Point Austin: Dude, Let's Go Bowling
You can tell a lot about newspapers by what they don't cover
By Michael King, Fri., April 11, 2008
"In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to 'domestic military operations' within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
"Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS [an online media database], that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
'Yoo and torture' – 102
'Mukasey and 9/11' – 73
'Yoo and Fourth Amendment' – 16
'Obama and bowling' – 1,043
'Obama and [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright' – More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
'Obama and patriotism' – 1,607
'Clinton and Lewinsky' – 1,079
"And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq – that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight – has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. 'The Clintons are Rich!!!!' will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two."
Liars and Statistics
Indeed, because we are so poorly served by our major media, some of the stories Greenwald lists require additional explanation. Thanks to the campaign reporters and the major pundits, I'll take it for granted that most of you are now aware that Barack Obama is a lousy bowler and that this failing is somehow of major public interest. However, to recount only one example, I suspect most of you aren't aware that in late March the U.S. attorney general, Michael Mukasey, told a San Francisco audience – falsely and perhaps fantastically – that because of legal restrictions on wiretapping, U.S. intelligence could not monitor a phone call from an Afghanistan ("al Qaeda") terrorist cell to the U.S. prior to 9/11. Moreover, Mukasey said, if Congress doesn't grant additional wiretapping powers to the president and award retroactive amnesty to the telecom companies who may have broken the wiretapping law, the terrorists will be able to discover U.S. intelligence methods "in open court." As Greenwald wrote at the time, this is not just a mistake: "Mike Mukasey was a long-time federal judge and so I feel perfectly comfortable calling that what it is: a brazen lie."
Just for fun, I searched the major Texas daily newspapers (Austin, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, El Paso) for the last month to see how they compared to the overall national media for the stories Greenwald had searched. That small a sample is a little inconclusive (a search through all Texas papers would be more lamentable), but it's still roughly comparable:
"Yoo and torture": one mention, in the Houston Chronicle;
"Mukasey and 9/11": no mentions;
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment": one, in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram;
"Obama and bowling": three mentions, two in the Chronicle, one in the Star-Telegram;
"Obama and [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright": 150 citations, led by The Dallas Morning News with 56, the Star-Telegram with 42, and our Statesman contained a relatively paltry 11;
"Obama and patriotism": eight mentions;
"Clinton and Lewinsky" (a story which you might have thought was very old news): no fewer than 14 references in the last month, nine in the Chronicle, and four in the Star-Telegram.
Counting Couplings
The 14th citation of "Clinton and Lewinsky" occurred in the San Antonio Express-News, in a context that itself unintentionally confirms Glenn Greenwald's argument. In a March 30 column ("When political leaders step in it, E-N reports it") by the paper's Public Editor Bob Richter, Richter stoutly defends the Express-News from a reader's complaint that the daily overemphasizes U.S. military deaths in Iraq (as opposed to all military deaths under the Clinton administration) and specifically from the reader's objection to the paper's Page 1 attention to the 4,000th dead U.S. soldier. Richter corrects the reader's misleading statistics and continues: "Newspapers report such totals for all wars. We should not ignore them. We should highlight them on Page 1, as a reminder that there's a price to pay when the politicians send the troops off to fight."
That's certainly true (as far as it goes), although it bears noting that neither reader nor editor feel obliged even to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion and occupation.
But another comparative statistic that Richter dug up also caught my eye, and this is where Ms. Lewinsky receives her 14th belated Texas notice in the last 30 days. According to Richter, "an archival search [in the Express-News] of 'George W. Bush and Iraq' netted just 963 stories and columns, and a search of 'George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein' referenced only 322 stories and columns.
"Finally, in what comes as no surprise, a search of 'Clinton and Lewinsky' identified 1,494 pieces in the E-N archives about the ex-president and his former intern/paramour." Richter considers nearly 1,500 stories on Clinton and Lewinsky's White House dalliance as incontrovertible evidence of a lack of "institutional bias" at the Express-News: "When leaders step in it, we write about it." Yet even allowing for the inadequacies of simple two-word searches, there's that puzzling discrepancy: "Bush and Iraq": 1,000 citations; "Clinton and Lewinsky": 1,500 citations.
Considering just those numbers, which coupling would you suppose has had a greater effect on the history of our time and the future of the republic and the world?
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