| About | |
| Contact Us | |
| Articles | |
| Topic Index | |
| Reports | |
| Quotes | |
| On the Web | |
| Links | |
| TW Tracker | |
| Support | |
Times Watch for
January 27, 2004
Accuracy on Ice: The
Times on Global Warming
Sunday's editorial page lets off some steam about what they see as Bush's negligent attitude toward global warming: "Two recent reports illustrate the dangers. A study by an international research team, published in Nature, warned that unabated warming could drive 15 to 37 percent of 1,103 living species the team studied toward extinction by 2050. Shortly thereafter came an ominous report by The Times's Andrew Revkin on warming's impact in the Arctic, where the sea ice is in rapid retreat, and its potentially devastating effect on Alaska's fragile tundra."
But its own flawed history suggests the Times should avoid getting heated up over the retreat of Arctic sea ice and any connection it may have with global warming.
As the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted in September of 2000: "The New York Times had egg on its face August 29 when the Old Gray Lady was forced to retract an alarmist front-page story of August 19 that flatly stated the North Pole is melting. Not true, as the paper was later forced to concede. But readers on August 19 were treated to a scare story that led with this sentence: “The North Pole is melting.” The photograph that ran with the above-the-fold article was captioned: 'A lecturer on a tourist cruise captured this view of open water at the North Pole, a sight presumably never before seen by humans….As the Times would write in its correction, the original article 'misstated the normal conditions of the sea ice there. A clear spot has probably opened at the pole before, scientists say, because about 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean is clear of ice in a typical summer.'"
For the rest of the "devastating" editorial, click here.
• Arctic | Editorials | Environment | Global Warming
"The Coalition of the Unbelieving," editor Serge Schmemann's take on a passel of anti-Bush books, nabs the cover story of the Sunday Book Review. The cover line (featuring a caricature of an Uncle Sam with his back turned apparently going through a button-popping, Incredible Hulk-style metamorphosis) is this: "The Only Superbad Power: Three years into the presidency of George W. Bush, many people here and abroad fear and loathe our country, its power, its policies, its pride. Is America an evil empire? Seven new books seem ready to think so."
Schmemann's actual review is slightly less slanted. A former Times reporter who is now editorial page editor of the Times' international paper the International Herald Tribune, he calls Bush "a prodigal patrician who metamorphosed into a born-again Christian and Texan and slipped into the White House as the standard-bearer of Reaganites and neo-cons. Though in the beginning he exhibited a disdain for international institutions and treaties and took some tentative swipes at Russia, China and the axis of evil, there was little to suggest that the early Bush harbored an ambition to reshape the world, or for that matter had much real interest in foreign affairs."
While pooh-poohing some of the more intemperate left-wing attacks on Bush, Schmemann nonetheless suggests they're on to something: "It is inevitable that a foreign policy couched in biblical symbols, eschewing subtleties and advanced by Texans, oil-men, neocons and industrialists would be insufferable to liberals, doves, internationalists and New Englanders (conversely, remember what Bill Clinton did to conservatives). One suspects that even the senior George Bush occasionally looks out from his crag at Kennebunkport on the policies of his firstborn with some misgiving. Still, it is difficult to explain the level of loathing that the junior Bush and his government have achieved among otherwise rational liberals. The assaults in these books range widely in theme and quality, and Bush's defenders are likely, with some justification, to dismiss the more strident writers as congenitally allergic to any manifestation of American power. But the urgency with which they sound the alarm requires attention. History is too clear on what unconstrained power can lead to."
Schmemann concludes with a line from an anti-Bush book by liberal financier George Soros: "The more moving judgment comes from Soros, a Jew from Hungary who lived through both German and Soviet occupation: ''This is not the America I chose as my home.'"
This would be the same "moving" Soros who compared a Bush line to a Nazi slogan in the November 11 Washington Post: "Soros believes that a 'supremacist ideology' guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. 'When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans.' It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ('The enemy is listening'). 'My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me,' he said in a soft Hungarian accent."
For the full Schmemann review, click here.
• Book Review | George W. Bush | Iraq War | Serge Schmemann | George Soros
The Howard Dean recentering project continues in Sunday's campaign story by Katharine Seelye, in which she seems surprised anyone would call Dean a liberal: "He balanced the state budget, cut taxes, favored tightening the rules for welfare recipients, won the top rating of the National Rifle Association, opposed methadone clinics, fought the legalization of marijuana (a big issue in Vermont) and was re-elected five times….He supported the death penalty….He also appointed judges whom he considered conservative, even though their stiff sentences resulted in overcrowded jails….Despite these conservative credentials, Dr. Dean has been cast by some pundits in the presidential campaign as an extreme liberal, largely because he signed a bill making Vermont the only state to provide the same legal benefits to gay couples as to married heterosexuals. But in Vermont, he was criticized by some for not going further and allowing gay marriage."
Actually, the main reason Dean is considered liberal is his Bush-bashing and extreme anti-war stance. Dean's supporters certainly seem to think he's sufficiently liberal; they come predominantly from the liberal wing of the party, brought there by Dean's anti-Bush and anti-war anger.
For the rest of Seelye on "He's not that liberal" Dean, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Howard Dean | Labeling Bias | Katharine Seelye
Bush's "Bold" (and Liberal) FDA
Sunday's front-page story by science writer Gina Kolata, "Many Are Surprised By Bold Decisions Of the Bush F.D.A.," is a glowing profile of Bush's FDA commissioner, Mark McClellan.
"Some people thought they knew what to expect of the Food and Drug Administration under President Bush," Kolata writes. "It would be attuned to business and sensitive to religious conservatives. It would put off difficult decisions and issue fewer regulations."
Happily for the Times, McClellan has turned out to be more its kind of commissioner: "The agency's announcement last month that it would prohibit the sale of ephedra was a move sought by liberal Democrats like Senator Edward M. Kennedy and consumer groups like Public Citizen's Health Research Group."
Good for the Times for finally calling the liberal Kennedy a liberal. Too bad it comes in a story praising more regulations in the guise of "bold moves."
Kolata then points out a Bush move that undercuts her premise of boldness, showing the Bush administration in fact putting off one of those "difficult decisions": "In another move that could be construed as hindering business, Dr. McClellan deferred a decision on whether to allow silicone breast implants back on the market after more than a decade-long hiatus. He said the F.D.A. needed more data on safety."
For the rest of Kolata on Bush's "bold" FDA, click here.
• FDA | Health | Gina Kolata | Sen. Ted Kennedy | Labeling Bias
Communist East Germany's "Social Safety Net"
Jere Longman files a fascinating profile Monday on East German women's shot-put champion Heidi Krieger (now Andreas Krieger and living as a man after a sex-change operation in 1997.) But in the middle of Longman's report on the scandal of officially sanctioned doping of Olympic athletes with performance-enhancing steroids in Communist East Germany, is this line on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the regime that ruined Krieger's life in the first place: "Retired, unemployed, the social safety net of her country no longer available to soften her fall after reunification, Heidi began to experience a deepening sense of dislocation, despair and ambiguity about her sexual identity."
For the rest of Longman on the East German doping scandal, click here.
• Communism | East Germany | Jere Longman | Olympics | Sports
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org