Nagourney Nags Zell, Cheney for "Brutal" Attacks -- September 2, 2004 -- TimesWatch.org

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Times Watch for September 2, 2004

Nagourney Nags Zell, Cheney for "Brutal" Attacks

The Times again emphasizes "brutal attacks" on Kerry from the convention floor in Thursday's front-page story, "Cheney and G.O.P. Mount Vigorous Assault on Cheney."

"Mr. Cheney's remarks were part of a vigorous assault that he and his party mounted on Mr. Kerry's domestic and foreign policy credentials, coupled with a spirited defense of President Bush's economic stewardship, as the Republicans gathered for the third night of their nominating convention in New York," note reporters Adam Nagourney and Robin Toner. "Mr. Cheney led a parade of Republicans--and one Democrat--in a carefully orchestrated evening [Editor's note: The "carefully orchestrated" cliché appears in the print edition of the paper, not online, which merely calls the evening "orchestrated"] intended to undercut Mr. Kerry's commander-in-chief credentials while also trying to seize the ground on economic issues."

On Democratic Sen. Zell Miller's speech: "Republicans enlisted the Democrat who delivered the keynote address at the 1992 Democratic convention that nominated Bill Clinton, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, to offer the keynote for the Republicans, which amounted to a memorably brutal attack on Mr. Kerry and the Democratic Party. Mr. Miller, a Southern conservative who has grown increasingly alienated from his party, said Democrats had placed partisan politics over national security during this time of war and portrayed Mr. Kerry as 'faint-hearted,' self-indulgent and indecisive….If Mr. Miller was fiery and provocative, Mr. Cheney delivered equally brutal lines in an understated fashion….Mr. Kerry's aides accused the Republicans of distorting his record--and were particularly dismissive of Mr. Miller. 'This angry old man is scaring the children,' said Jay Carson, a Democratic Party spokesman."
Todd Purdum's online audio review of Wednesday night's speeches also made the "rough" point: "Tonight's speeches were sharp and rough-edged in prime time. Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia both gave pretty rip-snorting speeches in which they lauded George W. Bush, but they also attacked John Kerry openly and in unhesitating terms."

For more of Nagourney on Wednesday night's speeches, click here:

Stubborn Cheney's "Simple," Harsh" Speech

David Sanger's "analysis" of Dick Cheney's speech, "The Vice President's View of the World, With an Emphasis on Danger and Boldness," uses the Iraq war to paint Dick Cheney as a throwback stuck stubbornly in the past.

The story opens: "Vice President Dick Cheney reverted last night to the simple, bold declarations of how America should exercise its power that were often heard in the first year after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had not yet been invaded, intelligence reports had not yet proved false, and 17 months of insurgency had not yet raised the question of whether George W. Bush had taken a wrong turn in the fight against terror. Instead, Mr. Cheney jettisoned the complications of the past year, honing the central argument of the Republican campaign: that the country could not trust Senator John Kerry to strike decisively in the defense of American interests."

Sanger appears to work in his own opinion couched in this bit of "some say" criticism: "To some it may seem an overdistilled message, discarding much of what the Bush administration has learned, often the hard way, over the past year. It largely ignores discussion of the value of alliances, the need to treat the roots of terrorism, or the requirements of slow, patient diplomacy in places where there are no real military options. Mr. Bush's critics will say it sidesteps the problems of murky intelligence and deeply festering resentments of American power around the world."

Indeed, Sanger has made no secret of his displeasure with Bush's foreign policy and war conduct ("There are a lot of people who think it was simple solutions and simple slogans that made for a rough time in Iraq," he said on Washington Week in Review last month.)

Later Sanger gripes: "Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have turned pre-emption from a post-cold-war doctrine of American defense strategy into a campaign theme. In that process, a lot has been thrown overboard. Washington may still be talking about missing unconventional weapons, or whether the occupation of Iraq is aiding the battle against terrorism or fueling it, but little of that debate has been acknowledged at Madison Square Garden."

Sanger then laments Cheney's lack of nuance: "The reversion to such simple precepts and harsh language may be in part a response to polls that show growing doubts about how Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have conducted the country's national security policy. While they consistently say Mr. Bush is doing a good job of handling terrorism, Americans are less certain about his handling of foreign policy in general, and Iraq in particular."

For the rest of Sanger on Cheney, click here:

Cheney: "A Rock More Than a Rock Star"

Geez, what did Dick Cheney ever do to Rick Lyman?

After a highly unfavorable write-up yesterday, reporter Lyman today takes on the veep's stoic speaking manner in a review embellished with extraneous insults in "For a Night, Cheney Dons Charisma."

Lyman mocks: "There cannot be many people in the world who would confuse Dick Cheney with Elvis Presley, but all of them seemed to be in Madison Square Garden last night. 'Cheney Rocks,' read a hand-lettered sign waved from the crowd. Mr. Cheney tried his hardest to prove that they were right but still needed a lot of help from a supportive crowd…. Critics say Mr. Cheney, on the stump, tends to resemble a rock more than a rock star….When the speech built to its Democrat-bashing height, the adoring audience simply willed Mr. Cheney into a fleeting state of charisma, or something quite like it. Although it continued to seem an ill-fitting cloak on the taciturn Westerner, he wore it with as much aplomb as he could muster."

For the rest of Lyman on Cheney, click here:

• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004

Bush Gets Union Endorsement: Is He Exploiting 9-11?

Apparently any union endorsement of Bush is automatically suspect: Two Times reports on Bush's endorsement by New York City's largest firefighters union take time to fret about Bush's possible exploitation of 9-11.

In "Bush Reaches City, Accepting Firefighters' Endorsement in Queens," White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes: "The president's entrance into the convention city via the multiethnic, working-class neighborhood of Elmhurst was carefully staged by his re-election campaign and designed to showcase Mr. Bush as both a man of the people and the leader who stood by the city in the days when parts of lower Manhattan lay in ruins….The White House appeared to be walking a fine line between saluting the firefighters for their heroism and exploiting the tableau for Mr. Bush's campaign."

On Wednesday, union-beat reporter Steven Greenhouse filed a story on the firefighter's union that included this dash of cold water in the cut-out line: "A need to walk a fine line to avoid appearing to exploit a tragedy."

For the rest of Greenhouse, click here:

For more Bumiller, click here:

NYT Executive Editor Blasts Fox News, Swift Boat Vets

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller appeared on C-Span's "Washington Journal" Wednesday and unloaded on the "psuedo-journalism" of Fox News and the stories being told by the Swift Boat Veterans, which he apparently automatically assumes are "fallacious."

About halfway into the program, hosted by Brian Lamb, Keller lamented the existence of Fox News (which he didn't refer to by name) when he railed against "the cacophony of news or pseudo-news outlets that are, you know, claiming to be fair and biased [sic] but that are really, you know, tendentious and one-sided and it kind of pollutes the pool for the rest of us."

Several minutes later, after a conservative caller from West Virginia asked him to address the rising popularity of Fox News and Bush's response to the Swift Boat ads, Keller unloaded: "Fox is an interesting question. There is a kind of unspoken non-aggression pact among media that they don't beat up on each other. Fox tends to be the exception in our business. You know, John Carroll, who is the executive editor, basically holds my job at the Los Angeles Times, gave a speech in the spring, and most of which was devoted to Fox New. And in there he argued that what they do isn't really journalism, it's pseudo-journalism, and he defined a number of characteristics that meet his standard of what is journalism, including making a real effort to correct your mistakes when you are confronted with them. And he said that Fox doesn't meet that test. I have to say that, as somebody who watches Fox from time to time, I agree with him. I think there's a lot more heat than light generated by Fox News and it's obviously, it's a free country, you know, they can put what they want on the air, but it feels like it's my business, because I think there's a general cheapening of the discourse, the political discourse in this country and I think Fox is a contributor to that.

"The Swift Boat controversy is, is it's a tricky story, it kind of gives you goosebumps when stories like this come along and Swift Boat is not the first, when one party in a campaign is slinging charges, unsubstantiated or at least very dubious charges at another party in the campaign, and here you are as a newspaper this is happening, the two sides are shouting at each other, you need to cover it because its news, you can't suppress it or pretend it isn't happening. But just by the act of reporting it, you are to some extent serving the people who are producing the fallacious charges because you're so in doubt, you know [Keller in mocking voice] 'Maybe John Kerry, you know, wasn't really in Vietnam at all, who knows?' And you know, you just have to try to write as carefully as you can, and in this case we devoted quite a bit of effort to first of all, examining whether the charges were true; second of all, trying to find out who the people were who were promoting the charges and why; and third, reporting on what the president had to say including his remarks about 527s and about this particular ad."

Indeed, Times coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans has been almost wall-to-wall negative.

• Fox News | Bill Keller | Sen. John Kerry | Liberal Bias | Swift Boat Veterans

Bush, Simplistic Polarizer-in-Chief

Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard Stevenson pen a long profile of George Bush on the eve of Bush's acceptance speech. Under the headline: "A Leader Now Tested by Tragedy," the reporters note: "Four years ago, George W. Bush arrived at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia as a governor untested in foreign policy, best known as his father's son and caricatured as a princeling who would do the bidding of his older advisers. Tonight, Mr. Bush will stride into Madison Square Garden as a president of consequence, tested, altered and defined by the history that intervened on a crystalline September morning four miles south of the stage where he will accept his party's nomination for a second term."

Later they talk of the "polarizing" president who sees things only in black and white: "If Mr. Bush has left the nation more polarized, on domestic policy as much as on his approach to national security, he expresses few regrets. And though he appears a little less cocky, he is no more prone now than he was four years ago to self-doubt….As a leader and politician, Mr. Bush has displayed traits that infuriate and intimidate his opponents and sometimes surprise even his supporters. In a complex world, he rejects ambiguity for the certitude of the choice between good and evil and the comfort of a morality shaped by his religious faith. When faced with a political setback, he has a knack for capitulating and then claiming victory."

They link Bush to an old liberal media bogeyman: "Mr. Bush is a street-smart, intuitive politician, heavily influenced by Lee Atwater, his friend and his father's attack dog of a campaign manager in 1988. He is ruthless, quick to pass judgment and quickly figures out what other people want from him and what he must do to get their support. Unlike his father, he sees the world not through the nuance of policy but through the combat of politics."

The Times lets Bush's critics get their licks in: "To his opponents, Mr. Bush's record is equally clear: he has been a divider, not a uniter; a politician who pressed ahead with a radical agenda that delivered tax breaks to the rich and produced huge budget deficits; a man who exploited the disaster of Sept. 11 to make the nation forget the dubious legitimacy of his election and led nearly 1,000 Americans to die in Iraq in a war based on a false premise. In the view of his critics, Mr. Bush's political skills are nothing more than brilliant salesmanship combined with all the advantages of being profoundly unreflective. They say that the same qualities that make Mr. Bush an effective politician--his risk-taking, his decisiveness, his certitude--have also fed what they call his arrogance and ignorance. In the critics' formulation, a president who always knows what he thinks never has to ponder the details; dogmatism saves time, and everything becomes strategy."

Later they suggest Bush has found an enemy that suits his simplistic style: "In Islamic terrorists, Mr. Bush found himself facing an enemy well suited to his black and white view of the world."

For the rest of Bumiller and Stevenson's long profile of Bush, click here:

Could Job Figures Dampen Convention Enthusiasm?

Richard Stevenson takes an economic tack in his Thursday story, anticipating some wobbly job figures that he insists could hurt Bush in "Jobless Figures Could Emphasize Bush's Big Weakness."

The story's cut-out line could be read either as a prediction or wishful thinking, given the Times' anti-Republican bias: "The Republican convention enthusiasm could be dampened."

Stevenson notes: "About 10 hours after President Bush accepts his party's nomination tonight, the government will release an important report on the state of the economy. Even some of his allies say that if it is weak it could dampen Republican enthusiasm coming out of the convention and leave Mr. Bush on the defensive for a pivotal issue heading into the campaign homestretch. Economists do not expect the employment report tomorrow to show terribly strong growth in jobs. With economic statistics over the last month suggesting that the recovery has slowed or even faltered, Mr. Bush is heading into the final two months of the campaign vulnerable to any further bad economic news, especially in swing states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where employment losses have hit hard."

Then he lectures Bush: "Certainly for the White House, the economy poses a problem and has been overshadowed at the convention by the focus on terrorism. The White House can hardly afford to ignore the subject. Polls suggest that the economy and employment continue to dominate the public's agenda."

For the rest of Stevenson on what a bad jobs report could mean for Bush, click here:

• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Economy | Employment | Richard Stevenson

Did Protests "Cast a Shadow" Over Convention?

The Times again insists in a front-page story that Sunday's convention-eve protests somehow affected the opening day of the Republican convention. In Thursday's "Police Tactics Mute Protesters And Messages," on publicity for the left-wingers protesting the Republican convention, Michael Slackman and Diane Cardwell assert: "In fact, the image that went nationwide, on television and in newspapers, was from Sunday, when United for Peace and Justice, a protest coalition, held a huge but orderly march that managed to cast a shadow over the opening day of the convention."

For more of the protester coverage from Slackman and Cardwell, click here:

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