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Times Watch for 04/23/03
So What’s President Clinton’s Excuse?
In her review of FOX’s “Mr. Personality,” yet another new reality show, the Times television reporter Alessandra Stanley says host Monica Lewinsky is a bad girl: “[Ms. Lewinsky] was brought up in Beverly Hills wealth and privilege, but those advantages did not inhibit her from dallying with President Bill Clinton like a saucy Edwardian upstairs maid. Nor did that public disgrace shame her into silent penance.”
Hmm. Who knew the paper had such a scarlet letter streak? The Times thinks former intern Lewinsky is the one who should beg for America’s forgiveness, not Clinton, former leader of the free world. Well, at least Monica keeps her mouth shut about politics, unlike her presidential paramour, who continues inflicting his self-gratifying views on us.
The Times “Public Lives” of Liberals
The Times “Public Lives” feature on producer Harit Allan Buchman is only the latest example of the paper using the recurring personality profile as a vehicle for unadulterated liberal advocacy. Buchman is the producer of “The Exonerated,” an anti-death penalty theatre piece which has featured left-wing activists like Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.
Most “Public Lives” are unobjectionable slices of city life. (Sample headline: “So Many Street Corners, So Many Stories.”) And it’s understood that a newspaper feature profiling Manhattanites and other area people will hit a lot of liberals. But “Public Lives” makes it all too obvious: Of the last 20 editions dating back to March 20, five have provided unedited liberal advocacy, while only one featured a right-leaning subject—and that one uniquely contained criticism.
In addition to the Buchman profile, “Public Lives” has given laudatory looks at Vanita Gupta of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey’s liberal chief of staff James Fox; Roger Ullman, creator of Environmental Entrepreneurs; and New Jersey’s commissioner of environmental protection, Bradley Campbell. In each case, the subjects are given free reign to promote their liberal causes without journalistic interference or even a discouraging word.
The one conservative-leaning voice featured in “Public Lives” since March 20 is Morton Klein, the pro-war president of the Zionist Organization of the America. But unlike the local-paper style boosterism that greets the liberal subjects of “Public Lives,” Klein’s profile contains criticism: “Not surprisingly, Mr. Klein’s critics fault him for seeing the world in black and white terms and for smearing his enemies.”
Middle East specialist Dilip Hiro’s op-ed, “Why the Mullahs Love a Revolution” asserts the UN is Iraq’s best hope for democracy, and calls on America to “step down as power broker.” Hiro writes: “The United Nations, with strong representation from such secular democratic Muslim countries as Turkey, Malaysia and Bangladesh, would seem to have the best chance of success. This, of course, is the last thing the Bush administration wants.”
But does Hiro know what he’s talking about? Well, here’s
one of his
pre-war predictions: “Were the Bush administration to repeat its Afghan military performance in Iraq – deploying up to 250,000 troops on land, sea and air – with the concomitant loss of thousands of civilian lives and massive damage to Iraqi public and private property, it would daily provide hours of visual record of the carnage to tens of millions of Arabs and Muslims. One can well imagine how popular feeling in the Arab and Muslim states would be inflamed and the destabilizing consequences if that sentiment were to escalate into street rioting and attacks on Western targets in those countries.” So far, Hiro’s predictive record is on par with that of the
Times Nicholas Kristof
and R.W. Apple.
There’s nothing wrong with anti-war points of view. But Hiro’s not just anti-war; he’s been proven wrong on the very nature of the post-war Middle East. So why does the
Times still consider him credible?
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org