"If BP insists on dumping more pollutants into our lake, it's time for us to stop pumping its gas into our tanks," reads the paper's editorial. "We're calling for an all-out boycott of BP gas."

"Tens of thousands" of Chicagoans have protested the permit, which allows BP's refinery in Whiting, Indiana, twenty miles from Chicago on the south shore of the lake, to discharge 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more suspended solids into the water annually. The facility also received an exemption from meeting tough limits on mercury pollution for the next five years. BP contends that it needs the permit (the first it has received since 1990) for a $3.8 billion expansion that will enable the refinery, already the largest in the Midwest, to process more heavy Canadian crude oil. The company has attempted to justify the expansion by pointing out that it will create eighty permanent jobs and 2,000 construction jobs; that its discharges meet or beat state and federal emissions standards; and that it will invest $150 million to improve its onsite wastewater treatment facility.

Since the Indiana Department of Environmental Management approved the permit in June, however, there has been what local newspapers variously describe as a "blitzkrieg," "firestorm," "avalanche," and "groundswell" of protest from around Lake Michigan. But the opposition has been fiercest in Chicago, where mayor Richard Daley and others have threatened legal action to block the permit, and are leaning on the federal Environmental Protection Agency to reverse its statement that the new pollution limits would not violate the Clean Water Act. In late July, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a resolution urging Indiana to reconsider the permit.

The Sun-Times boycott comes just one day after BP and Indiana regulators for the first time "softened their defense" of the permit, saying they would review suggestions from Chicago officials, the EPA, and environmental groups about technologies that could reduce the Whiting refinery's pollution. Mayor Daley has urged his constituents to hold off on the boycott pending a "credible, independent" evaluation ordered by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels this week. But local newspapers have been adamant in their opposition to allowing more toxic waste.

The Sun-Times has now published three editorials railing against BP's new permit. "Even if the giant oil company proves that the extra waste it will be dumping is no threat to aquatic life or humans," the paper wrote in July, "we must have zero tolerance for the release of any additional pollution into our precious lake waters."

Lake Michigan supplies most of the region's drinking water and is popular for fishing and other forms of outdoor recreation. Although BP denies that increasing its toxic discharges will "damage" the environment or harm individuals, all of the effluents covered in the permit pose hazards. Ammonia and suspended solids have received the lion's share of attention - ammonia can cause algal blooms that kill fish, and suspended solids can work their way into the food chain via the aquatic life that swim in polluted water. A third and even more toxic effluent, for which BP received a discharge exemption, has received much less attention. Mercury, one of the most strictly regulated environmental toxins, can cause brain and nervous system damage in even low dosages. The new permit allows the Whiting refinery to continue dumping two pounds into the lake annually until 2012, when it must meet federal standards that will drop the limit 8/100th of a pound.

Both the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune have done an impressive job covering the various and far-flung protests that erupted after the permit was granted, but only the latter has given any significant attention to the environmental science behind BP's toxic waste. In late July, the Tribune published an excellent investigation highlighting the "little-noticed" mercury exemption contained in BP's permit. Reporter Michael Hawthorne points out that the Whiting refinery is only one of two polluters that still dump mercury into Lake Michigan, but he also gives respectable balance to the story by pointing out that the amount released is small compared to that which falls into the water from air pollution. In addition, Hawthorne provides a thorough review of all the other nasty chemicals coming out of the refinery.

It would be nice to see more technically inclined articles such as this, but credit must still be given to Chicago papers for mounting such aggressive opposition to BP's plans, and for covering all the related protests in such depth. The Sun-Times' boycott call follows the lead of the city's most powerful alderman, Edward M. Burke. Two weeks ago, Burke introduced a plan in the City Council that would stop the city's use of roughly ninety-seven BP gas station credit cards. Burke is also trying to block three major banks that have ties with BP from receiving lucrative city bond deals. "The stakes are high," the Sun-Times reported, with millions of dollars on the line.

The Tribune has not been quite as outspoken or prolific as the Sun-Times in opposing BP's permit-it has published only one editorial on the matter-but still takes a zero-tolerance position. "We like jobs. We like gasoline," the paper wrote in July, "But this page's policy on dumping any more pollution into Lake Michigan isn't tangled in skeins of regulation or submerged in legal jargon. It's this: No. No more polluting of the lake." The Tribune should also get credit for providing an open and balanced forum to community members: it has published letters from the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Illinois Petroleum Council, and BP, all supporting the refinery's permit. And the Chicago press has not been alone in its coverage. The Post-Tribune in Gary, Indiana, a blue-collar town that has, historically, provided much of the Whiting refinery's work force, has published over two dozen articles about the BP permit and consequent protest. This includes an editorial that chided Indiana regulators for allowing their colleagues in Illinois to take the lead in protecting Lake Michigan.

Unfortunately, the protests surrounding the Whiting refinery have not received a lot of attention from the national media, save for a handful of wire articles and a good round-up by The New York Times. But the Chicago-area press has done an excellent job of both fleshing out the story and spurring opposition to more toxic waste. BP and Indiana are now reconsidering the pollution permit, but the oil company has not committed to any compromise and insists it will go forward with the refinery's expansion. Thankfully, as evidenced by the boycott, the press seems poised to keep up the good fight and not let the decades spent cleaning up Lake Michigan go to waste. A good place to start is with more scientifically minded evaluations of the technologies environmentalists and others have proposed to capture or reduce BP's noxious pollution.

The study crunched traffic stats for one hundred and sixty news sites over a year's time, and found that while national papers like the Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today saw gains in Web traffic of an average of 10 percent, "the websites of most other newspapers--whether in large, medium-sized, or small cities--have lost audience. Their sites on average have substantially fewer visitors now than a year ago."

Likewise, the Web sites of national television networks like CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and Fox all saw traffic increases in excess of 30 percent on average. At the same time, sites for local television and radio stations also gained audience, albeit at a slower pace. In a kind of companion piece to the study, Editor & Publisher reported yesterday that for the month of July, the New York Times's unique audience rose to over fourteen million from twelve million visitors, while USA TODAY's site logged ten million and The Washington Post got a little over nine million eyeballs.

Those are pretty hard numbers to beat, and it kind of puts the onus on those who say that the MSM is dying a slow death to try to spin this one to their advantage--although there's more than enough red meat in the report for MSM-haters to sink their teeth into.

The study reported that the "biggest gains in audience occurred among the non-traditional news providers. The sites of search engines, service providers, aggregators, and bloggers grew faster on average than the sites of traditional news providers, whether print, broadcast, or cable." Indeed, a 2006 Pew study found that 23 percent of respondents who said that they regularly get their news online listed Yahoo! as a news source. (But aggregators like Yahoo! and Google News still have to rely on the old MSM for content, so while lots of people might use them as their online news source, they're still reading content provided by AP, Reuters, the Times, etc.)

And now for the blogs. The study looked at traffic for "eight prominent blogs" and found that while each averaged almost 200,000 monthly visits, the traffic level rose only 6 percent on average over the past year. But a list of the blogs the study looked at reveals something interesting: they're almost exclusively liberal. The sample set included dailykos.com, firedoglake.com, wonkette.com, huffingtonpost.com, watchblog.com, crooksandliars.com, mydd.com, and littlegreenfootballs.com. Of those, five are pretty far to the left; one (watchblog) has different editors writing from different ideological standpoints; one (wonkette) is an equal opportunity offender, but is still essentially a product of the left, and only one (littlegreenfootballs) is from the right.

Tom Patterson, professor at Harvard's Kennedy School who helped put the study together, told CJR that in putting the study together, the staff had much more trouble deciding which "non-traditional" media outlets to monitor than it did traditional media. "We were interested in looking not at the brand-new blogs," he says, but instead "we tried to look and pull down some reasonably well-known blogs that have been around for a bit."

But overall, the study isn't so surprising. Newspapers--particularly big, national papers--have the brand recognition and the big-ticket talent that smaller papers, and blogs, just can't match. One important thing to consider when looking at the robust numbers for the big papers is that they have been pouring resources into trying to beat blogs at their own game. The Times, the Post and USA Today have all rolled out their own blogs, which can't hurt their traffic numbers, especially since a few--like the Times's The Lede and Freakonomics blogs, and the Post's Government Inc., Capital Briefing, and Early Warning--have become must-reads.

Another thing that probably led to the smaller growth percentage among the political blogs--especially the highly partisan ones the study looks at--as compared to big newspapers, is that the sample set has probably come pretty close to maxing out on its potential audience. There are only so many hardcore political junkies out there on either side who want to read what these outlets have to say. It's by definition a niche audience, and as such its growth, if it happens at all, will probably be slower than that of a general-interest newspaper.

But he also knew he was lucky to get even that much. That’s because HRC initially invited only candidates who had raised over $100,000 that quarter, the minimum threshold for federal matching funds, which would have left the former senator from Alaska out.

So he took some of his limited time to thank a handful of activists from San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Club for raising hell and getting him into the event. (More on that in a minute.)

You wouldn’t know about any of this from reading the press coverage of the debate. Gravel, like virtually all candidates tagged as fringe-dwellers by the mainstream press, is mostly ignored. It happens in every campaign, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

Yes, it’s impossible for debate sponsors—whether news organizations or advocacy groups—to invite all the announced presidential candidates to every event. There are at least twenty-seven Democratic contenders, including many candidates who’ve never held elected office. Anyone thinking seriously about pulling the lever for Dal LaMagna, best known from his past career as a Long Island tweezers manufacturer?

Gravel’s no Tweezerman. He was in the Senate from 1969 to 1981—almost as long, it’s worth noting, as the three frontrunners’ combined Senate service.

But he’s no Obama or Clinton, either. Hell, he’s not even a Biden.

He’s been off the national political radar for the last twenty-five years. Since reappearing, he’s become best known for using his debate time to needle the frontrunners for their hawkishness toward Iran, to call for the criminalization of the war in Iraq, and to tell voters not to “believe a word” of his opponents spending plans. His tone is sometimes akin to Howard Beale, the disgruntled “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” television anchor in Sidney Lumet’s Network.

He’s always entertaining. And he’s not saying much that you couldn’t read in your local alt-weekly. It just isn’t the highly scripted, centrist positions that we’re conditioned to expect from our candidates—stuff that has the blessing of the party and is calculated to offend as few people as possible.

But that’s kind of the point here.

Jon Emery, a vice president of the Harvey Milk Club’s board, was not entirely unsympathetic to HRC’s initial decision. “You have to draw the line somewhere to keep out the crazies,” he says. But in this case, Emery felt Gravel’s strong advocacy for gay rights made him a no-brainer for the HRC event—that’s what it was about after all. Gravel and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich are the only two major-party presidential candidates who support same-sex marriage. In June, during San Francisco’s pride parade, Gravel rode on the back of a silver Volvo convertible, waving to the crowd, flashing the thumbs up, and posing for snap shots with fans. The seventy-seven-year-old candidate made history that day as the first major party presidential candidate to appear in the thirty-five-year-old parade.

So members of the Milk Club mobilized and had HRC members call in to complain. They sent e-mails to HRC board members, and on July 13 Emery brought out the big guns, telling the HRC that unless Gravel received an invitation, the Club would picket HRC’s major San Francisco fundraising gala, which coincidentally was to be held the next night.

Before the end of the day, the Gravel campaign got a call from HRC extending a verbal invitation. A little outrage goes a long way.

On the Monday August 6, four days before the Human Rights Campaign event, MSNBC and the AFL-CIO sponsored a debate—and invited Gravel. His campaign, though, forgot to file a requisite endorsement questionnaire, and so the union excluded Gravel. Okay, these things happen. (One wonders, though, if the Obama or Clinton campaigns had forgot to dot this particular i, whether their candidates would have been left out.)

But Howie Kurtz of The Washington Post praised MSNBC, incorrectly, for having the “intestinal fortitude” to exclude Gravel. Even though Kurtz was wrong, why does he feel so strongly about excluding these candidates who won’t win?

The discourse in this country—as reflected in our political campaigns—is so scripted and safe that it is hard to imagine how a genuinely new idea could survive. Media organizations that cover, air, and co-sponsor debates should be working to broaden this discourse rather than abet its further narrowing.

The defenders of the “objective” media say their job isn’t to judge, but rather to report the facts and let readers and viewers decide. Excluding someone like Gravel (or the long-forgotten Larry Agran) is essentially judging what he has to say as unworthy of the American public. These broadcasts are one of the few times voters get to hear from national politicians who are outside of party power centers, giving voice to unpopular or untested ideas.

I think that’s what we used to call debate.

Which -- yikes! -- would all be pretty scary…except that those headlines aren’t entirely accurate. The study whose results they describe, published last week by a team of University of Washington researchers in the Journal of Pediatrics, found, specifically, that videos in the so-called Baby Genius Edutainment Complex may be detrimental to language acquisition in infants. The researchers, through phone interviews with parents, measured which kid-common vocabulary words (“mommy,” “cookie,” “nose”) children seemed to recognize -- and found that babies eight to sixteen months old, for every hour they watched Baby Einstein and similar videos, recognized on average six to eight fewer words than those who didn’t watch the videos. (Infants have generally learned about thirty words by sixteen months, according to the journal Science.)

Here’s the big “however,” though: the other half of the 1,000-baby-plus sample group was toddlers aged seventeen to twenty-four months -- and this older group showed no measurable difference in language ability than their non-Baby Einstein-watching peers.

But wait! Waah! This finding complicates the easy, eye-catching Brainy Baby-breeds-just-the-opposite story angle to which many articles so eagerly reduced this study. What’s a publication to do? TIME's assessment, for one, simply ignores it. (Hey, the press release announcing the study downplays the toddler data. Why slog through the entire study when you can take your cues from publicists?)

And why highlight for readers that “the jury is still out on whether [the videos] are harmful” -- as the study’s lead author, Frederick Zimmerman, said -- when you can write crackling copy about how these videos are turning our baby geniuses into “baby Homer Simpsons” (the L.A. Times) and “baby Buttafuocos” (NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me)? Lucky for reporters, another of the study’s authors provided a quote much zippier than Zimmerman’s, one that begs for lead-or-kicker placement: “I would rather babies watch American Idol than these videos,” said Dimitri Christakis. By which he meant -- though most articles gloss over this point, as well -- that, since in-person contact is key to babies’ language acquisition, and since families often view Idol together (whereas Baby Einstein is often used in loco parentis), watching the talent show might yield more developmental benefits than watching the supposedly educational videos.

So what’s going on here? Is this just another case of reporters oversimplifying and hyping an inconclusive scientific study in order to grab eyeballs (in this case, ever-anxious parental eyeballs)?

Perhaps. And there could be another element here: the media may well be indulging in a baby-sized bit of journalistic schadenfreude. The Baby Einstein series, after all, since it first emerged on the market ten years ago, has met as much ridicule as praise for its promise of effortless genius -- a kind of get-rich-quick scheme for the yuppie-parent set. It has also been decried as a symptom of a larger trend: that, when it comes to our children, we are simultaneously raising the bar for socio-intellectual achievement and lowering the age for the benchmarks we impose. The familiar cliché has some truth to it: while past generations of children spent their free time playing kickball in the street, today’s kids spend their “free time” getting shuttled from math tutoring (intellectual development? check!) to piano lessons (artistic development? check!) to soccer practice (physical conditioning? socialization? check and check!). Baby Einstein and similar videos imply that intelligence-protection insurance can be bought in policies of $19.99 a pop (and only $369.99 for the entire Ultimate DVD Collection, plus shipping and handling!)—and that the old “but guys, I’m still in diapers” excuse for academic mediocrity is one that only naïve or lazy parents accept from their Mini-Mes.

The Baby Einstein study seems, at first blush, to fling a science-stamped told-you-so at the high expectations for -- and endorsers of -- these videos. (Incidentally, one of the videos’ highest-profile supporters has been the president himself: Bush invited Baby Einstein creator Julie Aigner-Clark to this year’s State of the Union, honoring both the videos and their designer in his speech.) And many of the articles announcing the study’s findings fairly chortle in their glee at the (supposed) fallacy of the Buying Brilliant Babies myth. “Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All,” TIME announces. “Parents aiming to put their babies on the fast track, even if they are still working on walking, each year buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the videos. Unfortunately it’s all money down the tubes,” writes the L.A. Times. And Gawker, exercising its famed dexterity with Reductive Snark, gawks this way: “Study: Babies Raised By Videos Approximately As Dumb As Expected.” (The kicker? “Hahahaha, your kids are going to grow up stupid! Hope that extra time you spent on your Blackberry was worth the lifetime of stagnant wages and mediocre employment to which you've doomed your offspring.”)

So what can we learn from all of this? One more time for those of us who watched too much TV as babies: Scientific studies are easily cherry-picked for their sexiest bits. And headlines are often better at seducing than summarizing. After all, “Baby Einstein Videos Ineffective, Study Finds” -- NPR’s ho-hum yet accurate header -- just doesn’t have the same crazy-making urgency as, say, “Your Video-Watching Baby May Never Speak, Study Finds.”

Columnist Robert J. Samuelson takes issue with last week's cover story by science writer Sharon Begley about the climate "denial machine." In that article, Begley makes the case that a "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry" continues to undermine the scientific consensus that man-made global warming is a problem. Begley chronicles the last twenty years of this campaign, coming to the conclusion that it is still inhibiting meaningful political action.

According to Samuelson, however, this is all much ado about trifles. "The story was a wonderful read," he writes in the current issue, "marred only by its being fundamentally misleading." There are much bigger issues at stake, he says: "The global-warming debate's great unmentionable is this: we lack the technology to get from here to there."

Samuelson is very pessimistic. In light of the immense (and possibly insurmountable) difficulty of mitigating global warming, he argues, Begley's article is "peripheral and highly contrived." As we struggle to find climate change solutions, such as curbing greenhouse gas emissions, "journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale." He accuses Begley of oversimplifying a "messy story" by succumbing to "good guys vs. bad guys" approach.

But let's consider who is really oversimplifying things here.

Good-guys-vs.-bad-guys reporting is, in fact, a problem in science journalism, especially when it come to climate change. Reporters who do not understand a piece of controversial research will often frame it with he-said, she-said quotes to meet a deadline and satisfy those cautious editors. But that is not the case with Begley's cover story. She does not pit talking heads against one another, but rather chooses to chronicle the history of one side in detail. It is no simple morality tale, and the clever manipulations of that side are certainly not trifling, if Samuelson is indeed concerned about solutions.

Jon Meacham, Newsweek's editor, gave a pithy enough response to Samuelson's column in the front of the book: "The point of the cover story stands, for the question of what to do about global warming is made more difficult when influential voices from talk radio to Capitol Hill speak as though global warming is, in Rush Limbaugh's term, a 'hoax.'"

Samuelson is not a global warming skeptic. He thinks it has "clearly occurred; the hard question is what to do about it." But Meacham correctly points out that Samuelson is, to some degree, making a disjointed comparison between his point that climate solutions will be difficult to elusive, and Begley's point that there is a long-running effort to discredit the majority opinion that we actually need solutions, no matter how difficult. Those two angles are both perfectly legitimate, equally important, and they need not be mutually exclusive. Samuelson insinuates that Begley is suppressing minority opinion and fostering a situation in which "anyone who questions [global warming's] gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge."

Again, this is simply not the case. If one wanted to attack the balance of Begley's article, one could point out that there is perhaps a better-coordinated, better-funded campaign to support mainstream climate science than there is to refute it. And like it's skeptical counterpart, this campaign has also used deceptive tactics (think ubiquitous pictures of "starving" polar bears) to advance its opinions and agendas. But Begley's article was not about that side - it was about the skeptics (she calls them "deniers"); the tone of her writing does not ridicule anybody, and she does not use the words crank and stooge. Samuelson argues for hearing different solutions, but the organizations and individuals that Begley wrote about-and that he defends-are antisolution. Most of them support a do-nothing approach to climate change.

It is worth listening to Samuelson's opinions about climate policy, however. In the current issue he calls for more energy research and development and raising the gasoline tax, and he has argued against "symbolic gestures [that] masquerade as policy" since the 1980s. He is correct that the world needs solutions-oriented journalism. An article in last Sunday's New York Times Money section echoed Samuelson's concerns about the slow progress of warming-mitigation technologies. But the frustration Samuelson directs at Begley seems misplaced and, to use his own word, oversimplified.

This is not to say that I think Samuelson did a bad thing. Like I said, I love to see columnists and reporters wrangling in the pages of their own publication. This spring, The Nation ran opposing climate articles by writer Alexander Cockburn and scientist James Hansen - I did not find either piece particularly compelling, but the tension between them was refreshing. And they were not even attempting to rebut each other specifically.

So I wrote to Meacham asking if Samuelson's column had caused any strain in Newsweek's newsroom, but he was headed out of town and referred me back to his editor's note with the additional line: "Vigorous disagreement is a sign of a healthy and challenging journalistic culture that is ultimately good for our readers."

He has a point. I disagree with Samuelson's rebuttal of Begley's piece, but such in-house debate is likely to make readers think harder about information they receive via the media.

Kevin Drum picked up on the theme, adding that no matter the merits of Kleiman's critique, he still hasn't seen anyone offer a solution to the problem. He identifies the difficulties inherent in trying to change the way contemporary American journalism practices its craft: "Who gets to decide whether an issue is still debatable? The reporter? But most reporters aren't subject matter experts. Would you trust the average reporter to take on this role on a daily basis? And even if we do believe reporters should be routine arbiters of the truth, how exactly should they express this? Flatly call things lies? Insert contrary evidence in their own voice whenever they decide someone has crossed the line?"

These are all legitimate concerns, and not one of them is easily solved. The issue of "objectivity" in reporting is something CJR has long grappled with, and there's no quick fix for what has become one of the most prominent criticisms of American journalism. If reporters start serving as the arbiters of factual disputes, charges of bias--already prevalent and shrill--would surely escalate. Still, simply reprinting obvious falsehoods along with a countervailing point of view is a frustrating, and indeed damaging, way to practice journalism.

So what is to be done? Matt Yglesias picked up the thread on the debate this morning, arguing that a market-orientated approach is the way to go: "As we move toward a world where the internet provides consumers with a large degree of choice, managers and reporters who manage to consistently cover the news in a way that people find useful will prosper, while those who fail to do so will suffer."

There's a good point in there somewhere, but his take sounds a bit too simplistic. This isn't to say that the objectivity problem is unsolvable, only that it's going to take time, and it will have to be done incrementally. For better or worse, our newspapers produce the vast majority of original reporting being done today. While much too much of it is marred by the ineffectual back and forth as dictated by the need for "balance," the best of it produces the kind of public service journalism--warrant-less wiretapping, CIA "black sites," Walter Reed, to name a few--that the Web hasn't been able to equal.

But for all the hard-reporting success, newspapers should think seriously about shaking up their formats. A good way to start would be to develop a kind of two-tier system--which seems to be developing organically, anyway--where the big news organizations deliver the goods in the form of hard news and investigative pieces whose production requires the kind of investment in time and money that most Web sites and blogs can't match, while the blogosphere takes the lead in opinion writing and analysis. In fact, it doesn't seem implausible that some time in the not too distant future, newspapers will choose to get out of the op-ed business altogether, ceding that niche to the sharpest minds on the Web. It's one thing that the Web does much better than traditional media, since in many ways it is a true meritocracy, in the way that Yglesias describes, and not the old boys club of too many calcified newspaper op-ed pages.

Indeed, the ultimate test in Beijing might have less to do with the Games themselves and more with the people who tell their story: the Chinese press. In one of the world’s few remaining Communist regimes—and, not for nothing, its most populous nation—press freedom is notoriously constricted. China’s chronic maltreatment of the media, in fact, was one of the key issues of contention in Beijing’s bid for the Games back in 2001; the People’s Republic finally made reluctant concessions on that point (and others) to win the honor. (“We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China,” Wang Wei, the bid committee’s vice president, assured reporters.) Now, with only a year to go until the Beijing Games—a mere blip on the epic scale of Olympic Standard Time—it’s fair to assess: was that pledge merely empty appeasement? Or will China play by the rules of the Games, ushering in, as it promised it would, a better era for its journalism?

A report just released by the Committee to Protect Journalists provides some preliminary, and fairly dismal, answers to those questions. An aggregative examination of press freedom—or lack thereof—in the PRC, the study paints a picture of a press corps whose ability to exercise journalism’s most basic mandate—to bear witness to the world around it—still finds itself caught in the vice of a politically paranoid regime. Media outlets in China are still overseen by the state, and their work is still reviewed by Communist Party censors. Journalists’ e-mail accounts—and Web sites and blogs and IM conversations and text messages—are still monitored. Their salaries are still partially based on the number of articles they publish, with pieces deemed unfriendly to the government (especially stories about the military, religion, and internal Party workings) routinely suppressed. Acting as a fixer for an international journalist, when not arranged through government channels, is still a punishable offense.

None of this is news, really. But that’s kind of the point—the old news about those press freedoms still applies. The Chinese government promised to relax its grip, but it didn’t.

More immediately worrisome, CPJ reports that twenty-nine journalists are currently imprisoned in China, twenty-four of them on ambiguous “anti-state” charges. (Reporters Without Borders puts the number jailed at fifty.) That makes China the world’s top jailer of journalists—a gold medal it has earned each year since 1999.

Here is what China has done, nominally at least, in the service of press freedom: on January 1, 2007, its government eased travel and reporting restrictions on foreign journalists, making movement around the country—and interviewing Chinese sources—more feasible. However, in a move that is difficult to see as anything other than a subtle extension of China’s middle finger toward press-freedom nags, those improvements are legally set to expire on October 17, 2008—a mere two-months and change after the Games’ closing ceremonies. Furthermore, that fleetingly loosened grip applies only to international journalists. For Chinese reporters it is, apparently, business as usual.

Beijing, like any host would, is busily preparing for its guests’ upcoming arrival. Its home is being cleaned; its pillows are being fluffed; its walls are getting fresh coats of paint. Its visitors—and viewers—next August will be treated to the very best the city, and its country, have to offer. China will be putting out the good china, if you will. Meanwhile, Chinese government researchers, as ABCNews reports, are already compiling dossiers on groups and individuals “that could cause disruptions at the games”—and this past Monday, roughly a dozen Reporters Without Borders protesters were briefly detained, without explanation, by twenty Beijing police. Get close enough, and that “good china” looks a lot like the everyday stuff.

Susman is reporting from near the town of Yousifiya, in an area south of Baghdad sometimes referred to as the "triangle of death," and her story about what the American soldiers are facing in the area is nuanced, thoroughly-reported, smart and incisive--in short, it's a damn fine bit of embedded reporting.

She explains the successes and setbacks a unit with the 10th Mountain Division has experienced in the region over the last year, writing that the troops she spoke with say that moving out from big bases to smaller combat outposts that dot the countryside--a big part of the "surge" strategy"--has shown real results.

Roads once booby-trapped with bombs are mostly quiet, and locals armed with clubs patrol some stretches to chase off outsiders. Soldiers on overnight guard duty at lonely battle positions might spend an entire shift behind their .50-caliber machine guns without hearing a shot. Locals line up for free checkups and medicine when U.S. forces bring mobile medical units to their villages.

"We used to take a collective breath, because you knew you were going to get blown up," said [Major Rob] Griggs, describing what patrols used to be like in the region.

But this fragile peace hasn't come without cost: twenty-one U.S. troops along with three Iraqi interpreters have died since last September, Susman reports. Unlike much of the reporting we see out of Iraq and Afghanistan, Susman also manages to provide a revealing snapshot of the conflicting scenes American troops encounter on a day-to-day basis, telling the story of Staff Sgt. Clark Merlin, who "recalled playing soccer with local kids one day along with other U.S. troops. As soon as some Iraqi army soldiers came to join in, women took their children home, Merlin said. "There is definitely a lot of distrust," said Merlin, who says most of the Iraqi soldiers he has seen lack the discipline to hold onto the security U.S. troops have achieved."

Susman manages a rare trifecta in Iraq reporting, conveying in a single piece the good, the bad and the mundane--it's well worth a read.

It’s interesting, because that was the exact phrase that came to mind as I read Campbell’s piece; that, along with “straw man” and “faulty logic.”

First of all, what reasonable critic has ever suggested that Murdoch is “single-handedly responsible” for what ails modern journalism? Murdoch is more a symptom than a cause. Campbell, a former London reporter who became Tony Blair’s top adviser, proceeds to finger the 24/7 news cycle as the true culprit in our dissipated newspaper culture, and here he’s closer to reality.

The more fundamental breakdown in Campbell’s logic, though, is that he asks us to celebrate his former boss for having been “ahead of the game” at “virtually every step” of the changing nature of the media business and the world it covers over the last twenty years. No argument there—from cable news to the Internet, Murdoch has been a shrewd businessman.

But what has that pioneering spirit wrought, beyond considerable wealth and power for Murdoch’s News Corp.? Well, one result is that it has contributed mightily to the very nonstop news cycle that Campbell decries.

And what of the quality of Murdoch’s journalism? What good is it to be a media-industry visionary if not in service of better journalism? It’s worth noting that in response to all the solid reporting done in recent months by, among others, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, on Murdoch’s lengthy record of using his journalists to further his business interests, there was no solid reporting done to refute that charge. Just pieces like Campbell’s that seek to change the subject.

Campbell suggests that Murdoch is “a businessman first, a journalist second and a power player third.” This may be the most accurate claim in the piece, but here again Campbell stops short of the point: with Murdoch, the distance between role number one and role number two is so vast that never the twain shall meet.

The two had been buried, you see, under Clinton’s erstwhile “desexualized uniform: a black pantsuit.” Now, however, if you squint—or if you have a high-def, big-screen TV you keep tuned to C-SPAN2—you can see for yourself the bit of newly uncovered Clintonian Cleavage, “that small acknowledgment of sexuality and femininity peeking out of the conservative—aesthetically speaking—environment of Congress.”

It’s enough to make you long for those heady days of the Hillary v. Obama diplomatic-relations debate: as inane as that whole sideshow was, at least there was a snippet of political substance behind it. Instead, we get Robin Givhan, the Post’s Pulitzer-winning fashion editor, doing her best Nancy Grace impression as she analyzes the case of Clinton v. Low-Cut Top:

The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn’t an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.

“Unbelievable” might be a better word—not to describe the supposed cleavage, but to describe the fact that the Post printed such an analysis in the first place. It’s not like Clinton went and pulled a Janet Jackson on the Senate floor. The mammary madness Givhan describes was, rather, exceedingly—almost laughably—tame. (The top in question, incidentally, was worn under a congresswoman-conservative—if bubblegum-pink—blazer.) Yet “it’s tempting to say that the cleavage stirs the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting Rudy Giuliani with his shirt unbuttoned just a smidge too far,” Givhan writes. “No one wants to see that. But really, it was more like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!”

Just look away, indeed. Givhan might have taken her own advice, thus sparing us from the ensuing media circus that made mountains out of…well, you know.

Instead, pundits pounced on the Post piece, making the cleavage sighting, and Givhan’s analysis of it, A Thing, investing it with the tacit legitimacy that media coverage instantly bestows. The New York Times’s guest op-ed columnist used the unlikely news peg to craft a personal account of cleavage-in-the-workplace that might have been subheaded “My Cleavage, Myself.” Across the pond, The Times of London offered this witty take: “As newspapers and blogs discuss Clinton's TV appearance, we wonder if political analysis in America plunged to a new low.” And on July 29, Hill’s Hills met the press, in what has to be the first instance [Historic Occasion alert!] of Candidate Cleavage being part of the landmark Sunday show. WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, CNBC’s John Harwood, and Andrea Mitchell veered from their analysis of the Democratic candidates’ most recent polling numbers to join the to-cleave-or-not-to-cleave debate, Tim Russert looking on, an expression of amusement-slash-dear-God-how-did-my-career-come-to-this on his face.

The whole décolletage debacle has the sour stink of a Barnum-esque PR ploy; if publicity, as one has at least to suspect, was the article’s goal, then well played, Ms. Givhan. The auteur, however, defends her story: Clinton’s cleavage “is news,” Givhan told the Post’s ombudsman, “because it is out of the ordinary and says something about clothing and sexuality in our culture and the way that we perceive people and the way that people want to be perceived.”

And in fairness, Givhan’s treatise isn’t merely an exposition of Clinton’s “tentative dip into new neckline territory,” as its headline so artfully puts it. Rather, it’s a brief analysis of Clinton’s clothing choices within the context of her campaign. Hillary’s décolleté exposé seems particularly shocking, Givhan writes, because her sexuality has previously been kept, both literally and figuratively, under wraps. (Chelsea, one presumes, arrived via stork.) For “someone who has been so ambivalent about style, image and the burdens of both,” Givhan writes, such an uncharacteristically, well, titillating exposition is worth our attention. “To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d’oeuvres is a provocation,” and in this case, Givhan suggests, the display signals a shift in Clinton’s attitude, both about herself and about her campaign.

It’s this very brand of Givhanian scrutiny—the examination of the choices people make, through their clothing, in presenting themselves to the world—that won her a Pulitzer for criticism last year. The prize was well deserved; Givhan’s articles, though they sometimes provoke ire, are often sublime collisions of the superficial and the essential. Yet her trademark couturial analysis can backfire when it tries too hard to find the meaning behind even the most basic and innocuous of fashion choices. And it can seem downright devious when Givhan’s considerable cleverness serves only a dull and mean-spirited thesis: “in matters of style, Clinton is as noncommittal as ever.” (Fine, maybe she is—but is that really a story?) Givhan’s swathing of her piece in the silken robes of politico-intellectual discourse doesn’t disguise the message that pulses beneath it: that Campaign Trail Clinton somehow isn’t allowed to be a woman. That any public acknowledgment of her femininity is somehow an anti-feminist cop-out. That if Hillary wants to play on the boys’ team, she’d better suit up just as they do.

Compare Clinton 42 with Clinton maybe-44. While Hillary’s libido-oozing husband could rile voters with a soulful sax session on The Tonight Show—and while male politicians as a rule, from TR to JFK to W, have gained capital from sheer virility—she gets consternation for a V-neck. Givhan doesn’t just describe that double standard; she endorses it. Blatantly. And that’s what seems to have struck the biggest nerve here: the sense that Givhan’s article is somehow a betrayal of the women’s movement itself, that the considerable progress that’s been made—enough to get Clinton where she is right now, leading the pack for the Democratic presidential nomination—is disappearing in the dip of a neckline. If Hillary is playing for the boys’ team, then Givhan’s article is a turnover at the one-yard line. The sheer frustration in much of the coverage is nearly palpable. “Message to women,” writes The Nation’s Katha Pollitt. “You can't win. You can't win. You can't win.”

Givhan has neatly articulated the basic Catch-22 of Clinton’s candidacy: that her political legitimacy is somehow inversely proportional to her sexuality. That the more she puts her femininity on display, the less presidential she seems. It’s not simply a matter of the “sex sells” maxim not applying to Clinton; it’s a matter of gender politics seeping into conventional politics—and of paradigms shifting, forcibly, before our eyes. Clinton, in short, is calling our bluff. And Givhan is revealing our hand: in a society still deciding where to draw the line between “attractive” and “slutty,” assertiveness and bitchiness, and all the other familiar dichotomies of attempted egalitarianism, a woman asking to be our leader still, to some extent, confounds us. In the many calculations of the campaign trail, the sexual appeal-equals-political appeal equation is one that simply won’t work for the first woman with a serious shot at the Oval Office. Not only does sex not sell for Clinton; it could end up selling her out.

What about it offends the critics' delicate sensibilities? It's right there in the headline: the billing that there are basically two views on the war, which carries the implicit promise that Mazzetti is going to split the difference between pro-war and anti-war. He delivers on this promise fully, with a bloodless bit of he said-she said journalism masked as "News Analysis."

That tag notwithstanding, there is precious little analysis in this piece. Mazzetti doesn't do much more than report two sides of the debate. In the fourth paragraph, he sums up the entire piece, writing that, "With a promised progress report from the top American commander in Iraq now just six weeks away, partisans on both sides of the debate in Washington are searching desperately for evidence to bolster their judgments about the success or failure of the strategy that the Bush administration calls a 'surge.'"

And the next two paragraphs don't give us much red meat, either:

The war's staunchest supporters have seized on the reduced death toll in July for American troops as a sign that an influx of troops is dampening sectarian violence in the country.

Yet even before the car bombings on Wednesday, opponents of the war were citing reports that the Iraqi civilian deaths were on the rise--a fact they say belies any notion that the White House strategy is having its intended effect of protecting the Iraqi population.

That's pretty much all you're going to get here, since the remainder of the piece essentially just goes back and forth between the two camps. The points Mazzetti raises are certainly valid, and do represent some of the major claims in the Iraq debate; but that debate is a rich brew of gripes, stats, historical analogies, projects completed and abandoned, mistakes, successes, innovation, and political maneuvering. Obviously, Mazetti's piece wasn't intended to capture all this (several books have barely captured all of it) but it also doesn't make any headway in analyzing the situation, or even giving us anything new to chew over, either. A more apt tag would have been "News Summary." It's frustrating, because we need more from our best newspapers.