25 January 2010 @ 8:40AM >> The New York Times is on the receiving end of a very good point:

To the Editor:

In “The Court’s Blow to Democracy” (editorial, Jan. 22), you strenuously disagree with the proposition that “corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.”

Every day, The New York Times Company exercises its First Amendment right to engage in political speech. Today, it expresses its desire to deny that right to most other corporations.

The Constitution does not permit the government to criminalize speech based on the identity of the speaker. If any corporation has First Amendment rights, all corporations must have First Amendment rights.

Adam J. Kwiatkowski
Baltimore, Jan. 22, 2010

The writer is a lawyer in private practice.

30 September 2009 >> Daniel Okrent, the former public editor of the New York Times, recently made some interesting comments on his old employer and the media in general. Some highlights:

[T]here is a shortage of conservatives working in the news media — or, I should say, an imbalance between liberals and conservatives. The last survey I saw was on the ‘04 election - I don’t know what it was in ‘08 - but in ‘04 something like 75 percent of working journalists at daily newspapers voted for the Democrat. I mean, you can’t deny this. It’s a reality.

[...]

When I was at the Times - my term there ended four years ago - everybody on the editorial board was a Democrat. I asked Gail Collins, who was then the editorial page editor, “Why don’t you have a greater ideological variety and philosophical variety so you can have richer debate on the page?” And she said, “If I had a couple of conservatives on this page, they’d be unhappy all the time. They’d either have to write something that wasn’t their view, because we decide our view consensually, or they’d never get to write. So, what’s the point?” Now, Gail knows a lot better than I the dynamics of coming to an editorial position, but it would seem to me that, if for no other reason than to challenge the conventional thinking that may - and I stress the may - dominate the conversation on the editorial board, it’d be nice to have somebody else there who might say, “Well, here’s another point of view.”

[...]

If it’s to survive and flourish, the Times has to be an honest broker, and the perception left by that op-ed page and the adjoining editorial page is that it’s not.

[...]

When I was at the paper I criticized it pretty strongly for not having ideological diversity or religious diversity on the staff. The same reason we would want racial diversity, to provide different perspectives on the world, would suggest that we want the same thing religiously and ideologically and philosophically. And I was very roundly criticized by some people on the left about that, people who thought it was an outrage that I was suggesting that the Times hire more conservatives. Why is that an outrage? Why is it an outrage to get a more varied view of the world? We want a varied view if we’re going to be good citizens, if we’re going to have a functioning democracy. We must have a varied view.

Daniel Okrent was an honest broker during his tenure as the Times’s public editor, and the paper would be better off if it paid closer attention to his advice.

19 July 2009 @ 7:22PM >> An insightful observation from a reader of Instapundit.com:

Notice how there was no “antiwar” movement during the ’90s, even though we were at war the entire time in Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, a dab here and there in Afghanistan and Sudan. Then, after 9/11, it was the “Next Vietnam” with a passionate “antiwar” movement with the [New York Times]’s full treasonous participation, just like the good old days. And now, even though the daily death count has matched the highest daily rate we ever saw in Iraq, there is no “antiwar” movement or daily casualty count in all the newspapers. It’s like the “antiwar” movement can be turned off and on like a switch, depending on which party is in the White House.

13 June 2009 @ 4:34PM >> Received in an e-mail forward recently:

Sam, a U.S. Naval Officer, visits New York City for Fleet Week.

With the afternoon off, he decides to see the Bronx Zoo. Dressing in civilian clothes so as not to attract attention, he blends in well with the other tourists.

As Sam strolls by the lion’s cage, he notices a little girl leaning into the bars, grabbing towards the lion to try to pet it.

Suddenly, the lion snatches the girl by the cuff of her jacket and yanks her against the bars, trying to pull her inside. As the girl cries out in fear, her parents stand by helpless, screaming.

Sam runs to the cage and stuns the lion with a powerful punch square on the nose. The lion jumps back, whimpering, and lets go of the girl. Sam brings her to her terrified parents, who gush an endless stream of thanks.

“Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I saw a man do in my whole life,” the girls’ father says.

“Why, it was nothing, really,” Sam replies. “The lion was behind bars. I just saw a little girl in danger and I acted.”

The girl’s father thanks Sam again and says, “I’m a journalist with the New York Times. I’ll make sure your heroics will be on the front page in tomorrow’s paper. So, give me a little background about yourself. What does a hero like you do for a living?”

“Well,” Sam says, “I’m in the Navy, and I’m visiting the city as part of Fleet Week.” He spends the next hour answering the reporter’s questions before they finally part ways.

The next morning, Sam wakes up and rushes out to buy a copy of the Times. The headline on the front page says:

“MILITARY THUG TORTURES AFRICAN IMMIGRANT — AND STEALS HIS LUNCH”

3 April 2009 @ 9:12AM >> Today’s Quote of the Day comes courtesy of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller:

Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.

31 March 2009 >> It’s not fit to print if Obama won’t benefit—at least not when there’s an election at stake.

The Philadelphia Bulletin reports:

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”‘

Ms. Moncrief made her first overture to Ms. Heidelbaugh after The New York Times allegedly spiked the story - on Oct. 21, 2008.

October 21st was exactly two weeks before the election.

10 February 2009 @ 9:09AM >> Being a member of the media isn’t much different from being an Obama campaign worker. The International Herald Tribune reports:

Republicans have long accused mainstream journalists of being on the payroll of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, a common refrain of favoritism, especially from those on the losing end of an election.

But this year the accusation has a new twist: In some notable cases it has become true, with several prominent journalists now on the payrolls of Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.

An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media.

I know it’s unfair to characterize the entire media as Obama sycophants. There are still some hard-nosed journalists out there, bravely speaking truth to power. For example, there’s Judith Warner of the “All The News That’s Fit to Print” New York Times:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes - because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”

[...]

Many women - not too surprisingly - were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.

Now that the Obama presidency has transformed venerable news outlets like the New York Times into a poor imitations of Teen Beat, and with a former SportsCenter newscaster now Obama’s main cheerleader on the cable outlet of NBC News, I guess it’s not that bizarre to discover the Washington Post has transformed itself into a sports publication.

Why else, during President Obama’s press conference on the economy, would the Post’s White House reporter waste a question by asking:

What is your reaction to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?

I’ve seen more serious reporting from Perez Hilton.

I don’t know why news outlets still bother employing political reporters. I guess the only reason is that there are still a handful of people in Washington who need oversight. They’re called Republicans, and they ain’t gonna bash themselves.

2 February 2009 @ 8:58AM >> During the Superbowl last night, NBC News was running ads for the Today Show touting an interview with President Obama. The ads contained a revealing line saying that Obama would enjoy “home field advantage” during the interview. In other words, NBC News has finally admitting to being nothing more than Obama cheerleaders.

They are not alone.

On the night of the Inauguration, The New York Times did its part to rally the true believers by handing out buttons with its logo prominently displayed beneath the profile of the new president.

Not to be outdone, CNN is selling t-shirts with the caption, “Obama raises hand, lifts a nation.”

And the Detroit Free Press is asking you to “see Obama in yourself” and send them a picture of your face behind a half-cutout Obama mask.

Perhaps the editors of the Free Press were worried that Obama worship wasn’t quite cult-like enough.

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. As Helen Thomas—a White House reporter since the 1950s—recently said, “I’m a liberal, I was born a liberal, I’ll be one ‘til I die, what else should a reporter be when you see so much and when we have such great privilege and access to the truth?”

No surprise. Reporters are liberal, so they’ll favor a liberal president. But given the financial state of the news industry, perhaps political reporters can be laid off for the next for years, and the media can simply re-print White House press releases.

It would save a lot of money, and the resulting press coverage wouldn’t be any different.

1 November 2008 >> Over at the the New York Times website, there’s a nifty little widget illustrating the paper’s presidential endorsements throughout its history.

Since 1884, Democrats have gotten 78% of the paper’s endorsements, while Republicans have gotten 19%. (A third-party endorsement in the election of 1896 accounts for the remaining 3%.)

Since the election of 1960, the paper has endorsed only Democrats.

28 August 2008 >> A report from the press area at the Democratic convention:

Here in Denver, there were audible cheers in the press pavilion from multiple directions when Barack Obama walked on stage. It’s outside the convention center and no regular delegates are here — only press.

And another:

Several members of the media were seen cheering and clapping for Barack Obama as the Illinois senator accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday.

Standing on the periphery of the football field serving as the Democratic convention floor, dozens of men and women wearing green media floor passes chanted along with the crowd.

As if to underscore the media’s Obama-worshipping, today’s New York Times carries this example of ostensible journalism entitled, “For a New Political Age, a Self-Made Man,” which essentially argues that the biggest challenge for Barack Obama is overcoming how great he is.

4 January 2008 @ 9:28AM >> Matthew Sheffield of NewsBusters busts the New York Times:

The quickest way to get the liberal media to pay attention to you is to claim to be a Republican who hates Republicans. It’s an almost infallible public relations strategy that of late has worked well for "Republican" Monica Green.

It’s also done wonders for "lifelong Republican" Henry A. Lowenstein, who has managed to get 20 different letters published in the New York Times since 2003, a remarkable feat when you consider that the Times (by its own admission) receives around 1,000 letters a day and prints only 15 on its letters page. That means the odds of the average liberal person (the paper freely admits it favors left-wing letter writers) getting his or her letter printed are about 1.5 percent.

It’s worse when you think of the numbers on a yearly scale. In the past five years, the Times has received approximately 1.8 million letters. It’s printed 20 of Lowenstein’s.

With a look at Lowenstein’s e-mails (and the political contributions of a New Yorker with the same name), Sheffield makes a convincing case that the Times has been duped. Perhaps willingly?

16 October 2007 @ 9:31AM >> In yesterday’s New York Times, Professor Stanley Fish took an extensive look at Indoctrinate U. While it is clear that the professor and I feel quite differently about the extent of the problems in academia, the final two paragraphs of the piece contained more intellectual honesty than the last bit of coverage the Times gave Indoctrinate U. Professor Fish admits:

But then there’s the part we should take seriously: professors who use the classroom as a stage for their political views. Maloney speculates that perhaps one out of seven perform in this way. I would put the number much lower, perhaps one out of twenty-five. But one out of 10,000 would be one too many.

Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom. Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary. In 1915, the American Association of University Professors warned that if we didn’t clean up our own shop, external constituencies, with motives more political than educational, would step in and do it for us. Now they’re doing it in the movies and it’s our own fault.

Perhaps my biggest disagreement with Professor Fish is over the issue of speech codes. Professor Fish contends:

This is a fake issue. Every speech code that has been tested in the courts has been struck down, often on the very grounds — you can’t criminalize offensiveness — invoked by Maloney. Even though there are such codes on the books of some universities, enforcing them will never hold up. Students don’t have to worry about speech codes. The universities that have them do, a point made by “Indoctrinate U” when Maloney tells the story of how Cal Poly was taken to the cleaners (no, not his cleaners) when it tried to discipline a student for putting up a poster with the word “plantation” in it.

In the Cal Poly case cited by Professor Fish, a student spent 18 months of his life under the threat of expulsion while he battled the university all the way up to federal court. His crime? Posting a flier announcing an upcoming event: a speech by Mason Weaver, a black conservative author who wrote a book on economic empowerment called It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. Apparently, Mr. Weaver’s point of view was not welcome in the Multicultural Center on campus, so Steve Hinkle, the student who attempted to post Weaver’s flier in there, had the police called on him and was brought up on disciplinary charges by the school.

Ultimately, Hinkle was vindicated, and Professor Fish focuses only on the positive outcome in order to deem the whole issue of speech codes to be “fake.” But having to spend 18 months fighting for rights that are already constitutionally guaranteed sends a strong signal to other students that expressing the wrong point of view will end up costing you dearly. It corrodes the whole concept of free speech by dissuading people from speaking. After all, if simply hanging a flier could result in 18 months of battles, many students are going to conclude that certain speech just isn’t worth it. People whose views differ from the campus orthodoxy are going to keep quiet. Speech is undoubtedly chilled.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) gets hundreds upon hundreds of cases each year involving students and professors who have had their rights of conscience trampled. Many of these cases center on the “fake issue” of speech codes. A recent study conducted by FIRE found that over 90% of the hundreds of schools they surveyed had some form of speech regulation on the books.

FIRE’s William Creeley comments on Professor Fish’s dismissal of the issue of speech codes:

First, while Fish correctly observes that “[e]very speech code that has been tested in the courts has been struck down,” he vastly understates the severity of the problem by dismissively concluding that therefore “[s]tudents don’t have to worry about speech codes.” That’s hogwash. While the fact that restrictive speech codes have been consistently struck down in court offers clear proof of their unconstitutionality, it certainly doesn’t mean that “[s]tudents don’t have to worry” about them. Contrary to Fish’s assertions, a student at a college with restrictive speech codes on the books is in danger of being punished for engaging in speech clearly protected by the First Amendment. According to FIRE’s first annual speech code report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, more than 68% of the 330 colleges and universities surveyed maintained policies that clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech. Regardless of Fish’s contention otherwise, that’s something to worry about, as FIRE’s extensive list of speech code cases proves. Besides, Fish gets it exactly backwards: the fact that speech codes are still so pervasive on our nation’s campuses despite consistently losing in court is cause for outrage, not apathy.

Further, students at schools which maintain speech codes must carefully tailor their speech to satisfy oftentimes inscrutable rules—e.g., students at The Ohio State University must be sure that their words aren’t unintentionally “threatening infliction of emotional harm,” whatever that means—or else risk discipline. The chilling effect that inevitably results causes students to self-censor and renders free speech on campus all the more elusive. This too is something to worry about.

Contrary to Fish’s casual faith in the courts, resorting to litigation in hopes of vindicating one’s right to free speech is almost never an attractive option for students. The sheer amount of time spent securing representation, preparing a case, filing charges and, if necessary, pursuing appeals is extremely daunting to students. Just ask the San Francisco State University College Republicans, who are suing SFSU after being put on trial for “harassment” for stepping on Hamas and Hezbollah flags at an anti-terrorism rally. In addition to spending countless hours preparing their defense against SFSU’s charges, the students have had to coordinate a federal lawsuit against the college they currently attend. That’s not an easy or enjoyable task by any standard, and FIRE knows firsthand that despite the strength of their case, too many students decide that a lawsuit is just not worth the time, stress, trouble and alienation.

Still, the good professor does acknowledge a problem in academia. We just disagree about the scope of it and the interpretation of the data that document it.

There are other points made by Professor Fish that I could quibble with, but I don’t want to spend too much time arguing with someone who says I have “lean boyish looks that could earn [me] a role in Oceans 14 alongside Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.”

Can someone please forward that suggestion to a few agents in L.A.? I’d do it myself, but the self-promotion might be a bit much...even by Hollywood standards.

26 September 2007 @ 9:00AM >> This Washington Monthly column reminded me of something...

Recently, The New York Times announced that they were ending TimesSelect, the wall that the paper built around their opinion columnists to prevent non-subscribers from reading them online.

When TimesSelect was announced, some folks reacted as if Ambien had just been taken off the market. Without the interchangeable columns of Bob Herbert, how were people supposed to ease their way into dreamland?

To solve such a weighty problem, I wrote a piece of software called Automatic Bob, the bot that generates Bob Herbert columns in much the same way that the author himself does.

I did not have time to build sentience into Automatic Bob, but I’m sure if he had feelings, he’d sense the bittersweet nature of this moment. On the one hand, Automatic Bob’s mentor—the real Bob—is back. But on the other hand, will Human Bob’s return lead to a decommissioning of AutoBob?

Not to worry!

You see, even though Human Bob has returned to the public web, he is still human and therefore only capable of generating a small number of columns each month. AutoBob has no such limitation.

So, even though the TimesSelect wall is down and there is nothing standing between you and the latest Bob Herbert column except a free registration, Automatic Bob will remain ready to serve you for all those times when your insomnia requires something stronger than the mere trickle of columns that a Human Bob can produce.

25 September 2007 @ 9:28AM >> After days of denials, The New York Times has finally admitted that a controversial MoveOn.org ad referring to General Petreus as “General Betray Us” was not handled according to the paper’s usual advertising guidelines. Public Editor Clark Hoyt writes:

For nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.

But I think the ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to.

On Monday, Sept. 10, the day that Gen. David H. Petraeus came before Congress to warn against a rapid withdrawal of troops, The Times carried a full-page ad attacking his truthfulness.

Under the provocative headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the ad, purchased by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org, charged that the highly decorated Petraeus was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving upbeat assessments of progress and refusing to acknowledge that Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

“Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us,” MoveOn.org declared.

The ad infuriated conservatives, dismayed many Democrats and ignited charges that the liberal Times aided its friends at MoveOn.org with a steep discount in the price paid to publish its message, which might amount to an illegal contribution to a political action committee. In more than 4,000 e-mail messages, people around the country raged at The Times with words like “despicable,” “disgrace” and “treason.”

[...]

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?

The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was “rough,” he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”

For its part, MoveOn has decided to pay the Times an additional $77,083 for the ad, to make up the difference between what they paid and what they should have paid. This move shields the Times against accusations that it made an in-kind contribution to MoveOn, something that could be legally perilous for the paper.

But it strikes me that MoveOn giving more money to the Times after the paper gets caught doesn’t change the equation much. One high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement gives some cash to another high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement. Big deal.

19 August 2007 @ 2:09PM >> Today’s New York Times profiles Thor Halvorssen, one of the producers of Indoctrinate U.

The piece quotes Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock as saying Indoctrinate U “could be a lightning rod.” Spurlock adds, “Movies that get attention and spark a dialogue, get people talking on news shows, can be profitable at the box office.”

Hopefully the Hollywood gatekeepers will give us a chance to prove him right!

9 July 2007 @ 8:20AM >> Librarians aren’t just librarians anymore. Now they’re political activists:

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

[...]

“I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.

[...]

Michelle Campbell, 26, a librarian in Washington, said that librarianship is a haven for left-wing social engagement, which is particularly appealing to the young librarians she knows. “Especially those of us who graduated around the same time as the Patriot Act,” Ms. Campbell said. “We see what happens when information is restricted.”

So, to the New York Times, left-wing social activism equals cool. That’s about what I would expect from the Times.

But I wonder if the reporter bothered posing a follow-up question to the liberal librarians: what book, exactly, did the Patriot Act ban? What information was restricted?

28 June 2007 @ 11:18AM >> Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels misrepresented by The New York Times. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, was also quoted in the Times piece on Indoctrinate U. Here’s his reaction:

I am, to say the least, disappointed by Joseph Berger’s column in The New York Times today concerning Evan Maloney’s film “Indoctrinate U” and free speech on campus in general. I have been corresponding with Joe for several weeks, and even had lunch with him this past Friday. I had hoped that after such extensive interaction, I had demonstrated to him that a serious and ongoing free speech problem exists on campus. I also hoped that I had convinced him that taking student fee funding away from a student newspaper for printing a controversial article is censorship. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

As for the article, I don’t know which is worse: that Berger uses the single example of Vassar College’s handling of a controversial article as a tool to refute the idea that there is a serious censorship problem on campus, or that he chose to praise the outcome of a case in which the school did, in fact, punish a student publication for what would be clearly protected speech outside Vassar’s gates.

[...]

As for using Vassar as the sole counterpoint to “Indoctrinate U’s” presentation of the illiberal academy, Berger cannot claim that he did not have enough examples. At his request, I sent him links to our entire case archive, our 2006 report on speech codes, summaries of our cases at Glendale Community College, Marquette University, SUNY Fredonia, Washington State University, the University of New Hampshire, and Hampton University, as well as our letter to Mayor Bloomberg and details about the Tufts case.

[...]

Despite all of this information, my major contribution to the piece seems to be that I “acknowledged that campus freedom of expression has improved since the low points of the 1990s.” This is my opinion, but I also said: (1) that the situation on campus with regards to speech is actually worse than it appears in “Indoctrinate U”; (2) that speech codes are paradoxically more common than ever; and (3) that I think that the improvement I refer to has been in no small part the result of the attention FIRE and our co-founders Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate have been able to bring to the problem on campus.

So, yes, I am disappointed. I enjoyed meeting Joe Berger, I liked him, I appreciated his interest in FIRE’s issues, but it seems that after spending hours getting him information about the very serious problems on campus, he left our meeting on Friday believing exactly what he believed when he came into the meeting—the problem on campus just ain’t that bad. It’s a shame, too. FIRE could use the help of the Gray Lady in fighting campus censorship, but apparently we’ll have to keep waiting.

27 June 2007 @ 8:28AM >> Today’s New York Times contains a discussion of Indoctrinate U and the issue of free speech on campus.

Most of the article was spent addressing cases that weren’t in the film, rather than addressing what was in the film. The author also claims that “professors, administrators and students say the national picture is far more complicated than that pictured in ‘Indoctrinate U,’” although I don’t know how they could know that, because none of those people actually saw the film.

One of the examples cited in the article (but not the film) was the case of a student paper published by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent and Conservative Student Alliance. It was an odd selection of cases if the point was to argue that there’s more “nuance” to reality than what is shown in Indoctrinate U, because a close inspection of this case shows that it actually backs up the thesis of my film.

The paper was de-funded and shut down for a year after publishing a piece criticizing the school’s funding of special “social centers” for minority and gay students. But because the paper was eventually allowed to start publishing again—the following year—the Vassar case is presented as one in which “[u]ltimately, free speech was respected.”

Sorry, but shutting down a paper for a year is not a benign event, and it is certainly not one in which we can say “free speech was respected.” If Homeland Security shut down the Times for a year after exposing ways that we track terrorist financing, I’m sure they’d understand my position on this.

Rather than address the multiple cases in the film where people were told to see school psychologists because they had the wrong set of views, rather than address the fact that people’s academic careers were put in jeopardy for things like being registered in the “wrong” political party, this piece ignores the evidence presented in the film to set up an alternative straw man to knock down.

And when the author finally gets around to discussing cases that are actually in the film, he minimizes them by leaving out the most vital information.

One student, he says, “underwent a daylong disciplinary hearing for posting a flier.” Actually, that student had the police called on him, he was ordered to see a psychologist, he was questioned by an attorney without being allowed to have one of his own, he was threatened with expulsion, and he was “convicted” by the university for an offense that they couldn’t even define when asked.

The student’s crime? Posting a flyer which promoted an upcoming speech by an author named Mason Weaver. It merely had a picture of him, the title of his book, and the date, time and location of the event. Yet university regarded the flyers as “literature of an offensive racial nature,” and used it to railroad a student whose views they didn’t like. This case lasted 18 months and ended up in federal court before the student finally prevailed.

I think all that amounts to a tad more than “a daylong disciplinary hearing.”

To be honest, I expected worse treatment from the Times. And being written about in the Times—even negatively—is probably better than being ignored, so on the whole, I’m happy that this piece ran.

But I just wish the author addressed cases that I actually covered in the film, rather than ones I didn’t.

1 May 2007 @ 8:53AM >> &When Iran needs help building two nuclear reactors, where do the mullahs go to place the ad?

To their acquaintances at The New York Times Company, of course!

Update: A reader has alerted me to the fact that the ad also appeared in a recent issue of The Economist (page 111 of the April 28th, 2007 edition, on the lower-righthand side). I would have expected The Economist to exercise better judgment than that.

All this reminds me of the statement “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them,” which is attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Although in this case, it’s not rope, it’s radioactive fuel. And we’re teaching Iran how enrich it, perhaps so it may one day end up in a nuclear bomb.

9 January 2007 @ 7:49AM >> The Blue Fund is an investment portfolio that—among other criteria—only holds stock in companies whose political contributions favor Democrats. Not surprisingly, the fund invests in the New York Times and CBS.

31 December 2006 @ 4:21PM >> On April 9th, the New York Times Magazine ran an article claiming that a woman named Carmen Climaco was serving a 30-year jail sentence in El Salvador. According to the Times, she received the sentence for having an abortion; a caption under her picture noted that she “was given 30 years for an abortion that was ruled a homicide.”

However, today’s New York Times contains an eye-opening revelation from public editor Byron Calame:

It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002 that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth, and that she had strangled the “recently born.” A three-judge panel found her guilty of “aggravated homicide,” a fact the article noted. But without bothering to check the court document containing the panel’s findings and ruling, the article’s author, Jack Hitt, a freelancer, suggested that the “truth” was different.

[...]

The care taken in the reporting and editing of this example didn’t meet the magazine’s normal standards. Although Sarah H. Smith, the magazine’s editorial manager, told me that relevant court documents are “normally” reviewed, Mr. Hitt never checked the 7,600-word ruling in the Climaco case while preparing his story. And Mr. Hitt told me that no editor or fact checker ever asked him if he had checked the court document containing the panel’s decision.

Why did the Times article contain such a blatant error? Perhaps it had something to do with a translator hired by the author:

Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn’t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries “to some degree.”

Ipas used The Times’s account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for “identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization “continue critical advocacy work” across Central America. “A gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,” states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14.

When the public editor started digging further into the story, the publisher’s office asked two editors—Craig Whitney and Gerald Marzorati—to draft a response to the concerns about the story’s accuracy:

The response said that while the “fair and dispassionate” story noted Ms. Climaco’s conviction of aggravated homicide, the article “concluded that it was more likely that she had had an illegal abortion.” The response ended by stating, “We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the facts as reported in our article, which was not part of any campaign to promote abortion.”

But when confronted with the court documents themselves—which were never reviewed by the author—Marzorati, the editor of the Times Magazine, made an astonishing admission to Calame:

The article was “as accurate as it could have been at the time it was written,” Mr. Marzorati wrote to me. “I also think that if the author and we editors knew of the contents of that third ruling, we would have qualified what we said about Ms. Climaco. Which is NOT to say that I simply accept the third ruling as ‘true’; El Salvador’s judicial system is terribly politicized.”

I asked Mr. Whitney if he intended to suggest that the office of the publisher bring the court’s findings to the attention of those readers who received the “no reason to doubt” response, or that a correction be published. The latest word from the standards editor: “No, I’m not ready to do that, nor to order up a correction or Editors’ Note at this point.”

One thing is clear to me, at this point, about the key example of Carmen Climaco. Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.

So now we know the editorial standards at the Times: an article is “as accurate as it could have been” even if the facts are completely wrong. Even if the original court record was never checked. Even if crucial interviews were translated by partisan activists. Even if those activists then use the resulting article for fundraising efforts. At the Times, none of that matters. None of that’s worthy of a correction, even after the article’s facts have been proven wrong.

No, it appears that the only standard that matters at the Times is whether the author’s conclusions are considered correct by his higher-ups.

Kudos to Calame for doggedly pursuing this. And shame on the rest of the editors at the Times for pretending that facts don’t matter.

---

Update: The New York Times has since corrected the article. However, for some reason, Times corrections are only available on the web for one day, so I can’t link to it.

18 December 2006 @ 6:38PM >> Today’s New York Times contains a lengthy article discussing the financial woes of Air America Radio. The Times, which describes Air America as a “liberal network” created to be “an alternative to right-wing talk radio,” says that the now-bankrupt network “was engulfed in a series of financial crises.”

But the paper—whose famous tag line is “all the news that’s fit to print”—inexplicably fails to mention the most significant of those self-inflicted crises.

In July 2005, word leaked out that the New York City Department of Investigation was looking into Air America Radio for its role in diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Bronx charity. The Attorney General of New York later opened an investigation over allegations that Air America ended up with $875,000 intended for underprivileged kids at the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club. The scandal eventually caused the club to shut down after having its charter yanked.

In August 2005, I noted that major establishment news outlets—including the New York Times—were ignoring the Air America scandal.

Here we are, well over a year later, and the Times is still doing everything it can to gloss over that scandal. In an article that measures over 1,600 words—an article whose unifying theme is the financial mess that is Air America—the Times can’t even bring itself to print word one about the fact that the supposed champions of the dispossessed felt no compunction about ripping off inner-city kids so they could keep their million-dollar hosts on the air.

All the news that’s fit to print? Or all the news that fits their ideology?

13 December 2006 >> Some thoughts on the future of newspapers from The Atlantic Monthly:

[T]op reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

So what should newspapers do? They could stop printing. It may happen eventually, or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes), but that’s not what I’m getting at. The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

That, I’d venture, is how you start rethinking the newspaper business. Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Post’s Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth (obligatory disclaimer: “The views of posters do not necessarily represent those of the Washington Post Company”). Go even further: incentivize the critics and reporters by allowing them to profit based on the popularity of their sites; make it worth their while to stick around.

[...]

Playing this logic out, the next task would be uniting the Sanneh or Priest site to the Times or Post whole. You could essentially self-syndicate, sending your regular Times or Post headlines to Sanneh’s and Priest’s sites, luring readers back to the mother ship while increasing the number of times each story is read. Indeed, the logic could be (and in some circles already is being) played out even further. What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.

4 December 2006 >> A study of how the media has been distoring war reporting since the September 11th attacks:

Convincingly and without resorting to partisan politics, [study author Jim A.] Kuypers strongly illustrates in eight chapters “how the press failed America in its coverage on the War on Terror.” In each comparison, Kuypers “detected massive bias on the part of the press.” In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution” in the conclusion.

“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president’s themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”

15 November 2006 >> In an editorial entitled “A Grand New Republican Party,” the New York Times gives New York State’s Republicans a bit of advice:

A pragmatist like Mayor Michael Bloomberg could serve as the vanguard of a new New York Republican Party. He won twice in a heavily Democratic city by adding probity and managerial expertise to Mr. Pataki’s issues list. Some upstaters regard Mr. Bloomberg as too independent — their term is RINO, or Republican in Name Only. That’s a self-destructive attitude for a party on the ropes. New York’s G.O.P. should embrace the city’s dynamic mayor as its guiding star.

Asking Republicans to be more like Mayor Bloomberg is akin to asking Republicans to be more like Democrats. In fact, until shortly before deciding to run for Mayor, Mike Bloomberg was a Democrat. One theory to explain his party change is that it was borne out of political expedience.

In a city where the Democratic primary is usually the election that determines who will fill a given office, Mayor Bloomberg’s late switch to become a Republican enabled him to sidestep the competition in the Democratic primary. So, while five Democratic candidates were bashing each other in the primary campaign, Bloomberg sat on the sidelines, unbloodied by the primary fight, and used his fortune to edge out Mark Green, the Democratic opponent who barely survived a run-off just weeks before the general election.

Bloomberg’s been a decent mayor, and I probably would have voted for him regardless of party affiliation, but if he’s the future of the Republicanism, then there really is no difference between the two parties. Party labels should represent something more than a mere brand name; they should tell you something about the candidate’s underlying philosophy. Parties should stand for some defining and distinguishing ideas.

But what’s laughable is that the editors of a paper that hasn’t endorsed a single Republican presidential nominee in over fifty years would decide, out of the kindness of their hearts, to try and help Republicans with some unsolicited advice.

Still, maybe we should give the Times the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there are some well-placed Republicans at the paper using the editorial page to try to righten a ship that has clearly veered off course.

How do we find out? Check the voter database maintained by the New York City Board of Elections. It’s a matter of public record, so anyone can conduct their own search.

For simplicity, this search was limited to Manhattan, and in cases where there was ambiguity (multiple identical names, wrong professions listed, etc.), the results were ignored. Nine Times bigwigs showed up:

Arthur Sulzberger, Publisher: Democrat

Bill Keller, Executive Editor: Democrat

Gail Collins, Editor: Democrat

Eleanor Randolph, Editorial Board: Democrat

Dorothy Samuels, Editorial Board: Democrat

Carolyn Curiel, Editorial Board: Democrat

Frank Rich, Editorial Columnist: Democrat

“Automatic Bob” Herbert, Editorial Columnist: Democrat

Believe it or not, one Republican was found, although as an associate editor, he isn’t exactly the highest man on the totem pole. And whereas the Democrats listed above voted in nearly every special election, primary and general election, our lone Republican—who shall remain nameless lest it jeopardize his job—is much less active in his political involvement. According to the Board of Elections, he’s voted only 3 times since 1985. I guess that’s the only kind of Republican tolerated on the editorial board of the New York Times.

So, here’s the recap: out of nine people found, one is a Republican. Keep that in mind when you read Times editors. You may not be getting a balanced view of the world, but at least now you’ll know where they’re coming from (mostly the Upper West Side, according to the voter database).

And if you’re a Republican official in New York State trying to figure out whether to heed the advice of the Times, perhaps my friend Marcus put it best: “It’s like George Steinbrenner giving pointers to the Boston Red Sox.”

13 November 2006 @ 8:13AM >> Yesterday, just in time for last Tuesday’s election, the New York Times editorial page finally admitted something I have contended for quite a while: that—for all their criticism—the Democrats have no real plan for Iraq:

Americans are waiting to hear if [Democrats] have any good ideas for how to get out of Iraq without creating even wider chaos and terrorism.

[...]

The Democrats will also need to look forward — and quickly. So far they have shared slogans, but no real policy.

[...]

Voters gave the Democrats the floor — and are now waiting to hear what they have to say.

Waiting to hear what they have to say? Isn’t that what campaigns are for? You’d think the Times would have noticed that the Democrats had nothing to say before the election, but for some reason the paper thought that minor detail wasn’t worthy of coverage until now. I wonder why that is.

31 October 2006 @ 9:52AM >> It seems that New York Times readers complain of the paper’s political agenda so frequently when canceling subscriptions that customer service operators actually have a code for recording that type of complaint.

The Times may continue the charade of claiming to be a non-biased source of information, but (former) readers apparently know better. Perhaps that’s why circulation of the Times fell another 3.5% in just six months. You can fool some of the people some of the time...

3 October 2006 @ 8:52AM >> A headline from the more-true-than-they’d-like-to-admit department: “Al Qaeda Increasingly Reliant on Media“.

9 August 2006 @ 5:59PM >> Reuters isn’t the only outfit publishing questionable photos that just so happen to benefit Hizbollah’s propaganda campaign.

One Lebanese woman is shown in two pictures from two different locations taken two weeks apart, but in each picture, she is said to be mourning the destruction of her home:

In the first photograph, taken by Reuters, a woman is seen in front of a bombed out building in Beirut. “A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment, in a building, that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut,” Reuters said in its caption. The photo was dated July 22 2006.

A second photograph of a woman who looks exactly like the woman in the first Reuters image, even bearing the same scar on her left cheek, is then supplied by the Associated Press.

“A Lebanese woman reacts at the destruction after she came to inspect her house in the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon,” the Associated Press caption claimed. The date accompanying the photograph is August 5 2006, and the scenes behind the woman are different to those of the July 22 photo.

The New York Times also got into the act with a different transgression—but quickly issued a correction after being found out. The correction reads:

A picture caption with an audio slide show on July 27 about an Israeli attack on a building in Tyre, Lebanon, imprecisely described the situation in the picture. The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.

The correct description was this one, which appeared with that picture in the printed edition of The Times: After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt.

I guess the Times figured out that there’s quite a difference between being killed and falling down.

Although the Times corrected this issue quickly, last Saturday, the paper ran a front-page above-the-fold photo from Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer busted (and fired) for passing along doctored pictures.

Reuters felt that Hajj’s work was questionable enough to remove all 920 photos he submitted from their catalog, but the Times still has not even mentioned the Reuters photo scandal or otherwise explained the paper’s use of his photos.

6 July 2006 >> The New York Times’s publishing the details of our efforts to track terrorist finances seems to have struck a nerve with Americans. Nearly two weeks after the story broke, it is still a hot topic of discussion on political chat shows and the Internet. There is even a protest planned outside the Times headquarters next Monday.

Brain Terminal readers are also weighing in. Mike Thorneburg writes:

I just read your 30 June ”The Times and the Spy Loophole” post on Brain Terminal. In reference to your hunch that the public will be calling for some heads to roll at the publishing of The Times’ next treasonous diatribe, my suspicion is that we’re already sharpening the axes.

We should have demanded from our legislators a full accounting of the Times’ expose of the phone database program which is (was) a completely legal and successful method of monitoring the nature of calls placed to and received from terrorist countries by persons living in the United States. Moreover, I think many of us have missed the really big picture here and that is: WHO INSIDE THE ADMINISTRATION OR ACROSS THE AISLE IS LEAKING THIS CLASSIFIED INFORMATION TO THE PRESS? That’s what I really want to know.

Given their track record, I certainly wouldn’t dismiss desperate liberals and Dems, anxious to regain their political power, from abandoning our country’s security in order to attempt to discredit the administration and have it appear that President Bush and his appointees are abusing their power and usurping the general rights of the citizenry. After all, The Times’ story said nothing of this program being illegal nor did it allege any wrongdoing by the program’s developers or administrators. The article was simply a cheap shot at oneupmanship by an arrogant New York elitist culture hell bent on shoving its own particular leftist agenda down our throats. We should press our leaders for a full investigation of the story and demand they find out WHO is leaking information about these classified programs so that they can be hauled into court and prosecuted.

[...]

As for the Bill Kellers of the world, fortunately, we have long been a few steps ahead of them. We’re not so naive that we can’t smell the stench coming from the press barn. Mr. Keller has proven himself time and again an adversary to most mainstream Americans and part of the problem, not the solution. In my book, he’s a traitor and a pig, more concerned with selling papers and stroking his own ego than keeping America informed.

John adds:

I’m over here in Iraq and read your article today and have one question that I’m sure has been asked before (but I’m asking it again): If the NYT received classified information in advance of the operation that killed [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi], would they have published it, thus letting [Zarqawi] make his getaway, set up an ambush, or worse, both?  Yet, in a roundabout way, that is exactly what they are doing in the publishing of these stories.  And not only are they hiding behind the first amendment, but there doesn’t seem to be any investigation that I’ve heard of to prosecute their source(s).

Yesterday I witnessed the immediate aftermath of an [improvised explosive device].  Thankfully, no one was killed, yet one soldier was injured.  These attacks, as you point out, were made possible because of the financing.  It takes money to make even a terrorist’s world go ‘round.  Sure, the terrorists know there are programs designed to track their finances.  But I’m sure they don’t have as detailed a picture as they’d like so as to counter and change their tactics.  The NYT was happy to accomodate them, however.  And, in that same roundabout way, one of our soldiers is now in the hospital.

All the muck that’s fit to rake.

Lastly, “DiggaFromDover” sums up the situation with:

Freedom without responsibility is journalism.

Other than Dan Rather’s bogus memos, I can’t recall any other media action that caused this level of anger among e-mailers. While Dan Rather’s memos were intended to defeat a particular politician—President Bush—the actions of the Times put the entire country at risk by making it harder to identify and track terrorists as they move around the globe. And you don’t have to be a fan of President Bush to be disgusted with that.