• Home
• Articles
• Support
• About
• Links
Times Watch for May 29, 2003
Richard Stevenson’s story, “Bush Signs Tax Cut Bill, Dismissing All Criticism” opens on this discouraging note: “President Bush signed into law today the third tax cut in three years, dismissing criticism of the legislation's cost, fairness and effectiveness, while casting the measure as ‘essential action to strengthen the American economy.’ Despite widespread disagreement among economists about the bill's potency as economic medicine in the short run and its implications for the national debt in the long run, Mr. Bush hailed the legislation as a job-creating measure that would also put much-needed cash in the hands of working people.”
Stevenson poses the alternatives in such a way that Bush can’t win: “Having aggressively sold the tax cut as a cure-all for an economy that has not been growing fast enough to prevent a steady loss of jobs or encourage a recovery in the stock market, Mr. Bush has much riding politically on whether it delivers on its promise--or is perceived to do so, given forecasts that the economy is recovering gradually anyway.”
How convenient. The way Stevenson frames the debate, Bush and his tax cut can be blamed if the economy remains in the tank, while Bush gets no credit if the economy improves, since forecasts show it’s recovering anyway.
For the rest of Richard Stevenson’s tax cut story, click here.
More Mean Republicans And Helpless Democrats
Adam Clymer’s audio www.nytimes.com/washington follow-up to his two-part front-page series on the state of the parties works over the same biased ground: “[Republicans] play rougher than the Democrats do, whether it’s Willie Horton or ads that charge that a triple amputee, Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War, was not concerned about national security. The Democrats don’t play that hard, and it might be nicer if neither party did, but if one party is and the other isn’t, the party that plays tough is going to win.”
In fact, Clymer has cited the Willie Horton advertisement in print seven times since 1991, as an example of Republican hardball tactics. Yet Clymer has yet to utter a single comment on the presidential campaign ad the NAACP ran in the fall of 2000 linking Texas Gov. George Bush to the dragging death of James Byrd, a black man in Texas.
No More Braggadocio at the Times?
After completing the no-doubt unenviable task of covering Times executive editor Howell Raines’ mea culpa to the paper’s staff, Steinberg covers the resignation of Times reporter Rick Bragg.
Steinberg’s story, “Times Reporter Steps Down Amid Criticism” says Bragg’s resignation “came at the end of a frenetic day of debate among journalists over the appropriate amount of assistance that correspondents should receive from freelancers. Some of Mr. Bragg's colleagues on the national staff had exchanged phone calls and e-mail messages, angered by comments from Mr. Bragg suggesting that it was routine for Times correspondents to rely on freelance contributors to do the bulk of the reporting on some articles.”
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post goes into more detail, describing a “newsroom [that] has erupted in anger over reporter Rick Bragg and his aggressive defense of relying heavily on stringers and interns, with many reporters denouncing the practice and insisting that's not the way they do business.” Kurtz also relays: “Peter Kilborn, a national correspondent based in Washington, called Bragg's remarks ‘outrageous. I just don't do it,’ he said, adding that he has used stringers only to get minor details on breaking-news events. ‘I want to control the story. I know what the essential elements are for a feature story. I want to see the images. I want to hear the voices. It's a matter of pride. I'm not going to paint a picture and have somebody else come in with his brush.’”
For the rest of Jacques Steinberg’s piece on Rick Bragg’s resignation, click here.
“Hunger” in America
Coverage: Fact-Free
Reporter Peter Kilborn’s statistically malnourished piece on “hunger” in America sports the headline: “For Food Pantries, Cupboard Isn’t Bare But It’s Coming Close.”
“Food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters have rarely seen such demand,” Kilborn claims. “Second Harvest says it is seeing three times more clients than it saw in the days before Sept. 11, 2001, when the surge began. In the face of the demand, some pantries are rationing food by putting less in the bags they distribute, asking clients to wait longer for bags or setting limits on the number of clients they serve.”
After some more anecdotal reports of food shortages from food bank administrators, Kilborn writes: “While demand varies from city to city, the United States Conference of Mayors reported in December that in a survey of 25 cities, the number of requests for free food last year exceeded the 2001 average by 19 percent.”
Kilborn doesn’t mention that the US
Conference of Mayors has been saying the exact same thing since way before
September 11. In fact it’s been the same message 16 years running. From 1987 to
2002, the Mayors have never reported a less than 9% increase in demand for
emergency food in any one year. Extrapolating the findings of the Mayors
Conference (see
the appendix after page 119) over 16 years, one obtains the following
bizarre figure: A twelve-fold rise (1240%) in hunger in America since 1987. That
makes the U.S. sound more like Stalinist North Korea than the most prosperous
nation in history.
“To help meet the demand through a program that provides about 25 percent of the
food that Second Harvest manages, the United States Department of Agriculture
says it spent $380 million in the 2002 fiscal year, about $200 million more than
in the 2000 fiscal year. But the other sources of food are not keeping pace with
the demand.”
Kilborn knows what to blame it on: That old devil, welfare reform. “But there are other reasons beyond shifts in the economy. The 1996 overhaul of the welfare system and the law's tighter eligibility standards for food stamps are one. In moving more than half of the 12 million recipients off the rolls and into jobs, advocates of the poor say many former recipients still fail to earn enough to cover basic needs.”
Joyce Purnick’s Thursday “Metro Matters” column, “Free Food Taking Place of Welfare,” also blames welfare reform: “Throughout the city, charitable food programs are reporting higher numbers of people seeking help as tough economic times continue. The patrons of food pantries and kitchens are routinely called ‘the hungry,’ and some are. But a close examination of the system shows that it serves as an essential source of income for most, a substitute--only a partial one, critics say--for cuts in welfare grants and restrictions on food stamps.” Never mind that child poverty rates have fallen to a 25-year low, as David Brooks notes in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard.
For the rest of Peter Kilborn’s story on hunger, click here.
For the rest of Joyce Purnick’s column on hunger, click here.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org