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Times Watch for
February 13, 2004
Globe Bashes Burkett's Anti-Bush Story:
Will the NYT React?
The Boston Globe, the Times' sister paper, disputes allegations by Bill Burkett regarding Bush's National Guard record. The Times found Burkett credible enough to use as the basis for 1,000 words of speculation on Thursday, in which Burkett suggested aides to Bush improperly screened his National Guard files.
In a piece headlined "Doubts raised on Bush accuser--Key witness disputes charge by Guard retiree that files were purged," Globe staff reporter Michael Rezendes notes: "But a key witness to some of the events described by Burkett has told the Globe that the central elements of his story are false….George O. Conn, a former chief warrant officer with the Guard and a friend of Burkett's, is the person whom Burkett says led him to the room where the Bush records were being vetted. But Conn says he never saw anyone combing through the Bush file or discarding records."
After using Burkett as its source for the anti-Bush story, Times Watch will see if the Times issues a follow up based on the anti-Burkett information uncovered by its sister paper.
• AWOL | Boston Globe | Bill Burkett | George W. Bush | National Guard
The Right's "Hysterical" NEA Critics
Former arts editor turned columnist John Rockwell listens to a Harvard talk by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and comes away still distressed over the future of art in America.
Rockwell does like Bush's proposed increase in NEA funding, calling it "a far cry from the steady whittling to which the agency has been subjected in recent years, and a striking show of support from a Republican administration, because it has been the right that has spawned the agency's most persistent, not to say hysterical, critics."
Rockwell then outlines the dangers of leaving cultural funding up to stodgy conservatives: "But the endowment also had--until the violence of the right's attacks against it in Newt Gingrich's Contract With America--an honorable tradition of supporting individuals who make edgy work. By now, self-censorship seems firmly in place....But if public arts grants can annoy some parts of the populace and seem elitist--the endowment's 'peer panels' stereotypically passing the grant goodies around the table--private support has its own severe limitations, too. Rich people support major arts institutions disproportionately, and rich people are mostly conservative. So with Mr. Gioia's consensus built on the presuppositions of conservative political control in Washington, and with private donations more likely to support Franco Zeffirelli than, say, Peter Sellars, the deck at present is decisively stacked against challenging new art."
Rockwell doesn't address the seeming contradiction of "challenging new art" being produced through establishment funding. As liberal columnist Michael Kinsley put in a 1992 New Republic piece, "There is something irksome about people wanting to be a counterculture on the majority's nickel."
Incidentally, last month Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz noted that Rockwell donated $2,000 to Hillary Clinton in 2000.
For the rest of Rockwell's take on art funding, click here.
• Arts | NEA | John Rockwell
Columnist Paul Krugman wonders what the heck's wrong with those stupid Bush supporters: "The sad truth is that people who have been taken in by a cult of personality--a group that in this case includes a good fraction of the American people, and a considerably higher fraction of the punditocracy--are very reluctant to give up their illusions. If nothing else, that would mean admitting that they had been played for fools."
For the rest of Krugman, click here.
• George W. Bush | Columnists | Paul Krugman
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org