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Times Watch for
March 19, 2004
“Unavoidable” McCain, Avoidable Zell
It should not be surprising that liberal reporters would be giddy when the Senator from Arizona declared this his friend Sen. Kerry was not “quote, weak on defense.” The front-page headline described McCain’s remarks as displaying an “independent streak,” as Purdum elaborated that his defense of Kerry “shows once again how Mr. McCain’s incorrigible independent streak and ill-disguised distance from President Bush make him one of Washington’s most unpredictable – and unavoidable – men.”
Purdum glossed over how the Bush campaign and McCain’s people “have little love for each other,” and how the Bush camp tried to emphasize their common ground. After that, there was absolutely no sense offered to readers that most Republicans were incensed at McCain for helping Democrats undercut the latest Bush commercials on Kerry’s voting record.
(Yesterday on the Times Web site, reporter Carl Hulse described McCain as adding “a rare bit of restraint to the escalating tone of the presidential campaign today, rejecting assertions by other Republicans that his colleague, Senator John Kerry, would endanger national security if elected.”)
The Times does not find it as newsworthy when a Democratic senator goes further than McCain, and actually endorses the candidate from the other party. On October 29, 2003, Sen. Zell Miller announced he would vote for President Bush. The Times didn’t notice until November 22, and then on Page A-10. Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s article was headlined “Among G.O.P. Senators, A Favorite Democrat.” (Reverse the party labels, and McCain very much fits.) Perhaps the Times could explain their avoidance of Miller by pointing out that network television was hardly breathless in covering Sen. Miller last fall, either.
Stolberg reported: “Now Mr. Miller is preparing to retire, and has taken his frustrations public. In a blistering parting shot, he has written a book attacking national Democrats as ultraliberal, beholden to special-interest groups and unable to compete in the South. At 71, he has said he will cast his first ballot for a Republican next year, when he votes to re-elect President Bush. Democrats, furious and bewildered, feel betrayed by a man they spent decades working to elect. But in Republican circles, Mr. Miller is a hot property.”
There were no Republicans “furious and bewildered” at McCain in Purdum’s story, although they certainly exist in large numbers.
For more, click here.
• John McCain | Zell Miller | Todd Purdum | Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Halbfinger quoted a “longtime adviser” who made the schizophrenic comparison between “‘indoor John and outdoor John’ – one who agonizes over decisions, and another who acts boldly on them. It was outdoor John, decidedly so, who emerged from an armored S.U.V. at the foot of Bald Mountain here on Thursday morning, outfitted in blue ski gear and swigging from a bottle of vitamin-fortified water.”
The real attraction of the story didn’t come until paragraph 15, which was highlighted on the Drudge Report. Kerry was knocked down from his snowboard by a Secret Service agent. “When asked about the mishap a moment later, he said sharply, ‘I don’t fall down,’ then used an expletive to describe the agent who ‘knocked me over.’”
The article also noted a New York Times-CBS News poll indicated “many Americans were beginning to see him as the kind of politician that says what he thinks people want to hear.” The poll results were first reported Tuesday on page A24 under the headline “Nation’s Direction Prompts Voters’ Concern, Poll Finds.” The Kerry numbers, while referenced in the first paragraph, are buried deep in the story.
For more of Halbfinger’s dispatch from the Idaho slopes, click here.
• John Kerry | David Halbfinger | Polls
In her article, headlined “For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy,” Brown included the obligatory paragraph about how normal these families are: “But even if gay marriage goes away, gay parents will go on living de facto married lives, rearing children from past heterosexual marriages or forming families through adoption, foster care or sperm or egg donation. For the children, who know their parents as car-poolers, class mother, soccer coaches and Scout leaders, the recent marriages have been at once historic and deeply personal. Some use the word ‘we’ to describe marrying.”
Brown could only find academic experts on one side of the gay debate: “Studies show that children of gay and lesbian parents are developmentally similar to those with heterosexual parents, said Charlotte J. Patterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who has studied gay and lesbian families.” Brown did not seek experts who have assembled research that finds less sanguine results, for example, Timothy Dailey and Peter Sprigg at the Family Research Council.
To read Brown’s story, click here.
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org