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Times Watch for
January 12, 2004
Moms…Who Needs'em!
The latest effort by the Times to mainstream gay parenting makes Monday's front page, in the form of a sympathetic story by Ginia Bellafante. "Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home" concerns several male-male couples with children, gained either through surrogate mothers or adoption. Bellafante takes for granted that adoption laws which favor heterosexual couples are discriminatory: "The obstacles of finding surrogate mothers and of discriminatory adoption laws that favor heterosexual couples have led some gay men to pursue parenthood with fervor."
For the rest of Bellafante's story, click here.
• Adoption | Ginia Bellafante | Gay Rights
Louis Uchitelle's front-page unemployment rate story from Saturday, "Growth in Jobs Came to a Halt During December," includes this pearl of wisdom: "But there is little more the president can do to stimulate the economy, and the administration is not likely to get much more help from the Federal Reserve, which has already lowered short-term interest rates to just 1 percent. That leaves the White House waiting and hoping that the employment picture improves between now and the elections."
Now here's a part of Edmund Andrews' business section story from that same day: "The problem confronting Mr. Bush is that there is little he can do between now and the elections except wait and hope that the employment picture improves. And the administration is not likely to get much more help from the Federal Reserve, which has already reduced short-term interest rates to just 1 percent."
For Uchitelle's take on unemployment, click here.
For Andrews' (or is it the other guy?) take, click here.
• Edmund Andrews | Campaign 2004 | Gaffes | Louis Uchitelle | Unemployment
Times Finds Liberal Hunger Story Hard to Swallow
Sunday's Week in Review story by reporter Tom Zeller, "Of Fuzzy Math and 'Food Security,'" brings some welcome skepticism to play concerning a hunger survey which traditionally is given enormous respect in the media. This year's U.S. Conference of Mayors annual report, released every year around holiday time for prime sympathetic effect, claims that demand for emergency food has risen 16 years in a row.
The Media Research Center (third item) ran the numbers on a previous Mayors report from 1997 and found it yielded an impossible-to-believe 1240% increase in hunger in America over a twelve-year period--making the U.S. seem more like North Korea than the most prosperous nation in history.
Sunday's Times, in a surprising turnabout, actually picks up on a recent Heritage Foundation report that makes a similar argument against this year's survey. After opening with broad-based skepticism of statistics in general, Zeller analyzes the Mayors report: "Take the annual survey of homelessness and hunger published by the United States Conference of Mayors, a nonpartisan organization encompassing 1,183 cities with populations of 30,000 or more. The 2003 installment arrived in mid-December, and as it has for each of the last 16 years, the survey reported an increase in "demand for emergency food"--this time by 17 percent."
Zeller notes the report's success in the media. The Boston Globe and Washington Post ran stories on it, and the Times itself mentioned the survey in an editorial. Zeller then gives the other side of the story: "But the math behind that trend had, for the last several years, caught the eye of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which published a pre-emptive rebuttal a few days before the survey was released. Policy makers should be wary of the claims of 'increasing hunger' that are likely to be made in the upcoming 2003 U.S. Conference of Mayors report," the foundation's paper warned."
Zeller uniquely questions the methodology and motivation behind the liberal findings of the group of big-city, mostly Democratic mayors: "Social ills like hunger and need for food assistance are notoriously difficult to measure. In a flagging economy, or even in boom times, those on the front lines--soup kitchen operators and food bank administrators, who must rely on donations and government subsidies--are always in the shadow of a shortfall. So it is not surprising that the mayors' survey, which relies primarily on the collected impressions (and varied recordkeeping) of these agencies, would consistently report an increase in demand."
Reporter Zeller then does that rarest of things: He poses a challenging question to the liberal mayors group: "When asked for the numbers behind the percentages, Eugene Lowe, the assistant executive director for community development and housing for the mayors' conference, said there weren't any….The Heritage Foundation took that methodology to task, comparing the rate of increase implied by the mayors' data with measures taken by the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture."
Zeller's story also includes some helpful explanatory graphics, showing the enormous rise in hunger being claimed by the Mayors Conference and comparing it to the far less alarming statistics put out by government bureaus.
For the rest of Zeller's hunger story, click here.
• Hunger | Mayors Conference | Tom Zeller
James McKinley's Monday profile of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, "A Journey From a Mill Town Ends With a Run for President," includes this line appearing to equate gay marriage with civil rights: "At times [Edwards] can be blunt. Two young lesbians at the University of New Hampshire challenged him on why he does not support marriage for gay couples, a stance that might seem at odds with his support for affirmative action and civil rights generally."
For more of McKinley's long profile of Edwards, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Edwards | Gay Rights | Marriage | James McKinley
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org