Click for Main Weblog

   
The Weblog at The View from the Core - Mon. 12/02/02 12:10:11 PM
   
   

All the News That's Fit for Ginning Up

More and more folks are taking notice of the political agenda of The New York Times.

Some of them are a few decades late.

Newsweek, of all things, has an article (at MSNBC) on the machinations of the New York Times' editor Howell Raines to make the newspaper more blatant in its pursuit of a left-wing political agenda.

.... It’s not just the newsroom that’s concerned. From conservative activists to everyday readers, many people around the country are noticing a change in the way the Old Gray Lady covers any number of issues, from the looming war with Iraq to the sex-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church to the New Jersey Senate race. Raines, the hard-charging executive editor, has an almost religious belief in “flooding the zone” — using all the paper’s formidable resources to pound away on a story. But increasingly, the Times is being criticized for ginning up controversies as much as reporting them out. “This is certainly a shift from The New York Times as the ‘paper of record’,” says Alex Jones, a former Times media reporter and coauthor of “The Trust,” a book about the paper. “It’s a more activist agenda in terms of policy, especially compared to an administration that’s much more conservative.” Or as Slate’s press critic, Jack Shafer, puts it, “The Times has assumed the journalistic role as the party of opposition.” ....

As far as I can tell, Raines' only mistake, as far as many of these complainants, is to make the Times' bias unmistakable. Only conservatives complained when the bias has been subtle.

.... But the paper’s recent penchant for shaping the national debate isn’t easily articulated by politics or policy. Retiring Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli, who dropped out of his re-election race after being dogged by scandal, believes the Times’s enmity helped force him from the race. And President Bill Clinton was ferociously hounded by Raines’s editorial page....

You don't suppose the Times' alleged "enmity" towards Torricelli might have been engendered (if it existed) by their increasing trepidation that he was going to lose — do you? And I don't suppose somebody, somewhere, has any documentation whatever to back up this claim about the Times' having "ferociously hounded" Bill Clinton — do they?

If Raines is working in any tradition, it’s that of the crusading Southern populist. He began his career in Alabama, and cut his teeth at a time when the Southern papers were still charging the barricades of segregation. On the foreign-policy front, the Vietnam era helped cement his skepticism about government authority when lives are on the line. He once said the Reagan years “oppressed me because the callousness and the greed and the hardhearted attitude toward people who have very little in this society.” ....

Ah! His partisan crusade was engendered by his having been a living saint. What a relief! (By the way, wasn't it Bill Clinton who signed welfare reform into law? Just checking.)

Whatever their track record, it seems clear that the Times’s leaders have sometimes gone out on a limb. In August, the paper printed two consecutive front-page stories incorrectly including Henry Kissinger among the “prominent Republicans” opposing war with Iraq (Kissinger had expressed realpolitik reservations but stopped far short of arguing against an attack). After an ensuing flap, the paper assigned a media reporter a story on how the American press was increasingly seen as driving the debate on Iraq.

Gee. If the newspaper were interested in reporting reality, instead of trying to influence perceptions of reality, that reporter's assignment would have been "a story on whether the American press was increasingly seen as driving the debate on Iraq." No?

According to a number of sources at the Times, the reporter, David Carr, went back to his editors and told them the media, per se, weren’t driving anything: the only publication injecting itself into the policy debate was the Times itself. (Carr did not return calls seeking comment.) The story never ran. An editor’s note, explaining the Times’s mistakes, was printed instead. But people were talking.

Somebody ought to get this Raines guy into outright politics, instead of politics masquerading as journalism: I say, nominate him for DNC chairman!

(Thanks Robert.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 12/02/02 12:10:11 PM
Categorized as Media.

   

The Blog from the Core © 2002-2008 E. L. Core. All rights reserved.