30 June 2006 >> If you as a private citizen came into the exact same information that the Times eventually published, but instead of publishing it, you passed it along to an al Qaeda operative in a dark alley somewhere, you would be guilty of treason and could be executed. Yet, Bill Keller seems to think that “freedom of the press” amounts to one huge legal exemption—the espionage laws do not apply to him!—and by being chosen by a handful of old-money New Yorkers to edit a newspaper, he is somehow in better position to decide what is in the public interest than the government officials that we the people elected to act on our behalf. More >>

26 June 2006 >> A letter to The New York Times:

Your recent decision to publish information about a classified program intended to track the banking transactions of possible terrorists is not only detrimental to America but also to its fighting men and women overseas. I know because I am a sergeant in the army on my second tour to Iraq. As I am sure you don’t know because you aren’t in Iraq, and I am sure never will be, terrorism happens here everyday because there are rich men out there willing to support the everyday terrorist who plants bombs and shoots soldiers just to make a living. Without money terrorism in Iraq would die because there would no longer be supplies for IEDs, no mortars or RPGs, and no motivation for people to abandon regular work in hopes of striking it rich after killing a soldier.

Throughout your article you mention that “the banking program is a closely held secret” but the cat is out of the bag now isn’t it. Terrorists the world over can now change their practices because of your article. For some reason I think that last sentence will bring you guys pleasure. You have done something great in your own eyes-you think you have hurt the current administration while at the same time encouraging “freedom fighters” resisting the imperialism of the United States. However, I foresee a backlash coming your way. I wish I had a subscription to your paper so I could cancel it as soon as possible.

Well, one prominent L.A. blogger exacted that punishment against the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, an interesting observation:

Because the war on terror is fought in a peacetime atmosphere, treason can be presented as dissent, and you can get away with it.

And finally, on a ligher note, a little mockery.

22 May 2006 @ 7:31PM >> A few links worthy of reading:

• The website TimesWatch says that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger apologized to graduates of SUNY New Paltz for failing to stop the Iraq war. (And here I was naively thinking that the purpose of a newspaper was to report the news, not to prevent the implementation of American foreign policy.)
• German magazine Der Spiegel reports that Latin America is becoming increasingly dominated by organized crime.
• According to this report from ABC News, the Palestinian Territories may be on the verge of civil war.
• The London Times reports that al Qaeda is specifically targeting Christian children for kidnapping. The children are then sold into domestic slavery and the sex trade, with al Qaeda pocketing the profits.
• As the Mexican government threatens to sue the United States for enforcing immigration laws, it is banning non-Mexicans from being employed within the country.
• Meanwhile, nearly 15% of the Mexico’s labor force is now working within the United States.

2 May 2006 >> According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. “For several months now,” Kruh writes, “as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon.”

What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert’s columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column is just a random recombination of verbiage from earlier columns.

Given the paper’s recent stock performance and rumblings from restless investors, I thought I’d help the Times find ways to put out the same product for less money. So I spent about fifteen minutes writing software that can generate Bob Herbert columns while using a minimal amount of our Earth’s precious resources. More >>

29 March 2006 @ 1:42PM >> Saying the paper published a “fatally flawed” story on Abu Ghraib, New York Times public editor Byron Calame explains the problem:

The March 11 article profiled a man who said he was the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner famously photographed about two years ago, standing on a box with wires attached to his extended hands. The article included an interview with the man, Ali Shalal Qaissi, a one-time neighborhood mayor under the government of Saddam Hussein and now a self-styled activist for prisoners’ rights in Iraq. He had been invoking that symbol of the torture at Abu Ghraib in helping to push lawsuits on behalf of the prisoners.

...so naturally, the Times bought his story.

It turned out that The Times had the wrong man. And clear evidence of the error had existed in an unnoticed 2004 Times story.

To the credit of The Times — and to the benefit of readers — editors did not allow the embarrassment to impede a timely and very open exploration of the mistake. When the online magazine Salon quickly disputed Mr. Qaissi’s story after the article ran in The Times, the paper immediately reported on the challenge on March 14 and promised its own investigation. In a front-page story published a week after the original article, The Times reviewed the mistaken identity and Mr. Qaissi’s life in recent years. And an extensive Editors’ Note the same day acknowledged the original article’s shortcomings.

This openness, however, didn’t involve fully exploring some journalistic practices that raised questions in my mind about the handling of the story.

Searching out what has already been published about a subject — “checking the clips” in newsroom parlance — is part of the blocking and tackling of journalism. When someone claiming to be the person behind such a powerful symbol is going to be displayed on Page 1 of The Times, extraordinary care is necessary. And the absence of any intense competitive or deadline pressure left time for extra care.

Is it possible that the story was “too good” to be fact-checked?

Although the initial reporting was sloppy, as Calame points out, the way the Times handled the scandal beyond that is commendable. Calame comes off as a straight-shooter, too. Hopefully his quality-control suggestions will be adopted. But without a competition of ideas and viewpoints inside the newsroom, these sorts of errors in reporting will continue. People tend to ignore the mistakes that further their own arguments, so if the newsroom is ideologically monolithic, the mistakes that favor the dominant ideology will likely continue.

Intellectual diversity can bring about a balance that helps keep everyone honest. If the Times really wants to improve its reporting, it doesn’t just need to perform more rigorous fact-checking, it needs to create a newsroom environment in which new perspectives challenge the most closely-held assumptions of the current employees.

24 March 2006 @ 4:55PM >> The Quote of the Day, courtesy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:

If you believe everything you read in Maureen Dowd, you better get a life.

15 January 2006 @ 10:50AM >> Support. Oppose. It seems that the New York Times’s position on wiretaps depends primarily on who occupies the White House.

4 January 2006 @ 1:50PM >> The factual inaccuracies in the reporting of self-proclaimed economics expert Paul Krugman are so plentiful that an ad-hoc “truth squad” exists online solely to correct his many errors.

You can add Stuart Browning to the ever-expanding list of truth squad members. Stuart—one of the executive producers of my upcoming film Indoctrinate U—is also working on his own project analyzing the Canadian health care system. Last October, he and Blaine Greenberg—my two partners in On The Fence Films—released a short film called Dead Meat on the topic, and more will come later this year.

In his research on health care, Browning is discovering the various tricks that advocates of socialized medicine use to portray Canada as the utopian ideal of health services, an image that Krugman tries to promote when he describes the Canadian model as the “obvious solution” to the perceived shortcomings of our system.

Browning writes:

What Krugman doesn’t say is that its easy to hold down health care costs if you do what Canada does: withhold medical treatment from sick and injured people. The U.S health care system could save billions of dollars if we drastically reduced the number of doctors, hospitals, outpatient clinics, medical devices and diagnostic machines available. If we followed Canada’s lead, we would severely limit each surgeon’s allotted hours in the operating room so that they couldn’t perform too many surgeries. Americans would wait months and years for critical medical tests and treatments - many would suffer greatly, become crippled, addicted to painkillers, go blind or die while waiting - however, the country would spend a lot less money on health care.

Browning then proceeds to administer a fact-based smackdown of Krugman’s spin. It’s a good read if you’re not Paul Krugman. And if you are, you may want to avoid the embarrassment.

9 December 2005 >> I remember seeing an old New Yorker cartoon years ago that had a guy in a bookstore telling a clerk, “I’d like a book on chutzpah, and I want you to pay for it.”

Out of that same mold comes this proposal from Joe Mathewson, a journalism professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism:

[N]ewspapers, as important to the civic health of our society as public transportation, have a claim on public allegiance that goes beyond financial measure. Does anyone believe that our society is better, our civic virtue enhanced, by the failure of the Washington Star and the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News and all the other fine dailies that have perished for purely financial reasons?

Because declining readership and revenue threaten the newspaper industry, Professor Mathewson recommends converting newspapers into tax-exempt entities. In effect, taxpayers would be underwriting the publishing of newspapers by giving them a free pass on their tax bills.

Just imagine...not only would you have the privilege of choosing to buy the print edition of The New York Times or paying $50 a year for TimesSelect, under Mathewson’s scheme, you’d have the additional privilege of subsidizing the Times through tax breaks, which would underwrite an editorial page that consistently calls for higher taxes. You’d be paying taxes so the Times could lobby for you to pay even more taxes.

Chutzpah indeed!

7 November 2005 >> Before Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr was killed in Iraq, he left a note on his laptop to be read by loved ones in the event of his death. Last week, The New York Times found itself embroiled in controversy after the paper was caught selectively editing Starr’s letter to remove any mention of his support for the war effort. Now, Starr’s surviving girlfriend Emmylyn Anonical is blasting the paper, saying that she was “upset about what they took out of that letter”:

In her first public comments since the letter scandal erupted, Anonical told The [New York] Post that going public with the private letter was one of the hardest decisions of her life.

Seeing it used by the Times to misrepresent her boyfriend’s beliefs about the war stung deeply, she said.

“The reason I chose to share that letter was the paragraph about why he was doing this, not the part about him expecting to die. It hurt, it really hurt,” she said by phone from Seattle.

The fallen Marine’s family and conservative critics are now accusing the “paper of record” of inserting its anti-war stance into news pages.

Starr’s uncle, Timothy Lickness, told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that the family’s reaction to the Times and its editing “was not so much anger as it was disappointment.” Apparently, even before this incident, the Times was not held in high regard by the family. “[T]his being the story in the Times, I don’t think anybody is all that surprised,” Lickness said. He’s now waiting to hear back from the paper:

We really are not a bitter family. We are not a family that holds grudges. We want to honor Jeffrey, and so we wanted the rest of his story to be told. I did write to the Times, and I asked them, I thought very politely, if they would run the rest of the story. I did not get a reply.

Meanwhile, in the context of a hard-to-locate correction from Times columnist Nick Kristof, Mickey Kaus discovers another possible explanation for the paper’s decision to hide some content behind the $50-a-year firewall known as TimesSelect. It turns out that TimesSelect is the new dumping ground for corrections that the paper would rather not print:

Kristof may have hit on the marketing breakthrough that will save TimesSelect. Call it TruthSelect. Here’s the plan: Have the op-ed columns in the print edition contain flagrant inaccuracies. Figure out what the factual version of events is, but print the corrected, accurate version only on the restricted, premium portion of the Web site, where people have to pay $49.95 to get at it. The B.S. is free. The truth you have to pay for! It’s so simple and intuitive it’s genius.

3 November 2005 @ 10:05AM >> When you turn on the news or open the paper for reporting from Iraq, what do you see? These days, news coverage is little more than a recitation of the latest casualty reports on our side. One solider was killed by a roadside bomb. Another soldier was killed in a helicopter crash. Do you ever wonder what these soldiers were doing while they were alive? You’ll rarely hear that. Are you ever curious about any of our military operations? If we still had the media of World War II, you might actually learn something beyond the latest death count. But today’s media can’t be bothered with that.

And how about the political progress in Iraq? There have been two historic national elections, one to fill a parliament, and another to ratify the country’s new constitution. Iraqis literally risked death just to vote, and they still had higher turnout than American elections do. Yet I saw more media coverage of long lines at polling places in Ohio than these two Iraqi elections combined. It’s pretty damn remarkable that a country went from a brutal dictatorship to a struggling but hopeful democracy in two years. So why aren’t we hearing more about it?

Whether it’s bias, laziness, incompetence, or just a fascination with the bloody, if you get all of your news from the establishment media, you’re getting a pretty skewed vision of the new Iraq. Many people have noticed this for a long time, soldiers especially. Recently, CNN interviewed one soldier who gave a critique on the media’s coverage:

[I]t is kind of disheartening sometimes to see everything focused on just the, the death and destruction and the IED strikes and not focused on how well the U.S. and coalition forces are doing building up the Iraqi police services and the Iraqi army. It really is a tremendous effort being put into that infrastructure and building a self-sufficient government over there. And they’re absolutely making progress.

But you almost never see that progress covered. Instead, you see the exact same story—with a few variables changed—repeated over and over.

The media’s decisions about what to cover and not cover are made by a handful of people in New York and Washington, DC. If they all share similar views, that may explain why virtually all coverage of Iraq is identical: the latest death count, and little more. It’s been this way for so long that even journalism students are beginning to notice. In the Columbia Journalism Review, certainly no bastion of neo-conservatism, one columnist questions the state of Iraq reporting:

[T]he 2,000th military death in Iraq happened to fall on exactly the same day as the Iraqi constitution was officially passed. The constitution story, though appearing on many front pages, paled in placement and headline size to the 2,000-death story, with many papers boldfacing and enlarging the number “2,000,” so that it eclipsed any other nearby story. As one would expect, conservative critics jumped at this as further proof that, once again, the liberal media was trumpeting the bad news and suppressing the good news.

The columnist did a quick search and found that “[i]n the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times there was just one story each about the constitution passing. Whereas the 2,000 deaths story inspired three to four stories and a couple op-eds and editorials per paper.”

In my mind, every soldier who dies is significant. The first, the fiftieth, and the five-hundredth death are equally worthy of our sorrow and our gratitude that some people are willing to sacrifice their lives for others. But the 2,000th death is a story only because we happen to use a base-10 counting system. Is one number a bigger story than another because it has a few zeros on the end? Is it a big enough story to eclipse something as historic as a freed people voting themselves a new constitution?

In the media’s reporting, the storyline for each event in Iraq is set even before it happens. To the small clique of media bigwigs who make these decisions, negative stories get prominence and virtually everything else gets ignored. So what happens when reality doesn’t quite fit the predetermined model? Well, that’s just a minor inconvenience that can be fixed with a little selective editing. Take, for example, The New York Times and its body count watch for the 2,000th soldier killed in Iraq. The Times coverage mentioned Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr, who died earlier this year on Memorial Day. Starr left a note for his loved ones to be read in the event of his death. Here’s some of what he wrote:

Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

Here’s how the Times reported Starr’s statement:

Sifting through Cpl. Starr’s laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the Marine’s girlfriend. “I kind of predicted this,” Cpl. Starr wrote of his own death. “A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.”

Starr’s words posed a problem for the predetermined storyline, so the Times just left most of them out. That’s how a statement in support of the operations in Iraq became a simple fatalistic prediction of death. And that’s far from the first time the Times has shaped quotes to fit its worldview.

So what does this all mean? For now, it means that the media’s artificially negative portrayal of Iraq is sapping U.S. support for the war. But in the long run, it’s proof that the establishment media is willing to destroy itself in the process of furthering a political agenda. The media’s only real asset is their credibility, and they’re pimping out that credibility every time they try to jam current reality into a Vietnam-era model of the world.

Psychologically, it is understandable. The media has never been as powerful as it was when it turned the nation against the Vietnam war. Some people have a hard time letting go of their glory days. But for an industry that’s already in decline, selling a product with so many obvious flaws makes about as much sense as shooting yourself in the head while you’re jumping off a skyscraper.

---

(Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously referred to Corporal Jeffrey B. Starr as the 2,000th U.S. soldier who died in Iraq. His profile was included in New York Times coverage of the 2,000 mark, but was not himself the 2,000th soldier killed.)

12 October 2005 @ 11:01AM >> A letter from Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq was intercepted by American forces this summer. Yesterday, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released the letter, which provides a window into the strategic thinking of al Qaeda’s leadership.

American Future has dissected the letter and notes that not all is well for al Qaeda or for the effort to stop the march of democracy in Iraq.

One interesting tidbit in the letter is the degree to which al Qaeda depends on the media for its own success. Zarqawi says “more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media” and holds out hope that “[t]hings may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam—and how they ran and left their agents—is noteworthy.”

In other words, Zarqawi hopes that the media will sway enough Americans against the war, leading to a Vietnam-like pull-out and a huge power vacuum (and opportunity for al Qaeda) in Iraq.

As if on cue, The New York Times spins the Zarqawi letter thusly:

In [the letter], Mr. Zawahiri told Mr. Zarqawi that the American occupation of Iraq had provided Islamic militants with a historic opportunity to win popular support.

Actually, the letter seems quite the opposite: al Qaeda’s global leadership has had its lines of communication severed and is in desperate need of money, and Zarqawi’s constant killings of Muslims in Iraq are turning the Iraqi people away from al Qaeda. Leave it to The New York Times to report this as “a historic opportunity to win popular support.” Yeah, and having your car stolen is a great opportunity to get a new car.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine takes a closer look at the letter and the Times’s mis-reporting of it.

19 September 2005 @ 7:57PM >> The New York Times launched a brilliant new initiative that just may help improve its image. Stung by constant embarrassment over the mental droolings of columnists like Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert, the Times has decided to partition off the offending writers, putting them behind a wall that costs $49.95 a year to breach.

No longer will the great unwashed masses of Internet writers be able to directly cite the work of these columnists, which may be precisely the point. Who’s going to bother paying for the privilege of fact-checking Paul Krugman? I’m sure I’m not the only one who won’t be forking over any cash to wade through the high school fantasies of Maureen Dowd, whose meandering columns read like notes taken by her psychologist.

I understand why the Times wishes to build a cocoon around itself, but doing so may only hasten its descent into irrelevance. Still, as an online-only reader of the paper, I applaud the decision. Not having the option of reading those columnists is going to save me a lot of time.

16 September 2005 @ 2:03PM >> Byron Calame, the public editor of The New York Times, blasted opinion columnist Paul Krugman and editorial page editor Gail Collins today for the failure to issue a correction over Krugman’s misrepresentation of the media-led recount effort in the wake of the 2000 election:

An Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times who makes an error “is expected to promptly correct it in the column.” That’s the established policy of Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page. Her written policy encourages “a uniform approach, with the correction made at the bottom of the piece.”

Two weeks have passed since my previous post spelled out the errors made by columnist Paul Krugman in writing about news media recounts of the 2000 Florida vote for president. Mr. Krugman still hasn’t been required to comply with the policy by publishing a formal correction. Ms. Collins hasn’t offered any explanation.

[...]

A bottom-line question: Does a corrections policy not enforced damage The Times’s credibility more than having no policy at all?

That’s a good question, and Mr. Calame deserves credit for asking it. At least one person at the Times apparently believes that long-term credibility matters; apparently it doesn’t to Paul Krugman or Gail Collins.

Welcome to the fight, Byron. You officially have my respect.

26 August 2005 @ 6:09PM >> Jack Kelly reports:

Colonel Thomas Spoehr is annoyed with New York Times reporter Michael Moss, for what I think is a good reason.

The story is a good example of how The New York Times manufactures bad news from Iraq.

20 August 2005 @ 6:26PM >> Mickey Kaus disagrees with my take on the Krugman article, while James B. rebuts Kaus.

My main problem with Krugman’s article is the apparent surety with which he makes the claim that Gore was the rightful winner in 2000. It was a close election, and trying to cast it in such certain terms is bogus. There were many scenarios in which Bush would have won, and one variant of counting in which Gore would have won. The lack of specificity in Krugman’s claim is a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader into believing that no scenario showed Bush the winner, whereas the reality is that most of them did. This is a pretty feeble foundation upon which to build the argument that your guy was robbed.

19 August 2005 @ 10:47AM >> In a New York Times op-ed piece, Paul Krugman pulls a fast one with the truth:

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.

Sorry, Paul, but that’s just not true. In fact, the two studies commissioned by various media organizations found the exact opposite: Bush would have won a full state-wide recount.

According to CNN:

If a recount of Florida’s disputed votes in last year’s close presidential election had been allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won the White House, two newspapers reported Wednesday.

The Miami Herald and USA Today conducted a comprehensive review of 64,248 “undercounted” ballots in Florida’s 67 counties that ended last month.

The other study had similar findings:

A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies [...]

The Times should know better than to print Krugman’s blatant misrepresentation. After all, the paper is listed as the first sponsor of the NORC study:

Included in the group are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Tribune Publishing (which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and a number of other newspapers), CNN, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times and the Palm Beach Post.

Of course, because Krugman doesn’t actually name the studies he’s apparently citing, he might not be talking about these two, which were widely regarded as the most thorough, comprehensive and credible. Maybe the consortium of Mad Magazine, Cracked and Comedy Central came to different conclusions.

The Times may eventually issue a retraction on Krugman’s fact-twisting, but by that point, hundreds of thousands of people will have read Krugman’s article and assumed that, since it ran in the nation’s “newspaper of record,” it must be true. The correction itself—if it is ever issued at all—will be buried days later in a small corner of the paper and will barely be noticed.

Good thing all those editors at the Times provide the layers of rigorous fact-checking that blogs lack!

4 August 2005 @ 6:45PM >> Over a week ago, I noted that liberal radio network Air America was under investigation. It looks like Air America was on the receiving end of potentially several hundred thousand dollars taken out of a charity for underprivileged children. Just the sort of thing you’d expect, say, The New York Times to cover, right? After all, the Times gave lots of ink—also known as free publicity—to the network when it was in its infancy. The paper even plugged a possible Senate candidacy for former funnyman Al Franken, the flagship host on Air America. Considering that the scandal centers on the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx—right in the backyard of Times-land—it seems tailor made for coverage in the nation’s self-proclaimed “newspaper of record.”

But, of course, the establishment media these days is so predictable in how bias shows itself that we all know the Times hasn’t covered the story, and probably won’t unless and until there’s a tidbit of information that casts Air America in a good light.

Michelle Malkin, who has been covering this story extensively, is keeping score in her latest update:

Number of NY Times articles mentioning Air America since March 2004: 59

Number of NY Times articles mentioning the Air Enron scandal: 0

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker of PowerLine takes note of what the Times is covering these days:

In today’s paper, for example, the Times covers a much more boring controversy in which Westchester County’s District Attorney is being pressed to reimburse the county for the expense of after-hours security. The story is a yawner. The DA has a legitimate argument that she needs 24-hour security because of her job; there are no falsified reports or conflicting stories; no one is stealing money from poor children or Alzheimer’s victims; and no one is funding a controversial political and commercial enterprise. Yet the Times finds the story newsworthy, while ignoring Air Enron, which is also taking place in its own back yard. Why? Well, maybe because it’s because the Westchester DA is a Republican, Jeanine Pirro, who is interested in higher office. Or maybe it’s because no hard work—like actually carrying out an investigation—was necessary; all the Times had to do was quote Democratic Party spokesmen.

Or maybe both.

The Times is getting criticized because this is the sort of story that they should be covering, and most certainly would if the hosts on Air America had political views that occupied the other side of the political spectrum.

Investor’s Business Daily argues:

[M]oney intended for poor minority children and Alzheimer’s victims was instead used to make sure the financially tanking and ratings-troubled Air America could keep blathering.

Public funds used to prop up a business! Just the kind of scandal that left-leaning media would die for. Yet for some reason they’re giving this one a pass.

Is it because there are no mean ol’ conservatives to blame?

When [Rush] Limbaugh’s problems with painkillers came to light, the mainstream media could hardly contain themselves. They called him a “pill popper” and hypocrite and cheered for release of his medical records. And when he returned to the air, they couldn’t talk enough about his stay in rehab.

Al Franken, Air America’s featured host, seized the moment and labeled Limbaugh a “drug addict” — after calling him a “Big Fat Idiot” in the title of his book years before.

Nothing wrong, mind you, with reporting on Limbaugh’s woes. Nothing, that is, as long as the media cover flaws of those on the left with equal enthusiasm.

On an increasingly frequent basis, the establishment media unwittingly reveals itself as a champion of a particular ideology, not the dispassionate conveyor of information that they claim to be. At the same time, TV news networks and major newspapers continue to lose audience. Part of that is due to the fact that the Internet has made their distribution channels redundant. Another reason might be that their product has become boring. These days, it is quite easy to predict what stories the Times will report and what spin their coverage will contain. If I can predict what I’ll read in tomorrow’s Times long before the printing presses finish their daily run, why bother paying for the paper?

14 July 2005 @ 9:39AM >> If you’ve been relying on the establishment press for news on Karl Rove’s apparent involvement the Valerie Plame controversy, you might be missing a few very important details that PowerLine and The Wall Street Journal have outlined.

I haven’t had much to say on this affair because almost all of the reporting is based on speculation about secret grand jury testimony. There aren’t many real details known except that Karl Rove spoke to a few reporters, a fact that the entire media establishment is now spinning into scandal. Okay, fine, if Karl Rove broke the law, President Bush should get rid of him, but there’s absolutely no evidence of that; there are just the expressed wishes of a few Democrats and their media mouthpieces.

Something about the way the media is acting makes me think they’re going to end up with egg on their faces yet again. That’s just a gut feeling, perhaps fed by my own biases—in this case, my hyper-skepticism about the press—so I reserve the right to be wrong.

Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter, sits in jail right now for refusing to testify for the grand jury. She claims she’s protecting a source, but she also admits that the source granted her permission to talk. In her judgment, the source’s permission was granted under duress and therefore wasn’t truly voluntary, so she’s sticking with her commitment to hide her source even though she’s been released from that commitment. Would a New York Times reporter really go to jail to protect Karl Rove?

Miller believes that her source was essentially coerced to release her from the confidentiality agreement. President Bush is only person who could conceivably exert pressure on Rove to release Miller from the confidentiality agreement. So we’re expected to believe that Miller sits in jail even though Rove and (presumably) President Bush authorized her testimony. Sorry, that doesn’t seem plausible to me. My suspicion is that Miller’s source—and perhaps the source of other reporters—is not Karl Rove. Perhaps the source is actually someone who will embarrass the Times instead of the Bush Administration. That would explain the tight lips over at the Times.

Judith Miller is now being cast as a noble journalist who’s willing to go to jail to stand by her principles. Is she protecting a source, or is she really just protecting the name of the Times from further self-inflicted sullying?

The only people who know for sure are the source and a few people at The New York Times. But the Times isn’t talking. So much for the public’s right to know!

27 June 2005 >> NPR reporter Nina Totenberg and Newsweek editor Evan Thomas bicker over the “liberal” label:

Evan Thomas: Can I ask, is this going to, is this attack going to make NPR a little less liberal?

Nina Totenberg: I don’t think we’re liberal to begin with and I think if you would listen, Evan, you would know that.

Thomas: I do listen to you and you’re not that liberal, but you’re a little bit liberal.

Totenberg: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a fair criticism, I really don’t — any more than, any more than you would say that Newsweek is liberal.

Thomas: I think Newsweek is a little liberal.

Hey, at least Thomas is honest.

Speaking of honesty, the New York Times is once again admitting that it knows what it is. In a recent memo to Times staffers (PDF file, 10 pages), editor Bill Keller wrote:

[D]iversifying the range of viewpoints reported — and understood — in our pages is not mainly a matter of hiring a more diverse work force. It calls for a concerted effort by all of us to stretch beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.

That would be a nice trick, if the Times can pull it off. Either way, it’s a good sign that the Times is thinking in such terms.

Five years ago, you never would have heard such admissions of bias coming straight from the mouths of the establishment media elites. We’ve come a long way...

26 June 2005 @ 12:55PM >> The Arts section of today’s New York Times discusses the emerging conservative film movement. Although it’s quite nice that the article contains a mention of Brainwashing 101, the casual reader would probably leave with the impression that conservative = religious right. That’s too bad; conservatism as an intellectual strain is far more diverse than that, which was very apparent at last year’s two conservative film festivals.

22 May 2005 >> In a New York Times article entitled “Believe It: The Media’s Credibility Headache Gets Worse,” Patrick D. Healy unintentionally illustrates precisely why the media’s credibility is in tatters (emphasis mine):

Almost like clockwork, each new month seems to usher in a new controversy over journalistic competence or integrity - the latest being the retracted May 9 article in Newsweek, about a report that American interrogators flushed a Koran down the toilet, that has been linked by the White House to at least 17 deaths during anti-American protests that followed.

Actually, Mr. Healy, it was the rioters themselves—or, as you put it, “protesters”—who carried signs criticizing the alleged Koran desecration that Newsweek reported. The Muslim rioters conveniently rendered their signs in English, knowing that the establishment press would gladly pick up and broadcast the message to the English-speaking world. So the link wasn’t drawn by the White House, it was explicitly stated up front, from the very beginning, by the rioters.

By blaming the White House, Healy is engaging in a little intellectual sleight-of-hand. The way he reports it, the reader is left to conclude that the there was no connection between the riots and the Newsweek report until the White House suggested it. In other words, according to Healy, the link was nothing more than White House opinion. The only way to reach that conclusion is to completely ignore what the rioters themselves said in their signs. With this logic, Newsweek is cast as a victim of White House spin. This media-as-victim tactic is telling, considering an analogy drawn by Healy earlier in the article:

[...] Johnson & Johnson proved that credibility, not to mention market share, could be regained after scandal - in its case, a series of deaths caused by cyanide-laced [Tylenol] capsules some 20 years ago. Part of the strategy was to portray the company as a victim in its own right.

[...]

Compared with the news media outlets, Tylenol may have had it easy. It would be hard for the media to pitch itself as a innocent victim of its own shortcomings.

It can’t be too hard, apparently, because that’s exactly what Healy does by implying the White House concocted a connection that the rioters themselves claimed quite openly. Maybe asking a Times reporter to look at the photographic evidence is too much. Either way, there’s one assertion Healy has right: “American confidence in the news media is at an all-time low.”

13 May 2005 >> NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen praises the 18-month tenure of the very first public editor of The New York Times, Daniel Okrent. I’m inclined to agree. Okrent was the very first Times insider to admit the paper’s bias. And he did so in a matter-of-fact way that was not snide, not defensive and not dismissive of those of us who’ve been pointing out the bias for years.

By being the first to speak the unspeakable truth about the paper, Okrent made it that much easier for similar honesty to prevail in the future. As a business, that would be very healthy for the Times. Conservatives will read liberal papers. But fewer conservatives will read liberal papers that insult our intelligence by pretending not to have the perspective that they do. If Okrent’s legacy lives on, the Times might be able to lure back some readers who find the newfound candor refreshing.

12 May 2005 >> The New York Times reports on its “Preserving Our Readers’ Trust” report. We can quibble about whether the “preserving” in the title of the report should be replaced with “regaining,” but if the Times implements some of these suggestions, then it will have taken an important first step towards regaining some credibility.

The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye writes:

In order to build readers’ confidence, an internal committee at The New York Times has recommended taking a variety of steps, including having senior editors write more regularly about the workings of the paper, tracking errors in a systematic way and responding more assertively to the paper’s critics.

[...]

The committee, which was charged last fall by Bill Keller, the executive editor, with examining how the paper could increase readers’ trust, said there was “an immense amount that we can do to improve our journalism.”

As examples, the report cited limiting anonymous sources, reducing factual errors and making a clearer distinction between news and opinion. It also said The Times should make the paper’s operations and decisions more transparent to readers through methods like making transcripts of interviews available on its Web site.

The report also said The Times should make it easier for readers to send e-mail to reporters and editors. “The Times makes it harder than any other major American newspaper for readers to reach a responsible human being,” the report said.

[...]

One area of particular concern to Mr. Keller at the outset was the relentless public criticism of the paper, amplified by both the left and right on the Internet, that peaked during last year’s presidential campaign. The paper was largely silent during those attacks, and Mr. Keller asked the committee to consider whether it was “any longer possible to stand silent and stoic under fire.”

The committee asserted that The Times must respond to its critics. The report said it was hard for the paper to resist being in a “defensive crouch” during the election but now urged The Times to explain itself “actively and earnestly” to critics and to readers who are often left confused when charges go unanswered.

This would be good. One of the problems with media bias is that its very existence magnifies the perception of itself. Sometimes errors are the result of incompetence, not bias, but when the slant of the incompetence matches the prevailing slant of the media’s bias, people tend to assume it’s all bias. If the media cleansed itself of actual bias—assuming it is even possible for humans to do that—it would find itself under much less assault for the honest reporting and honest mistakes that are often perceived as bias.

Speaking of mistakes, the report highlighted the paper’s astonishingly high error ratio. (Alex Rodriguez, eat your heart out!) On any given day, the paper corrected an average of nearly nine errors:

As for errors, the report noted that the paper printed 3,200 corrections last year and proposed a system to track errors to detect patterns to try to prevent them from recurring.

Of course, this error rate would be even higher if the paper issued corrections for minor infractions like doctoring quotes.

The committee said the system would not be used to compile error rates of individual reporters, noting that using raw numeric counts as part of a reporter’s evaluation “would breed resentment.”

Resentment on whose part? The people screwing up? What kind of politically correct management worries that keeping metrics of your employees’ performance might upset them? Sounds a bit like the schools that prevent teachers from using red pens over worries that the color might hurt kids’ feelings. Maybe a lax management philosophy is what led to such a high level of mistakes in the first place.

Other perspectives: Media insider Jeff Jarvis likes what he sees in the Seelye article, while blogger Ace of Spaces dug through the report and detects an admission of bias:

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.”

We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. We particularly slip into these traps in feature stories when reporters and editors think they are merely presenting an interesting slice of life, with little awareness of the power of labels. We need to be more vigilant about the choice of language not only in the text but also in headlines, captions and display type.

[...]

In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic. Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that we are missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.

This isn’t the first time the paper has admitted its bias, but still, the Times should be commended for its honesty. There’s nothing wrong with a liberal paper that owns up to its perspective, as long as opinion is not presented as news. It may take a while for the culture within the newsroom to embrace the suggestions of this report, though; the evidence is, they haven’t yet.

7 April 2005 >> In exchange for an early look at Columbia University’s report absolving itself of charges of bias in the classroom, The New York Times agreed not to speak with any of the students who lodged the complaints:

With a highly sensitive report coming out about allegations of misconduct by anti-Israel professors, Columbia University officials turned to the news organization they trusted most to handle the delicate subject: the New York Times.

Representatives of the two institutions then struck a deal: Columbia would grant the Times exclusive early access to the report if the Times agreed that its reporter wouldn’t seek comment on the report from interested parties, or do additional reporting until the next day when the report was made public. As it happened, the newspaper, with Columbia’s permission, did seek comment from a faculty member whose conduct was criticized in the report, Joseph Massad, but it kept its promise not to solicit comment from the Jewish students who had come forward with the complaints against the professors.

This deal, first reported by The New York Sun’s Jacob Gershman late last week, allowed Columbia to present its spin in The New York Times unchallenged by the students until the following day, when the Times produced a follow-up report that included quotes from the students. Today, the Times finally acknowledged this egregious oversight in journalistic ethics:

The article did not disclose The Times’s source for the document, but Columbia officials have since confirmed publicly that they provided it, a day before its formal release, on the condition that the writer not seek reaction from other interested parties.

Aside from the Times and the school’s own Columbia Spectator, no other media outlets were given a sneak peek at the report. In fact, when a reporter from the Sun went to Columbia seeking a copy of the report (it has since been made public), she was threatened with arrest.

It’s no wonder the school favors the Times; in all the reporting of the recent controversies at Columbia, the Times has consistently provided the most favorable coverage to the university. But what does the Times get out of the deal? A one-day scoop on a report that makes no news? (”Stop the presses! Huge organization investigates self, finds self innocent!”) Or it is another example of the Times using its news pages to push its political views? (”There’s no bias in the classroom. Seriously! The people who run the classrooms told us themselves.”)

For several days earlier this week, I called Karen Arenson—the Times reporter who filed the story—requesting more information on this deal. None of my calls were ever returned. I guess now I know why.

31 March 2005 @ 4:28PM >> Remember the unrelenting coverage of the Enron scandal? Listening for similar media indignation over Oil-for-Food? You’re probably hearing nothing but crickets and faint coughs.

Dollar-wise, Oil-for-Food is a much bigger scandal, and that’s ignoring the fact that the U.N. and some of our supposed allies were essentially being paid by Saddam Hussein to oppose our foreign policy position on Iraq. You’d think something like that would be worth covering extensively, but then again, you’re not the editor of The New York Times.

At his G-Scobe website, Gregory Scoblete takes a look at the Times’s editorial outrage gap between Enron and Oil-for-Food. Illuminating, but not entirely surprising.

28 March 2005 >> In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes reports on the latest Republican-bashing mystery memo promoted by the establishment press:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist never saw it. Neither did the Senate Republican whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The number three Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, didn’t get a copy. Nor did the senator with the closest relationship with President Bush, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. And the senator with the familiar Republican last name, Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, didn’t see it or read it. The same is true of Senator Mel Martinez, the rookie Republican from Florida.

Yet the infamous memo that argued Republicans stood to gain politically by saving the life of Terri Schiavo was characterized by ABC News as consisting of “GOP Talking Points.” True, a few paragraphs were of Republican origin. They had been lifted, word for word, from a Martinez press release outlining the provisions of his legislative proposal, “The Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act.” This was the inoffensive part of the memo. The offensive part—it didn’t come from Martinez—left the strong impression that Republicans are callous and cynical in their attempt to save Schiavo’s life, ill-motivated in the extreme.

Despite the fact that nobody could authenticate the memo or determine its source, both ABC News and The Washington Post described it using language that implied it came from the Republican Party itself:

Supposedly the memo was distributed only to Republicans on the Senate floor. Ergo, it was a Republican document. ABC correspondent Linda Douglass first reported its existence on March 18, saying the network “has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case.” She mentioned the two offensive passages, and the memo was shown on the screen. The ABC website was explicit about the source of the memo: These were “GOP talking points on Terri Schiavo.” Two days later, the Washington Post referred to it as “an unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators.”

There wasn’t a hint in these reports the memo could have any other source but Republicans. Yet there was no evidence it had come from Republicans. It was unsigned and had no letterhead or date. Nothing indicated it came from the Republican leadership or the House or Senate campaign committee or from the Republican National Committee or even from a stray Republican staffer.

[...]

How did ABC and others get wind of the memo in the first place? It came from “Democratic aides,” according to the New York Times, who “said it had been distributed to Senate Republicans.” Not exactly a disinterested source.

How curious that such sloppy reporting just so happens to work against Republicans yet again. But it gives the Republicans an opportunity to strike back: simply author an “incriminating” but unsigned memo with no letterhead, get some GOP staffers to pass it out, claiming that it came from Democrats, and wait for the establishment media to report the “story.” Think you might be waiting a long time? Then I guess you understand the game by now.

Update: The memo’s author has come forward.

25 July 2004 @ 3:38PM >> It’s I-told-you-so time! This admission from New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent confirms what may of us have known for years:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

[...]

Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.

Okrent goes on to describe how the culture at the Times views some people as “as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide,” such as “devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, [and] Texans.” (I would add conservatives to that list.) Okrent argues that this culture permeates the Times as a whole and is not limited to the editorial page, the one place where bias is understandable.

While it may not seem that we should be applauding Mr. Okrent for stating the obvious, one must appreciate the massive institutional resistance that likely opposed such a public admission. But it is a wise move, not because it fixes anything, but because credibility is the primary asset of any media outlet. If a paper isn’t even honest about itself, how can one believe anything else printed there?

Mr. Okrent notes how the perception of liberal bias at the Times allows readers to dismiss what they read there:

Newspapers have the right to decide what’s important and what’s not. But their editors must also expect that some readers will think: “This does not represent me or my interests. In fact, it represents my enemy.” So is it any wonder that the offended or befuddled reader might consider everything else in the paper—including, say, campaign coverage—suspicious as well?

Okrent’s article may be a one-time event, or it may be the first step toward bringing balance to the Times. If it’s the latter, then this admission represents a monumental moment at the Times. And if not, then at least it provides some ammunition against liberals who either refuse to admit or can’t see the slant at the Times. (I had one college professor who repeatedly argued that the Times was right-wing, an argument we stopped having after I showed him that the Times hadn’t endorsed a single Republican presidential candidate in over 50 years but had consistently backed liberal icons like George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Mike Dukakis, all of whom lost landslide elections.)

Good for you, Mr. Okrent. I’m sure this won’t make you terribly popular among your peers over at the Times. But the truth will rarely win you a popularity contest.

20 June 2004 @ 4:59PM >> First, his autobiography gets panned by The New York Times:

As his celebrated 1993 speech in Memphis to the Church of God in Christ demonstrated, former President Bill Clinton is capable of soaring eloquence and visionary thinking. But as those who heard his deadening speech nominating Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta well know, he is also capable of numbing, self-conscious garrulity.

Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Clinton’s much awaited new autobiography “My Life” more closely resembles the Atlanta speech, which was so long-winded and tedious that the crowd cheered when he finally reached the words “In closing...”

The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull—the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.

Yikes. One would certainly expect a New York Times reviewer to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt, especially one who finds much to praise about Clinton and his presidency—so maybe the book really is this bad. (Of course, that may depend on the precise meaning of “is.”)

It gets worse for poor Bubba. Apparently, he lost his cool during a yet-to-be-aired BBC interview:

The former American president, famed for his amiable disposition, becomes visibly angry and rattled, particularly when Dimbleby asks him whether his publicly declared contrition over the [Monica Lewinsky] affair is genuine.

“As outbursts go, it is not just some flash that is over in an instant. It is something substantial and sustained,” said one BBC executive who viewed the interview footage. “It is memorable television which will give the public a different insight into the President’s character.”

3 July 2003 >> As errors and distortions plague the traditional news media, Internet outlets have emerged as an important watchdog, checking the power of the press and providing some much-needed media accountability. What impact has this new “open-source media” had, and what does it mean for the future of reporting? More >>