Yesterday on Fox News’s Hannity’s America, host Sean Hannity attempted to blame Al Gore for skyrocketing global food prices:

But how did the food shortage become so acute so fast? The growing consensus is that the crop deficit is directly related to the increased demand for production of, quote, “earth friendly” bio fuels, an effort pushed by none other than the vanquished vice president Al Gore and all in the name of quote, “saving the planet.”

Fox News also promoted the segment on its website with the headline, “Gore’s Grocery: Blame Al Gore for your rising food prices.” Watch it:

Hannity pins ethanol production — and hence, the entire food crisis — on Gore by pointing to a 1998 statement in which the then-vice president said he was “proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in Congress.” But as Ellen at News Hounds points out, Hannity failed to mention that more recently, Gore has endorsed cellulosic ethanol over corn-based ethanol.

Additionally, there is no one cause for the food shortage. Biofuel production has been a factor but is not solely responsible. The real culprits are: changing diets, global warming and drought, high energy costs, and investors fleeing the dollar and going into commodities.

Later in the segment, Hannity once again attempted to smear Gore by falsely stating that he said Tropical Cyclone Nargis was a consequence of “global warming.” As The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson pointed out, this allegation is based on a doctored clip of an NPR interview with Gore.

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George Stephanopolous reads exit polls:

We did ask a question I know in the exit polls about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and whether that was influencing voters. What did we find? Right down the middle. About half said it’s important, about half said it was unimportant. Of those who said it was important, look at this in Indiana, 70% went for Senator Clinton. Of those who thought it was unimportant, again right down the middle, 65% for Barack Obama. So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.

As Lee Siegelman points out the causal inference here is all wrong. Much more likely is that voters already committed to Clinton — or strongly predisposed to commit to Clinton — adopted the view that Reverend Wright was an important issue because they knew it was an issue that reflected poorly on Obama. Note, for example, that both pre- and post-Wright, both Clinton and Obama took a fairly constant share of different demographic categories.

The thing is, you shouldn’t need to be especially sophisticated about statistics to figure this out. Clearly, Wright may have swayed some voters, but equally clearly most people had opinions about the election before Wright ever came on the scene. But Stephanopolous is hardly alone here, almost every time I see exit polls discussed on TV it’s done with almost no understanding of how to read them properly.

One weird thing about journalism is that most people who work in the news business are happy to concede that the press is somewhat more trivial than they’d like it to be. This is often chalked up to commercial pressures — we’re not doing a terrible job because we’re idiots or bad people, the journalist says, it’s because the audience is so horrible. And yet despite the theory that the “freak show” builds ratings and sells papers, the reality is that television, newspaper, and magazine journalism are all in long-term structural decline steadily losing audience. It’s almost as if people don’t, in fact, want to watch the news covered in a stupid manner but actually would be somewhat interested in learning important information about the world.

Along those lines, Joe Matthews started paying close attention to local news in the Los Angeles media market and found that the Spanish-language channels were substantially more substantive than the English-language ones. And guess which language they speak on L.A.’s top-rated local newscast? Spanish, of course, perhaps because “in Spanish, viewers got fewer soft features and more deeply reported, longer pieces.”

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said that since wrapping up the Republican nomination for president last March, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has used his time only “moderately effectively.”

To beef up his candidacy, Kristol suggested that McCain model his domestic policy after “the surge” because, according to Kristol, the surge was about “changing the way the U.S. military works” and it “succeeded.” Speaking as a revolutionary, Kristol said McCain needs to advocate “a reformist surge” against “the whole U.S. government”:

KRISTOL: [McCain] could say, “Look, I was a great proponent of the surge. What was the surge about? It was Dave Petraeus changing the way the U.S. military works, and it worked. It succeeded. Why can’t we do this for the rest of the U.S. government? Lots of the U.S. government is broken. We need, in effect, a surge, a reformist surge, for the whole U.S. government.“

Watch it:

It is entirely unclear what Kristol is talking about. But following his Iraq “surge” analogy to its logical conclusion, it seems Kristol is advocating for either 1) an escalation in domestic government staffers to “reform the U.S. government,” 2) more domestic agencies, or 3) a Petraeus-like czar to oversee a government surge.

But isn’t Bill Kristol — a staunch conservative — an advocate of “limited government?” It is odd then that he would suggest such a domestic “surge” for McCain, given that expanding government to change the government is the complete opposite of that philosophy.

All this proves is that Kristol just “really, really loves the surge.”