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Times Watch for
February 27, 2004
Kerry “Softens” Image, Bush’s “Tough Attack”
The Times campaign correspondents covering John Kerry and George W. Bush display the newspaper’s shifting standards of news coverage. The Kerry story on A16 is headlined “Kerry Uses Edwards’s Common Touch to Soften Image.” The Bush story on A17 is headlined “Bush Continues a Tough Attack on Kerry.”
From Louisville, Elizabeth Bumiller reported: “President Bush continued his assault on Senator John Kerry on Thursday as he took his new speech to Kentucky, where he also collected hundreds of checks for a campaign that has raised more than $150 million.” She later added: “Mr. Bush repeated his attack on Mr. Kerry that he started on Monday in Washington with a tough new speech that signaled he was no longer content to be a sideshow.”
Bumiller noted that Bush’s day in Louisville began with artifice, with Bush “moderating a ‘conversation’ with on the state of the economy with five participants chosen by the White House. All of them said the President’s tax cuts had improved their lives…Despite the good news on stage, the unemployment rate has increased, from 5.4 percent from 4.9 percent, since Mr. Bush took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
On the previous page, reporter David M. Halbfinger found Kerry killing the John Edwards campaign softly by stealing his song: “Mr. Kerry’s transformation into an empathetic candidate with a decidedly blue collar on his navy pin-striped suit began months ago as he struggled to connect with audiences put off by his patrician manner and emotional distance.”
In stark opposition to Bumiller’s distaste for staged campaign events and pre-selected regular Joes, Halbfinger recounted the testimony of regular people at Kerry events for at least eight paragraphs. In Dayton, Kerry “sat between two mill workers and listened as they described their plight” at an event organized by the United Auto Workers. Outside Youngstown, he toured a long-abandoned steel mill with union members and heard more testimony. “The shut-down steel mill was mainly a photo opportunity, but many of these encounters give Mr. Kerry fodder for the kind of anecdotes he likes to use on the stump.”
Halbfinger ended with some encouragement from liberal academic Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who said Kerry’s chameleonic embrace of the Edwards message is smart: “If Kerry demonstrates he listens and understands, he’s neutralized Edwards’s message.”
For the complete Bumiller story, click here.
For the complete Halbfinger story, click here.
Reporter James Dao reported from the Democrat-dominated state legislature in Annapolis, Maryland, but he couldn’t find any liberal labels, using just the terms “gay rights activists, “ “gay rights advocates,” and “gay rights groups.” But he labeled “conservatives” or “social conservatives” eight times.
Dao began: “In state after state, fierce battles have broken out this week in the legislative aisles, as conservative lawmakers push for much more than the federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage that President Bush has endorsed.” In Oklahoma, Dao reported, it was so fierce that “dueling protests last week led to the arrest of a man who was carrying a fake gun and yelling antigay smears.”
A reader might think this “conservative” push comes from nowhere, with no acknowledgement of San Francisco’s law-defying ceremonies until the sixth paragraph. In response to “conservatives,” Dao quoted left-wing gay activists -- Cheryl Jacques of the Human Rights Campaign, Wally Paynter of the Hoosier Families for the Preservations of the Constitution, and Dan Furmansky of Equality Maryland – but they received no ideological identification. It could be because Dao led the story with the HRC as his authoritative expert on state trends, and the Times uses an HRC map as its authoritative source on the current political playing field.
For more of Dao, click here.
• James Dao | Gay Rights
Jayson’s Back…And In the Bookstore
Times media reporter Jacques Steinberg reported briefly on the forthcoming Jayson Blair memoir. Executive Editor Bill Keller declared: "We don't intend to respond to Jayson or his book.” In the next sentence, the Times responded. “Yesterday Catherine J. Mathis, a spokeswoman for The Times, said: ‘The events of last spring were deeply painful to The Times and its staff…’”
On Page A18, Steinberg noted that they received a copy of the Blair book by ordering it on Amazon.com. The biggest news in the book? “Mr. Blair also writes about one fabrication — he suggests it was his first — that the newspaper did not discover during an examination last year into his reporting. In a 625-word article published a week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Blair wrote of a day trader named Andrew Rosstein who had fled a brokerage office in tears after experiencing substantial losses.”
"I improvised by creating a last name for him," Mr. Blair writes. "I had lifted quotes from other papers before, but never made something up."
For Steinberg’s full, but brief story, click here.
• Jayson Blair | Jacques Steinberg
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org