Kurtz link. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz links to my Wednesday item on so-called liberal media bias. Thanks to reader NH for calling it to my attention, even though she didn't think much of what I wrote.

Do they eat babies in China? The news is so mindblowingly horrifying that it can scarcely be believed. But is it true? The Weekly Standard's J. Bottum has a dispatch on the magazine's website today reporting that a Chinese performance artist named Zhu Yu has been photographed eating a stillborn baby. Bottum also recycles an old report from the London Daily Telegraph that a Chinese abortion clinic distributes human fetuses to be cooked up along with the ginger and scallions. Writes Bottum:

We need a word for things that are so wrong, it is wrong even to report them -- actions to which we somehow lend countenance just by entering into a discussion of why they are beyond all countenance.

Well, here's a word for it: "hoax." It's hard to tell whether Bottum believes what he's writing. He tells it straight, but the subhead's reference to "a modest proposal" suggests that his tongue may be somewhere in the vicinity of his cheek.

In any case, according to this About.com site on "Urban Legends and Folklore," the stories about Zhu Yu and the abortion clinic have long since been discredited. There are photos (links are included, though I couldn't get them to work), but writer David Emery says that Zhu could easily have faked them with animal parts and dolls. Emery adds:

The claim that baby or fetus eating is an accepted practice in China (or Thailand, or Japan, or Korea, or Israel, as other variants of this same rumor claim) is more or less a modernized version of an ancient legend known as "Blood Libel." It has typically taken the form of one culture accusing another (or a subculture) of ritually sacrificing infants and in some cases eating them. The Greeks accused the Jews of it, the Romans accused the Christians, Christians accused the Jews again, and so on throughout history.

The respected urban-legends site Snopes.com also debunks the baby-eating story. Be careful when you follow the link, since it's accompanied by a color photo of Zhu in mid-bite. Snopes says Zhu is most likely nibbling on a duck's carcass to which a doll's head has been attached.

Whether Bottum is being disingenuous or is just plain gullible, the uses to which he puts his sensationalistic findings are sleazy, to say the least. He argues that baby-eating is just another step on a road whose signposts include abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research:

Once upon a time, we built hedge after hedge of protection around the deep things about life and death a culture must maintain. The hedges themselves are not all that important, but when they fall they weaken our defenses -- however much those people who knock them down insist they are only clearing away a single hedge.

Call it performance art, conservative-style: libeling an entire people in order to make a political point. Bottum, and the Standard, should apologize for this miserable piece of work.

Romney's bogus numbers. Excellent analysis by the Globe's Scot Lehigh on what was wrong with Governor Mitt Romney's inaugural address. By disingenuously characterizing the state's fiscal crisis as the result of overspending, rather than of $4 billion a year in tax cuts by his three Republican predecessors, Romney raised unrealistic expectations on how to get out of the mess, Lehigh observes, writing that "if you focus on false causes, you create false hopes for false solutions."

By contrast, the Herald's Tom Keane and the Globe's Brian McGrory focus on Romney's tone rather than the substance, and thus wind up giving him far higher marks than he deserves. (Actually, McGrory gave Romney higher marks than, say, Pericles or Cincinnatus would deserve.) Their hope isn't entirely misplaced: Romney has made some good Cabinet appointments, and he seems as though he might actually be serious about peeling back a few layers of patronage.

But his lack of honesty about the budget is going to bite him in the hindquarters.

Er, about that Iraqi-Al Qaeda nerve-gas connection ... Some post-holiday clean-up. Remember that front-page Washington Post story reporting that Bush-administration officials believed a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda may have obtained nerve gas in Iraq and smuggled it out of the country? Well, here we are three weeks later, and still no follow-up or further details. Not only that, but it turns out that on December 22, the Post's pit-bull ombudsman, Michael Getler, gave the story the hairy eyeball and questioned reporter Barton Gellman's sourcing and equivocations. Wrote Getler:

It is to Gellman's and The Post's credit that all of these uncertainties are laid out. But the effect on the complaining readers, and on me, is to ask what, after all, is the use of this story that practically begs you not to put much credence in it? Why was it so prominently displayed, and why not wait until there was more certainty about the intelligence?

Good points. Thanks to Romenesko for the link. You can click here for my last post on the subject, which in turn includes links to my previous posts.

Hub Blog on the liberal media. Jay Fitzgerald has written his own take on the liberal/conservative media debate. Fitzgerald, who describes himself as a "moderate conservative," winds up agreeing with me that "the balance of power tilts today towards conservatives." Smart man!

The dot-com dupes of the media. Another year has passed, and if you're like most people, your stock portfolio is considerably lighter today than it was a year ago -- a moment when most of us were hoping the market had already reached rock bottom.

On the op-ed page of today's New York Times, James Ledbetter, a former media critic for the Village Voice and a staff reporter for the late, unlamented Industry Standard, offers a smart mea culpa on the business press's role in helping to create the great stock-market bubble of the late 1990s.

Good reading, if you can stand it.

The problem, as always, is that the media's most primal instinct is to act as lapdogs to winners. Yesterday it was the dot-com smartasses. Today it's George W. Bush and the Republican Party.

Back in the heyday of Enron, WorldCom, and AOL, we needed skepticism and we got cheerleading. Now we're on the verge of a war that may prove to be unnecessary, with the devastating, unanticipated consequences that war often brings. And the media, with few exceptions, are failing to ask the tough questions.

Some things never change.

More on the liberal media. Jim Rutenberg has a front-page piece in this morning's New York Times on efforts by a few Democratic activists to build a liberal media to counter the likes of the Fox News Channel, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

Sorry, but it's not going to work. Conservatives might enjoy absorbing talking points from the Republican National Committee, but that's not how it happens with liberals. As I've argued before, there are liberal media -- most of the mainstream media are liberal, as conservatives have long contended -- but they work differently from the conservative media. Telling liberals what to think is like herding cats.

The cutting edge of the liberal media are the Times itself and National Public Radio, the size of whose audience rivals Limbaugh's 20 million weekly listeners. The network newscasts, which can reach a combined total of 30 million viewers a night depending on what's going on in the news, are another outpost.

But the mainstream media, though overwhelmingly liberal on cultural issues such as gay rights and reproductive choice, are moderate to conservative on economics and trade issues. Elite liberal opinion is as contemptuous of organized labor, for instance, as elite conservative opinion is. And the Times has been virtually alone in raising serious questions about the Bush administration's aggressive policy toward Iraq.

The difference between the large, amorphous liberal media and the relatively small but cohesive conservative media is that the latter are ideologically in tune with the Republican Party and loyal to its candidates. The liberal media aren't going to take their marching orders from the Democratic National Committee. Even if they did, their audience would tune out.

Gag me with a silver spoon. Governor-elect Mitt Romney says he hopes his and running mate Kerry Healey's decision not to take their salaries "sets the appropriate tone" as they prepare to assume office on Thursday. Yes, it certainly does. Nothing like two rich folks engaging in a cheap publicity stunt while rewarding their chief media strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, and legislative lobbyist, Cindy Gillespie, with salaries of $150,000 apiece.

Romney describes his and Healey's decision to forgo $255,000 in annual salary as "symbolism." Here's what it's symbolic of, Mitt: you've got it, we don't. The subliminal message is that only the rich have the integrity and public-spiritedness necessary to govern, which is a load of crap.

As campaign-finance watchdog George Pillsbury tells the Globe, it would have been more impressive if Romney had taken the $6 million in personal wealth that he dropped on getting elected and spent it on saving some of the social programs that he's about to whack.

Where's Dave? WBZ-TV (Channel 4) deserves credit for being the only local network affiliate to go live on New Year's Eve, broadcasting the celebration in Boston while also taking the feed from New York. There was just one problem: no Dave! Of all the garbage that was on the tube last night, the Late Show with David Letterman was the one program I was looking forward to. Okay, I'm a loser, but you try going out on New Year's Eve with two kids under 12.

Attacking Kerry's war record. You'd think it would be impossible for the Republicans to turn John Kerry's military experience against him. Indeed, Kerry and his supporters hope that his status as a Vietnam veteran and a war hero will offset his reputation as a Massachusetts liberal. But Jed Babbin, a Defense Department official for Bush I, gives it a try this morning on the right-wing American Prowler website. (I found the link at Real Clear Politics.) Babbin's is a crude and ugly attack, fascinating mainly because it may serve as a rough draft for what's coming should Kerry succeed in winning the Democratic nomination.

According to Babbin's screed, Kerry's service in Vietnam so damaged him that he wound up a dangerous bleeding heart who can't be trusted as commander-in-chief. Here's the nastiest passage, attributed, naturally, to anonymous sources:

One senior Army officer, a warrior from Gulf War 1, told me that Kerry suffers from the Vietnam syndrome. In his judgment, Kerry is, "too traumatized by the lost war to cope with any other war under any circumstances." A former Navy SEAL told me he thinks Kerry is an opportunist. That same judgment of Kerry came independently from a Marine whose Vietnam service was as tough or tougher than Kerry's. He told me, "I do not trust people like [Kerry] -- scratch that individual and watch an opportunist bleed."

So the right, after eight years of distrusting Bill Clinton because he never served, now distrusts Kerry because he did serve. Apparently the only proper course for a future commander-in-chief is that of George W. Bush, who safely maneuvered planes over Texas skies, thus giving him the military record that Clinton lacked while sparing him of the terrible knowledge that Kerry paid such a high price to obtain.

Nyhan's column lives. Walter Brooks, who compiles the invaluable News Junkies Weekly Fix, sent me an e-mail explaining where Salem News content disappears to after that day's issue expires. So without further ado, here's the link to David Nyhan's column of last Thursday. But hurry! Once this Thursday's paper comes out, it will be gone for good.

Sophisticated kidvid. The Wild Thornberrys Movie is wonderful, a story aimed at adults and kids alike. I took my daughter to see it on Saturday, and felt like I'd been rewarded for all the times I'd been forced to sit through such loathsome fare as the Pokemon movies and Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius. There are lots of children's movies that try to lure in the adults with double entendres that fly over the kids' heads, but The Wild Thornberrys doesn't stoop to such cheap tricks. It's sophisticated enough for the grown-ups, and it never panders to the kids.

Happy holidays. Media Log is going on semi-hiatus until after New Year's Day. I may feel the urge to spew a couple of times, but between Christmas, travel, and some serious computer problems that I haven't been able to diagose, it seems like it would be a good idea to hibernate for a few weeks. I won't be sending out e-mails, but you might want to check the website from time to time.

The real Trent Lott. There's a school of thought -- a blessedly small one, to be sure -- that poor Trent Lott was forced to resign just as he was finally starting to get it.

According to this thinking, the real reason that Senate Republicans finally rose up and overthrew him was not that they were offended by his decades-long record of racist statements and actions, but that they feared he was morphing into a pro-affirmative-action moderate. That might what Globe columnist Tom Oliphant was trying to say this morning, although I'm reserving judgment until I see the English translation.

With such woolly-headedness on the loose, it's great to see the post-resignation Lott cutting loose and putting all doubts to rest. According to this dispatch from the Associated Press, Lott drops the pretense of being sorry and makes it clear that he thinks his only mistake was to fall into a "trap" set by his political enemies.

Lott acknowleges having made an "inappropriate remark," thus slithering away from his two endorsements of Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign -- spoken 22 years apart -- as well as his association with the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, his opposition to the Martin Luther King holiday, and the like. Incredibly, he adds:

There are some people in Washington who have been trying to nail me for a long time. When you're from Mississippi and you're a conservative and you're a Christian, there are a lot of people that don't like that. I fell into their trap and so I have only myself to blame.

So now you have the Gospel according to Trent. It's not that he's a racist, or that he made racist remarks, or that he has sought friendship and support from racists for his entire sorry career. It's that he's ... a Christian. God help us.

Nyhan calls Romney's bluff. Retired Globe columnist David Nyhan takes a look at Mitt Romney's suddenly inoperative promise to steer the state through the budget crisis without raising taxes or cutting services in any significant way. Nyhan's column appeared in yesterday's Salem News; you can try following this link, although if past practice is any guide, it will expire long before the end of the day.

Nyhan goes easier on Romney than he should, given that the parameters of the current crisis were well-known before Election Day. You could even argue that Romney won because he reassured voters that they had nothing to worry about while his opponent, Shannon O'Brien, was somewhat more honest. (I think Romney would have won anyway, but maybe by a smaller margin.)

Still, Nyhan is unsparing in reminding readers that Romney was claiming a $1 billion deficit when everyone else was using a figure of $2 billion -- a number that Romney has now embraced -- so that he could mouth his phony promise to eliminate that deficit through reorganization. No one, including the highly credible Massachusetts Taxpayers Association, believes Romney can save anywhere near that much without slashing services. Nyhan also notes that the deficit was fed in large measure by $4 billion in tax breaks for the affluent during the Weld/Cellucci/Swift years. Nyhan writes:

Mitt had to lowball the deficit during the campaign if he was to have any credibility at all with his no-new-taxes approach. He even went so far as to vow to roll back the $1 billion in new/old taxes that the Legislature forced upon acting Gov. Swift in facing up to the deficit avalanche swooping down on the state.

But if Mitt is to have any future in national politics as a Republican candidate for president, vice president, or the Bush cabinet, he has to go the no-new-taxes route.

Nyhan's conclusion: "So what does all this amount to? Politics as usual, I'm afraid. Yep, it's even worse than we thought."

And by the way, Dave, let's make a deal: get your son or one of his friends to put together a website collecting your columns so that they don't disappear into the ether within a few hours of their being posted, and I promise to add a link somewhere.

NU J-school director whacks Buckingham. Steve Burgard, the director of Northeastern University's School of Journalism and a former editorial-board member at the Los Angeles Times, e-mails Media Log on an additional reason why Virginia Buckingham would be a poor choice as the Herald's deputy editorial-page editor:

The Boston Globe has reported that Virginia Buckingham, a former head of the Massachusetts Port Authority, has been talking to the Boston Herald about becoming deputy editorial page editor. Let's hope that the lunch meeting she was spotted having with Rachelle Cohen, the editorial page editor, was that and only that. Lunch.

To see why having Buckingham as number two of one of the city's major daily editorial boards is a bad idea, look no further than today's (Dec. 19) Herald. In a story headlined "Logan hit hardest post 9/11," the newspaper reports on a study that found that Logan International Airport lost almost a quarter of its flights since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Massport's spokesman was quoted as citing drastic agency actions such as cutting budget, laying off 15 percent of its work force and delaying capital projects.

Readers look to major editorial pages to make sense of important stories like this. How much stock could they put in an institutional voice spoken by a former political appointee whose fingerprints were all over Massport and its troubles?

Editorial pages can and should have a point of view, but they will cheat readers of clear, independent thinking if they are too politically connected or ideologically rigid. Make no mistake either about the clout inherent in a deputy editor's position. At major newspapers, deputies exercise enormous influence over the daily editorial line, and when the boss is out of the office, they often set it.

Burgard's letter has already been posted by Romenesko, too. The Globe item described Buckingham as a "shoo-in." But you've got to wonder if the opposition of someone as respected as Burgard might make Cohen and publisher Pat Purcell pause.

Larry and Rummy, kissy-kissy. Here's my favorite exchange from Larry King's on-his-knees interview last night with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

KING: Morale is high?

RUMSFELD: Excellent, just excellent.

Of course, it's too easy to make fun of King. You can't deny that there's value in letting someone like Rumsfeld talk unimpeded for the better part of an hour. You might even learn more than you would if an interviewer with an agenda kept trying to steer the interview in his direction. Given Rumsfeld's refusal to answer any questions about the inner workings of the administration, it's easy to see how someone other than easy-going Larry would have turned the entire hour into a testy exchange over the Defense secretary's penchant for secrecy. Okay, but he's still not going to answer the question.

But even given King's low standards, I was nevertheless stunned that he failed to ask about the single biggest Rumsfeld story of the week. Veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has a piece in this week's New Yorker on Rumsfeld's controversial efforts to push the military into carrying out smaller, faster operations aimed at taking out terrorist cells -- operations that his critics call "assassinations."

Hersh is often criticized for becoming a prisoner of his sources, but this piece is better balanced than some of his previous efforts. I came away impressed with how dangerous it is to carry out operations like the recent missile attack in Yemen, where Al Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and five other men were killed. Hersh's sources make it clear that Rumsfeld risks (a) making mistakes and killing innocent noncombatants and (b) elevating assassination to the status of a legitimate tool of warcraft that can just as easily be used against the US.

Yet Hersh also takes note of the danger of not acting as well. He quotes a "Pentagon adviser" on Rumsfeld's frustrations in dealing with his cautious -- overly cautious? -- generals: "The idea of not wanting to go after the senior leadership of a paramilitary group that has declared war on you is such a perversion that it's mind-boggling. The problem of a peacetime military is that they cannot conceive of doing what they are paid to do. 'Going after the leadership of Al Qaeda -- that's a serious problem.' My God!"

It's an important and fascinating look at one of the most momentous debates going on inside our government, and Larry had an hour to interview one of the principals. Too bad he didn't ask him about it.

A Bulger defender checks in. The Dorchester Reporter's Bill Forry finds some things to like and some things to object to in my recent commentary on UMass president Bill Bulger's refusal to testify before the Burton committee. (Click here, here and here for what I wrote.) Forry doesn't have a whole lot of nice things to say about the rest of the media regarding the Bulger Chronicles, either, except for Globe columnists Brian McGrory and Tom Oliphant. Worth a read.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus. The Globe reports this morning that the Herald is wooing former Massport director Virginia Buckingham to be its deputy editorial-page editor. Why? I am not a Buckingham-basher. Yes, she got her last job through political connections, but so did all of her predecessors, and she was more professional and diligent than many of them. To blame her for 9/11 is ludicrous. But her only published piece that I'm aware of was a self-pitying essay for the Globe's Sunday magazine last fall. And if she has any ideological convictions other than being a Republican, she's done a good job of hiding them.

For some reason, the Herald has never seemed willing to turn its editorial and op-ed pages into a smart, conservative alternative to the Globe. Of the local columnists who write for those pages now, Wayne Woodlief and Tom Keane aren't conservatives, and Beverly Beckham belongs in the lifestyle section. The departed Don Feder was a conservative, but his screeds were boring, lazy, and predictable. If publisher Pat Purcell really wants to give the Globe a run for its money in the pundit department, he should give editorial-page editor Shelly Cohen the budget to expand from two pages a day to four (giving her approximately the same square footage as the Globe) and to sign up some bright new columnists.

Hiring Buckingham sounds like a sideways move -- and an expensive one at that.

You've got Cosmo. Jay Fitzgerald's Hub Blog beat me to it (I overslept), but Boston Herald business columnist Cosmo Macero has unveiled a personal website and a weblog. No doubt Macero will make it worthwhile. But it's unusual, and a little dangerous, for a newspaper staffer to write a blog that's not connected to his newspaper's website.

Earlier this year, the Houston Chronicle fired Steve Olafson for his extracurricular blogging activities (but not before reportedly being told to "take the fucking site down"). Brit commentator Andrew Orlowski referred to Olafson's firing as an example of "America's constipated 'journalism ethics.'"

Be careful, Cosmo. It can get ugly out here in Blogland.

Now, Kerry versus Lieberman. The New Republic's Ryan Lizza, in a dispatch today for TNR Online, makes the case that Joe Lieberman will be the chief beneficiary of Al Gore's decision not to run for president in 2004. Of course, Lieberman's right-of-center Democratic Leadership Council credentials make him a favorite of TNR. In the current print edition, editor Peter Beinart actually urges Lieberman to run against Gore, a personal friend of the magazine's editor-in-chief and chairman, Marty Peretz.

Still, Lizza is right. What Gore may have guaranteed is a showdown between John Kerry and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party versus Lieberman, the best hope of the moderates. With a primary schedule even more front-loaded than 2000's, there will be a huge premium on candidates who are already well-known and who can raise vast amounts of money before the first vote is cast. No dark horses need apply. Sorry, Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, John Edwards, etc., etc. (Although John Ellis, interestingly, sees it as Lieberman-Gephardt.)

The New Yorker has already published long profiles of Kerry (marred by a rare lapse by writer Joe Klein, as reported by the Globe's Alex Beam) and Lieberman (by Jeffrey Toobin). Both pieces were positive, to say the least. But you can't understand the candidates unless you first understand how they see themselves, before the political and media spinners start ripping them apart. A plea to editor David Remnick: put the pieces online!

Bored pundits, outraged public. All-purpose quote machine Larry Sabato makes some smart observations about Trent Lott on Newsweek's website. The most important is that the media are so bored and cynical that they had to be reminded by the public that Lott's racist remarks were truly outrageous. Says Sabato:

Public officials frequently say things that are out of the box and those who are covering it can slough it off and say, "there he goes again." Average people have a different, much more human reaction which is to take a more genuine offense.

David Brooks's contribution to the Newsweek package is an assertion that Republicans really don't wax nostalgic about cross-burnings and segregation when they get together and no one else is around. I'm sure that's true of Brooks's well-educated neoconservative crowd. But the question remains: what do Southern Republicans such as Lott talk about among themselves? Lott's comments are racist enough even when the cameras are rolling.

The problem with the Republican Party today is not that it is racist -- the genuine outrage over Lott's remarks expressed by George W. Bush and a range of conservative commentators is evidence of that. The problem is that a cadre of hardcore racists make up a small but important part of the Republican coalition.

Put it this way: the reason that 95 percent of African-Americans routinely vote for Democratic presidential candidates is not because they don't want a tax cut.