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Times Watch for
September 21, 2004
Florida Now, Florida Forever for the
Times
The Times editorial page has yet to recover from Florida 2000. In Tuesday's "Partisans, and Nonpartisans, in Florida," about putting Ralph Nader on the ballot in Florida, they assert: "When [Glenda] Hood was appointed Florida's top elections officer, there was widespread concern that she would bend the rules to favor Republicans. That is what her predecessor, Katherine Harris, did in the 2000 election."
Even an editorial is obliged to have some factual backup, and the Times again fails to substantiate the conventional, angry-liberal allegations they make against Harris.
The page makes the same kind of broad accusation in Monday's masthead "In Defense of Civil Liberties," which states: "Mr. Bush has tried to sweep aside the Constitution by declaring selected American citizens to be unlawful combatants and jailing them indefinitely; Mr. Ashcroft's Justice Department produced the appalling memo justifying the torture of prisoners. It was also responsible for, among other things, jailing a lawyer from Portland, Ore., on charges of international terrorism based on a misreading of his fingerprints and, apparently, on his religious beliefs. The administration set up a detention camp in Guantánamo Bay where minimal standards of justice have been suspended or eliminated altogether."
• Abu Ghraib | George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Civil Liberties | Editorials | Florida | Katherine Harris | Ralph Nader
Dan Rather (Sort of) Apologizes;
NYT Notices
The Times fronts the "apology" by CBS News anchor Dan Rather over his use of forged memos. Reporters Jim Rutenberg and Kate Zernike note: "The day's concessions were a sharp turnaround from more than a week ago, when CBS News officials and Mr. Rather, for decades the face of CBS News, were standing steadfastly by the report, dismissing days of accusations from document experts that the records were fakes produced on a modern computer. Network officials yesterday admitted that the man who gave them the documents had lied about where he got them, and that inconsistencies in the cloak-and-dagger account he gave them in the past few days had left CBS unable to say definitively where they came from. Moreover, CBS was unable to reach the person the man identified as his source, Mr. Rather said….The network said it was appointing a panel of experts to review how such a flawed report got onto the air, especially one with such potential implications for a sitting president some 50 days before an election….The network's executives acknowledge that its team's failure to get in contact with the supposed original source should have been a red flag."
For the rest of Rutenberg and Zernike on Dan Rather's minimalist mea culpa, click here.
• CBS | Dan Rather | Forged Documents | Jim Rutenberg | Vietnam | Kate Zernike
"Consumer Advocate" Nader
Managing editor Michael Oreskes reviews Ralph Nader's new book and wonders what ever happened to the old left-wing activist--oops, make that "consumer advocate."
Oreskes notes in his Sunday review of Nader's "The Good Fight": "For much of his career, stretching back better than four decades now, journalists have found it hard to call Ralph Nader what he was. They labeled him a consumer advocate. The phrase was less threatening, but also less complete, than the reality. For as the power of corporations expanded across the years, Ralph Nader's place as their most relentless critic grew too." Oreskes, like his media predecessors, doesn't identify Nader as being in the liberal camp.
Oreskes does, however, elevate Nader into the pantheon of historical muckrakers: "'Unsafe at Any Speed' is his detailed portrait of how the auto industry willfully resisted safety innovations and thus contributed to thousands of highway deaths a year. That book deserves a place in the canon of American muckraking alongside the works of Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell."
However, he doesn't seem to like the new Nader, who claims that there is no difference between the two parties (a formulation that benefits Bush): "The intensity that forced safety measures in cars and saved thousands of lives four decades ago now makes it harder for the uncertain--including those who might think there is a difference between John Kerry and George W. Bush--to listen to his calls for action."
For the rest of Oreskes on Nader, click here.
• Books | Campaign 2004 | Labeling Bias | Ralph Nader | Michael Oreskes
Kerry Suffering "For Changing His Mind"
In Damien Cave's "Flip-Flopping Slip-Slides Into the Debate," he ponders why Sen. John Kerry's campaign is being hurt by such a "ridiculous" term: "Yet Senator John Kerry seems to be suffering in the polls for changing his mind. Republicans have tagged him a flip-flopper, and the mildly ridiculous term has somehow become a potent weapon, an 11-letter dig suggesting that Mr. Kerry has shifted policy positions frequently and is therefore weak, indecisive and more ambitious than principled. Senator Kerry's defenders say he is a pragmatist whose views reflect the complexity of evolving issues. So what makes the term flip-flopper so radioactive this year? Why is Senator Kerry falling victim to the charge? It could be a matter of style. Even flip-flopping, it seems, can be
nuanced."
Cave suggests that a sense of religious certainty among voters is helping Bush, and throws segregationist governor George Wallace into the mix: "In today's angry politics, however, change is bad, conversion is good. President Bush's transformation from a frat-boy alcoholic to a teetotaling Christian public servant is believable; so are the multiple epiphanies on race experienced by Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, if only because they asked for forgiveness….Contrast [Jimmy] Carter's experience with the 2000 campaign, when both Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush made conspicuous displays of faith, and Senator Kerry's problem becomes apparent. Reason is slipping, religion is sprinting and Mr. Kerry has bet on the wrong horse. His pragmatic liberalism, says Mr. Schulman, 'doesn't play as well as George Bush's religious conversion.'"
For the rest of Cave on Kerry and the art of the flip-flop, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | George W. Bush | Damien Cave | Sen. John Kerry | Religion
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org