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Times Watch for July 8, 2003

More Unlabeled Liberals

In a Tuesday article on President Bush’s proposed changes in Head Start, “the popular Lyndon Johnson-era preschool program for poor children,” White House reporter Elizabeth Bumiller explained that Bush’s words at an Illinois pre-school “unleashed a new torrent of criticism from advocates for the poor and political opponents who said that the administration could not be trusted on the issue.”

     Bumiller then explained: “Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, the most important member of the Senate on education issues, said in a statement. 'Why would anyone want to turn Head Start into Slow Start or No Start?'" She also noted that the president of the National Head Start Association said this about giving the program more state flexibility and more educational accountability: “We think it would absolutely destroy Head Start.”

     Bumiller also avoided a label in explaining “Head Start advocates and the president's opponents said they remained skeptical about the administration's motives and worried that the eight-state pilot program would be, as one education expert put it, 'the camel's nose.'" The camel’s nose to what? Giving a federal program over to the states, when some want all the bureaucratic power concentrated in Washington. They’re often called liberals.

     Times reporter Stephanie Strom also avoided the L word as she reported the interesting news that “The board of the Ford Foundation, one of the country's largest private charitable foundations, has decided to keep its chairman despite accusations by federal regulators that he participated in accounting fraud when he was chairman and chief executive of the Xerox Corporation.”

     While Strom notes that last summer’s uproar over corporate malfeasance is spilling over into the potential for greater accountability for major nonprofit groups, she doesn’t note that the Ford Foundation is a major money-bags for the ACLU, NOW, and other left-wing advocacy groups, even Consumers Union – which no doubt has an unfavorable view of corporate accounting tricks by public companies.

For the complete Bumiller story, click here.

For the complete Strom story, click here.

• Ted Kennedy | Elizabeth Buhmiller | Head Start

“Crime Falling, Yet Prisons Still Filling,” Part XVIII

African tribes have the griot -- historical fables passed on from generation to generation. The Times has its own griot, expressed most pithily in an infamous 1997 headline: “Crime Rates are Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling,” as if the two trends were unrelated.

     A signed editorial by Adam Cohen on Sunday repeats that cherished bit of Times naivete, which last appeared in the paper a mere three months ago.

     In “What ‘Capturing the Friedmans’ Says About Getting Tough on Crime,” Cohen discusses the art-house hit “Capturing the Friedmans,” a documentary about a Long Island family in which a son and his father were convicted of molesting students in computer classes held in their home.

     Cohen liked the movie, but says it “also has a political message that is being overlooked. At a time when ‘get tough’ crime policies are running amok -- and, as a result, the prison population has soared past two million -- Jesse Friedman's travails are a forceful reminder of why we need a more progressive criminal justice system, one less intent on seeing the world in black and white.”

     After lamenting that “judges' discretion is increasingly being usurped by inflexible, and draconian, sentencing guidelines and ‘three strikes’ laws,” Cohen then passes along the Times griot, the paper’s favorite fable about crime: “After a three-decade surge, which has continued even as crime rates have dropped, the United States has 702 inmates per 100,000 people, the highest incarceration rate in the world.” Last, Cohen insists the law “has a moral obligation -- one it has abandoned in recent years -- to try to see crime and criminals in all of their complexity.” But if the Times truly was sophisticated about crime, it would realize crime is dropping precisely because prisons are filling. With more criminals in prison, there are fewer criminals on the street committing crimes. This makes sense to everyone but sophisticated Times editorial writers.

For the rest of Adam Cohen’s editorial on crime, click here.

• Adam Cohen | Crime | Editorial | Movies

Greg Myre’s Own Mideast Road Map

Wishful thinking by a pro-Palestinian reporter? An alert reader of the influential pro-Israel weblog Little Green Footballs notes the first draft of Greg Myre’s Monday article from Jerusalem (posted online) falsely asserted the Middle East peace “road map” requires Israel to release Palestinian prisoners. Myre wrote: “The release of Palestinian prisoners is just one of many demands placed on both sides under the Mideast peace plan, known as the road map.”

     In fact, the road map requires no such thing. (The Times corrected the story online, but the pro-Israel website Honest Reporting has a screen capture of the original.)

     In contrast, a Friday front-page story by fellow Middle East reporter James Bennet accurately reports: “Israel has begun releasing some of its more than 5,000 Palestinian prisoners, a step not in the plan.”

For the rest of Greg Myre’s story on Israel’s release of Palestinian prisoners, click here.

• Corrections | Israel | Middle East | Greg Myre | Palestinians | Prisoners | Road Map

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org