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Times Watch for
May 17, 2004
Front-Page
Cheers for Kerry-McCain
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jodi Wilgoren get front-page treatment for the latest exercise in media wishful thinking: A Kerry-McCain ticket.
"Undeterred by McCain Denials, Some See Him as Kerry's No. 2," reads the headline to their Saturday story. Although the Times notes that as recently as last Friday McCain said he had "totally ruled it out" (joining the Democratic ticket), that doesn't stop the paper from saying in the very next sentence: "Even so, Democrats say a bipartisan Kerry-McCain ticket, featuring two decorated Vietnam War veterans from different parties and regions of the country, would give them a powerful edge in the debate over who can best lead the nation in the war on terror."
The Times allows former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey and Democratic strategist Chris Lehane to gush over McCain. Predictably, much of the rest of the media is following the Times lead, with the CBS Evening News and NBC’s Meet the Press also promoting a Kerry-McCain ticket.
For the rest of Stolberg-Wilgoren on Kerry-McCain, click here:
• Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Kerry | Sen. John McCain | Sheryl Gay Stolberg | Jodi Wilgoren
Jessica
Lynch Gone Bad
First it was Abu Ghraib and My Lai. On Sunday, Arts
editor Frank Rich's latest column, "Saving Private England," features
another strained
comparison. This time, it's Abu Ghraib abuser Lynndie England and Jessica
Lynch. This gives Rich the excuse to replay the "Jessica Lynch as Pentagon
propaganda" canard and to warn of "our country's descent into the gulag."
He begins: "It's almost too perfect. Two young working-class women from opposite ends of West Virginia go off to war. One is blond and has aspirations to be a schoolteacher. The other is dark, a smoker, divorced and now carrying an out-of-wedlock baby. One becomes the heroic poster child for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the subject of a hagiographic book and TV movie; the other becomes the hideous, leering face of American wartime criminality, Exhibit A in the indictment of our country's descent into the gulag. In the words of Time magazine, Pfc. Lynndie England is 'a Jessica Lynch gone wrong.'…Flash back for a moment to the creation of Jessica Lynch Superstar. It was in early April 2003 that the stories first surfaced about the female Rambo who had shot her way out of an ambush. 'She Was Fighting to the Death' read the headline in The Washington Post, an account that was then regurgitated without question by much of the press. Later we learned that this story was almost entirely fiction, from the heroine's gunplay to the reports of her being slapped around by her Iraqi captors to the breathless cliffhanger of her rescue....In retrospect, much of what we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom was as fictionalized as CentCom's version of 'Saving Private Jessica.' When we weren't staging the news, we were covering it up."
For more Rich, click here:
• Columnists | Iraq War | Jessica Lynch | Frank Rich
"Mild-Mannered"
Tom Daschle?
Reporter Carl Hulse pens "From the Senate Minority
Leader, a Call to Calm" for the Times online, blog-type feature, Times on the
Trail. In it, Hulse focuses on a speech at Kansas State University by Sen. Tom
Daschle on the "startling meanness" of modern politics--but doesn't mention
Daschle's own contributions to the till.
In a May 10 entry, Hulse wrote: "Mr. Daschle is a favorite target of Republicans, who blame the usually mild-mannered lawmaker for stalling their favored legislation in the Senate and just generally tying the place in knots."
(Hulse evidently missed the time "mild-mannered" Daschle accused Rush Limbaugh listeners of threats and compared his conservative critics to the Taliban.)
Hulse continues: "In his comments, he specifically mentioned the 2002 Senate campaigns run against two fellow Democrats, Tim Johnson, who won re-election in South Dakota, and Max Cleland, who lost in Georgia. Both had been the subject of ads that compared them with Osama bin Laden for their objections to parts of a proposal to create the new homeland security agency. But Mr. Daschle also criticized an ad posted briefly on the Website of Moveon.org that compared President Bush with Hitler."
Did a 2002 political ad really compare Cleland to Osama bin Laden? No. Though the claim has taken on mythic proportions on the left lately, a look at the actual ad shows Cleland wasn't pictured with bin Laden, and the ad's script makes no such comparison.
For the rest of Hulse's "blog entry" on Daschle, click here:
• Sen. Max Cleland | Sen. Tom Daschle | Gaffes | Carl Hulse
Still
No Liberals in the Gay Marriage Debate
Sunday's front-page sports a story by conservative beat
reporter David Kirkpatrick on the apparent lack of interest that conservative
religious activists have shown regarding a proposed constitutional ban on gay
marriage.
Kirkpatrick's "Backers of Gay Marriage Ban Find Tepid Response in Pews," while generally fair, exhibits the paper's usual bias in the labeling of warring ideological groups. While the term "conservative" (as a description of groups like the Family Research Council) crops up 16 times in Kirkpatrick's story, there are zero uses of the term "liberal."
To be fair, the story's focus is on conservative groups. Yet the liberal groups brought up in the story are not identified as such, but only as "gay rights groups." That disparity leads to ideologically unbalanced sentences like these: "Gay rights groups argue that social conservatives in Washington overestimated the level of anxiety about gay marriage among their supporters….Both conservatives and gay rights groups say there is not enough support to approve the amendment, although that might change if its text were somehow revised."
For the rest of Kirkpatrick and "conservatives," click here:
• Conservatives | Gay Marriage | David Kirkpatrick | Labeling Bias
Except
for the "Killing U.S. Soldiers" Part, That Is
"Tyranny Of the Minorities," Thomas Friedman's Sunday
column, opens on this provocative note: "Question: What do the Shiite extremist
leader Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have in common with the extremist
Jewish settlers in Israel? Answer: More than you'd think. Both movements combine
religious messianism, and a willingness to sacrifice their followers and others
for absolutist visions, along with a certain disdain for man-made laws, as
opposed to those from God. The big question in both Iraq and Israel today is
also similar: Will the silent majorities in both countries finally turn against
these extremist minorities to save their future?"
Yes, they're basically identical--except that one group kills U.S. troops in Iraq and the other doesn't.
For Friedman in full, click here:
• Columnists | Thomas Friedman | Israel
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org