President Trump’s Plans for Planet Not of Interest to Major Media
Donald Trump was interviewed by major news outlets at least a dozen times since he became president—including the New York Times (4/5/17), AP (4/23/17), CBS (4/30/17), NBC News (5/11/17), ABC News (1/25/17), Fox News (2/5/17) and Time (3/27/17)—and none of these outlets asked him anything about climate change. The topic was raised before he took office in two interviews with editors at the Washington Post (3/21/16) and New York Times (11/23/16), but the vast majority of questioners during the campaign displayed no interest in what if anything Trump would do about human-caused global warming.
Covering Trump’s Nominees Through GOP Eyes
In coverage of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees from Election Day (11/8/16) to Inauguration Day (1/20/17), Republican partisans outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a 5-to-2 ratio, according to a study of seven major outlets by FAIR’s Joshua Cho (6/1/17). In the New York Times, 80 percent of the partisan sources were Republican, and 74 percent in the Washington Post’s. The outlet with the least unbalanced partisan sourcing—PBS NewsHour—was still 60 percent Republican.
Citing Think Tanks Without Noting Who Paid for Those Thoughts
The Washington Post quoted former Ambassador Gerald Feierstein on the wisdom of selling Raytheon weapons to Saudi Arabia.(image: Middle East Institute)
In the past year, media have quoted analysts from the Center for Strategic & International Studies at least 30 times in support of deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system in South Korea. Omitted from all these CSIS media appearances was that one of CSIS’s top donors, Lockheed Martin, is THAAD’s primary contractor; the arms maker’s take from the THAAD system is worth about $3.9 billion alone. Lockheed Martin directly funds the Missile Defense Project Program at CSIS, the program whose talking heads are cited most frequently by US media.
Lack of disclosure is endemic when think tanks are cited. The Just Security blog (6/5/17) noted that when the Washington Post (3/8/17) cited Gerald Feierstein, director of the Center for Gulf Affairs at the Middle East Institute, arguing that Saudi Arabian killing of civilians just meant the Saudis needed more accurate weapons. The Post didn’t note that both the Saudis and Raytheon, makers of the weapons in question, are major funders of the Middle East Institute.
To Simplify Factchecking, NYT Inserts Its Own Errors
In a “Fact Check” on Affordable Care Act claims, the New York Times’ Linda Qiu (5/3/17) was careful to call into question two Republican and two Democratic statements. One of the Democratic statements was from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “Up to 17 million children who have pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage by insurers.”
The New York Times said Nancy Pelosi’s statement that “up to 17 million children…have pre-existing conditions is the upper limit of… estimates.” (photo: Gabriella Demczuk/NYT)
First Qiu rephrased Pelosi’s statement, removing her qualification (“up to”): “Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said the Affordable Care Act insured 17 million children with pre-existing conditions.” Then she debunked not Pelosi’s actual statement, but her own paraphrase of Pelosi’s statement: “This is misleading. Ms. Pelosi’s office cited a 2011 Department of Health and Human Services report, but the 17 million figure is the upper limit of the department’s estimates. The report’s lower figure, 4 million, is a fraction of that.”
Obviously, it’s not misleading to cite an upper limit with the phrase “up to”—that’s what “up to” means. But when you read the HHS report referenced, you see that 4 million is based on “eligibility guidelines from state-run high-risk pools”; the higher estimate cited by Pelosi is based on “major health insurers’ underwriting guidelines”—clearly a better gauge of which conditions require the ACA’s protection.
USA Today Sees Bright Side of Massive Loss of Health Insurance
When the Congressional Budget Office (5/24/17) reported that the GOP’s Obamacare repeal bill would take health insurance away from 23 million Americans, outlets like the New York Times (5/24/17), Washington Post (5/24/17) and Associated Press (5/24/17) stressed this face when they broke the news on Twitter. But not USA Today, which chose instead to stress that the report forecast slightly fewer Americans losing health insurance than under less was an improvement over the past CBO projection of an earlier different version of the law. “#BREAKING: CBO says House Obamacare repeal bill covers 1 million more people than prior draft.” The glass isn’t 23/24ths empty, the paper wanted its 3.3 million followers to know; it’s really 1/24th full.
Put WaPo Sources in Prison, WaPo Columnists Urge
Washington Post editorial (9/16/16)
For the third time in a year, the Washington Post has promoted the prosecution of Washington Post sources. Last September, the Post controversially published “No Pardon for Edward Snowden” (9/16/16), an editorial calling for prosecution of the whistleblower who helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize in 2014.
Now two Post columnists have joined the Post’s call for putting Post sources in prison—this time in regard to the Post’s major scoop (5/16/17) about President Donald Trump leaking classified intelligence to Russian diplomats. First former head of the CIA, pro-torture pundit and frequent Trump critic Mike Morell wrote an op-ed piece (5/17/17) arguing that the anonymous “current and former US officials” who tipped off the Post “did commit a crime, and they should be held accountable.” Then Post columnist, pro-torture theologian and former Bush official Marc Thiessen (5/22/17) asserted that “the decision of these anonymous leakers to share code-word intelligence with the media is a crime that did far more damage than Trump’s apparently inadvertent disclosures to the Russians.”
It’s hard to picture the Post during its Watergate heyday running op-eds calling for Deep Throat to be put behind bars.
