I’m not sure what to make of this. Armed Forces Radio hired Lund Media Research to conduct surveys and focus groups of listeners (i.e., people in the US military) and make recommendations for future programming. The recommendations? Dump or dramatically ramp back Rush, Hannity and NPR. The same with country music and play-by-play sports coverage. And replace it with more hip-hop, rap and pop.

You can see more of the details in this article in Stars and Stripes. But that’s the gist of it.

Dropping sports is the easiest to explain. Lund found that most people in the military want to watch sports programming, not listen to it on the radio. So no big cultural shift there. At least not in the broad sense.

With country music, the issue seemed to be that not all that many people liked it. And those who didn’t affirmatively like it, hated it. Said Warren Lee, operations and plans officer for American Forces Radio and Television Services, “They said when we play country, we pull in the country fans but lose everyone else.”

The most interesting finding, to my lights, came in the relative unpopularity of talk radio. It wasn’t that folks in the military are turning off right wing talk radio. The skew was still heavily toward right wing talk, as opposed to left wing talk — which probably is true for the country as a whole. The key was that while older troops are still big into talk radio, that’s not the case with younger troops. The survey defined ‘younger’ as 18-34. And given the demographic structure of the the military that’s got to be the overwhelming majority of those who serve.

NYT: “The European Union’s foreign policy director, Javier Solana, arrived in Tehran on Monday night with incentives intended to resolve the nuclear crisis with Iran, including a proposal to allow Iran to upgrade its aging civilian air fleet through the purchase of aircraft parts from an American company, Boeing. The package, to be presented Tuesday to Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and to Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, is to include waiving trade sanctions against Iran to allow the purchase of American agricultural technology, said European diplomats and a senior Bush administration official.”

Heckuva job Soli? AP’s Solomon lauded for great Reid reporting by Associated Press brass.

Texans in Congress throw departing former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) a going-away dinner — at a French restaurant. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Just in time?

From CBSNews: “U.S. officials believe Canadian arrests over the weekend and three recent domestic incidents in the United States are evidence the U.S. will soon be hit again by a terrorist attack. Privately, they say, they’d be surprised if it didn’t come by the end of the year, reports CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart in a CBS News exclusive.”

Remember last week we reported extensively on AP reporter John Solomon’s reporting on Sen. Harry Reid. Well, apparently, that’s exactly the sort of excellence the editors at the AP are shooting for.

Here’s the text of an internal email sent out to AP staff announcing the award Solomon got for the pieces in question …

Dear Staffers:

It was the most talked-about, blogged-about political story of the week _ twice.

First, John Solomon in Washington broke the news that Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid had accepted free ringside seats to three pro boxing matches from the Nevada agency that was trying to influence his legislation to bring federal oversight to the sport.

Then Solomon followed up by describing how Reid returned home to Nevada and misstated the ethics rules in an effort to defend himself. Ultimately, the Senate leader reversed course, admitted he misstated the rules and promised never again to accept free tickets from special interests.

The exclusive resulted from several tips that came in after Solomon and Sharon Theimer wrote a series of stories about gifts lawmakers got from fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Before his report moved, Solomon had a one-hour interview with Reid in his Capitol office where Reid uttered his widely quoted declaration that, “I’m not Goodie Two-Shoes.”

AP secured the rights to HBO video footage showing Reid in his free ringside seats at one of the fights, and that footage became the centerpiece of an OVN package and also was used by the TV networks and in frame grabs in newspapers. Solomon also did an audio Q&A for radio and Web customers. The story and video won widespread play on the Web fronts and newspaper fronts, and stirred an enormous debate in the blogosphere, generating more than 10,000 postings and more than a dozen newspapers wrote editorials chastising Reid, including USA Today.

For his work giving AP ownership of this high-profile story, Solomon wins this week’s prize of $500.

AP Director of Media Relations confirmed to TPMmuckraker’s Paul Kiel that the email “was sent to all AP staff as part of AP’s weekly recognition of staff reporters.”

Speaks for itself.

Greg Sargent has some follow-up on what he calls the Associated Press’s “deeply perverse” decision to reward John Solomon for his flawed and tendentious reporting on Sen. Harry Reid. As Greg notes, the AP apparently saw it as a positive that Solomon’s reporting had ignited such a storm in the blogosphere.

The nature of the firestorm apparently didn’t matter.

But I would say that it is more than that the reaction was critical. There were actually quite detailed critiques that pointed to numerous errors in Solomon’s reporting and repeated instances of tendentious misconstrual or ommission of key facts. In short, it was bad and in several instances mendacious reporting.

The AP ignored most of those criticisms and responded with at least two demonstrably false claims about TPMmuckraker.com’s reporting on Solomon’s series. Not judgment calls, straight-out false claims, which they’ve made no effort to retract or clarify. (There was a much lengthier exchange with TPMmuckraker and Media Matters. But I point out these falsehoods as an example of the caliber of the response.)

These criticisms aren’t restricted to the blogosphere. They were shared by a number of mainstream media reporters I discussed this with. It was simply that these criticisms only found voice on the blogs because of reporters’ deep reluctance to criticize colleagues.

There was nothing about this sorry episode that deserved praise or reward, even in an informal newsroom way. It’s hard to see the AP in the same light again. But it does renew my sense of why we do what we do and reminds me of the essential corruption of much of the national political press. Washington’s a funny place.

William Jefferson: corrupt? or really, really corrupt?

House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Jim McCrery says that next year’s the year to finally phase out Social Security, says Congress should “start all over” on privatization next year.

Late Update: Rep. McCrery was actually quite a waffler and a warbler on Social Security phase-out during all the hijinks last year. Here’s the reporting TPM did on McCrery last year.

Later Update: The Stakeholder has yet more.

Another odd connection in the expanding Cunningham investigation.