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Times Watch for
March 1, 2004
Hope He Didn't Bet on the Oscars
"It's hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (possibly without benefit of subtitles)." -- Times editor turned columnist Frank Rich, attacking Mel Gibson's movie about the last hours of Christ, August 3.
"The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson's new film about the Crucifixion, continued its strong box-office run over the weekend. It took in an estimated $76.2 million over Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for a total of $117.5 million since it opened Wednesday. That is the second-highest five-day total ever for a Wednesday opening, behind only 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,' which made $124.1 million in its first five days in December. 'Passion' had the highest opening-day ticket sales of any February film in Hollywood history." -- Evelyn Nussenbaum, March 1 New York Times.
• Gaffes | Mel Gibson | Frank Rich | Movies | "The Passion"
George Bush simply can't win. Monday's masthead editorial, "Shattered Democracy in Haiti," carps at Bush for waiting a few days before sending Marines to intervene in Haiti (this from a page that still laments Bush's long "rush to war" in Iraq).
The editorial sniffs: "Sending the Marines was the right thing to do, but Mr. Bush should have done it days ago, when there was still a chance for an American-proposed compromise that would have reinforced the framework of constitutional democracy. Mr. Bush's hesitation leaves Washington looking as if it withheld the Marines until Mr. Aristide yielded power, leaving Haitians at the mercy of some of the country's most vicious criminal gangs." The Times concludes sourly: "The Bush administration's mishandling of this crisis guarantees that Haiti will require substantial American help for many more years to come."
Predictably, there's no criticism of Clinton administration "mishandling" of Haiti, aside from an amorphous mention that "Washington made matters worse by prematurely winding down its post-1994 efforts to create a professional and politically independent police force…"
Then there's a story that same day from reporter Tim Weiner, "Aristide Raised Haiti's Hopes, Then Shattered Them." The editorial and Weiner's story stories share a perverse consistency: Instead of criticizing Bush for being too slow to intervene, as in the editorial, Weiner's report from Port-au-Prince implicitly criticizes Bush for having intervened at all.
After quoting liberal Carter administration diplomat Robert White saying "the United States has undermined constitutional government in Haiti," Weiner concludes his article by noting Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's "tortured relationship with the United States worsened after he and President Bush took office within weeks of each other three years ago. Many administration officials saw him as little more than a leftist leader of a country whose principal exports were refugees in rickety boats and transshipments of Colombian cocaine. The opposition of those officials now puts them in the awkward position of seeming to have pushed a freely elected president from power in America's backyard."
For the Times editorial blaming Bush for hesitating to intervene in Haiti, click here.
For Tim Weiner's article questioning whether Bush should have intervened at all, click here.
• Aristide | Editorial | Haiti | Iraq War | Tim Weiner
Uneducated Southern Fundies Against Gay Marriage?
It wasn't quite "poor, uneducated, and easy to command" (Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf's notorious
1993
insult of the followers of TV preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson). But Saturday's story by David Kirkpatrick on the evangelical community in Grand Rapids, Mich., did contain a hint of elitist snobbery in its description of the community, which (unlike some Southern evangelical communities) is not particularly opposed to gay marriage.
Kirkpatrick writes: "Of course, Grand Rapids is a long way from the traditional Bible Belt in the South. Conservative Dutch Calvinists settled the region in the mid-19th century and founded the evangelical Christian Reform Church here. The evangelical culture they imparted always placed a greater emphasis on education than similar evangelical denominations like the Southern Baptists, said James Guth, a political science professor at Furman University in Greenville, S.C. 'I think in the Christian Reform Church you are going to find more people who are a little quieter on these issues,' he said in a telephone interview, noting that many Baptist congregations near his home in Greenville were praying for passage of the amendment."
For Kirkpatrick's story in full, click here.
• Amendment | David Kirkpatrick | Gay Marriage | Religion
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org