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Times Watch for
May 6, 2004
Rumsfeld Gets the Bum’s Rush, Squared
While the front page and the Web site emphasize trouble for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, columnists Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman both want Rumsfeld fired, “today, not tomorrow or next month, today.”
On the front page, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard W. Stevenson noted that President Bush “chastised” Rumsfeld for his handling of the prisoner-abuse scandal, “an extraordinary display of finger-pointing in an administration led by a man who puts a high premium on order and loyalty.” In a Web site dispatch, reporter David Stout lamely attempted to add drama: “In advance of his appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the White House was standing by the defense secretary, at least in public.”
On the editorial page, the pull-quote potentates underlined the media-imposed danger for Rumsfeld. The Maureen Dowd column carried the quote “Fire Rummy, or make him read faster.” The Thomas Friedman column carried the quote “It’s time for Rumsfeld to go.”
But it gets funnier: Dowd scolds the Pentagon brass for showing up next to her at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night. She reported she wanted to scream to Defense second banana Paul Wolfowitz: “Get back to your desk, Mr. Myopia from Utopia!” She claimed that somehow, the Arab nations have suddenly started hating Jews since the Iraq invasion: “far from transforming the Mideast into democracies that flower with love of America and Israel, the bumbling neo-cons have unleashed a rash of racism, revenge, and hate.”
Friedman isn’t much more sensible, demanding like a spoiled child that Bush fire Rumsfeld “today, not tomorrow or next month, today.” After fussing that “I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today,” he claimed: “It’s not wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom ‘Friends’ right now. They’re the only friends we have, and even they’re leaving.”
For the complete Bumiller and Stevenson story, click here.
For the full Stout web dispatch, click here.
For the latest Dowd column, click here.
For the full Friedman commentary, click here.
• Donald Rumsfeld | Maureen Dowd | Thomas Friedman
Abu Ghraib Word Games
Reporter Dexter Filkins suggested that now that the Americans run the prison at Abu Ghraib, it is “now a byword for inmate abuse.” Three days before, the Times editorial board found it was a “byword for torture under Saddam Hussein.”
Times reporter Dexter Filkins began his retelling of yesterday’s tour of the Abu Ghraib prison facility, with this loaded lead: "It was an inauspicious start for a guided tour meant to show that things had changed at the prison that is now a byword for inmate abuse."
But wait, on Monday, the editorial board saw Abu Ghraib a bit differently: "The American military made a strange and ill-starred decision when it chose to incarcerate Iraqis in Abu Ghraib, the prison that had become a byword for torture under Saddam Hussein and a symbol of everything the invasion of Iraq was supposed to end."
To the Times editorial board, Abu Ghraib was an indictment of Saddam’s brutality. To Times reporter Filkins, it is an indictment of the American military. Filkins has proven that his name could be a byword for anti-American bias.
For the full Filkins report, click here.
For the Monday editorial, click here.
Purdum’s Pablum
Usually, in a presidential year, reporters are thought to scrub public records about the candidates for president, and ask tough questions about what the records provide. That is not the way Todd Purdum reported Thursday on released FBI files on John Kerry’s anti-war activities.
Purdum began: “A confidential F.B.I. memorandum dated April 29, 1971, on a just-concluded antiwar march on Washington by Vietnam Veterans Against the War concluded that the group's nominal leaders had been overshadowed by ‘a more popular and eloquent figure, John Kerry,’ who was ‘glib, cool and displayed best what the moderate elements wanted to reflect.’ One version or another of that assessment of the young Mr. Kerry is echoed repeatedly among 20,000 pages of once-secret F.B.I. files”.
Purdum acknowledged indirectly that VVAW wasn’t hard to be a “moderate” in, since they debated assassinating pro-war U.S. Senators. But was Kerry “moderately” anti-war, or was he just doing his traditional tactical straddle? Kerry "announced to those present that he was resigning from the executive committee for personal reasons; however he would be available to speak for VVAW." And: “Mr. Kerry has said he has no memory of attending the Kansas City meeting — a multiday affair at which a proposal to kill American politicians who supported the war was discussed — but does not dispute that he might have been there.”
Having a record of left-wing agitation this confusing spurs the Times to call Kerry “complex.” So far this year, the Times has acknowledged only once Kerry’s inflammatory words before the Senate in April 1971 about the murders, tortures, and mutilations supposedly committed routinely by American soldiers, with the full knowledge of their commanders. The Times carried the quote on the front page on Saturday, February 28, in a story by Purdum headlined: “In ’71 Antiwar Words, a Complex Picture of Kerry.”
For the full Purdum story from Thursday, click here.
• Sen. John Kerry | Todd Purdum
More Michael Moore
Yesterday, the Times highlighted on the front page the spat between Disney and Miramax over distributing Michael Moore’s anti-Bush film “Fahrenheit 9-11.” To give you an idea of the Times approach to Hollywood news, the Times never put “The Passion of the Christ” on the front page as it took the nation by storm in the last ten weeks, grossing $366 million. By contrast, Michael Moore’s last film grossed $21 million.
Once again, reporters Jim Rutenberg and Laura M. Holson curtailed the coverage to battling liberals only, between Miramax (run by big Democratic contributor Harvey Weinstein), Disney (run by major Clinton fundraiser Michael Eisner) and Moore. Rutenberg allowed one producer to compare the film to “The Passion,” as he predicted “There’s no bad news here for Mr. Weinstein or Mr. Moore.” There’s certainly not any bad news when there are no conservative critics in the story -- or any analysis of the accuracy of the purported claims of the Moore film. Gibson’s film was pounded by the Times for months before its debut by Frank Rich and others as a vicious blast of untruth. But in this story, Moore was allowed to claim: “This is not an anti-Bush diatribe.”
For the full Rutenberg and Holson story, click here.
• Michael Moore | Jim Rutenberg | Laura M. Holson
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org