I’m actually not incapable of disagreeing with people without insulting their intelligence, motives, or other qualifications. I especially enjoy debating the most intelligent and interesting conservatives, like Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and David Frum, not to mention numerous liberal writers I respect.

Now, de Rugy is a bright gal, possessed of a PhD in economics from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. But that’s a great setup for a column.

To increase selectivity (one of the statistics that go into U.S. News’s secret mumbo-jumbo formula to produce an overall ranking), many colleges deliberately encourage applications from students who don’t have a prayer of getting in. To increase average SAT scores, colleges offer huge scholarships to un-needy but high scoring applicants to lure them to attend their institution. (The Times story mentioned that other colleges have been offering payments to admitted students to retake the test to increase the school average.)

One of my favorite bits of absurdity was what a friend on the faculty at Case Law School told me they were doing a few years ago: because one of the U.S. News data points was the percentage of graduates employed in their field, the law school simply hired any recent graduate who could not get a job at a law firm and put him to work in the library.

Their other tactic was pure genius: the law school hired as adjunct professors local alumni who already had lucrative careers (thereby increasing the faculty-student ratio, a key U.S. News statistic used in determining ranking), paid them exorbitant salaries they did not need (thereby increasing average faculty salary, another U.S. News data point), then made it understood that since they did not really need all that money they were expected to donate it all back to the school (thereby increasing the alumni giving rate, another U.S. News data point): three birds with one stone!

[...]

As someone who knew a little math, what really drove me bonkers about the college guide was:

(a) the logical absurdity of adding together completely unrelated statistics to produce a single measure of merit—the key point being that you can produce an astonishing range of different results depending  on the relative weight  each component factor is assigned. And there is simply no logical, a priori basis for establishing such a weighting objectively. Do SAT scores count 30% of the total score? 32.2%? 18.78234%? (How about zero?) It’s the classic apples + oranges – bananas/kumquats  = fruit salad approach to statistics, and is completely meaningless.

(b) the fact that the entire exercise was designed to emphasize noise over signal: tiny, random fluctuations from year to year would result in regular changes in the final rankings. Even within its own absurd methodology no one ever dared broach the question of the actual statistical significance of the differences between the “No. 1″ school and say the No. 5 school. In fact, there was pretty clearly none. It is of course ridiculous to think that when Harvard, Stanford, Yale, whoever changed places from one year to the next in the final rankings this reflected any actual sudden change in the underlying quality of the schools. But the only way to keep selling the damned guide each year was to make sure things kept changing from year to year.

What’s amazing is not that the magazine used this gimmick to increase sales or that some try to game the system but that almost all the colleges and universities in America willingly went along with it. I can sort of understand why a 2nd or 3rd tier institution would tout its rankings in some tertiary category (Best value of any medium sized liberal arts college in the Southwest!) as a means of claiming prestige. But what did Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the like have to gain by playing along?

For the third year in a row, the Super Bowl was the most-watched television program in history:

NEW YORK—For the third consecutive year, the Super Bowl set a record as the most-watched television show in U.S. history.

The Nielsen Co. said Monday that an estimated 111.3 million people watched the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots on Sunday night. That narrowly beat the 111 million who watched Green Bay’s win over Pittsburgh last year.

NBC was blessed by a competitive game between two teams that played in one of the Super Bowl’s most memorable contests four years ago, with one of them representing the largest media market in the country.

The game wasn’t over until Tom Brady’s last-second heave into the end zone dropped onto the turf. That play itself had the biggest audience of any play in the game, according to the digital video recorder maker Tivo. Nielsen said 117.7 million people were watching during the last half hour of the game.

The last two Super Bowls, along with the 2010 game between New Orleans and Indianapolis and the finale of “M-A-S-H” in 1983, are the only programs to exceed 100 million viewers in U.S. television history.

Madonna has some bragging rights, too. Her halftime show was seen by an estimated 114 million people — a higher average than the game itself — and was the most-watched Super Bowl halftime entertainment show on record, Nielsen said.

Given the plethora of television and other entertainment offerings, it’s likely that only other Super Bowls will break this record in the future.  Interestingly, four of the five most-watched television broadcasts, and five of the top six, are Super Bowls that have taken place between 2008 and 2012.

Many of you will remember back in September of 2010 when Rutgers University Freshman Tyler Clementi committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge after what was described at the time, and believed by many to be, a case of anti-gay bullying.  The story as it was understood at the time, and for the year and a half that has passed since then, was that Clementi’s roommate Dharun Ravi and his friend Molly Wei had surreptitiously caught Clementi on video having some kind of sexual encounter with a man which they broadcast over the Internet. It was the humiliation of being outed, we were told, that led Clementi to kill himself.  Ravi and Wei both left Rutgers shortly after the incident, and after being charged with a series of crimes, including charges that carry a bias charge that would enhance the sentence if convicted. Wei has since made a deal with prosecutors and is likely to end up testifying against Ravi when he goes to trial later this year.

Much time has passed, and the story has long left the front pages, but Ian Parker has a new piece in The New Yorker that calls to question many of the popularly understood facts of the case:

It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet. But last spring, shortly before Molly Wei made a deal with prosecutors, Ravi was indicted on charges of invasion of privacy (sex crimes), bias intimidation (hate crimes), witness tampering, and evidence tampering. Bias intimidation is a sentence-booster that attaches itself to an underlying crime—usually, a violent one. Here the allegation, linked to snooping, is either that Ravi intended to harass Clementi because he was gay or that Clementi felt he’d been harassed for being gay. Ravi is not charged in connection with Clementi’s death, but he faces a possible sentence of ten years in jail. As he sat in the courtroom, his chin propped awkwardly on his fist, his predicament could be seen either as a state’s admirably muscular response to the abusive treatment of a vulnerable young man or as an attempt to criminalize teen-age odiousness by using statutes aimed at people more easily recognizable as hate-mongers and perverts.

As it turns out, though, Clementi was not closeted at all. Not to his family, who he had come out to weeks before leaving for Rutgers, not to his roommate, who knew Clementi was gay before they met, and not to his fellow students. That’s not to say that what Ravi did here wasn’t despicable and mean, because it was. He may still end up being convicted of a crime for what he did. I’m certainly not going to defend him because there’s very little sympathetic about him. However, as Rod Dreher notes, this case is similar to many others in the manner that it became a rallying cry for people with a cause even if the facts ultimately don’t fit the model:

A close look at the evidence indicates that many people have projected their own feelings about anti-gay sentiment and bullying onto this case, and this defendant. The truth is a lot more complicated. I too thought that Clementi had been outed after Ravi filmed him having sex. As Parker shows, Clementi was not closeted, and he wasn’t filmed having sex. And yes, Dharun Ravi is an ass. But he is not facing criminal trial for being an ass.

This is what moral panic does. I’m as susceptible to it as anybody. It is hard for me to hear of cases of priests accused of molestation and to think that they are innocent until proven guilty, because I already have a particular narrative in my head. It is hard for me to be fair in these particular cases, but it is necessary to fight against my own instincts in this case and in every case. You too.

That’s a an admonition we’d do well to keep in mind in all sensationalistic headline grabbing cases. It’s very tempting to take a tragic case like Clementi’s, combined with the absolutely boorish behavior by a college student who apparently decided to invade his roommate’s privacy to make himself look cool to his friends, and draw some grand conclusion of “what it all means” for society as a whole. The truth, though, is that sometimes it doesn’t necessarily mean everything. We’ll never know what was really going on in Tyler Clementi’s head those final days in September 2010. The article suggests that it may have been more the invasion of privacy and betrayal of someone who should have been a friend that pushed him over the edge than the fear of getting outed. Whatever the reason, though, it is, as I noted when this happened, a tragedy.

At the very least, this case should be another lesson for all of us not to rush to judgment every time a tragic story makes the evening news. And, yes, that is easier said than done.

“NBC, Tom Brokaw ask Romney to take down ad made with news footage” (The Hill):

The ad released Saturday consists entirely of a single clip of a single clip of Brokaw reading the top of the broadcast on Jan. 21, 1997, the day the House voted to reprimand former House Speaker on ethics charges.

“Good evening. Newt Gingrich, who came to power, after all, preaching a higher standard in American politics, a man who brought down another Speaker on ethics accusations, tonight he has on his own record the judgment of his peers, Democrat and Republican alike,” Brokaw says in the clip used in the ad.

[...]

“I am extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad,” Brokaw said in a statement. “I do no want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign.”

NBC’s legal department said it had written a letter to Romney’s campaign asking that it remove all NBC News material from the campaign’s ads. NBC added that it has issued similar requests when other campaigns have “inappropriately used Nightly News, Meet the Press, Today and MSNBC material.”

Romney’s campaign said they were reviewing the letter, but that they believed it fell under the “fair use” exception to U.S. copyright law. The campaign declined to say whether it would pull the ad.

I don’t have the expertise in intellectual property law to know whether this use constitutes “fair use” but it certainly should. The clip is used as political commentary and is sufficiently short so as not to diminish whatever ability NBC has at this point to charge for the use of the newscast. If anything, it revives interest in material that one imagines has been of no interest to anyone for more than a decade.

Nor would any reasonable person view the ad and see it as an endorsement of Romney by Brokaw or NBC. To the extent people view it as Brokaw making an personal judgment that Gingrich is an unfit leader, it’s from an in-context viewing of what Brokaw said at the time on a scripted news program.

The entire above-the-fold is devoted to anti-Gingrich stories, which continue on scrolling:

NEWT FLASHBACK 1983: REAGAN RESPONSIBLE FOR NATIONAL ‘DECAY’…

NEWT 1986: ‘The Reagan administration has failed, is failing…

NEWT 1988: ‘If Bush runs as continuation of Reaganism he will lose’…

INSIDER: GINGRICH REPEATEDLY INSULTED REAGAN

R. EMMETT TYRRELL: William Jefferson Gingrich…

COULTER: RE-ELECT OBAMA: VOTE NEWT!…

DeLay: ‘He’s not really a conservative’…

FL Poll: Romney Stronger than Gingrich in General Election vs. Obama…

Liberal Groups Plan Florida Assault on Romney…

CNN: Gingrich admits his ABC claim was false during debate…

Gingrich tells UNIVISION: No perjury during my divorce depositions…

Marianne Gingrich lawyer: ‘He was never deposed’…

FLASHBACK 1998: Gingrich Orchestrated GOP Ads Recalling Clinton-Lewinsky Affair…

One gets the impression that Drudge isn’t all that fond of Newt Gingrich.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated whom Newt Gingrich is said to have asked for an “open marriage.” It was an ex-wife, not his current wife.

Well, not yet. As far as we know.

Within an hour last evening, I passed along two breaking news stories on Twitter. First, that former Florida governor Jeb Bush was set to endorse Mitt Romney ahead of that state’s suddenly very important primary. Second, that legendary but recently disgraced former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno had died. Within the next hour, I passed along news that both of those stories were premature.

While Twitter is at the low end of my diligence hierarchy–I’ll pass along (by re-tweeting) stories from trusted sources without verifying them, sometimes even without reading them–compared to blogging, much less more deliberately researched pieces written for publication elsewhere, that wasn’t my downfall in either case here. Both stories came from very solid support chains.

My re-tweet of the “Jeb Bush to endorse Romney” story re-tweets Stephen Hayes and Patrick Ruffini, well connected Republican analysts, and they were passing along a report from Josh Marshall’s well regarded Talking Points Memo which was passing along a CNN report.

I actually sent out three re-tweets in rapid succession on the Paterno story. First, Alabama sports journalist Izzy Gould‘s recollection that he’d covered Paterno’s last loss as a head coach, to the University of Alabama, last year. Then, NYT NFL writer Judy Battista‘s passing along of a CBS Sports report. Then, NFL business guru Andrew Brand‘s re-tweet of Onward State’s report “Our sources can now confirm: Joseph Vincent Paterno has passed away tonight at the age of 85.”

Both incidents demonstrate the nature of a Twitter stream: well-connected folks are connected to one another and things can go viral very quickly because of it. Bad reporting can spread in a matter of a few minutes. Thankfully, so can good reporting.

Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman examines “How false reports of Joe Paterno’s death were spread and debunked.” Essentially, Onward State, a Penn State student news website, broke the news at 8:45pm, noting that “Football players received an email minutes ago informing them of Paterno’s passing.” Local FM station Radio 94.5 apparently reported the story “around the same time.” This spurred CBS News and Huffington Post to rush to publish pre-prepared obituaries.

Those of us following people who follow these sources–which is to say, pretty much everyone likely to be on Twitter around 9 on a Saturday night–made the story go viral. But, Sonderman notes, “Minutes later though, other news organizations contradicted the reports, citing a family spokesperson. New York Times reporter Mark Viera appeared to be among the first.” Following that, “CBS Sports updated its obituary to include attribution to the Onward State report and a second paragraph noting contradictory claims. Other news organizations scrambled to react.” Soon, “Joe Paterno’s son, Jay, later tweeted his own report.” Finally, “Around 9:29, about 45 minutes after its first report, Onward State apologized to its Twitter followers.”

I never saw the Online State retraction but I did re-tweet several retractions, including the Jay Paterno tweet, in something close to real time. How quick did this all happen? Well, take a look at my tweets from last night:

Aside from the Ali G/Newt Gingrich tweet, seven successive tweets took me from the original Izzy Gould report to two others to Doug Mataconis’ OTB post passing along the news (which he unpublished in the space of maybe 5 minutes) to the “family spokesman” and Jay Paterno’s denials.

My last tweet on the subject for the night, “Rumors that Joe Paterno is set to endorse Mitt Romney are unconfirmed. Say again, unconfirmed,” may have been in questionable taste. But it reflects my bemusement over the whole thing.

Update (Doug Mataconis): As noted in the comments, Joe Paterno’s family reports that he passed way early this morning.

Mallary Jean Tenore writes about an interesting journalistic dilemma that has developed in Orange County, California:

While on a train Thursday, Bob Salladay, a senior editor at California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting, realized he was sitting near Santa Ana City Council member Michele Martinez. He listened to her talk on the phone and then started tweeting what she said about her campaign. He also tweeted that he was “99 percent sure it was Michele Martinez.”

It turns out, it was. In an email statement, Martinez responded: “I don’t know what’s worse; someone secretly listening to a private conversation without consent or misrepresenting that conversation publicly. It’s disrespectful, dishonest and downright creepy.” Salladay tweeted in response: “There is nothing secret about an elected official talking loudly on a public train.”

Salladay told me via email that he heard from several people who supported his decision to tweet about the conversation, and that he didn’t think there was anything he needed to verify. “I was tweeting a snapshot in time of what she was saying; that’s how you use Twitter. I was just bringing people into my world,” he said, noting that California Watch may follow up on what Martinez said in the phone conversation.

Judging from the story itself, the information that Sallady overheard, while hardly of national significance, were potentially important to Martinez’s campaign:

Cell phone technology has evolved to the point where the speaker no longer needs to shout into it to be heard, which is a lesson everyone should learn (me included).  In a series of Tweets from Bob Salladay, a senior editor of investigative reporting for California Watch, who is currently on a train from Southern California to Oakland, the reporter is apparently sitting next to or near Santa Ana City Council member and AD-69 candidate Michelle Martinez.  He tweets she’s loudly speaking about her campaign into a cell phone.  The Tweets were posted between (9:45 and 10:30 AM).

From the details Sallady couldn’t help but overhear:

• That Martinez is allegedly working with an Indian tribe on an IE (independent expenditure).
• She says: “I’m working with chairman Robert Smith from Pala. (Indian tribe) Yeah, they are going to come in real big with some IEs.”
• She’s also lamenting: Assemblyman “Mike Gatto didn’t want to endorse me because rumor has it he wants to run for Speaker.”
• “99% sure it was Michele Martinez, Santa Ana council member. She’s headed to Oak for nurses union interview”
• “Also said she got Assemblywoman Norma Torres’ endorsement in Sacto yesterday.”

Besides the fact you shouldn’t be discussing “business” in a confined area, Martinez’s comments on the IEs with the Indian Tribe warrant a possible investigation.  IEs are not supposed to be coordinated with the campaign and Martinez’s comments to her caller clearly place her knowledge about IEs with the tribe and her campaign.

Tenore notes that the incident raises questions for journalists who use Twitter and other forms of social media:

If you overhear a local official say something in an informal setting, should you tweet about it? There are risks, of course, in doing so. When you tweet information you haven’t verified, the potential to spread misinformation that could affect the public becomes higher — especially if you don’t have context to support the tweets, and you’re not 100 percent sure that the person is who you think it is.

That last part is a far point, obvious, if one sees someone who looks like they might be a prominent public official saying or doing something in public and then shares it via a network like Twitter, there’s always the danger that you’re observing something that isn’t what it seems and that an untrue accusation will spread around the internet before anyone has a chance to comment on it. Nonetheless, one can presume that a reporter who covers local politics would be familiar enough with local officials that they could be reasonable sure that the person sitting near them on a train and speaking loudly was in fact who they thought it was. Absent a specific company policy forbidding it, and some media organizations have started developing policies for social media use by employees that would potentially bar “reporting” unsubstantiated “breaking news” via a social network, then I’m honestly not sure what the problem is here. This would seem to be especially true in a case like this where what the reporter is overhearing is potentially a violation of campaign laws.

Of course, all of this raises the question of why Martinez (who has not denied that it was her on the train or that Salladay reported what she said accurately) would have a conversation like this is in public to begin with. We’ve all been in some public area where people talk on their cell phone far louder than they need to, forcing at least one side of their conversation upon us whether we want to hear it or not, and I’ve personally been surprised at the number of times you can hear people talking about things out loud that one would think they wouldn’t want anyone else to know about. Martinez’s outrage here would sound a little more sincere if it weren’t for the fact that she was dumb enough to talk about this on a train where anyone around her could here what she’s saying. The fact that one of those people happened to be a reporter is really just her bad luck.

What if the conversation that Salladay had overheard hadn’t had anything to do with the campaign, though? What if it was some kind of personal conversation that revealed, or appeared to reveal, something embarrassing of a personal nature? Would it have been appropriate, from a journalistic standpoint, for him to “live tweet” the conversation in that case? Admittedly, it becomes a more difficult question at that point, and it’s hard to make the case that the private life of a state representative is really all that newsworthy unless it involves something illegal. The fact that Martinez might have been having a fight with her husband, for example, doesn’t strike me as something the public needs to know. At the same time, thought, it’s a tough line to draw and it’s hardly an invasion of privacy if someone is speaking so loudly in public that everyone around them can hear clearly.

The real lesson here, of course, has nothing to do with journalism. The real lesson is that if you have something to talk about in a phone conversation that you don’t want others to overhear, you probably should be more discrete about it.

Public editor Arthur Brisbane created a firestorm yesterday when he asked for reader input as to “whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another 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?

On first reflection, this struck me as a perfectly reasonable question and two very good examples. My instinct is that neither of these cases call for reporters to directly challenge the “facts,” since the assertions aren’t falsifiable. Rather, reporters should simply report what was said and, in the case of controversial political assertions, also report that the interpretation is in dispute.

As the debate has unfolded, though, I’m less sure as to how far that should go.

In a follow-up post last evening, Brisbane observed,

 I must lament that “truth vigilante” generated way more heat than light. A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth.

That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

He also included a reply from NYT executive editor Jill Abramson stating, in part,

Of course we should and we do. The kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.

We do it every day, in a variety of ways. On the most ambitious level, we sometimes do entire stories that delve into campaigns to distort the truth. On a day to day basis, we explore the candidates’ actions to see if what they’ve done squares with what they are saying now . . .

[....]

And providing facts to challenge false or misleading assertions isn’t just part of political coverage. We do it routinely in policy stories from Washington and business stories from Wall Street. We do it in science coverage, too — for example, we constantly point out the scientific consensus on climate change,

Of course, some facts are legitimately in dispute, and many assertions, especially in the political arena, are open to debate. We have to be careful that fact-checking is fair and impartial, and doesn’t veer into tendentiousness. Some voices crying out for “facts” really only want to hear their own version of the facts.

This was not good enough for most commenters, though, who think that, by trying to be “objective” and avoid charges of liberal bias, the mainstream press has gone too far and become mere “stenographers.”

American Journalism Review‘s Rem Rieder argues for “Real Time Fact-Checking.”

Allowing a politician to get away with nonsense day after day lets false statements seep into the public consciousness. Once that happens, it can be hard to dislodge them. And the separate fact-checking piece, while incredibly valuable, is an imperfect antidote.

Questionable claims should be challenged as quickly as possible. Sometimes that will be possible in a first-day story. Sometimes it won’t. In the latter case, once they have run separate assessments of the claims, news outlets should replicate the findings when the allegations come up again. Because so often they do.

If the Times goes this route, as I hope it does, Brisbane wonders if the paper can do so “in a way that is objective and fair.”

Sure it can. How? By being an equal-opportunity scold. Hold everyone to account, whether it’s President Barack Obama or Mitt Romney or Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich or the local candidate for mayor. A clearly partisan take would be disastrous. A straight-down-the-middle approach would be an immense public service.

But this is easier said than done.WaPo’s Greg Sargent asks pointedly, “What are newspapers for?”

Should news reporters include that last paragraph giving readers the information they need to evaluate whether Romney’s claim that Obama “apologized for America” — which the paper itself is amplifying — is true?

I’m sympathetic to Brisbane’s worry that that regular fact checking by reporters could mean some statements will get checked and others won’t. (Although as Jamison Foser neatly illustrates, newspapers are already choosing which quotes to amplify and which ones to ignore, which itself throws into question whether total “objectivity” is possible.)

But I think there’s a simple way to drive home to Brisbane why reporters should include info enabling readers to judge such claims.

The Times itself has amplified the assertion — made by Romney and Rick Perry — that Obama has apologized for America, without any rebuttal, at least three times: Here, here, and here. I urge Brisbane to check them out. If he does, he’ll see that any Times customer reading them comes away misled. He or she is left with the mistaken impression that Obama may have, in fact, apologized for America, when he never did any such thing.

In other words, in all those three cases, the Times helped the GOP candidate mislead its own readers — with an assertion that has become absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. Whatever the practical difficulties of changing this, surely we can all agree that this isnot a role newspapers should be playing, particularly at a time when voters are choosing their next president.

The problem with this is that the “apologize for America” trope, while tired, has a real basis in fact. As someone who will probably vote for Romney over Obama in November given that choice, I think it’s a cheap spin on Obama’s record. But the “apology tour” meme came about in real time from a series of speeches given by Obama early in his administration which, in my judgment, did come across as too apologetic.

Back in June 2009, Heritage’s Nile Gardiner published a list of “Barack Obama’s Top 10 Apologies: How the President Has Humiliated a Superpower.” Most of them strike me as weak tea, at best, but a handful of them are genuinely apologies. As Romney explains in the book which kicked off his campaign,

In his first nine months in office, President Obama has issued apologies and criticisms of America in speeches in France, England, Turkey, and Cairo; at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. He has apologized for what he deems to be American arrogance, dismissiveness and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, and for acting without regard for others; for treating other countries as mere proxies, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations and for feeding anti-Muslim sentiments; for committing torture, for dragging our feet on global warming and for selectively promoting democracy.

PolitiFact rules that, on balance, this is incorrect. But it’s mostly because Obama never used the words “I’m sorry.” What he did say, though, certainly comes across as apologetic. He told a French audience that the United States “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” On the war on terror, Obama proclaimed that ”our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.”

Now, I’d argue that these statements are defensible, if not objectively true. Further, I think there’s a subtle distinction between “apologizing for America” and rejecting as unwise the policy positions of her previous leaders. That’s especially true if one takes the speeches in their fuller context rather than cherry pick the passages where he tries to be conciliatory towards his audience. But it’s perfectly understandable that others would perceive this as part of an “apology tour.”

My preference in these instances, then, is for straight news reporters to simply but succinctly note that the assertions are in dispute. Presumably, some Obama administration official has gone on the record taking exception to the “apology” meme. Briefly note that and move on.  (At least, that’s how a print story should be handled. For online stories, it’s possible to reference and hyperlink longer expositions on the dispute at hand in a way that doesn’t detract from the story.) Otherwise, a story about actual news–what’s being said on the campaign trail that day–gets hijacked by the reporter’s analysis of Romney’s opinion about something Obama said three years ago.

At the same time, though, there’s a difference between genuine differences of opinion–where I think the “apology” example fits–and outright lies. For that matter, there’s a distinction between silly lies that politicians tell on the campaign trail to give partisan crowds the red meat they came for and serious lies about grave public policy issues.

I agree with Glenn Greenwald that a press corps that’s too credulous, simply reporting assertions made by public officials, can become propaganda outlets for the government.

Every day one can find prominent news articles that are shaped entirely by the following template: A, B and C are true, say anonymous American officials; government claims drive the entire article and shape its narrative, with “officials say” tacked on as an afterthought, an unnoticed formality. In the realm of reporting on the government, this practice encourages and enables government lies; in the realm of political reporting, as Greg Sargent’s examples show, it incentivizes candidates to lie freely.

But there is one important caveat that needs to be added here. This stenographic treatment by journalists — of simply amplifying what someone claims without any skepticism or examination — is not available to everyone. Only those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems are entitled to receive this treatment. For everyone else — those who are viewed as ordinary, marginalized, or scorned by America’s political establishment — the exact opposite rules apply: their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.

He points to a caption on an AP photo of the Iranian nuclear scientist killed in a car bomb the other day and notes that it caveats everything:

Greenwald thinks this is as it should be:

Extreme skepticism oozes from every pore of that photo caption. AP refuses to accept that this scientist was killed; they even refuse to accept that this is an actual photograph of the scientist in question and that the photograph shows him with his son. Instead, AP wants you to know that even these pedestrian assertions are nothing more than unverified “claims” from Iran’s state-controlled media and thus cannot and must not be assumed to be true.

I have no problem with that type of skepticism. To the contrary, it’s warranted; as I.F. Stone famously taught, the only thing journalism students need to know is that “all governments lie.” But the point is that one would never, ever see this level of overt skepticism from AP or any other establishment media outlet when it comes to claims from the U.S. Government. Instead, those claims are treated as presumptively true; in fact, they’re so trustworthy that entire news stories can be written that do little more than adopt those government claims as the dominant narrative (“The drones would be cleared to fire on a senior militant leader if there was credible intelligence and minimal risk to civilians, American officials said“).

It seems to me that this is a much cleaner case than the Romney quote. Whether the person in the photo is actually the Iranian nuclear scientist is a verifiable fact; until it’s verified, caveating is warranted. Similarly, reporters have an obligation to find out the truth about important stories like the American drone war in Pakistan. To the extent that they can verify statements made by US officials, they should of course do so.

At the same time, however, reporting on breaking news comes under deadline pressure. Oftentimes, all reporters have to go on in the initial hours and days are statements, photos, and other information that come from government sources. That means that such stories will have little choice but to rely on those sources in describing the events. Ideally, stories about national security policy will be run through a filter of skeptical journalists who actually know the beat. Further, subject matter experts in academia, think tanks, and the like–including those who previously served in government–should of course be asked to comment on the likelihood of the official version of facts being correct.

That actually does tend to happen. Of course, as Peter Singer outlined in detail back in August, there’s the wee problem that many “think tanks” are actually just propaganda outlets for one party or ideological cause. Pretending otherwise is one of the real places where journalists do practice stenography.

Now like all good things, this adventure is coming to an end. I’ve been invited to move my blog and print journalism to the Daily Beast/Newsweek, a larger and more technologically advanced platform. Tina Brown is one of the great media visionaries of our time. The opportunity to work with her-and learn from her-is deeply exciting.

Starting Monday, my work will shift to the Daily Beast/Newsweek site. The FrumForum URL will forward readers to the David Frum page at Daily Beast/Newsweek. FrumForum itself will continue to exist as an archive site, preserving three years of debate-the brilliant insights of our writers-and the passionate comments of our readers. Noah Kristula-Green will join me on the Daily Beast/Newsweek team.

The top banner’s slogan, “The Republican candidates are leaving Iowa. But their terrible ideas are here to stay” is amusing. Of course, they’d use essentially the same line in retort.

It’s that time of year again for Time Magazine to name its Person of the Year, and for people to complain about it. This year, the editors at Time returned to a formula that has become familiar, and somewhat annoying, in recent years. Instead of actually naming a person as person of the year and explaining why that person had such a huge impact on the world, which is what the concept was originally intended to be when Henry Luce started it so long ago, they picked a group. This year, the group is amorphously called “The Protester,” which Time describes thusly:

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the “end point of … ideological evolution” in globally triumphant “Western liberalism.” The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: “Fight the Power” was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix.

“Massive and effective street protest” was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

The Time feature story starts, of course, in Tunisia where a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in downtown Tunis after being forced to endure yet another indignity at the hands of the police. That event set off waves of protests across Tunisia that led to the surprisingly fast downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years in power. From Tunisia, the protests spread like wildfire. First to Egypt, where text messaging and Facebook helped organize a series of protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30 years in power. Protests also popped up in Yemen, which also led to the downfall of that country’s leader, and to Baharain where a Shi’ite uprising against the monarchy led to intervention by military forces from the other Gulf States. In Libya, the protests led to a brutal crackdown by the Arab world’s longest ruling dictator that set off a civil war that led to NATO intervention and, ultimately, to a new and uncertain future that had not known anything but the Gadhafi regime since 1969. Finally, protests even popped up in Syria where they continue to this day despite the efforts of Bashar Assad’s regime to brutally repress it. The future course all these uprisings will take is still not clear, but it surely cannot be contested that, in the course of just eleven short months, the face of the Arab world, and teh world as a whole, has been changed significantly. Along with 1989 and 1848, 2011 looks to go down in history as a year of massive change, whether it will be for good or ill remains to be seen.

Of course, as Time notes, it wasn’t just the Middle East that saw protests in 2011:

In the spring, they spread to Europe. On May 15, tens of thousands marched to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza, along with tens of thousands more in dozens of other cities, united by slogans like “We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers.” They were frustrated by unemployment, a lack of opportunity and politics headed nowhere. They called themselves Los Indignados, the Outraged.

Spain’s one-day march turned into a months-long self-governing encampment — one of the new defining characteristics of 2011′s brand of communal resistance. Throughout the country, about 6 million out of a population of 46 million participated in Indignados protests. Among those in Madrid was Olmo Gálvez, 31, an Internet entrepreneur just back from three years working in China and new to politics. He’d helped set up social-media networks for the protest. “It was marvelous to see people become the actors in their own lives,” he says. “You could watch them breaking out of their passivity.”

Ten days after the Madrid protests began, the contagion spread to Greece. George Anastasopoulos, 36, has a Ph.D. in sociology but earns his living as a DJ. “That first Sunday when we saw 100,000 people show up, we were overwhelmed,” he says of the Athenians’ camp in Syntagma Square, in sight of Parliament. “And then the second Sunday, 500,000 people showed up. That enthused us so much, and we started dreaming really big

(…)

In early August, after police in London shot and killed a young black man they were arresting, riots broke out all over England. Naturally, the rioters’ instantly resorting to violence attracted little sympathy. Yet a new, three-month study by the Guardian and the London School of Economics concluded that these rioters were also protesters, motivated by anger about poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as overaggressive policing.

(…)

Until late September, 99% of New Yorkers had never heard of Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public plaza tucked between the Federal Reserve Bank and the World Trade Center site. On the last Saturday of the summer — sunny, mid-60s, perfect — a couple thousand people showed up, a hundred slept overnight, and the occupation was on. It seemed as though the world would little note nor long remember it. On the third day, the first arrests — of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks in violation of an antique New York anti-insurrection statute — got scant attention.

For the next two months, though, the Occupy movement was one of the most-discussed news stories in the United States. It was hard for anyone to ignore it, whether they agreed with the movement or not, and while it now seems to have petered out and been taken over by malcontents who think that shutting down the Port of Oakland is a good substitute for having a coherent agenda, it’s entirely probable that some manifestation of it will return during the 2012 elections.

More recently, and not in time t make it into Time’s story, we’ve seen protests in Russia of all places over Parliamentary elections and a system that many, correctly, perceive to be rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin and his cronies. What will become of that only time will tell.

Of course, it’s not entirely appropriate to lump together the protesters in the Middle East, Southern Europe, London, and Zuccotti Park as if they are representative of the same phenomenon. The protesters in Tunis, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya were motivated by a combination of grinding poverty, political systems that gave them absolutely no voice in governance whatsoever, and regimes that brutally cracked down on any form of dissent. The protesters in Spain and Greece were motivated by the fact that decades of profligacy by their leaders was forcing massive cutbacks in a welfare state that their nations could no longer afford, with the terms being dictated by bankers in France and Germany. In London, the summer riots seemed to be motivated by little more than the desire by some groups to commit violence and the damage that was done to small businessmen in some parts of the city dwarfed any benefit that whatever political agenda they claimed to advance would have had. Finally, the Occupy movement seems motivated both by frustration over an economy that has been stagnant for going on 4 years and the sense that the political system was rigged against anyone who didn’t buy access to the levers of power in a government that has become far too big to even think about being responsive to the needs of the public.  Yes they were all protesting, some more violently than others, but the fact that they were using similar tactics doesn’t mean that there’s much of a relationship between them.

It is perhaps the tying of the Middle East protests, the European protests, and the Occupy movement into the same narrative that is causing some people to react negatively to Time’s pick. Ed Morrissey, for example, is fairly dismissive of the entire concept:

Oh, please.  First, the idea that political protest originated in the 1960s is nothing but nostalgic nonsense, and quoting the long-debunked Fukuyama at this point is almost self-parody.  America has seen plenty of grassroots protests throughout its history, nor is the US alone.  From our own history, we had massive anti-war and anti-draft protests in the 60s … the 1860s, in New York.  It had the same effect as anti-war protests in the 1960s, which was that the war continued apace (and the nation elected a Republican as president in the next national election).

In 2009, Time had the same opportunity to pick “the protester” when the protests were the Tea Party and Iran’s Green Revolution, which followed from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and so on.  Who did they pick?  Ben Bernanke.  When the Tea Party movement actually delivered results at the ballot box in 2010 in a historic midterm drubbing of Barack Obama’s Democrats — they lost 68 seats, the worst outing since 1938 — they could have hailed The Protester then, too.  Who did they pick?  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

So they’re a little late to “the protester” story in terms of real impact.  And what impact has “the protester” actually had in 2011?  Has the Occupy Movement, such as it is, had any kind of ground-breaking impact on politics in the way the Tea Party did in 2010 and still does in this cycle?  Not even close, and even people on the Left have begun washing their hands of the literally pointless display.  The Arab Spring protesters have had somewhat more impact, but the two dictators they overthrew in Tunisia and Egypt look to be replaced by Muslim Brotherhood theocrats.  In Libya, Moammar Qaddafi didn’t get taken down by “protesters,” but by an armed insurrection that combined several militia forces with NATO’s air power dropping bombs on the capital for several months.  In Syria, the Assad regime is mowing down the protesters while the US and Europe stand idly by.  In that sense, it’s exactly like Iran in 2009 — when Time passed on the opportunity to name the martyred Neda as their person of the year.

I’m not sure I agree that Time was wrong in 2009 when it named Bernanke, and by extension the efforts to pull the United States’ economy out from its deepest recession in a generation, was the most significant news story of 2009. Yes, the Iranian protests were an important news story but the most important of the year? Probably not, especially from the perspective of an American news magazine. Moreover, its worth noting that the title “Person of the Year” isn’t meant to be honorific, but to make note of the most significant newsmaker of the year. Which is why it made perfect sense for them to name Hitler as Person of the Year for 1938 as the world careened toward a conflict that was only nine short months away, or Stalin as Person of the Year for 1939 given the role the Non-Aggression Pact played in allowing Germany to have free reign for the first year of World War II.

We don’t know what impact the protests movements that raced around the world this year will have in the future. There are fears in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, that greater democracy will lead to the rise of Islamist governments that will pose problems for the West, and lead to renewed domestic repression. None of the nations in Southern Europe have adequately dealt with the fiscal problems that faced them in 2011, and its entirely probable that the Eurozone will compete with the U.S. Presidential Election for our attention in the headlines in 2012. Here in the Untied States, it still seems unlikely that the amorphous, unorganized, and seemingly fizzled Occupy movement will lead to anything significant politically, but it’s already clear that the Obama campaign intends to adopt at least parts of its message for the campaign so we’re going  to be talking about those issues for most of next year as well.

In the end, I think we’ve come to the point where this “Person Of The Year” choice ends up generating far more attention than it’s really entitled to given the declining influence of news magazines in the United States. Usually, that attention comes from people complaining about the choice, or complaining that one person, group, or movement or another was ignored unfairly. Frankly, I can’t see how it really matters. When Time picked Charles Lindbergh as the first Person Of  The Year it meant something. Now, though, if you look through the list of Persons of the Year, especially in the years before 1938, there are many people on the list that make you wonder either who they are or what they did that was so newsworthy that they deserved the cover of one of America’s top magazines at the time. Many of the names have faded into history — does anyone remember who Owen Young was today, or Hugh Samuel Johnson? Does it matter? At this point, much like news magazines themselves, the Person of the Year has outlived its usefulness except as a means to garner attention for Time Magazine once a year.

That said, who can deny the bravery of the protesters who stood up against dictatorships across the Middle East, or the anger of protesters in the West when they look at a world that seems to offer a far different future than the one promised to them? And even if you can, saying that this wasn’t the most newsworthy event of the year seems rather silly since it seems to have been the only thing we all talked about from January until now other than the ridiculous circus that is the race for the Republican Nomination for President.

Late this afternoon, Moody reported via Twitter that he had just received this from Trump, apparently via facsimile:

What a complete jerk.

On the other hand, as I said to him, Chris won the Internet today.

By the way, if you’re not already reading Chris’s work at The Ticket, you should be.

Ultra-nationalist radio host Michael Savage and ultra-crazy radio host Glenn Beck are taking strong stands against Newt Gingrich. Savage has offered Gingrich one million dollars to drop out of the race and Beck has said that he’d vote for Ron Paul as a third party candidate rather than supporting the former Speaker.

Having myself declared Gingrich morally unfit to be president, I’m now in the unusual and uncomfortable position of being aligned with two rather unsavory characters. Could there be some redeeming quality about Gingrich that I’m missing?