush had lied about Iraq, adopted the spurious portrayal of Sonia Sotomayor as possessing an unimpressive intellect and being "abrasive" (perhaps we should be impressed he avoided the word "bitch") and mocked Barack Obama as "presumptuous" -- misrepresenting quotes in the process. He lazily adopted John McCain's budget demagoguery and the Heritage Foundation's attack on global warming science. Little surprise, then, that Milbank has a preference for Republican presidential candidates.

Now: Broder, Cohen, Marcus and Milbank are among the more liberal of the Post's columnists. The conservatives -- a virtual alumni association for former Republican presidential administration staff -- are even worse.

Bill Kristol, for example. A former aide to Dan Quayle and editor of The Weekly Standard, Kristol played a key role in killing health care reform in the early 1990s, so you can thank him, in part, for your skyrocketing health care costs. In 2002, he testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that American forces "will be greeted as liberators" by the Iraqis, so you can thank him for the Iraq war. He has argued that the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh will and should set the GOP's course, so you can thank him for an increasingly insane and irresponsible public discourse. He has dismissed concern about global warming as "hysteria," so you can thank him for the destruction of the planet. Even worse: He reportedly "discovered" Sarah Palin and played a key role in her selection as John McCain's running mate, so you can thank him for the fact that you know who Sarah Palin is.

Kristol has echoed Sarah Palin's "death panel" nonsense that was the "lie of the year" in 2009. He doesn't like unions or women but does like torture (and dismissed Abu Ghraib as a "small prisoner abuse scandal") and favors military attacks against just about everyone. He has argued that The New York Times should be prosecuted for exposing a secret Bush administration program and accused Democrats of disliking Joe Lieberman because the Connecticut senator is "pro-American." He has falsely denied the existence of evidence that Bush misled the U.S. into Iraq and defended Scooter Libby and attacked Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame. And he has hackishly attacked Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria while ignoring the fact that Republican members of congress were doing the same thing.  

But most of all, Kristol has been wrong -- wrong about nearly everything, nearly all the time, as Salon's Joan Walsh noted when The New York Times hired him in 2007:

I'll leave it to Crooks and Liars to document Kristol's sad history of being wrong on everything (about the likelihood Sunni and Shi'a in Iraq could all get along, on the urgency of a strike against Iran's probably non-existent nuclear program, about the Times itself deserving prosecution for its" totally gratuitous revealing of an ongoing secret classified program that is part of the war on terror.") Hey, we're all wrong sometimes. But Kristol has been consistently, spectacularly wrong for a living. He bears a special responsibility for selling the Iraq war using any means necessary, and for savaging war opponents to this day as traitors who don't care about national security. And I can't help but think in the long run that he hurts the paper. The main thing the Times has, as a brand -- and believe me, it's a lot -- is its association with and dedication to the truth. Kristol is anti-truth.

You could spend an entire day reading variations on the "Bill Kristol is always wrong" theme, most of which will include his claim that "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all." Wrong. (For a less consequential example of Kristol's uncanny knack for being wrong, check out his hilarious series of predictions of a Bush political rebound in 2005.)

Charles Krauthammer says environmentalism is "the new socialism," compares Barack Obama's 2008 campaign to China's Cultural Revolution, accuses Obama of thinking of himself "in messianic terms" and of using "Orwellian language that you expect" from Hugo Chavez and calls Chavez Obama's "new pal" and invokes the Nazis in writing about Obama's stem cell policies. He referred to Khamenei as Iran's "Supreme Leader," attacked Barack Obama for doing the same thing a few days later, then just a few days after that, again referred to Khamenei as the "Supreme Leader." Principled!

Krauthammer has called possible torture investigations "banana republic politics" and made false claims to support his case against investigations. That's unsurprising, given that Krauthammer goes back and forth on whether waterboarding is torture -- but is unwavering in his support for it. And like any good Washington Post columnist, he didn't like the Plame investigation, or feel bound by the facts when discussing it -- and even wrote that Bush should pre-emptively pardon Libby. And Krauthammer has falsely defended the Bush administration's use of Iraq intelligence. He even praised Dick Cheney for doing the "manly thing" in withholding information about his shooting of a hunting companion.

Finally, while Krauthammer was never actually employed by a Republican politician -- unlike several of his colleagues -- he did apparently run afoul of Washington Post conflict of interest rules by offering advice to Bush administration strategists and speechwriter Michael Gerson, who would later join Krauthammer at the paper. Hiatt stood by his columnist, denying that Krauthammer had advised the administration, even though the Post's own news division had broken the story.

Gerson was a Bush administration speechwriter until 2006, when he joined the Washington Post as a columnist. At the time, Hiatt said of Gerson: "I expect he will be an independent voice." He didn't say who he expected Gerson -- described by the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru as "Bush's soul" -- to be independent from. According to Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Gerson's work for Bush included helping prepare Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations, inserting yellowcake references into Bush speeches including the 2003 State of the Union, and conceiving the warning of a nuclear Iraq: "The first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud." As Media Matters detailed upon Gerson's hiring by the Post, many of the Iraq falsehoods he helped craft for the Bush administration were adopted by his future Post colleagues -- and never corrected.

As media critic Jeff Cohen explained in 2006, the Post enthusiastically supported Gerson's pro-war efforts for Bush:

As Gerson's "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" soundbite took flight, Al Gore made an Iraq speech questioning "preemptive war." On the Post's op-ed page, Gore's speech was "dishonest, cheap, low" and "wretched ... vile ... contemptible." And that was all in one column. Another called it "a series of cheap shots."

By contrast, the error-filled Colin Powell speech at the U.N. (that Gerson worked on) was hailed at the Post with almost Pravda-like unanimity. An editorial -- headlined "Irrefutable" -- declared: "It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." And the Post's op-ed page from right to "left" embraced Powell's speech.

[...]

Gerson and his new colleagues at the Post worked together to help bring us one of the worst foreign policy debacles in our nation's history. Newspapers are supposed to hold discredited public officials to account. The Post is hiring him.

As a Post columnist, Gerson has continued to advance his pet cause (that would be war, of course). In an April 2008 column, he argued for three simultaneous wars -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Gerson pays lip service to opposing what he tactfully calls "harsh interrogations," but when you get past the throat-clearing, Gerson argues that firm opposition to such tactics simply "is not an option for those in government." And he has bitterly denounced efforts to investigate Bush administration interrogation methods, using rhetoric Nathan Jessep would appreciate:

And now Obama has described the post-Sept. 11 period as "a dark and painful chapter in our history." In fact, whatever your view of waterboarding, the response of intelligence professionals following Sept. 11 was impressive. ... Now the president and his party have done much to tarnish those accomplishments. So much for the thanks of a grateful nation.

Given the magnitude of Gerson's culpability in crafting a bogus case for war, it seems small change to point out that this "independent voice" shares with his colleagues the habit of attacking liberals for things conservatives do, too. Or that he has been accused of plagiarism by another former Bush speechwriter, David Frum -- an allegation that the Post kindly omitted from an article that mentioned other Frum criticisms of Gerson. Probably just another example of that famed "church-state" separation between the Post's news and opinion operations.

Speaking of Bush administration speechwriters, the Post just hired another one. Marc Thiessen became a Post columnist earlier this month. It probably won't surprise you to learn that Thiessen has made dubious claims in defense of waterboarding. He has equated waterboarding of detainees with training of U.S. military personnel, a comparison that even the Bush Justice Department disagreed with. (Naturally, he opposed the release of documents relating to the Bush administration's interrogation practices.) And Thiessen claimed in a Post guest op-ed last year that the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had prevented a terrorist attack on Los Angeles -- a claim that was undermined by the Bush administration's statements that the attack was thwarted more than a year before KSM was even captured. In another 2009 guest op-ed for the Post, Thiessen claimed there were no domestic terror attacks under Bush after 9-11 -- an example of damning-with-faint-praise if ever there was one. Oh, and it isn't true, as anyone who worked in Washington during the anthrax and sniper attacks of 2001 and 2002 surely knows.

Some editors would be upset that Thiessen used their opinion pages to peddle such transparent nonsense. Fred Hiatt hired him.

Former Reagan administration speechwriter Robert Kagan writes for the Post, too. A supporter of the Iraq war, Kagan used his perch at the Post to attack Al Gore for an "astonishing reversal" on Iraq, though Gore hadn't actually reversed himself. Then a few sentences later, Kagan complained: "At least in the short run, dishonesty pays. Dissembling pays."  Showing a deep commitment to that principle, Kagan earlier this month described a proposed $14 billion increase in defense spending as a 10 percent cut.

And Kagan memorably lauded Sen. Joe Lieberman as "the last honest man," which pretty well speaks for itself.

Post editorial board member and columnist Charles Lane has argued for cutting -- yes, cutting -- the minimum wage. (The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour comes out to $15,080 for 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.) And he wrote a dishonest screed defending Joe Lieberman by arguing that we should take him at his word rather than assessing his actions. No, really.

Post columnist George Will still finds time to deny the efficacy of the New Deal, but spends much of his time these days peddling falsehoods about global climate change -- falsehoods Hiatt and the Post refuse to correct. Will seems to share Lane's belief that the minimum wage is overly generous. And he shared his colleagues' dismay at poor Scooter Libby facing punishment for his crimes. Will also opposes prosecution of those responsible for Bush-era torture practices -- perhaps because he thinks "[t]here are intelligent men and women of good will who say that anything that inhibits the President's power to defend the country is not binding."

Finally, we come to Fred Hiatt, the so-called "traditional liberal in all matters domestic." He's the kind of "traditional liberal" who thinks health care reform is too expensive -- all while disregarding liberal reform proposals that would reduce the cost. The kind who distorted Barack Obama's comments while praising John McCain's strongly held "principles" on issues on which McCain had shifted and displayed inconsistency. The kind who allows Will to mislead readers about climate change, over and over again. And Hiatt, of course, opposed a special prosecutor examination of Bush terror practices. (Argue, if you like, that applying the rule of law to government officials is not a domestic matter -- but I don't buy it.)

A few of the guest op-eds published by Hiatt are worthy of mention. Last summer, the Post published an op-ed in which Martin Feldstein falsely claimed that Barack Obama supported "a British-style 'single payer' system in which the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are salaried." When the inaccuracy of Feldstein's claim was pointed out by, among others, Jon Chait and Paul Krugman, Hiatt refused to run a correction. Instead, he has rewarded Feldstein by publishing two more of his op-eds attacking "Obamacare," Feldstein's opposition to which may have something to do with his service on the board of directors of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.

Hiatt published two op-eds by Sarah Palin last year, one of which repeated several already-debunked claims about climate change. The Post dragged its feet in running a response to Palin, doing so only after running a Palin letter to the editor.

Last October, Hiatt handed insurance company lobbyist Karen Ignagni op-ed space to tout a deeply-flawed "study" her organization commissioned -- a study the Post's news pages had already debunked. In August, Hiatt ran an op-ed defending the "death panels" lie. Last spring, Hiatt published an op-ed by Charles Murray, darling of the "white nationalist" VDARE crowd. And just this month, the Post actually commissioned a column baselessly asserting that liberals are more condescending than conservatives.

It seems the real reason The Washington Times has never been able to make any money may be that its hard-right editorial stance is redundant in a city that already has Fred Hiatt's Washington Post.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Alexander began by asserting that "liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives" are condescending -- a claim about the relative quantity of condescension on each side that he never even attempted to support with anything beyond his own assertions that he is correct.

He then moved on to providing examples of liberal condescension that, well, aren't. Like President Obama's statement that some opponents of health care reform are peddling fear of a "Bolshevik plot." That is happening, and Alexander made no effort to explain why pointing it out constitutes condescension. Instead, he moved on to his next example: Obama's statement that he and his allies need to do a better job of "speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are" -- the kind of utterly unremarkable comment politicians of all stripes make whenever the political winds seem to shift against them. And those two examples -- neither of which is actually an example of condescension -- are the ones Alexander chooses to lead off his argument. That is not a good sign.

It was, however, representative of Alexander's argument, which consisted largely of identifying "four major narratives" liberals promote about conservatives -- narratives that Alexander seems to think are condescending, but which are not.  Like this:

The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics.

Yeah ... that isn't condescension. Neither is this: "It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants." (And if Alexander is going to convince anyone that is a condescending belief for liberals to hold, he might want to have a few words with Ken Mehlman, who -- as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2005 -- admitted the GOP had exploited "racial polarization" for decades.)

In short, Alexander offers a series of liberal criticisms of conservatives, which he mistakes for condescension. Those criticisms can, of course, be made in ways that are condescending. But that isn't what Alexander argues -- he argues that they are inherently condescending. They aren't -- not unless we want to rob the word of all meaning.

And all the while, Alexander pretends that conservatives only rarely make condescending statements -- and even then, the statements tend to come from the movement's fringes. It's as though he's never heard the patronizing, mocking comments about "community organizers" and effete coastal elites -- or he thinks his readers haven't. As though he's never heard Rudy Giuliani give a speech. Or Sarah Palin. Or Karl Rove. Or seen Bill O'Reilly dismiss liberals as "pinheads."

So running Alexander's poorly-considered piece -- which, it should be noted, the Washington Post solicited -- would have been a mistake at any time. What makes this week, in particular, so bad? Well, it certainly doesn't help that it ran the morning after Sarah Palin's speech at the Tea Party convention in Nashville, in which she mockingly asked the 69 million Americans who voted for Barack Obama, "How's that hopey, changey stuff working out?" Now, that's condescending.  

But the bigger problem is that Alexander's piece ran at the beginning of a week in which the conservative media did everything it could to justify every drop of condescension liberals can possibly muster. Some arguments are so brazenly stupid that to treat them as though they have merit is to participate in the dumbing-down of public discourse to an extent that can only lead to ruin.   

And that's what the right-wing media narrative that a few days of snow in February disproves global warming is -- brazenly and willfully stupid. Not because it contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus, but because of the way in which it does so. It pretends short-term weather is more meaningful than long-term climate changes. It privileges small sample sizes over large. It's like using a single baseball game to argue that Mark Whiten is the best hitter in the history of the game -- he had 4 home runs and 12 RBIs! Or pointing to the fact that Bill Gates doesn't have any money in his left jacket pocket as evidence that he's poor. Or flipping a coin, seeing that it comes up heads, and concluding that flipped coins always land heads-up. It's absolute nonsense.

And conservatives have been gleefully peddling this quackery all week.  

Among the culprits: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, The Washington Times, Sean Hannity, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, Glenn Beck, and Human Events. Not to mention other conservative leaders like Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Jim DeMint, and Newt Gingrich.

Now, I'm sure that Gerard Alexander would try to argue that Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Washington Times, the Senate Republican Leader, and Newt Gingrich are not representative of the conservative movement. That's essentially what he did during a Washington Post online Q&A whenever anyone brought up examples of condescending conservatives: He stipulated to the examples, but asserted they weren't representative, often asserting by way of evidence that National Review doesn't engage in the tactics in question. So, apparently National Review is the only example he'll accept for his rigged little game. Fine by me. National Review's Deroy Murdock, Tom Gross, and Greg Pollowitz (again and again and again) have all dabbled in cold-weather-disproves-global-warming nuttiness. 

The next time the Washington Post wants to promote an inane column asking "Why are liberals so condescending?" (and, sadly, I'm sure there will be a "next time") they should try it in a week in which the nation's leading conservative media voices aren't quite so busy demonstrating why liberals have reason to be more condescending.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

If Breitbart has one defining characteristic, it is his flagrant dishonesty -- a dishonesty that is apparent not only in his willingness to traffic in bogus attacks, but in his rejection of basic standards of proof and logic and reason and consistency. And yet the typical profile of Breitbart portrays him simply as an eccentric but brilliant entrepreneur waging a valiant and impressively successful struggle against craven and corrupt elites -- while his dishonesty goes unmentioned and his critics go unquoted. 

Take this week's piece by NPR's David Folkenflik, which quotes Breitbart extensively and includes praise from Glenn Reynolds (who was not, by the way, identified as a conservative) and noted that the New York Times public editor rebuked the paper for not reporting on Breitbart's ACORN videos but said that Breitbart's approach is "primarily ... aimed at trying to score ideological points," rather than "broadly informing the public." But no specific criticism of Breitbart's product is included -- not one. Not a single example of Breitbart ever getting anything wrong. No mention of his sites peddling birther conspiracy theories. And much the same can be said about Lloyd Grove's profile of Breitbart for The Daily Beast, and for Perry Bacon's (slightly better) Washington Post profile last fall, which generously portrayed Breitbart as a conservative Josh Marshall. (Unlike Folkenflik and Grove, Bacon did include quotes from Breitbart critics, including Media Matters' Eric Boehlert. But he did little to seriously examine Breitbart's credibility.)

Some of this, of course, stems from the media's typical unwillingness to call a lie a lie and a liar a liar (unless, of course, the lie is about sex and the liar is a Democrat.) Nothing new there, unfortunately. But Breitbart also benefits from the nature of his dishonesty. Convoluted conspiracy theories and thinly evidenced allegations against obscure targets are, by their very nature, confusing. Getting to the bottom of Breitbart's claims and assessing their validity takes time and effort -- time and effort many reporters are unwilling to spend, even when they are writing about Breitbart. Add that to the media's general unwillingness to be seen taking sides in ongoing controversies, and it's no wonder Breitbart isn't more clearly shown to be the fraud that he is.

If mainstream reporters are unwilling or unable to assess Breitbart's credibility based on the "journalism" he and his accomplices produce each day, they may find illumination in a little-noticed 3 a.m. tweet Breitbart posted on January 5. Donning his tin-foil hat, Breitbart lashed out at critics of the "Birthers" and aligned himself with the Vince Foster conspiracy theorists of the 1990s:

Birther template is Vince Foster Redux. Asking questions renders 1 conspiracy theorist. @mmfa & mod cons reinforce toxicity. Rinse, repeat.

Surely by this point, the media can understand the dishonesty and the delusions of the Vince-Foster-was-murdered crowd -- a crowd that Breitbart stands proudly alongside, insisting that they were simply "asking questions" and were unfairly maligned as "conspiracy theorists." It is not complicated, and it does not require taking a position on current affairs. The Vince Foster conspiracy theorists were nuts and liars, and Andrew Breitbart defends them.

A brief refresher: After White House counsel and Clinton friend Vince Foster committed suicide in 1993, an unholy alliance of right-wing true-believers and opportunistic profiteers began peddling ever-more-convoluted claims that he had, in fact been murdered -- perhaps by the Clintons themselves, perhaps in a (non-existent) apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and so on.

Like any good conspiracy theorist, they became more and more certain of foul play as time went on -- their certainty only reinforced by facts and evidence and official investigations to the contrary.

The United States Park Police investigated Foster's death and ruled it a suicide; the conspiracy theorists disagreed and demanded another investigation. Whitewater special prosecutor Robert Fiske (a Republican) investigated the death, concluding it was a suicide. The conspiracy theorists were unsatisfied, and demanded more. Congressional committees investigated (with Republican Dan Burton of Indiana going so far as to shoot up his vegetable garden in a creative if misguided attempt to prove that Foster was murdered) but they, too, failed to produce any evidence of murder. The conspiracy theorists were unswayed. Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr, leaving no stone unturned in his effort to find something -- anything -- to make Clinton look bad, investigated. Starr, too, ruled the death a suicide. The conspiracy theorists announced that Starr was covering for Clinton. Don't believe me? Here's a taste:

[I]n all likelihood, Starr agreed to cover up Clinton crimes because he too, has taken money from the Communist Government of China. ... The Communist Chinese Government influence is particularly significant, since it now appears that they financed the entire 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. ... we knew that the Starr investigation was corrupted enough to cover-up the murder of Vince Foster ... Starr obviously got Janet Reno to expand his investigation to include Monica Lewinsky so that he could use it to cover-up the real crimes of Bill Clinton.

Yes: the lunatic fringe behind the Foster conspiracy theories were so certain of their cause -- or so willing to profit from pretending to be certain -- that they accused Ken Starr of covering up for Bill Clinton. That's like accusing the Hatfields of being in league with the McCoys, or the Red Sox of conspiring to aid the Yankees. And it's classic conspiracy-theorist behavior: Everybody's in on it. Even Rush Limbaugh!

These are the people Andrew Breitbart defends as simply "asking questions." These are the people with whom Andrew Breitbart aligns himself.

One of the leading voices in the Ken-Starr-is-covering-for-Bill-Clinton brigade was WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah:

Could this be a simple oversight, incompetence, negligence? Or is Starr an active party in the cover-up of the strange circumstances surrounding Vincent Foster's death?

These days, Farah keeps himself busy peddling nutty claims about Barack Obama's citizenship -- just like Andrew Breitbart.

Typical of the approach taken by the Foster conspiracy theorists was right-wing "journalist" Chris Ruddy's claim that Foster's death scene must have been staged, because the gun with which he killed himself was found in his right hand, despite the fact that he was left-handed. Aha!

Only one problem: Vince Foster was not left-handed.

Undaunted, Farah continued selling videos containing Ruddy's false claim years later.

Again: These are the people Andrew Breitbart defends as simply "asking questions." These are the people with whom Andrew Breitbart aligns himself.  

And, indeed, his approach to evidence is eerily similar. Like his predecessors, Breitbart sees treason everywhere he looks. And like any good conspiracy theorist, he demands that the victims of his allegations prove their innocence. Take his excitement at discovering that ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis had visited the White House. A classic "who cares" story, Brietbart's BigGovernment.com treated it like an actual, full-fledged scandal. But -- whoops! -- it turned out to be a complete crock. ACORN's Bertha Lewis hadn't visited the White House; the visitor was a different woman named Bertha Lewis, the giveaway being that the two women have different middle initials.

When caught in such a blunder, you can go one of two ways. You can admit your mistake and commit yourself to avoiding such false claims in the future. Or you can write something like Breitbart's January 4 tweet:

$1K bet to @ericboehlert. Ill give 2 teachfisting2kids 'safe school' program of your choice if U can prove it isnt ACORN Bertha Lewis. @mmfa

Breitbart, in other words, responded to criticism for publishing false claims by demanding that his critics prove that two people with different names are not the same person.

Major-media profiles of Breitbart tend to portray him as a mix of Hunter Thompson's gonzo journalism and William Buckley's pioneering work establishing conservative journalism. But that isn't Breitbart's true lineage, and (as Eric Boehlert has explained, Buckley would be aghast at the idea that Breitbart was carrying on his legacy).

No, Breitbart continues a long line of right-wing cranks, peddling lies for fun and profit.

He's a modern-day Chris Ruddy, who (with the help of Richard Mellon Scaife) parlayed his bogus claims about Vince Foster's death into Newsmax.com, his own conservative mini-media-empire. He's Joseph Farah -- the Obama Birther who was behind the Ken-Starr-was-covering-for-Bill-Clinton madness -- with better P.R. He's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard -- the British journalist described by Gene Lyons as "The Pied Piper of the Clinton Conspiracists" for his claims of Clinton involvement in Foster's death and the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building -- with HTML skills.

During the Clinton years the mainstream media enabled and empowered the Ruddys and Farahs and Evans-Pritchards of the world by chasing after the nonsense. Trumped-up scandals and controversies oozed forth from these conservative charlatans and ended up in The Washington Post and on ABC News, with the sensational claims receiving more attention than the lack of credibility of the accusers. And they're doing it again. But this time, they have more to lose. Already in a weakened state, the media cannot afford to empower a dishonest crank bent on destroying them.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Quinn -- who gained fame when The Washington Post was forced to retract her false claim that Jimmy Carter's national security adviser unzipped his fly during an interview -- makes the extraordinary claim in her January 26 column that Carter lost his re-election campaign due to his failure to attend Washington dinner parties. Not only that -- according to Quinn, Ted Kennedy ran against Carter because of it:

When Jimmy Carter arrived in Washington, he and Rosalynn and many of their advisers were decidedly not interested in the locals and made it known. That chill was such a mistake that Teddy Kennedy felt free to challenge Carter, which doomed Carter's reelection.

Wow. Who knew that when Kennedy declared "the dream shall never die," he was referring to the dream that one day Sally Quinn would once again rub elbows with presidents?

But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Quinn's column -- in which she complains that the last several presidential administrations have been insufficiently interested in partying with her and her friends -- is chock-full of self-aggrandizement, casual indifference to the actual act of governing, and comically transparent hypocrisy. Consider:

The Clintons brought in a whole new crowd, many of them young and arrogant and clique-ish, which created such a competitive social atmosphere that the environment became toxic.

That's right: Sally Quinn, in the middle of a column boasting that the Washington establishment (her word) to which she belongs tears down presidents who don't socialize properly, declares the Clinton crowd "arrogant and clique-ish."

Quinn continues with an odd little story:

Ironically, President Clinton had given a toast at Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham's welcoming dinner for him shortly after he was elected. He talked about Washington being a place that was obsessed by "who's in and who's out, who's up and who's down." It was as though he were predicting his own tenure: A lot of enemies were made.

What's odd about that is that if Clinton said those words at Katherine Graham's little soiree, this is apparently the first time anyone has mentioned it in the 17 years since. Now, I wasn't at Katharine Graham's welcoming dinner for Bill Clinton, and I assume that Sally Quinn was. So maybe it happened. Or maybe Quinn is actually referring to Bill Clinton's first inaugural speech, in which he uttered that line. That seems more likely, particularly since Quinn herself began her infamous 1998 column about Washington's contempt for Bill Clinton with that same quote, attributed to his inaugural address.

It probably says something about Quinn that she cannot tell the difference between a presidential inaugural address and a party at Katherine Graham's house -- and it definitely says something about her that she omitted what Clinton said next. Here's the passage from Clinton's speech:

This beautiful capital, like every capital since the dawn of civilization, is often a place of intrigue and calculation. Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

Americans deserve better, and in this city today, there are people who want to do better. And so I say to all of us here, let us resolve to reform our politics, so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people.

[...]

Let us give this capital back to the people to whom it belongs.

In Bill Clinton's version, the nation's capital belongs not to the powerful and the privileged, but to "the people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way." You can probably see why that doesn't sit well with Sally Quinn.

It gets worse.

Quinn opens and closes her column by analogizing Washington to Avatar -- an analogy almost as insufferable as the film's dialogue. From Quinn's opening words ("Imagine Washington as the planet Pandora in the movie 'Avatar'") it's clear this isn't going anywhere good. In Quinn's telling, the Washington establishment (again: her word for her and her friends) is "the natives, the Na'vi." That is to say, the good and innocent people who face invasion and the destruction of everything they hold dear at the hands of soulless, shallow and power-mad villains.

Now, I should remind you that Quinn's central complaint is that incoming presidential administrations do not party quite as hearty as Quinn and her good-time pals would like:

When Obama was elected, people began singing "Happy Days Are Here Again." Expectations were over the top. It would be only hours before we would all be dancing on tables. They were beautiful and glamorous, hip and fun. They were the new Kennedys, and Washington would come alive again. They would set a new social tone. Young people would be out every night, partying, mixing and mingling. Members of Congress, who had been sleeping on sofas in their offices and in group houses because their families lived back in the home districts, would start accepting invitations again instead of working for 18 hours, three days a week, and then going home for four.

It was all a Camelot fantasy. Obama inherited the helm of the Titanic. Many of those he brought in were from past administrations. A lot of his crowd came in from Chicago and stuck together. People are working around the clock, and too exhausted and overextended to go out. The Obamas rarely entertain, except for large events.

I should assure you: I did not make that up. Sally Quinn actually wrote it. She actually wrote that members of Congress work too much and party too little.

Anyway, back to Quinn's analogy: The Na'vi had their sacred grounds bombed into oblivion, which is just like Barack Obama's failure to dance on a table with Sally Quinn. And that failure, according to Quinn, has consequences:

It would be inspiring to see a new administration understand the simple secret of how to belong to the community. Then, they would never have to hear, as the heroine of Avatar, Neytiri, says to the would-be hero, Jake Sully: "You will never be one of the people."

See, if you want to be "one of the people," you have to hobnob with Washington millionaires like Sally Quinn at elite gatherings of the connected and powerful. That's just basic common sense.

If you replaced Quinn's use of "establishment" with "The Village," the column would read like a parody of Quinn and her crowd penned by Digby or Bob Somerby. Instead, almost unbelievably, this is Quinn herself, and she is all too serious.

Again: You cannot caricature Sally Quinn. Don't even try.

Unfortunately, you also cannot completely ignore her. Hard as it may be to imagine, Quinn is not alone among establishment media in heaping abuse on presidents who don't make sucking up to her a priority -- particularly Democratic presidents. Just a few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin wrote that a key Obama shortcoming was his purported difficulty "Wooing Official Washington" -- by which Halperin meant himself and his friends. Or, as he put it: "Beltway salons and newsrooms whose denizens hoped the über-cool newbies would play." At the time, I noted that "this is the kind of idiocy that contributed to the elite media's hatred of the Clintons," and that there were other signs of Village restlessness -- particularly, Sally Quinn's call for the resignation of the White House social secretary, whose sins include the fact that she is "not of Washington."

Quinn's column may be absurd and shallow and betray a fundamental lack of seriousness, but it is not entirely wrong. Much of the Beltway media establishment really will trash a president for purely social reasons.

Keep that in mind: Their priorities are not your priorities. They care very little about jobs and health care and climate change. They just want to bask in the reflected glory that comes from dancing on tabletops with the "beautiful and glamorous, hip and fun." And if they can't, there will be hell to pay.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

For example, we need only to look back at Mark Halperin's 2006 declaration that the Democrats should be "scared to death about November's elections" or The Note's insistence that Iraq looked like a "2006 political winner for the Republican Party" or Howard Fineman's late-2005 column arguing that the Democrats had reason to be gloomy because, unlike the GOP, they lacked "stars" (Mr. Fineman, meet Mr. Obama). Or ABC's Claire Shipman's credulous statement just weeks before the GOP's crushing defeat in the 2006 elections that "political Svengali" Karl Rove had presented "a compelling scenario" for the Republicans to hold onto Congress.

And who could forget Chuck Todd's 2006 prediction that "if Democrats get control of Congress, President Bush's approval rating will be over 50 percent by the Fourth of July next year"? In fact, Bush's approval rating was barely over 30 percent by July of 2007.

You may have noticed a pattern in these examples: The media's fundamental belief that America is a center-right nation leads them to overestimate the political peril for progressives and progressive policies.

So it should come as no surprise that much of the media analysis following Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown's victory in Tuesday night's special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat has amounted to little more than a one-sided effort to see how many different ways one can say that progressives shouldn't pursue progressive policies.

At the most basic level, there was the immediate -- and often ham-handed -- attempt to insist that Tuesday's election was a repudiation of health care reform.

Now, there are some glaring problems with that assertion. Like a Rasmussen Reports election-night poll that found that people who voted for Democratic candidate Martha Coakley were more likely than those who voted for Brown to say that health care was the most important issue to them. And the fact that Massachusetts already has universal health care. And the fact that Brown himself said the election was not a referendum on health care. And the fact that Brown said in his ads: "I believe all Americans deserve health care coverage."

Still, many journalists were deeply committed to the idea that Massachusetts voters (suddenly, according to the punditocracy, speaking on behalf of America) had rejected health care reform, and they went about trying to find evidence -- any evidence -- to fit that conclusion. The biggest reach may have come on MSNBC yesterday morning, where anchor Savannah Guthrie seemed to think the fact that Brown signed his autograph with the number 41 -- he will be the 41st Republican senator, giving the GOP the ability to sustain filibusters all by themselves -- was a smoking gun.

That's right: Brown, who said "all Americans deserve health care coverage" and said the election was not a referendum on health care, signed his name with a 41 at the end, so Massachusetts voters must have been rejecting health care reform! That's about as lame an explanation as you could possibly think of, but Guthrie's colleague Chris Matthews peddled it later that day, too.

Most important: What does it actually mean if the election was a "referendum" on health care? What does that say about what Democrats have done for the past year, and what they should do over the next? The answers aren't as simple as much of the media coverage would suggest.

Actually, the shallowness of the media's political analysis this week wasn't limited to health care; it showed in their insistence that President Obama and the Democrats were guilty of "overreaching" on a wide range of issues. Time ran an article headlined "Five Ways Obama Went Wrong" that was typical of the establishment media's reaction to recent events. Time's "five ways" included:

• The challenges were just too big for any one man.
• Crises are not opportunities; they are just crises.
• The Obama mandate was not what it seemed.
• Health care is just too hard.
• Americans just don't like government.

Note that all five really boil down to the same thing: Obama tried to do too much.

Now, it's possible that's true. But there are other assessments that are at least as plausible.

For example: The stimulus package passed by the Democratic Congress and signed by President Obama last year was significantly smaller than it should have been, according to many economists -- and a sizable chunk of it was devoted to tax cuts included in part in a (largely unsuccessful) effort to win support from conservatives. Had that package been much larger and more focused on things that would provide more immediate stimulus, it's possible the economy would have shown greater improvement over the past year. And that would have almost certainly resulted in a political environment that is more favorable to the Democrats.

So it isn't difficult to conclude that the problem wasn't an attempt to do too much; it was that not enough was done. Conversely, what if less had been done? Would the economy be any better? Probably not. Would Democrats have avoided Republican attacks over runaway spending had they limited the bill to a mere $400 billion? Of course not. And so the Democrats' political fortunes would not be better, either.

The same applies to suggestions that Democrats tried to do too much with health care. Maybe they did -- or maybe the problem isn't that they tried to do too much, but that they did it too slowly, and that they'd be better off had they quickly slammed bold legislation through Congress last summer and moved on.

Again, let's look at the implications of the assumptions underlying the "overreached" theme. What if Democrats had pursued a health care that was half as ambitious as the Senate bill, with the same legislative strategy for getting it through Congress? Would that have convinced conservatives not to lie about it, or Republicans not to oppose it? Of course not. Would opponents still brand it a "government takeover of health care"? Of course. Would the media have done a better job of informing and educating the public about what the bill would actually do? Nope. So, again: How would their situation be any better?

Finally, even if the media consensus that Democrats overreached is correct, what does that say about what they should do going forward? The implication tends to be that they should tack sharply to the right and scale back their agenda. But if they do that, they're still going to get (falsely) hit for supporting a "massive government takeover of health care" -- that toothpaste has left the tube, and there's no putting it back in -- and for massive government spending. And they won't be able to do much to repair the economy if they're tacking rightward and scaling back their agenda. So they would risk facing a lousy economy and negative perceptions of their handling of health care and not having much to show for any of it. Is that really the best they can hope for? Maybe it is. But -- pretty obviously -- it might not be. It might be that they'd be better off quickly passing health care and a second stimulus, for example, and running on those accomplishments, since they're already paying the price for them.

To be clear: I'm not offering political advice here. Properly answering these questions requires far greater depth of study than is the scope of this column. My point is simply to demonstrate the shocking shallowness of the "political analysis" mainstream political reporters provide. It pretty much boils down to this: Democrats are unpopular and losing support from independents, therefore they were too liberal and tried to do too much, therefore they should run to the right and do much less.

Now, there are times when those are the correct conclusions. This may even be one of them. But that isn't actual analysis. Those are assumptions. Those are cocktail party platitudes. How can I say those could be the correct conclusions and that they are simply assumptions? Two reasons: First, those are almost always the media's conclusions. Second, they don't show their work. They don't address the questions I've raised: Things like: OK, if Democrats did too much, what would have happened had they done less? What would the political state of play be had the stimulus package and health care bill been half as large? If you don't work through these things, you aren't really "analyzing" anything -- you're guessing.

Instead, they rely on assumptions and jump to conclusions. (Here's where a conservative would likely argue that the same thing happens when Republicans lose: the media assume it's because they were too conservative. Guess what? I agree that those assessments are often based on flawed analysis. Again: My focus here is the quality of the analysis more than the correctness of the conclusions.)

One of those assumptions -- one that is obviously incorrect and that I'm confident none of them would consciously adopt -- is that the electorate consists of people scattered along an ideological spectrum, and that their position on that spectrum is static, and that they respond to legislative efforts based solely on how those efforts relate to their own position on the spectrum.

Here's an example: Politico's Ben Smith suggested yesterday that the position that the Democrats' problem was an excess of caution is incompatible with the position that the Democrats' problem is that independents are turning away from them. But those two things are only incompatible if you think "independents" are people who exist smack in the middle of the spectrum, between liberals and conservatives, and their political affections belong to whichever party pursues policies that are closest to their own ideological leanings. If, however, you think independents would be happy as clams if a significantly larger stimulus package last year had improved the economy, the two notions aren't even remotely incompatible.

Another: The silly notion that supporting a bill that costs $800 billion opens a politician up to attacks for reckless spending, but supporting a bill that costs $400 billion wouldn't. This is simply crazy. I can't believe anybody really thinks that conservatives wouldn't be able (or willing) to portray even $200 billion as too much money, if that was the price tag attached to health care reform, or to an economic stimulus package. It's $200 billion! And yet, you hear it all the time: The price tag is just so high, they're opening themselves up to attack. The reality is that numbers like $200 billion and $800 billion and $1.2 trillion don't really mean much to people -- and mean even less out of context, which is how they are almost always discussed. They all sound like -- or can easily be made to sound like -- a ton of money.

Which leads to the media's tendency to forget that effective policy makes for good politics. Spend $1 trillion on a stimulus package that improves the economy, and people are going to like you more than if you had spent $200 billion on one that didn't. But when they're covering debate over a stimulus package, the question of how well it will work tends to be missing from media discussions of whether people will think it's too expensive. And take a look at that Time assessment of Obama and the Democrats' political troubles, or at Politico's version: Neither contains much more than a few passing references to the concept that political and policy success are intertwined.

None of this would matter much, were it not for the fact that the news media are not merely observers of the political process, but active (which is not necessarily to say willing) participants in it. When they say over and over that something is too big, too expensive, too liberal, people -- politicians and voters alike -- tend to internalize that critique and adjust their behavior. And so the media have a distorting effect on political and public policy debates not merely by doing a lousy job of covering policy, but by doing a lousy job of the "political analysis" for which they all too often abandon coverage of policy.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Public and media reaction to the tragedy has been swift and in many cases admirable. Record-setting donations have poured into the Red Cross -- $4 million via text message alone. Some 30,000 people contributed another $2.6 million to Clinton Foundation relief efforts in just 24 hours. Much of this support can be attributed to the quick and powerful distribution -- by both old media and new -- of news, information, and photos relating to the earthquake. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been a valuable source of information, as have news organizations that scrambled to cover the tragedy. (The Business Insider has a good round-up of those efforts, with links to several useful resources.)

But much of the conservative media elite has reacted quite differently.

Fox News Channel's highest-rated shows, for example, all but ignored the disaster, according to a new Media Matters study:

On January 13, Fox News' three top-rated programs for 2009 -- The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Glenn Beck -- devoted a combined total of less than 7 minutes of coverage to the earthquake in Haiti, instead choosing to air such things as Beck's hour-long interview with Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly's discussion of Comedy Central host Jon Stewart, and Sean Hannity's advocacy for Massachusetts candidate Scott Brown's Senate campaign.

Fox News never hesitates to boast that its prime-time lineup draws more viewers than its competitors. But that success comes with a responsibility -- a responsibility to bring people important information in times of crisis. Fox fell far short of meeting that responsibility, instead inflicting upon viewers Sarah Palin's fumbling, bumbling attempt to answer a question about which of America's founders she most admires and continuing its attempts to elect Republicans to the Senate.

Not that O'Reilly, Hannity, and Beck were alone in dropping the ball. Christian Coalition founder and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson, host of the Christian Broadcasting Network's The 700 Club, had a rather unusual response to the devastation in Haiti:

ROBERTSON: [S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal."

And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. ... They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God.

Got that? Haiti was hit by a crushing earthquake because it made a deal with the devil to escape the French.

Robertson's reaction may seem bizarre, but it really isn't -- not for him, anyway. This is a man who "totally concur[red]" that the September 11 terrorist attacks could be attributed in part to "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians." A man who linked Hurricane Katrina to the legality of abortion. A man who suggested that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was the result of God's "enmity" against those who "divide" his land. A man who said Disney World's annual Gay Days event would bring "earthquakes, tornados and possibly a meteor."

At least he acknowledged that the meteor was only a possibility. Apparently Robertson's ability to divine the will of The Divine is limited to terrestrial events. Hey, he's only human.

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh did his best to convince us that he isn't.

First, Limbaugh said President Obama would use the Haitian tragedy to enhance his standing with the "light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country." Then he seemed to dissuade people from contributing to relief efforts, complaining: "[W]e've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax."

As with Robertson, this really isn't anything new for Limbaugh. He has long been contemptuous of U.S. efforts to help Haiti -- particularly when there is a Democrat in the White House.

In 1994, when Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was expelled by a military coup, Limbaugh opposed and ridiculed U.S. intervention, and claimed the only reason for restoring Aristide was to please the Congressional Black Caucus:

LIMBAUGH: As you know, we're invading Haiti simply because the Congressional Black Caucus wants it. Now the Congressional Black Caucus has got to be given a safe escort once the battle is over because they're going to go in there and plant their flag as in Iwo Jima. The Congressional Black Caucus will then capture Haiti and conquer it from the rest of the world. [9/1/94, via Nexis]

LIMBAUGH: The democratically elected government of Haiti is Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This guy -- I think he blinks once every five minutes. You know, he's -- he's -- he's not -- he's like a cup and saucer short of a full place setting according to all the psychological profiles. But the guy's a Marxist, ladies and -- I mean, he's a Marxist. He's a -- he's a Communist. He has written books, one of them entitled, I think, something like "Capitalism: The Mortal Sin," and so this is the democratic regime that we are implementing down there, or reinstalling because of the Congressional Black Caucus. [11/24/94, via Nexis]

If you're more interested in compassion than conspiracy theories, The New York Times has a list of relief efforts that can use your help.

In 1994, Limbaugh ridiculed Haiti, suggesting our only interest in the nation is "the fact that baseballs are made in Haiti" -- which he deemed "irrelevant" because of the baseball strike going on at the time. This week, he again ridiculed Haiti, saying the nation produces "zilch, zero, nada."

If Limbaugh and Robertson are any indication of the way the conservative media think about Haiti, maybe it's for the best that Fox's top-rated shows are ignoring the tragedy. I don't even want to think about the bizarre claims Glenn Beck would come up with. Probably something about the Obama administration faking the earthquake so they could funnel billions of dollars in funds to ACORN, just like Hitler would do.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Take, for example, Halperin's third sentence: "His approval ratings have fallen, and ideologically, liberals seem almost as unhappy with Barack Obama as do conservatives." Even allowing for a certain amount of hyperbole, that's absolute nonsense. In Gallup's polling at the end of the year, 89 percent of liberal Democrats approve of Obama's job performance, compared to 10 percent of conservative Republicans.

Now, let's look at Halperin's lists of the five things Obama is doing better and worse "than you realize." The number one thing Obama is doing well, according to Mark Halperin, is "Letting the co-equal branch do the heavy lifting." And the number two thing Obama is doing badly is "Driving the policy process." Those two things sound like opposite sides of the same coin, yet Halperin doesn't appear to notice. And he writes that by letting Congress do the heavy-lifting, "Obama has gotten much of what he has wanted out of Congress," which would seem to undermine the claim that Obama is doing a poor job of driving the policy process. It looks like Halperin was confused about whether Obama has been able to drive policy, and just decided to argue both sides -- each without acknowledging the other -- and hope nobody noticed.

Then there's the vapidity of Halperin's third Obama shortcoming: his purported difficulty in "Wooing Official Washington." At first glance, that may seem like a legitimate concern. After all, if "official Washington" -- diplomats and senators and generals and committee chairs and whatnot -- aren't on Obama's side, it will be hard for him to get anything done. But that isn't what Halperin means by "official Washington." No, he means journalists and pundits and Georgetown party-goers. He means, basically, him and his pals:

[P]olitically and personally, the First Couple and their top aides have shown no hankering for the Establishment seal of approval, nor have they accepted the glut of invitations to embassy parties and other tribal rituals of the political class. In the sphere of Washington glitter, the Clintons were clumsy and the Bush team indifferent, but the Obama Administration has turned a cold shoulder, disappointing Beltway salons and newsrooms whose denizens hoped the über-cool newbies would play.

Halperin's attempt to put Obama's purported failing in historical context just shows the emptiness of this complaint: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush won second terms despite their clumsiness and indifference towards the cocktail scene, which suggests that keeping Sally Quinn happy isn't all that important.

But Halperin's next criticism of Obama -- that he hasn't succeeded in "Changing the tone in Washington" -- is even sillier. First, Halperin, like much of the Beltway media, overrates the importance of bipartisanship. They often see it as a goal in and of itself -- as though a single mother struggling to pay for her kids' health care gives a damn whether reform passes on a party-line vote. But even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, to the importance of bipartisanship, Halperin's argument fails badly.

Halperin traces the origin of Obama's purported failure to his refusal to pursue a bipartisan stimulus passage:

Once the new President cast his lot with his party in passing an economic-stimulus measure rather than seeking bipartisan agreement, rival Republicans started digging in.

That simply is not what happened.

What actually happened is that President Obama bent over backwards soliciting Republican support, but the GOP rebuffed him even as he and congressional Democrats filled the stimulus package with $288 billion in tax cuts in an effort to woo them. What actually happened is that the President and Congressional Democrats passed a stimulus package that was much smaller than many economists thought was necessary, in part because they wanted to win support from Republicans who said they were concerned about the size of the bill. What actually happened is that Republicans refused to vote for the bill anyway, and the alternative they offered was completely -- 100 percent -- tax cuts.

And yet Halperin says (repeatedly) that President Obama was the one who failed to seek bipartisan agreement. That is the exact opposite of what happened. This is not a matter of interpretation; it is a matter of clear facts. The Republican proposal consisted entirely of tax cuts. That happened. It's a fact. The Democratic stimulus package included a mix of tax cuts and spending. That happened. It's a fact. When Mark Halperin says it was Obama and the Democrats who refused to seek bipartisan agreement, he is demonstrating that he is either so woefully uninformed about basic facts or so blatantly dishonest that, in either case, he cannot be taken seriously.

But Halperin doesn't merely fail on factual grounds. His arguments fail basic tests of logic and common sense as well:

Obama's aides continue to blame the Republicans for refusing to play ball, but the buck stops with the President, whose paths to success on issues such as climate control, jobs and education are all narrower because of a partisan bitterness that rivals that of the Clinton and Bush eras.

No. The buck cannot stop with the President; not when it comes to bipartisanship. The reason should be fairly obvious: The attainment of bipartisanship cannot be the responsibility of only one party.

Imagine that you have two children, 7 and 10 years old, and that they bicker constantly. You want them to stop, so you tell them they have to get along. And you tell the 10-year-old that it's her responsibility for them to do so: If they continue to bicker, the buck will stop with him, and she'll be grounded. What does that do? That gives the 7-year-old license to behave as badly as he wants. He can refuse to share his toys with the 10-year-old, while demanding access to all of hers. And the 10-year-old must either capitulate entirely, or be grounded.

That's the position Halperin's formulation puts President Obama in: Capitulate entirely, or be blamed for the failure of bipartisanship. The only way he can avoid blame, in Halperin's warped little world, is to allow the minority party to run the show. That just doesn't make any sense -- and even if it did, it certainly wouldn't be "bipartisanship."

When you combine Halperin's complaint that the Obama administration doesn't hang out with him and his pals enough with his fetishization of bipartisanship, you begin to get a picture of Halperin's idea of a successful presidency: one in which all of Washington gets along during the day and hangs out together at the same parties every night.

Basically, he wants senior year on Saved by the Bell. And he's looking for a prom king, not a president.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Take last week's explosive allegation, first described in detail by The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, that in order to secure Sen. Ben Nelson's (D-NE) support for health care reform, the White House had threatened to close Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base. That sent the right-wing attack machine into overdrive, with accusations of "politicizing national security" flying around and dark talk of the White House weakening U.S. national security and committing impeachable offenses.

It was an obviously ludicrous allegation (pushed, by the way, by people who worked for John McCain's presidential campaign), but it was hyped so forcefully that 20 Republican senators demanded an investigation.

Now, ordinarily, 20 U.S. senators calling for an investigation into a "scandal" the conservative media had been promoting would really set off a frenzy. Like sharks sensing blood in the water, right-wing bloggers and broadcasters would go for the kill. We'd see a constant barrage of attacks on Democrats for "blocking" an investigation into a vital matter of national security and allegations of corruption at the highest levels. They'd attack the media for not covering the alleged threat like it was Watergate, Teapot Dome, and Tiger Woods all wrapped into one. They'd be absolutely relentless.

But that didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened: When those 20 senators sent a letter to the Armed Services Committee asking for an investigation, the right-wingers who had been so outraged promptly went silent.

On December 16, for example, an Investor's Business Daily editorial said the Obama administration's alleged threat "would amount to playing politics with our national security." IBD hasn't mentioned the allegation since, even though it devoted its December 21 editorial to Ben Nelson's support for health care reform.

On December 15, Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey accused the White House of "extortion" and "threatening more base closures and disruption for [sic] national security." Morrissey wrote about Nelson twice more on December 17, again on December 19 and December 21, and once more on December 22 -- but he never again mentioned the base-closure allegation.

Last week, Glenn Beck suggested the alleged threat would constitute "high crimes" -- a reference to the "high crimes and misdemeanors" requirement for impeaching the president. Later that day, he said it "borders on treason." But then he went quiet. (Beck has been on vacation this week, but he didn't mention Nelson during last Thursday's broadcast of his Fox News show -- his last -- or his Friday appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. And if Glenn Beck really believed President Obama had committed anything approaching "treason" or a "high crime," you can be sure he wouldn't let a little thing like vacation keep him away from his chalkboard.)

Michelle Malkin wrote on December 15 that Nelson "is reportedly being threatened with closure of an air force base if he doesn't fall in line." Malkin has written at least nine posts since then that mention Nelson -- but has never again mentioned the alleged threat.

RedState's Dan Perrin wrote on December 15: "The White House and Democratic Leadership in the Senate has [sic] told Senator Nelson they will close every military base in Nebraska." That went further than anyone else, both by including the "Democratic Leadership in the Senate" in the threat and by expanding it to include "every military base in Nebraska." But Perrin, who acknowledged the threat was not "credible," has never again mentioned it, despite writing about Nelson on December 17, December 18, December 19, and December 20.

Even The Weekly Standard's Goldfarb has gone silent on his big "scoop" -- along with colleagues John Noonan and Matthew Continetti, who touted Goldfarb's claim on December 15 but haven't touched it since.

So what's with the sudden silence? Why isn't the right-wing noise machine that last week seemed so eager to accuse the Obama administration of "playing politics with national security" continuing the drumbeat? After all, it isn't like they've come up with any better ways to derail health care reform, which appears to be on the verge of passing the Senate (and is significantly closer to doing so than it was before Goldfarb came up with the Offutt allegation).

The simplest explanation is that they know the base-closing allegation is absolute nonsense, and they're afraid that an investigation into it would blow up in their faces.

Either that, or they take "playing politics with national security" and "treason" so lightly they just forgot all about it overnight.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

The conservatives allege that, in order to secure Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson's support for health care reform, the White House has threatened to close an Air Force base in Nebraska unless he falls in line. The allegation is impossible to believe, though right-wing media figures have -- with varying degrees of success -- pretended to do so.

Why is it impossible to believe?

Well, first, it comes from deeply dishonest conservative bloggers like Michael Goldfarb, the McCain campaign operative whose previous claim to fame was one of the most ludicrous television appearances ever by a campaign spokesperson.

Second, the sourcing is beyond sketchy -- anonymous and vaguely-described and impossible to either confirm or disprove.

Third, the target of the alleged threat: To the extent the White House has taken an aggressive stance toward Democratic members of Congress, conservatives like Nelson have not been known to be the recipients of pressure.

Fourth, Nelson's office -- the alleged target of the threat -- has firmly denied the allegation, as has the White House.

And finally: If the White House wanted to put pressure on Nelson, threatening to, as Goldfarb put it, "put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list" is just about the least effective way they could do so. See, BRAC -- the Base Realignment and Closure process -- just doesn't work that way. BRAC makes it extremely difficult for political considerations to influence base closure decisions. As the conservative Heritage Foundation notes, "Realignment and closure decisions are not made arbitrarily. The Pentagon, Congress, and the BRAC commission adhere to a predetermined set of criteria to guide them through the process." An independent commission makes closure recommendations, which Congress has an opportunity to reject. The process is lengthy, high-profile, and defined by built-in mechanisms that prevent just the kind of meddling the conservatives are alleging. And BRAC won't even make closure decisions for several more years.

So the alleged threat would take a long time to execute, would have a low probability of success, and, if found out, would make the White House look far worse than would much easier and immediate forms of pressure. It would be about as effective as threatening to put a hex on Nelson's dog. It just isn't plausible.

And yet 20 Republican senators are now calling for an investigation into this obviously bogus charge (though one of them, Nelson's fellow Nebraskan Mike Johanns, reportedly admits he doesn't believe the allegation.) So how did we get here?

Tuesday morning, conservative writer Matt Lewis wrote on his Twitter feed, "Hearing Ben Nelson has been threatened with closing his air force base" over Nelson's slowness to embrace health care reform. Lewis provided no details, and that's the last he wrote about the subject. Odd -- if Lewis really believed there was anything to this story, you'd think he'd want to take credit for breaking it (something he is not generally bashful about doing).

Three hours later, RedState blogger Dan Perrin claimed:

The White House and Democratic Leadership in the Senate has told Senator Nelson they will close every military base in Nebraska -- a threat that is not credible, really -- but they have also offered Senator Nelson between $300 million to $500 million in earmarks, according to key hill health care operatives.

And that's the last Perrin wrote about this allegation -- perhaps because he acknowledged the threat is "not credible."

Which brings us to Michael Goldfarb, Weekly Standard blogger and former McCain operative. Two hours after Perrin acknowledged the lack of credibility of the alleged threat, Goldfarb began pushing it:

According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn't fall into line.

Notice that Goldfarb attributed the claim to "a Senate aide," without providing the most basic possible information: Which political party does the aide belong to? Given that the allegation would appear more credible coming from a Democratic aide, we can assume from Goldfarb's wording that his source was a GOP staffer. How is this presumably Republican staffer in a position to know about a threat the Democratic White House made to a Democratic senator? Goldfarb doesn't provide any indication.

Now take a look at the "quotes" from Goldfarb's "source":

As our source put it, this is a "naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson's vote." They are "threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?" asked the Senate staffer.

Sure sounds like a Republican, doesn't it? By refusing to reveal the staffer's political orientation, Goldfarb was intentionally obscuring information that would make the report less credible. That's a pretty dishonest maneuver that itself undermines his claims.

Goldfarb closed by being the first to invoke the specter of "this administration playing politics with our national security":

STRATCOM [United States Strategic Command] was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.

Of course, the first part of that excerpt is exactly why such a threat is so unlikely. As for the second part: Making obviously false allegations against the White House in order to portray them as "playing politics with our national security" is, itself, "playing politics with our national security."

Yesterday, even as I was explaining the glaring flaws in Goldfarb's claim on Media Matters' County Fair blog, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and several conservative bloggers began pushing it. Beck suggested the White House's alleged threat constitutes "high crimes." Hannity read Goldfarb's blog post nearly word-for-word, echoing the "playing politics" line. Limbaugh pushed the allegation, too, but accidentally undermined it by saying "the next convening of a base closing commission is 2013." Really? We're supposed to believe the White House is threatening Nelson with something that wouldn't happen for four years -- at a time when Barack Obama may not even be in office any more?

And Goldfarb wasn't done yet. He appeared on Beck's radio show to announce: "As I understand it, Rahm Emanuel delivered a message to the Senate leadership that if Nelson did not get behind this, Offutt Air Force base would find itself on the next round of BRAC closures."

But by the time Goldfarb went on Beck's television show later in the day, he was busy retracting the claim that Emanuel was involved. Then Goldfarb acknowledged that "it's actually not a very credible threat" to shut down the base, given that the BRAC process won't start again for several years:

GOLDFARB: Look, and as my source told me -- he said, "Look, this was clearly done by somebody who didn't understand the BRAC process." It's actually not a very credible threat. The BRAC process won't begin again until 2012, 2013, but clearly they wanted to exert some pressure. ... [T]he sort of the funny thing here is this is not a very credible threat they've made to Nelson.

Well, that's pretty hard to believe. See, Goldfarb earlier claimed his source told him the threat came from Rahm Emanuel, who -- having served as a senior staffer in a previous presidential administration and as a member of the leadership in the House of Representatives, in addition to currently being White House chief of staff -- clearly does understand the BRAC process. Now Goldfarb claims his source told him it was done by someone who doesn't understand BRAC.

And if Goldfarb's source really did tell him the threat was made by someone who doesn't understand BRAC, and if Goldfarb really did understand it wasn't a "credible threat," why did he leave that information out of his blog post? The simplest explanation is that Goldfarb (and his source, if his source even exists) made all of this up, not having the first clue about the BRAC process. And once the absurdity of the claim was pointed out, he tried to save face by changing his account of what his "source" told him.

That would be consistent with Goldfarb's history of trying to paper over his obvious whoppers, by the way. Here's Goldfarb vouching for his credibility last night:

BECK: People will say you're a political hack. Why should we believe a guy who was a communications director for the McCain campaign?

GOLDFARB: Oh, I got a perfect track record. You know, I've never made up a story before. I hope that'll be enough.

But that's not true. Not even close.

During Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, Goldfarb claimed that when she was a student at Princeton, Sotomayor was allowed to teach her own class and grade her own work:

GOLDFARB: I went to Princeton but somehow I never got to teach my own class, or grade my own work. One wonders how Sotomayor judged her work in that class, and whether the grade helped or hindered her efforts to graduate with honors.

Goldfarb was referring to a 1974 Princeton press release about a seminar Sotomayor and two other students initiated.

But the press release didn't say Sotomayor taught the class -- to the contrary, it specifically said "[t]he seminar is being taught by Dr. Peter E. Winn, Assistant Professor of History and a specialist in Latin American affairs." And it didn't say Sotomayor got to grade her own work. The seminar also made clear that there was nothing unique about it; it had been "offered twice before." According to the release, Sotomayor and the other students "did what scores of other Princeton Students have been able to do for the past six years: they initiated their own seminar."

Goldfarb, in other words, made up the claim that Sotomayor taught her own class. He made up the claim that she graded her own work. He made up the claim that this was the result of preferential treatment.

And when I caught him doing so, and several others ridiculed Goldfarb for his obvious falsehood, did he retract his bogus claims? No. Instead, a few days later, Goldfarb added an update to his post -- an update that didn't retract the falsehoods but instead quoted a National Review writer implying, as Goldfarb claimed, that Sotomayor graded herself. The update -- much like Goldfarb's current attempts to make it look like he knew all along that the BRAC threat is implausible -- was a transparent effort to paper over his mistake rather than admit to it.

Then, two weeks later, he completely rewrote history, pretending that his claims about Sotomayor had been accurate and that "the left was outraged that anyone would suggest Sotomayor had benefited from affirmative action." That isn't what happened. What happened was that Goldfarb lied, was caught doing so, and refused to admit to having made false claims.

That's Michael Goldfarb's "perfect track record." That's the person responsible for the not-remotely-credible (and ever-shifting) claims about Rahm Emanuel and the White House threatening Ben Nelson. And that's the basis on which Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and 20 Republican senators are throwing around phrases like "high crimes" and calling for investigations: the ludicrous and contradictory claims of a deeply dishonest former McCain operative.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Today alone, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz -- one of the paper's most famous reporters, and the nation's most prominent media critic -- devoted more than 1,000 words to Woods, under the charming header "Harem management." (Followed by a mere 95 words about Afghanistan polling.) And so it goes at the Post, where Kurtz has written more than 4,600 words about Woods since December 1.

And that's just Kurtz. During that time, the Post has also published the following Tiger tales:

• "Par for the coarse," by Kathleen Parker
• "The game Woods couldn't control; With his bunker mentality, golfer whiffed on scandal's P.R.," by Paul Farhi
• "A rough Tiger can't escape," by John Feinstein
• "Tiger's validation complex," by Eugene Robinson
• "If he's looking, Woods could find redemption at a historic golf course in D.C.," by Courtland Milloy
• "Tiger should take a page from senator's playbook," by Dana Milbank
• "Cheating? Hello, you've got e-trail; Technological gains may render one person extinct in adultery: The blindsided dupe," by Monica Hesse, which examined the pressing question: "In an age of iPhones, TMZ and standard-issue personal GPS devices, is technology killing the affair?"

I should note that I'm not even including the Post's Sports section in this tally.

Then there's the Post's recent online Q&As, including:

• Opinion: Dana Milbank on Tiger, Baucus
• Celebritology: Liz Kelly on Tiger Woods, more
• The Reliable Source: The Salahis, Tiger, Ken Cen Honors, Peter Orszag, Shawne Merriman, more
• Paul Farhi on pop culture: How should 'respectable' media cover tabloid news stories?
• Howard Kurtz discusses Tiger Woods, Stephanopoulos, Climategate, more
• Celebritology Live: Talk Tiger Woods, the other women, more: You've Been Served... a Heaping Plate of Gossip

Again: All that without even including Post sports pages.

It should go without saying that newspaper resources are finite -- even at a paper like the Post, which enjoys massive subsidies from its parent company's Kaplan Test Prep division. A reporter who spends his afternoon writing about a golfer is a reporter who is not writing about Afghanistan. A front-page article about Tiger Woods is an article that doesn't explain the basics of health care reform.

During his Q&A, the Post's Farhi defended the paper's resource allocation:

Paul Farhi: [W]e seem to have covered the health-care bill pretty well. I suppose one could make the argument that we would cover it BETTER if we dropped the Tiger/Salahi stuff and devoted more of our resources to it. But I don't know why we would want to do that.

Got that? Paul Farhi supposes the Post could cover health care better if it spent fewer resources on a golfer's sex life -- but why would they want to do that?

Well, I can think of a few reasons, starting with the dubiousness of the claim that the Post has covered the issue "pretty well." (There's plenty more where that came from.)

But The Washington Post needn't take my word for it (or its own ombudsman's word): The Post has a polling budget. If they're so convinced that they've covered health care "pretty well" -- well enough that they can devote extensive resources to figuring out who golfers sleep with -- let's see them prove it. I dare the Post to conduct a scientific poll of its readers, asking them a basic question about health care reform: According to the Congressional Budget Office, would health care reform that includes a government-run public insurance option increase the deficit or reduce it?

If the Post has done a good job of covering health care reform, a large majority of its readers should be able to answer that question correctly. It would cost just a few thousand dollars -- a drop in the bucket for a newspaper like the Post -- in exchange for which the Post would be able to brag about how great its reporting is, and how well informed its readers are. And the paper would get to throw the results in the face of the critics Farhi dismisses as "presumptuous and self-serving" people who "lecture" the Post about " 'serious' news" simply "to telegraph that they themselves are verrrrry serious people and that we should follow their sterling example." Won't that be satisfying!

What's the downside? There is none, unless, of course, the Post thinks that the results would embarrass the paper and undermine its claims to have done a good job of reporting on health care.

Back to Tiger Woods: Even if we stipulate that the Post has done a sterling job of covering health care and Afghanistan and the economy and everything that matters more than an athlete's girlfriends, I submit that would still not justify the paper's obsessive coverage of Woods.

There is limited public benefit to leering over celebrity sexcapades, and privacy implications -- for all of us -- that should be troubling. The more the media behave as though some people (politicians, actors, musicians, athletes) are undeserving of privacy in their private lives, the more it erodes the idea that any of us is entitled to such privacy. We can't expect the National Enquirer to take that into consideration, but it would be nice if "respectable" media like The Washington Post did.

It also might be in the paper's self-interest. After all, once the media decide that politicians, athletes, and entertainers have no right to privacy, how much longer will it be before the same applies to big-name journalists. Consider the standard justifications reporters give for covering sex "scandals" -- those involved are influential public figures, and they moralize about others or project an image that is inconsistent with their private actions. Which of those justifications don't apply to famous reporters?

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Just a few months ago, they were convinced they had Obama and the Democrats on the run. They had suckered (or intimidated) the rest of the media into endlessly reporting the temper-tantrums thrown by a few town hall attendees, treating those tantrum-throwers as representative of the nation as a whole, and ignoring the obvious falsity of the tantrum-throwers' claims. They spread lies about "death panels" and went on and on about rationing and the horrors of government bureaucrats (who needn't worry about profits) replacing insurance company bureaucrats (who are quite concerned with profit) in the health care decision-making process. And they had suckered (or intimidated) the rest of the media into taking seriously their fantasies that millions of people had descended on Washington, D.C., to express their disapproval of President Obama.

They did such a good job of convincing the Beltway media that Barack Obama was on the ropes, they seemed to have bought into it themselves, and went for the political knockout punch. Led by the deeply disturbed Glenn Beck (who announced that his goal was to "take the administration down"), they launched some of the harshest attacks imaginable.

Barack Obama, they told us, was a racist and a socialist. A Stalinist. A Marxist and a Maoist. They claimed he reminded them of Mussolini and of Nixon (even getting a bunch of legitimate reporters to buy into that one). Not only that: He is just like Hitler.

But Godwin's Law is not to be trifled with. Comparisons to Hitler tend to blow up in the speaker's face, and this was no different. The constant barrage of off-the-wall claims -- like the suggestion that Barack Obama was history's greatest monster for urging kids to stay in school -- began to drive home a basic truth about the conservative media who were behind them: These people aren't right in the head.

So some on the right seem to be trying to dial things down, to dissociate themselves from the foaming-at-the-mouth fringes who have come to define their movement. And their criticisms of Barack Obama have become increasingly, well, lame.

Take, for example, the effort by The Washington Times, Fox News, and Matt Drudge to stir outrage over the White House's alleged failure to invite any Republicans to last month's state dinner. In fact, several Republicans had been invited, including the House and Senate minority leaders. But the whining over not being invited over for dinner would have been pathetic even if it were true. This isn't seventh grade. Surely there are more important things to worry about than who hangs out with whom after school. In the meantime, if Republicans want to eat in the White House, they should elect a Republican president.

Then there's the recent complaint that the Senate was going to vote on health care reform after only 10 hours of debate. Or, the right-wing blogger Gateway Pundit put it, "Senate Dems Will Only Deliberate 10 Hours Before Vote to Nationalize Health Care."

What's wrong with that criticism?

Well, for one thing, it isn't true. The vote in question was not on passage of health care reform (which, in any case, would not "nationalize health care"). No, the vote was to begin debate on the bill. In other words: the Senate was debating for 10 hours about whether to debate health care reform. Under the guise of supporting debate on health care reform, Gateway Pundit was actually complaining about the Senate voting to debate health care reform.

Finally, it isn't like the Senate -- and the country -- hasn't been debating health care reform for almost a year. (Or, depending on your point of view, for several decades.) And it isn't like the Senate "debate" over the bill is actually a deliberative process, as Gateway Pundit claims. Floor "debates" tend to be more explanatory than deliberative, with members explaining their votes rather than determining them. The Senate could schedule one hour of "debate" prior to voting on passage, or 30 hours, and it wouldn't have much impact on how thoroughly members have considered the issue at this point.

Then there's Fox's let's-throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-hope-something-sticks effort to raise a fuss over President Obama's use of the word "unprecedented." The less said about that one, the better. Even Glenn Beck suddenly feels the need to announce that he isn't crazy enough to believe the nonsense he's spewing.

Finally, take a look at conservative reaction to President Obama's Afghanistan speech this week. Here's Charles Krauthammer: "It's not exactly the kind of speech that you would have heard from Henry V or Churchill."

Ooooh ... burn.

But the right-wingers apparently thought this really was a deeply damaging assessment, for they quickly piled on:

• Bill O'Reilly: "I did not see a Winston Churchill-type performance. ... [it was] OK, but not exactly the Gettysburg Address."

• Sean Hannity: "I didn't hear Winston Churchill."

• Victor Davis Hanson: "[N]ot Winston Churchill."

• Nile Gardiner: "Barack Obama badly needed to display some Churchillian grit, but there was none on offer."

Coming after so many months of comparisons of Barack Obama to Hitler and Mao and Stalin, a bunch of conservatives saying that he's no Winston Churchill can only be viewed as praising with faint damnation.

Or maybe Pat Buchanan finally convinced his friends on the Right that comparing someone to Hitler is a compliment.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

Anschutz built his fortune -- his $8 billion net worth is good for 36th place on the Forbes 400, ahead of better-known Murdoch and Steve Jobs -- in the oil and gas industry, augmented with railroad and telecommunications holdings, as well as Regal Cinemas and the production company behind The Chronicles of Narnia films.

The far-right American Spectator describes Anschutz as "a committed conservative" who "gives lots of money to the Republican National Committee and to GOP candidates" and is "friendly with fellow oilman George W. Bush."

In 2005, Media Matters detailed Anschutz's history of conservative activism:

Anschutz has a history of supporting socially conservative causes. According to a recent Post article, Anschutz's family foundation gave James Dobson, the founder of the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family, an award for his "contributions to the American Family." The Post noted that according to the foundation's website, Focus on the Family works to "counter the media-saturating message that homosexuality is inborn and unchangeable" and that one of the group's policy experts referred to abortion as an example of when "Satan temporarily succeeds in destroying God's creation." Further, as the Post mentioned, Anschutz contributed $10,000 in 1992 to Colorado Family Values in support of the group's efforts to pass a state constitutional amendment to invalidate state and local laws that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. (The referendum passed, but the United States Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional.) According to the Post, "Anschutz's money helped pay for an ad campaign that said such anti-bias laws gave gays and lesbians 'special rights.'"

In May 2003, the Orange County Weekly reported that other Anschutz Foundation beneficiaries include the Institute for American Values, which according to the Weekly "campaigns against single parenting," and Enough is Enough, which "promotes Internet censorship." The San Francisco Chronicle noted on February 20, 2004, that Anschutz also funds Morality in Media. As Media Matters previously noted, the Institute for American Values also receives funding from the conservative Bradley and Scaife foundations, as well as grants from the John M. Olin Foundation, another major financer of conservative organizations. Enough is Enough and Morality in Media have also received funding from the conservative Castle Rock Foundation.

In recent years, Anschutz has turned his attention to his media holdings, including his movie production company. And he is building a news-media empire, as well: he bought the San Francisco Examiner in 2004 and launched the Washington Examiner the next year, while trademarking the "Examiner" name in more than 60 cities. And earlier this year, Anschutz purchased The Weekly Standard from Murdoch.

Anschutz and the people in his employ are quick to counter suggestions that his right-wing politics drive editorial decisions at his newspapers. A 2007 profile of Anschutz in American Journalism Review included a Washington Examiner editor stressing that Anshutz had told him "All I want to do is put out quality newspapers." A 2004 Washington Post article quoted another Anschutz employee stressing that Anschutz had "taken no hand in the operations, nor in demanding any particular editorial policy."

But Anschutz's publications certainly do reflect his conservative views.

Earlier this year, Media Matters' Terry Krepel detailed the right-wing tilt to the Washington Examiner's staff, including alums of the National Review, The Washington Times, NewsBusters, Robert Novak's newsletter, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.

And those kinds of staffing decisions lead to headlines like these, all featured on the front of the Washington Examiner's web page Wednesday afternoon:  

• Are Democrats exiting the sinking ship?
• Inside the numbers: How Obama has fallen
• Global warming industry becomes too big to fail
• Youngest voters spurn Obamacare
• Damn the deficit: Full speed ahead on health care

Then there's the Opinion section, which features such gems as:

• Gene Healy: Obamacare is unconstitutional
• Grace-Marie Turner: Ten reasons public won't buy Senate health care plan
• Dr. David Gratzer: Medicine isn't perfect, Obamacare is even less perfect
• Ken Blackwell: Obama's indecision is hurting foreign alliances

If Anschutz's right-wing politics were shaping only the Washington Examiner, it might not matter much. Washington has plenty of conservative media; how much damage can one more do -- particularly given that The Washington Times (another newspaper controlled by a right-wing billionaire) is in danger of imploding?

But remember: Anschutz trademarked the "Examiner" name in more than 60 other cities. And he is making a push into the "hyper-local" news market with his Examiner.com sites.

Anschutz launched Examiner.com about a year and a half ago as an Internet-only local news portal; it currently reaches 129 markets and its traffic ranks 21st among U.S. news sites -- with the fastest traffic growth of any site from August of 2008 to August of 2009. And just a few weeks ago, Examiner.com bought NowPublic, a Canadian citizen-journalism site with reporters in more than 140 countries. The New York Times reported at the time:

With the sale, Examiner.com, a unit of Mr. Anschutz's Clarity Digital Group, became the latest company to show interest in a lively corner of the Web: the tools that let people read and share the news around them, sometimes down to neighborhood blocks.

[...]

Rick Blair, the chief executive of Examiner.com, said in an interview that his company's expansion into more than 100 markets indicated that hyperlocal information could be a scalable and sustainable business. Whether it can be profitable is still to be determined. "We're trying many ways to determine the advertiser interest," he said.

Given the newspaper industry's struggles, it isn't inconceivable that Examiner.com could quickly become a key source of news and information for many Americans. At which point, based on Anschutz's history, it'll be like having a local version of Fox News Channel in every city in America.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.