Rotten News? 2010 P.U.-Litzer Prizes for Bad Journalism

At the end of every year FAIR
rounds up some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance.
This year brought no shortage of contenders; indeed, the hardest part
of the P.U.-litzers is narrowing down the list.

Readers who think we missed one can share their nominations at the FAIR Blog (fair.org/blog).

And without further ado...

• Prosecute the Messenger Award: Diane Sawyer (ABC News)

  On October 22, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer introduced a report on WikiLeaks' exposure of thousands of classified documents from the Iraq War. ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz summarized the contents of the WikiLeaks
  files: "Deadly U.S. helicopter assaults on insurgents trying to
  surrender.... The Iraqi civilian death toll far higher than the U.S. has
  acknowledged.... Graphic detail about torture of detainees by the Iraqi
  military." After Raddatz's report, Sawyer offered this followup: "I
  know there's a lot of outrage about this again tonight, Martha. But tell
  me, anything more about prosecuting the WikiLeaks group?"

• New Excuses for Bombing Iran Award: David Broder (Washington Post)

  In his October 31 column, the Washington Post's David Broder offered one way for Barack Obama to demonstrate leadership after the midterms--a war with Iran. He wrote:

  With strong Republican support in Congress for
  challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much
  of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will
  help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on.
  And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the
  economy will improve.
  I am not suggesting, of course, that the
  president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally
  around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the
  young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear
  ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one
  of the most successful presidents in history.

  Broder is "not suggesting" inciting a war with Iran. He was merely
  saying it would bring the country together, fix the economy and make
  Obama one of the greatest presidents of all time.

• The Quarter-Million-Dollar Middle Award: Kiran Chetry (CNN)

  CNN anchor Kiran Chetry (American Morning, 2/1/10)
  interviewing White House budget director Peter Orszag: "You also talk
  about letting taxes expire for families that make over $250,000. Some
  would argue that in some parts of the country that is middle class."
  Back in reality, more than 98 percent of U.S. households make less than
  $250,000.

• Disappearing Palestinians Award: New York Times

  On the New York Times op-ed page (8/27/10),
  Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution gave one reason to be hopeful
  about peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: "First,
  violence is down considerably in the region." What he meant was that
  Israeli deaths were down. Completely unmentioned were the roughly 1,500
  Palestinians that have been killed since the Israeli assault on Gaza in
  December 2008--the vast majority of whom were minors or noncombatant
  adults, according to the Israel human rights group B'Tselem. This
  oversight wasn't just confined to the op-ed page: a Week in Review
  article by Ethan Bronner (11/21/10)
  reported "that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has been largely
  drained of deadly violence in the past few years." Hundreds of dead
  Palestinians are what is meant by "drained of violence."

• Balancing Tolerance with Hate Award: Washington Post's On Faith Blog

  On National Coming Out Day (10/11/10), the Washington Post's On Faith
  blog decided it would be a good time to hear from raging homophobe Tony
  Perkins of the Family Research Council. Perkins penned a column
  attacking "homosexual activist groups" under the headline "Christian
  Compassion Requires the Truth About Harms of Homosexuality." Why on
  Earth does anyone need to hear Perkins' claptrap? The Post explained on Twitter (10/12/10)
  that it was a matter of journalistic balance: "We're working to cover
  both sides. Earlier, we hosted Dan Savage of It Gets Better in a live
  chat." For the record, "It Gets Better" is Savage's campaign to combat
  suicides among queer youth. Who knew that was a point of view that
  needed balancing?

• New Low in Wartime Propaganda Award: Time magazine

  In the wake of a release of damning WikiLeaks documents about the state of the Afghan War, Time magazine's August 9
  cover sought to turn the debate over the war around. The photo was of
  an Afghan woman's maimed face, headlined "What Happens If We Leave
  Afghanistan." The implication couldn't be clearer: The Taliban will
  commit similar atrocities without the presence of U.S. forces. The fact
  that this particularly atrocity--whose connection to the Taliban has
  been questioned--happened with U.S. troops staying in Afghanistan complicates Time's argument. Time's Rick Stengel defended
  the cover story by explaining that "bad things do happen to people, and
  it is part of our job to confront and explain them.... I would rather
  confront readers with the Taliban's treatment of women than ignore it. I
  would rather people know that reality as they make up their minds about
  what the U.S. and its allies should do in Afghanistan." We're still
  waiting for a Time cover that
  confronts readers with the bad things that happen to Afghans--including
  women and children--who are hit with U.S. bombs.

• Walk It Back Award: New York Times

  On November 29, the New York Times published an explosive piece based on the WikiLeaks
  diplomatic cables. "Iran Fortifies Its Missiles With the Aid of North
  Korea" was the headline, and the piece stated that Iran now possesses
  powerful missiles with "the capacity to strike at capitals in Western
  Europe." The Times declined to publish the cable that made this case "at the request of the Obama administration," but the cable was on the WikiLeaks website--and provided ample grounds to be skeptical about the Times'
  definitive conclusion. (It's not clear, it turns out, that the kind of
  missile Iran supposedly bought from North Korea even exists.) After
  critiques were published by FAIR and others, the Times published a follow-up (12/3/10),
  "Wider Window Into Iran's Missile Capabilities Offers a Murkier View."
  The piece suggested that "a review of a dozen other State Department
  cables" and interviews "with American government officials offer a
  murkier picture of Iran's missile capabilities." But that "murky view"
  should have been obvious from the start. The Times'
  first account was taken as fact in countless media outlets; their quiet
  follow up wasn't a correction, but it should have been.

• Nonexistent Union-Bashing Award: Rush Limbaugh

  After 29 workers died at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia,
  talkshow host Rush Limbaugh (4/9/10) fingered the culprit: the miners'
  union. "Where was the union?" he asked. "The union is generally holding
  these companies up demanding all kinds of safety. Why were these miners
  continuing to work in what apparently was an unsafe atmosphere?" As it
  turned out, the mine, owned by notorious union-buster Massey Energy,
  didn't have a union. Alerted to his inaccuracy, Limbaugh (4/15/10)
  doubled down, saying that 85 union coal miners won a decision against
  Massey and were re-hired. "So there were union workers there, and so the
  United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety.... You
  people, it's been 21 years. At some point you are going to learn: If you
  go up against me on a challenge of fact, you are going to be wrong.
  It's just that simple." What's even simpler? Disproving him: Those
  workers he's talking about are from an entirely different mine owned by
  Massey--which has appealed the ruling, so even those workers aren't back
  on the job yet (AFL-CIO Blog, 4/16/10).

• Pay Cuts for Everyone (Except Me!) Award: Steven Pearlstein (Washington Post)
  
  Under the headline "Wage Cuts Hurt, but They May Be the Only Way to Get Americans Back to Work" (10/13/10), Washington Post
  columnist Steven Pearlstein argued that "structural adjustments"--that
  is, lower pay--"are necessary if the U.S. economy is to find a new
  equilibrium." But he made clear that a 20 percent pay cut isn't for
  everyone--it's not for people like him, for example:

  I'm sure many of you are reading this and
  thinking that if anyone is forced to take a pay cut to rebalance the
  economy, surely it ought to be overpaid investment bankers, corporate
  executives and newspaper columnists. That's how things would work in a
  socialist paradise, but not in market economies, which are much better
  at producing efficiency than fairness.

  While it's hard to see investment bankers, whose industry survives
  because of a massive government bailout, as paragons of free-market
  efficiency, his inclusion of newspaper columnists is even less
  convincing: It's clearly inefficient for the Post to pay Pearlstein when people would write columns of a similar caliber for a lot, lot less.

• Adventures in Overstatement Award: Juan Williams (Fox News Channel)

  It's unsurprising that Juan Williams would have hard feelings about NPR's decision to fire him after comments he made on Fox News Channel
  about being nervous seeing people in airports wearing "Muslim garb."
  But it still took plenty of nerve for Williams to write this (FoxNews.com, 10/21/10):

  Daniel Schorr, my fellow NPR
  commentator who died earlier this year, used to talk about the initial
  shock of finding himself on President Nixon's enemies list. I can only
  imagine Dan's revulsion to realize that today NPR
  treats a journalist who has worked for them for 10 years with less
  regard, less respect for the value of independence of thought and
  embrace of real debate across political lines than Nixon ever displayed.

  Had he been alive to respond, Schorr may have pointed out that in the
  most infamous case, Nixon had CIA agents trailing reporter Jack
  Anderson, plotting ways they might kill him.

• Obama Move to the Right Award: Matt Bai (New York Times)

  In a crowded field of move-to-the-right pundits, Bai proved remarkably
  insistent that the White House's troubles could be fixed by further
  drifting to the right. On December 1,
  Bai explained that since Obama "isn't willing to break publicly with
  liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool
  of the left." This analysis somehow overlooks the scrapping of the
  public option in the healthcare debate, the massive escalation of the
  Afghan War, and so on. And this would be the same White House whose chief of staff referred to progressives as "fucking retarded," whose press secretary denounced the "professional left" and whose senior adviser said that such critics are "insane." Not to mention the fact that the vice president told the left to "stop whining" and the president himself urged them to "wake up." But, yes, when will they break publicly from the left?

• Fact Checking is Someone Else's Job Award: David Gregory (NBC)
  
  ABC's This Week interim host Jake Tapper decided to let the factchecking website PolitiFact evaluate statements made on the program. When asked if he would consider a similar arrangement for Meet the Press, NBC's David Gregory declined (Washington Post, 4/12/10):

  An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."

• Am-I-Reading-The-Onion Headline Writing Award: Washington Post

  For its April 26 story, "Amid Outrage Over Civilian Deaths in Pakistan, CIA Turns to Smaller Missiles."

  Honorable mention goes to the New York Times, whose November 11
  story explained the U.S. plan to remain in Afghanistan for at least
  three years longer than advertised. The headline: "U.S. Plan Offers Path
  to Ending Afghan Combat."

• Immigration Misinformation Award: Bill O'Reilly (Fox News Channel)

  During the debate over Arizona's harsh immigration law SB 1070, Fox News'
  Bill O'Reilly made a case in support of Arizona's crackdown: More
  immigrations equal more crime. According to O'Reilly, Phoenix's crime
  problem is "out of control" (5/3/10); in the state overall, the crime
  problem is "through the roof" (5/4/10, 5/13/10, 5/14/10), it is
  "overwhelming" (5/6/10). One problem: There was no crime wave in Arizona
  or Phoenix, where authorities were reporting that crime was actually
  down--which research suggests is typical in areas with higher immigrant
  populations (FAIR Action Alert, 5/17/10).
  After FAIR noted O'Reilly's errors, he actually stopped making them.
  But he soon found new ways to justify his anti-immigrant stance, like
  arguing that crime is indeed down along the border--because immigrants
  have stopped coming into the country (FAIR Blog, 6/21/10).

• Ask the Bosses Award: Fareed Zakaria (CNN)

  Given the dismal state of the U.S. economy, the idea that Fareed Zakaria would present an October 30 primetime CNN
  special called Restoring the American Dream made perfect sense. But
  then Zakaria got around to explaining his guestlist: "Many complain we
  don't hear enough from businessmen." And that presumably was Zakaria's
  rationale for a discussion of what's best for U.S. workers restricted to
  four CEOs. Now CNN's viewers know what the bosses are thinking about the state of the American dream; hopefully workers were taking notes.