September 2016 Soundbites

At USA Today, No Questioning of NATO War Spending

“NATO Nations Ducking the Check” was USA Today’s front-page headline (7/7/16) over a story that emphasized the “big separation between those paying for the common defense and those who aren’t.” While “only five member countries…meet the required threshold of 2 percent or more of economic output devoted to defense,” the story reported that “there has been overall progress. Twenty-two NATO members are spending a greater share of their economy on defense compared to last year.”

The story displayed not a hint of skepticism that increasing military spending, in a world in which 3.1 million children die from malnutrition each year, is anything other than an unalloyed good. Nor did it mention that military spending by NATO countries totals $906 billion a year—58 percent of global military spending, though NATO countries represent less than 12 percent of Earth’s population. By comparison, Russia—sometimes portrayed as a looming threat to the West—has an annual military budget of $43 billion, or less than five percent of NATO’s.

NPR Misremembers Historical Lesson on Terror and Elections

When NPR “counter-terrorism correspondent” Dina Temple-Raston (6/12/16) was asked about the potential impact of the Orlando nightclub massacre on the November election, she drew a parallel to the 2004 Madrid train attacks, which occurred just before the Spanish election: “The more conservative candidate ended up winning,” Temple-Raston claimed.

Actually, the incumbent conservative government lost, after falsely blaming the Al Qaeda-linked attack on Basque separatists. The Socialist Party won on a platform of withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq.

After a FAIR post on the error (6/13/16), NPR News posted an online correction (6/14/16) that emphasized Temple-Raston getting the year of the bombing wrong—but failed to point out that the political impact of the attack was the opposite of the one she had told listeners.

NYT Recalls Media’s ‘Journalistic Detachment’ Before Iraq War

In his retrospective (7/19/16) on outgoing Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who lost his job amidst numerous charges of sexual harassment, New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg included this remarkable sentence:

It was Mr. Ailes who, after the September 11 attacks, directed his network to break with classic journalistic detachment to get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House, which jarred the rest of his industry.

Of course, Fox News was far from alone in abandoning “classic journalistic detachment” (such as it is) in the lead-up to the Iraq War—the New York Times certainly not excepted. Times reporters like Michael Gordon and Judith Miller helped get the nation “fully behind the war” with front-page stories touting “evidence” of WMDs that did not exist, while others wrote “news analysis” like “All Aboard: America’s War Train Is Leaving the Station” (2/2/03) and “US Plan: Spare Iraq’s Civilians” (2/23/03). That’s aside from the Times’ editorialists and commentators lobbying for the war, like columnist Thomas Friedman, who argued (Charlie Rose, 5/30/03) that the invasion was necessary to send the message: “Suck. On. This.”

For those in center-left media, the impulse to rewrite their own role in selling the Iraq War is all too tempting–to turn Fox News into a cartoon propaganda outlet, and present their own editorial drum-beating, war protester-mocking, aluminum tube-peddling and Dick Cheney water-carrying as “detached” journalism, simply calling balls and strikes. Fox News was assuredly more naked in its war promotion, but the New York Times, with its nominal liberal reputation and air of objectivity, was almost certainly more effective.

Should UK Stay or Should It Go? Zakaria Can’t Distinguish the Difference

Fareed Zakaria is a certified Serious Person, and as such he’s allowed to make up his own facts without consequences. Take his Washington Post column (6/30/16), “The Obvious Trump Running Mate? Bernie Sanders, of Course,” in which he claims that “on these trade matters, US manufacturing, and now Brexit, Trump’s positions are largely indistinguishable from Sanders’.”

Here’s Trump’s position on Britain leaving the European Union (Fox News, 5/5/16; cited by BBC, 5/6/16): “I would say [the UK] are better off without [the EU], personally, but I’m not making that as a recommendation, just my feeling.” And Sanders’ (Meet the Press, 4/24/16): “I would hope that they stay in, but that’s their decision.” Pretty easy to distinguish, actually.

In the same column, focused on trade policy, Zakaria asserts that “Hillary Clinton…would simply continue Barack Obama’s policies.” Actually, Clinton has come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s signature trade initiative, saying, “I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set for creating jobs and advancing national security” (PBS Democratic debate, 10/7/15). Zakaria presents no evidence that she’s lying—but, as a Serious Person, he’s not required to.

For WaPo, Cigarettes Not ‘a Drug of Any Kind’

In the first paragraph of the Washington Post’s harrowing account (7/23/16) of an opioid addict in recovery, reporter Eli Saslow writes: “It had now been 12 days since the last time Amanda Wendler used a drug of any kind, her longest stretch in years.” Yet the story goes on to mention 11 times that, in her strenuous efforts to stay sober, Amanda is regularly taking another kind of drug: “She lit a cigarette and sat down in the garage…. Amanda stomped out her cigarette and headed inside…. Amanda walked out to the garage to light a cigarette.”

It’s not mere pedantry to note that cigarettes are, obviously, a “drug of any kind.” They’re actually a drug that kills far more people in the US than opioid overdoses—480,000 per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, vs. 28,647 for opioid ODs. And it’s not just because more people smoke cigarettes: The approximately 2.3 million people addicted to opioid painkillers and heroin have an annual death rate from ODs of 1.2 percent—the same rate you get dividing smoking-related deaths among 40 million smokers.