New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane has a new column wondering if the readers of the Paper of Record want to know if the politicians the paper covers are telling the truth.

Seriously. It's right here.

He writes:

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

He even has a pretty good example:

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

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

I don't think Brisbane's trying to be cute here, though he might want to know that Krugman for a time was actually not allowed call a lie a lie: During the 2000 presidential election season, Krugman said the Times "barred him from using the word 'lying'" when writing about George W. Bush (Washington Post, 1/22/03).

Nonetheless Brisbane even offers some language that a reporter might insert into a story about Romney's false assertion:

"The president has never used the word 'apologize' in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words."

This would be an improvement over nothing, but it's still pretty tame--if Romney's making this up in order to generate a campaign rally applause line, is it really a "misleading interpretation" of Obama's actual words?

The fact that this question is even being asked tells you something pretty profound about the state of corporate media--at least when it comes to politics, that is.

I don't think sports reporters would be so baffled by the idea that facts matter. Let's say New York Knicks star forward Amar'e Stoudemire declared after a game that he was proud of scoring 40 points, and went on to brag that this was much better than the measly eight points that Boston Celtics forward Kevin Garnett scored, who sat much of the second half due to foul trouble.

Reporters who watched the game and looked at the box score would notice that Garnett wasn't in foul trouble, had actually scored 20 points, and that Stoudemire hadn't actually scored 40 points.

I suspect that his odd, wildly inaccurate boasting would find its way into the paper--and that a reporter wouldn't talk about how Stoudemire had "misleadingly interpreted" the box score.

Of course political arguments aren't always so clear-cut (though the Romney example is pretty straightforward). But it is very easy to imagine a kind of journalism that demands powerful figures document questionable assertions--and note when they are unable to do so.

The presidential campaign is breaking down along familiar ideological lines, according to New York Times reporter John Harwood (1/12/12):

American voters loathe both major symbols of the forces squeezing their pocketbooks and life savings.

President Obama will seek re-election vowing to rein in one of them: Wall Street. Mitt Romney will focus on the other: Washington.

There are some complications (Republicans attacking Mitt Romney's "vulture" capitalism for starters), but Harwood assures readers that soon enough the candidates will be back to the sensible middle.

But what's the center?

Romney's right-wing rhetoric about Obama's fondness for Big Government and European socialism is a staple of his campaign. But the evidence of Obama's leftward anti-Wall Street message is a little harder to come by. This is where Harwood sees it:

He called for a 21st-century version of Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive movement that would raise taxes on the wealthy to finance job-creating improvements in infrastructure, education and scientific research. Mr. Obama's view draws strength from voters' antipathy toward a Wall Street culture that prospered while Main Street struggled--and then received a taxpayer bailout.

Harwood  tells readers not to much worry about what they're hearing, since they'll be back to The Middle soon enough:

Dramatic oratory aside, Messrs. Romney and Obama are seeking ways to position themselves as reasonable centrists in a general election. Mr. Obama on Wednesday announced that he will offer new business tax breaks for companies that return jobs to the United States. Mr. Romney has defended Social Security against Mr. Perry's ideas for transforming it, and criticized Mr. Gingrich for suggesting a weakening of child labor laws.

The implication, of course, is that neither of them is being particularly reasonable now. In the case of Mitt Romney, perhaps that means he doesn't really mean Obama is seeking "to put free enterprise on trial." To Harwood, Romney's centrism is that he supports child labor law and doesn't believe Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. That doesn't tell us much.

But as the Christian Science Monitor reported, Romney's actual Social Security plan would "gradually raise the retirement age to reflect increases in longevity."  That's not a particularly popular idea, but it's the kind of thing corporate media tend to support.

As for Obama,  is it really reasonable centrism to call for corporate tax breaks? Harwood seems to think so, especially when set against the left-wing Obama who calls for tax hikes on the wealthy to finance jobs programs. But those unreasonably progressive policies would seem to be fairly popular, even by the Times' own polling.

As is often the case, when media say "center," they don't mean policies that most people support. They mean policies that seem sensible to them. The two are not the same thing.

Last month the group Just Foreign Policy alerted readers to a Washington Post feature that was headlined "Iran's Quest to Possess Nuclear Weapons."

The Post changed the headline, and ombud Patrick Pexton weighed in with a column (12/7/11) saying that

the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.

Pexton added that Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman  "and his Web army were right. The headline and subhead were misleading."

At the Post's editorial page, these facts apparently don't matter. Their editorial today (1/11/12) about Iran sanctions closes with this:

Iran may be feeling some economic pain, and it may be isolated. But its drive for nuclear weapons continues.

How many "Web armies" will it take for the editorial page to get the facts right?

There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you're going to find that there's truth on both sides.

PolitiFact, a political factchecking project based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been criticized for taking the latter approach. An item it posted yesterday (1/9/12) is further evidence of its preference for the appearance of evenhandedness over its reality.

The item addressed Rick Santorum's assertion in a January 4 town meeting that as a result of the 1996 welfare law, "Poverty levels went down to the lowest level ever for...one of the areas that had the highest level of poverty historically, which is African-American children." PolitiFact concluded that the statement was "Half True," since "Santorum is right that poverty rates declined after the reform’s passage. But opinions differ on the primary cause."

As evidence that "opinions differ," the factcheckers turned to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, best known for his argument that the poor aren't really poor because they have microwave ovens and the like. Unsurprisingly, since he works for a group set up explicitly to promote conservative ideas, he does indeed have the opinion that the 1996 welfare law caused a drop in child poverty. But does this opinion have any basis in fact?

PolitiFact allows him to make his case at length, but the gist of it is this: "Since welfare reform, the poverty rate among black children has fallen at an unprecedented rate from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004." And PolitiFact helpfully gives you a link to a U.S. Census chart that shows that those numbers are almost accurate. But looking at the numbers for yourself, you see that there's no indication that the 1996 law had anything to do with them: Poverty among black children peaked in 1992, at 46.3 percent, and declined steadily from then until 2001, when it hit a low of 30.0 before moving upward.  1996 does not seem to have impacted the poverty trajectory at all; a naive reading of the numbers would indicate that black child poverty goes up when someone named "Bush" is in the White House.

Here's a graph of child poverty by race from Mother Jones (9/29/11--by raw numbers, not percentages) that illustrates the utter unremarkability of 1996 for black child poverty:

PolitiFact goes on to give equal space, and equal rhetorical weight, to sources who say economic growth is actually what drove child poverty down in the '90s: "While Rector maintains that the economy played only a secondary role in reducing poverty, other groups says it’s the main driver." But none of these sources directly rebut Rector's arguments, or point out how dubious it is to give a 1996 law credit for a decline that began four years earlier.

So it's true that "opinions differ" on whether the 1996 welfare lowered poverty for black children. A real factchecker would point out that the advocate for that opinion offers selective and misleading figures to back it up. But then, if you did point that out, you might look like you weren't being evenhanded.

(Thanks to Neil deMause for bringing PolitiFact's report to my attention.)

In theory, presidential campaigns are a valuable opportunity for journalists to evaluate candidates' positions on important issues so citizens can make an informed choice. Actual media coverage is different, of course. And it's striking how some media voices diminish the importance of what the candidates are saying, treating it as meaningless theater that need not bear any relation to what they really think.

It's remarkably cynical--and arguably dangerous as well. But that seems to be the approach when it comes to Republican candidate Mitt Romney. As Jim Naureckas already pointed out, there's a tendency in the corporate media to argue that Romney's flipflops are a strength, not a liability.

In the meantime, one should apparently be comforted by the fact that, soon enough, the "real" Romney will prevail. Here's Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (1/10/12):

Conservatives fear Romney is not telling the truth about his ideological conviction. Others, such as myself, are counting on it. We will forgive him these trespasses since to want to eliminate much of the Cabinet, reject all science regarding climate change, white-out the Federal Reserve or the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, round up all undocumented immigrants, mindlessly turn education over to local authorities, end the government's role in just about everything, and prohibit abortion, contraception and the errant midday sexual thought (pretty much the entire conservative platform right there) would severely hurt the American economy, not to mention ruining any chance of fun.

And Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times ("Waiting for Mitt the Moderate," 1/5/12):

If we do see, as I expect we will, a reversion in the direction of the Massachusetts Romney, that's a flip we should celebrate. Until the Republican primaries sucked him into its vortex, he was a pragmatist and policy wonk rather similar to Bill Clinton and President Obama but more conservative. (Clinton described Romney to me as having done "a very good job" in Massachusetts.) Romney was much closer to George H.W. Bush than to George W. Bush....

So, in the coming months, the most interesting political battle may be between Romney and Romney. Now, do we really want a chameleon as a nominee for president? That’s a legitimate question. But I'd much rather have a cynical chameleon than a far-right ideologue who doesn't require contortions to appeal to Republican primary voters, who says things that Republican candidates have all been saying and, God forbid, actually means it.

These are remarkable endorsements of a fraudulent and insincere brand of politics.

As if tensions between the United States and Iran weren't high enough, here's PBS NewsHour anchor Margaret Warner (1/9/12):

The Iranian government insists that its nuclear activities are for peaceful energy purposes only, an assertion disputed by the U.S. and its allies. On CBS yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta repeated international demands that Iran stop enriching uranium.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE LEON PANETTA: But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is, do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us. They need to know that, if they take that step, that they're going to get stopped.

The way that's presented you'd think that the United States has evidence that Iran is pursuing a weapon. Leon Panetta's soundbite is from his appearance on Face The Nation on Sunday. But the NewsHour removed one key phrase; right before Panetta says, "But we know," he said this:

Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.

So Panetta's statement--that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon--is being used to argue that the United States disputes Iran's long-standing contention that it not building a nuclear weapon.

In its new issue, Newsweek puts this as #4 on their list of "31 Ways To Get Smarter In 2012":

4. Get News from Al Jazeera

Don't shut yourself out from new ideas. A 2009 study found that viewers of Al Jazeera English were more open-minded than people who got their news from CNN International and BBC World.

That's a nice idea. Someone should tell my cable company, who make me pay way too much for the privilege of having Fox News Channel.

We've been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately--this time from Elizabeth Wurtzel on TheAtlantic.com (1/9/12):

All the reasons Romney is disliked are all the reasons he would be an excellent president. Let's start by recognizing that principled politicians are highly overrated--consider Jimmy Carter as Exhibit A. Despite our pretensions to pretension, we are not a country that loves ideology--we're not, heaven forbid, France--so much as we are a can-do people that, after all, last elected a yes-we-can president. We like what works, not what it says in The Communist Manifesto, which reads like a guidebook for a republic of dreams, and of course ends in a Stalinist bloodbath. Romney's, shall we say, flexibility (I refuse to use the word that refers to summer footwear) with his positions on abortion and just about everything else that makes the weasel go pop just shows that he is responsive to his constituents' desires. When they were a pro-choice crowd, that's where he stood, and when he fell in with the right-wing lunatics, he learned to speak in tongues. I think giving the people what they want is what we want.

This echoes Ann Gerhart in the Washington Post (12/11/11):

And in service of these goals, Romney's flip-floppery could be interpreted as a flexibility of thinking that might help him bust through warring ideologies in Washington--an asset, not a deficit--and fix his biggest set of problems yet.

And Frank Bruni in the New York Times (1/2/12):

But what if his doubters, his nemeses and many of us pondering the protean wonder of him have it all wrong? What if changeability is his strength? Someone not fixed in a single place can pivot to more advantageous ones. A vessel partly empty has room for the beverage du jour. And Romney is ready to be filled with whatever's most nutritive....

In the primaries, that’s a liability, and Santorum, with his ideological rigidity, could haunt Romney for a while. But if Romney nabs the nomination, his malleability may be an asset, allowing Obama-soured voters to talk themselves into him. After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn’t cling to extremes.

Later in the Times, Helene Cooper and Mark Landler (1/5/12) warned the Obama campaign to avoid attacking Romney as a political shapeshifter, again depicting that as one of the Republican's hidden strengths:

Independent voters might view Mr. Romney's shifting positions as pragmatic. And by highlighting his evolving views, political analysts say, the Obama campaign risks unintentionally promoting the image of Mr. Romney as a moderate.

The very things that have made Mr. Romney less palatable to the conservatives who populate the Republican primaries and caucuses--his past moderate positions--are what make him more palatable to the independent voters who will turn up next November.

Note that this is not the way that media pundits talk about Democratic primary candidates when they attempt to make ideological appeals to their party's base. (See Extra!, 7-8/06, for some good examples of this.) In media mythology, Democrats win when they attack their base--trying to appeal to them makes them seem "craven, weak and untrustworthy," in Joe Klein's words (Time, 9/25/05).

Why are Democrats and Republicans seen so differently? Well, the Democratic base likes it when you make populist economic appeals--that is, when you point out that the sort of people who own the media have too much wealth and power. From the corporate media perspective, that's not clever, that's dangerous.

Appealing to the Republican right, on the other hand, generally involves a little harmless racebaiting and god-bothering. Media pundits are confident (probably overly confident) that when the election is over, Romney will go back to the technocratic champion of moderate austerity and defender of corporate profits who they believe him to be at heart. And that's the kind of candidate who appeals to the media's base.

UPDATE: See Peter Hart's post "Pundits and the Romney Pass" (1/10/12) for more on this phenomenon.

Elizabeth Jensen has a preview (New York Times, 1/8/12) of the new Bill Moyers program coming to public television stations later this month--a show that is not being distributed by PBS. Why not? She reports:

Mr. Moyers said he was unsure why PBS, where he has spent most of his career since 1971, declined the show for its main schedule. Some public television executives, who would not publicly comment on a sensitive issue, said they believed that PBS did not want to realign itself with Mr. Moyers, a longtime target of some conservatives, as it was fighting to keep its federal financing.

Perhaps PBS might consider a new, more accurate slogan: Not Offending Conservatives When We're Fighting for Funding, Which is Always.

In the piece, Moyers seems happy with the situation, saying that  "we don't have to worry about somebody at PBS losing sleep over the fact that David Stockman says the Republicans have lost their minds on taxes."

And Jensen adds:

His return comes as public television executives are debating their path: More Downton Abbey, or local and national news? So far, public affairs programming is losing. PBS canceled Now when Bill Moyers Journal ended; the replacement show Need to Know was recently trimmed from one hour to 30 minutes.

Yet, Mr. Moyers noted, PBS announced an additional version of Antiques Roadshow just a few weeks after the Census Bureau released figures showing the number of people living in poverty had risen to more than 46 million.

"I love Antiques Roadshow," he added. "But it is just symbolic of how we’re not connected viscerally to the state of the American people right now."

Real estate developer and media mogul Mort Zuckerman has picked Colin Myler to be the new top editor for his New York tabloid, the Daily News. That's a surprising choice on at least a couple of accounts.

One is that Myler's last job was at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, which was shut down while he was boss due to the scandal over News reporters hacking into people's voicemail for scoops. True, the phone hacking seems to have happened before Myler got there--but he seems to have been brought in by Murdoch not so much to clean up as to cover up, to judge by his acknowledged deception (Guardian, 12/15/11):

Giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry into press standards, Myler was challenged over a letter he wrote to the PCC in August 2009--a month after the Guardian first wrote that phone hacking was widespread at the News of the World (NoW).

Jay, counsel for the inquiry, told Myler his reply to the PCC was "disingenuous" given that he had seen the so-called "for Neville" email a year earlier, which revealed that hacking at the NoW went wider than a single "rogue reporter" and prompted a £700,000 payment to football boss Gordon Taylor.

Responding to Robert Jay QC, Myler said: "I had no reason not to give them a full and frank answer. For that I apologize."

But Myler's involvement in scandals hasn't all been after the fact. Before being sent to the News, he worked at Murdoch's New York Post when that paper's scabrous ethics came under scrutiny. Here's Rolling Stones' summary (8/3/11):

The newspaper was rocked by a scandal in which a star Page Six reporter allegedly attempted to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle for "protection" from the gossip sheet, telling him, "It's a little like the Mafia."

Burkle secretly recorded Page Six reporter Jared Stern offering to go easy on him in the gossip sheet in exchange for a hefty payoff. "We know how to destroy people," Stern reportedly threatened. "It's what we do." To shield himself from character assassination, Stern allegedly suggested, Burkle could make a one-time payment of $100,000, followed by monthly installments of $10,000.

News Corp. axed Stern, dismissing him as a rogue reporter and calling his behavior "highly aberrational." But according to a 2007 affidavit by a fellow Post veteran, the alleged shakedown was an integral part of the company's culture. "The spineless hypocrites in senior management at the New York Post and News Corp. have always used 'expendable' employees as scapegoats for the misdeeds of its senior executives," Post reporter Ian Spiegelman testified. Spiegelman revealed that Page Six's top editor Richard Johnson and two others had accepted cash from a restaurateur whose business had received a positive mention the day before. Johnson also allegedly accepted a $50,000 all-expenses-paid bachelor party to Mexico from Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, whom the Post subsequently hyped as "the next Hugh Hefner." Spiegelman further charged that Col Allan, the Post's top editor, received free lap dances at the strip club Scores in return for favorable coverage by the paper.

Myler, as the Post's managing editor, was Johnson's superior when all this going on; it was Myler who handled Burkle's complaints when the billionaire wrote to the paper to complain about the shakedown (New York Times, 4/7/06).

Tom McGeveran of Capital (7/8/11) last year wrote up some more Myler-related scandals, including his resignation as editor of the Daily Mail in 2001 after his paper's interview in a soccer-related assault case led to a mistrial,  another mistrial that stemmed from the Post' s singling out a juror in a corporate corruption prosecution, and his defense of News of the World "investigations" that involved prostitutes tape-recording  orgies and the like.

It's been suggested that part of the appeal of hiring Myler for Zuckerman is that neither of them like Rupert Murdoch. That's true of plenty of people; it's not a good enough reason to put someone in charge of your newspaper.

FAIR's latest Action Alert (1/6/12) urges activists to contact the New York Times about its repeated assertions, contrary to the available evidence, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Feel free to leave copies of your messages to the Times in the comments thread here, along with any thoughts on the alert.

The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses--that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime--are basically correct.

As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12):

The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers' editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington's red-versus-blue fetish from news content--as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa's small contest.

Just one example of the absurdity:  At least one of Rick Santorum's final campaign stops was so mobbed by reporters that some of actual residents of Iowa he was supposed to be talking to couldn't squeeze into the meetings, as noted by the Washington Post:

The evidence of Santorum's recent surge was obvious: The overwhelming crush of media members at the Polk City stop included reporters from Italy and Australia. Dozens of voters--who two weeks ago probably could have had the candidate to themselves--were pressed out of the restaurant and stood in the cold.

"I'm actually from Polk City," one said to another as he was unable to squeeze his way inside. "Yeah, we don't count," the other responded.

Of the storylines that have emerged so far, one is that Mitt Romney has yet to dominate the competition. This has been present in the campaign coverage for months, and continued in the papers this morning.  Susan Page in USA Today wrote:

By favoring a conservative, a moderate and a libertarian in nearly equal doses, visitors to the state's 1,774 precincts did little to clear up what has been a topsy-turvy contest to choose President Obama's opponent next fall.

In the New York Times, Jeff Zeleny writes that "Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum." And Zeleny added later,  "The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House."

Also in the Times, courtesy of Jim Rutenberg:

But more than anything else, the Iowa caucuses cast in electoral stone what has played out in the squishy world of polls and punditry for the last 12 months: The deep ideological divisions among Republicans continue to complicate their ability to focus wholly on defeating President Obama, and to impede Mr. Romney's efforts to overcome the internal strains and win the consent if not the heart of the party.

There is no reason in the world that voters in any state in the country should line up behind any single candidate. The fact that the voters in a particular party are split between different candidates who represent different factions of their party is a sign that people have different views about who they think should lead the country. Which is, after all, a good thing.

The alternative would be to deprive voters everywhere else a chance to have a say about who their party's nominee will be. There's a curious sort of tension at work. On the one hand, you get a sense that reporters want the primary season to continue for months, if only for the sake of giving them something to cover. On the other hand, they spend an awful lot of time puzzling over why Mitt Romney can't manage to wrap up the Republican nomination after one state has voted.

Sean Hannity got his start in radio on UC Santa Barbara's KCSB in the late 1980s, where he got in trouble for promoting homophobia and disinformation about HIV and AIDS. I wrote about this in a 2003 Extra! profile of the then-Fox News show Hannity & Colmes:

After airing for less than a year, Hannity's weekly show was canceled in 1989, when KCSB management charged him with "discriminating against gays and lesbians" after airing two shows featuring the book The AIDS Coverup: The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS (Independent, 6/22/89). Written by homophobic Christian-right activist Gene Antonio, the book crankily argued that AIDS could be spread by casual contact, including coughs, sneezes and mosquito bites. Antonio charged that the government, medical establishment and media covered up these truths in the service of "the homosexual movement."

When Antonio appeared by phone on one of the shows, Hannity and his guest repeatedly slurred gay men. At one point, according to the UCSB campus newspaper the Daily Nexus (5/25/89), Hannity declared: "Anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. It's very dangerous if we start accepting lower and lower forms of behavior as the normal." According to the campus paper, Antonio responded by calling gay men "a subculture of people engaged in deviant, twisted acts."

When a fellow KCSB broadcaster called the show to challenge the host and his guest, Hannity pointed out that the caller, a lesbian, had a child through artificial insemination, and Antonio dubbed the child a "turkey-baster baby." When the caller took issue with that "disgusting" remark, Hannity followed up with "I feel sorry for your child" (Independent, 6/22/89; KCSB, 4/4/89).

This information as indicated was gleaned from local Santa Barbara and UCSB print media. At the time, I was unable to get audio of Hannity's KCSB shows, a situation now remedied by KCSB programmers Elizabeth Robinson and Richard Flacks, who have packaged two of the original Hannity shows in a station archival retrospective, "50 Years of People-Powered Radio."

What Hannity said on the air more than 20 years ago would perhaps not be overly relevant today but for the fact that he has always denied being homophobic...and his homophobia continues: For instance, reacting to the 2009 Academy Awards broadcast featuring a montage of romantic film kisses (not exactly a new feature of cinema), Hannity paraphrased his wife in protesting the inclusion of same-sex kisses in the montage (Hannity, 2/23/09): "They keep showing the scenes of men kissing. And I'm thinking, do we have to expose our children to more and more sex, more and more violence, you know, more and more controversy?"

The new issue of  Time magazine promises on its cover "Essential Info for the Year Ahead." One apparently essential report: U.S. drones are awesome.

The report--written by Mark Thompson, available to subscribers only explains that a "hot military trend" this way:

Today's generals and admirals want weapons that are smaller, remote-controlled and bristling with intelligence. In short, more drones that can tightly target terrorists, deliver larger payloads and are some of the best spies the U.S. has ever produced, even if they occasionally get captured in Iran or crash on landing at secret bases.

And also, you know, kill innocent civilians.

There's no time to dwell on that, because there are too many good things to say about our remote-control war. "Drones had a big year in 2011," Thompson writes, and 2012 will be even bigger. As Time readers learn, "Unlike humans, these weapons don't need sleep."

And best of all, apparently, the military aren't the only ones doing the killing:

America's arsenal has become so small and lethal, you don't need the U.S. Army--or any military service at all, in fact--to field and wield them. The CIA, which used to be limited to derringers and exploding cigars, is now not very secretly flying drones. With little public acknowledgment and minimal congressional oversight, these clandestine warriors have killed some 2,000 people identified as terrorists lurking in shadows around the globe since 9/11.

The British Bureau of Investigative Journalism's investigation of the CIA drone program in Pakistan (8/10/11) stressed less of the gee-whiz and more the real-life consequences of the attacks. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 390 to 780-- including almost 200 children. U.S. officials, for the record, were once making absurd claims that no innocents were killed.

As for the apparent enthusiasm for waging a war where "you don't need the U.S. Army" at all--that is precisely one of the criticisms of the drone program; some legal experts argue that non-military personnel are not legal combatants, and therefore killing every one of those 2,000 "people identified as terrorists" was a war crime. Others point out that employing drones outside an active combat zone could also violate international law. But none of that is "Essential Info" for 2012.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel has a column in the Washington Post today (1/3/12) outlining the three important election issues to watch--and one of them is about how the press covers the process:

Third, the media's obsession with false equivalence: How the election is covered will almost certainly have a measurable impact on its outcome.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman describes what he's witnessing as "post-truth politics," in which right-leaning candidates can feel free to say whatever they want without being held accountable by the press. There may be instances in which a candidate is called out for saying something outright misleading; but, as Krugman notes, "if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be 'balanced.'" For too many journalists, calling out a Republican for lying requires criticizing a Democrat too, making for a media age where false equivalence--what Eric Alterman has called the mainstream media's "deepest ideological commitment"--is confused, again and again, with objectivity.

That reminded me of a piece I read two days before in the Washington Post (1/1/12), where reporter David Nakamura discussed Barack Obama's looming decision on the Keystone tar sands pipeline, one of "several potential political landmines littering his playing field":

Republicans successfully added a provision to the two-month payroll tax cut extension mandating that Obama make a politically sensitive decision on the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline by the end of February. He had hoped to delay a decision on the project--which Republicans have said will create jobs but environmentalists have said would harm natural resources--until after a federal environmental review is completed in 2013.

As is the convention, both sides are represented here. But does this make much sense? The problem with Republicans claims about job creation is that they are, according to many experts, wildly inflated. That would be important to note in a piece discussing the "political landmines" here.

The flipside, we're told, is that "environmentalists" think the project might "harm natural resources." That could mean anything--pollution from a spill, perhaps. Or it might be a reference to the greater threat from climate change. So the "natural resource" would be the planet Earth.  "Balanced" journalism treats inflated jobs claims and the fate of the planet equally.