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Times Watch for June 2, 2003
“Vocal Gay Republicans Upsetting Conservatives” is the headline for Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s Sunday story: “As president, Mr. Bush has appointed several openly gay people, including James C. Hormel, the ambassador to Romania, to high-level jobs, and he has also declined to overturn executive orders issued by President Bill Clinton that bar discrimination against gays in federal employment and security clearances.”
Wrong. Hormel was in fact the openly gay man appointed ambassador to Luxembourg by Bill Clinton back in 1999. Stolberg is apparently referring to Michael Guest, an openly gay man who Bush indeed appointed ambassador to Romania in 2001. (The online version of Stolberg’s story has been corrected without acknowledgement of the error in the hard-copy edition.)
Today’s
Top Tax Story: A Liberal Press Release
After his trumped-up piece Friday on supposed flaws in Bush’s tax cuts (dissected by Brent Baker in the Media Research Center’s CyberAlert), Times reporter David Firestone files another front-page story Sunday that again takes dictation from a study done by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Firestone writes: “This is the second time since Congress passed the bill that critics have pointed out how some of its provisions would not help millions of people in the lowest tax brackets. In response to earlier disclosures about the complex bill's fine print, the Senate's chief Republican writer of tax legislation said on Friday that Congress should revise at least some of the law's provisions, involving child tax credits, to broaden their effect. [Editor’s note: Firestone is talking about Sen. Charles Grassley.]
“The new analysis says that the taxpayers who get nothing from the tax law are primarily low-income single people who do not have children and lack income from dividends or capital gains. A large number of low- and moderate-income single parents with children over 16 will also get no benefit from the law, because it did not change the tax rate for such parents who are unmarried.”
Firestone reports that Republican Sen. Charles Grassley is seeking a revision to the tax cut that would make it more palatable to the Times: “On Friday, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said he would propose legislation next week to provide the increased child credit to those minimum-wage families, and to make the increase permanent for all taxpayers instead of its expiring in 2005.”
Firestone continues: “In combination with the children who were cut from the bill's benefits by the Congressional negotiators, the study says, there are 50 million households -- 36 percent of all households in the nation -- who will receive no benefit from the tax law.” He then adds, almost as an afterthought: “The figure includes people who do not earn enough to owe income tax.”
For the rest of Firestone’s Friday piece on tax cuts, click here.
For the rest of Firestone’s Sunday piece on tax cuts, click here.
Sen.
Grassley’s Suspiciously Good Press
We don’t embrace the paranoid style at Times Watch. Still, right on the heels of David Firestone’s Sunday story in which Sen. Grassley says he would propose legislation that would make Bush’s tax cut more palatable to the Times, the paper issues a favorable profile of…Sen. Grassley.
Times reporter Robin Toner followed Grassley around Iowa as the senator talked to his constituents about Medicare. Toner’s Monday piece, “Reshaping Medicare, Rural Roots in Mind,” dwells on Grassley’s endearing modesty with hard-hitting details like this: “Mr. Grassley, who grew up on a farm but has spent the last 44 years in the state Legislature, the House and the Senate, carries himself modestly, happy to stay at economy motels on his round of town meetings, stopping by Wal-Mart at the end of the day….Even after 23 years in the Senate and becoming chairman of a powerful committee, Mr. Grassley seems determined to present himself as an Iowan, first and foremost.” And, as Times Watch noted on May 5, the paper praised Grassley three times as a man of his word during the tax-cut debate for promising not to permit a law that would reduce taxes by over $350 billion.
Why the soft soap for a politician who isn’t really the Times cup of tea (Grassley has a lifetime rating of 83 from the American Conservative Union)?
Perhaps because, in addition to Grassley possibly intervening to change Bush’s tax cut, the senator is also in a position to stop Bush’s privatizing style of Medicare reform: “If Mr. Grassley has his way, the interests of rural America will loom large in the push to enact a Medicare law. And that could make life complicated for the Bush administration and its conservative allies, who want to transform Medicare from a traditional government health insurance program for the elderly to a new marketplace of competing private health plans.”
For the rest of Robin Toner’s profile of Sen. Grassley, click here.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org