Kurtz welcomed to his panel today former Carter speechwriter James Fallows and Washington Post blogger Eric Wemple, both who expressed little sympathy for News Corporation and its entanglement in the scandal. Kurtz opened the chat proposing that, as much as many criticize Fox News for not devoting as much coverage as other networks to the matter, a risk existed, perhaps, that the network would be accused of “putting out some kind of sanitized version” of the story. Fallows argued that, yes, expecting them to be at the forefront of coverage on their sister organization’s corruption was unwieldy, but “it’s realistic to expect them to devote some coverage.” Wemple agreed: “there is a difference between responsibility and expecting them to be at the forefront.” Wemple also argued that they had to cover it because it was a juicy story, and “if they fully ignore it, they’ll push people elsewhere.”

As a media reporter, Kurtz admitted that the story was somewhat personal to him. “When CNN has controversy, we always do it,” he noted, and he expected the same of his analogs at Fox News. Otherwise, he argued, the network sends the message that “we’re only aggressive when someone else is in trouble.” He also called the Fox News Watch commercial segment on the topic, where the panel decided not to talk about it at all, “an embarrassment” but considered the possibility, as Cal Thomas argued the week after that segment, that those who are competitors are covering the story with more zeal because of their interests in it.

To that claim, Wemple argued that it was News Corp who were playing up the story by virtue of so many people in their organization being involved in it and stepping down, but refrained from attacking the American side of the organization too much because journalistic standards in America are “vastly superior” to those of Britain (with the exception of the New York Post). Fallows agreed in part: “the range from high to low [standards] is broader than in the United States.”

The segment via CNN below:

The clip takes place in “Beijing 2030″ as a Chinese professor lectures on why America collapsed. His reasons are, completely coincidentally, the same as the organization’s talking points: government stimulus spending during the Recession, major changes in health care policy, and public intervention in private industries. The Professor concludes “now they work for us,” as his students laugh maniacally.

Smith calls the ad “slickly-produced” and sure to get some attention. Fallows goes further, comparing it to attack ad greats like “Morning in America,” “Willie Horton,” “the Daisy Girl,” and “3am Phone Call.” Fallows acknowledges that the ad is factually flawed, as the “reasons why America fell” are all strategies used by the Chinese to fight recession, but concludes that the ad’s value as a tool of “persuasion and motivation” does not require it to make sense.

The ad promises to make a splash for another reason: it uses subtitles, making it ripe for easy parody. Have at it, Internet.

The initial, general consensus seems to be that Obama exceeded expectations and that his “sober” acceptance speech — which required him to walk a very tricky tightrope — will please the conservatives as well as the liberals as much as any speech by the president can. That said, for a Nobel Peace Prize speech the president spoke an awful lot about war. In fact, he mentioned ‘war’ 44 times during the speech — a ‘just war‘ appears to be the main takeaway. To contrast he mentioned ‘peace’ 29 times. Sound like a strange tone to strike whilst accepting a peace prize? Well, maybe just imagine if he had he not chosen to address the elephant in the room. Says the Atlantic’s James Fallows:

As with his Philadelphia speech, he made the speech about the most awkward issue of the moment, rather than trying to avoid it. (In Philadelphia, the racially inflammatory rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright; in Oslo, his predicament as a war president getting a peace price.) I don’t think he provided even a five-second passage of the speech that could be isolated by U.S. opponents to show that he was “apologizing” for America.

Time’s Joe Klein thinks this passage from the speech is particularly worth noting as there is “something remarkably gutsy about using Martin Luther King Jr. as a foil before the Nobel Committee”:

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Meanwhile Politico’s Ben Smith felt Obama used the opportunity to “to sell his foreign policy at home and abroad without public reference to human rights, viewed by this White House as cheap — as used by Bush — and potentially counterproductive.” You can read the full text of the speech here and once we get video I will update. (Update: video below)

Who is Betsy McCaughey? Fallows explains:

In the early 1990s McCaughey single-handedly did a phenomenal amount to distort discussion of health-care policy and derail the Clinton health bill. She did so through an entirely fictitious argument about what the bill would do. You can go back in the records here, here, and here, but the issue boils down to this: She claimed that the bill would make it illegal to go outside the government plan for coverage or pay doctors on your own. If a doctor took money for such outside-the-system services, she said, that doctor could go to jail. That was a flat-out lie.

…McCaughey has been at it again this year — twice, in fact. First was with an early, equally false claim that to compile “comparative effectiveness” data about medical care — which drugs had which effects, which surgical procedures led to which results, the sort of data collected routinely about education, air safety, and everything else — would lead to a Big Brotherish intrusion on individual medical decisions. That one seemed to get knocked out of contention fairly early. Then she was back with the “death panels” argument.

The New York Times today traces how McCaughey’s claim has been picked up by the conservative media:

But Ms. McCaughey’s article provided another opportunity for others to raise the specter of forced euthanasia. “Sometimes for the common good, you just have to say, ‘Hey, Grandpa, you’ve had a good life,’ ” Mr. Beck said.

Fallows says he can’t believe that this time around, the modern media, with its millions of Internet fact-checkers now built into the process, wasn’t immune to this kind of rumormongering. Well, it’s not because they weren’t warned: On July 29th, Greg Sargent‘s Plumline carried this headline: Figure Who Helped Kill Health Care With Distortions Last Time Rides Again (I just saw this via Andrew Sullivan, whom I checked as soon as I made the McCaughey-New Republic connection. Alas, he has not weighed in on this just yet. Hmm.) On July 31, Salon’s Joe Conason wrote “Will Bill and Betsy Kill Again?“, incredulous: “Knowing what we have since learned about him and her, it is hard to believe that anyone believes anything they say. But once again it is their words — brimming with falsehood, stupidity and possibly both — that inspire the opposition and confuse the public.”

It’s not that the fact-checking isn’t there – Conason traces the McCaughey ‘end-of-life counseling’ rumor back to mid-July on Fred Thompson’s radio show, saying “the healthcare reform bill would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.” Conason points out that Politifact.com debunked this as a “ridiculous falsehood.”

But debunking takes time and effort, especially when rumours spread.  Wednesday, Time’s Michael Scherer pointed to how McCaughey’s fallacious New York Post column attacking Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm, as a “deadly doctor” had spread like wildfire, catching him off-guard. Guess who wrote the column? Look no further than the smiling blonde above.

Paul Krugman’s column today, “Republican Death Trip,” doesn’t even mention McCaughey — it’s about Chuck Grassley‘s role, which he calls “flat-out despicable.” But the hand of McCaughey is behind Grassley, too (no matter how much he may claim that he’s “no nail“):

The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

It also may be worse because this message machine has so many more amplifiers: Blogs and Twitter and YouTube and Drudge and HuffPo and 24-hour cable news shows who shout first and fact-check later. It’s a multi-media many-headed Hydra, and as anyone who knows a little mythology (or has read Agatha Christie!) knows, it’s bloody impossible to contain because as soon as you cut off one head, up spring two more.  That’s how it is with debunking these rumors: They are carelessly thrown out, exaggerated and amplified, and why not? It’s the other side that wil have to go through the laborious process of fact-checking and proving why they’re wrong, using up precious time and labor to do so.  Do you think all the people who watched Glenn Beck’s crazy eugenics segment instantly rushed to their computers to fact-check him? Er, not quite. Probably more than a few of them rushed to make hand-held signs that they could then wave angrily at a town hall. For the TV cameras.

So: Now what? The New Y ork Times is (now) on the case – will that make the Washington Times recant? Stop publishing McCaughey? We all know the answer: It won’t. Which is too bad, because anyone who knows a little mythology knows, too, that that’s the only way to stop it. The next best thing may just be to keep vigilant eye out at all time, and never to assume fact-checking is the end of it. It should be, but as long as the world prefers many shouting Hydra heads to a smoldering dead one, the second side will always have to shout back, belatedly. No Exit, indeed.

I Was Wrong [James Fallows - The Atlantic]
Will Bill and Betsy Kill Again? [Salon]
Figure Who Helped Kill Health Care With Distortions Last Time Rides Again [The Plumline]
False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots [New York Times]
Republican Death Trip [New York Times]
Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s ‘Deadly Doctor,’ Strikes Back [Time]

Related in depressing posts from back in February:
Let’s Stop This Before It Goes Any Further [Jim Fallows - The Atlantic]

In the same essay, we have Microsoft’s Bill Gates saying he doesn’t even own a TV because if he did he wouldn’t have time to read the Economist cover to cover (maybe that’s how he missed the importance of the World Wide Web and the rise of Google!)

What accounts for the strange hold the Economist has over the American elite? Fallows provided a pretty good explanation. “The complications of Anglophilic snobbery and Oxbridge-style swagger prevent most American readers from realizing that, when they read Economist leaders, they’re essentially reading Wall Street Journal editorials, written with even less self-doubt.”

In re-reading Fallows’ piece recently, I laughed when I came upon this fairly cynical quote: “Americans think the Economist is better written because they impute a British accent to what they read.” The speaker was Richard Stengel, who would cite the Economist as his role model 17 years later, when he was tasked with reinventing Time Magazine.

This year, Stengel’s chief rival, Jon Meacham of Newsweek, also redid his magazine, in part to be more like the Economist (though in fairness, Meacham is also on the record dissing the Economist for its lack of original reporting).

Michael Hirschorn, the reality show impresario who moonlights as a media columnist for the Atlantic, has a very smart piece about the struggles U.S. newsweeklies find themselves in and how the Economist keeps chugging along, soaking up ads as if the whole InterWeb thing never happened. He notes that the entire American magazine industry – not just Time and Newsweek – often seems to have what he calls “Economist envy.”

Hirschorn puts his finger on the real reason for the Economist’s success – and why its admirers in the magazine industry sometimes miss the point even as they try to imitate it.  It is a sort of cheat sheet – or, as Hirschorn puts it,  “a true global digest.”  That’s roughly what Time and Newsweek were a long, long time ago, before they decided they needed to become more like the Economist. “True, the Economist virtually never gets scoops,” Hirschorn writes, “and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling.”

The Economist covers the world with dozens and dozens of hyper-distilled 400 to 500 word articles each week, all presented with that Oxford overlay that makes U.S. readers think it’s so authoritative. And it often has one long special report on subjects like the Malaysian electronics industry.

You sometimes get the feeling that the Economist is winking at you. It was odd that it called itself a newspaper 20 years ago, and is odder still today, given what’s going on in that business. And yes, the Economist covers the world more thoroughly than all but a handful of newspapers, and they manage to do it with far fewer people than even the smallest newspapers. They use a lot of stringers, whose dispatches from, say, Bangalore are often completely rewritten.

Ever wonder why the articles have no bylines? Fallows quoted Michael Lewis as saying that the cover of anonymity for the magazine’s writers, among other things, conceals how young much of the staff was, at least back then. “The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people,” said Lewis. “If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.”

Bill Gates might even start watching TV, if he hasn’t already.

Jim Impoco is a New York-based writer and a former editor of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times and deputy editor of Portfolio. He writes for Mediaite about the financial press. Please send tips or comments to jimpoco@mediaite.com.