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Times Watch for
January 13, 2004
"Soft Spoken, Gentle" Daschle Accused
Rush Listeners of Threats
While previewing Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle's reelection race, which is anticipated by both sides to be tough and close, Sheryl Gay Stolberg talks up the teddy bear style of the Senate minority leader: "With his soft-spoken, almost gentle manner, Mr. Daschle is the rare politician who can go on the attack without seeming snappish; one word often used to describe him is 'decent,'" Stolberg writes in Sunday's Times.
Really now? Here's "soft-spoken, gentle" Daschle from November 20, 2002, comparing conservative critics to the Taliban and suggesting Rush Limbaugh was feeding death threats against him and his family: "What happens when Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren’t satisfied just to listen. They want to act because they get emotionally invested, and so the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically on us and our families in a way that’s disconcerting….We see it in foreign countries and we think, well my God, how can this religious fundamentalism become so violent? Well, it’s that same shrill rhetoric. It’s that same shrill power that motivates....Pretty soon it’s a foment that becomes physical in addition to just verbal, and that’s happening in this country.”
What's gentle about comparing your political opponents to a group of violent religious nuts?
Now, a profile of a politician doesn't necessarily have to include every dubious statement ever made by the officeholder. (Stolberg's article includes one, from last year, when Daschle said he was saddened that President Bush had "failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war.")
But when the Times goes out of its way to portray someone operating in the bare-knuckle world of politics as being gentle and decent, one expects a little more rigor, especially when the politician makes statements that could be seen as off course from the journalistic lodestar of the First Amendment.
For the rest of Stolberg's profile of Daschle, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Sen. Tom Daschle | Rush Limbaugh | Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Hot For Communism in the Arctic
Nostalgia for Communism in Arctic Russia. Sunday's story by Timothy O'Brien, "In Post-U.S.S.R. Russia, Any Job Is a Good Job," reports from frigid Kirovsk, an Arctic mining town in Russia where the fertilizer factory Apatit is a major employer.
Judging from that unpalatable scene-setting, one could well imagine finding a few disgruntled employees in Kirovsk, and O'Brien does: "…as three Apatit machinists tipped back vodkas at a grocery store one recent evening, they complained that their circumstances had diminished under capitalism. 'Life was better under the Communists,' said Aleksandr, 49, who said he has worked here since he was 19; like the others, he asked that his last name not be used for fear of reprisal from the company. 'The stores are full of things,' he recalled, 'but they're very expensive, and labor isn't worth a thing.'" Of course, under Communism, everything was "free" and nothing was worth having, but O'Brien focuses only on the agonies of retrenchment.
What else was better under Communism? You guessed it--health care and education: "Victor, on the other hand, said the main problem was the long-gone stability of an earlier era of affordable health care, free higher education and housing, and the promise of a comfortable retirement--things now beyond his reach." Left unmentioned was the reality behind that Potemkin Village--years spent on waiting lists (except for those with Party connections) for shoddy, inferior housing, and truncated life spans--hardly an indicator of quality health care.
For the rest of O'Brien on Russians who miss Communism, click here.
• Timothy O'Brien | Communism | Russia | Soviet Union
Communist East Germany Not All Bad
Tuesday's story by Richard Bernstein, "Warm, Fuzzy Feelings for East Germany's Gray Old Days," is another, more playful look at Communist nostalgia, known as ostalgie--nostalgia for the tacky cultural icons of Stalinist East Germany.
From Eisenhuttenstadt (there's no shortage of syllables in the former East Germany, at least), Bernstein writes of a museum of ostalgie which holds objects from the former East Germany, including "jars of Bulgarian plums, schoolbooks, plastic water glasses that never seemed to come in the right colors. Seeing these familiar objects clearly stirs warm feelings about the vanished and unrecapturable past."
Bernstein unpacks ostalgie's strange pull, a less sunny version of the ironic hipster take on American '70s culture: "Ostalgie is complicated, made up of various ingredients. One is clearly the disillusionment felt by many former Easterners over German reunification, which took place 13 years ago. Unemployment these days is commonly 25 percent in regions like Eisenhüttenstadt. Rents are no longer subsidized. Doctor visits cost money. People can be fired. In addition, as Andreas Ludwig, the West German scholar of urban history who started the museum a few years ago, noted, even capitalist products break down or are shabby and schlocky."
Bernstein makes no attempt to dispel those Communist illusions of "free" health care and housing with facts, although he does quote the founder of the museum calling the government a dictatorship people were forbidden to leave.
Bernstein concludes by bringing up an old liberal standby: That Communism, whatever its failings, at least provided stability: "All this has given rise to a sort of East German post-mortem feeling that maybe the East had its good aspects after all, especially a certain economic security and stability, even if your best vacation option was Bulgaria." High literacy rates go blessedly unmentioned.
For the rest of Bernstein on "ostalgie," click here.
• Richard Bernstein | Communism | East Germany | Soviet Union
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org