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Times Watch for 04/03/03
The Times Indecent Proposal
“Scratch an anti-American in Europe, and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard or to have an article published in the New York Times.” That’s what Britain’s minister for Europe, Denis McShane, recently told Newsweek (and the Times has often obliged.) Now there’s evidence the Times not only readily publishes anti-war opinions, but actively solicits them from noteworthy figures.
Lawrence Eagleburger, secretary of state during the first Bush administration, gave some fascinating insight into the process Wednesday night on the Fox News show Hannity & Colmes. Responding to a Hannity query, Eagleburger said: “About ten days ago, I was approached from the New York Times to write an op-ed piece. To make it very short, when I talked to them about it, I was told what we want is criticism of the administration….Needless to say, I did not write the op-ed piece.”
Howell Raines recently told the New York Observer: “We live in a time when there’s a lot of ideological journalism going on. I think it’s interesting, but it has nothing to do with what we do.” Raines is half-right.
No Welcome For US Troops? That’s Soooo 20 Minutes Ago…
Christopher Marquis’ Thursday profile of Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke seems a bit behind the times (and the Times too): “More troubling, she faces a growing chorus, including several retired generals, questioning whether the war plan of Mr. Rumsfeld and his lieutenants was ill advised and whether the administration fueled unrealistic expectations that Iraqis would welcome American troops with open arms.”
Contrast that with the opening lines of Jim Dwyer’s front-page story that same-day from Najaf, Iraq. It’s a long excerpt, but it’s heartening to read:
“In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today. What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring? ‘Democracy,’ the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. ‘Whiskey. And sexy!’ Around him, the crowd roared its approval.
“Yet when the first round of welcomes to American soldiers and journalists were exuberantly, even affectionately completed, the people in the crowd had a more urgent request than liquor. They wanted water. There has been none in this town for four days. Again and again, people pointed to the sky, tilted their heads back and pointed to their open mouths. A boy, age about 6 or 7, approached an American reporter and said the two words that were uttered over and over: ‘America. Good.’ Then he kissed the reporter on the cheek, shook his hand and pointed to the sky, pleading for water.”
The Times Parrots The Military Line--On One Issue
Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse’s front-page story Wednesday on two racial preference cases being argued at the Supreme Court pits the “nuanced” liberal view versus the “absolutist” conservative one. The article’s headline, “Justices Look for Nuance in Race-Preference Case,” is actually more balanced than the article itself, which uses the preferred liberal phrase “affirmative action” 10 times and the more balanced “race-conscious government policies” just once.
Greenhouse also gets a huge assist from a group of retired senior military officers who filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of racial preferences. “Opponents of affirmative action came to the Supreme Court today to make an absolute case against race-conscious government policies but found the justices impatient with absolutes and hungry for nuance,” she writes. “Prepared to argue the merits of the color-blind principle, the opponents found the justices more concerned about a world where color still matters and where senior military officers describe affirmative action as essential for national security.”
Sigh. Who needs People For the American Way when you have military people making liberal arguments for quotas? Still, it’s odd that, for all the Times vaunted skepticism on the Iraq war, it’s content to leave an opinion from a military source unquestioned when it hews to the Times view.
"A BIT" Misleading?
From the Times correction page: "A front-page article on Tuesday about criticism voiced by American military officers in Iraq over war plans omitted two words from an earlier comment by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps. General Wallace had said (with the omission indicated by uppercasing), "The enemy we're fighting is A BIT different from the one we war-gamed against."
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org