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Times Watch for June 3, 2003
Bad Medicine At The
Times
Times critics are “flooding the zone,” as Howell Raines might say, regarding the paper’s slanted coverage of the pharmaceutical industry. A Sunday story from the Times veteran Robert Pear, “Drug Companies Increase Spending to Lobby Congress and Governments,” was criticized by none other than liberal, Ken Starr-bashing media critic Steve Brill for being unfair to pharmaceutical companies. Brill’s letter to Jim Romenesko’s “Media News” site notes that Pear made “no effort to get the lobby group itself to comment” on the story, which included internal memos from PhRMA, the leading pharmaceutical trade group.
Derek Lowe at the technology weblog corante.com says the Times recent heavy coverage of the drug industry suggests a possible Augusta National-style crusade in the works against drug companies, especially with prescription drug coverage expected to be a major campaign issue in 2004. “If we keep getting these Page Ones, I'm going to have to assume that there's an agenda at work,” Lowe writes. An agenda at the Times? Say it isn’t so!
Robert Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute considers a recent front-page story by Times reporter Erica Goode is “part of a war the newspaper has been waging against pharmaceutical research and development for a number of years. The theme is always the same. Drug and biotech companies develop drugs of marginal value, and then corrupt the practice of medicine because they market their products and pay for research on the drugs by themselves. The solution is also always the same: Let the government determine what the best medicines are, and require doctors to follow the state's guidelines.”
For the rest of Robert Pear’s story on drug industry lobbying, click here.
“Least-Civilized”
Students Heckle Chris Hedges
The Times finally gets around to the controversy over Chris Hedges’ anti-war commencement speech at Rockford College. The Metro section of Sunday’s paper features a long recap of commencement speeches from around the country, including addresses from Desmond Tutu and Dick Cheney. Reporter Sam Dillon writes: “America's debate over the Iraq war continued at colleges and universities this spring, as commencement speakers weighed in with reflections on the conflict.”
In the Times first acknowledgement of the Hedges’ controversy, Dillon writes: “Perhaps the least-civilized expression of ideas in the debate came at Rockford College, in northern Illinois, where students heckled Chris Hedges, a New York Times reporter and the author of a recent book on war. In his commencement address, Mr. Hedges questioned the Bush administration's moral rationale for waging the war in Iraq. After some students mounted the stage and cut power to the microphone, Mr. Hedges ended his speech early.” So after a twenty-odd year history of campus leftists disrupting conservative speakers, the Times suddenly voices disapproval when a liberal (who just happens to be Times reporter Chris Hedges) gets a rough reception.
But a prominent commencement speaker left off Dillon’s roster might take issue with the idea that campus incivility emanates only from the pro-war perspective. The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan Last sets the scene at Smith College: “As soon as the speaker began, a chorus of shouts and boos came from the back of the assemblage. The heckling continued until almost the seven-minute mark in the speech, when the speaker finally addressed the protesters and promised to meet with them afterwards if they would quiet down. Mercifully, they did. The speech went on for a few more minutes--nothing terribly controversial, the standard fare about reaching for your dreams and giving back to your community. Then, as the speaker mentioned the remarkable example of the passengers of Flight 93, a man rushed the stage carrying a sign proclaiming, ‘Another reason why they hate us.’”
Last concludes: “In case you're wondering, the beleaguered speaker was Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.”
For the rest of Sam Dillon’s run-down on commencement speeches, click here.
Adam Liptak's Tuesday story, "For Jailed Immigrants, a Presumption of Guilt" concerns the Justice Department's just-released inspector general report on the detention of illegal immigrants after 9-11. In the opening line, Liptak argues: "The Sept. 11 terror attacks not only turned the nation upside down, but they also inverted the foundation principles of the American legal system."
Liptak lets the executive director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, play the ethnic card: "The war on terror quickly turned into a war on immigrants." Liptak adds: "The general policy, which the Justice Department called 'hold until cleared,' might as well have been called 'guilty until proven innocent,' civil libertarians said."
That seems overstated, considering that Liptak himself allows that "nearly all of the 762 people detained on immigration charges in connection with them had overstayed a visa, entered the country illegally or committed another immigration violation." Since the immigrants were illegally in the U.S., the presumption of guilt was, at least in that sense, accurate. The headline of Eric Lichtblau's front-page Tuesday story, "U.S. Report Faults the Roundup of Illegal Immigrants After 9-11," at least makes clear that those rounded up were already breaking America's immigration laws by being in the country illegally.
For the rest of Adam Liptak's story on the Justice Department report, click here.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org