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Times Watch for 04/14/03
Times Golf Headline: A Good Lie For Martha Burk?
Times reporter Bill Pennington on Sunday spots only “about 40 supporters” at Martha Burk’s much-hyped protest at Augusta National--only ten times more people than the Times sent to cover the Masters itself. The Times tries to give Burk’s protest against Augusta’s all-male membership some late lift with a grossly misleading headline on Pennington’s piece: “She Did Not Prevail This Year, but Burk Has Time on Her Side.” That headline is based solely on a quote from an outside source.
Sportswriter Clifton Brown also forwards a bulletin from Augusta that is no doubt disappointing to the Times editorial staff: “What CBS announcers did not do yesterday was talk about the protests taking place down the street from Augusta National Golf Club because of the club’s men-only membership policy, a front-burner topic for much of the last nine months.” How hurt the Times must be: All those helpful protest-coverage pointers the paper gave CBS going for naught!
You Can Trust Him…To Keep Your Taxes High
When the New York Times salutes a Republican senator as “a man of his word” not once but twice in one piece, alert readers know to watch their wallets. On Saturday’s front-page, David Rosenbaum lauds Sen. Charles Grassley for sparing the nation a “big” tax cut: “The turning point — one of the rare occasions when the outcome of important legislation turned on a single speech — came when Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Finance Committee and a politician with a reputation for keeping his word, promised on the Senate floor that he would not permit, under any circumstances, a law this year that would reduce taxes by more than $350 billion over 10 years.”
After Rosenbaum warns that House Republicans, who “enforce strict discipline in their ranks,” won’t stop fighting for a larger tax cut, he continues: “But at least as of tonight, the intractability of the Republican defectors in the Senate and Mr. Grassley's formidable reputation for straight-talking seemed to mean that Mr. Bush and Republican leaders in Congress have an uphill fight if they hope to get a tax reduction larger than $350 billion.” Thank God we have a straight-talker like Grassley fighting to protect our right to…high taxes.
Times columnist Thomas Friedman ponders from Umm Qasr, Iraq, on why Arab countries don’t like the United States: “Partly that's because their media willfully distorted what we did, and partly it's because America has used its power out here more to defend oil and Israel than democracy.”
But in defending Israel, the United States is in fact defending the only democracy in the Middle East. Friedman’s lazy assertion that Arabs want the US to fight harder for democracy in the region is contradicted by Neil MacFarquhar in his Week in Review section piece, “Humiliation and Rage Stalk the Arab World.” MacFarquhar writes: “Sure, Saddam Hussein ranked up there in the pantheon of world-class tyrants, a torturer and mass murderer who slaughtered thousands of his people and waged reckless wars that beggared the rest. But he was still an Arab leader ruling an Arab country — their tyrant.”
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org