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Times Watch for March 22, 2004

Francisco Franco Is Still Dead...
Times Bias Is Still Disgraceful

     Talk about kicking a man when he’s down. If Elaine Sciolino’s consistently hostile reporting on pro-Bush, pro-war Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar wasn’t enough, she compares him to that country’s former fascist dictator General Francisco Franco in Sunday’s Week in Review.

     On the recent victory in Spain of Aznar’s opponents, the anti-war Socialist party (which vows to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq and whose victory was seen by some as capitulation to the Islamic terror that hit Madrid three days before), Sciolino claims it “highlighted the vibrancy of Spain's democracy.”

     Evidence mounted before the election that the Madrid attacks had in fact been accomplished by Al Qaeda, not by Basque terrorists as the government had initially claimed. Sciolino sees ominous parallels in this alleged “manipulating” of the truth: “Some Spaniards felt that the crisis of confidence unleashed demons lurking in Spain's history. It was only 29 years ago that General Francisco Franco died, bringing to an end nearly four decades of dictatorship. ‘We are still hearing the echoes of Franco,’ said José Antonio Martines Soler, editor of the Madrid newspaper 20 Minutes who had been kidnapped, tortured and subjected to a mock execution for an article he wrote during the Franco era. ‘In every act, in every gesture, in every sentence, Aznar told the people he was right, that he was the owner of the truth and those who disagreed with him were his enemies.’ His analysis is far from universally shared, and to claim that Franco's ghost still stalks the land would overstate the case. Still, the heavy-handedness of the Aznar government triggered memories of the distortions of truth, and of the censorship and the propaganda that prevailed during the dictatorship.”

     Sciolino, naturally, blames the war in Iraq: “Perceptions that the government had misled the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq blended with misleading public declarations about the investigation into the Madrid bombings, and both fed memories of the manipulations of truth under dictatorship decades ago. The vote became a referendum on the government's commitment to democratic rule.”

     The cut-out line of the story drives the Aznar-as-fraud-or-worse-point home: “A leader who manipulates the truth reminds many Spaniards of a dictator.”

For the rest of Sciolino’s piece on Aznar, click here.

• Francisco Franco | Iraq War | Elaine Sciolino | Spain | Terrorism

Rich Liberal Triteness

     Sunday’s Arts & Leisure column by Frank Rich, “Apres Janet, A Deluge” begins with a tired bit of liberal triteness: “If we lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban...” and meanders on to equate corporate pressure being put on shock jock Howard Stern to “one of the most hysterical outbreaks of Puritanism in recent, even not-so-recent, American history.”

     Rich, always vigilant for signs of looming decorum on the tube, traces TV’s newest crackdown to a time pre-Janet Jackson. It turns out the Bushies are to blame, not the breast: “Not all of this can be pinned on Ms. Jackson's nipple ring. This story dates back to 9/11, or, more specifically, to two weeks after, when the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, condemned a historically astute Bill Maher wisecrack about America's ‘cowardly’ pre-9/11 pursuit of Al Qaeda. Mr. Fleischer warned Americans that they should ‘watch what they say,’ and some Americans took heed. Mr. Maher's ‘Politically Incorrect’ was dropped by a few network affiliates and advertisers and then canceled by ABC.”

     As an Arts & Entertainment editor, Rich should have his chronologies nailed down better: “Politically Incorrect” wasn’t cancelled until May 2002--a full eight months after Maher’s controversial comments. Since most television shows don’t even last eight months, the connection seems tenuous at best.

     Rich follows with yet more fulminations against Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” excoriating Christian families for anti-violence hypocrisy: “The market is the one god that brings even Washington's born-again Puritans to their knees. That's why you don't hear any noise from politicians about curtailing violence in pop culture now that parents are taking their kids to the sadomasochist gore fest known as ‘The Passion of the Christ.’”

For Rich’s rant in full, click here.

• Columnists | Gaffes | Janet Jackson | Bill Maher | “The Passion” | Politically Incorrect | Frank Rich

The Times Passes Up Counting Up Anti-War Protesters

     Alan Feuer commemorates the first anniversary of the Iraq war in a Sunday story on the anti-war march in Manhattan: “It is virtually impossible to guess the size of crowds without wading into a swamp of politics. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said there were about 3,000 demonstrators on each city block. Since Madison Avenue from roughly 23rd to 34th Street was filled before the march, that would mean some 33,000 people. The march's organizers, on the other hand, said there were more than 100,000.”

     The Times didn’t find it quite so hard to make crowd estimates last year, during the protests marking the outbreak of the war. Last March 20, the Times somehow found 5,000 anti-war protesters in Times Square, at a time when news organizations like the Washington Post, Associated Press and New York Sun could only come up with 300.

For the rest of Feuer’s story on the anti-war protest in Manhattan, click here.

• Anti-War Protesters | Alan Feuer | Iraq War

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org