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Times Watch for
November 10, 2004
Ashcroft’s “Excesses” vs. Arafat’s “Aura”
The top-left corner of the Times today carried an Elisabeth Bumiller story on the resignations of Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans. The first paragraph noted the “polarizing” Ashcroft was resigning after a “tumultuous tenure in which he was praised for his aggressive fight against terrorists but assailed by critics who said he sacrificed civil liberties in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”
But elsewhere on the front page, Elaine Sciolino found less controversy, and even “apparent pragmatism,” in the camp of dying Palestinian terrorist Yasir Arafat. The Times didn’t use the word “terrorist.” Instead, Sciolino referred to Arafat as a cult hero, “the guerrilla fighter and Nobel Prize winner who has symbolized the Palestinian struggle for statehood for four decades.” Of his potential successors, Ahmed Qureia and Mahmoud Abbas, Sciolino noted: “Neither is especially popular among Palestinians, with little of the street credibility and aura that surrounded Mr. Arafat.” Although she found space for French President Jacques Chirac’s best wishes for Arafat, Sciolino featured no Arafat critics in her story to discuss his “excesses.”
Bumiller noted Ashcroft was praised in a statement from President Bush, then added the balance that “Mr. Ashcroft’s critics were caustic,” citing Georgetown professor David Cole, who called Ashcroft “a disaster from a civil liberties perspective but also from a national security perspective.” She did not note that Professor Cole is seen by conservatives as a radical, as a man who’s argued against criminalizing financial donations for terrorist groups.
In a graphic on “Ashcroft’s tenure,” there was no balance. “To his critics, he was a symbol of the antiterror campaign’s excesses.” The six one-paragraph items summarizing his tenure were a tendentious listing of liberal talking points, beginning with his championing of the Patriot Act, which the Times did not mention passed Congress almost unanimously. It also highlighted that in February, Ashcroft’s department subpoenaed Planned Parenthood medical records to defend “a new law banning late-term abortions.” It does not mention that Planned Parenthood had litigated to stop the partial-birth abortion ban, claiming the grisly procedure was a medical necessity.
The same bias crept into Eric Lichtblau’s analysis, headlined “Powerful and Polarizing: Antiterror Campaign Made Ashcroft a Lightning Rod for Bitter Criticism.” (And the Times was often one of the lightning-throwers.) Lichtblau briefly noted Bush praise for Ashcroft, then underlined that “To his many critics, however, Mr. Ashcroft was a symbol of excesses of the antiterror campaign, a man engaged in overzealous prosecutions and insensitive to civil liberties....In his four years at the helm of the Justice Department, Mr. Ashcroft left his mark by promoting a variety of conservative causes. He overruled prosecutors to push for more aggressive use of the death penalty, expanded prosecutions for Internet pornography, advocated a broader interpretation of gun ownership rights and subpoenaed the medical records of abortion providers. Lichtblau couldn’t use the conservative label just once, adding Ashcroft’s selection “was regarded as a plum for the president's conservative religious base.”
A fair-minded liberal reporter looking back on Ashcroft’s tenure might note that one knock against Ashcroft before he took office was that he wouldn’t enforce all the laws, especially the ones liberals revere. Barbara Walters asked President Bush in 2001: “The big question is, can an Attorney General enforce federal laws and protect rights that he personally, vigorously, opposes?" But Ashcroft could be seen as the go-get-em man for Planned Parenthood for the series of captures and prosecutions of violent anti-abortion fugitives during his tenure, from James Kopp to Clayton Waagner to Eric Rudolph.
But like Bumiller, Lichtblau went to liberal critics for Ashcroft-bashing with no labels attached -- first “Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat,” and then Anthony Romero of the unlabeled ACLU, who said Ashcroft amassed “one of the worst civil liberties records of any modern Attorney General.”
Lichtblau featured former Ashcroft aide Juleanna Glover Weiss briefly – to push her into acknowledging Ashcroft was a “lightning rod” – but made no mention of the conservative defense of his record beyond the liberal media’s obsessions. On National Review Online, Shannen Coffin noted that violent crime is at a 30-year low, declining by 27 percent during the three-year period between 2001-2003…federal gun-crime prosecutions are up over 75 percent in the last four years. In 2003 alone, more federal gun charges were brought than any prior year on record. The result was that 250,000 fewer gun crimes were committed in the last three years than in the prior three.” Where was that in the “legacy” summary?
For the rest of Bumiller’s story, click here.
For the rest of Lichtblau, click here.
For the rest of Sciolino’s story on Arafat, click here.
• John Ashcroft | Yasir Arafat | Elisabeth Bumiller | Eric Lichtblau | Elaine Sciolino
Bush’s “Brezhnevian Fondness for Secrecy”
Kristof is not inconsistent: he thought a special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak investigation was a bad, politicized idea from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats last year. Now that he’s lamenting that the result may be prison time for Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine writer Matthew Cooper, he’s quite dramatic in identifying special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as “the Inspector Javert of our age.” It must be an awfully short age, since Kenneth Starr always drew that literary allusion in the Clinton years.
But Hillary isn’t currently drawing blame for the prosecutorial vise grip on journalists. The Bush team isn’t so lucky: “Responsibility lies primarily with the judges rather than with the Bush administration, except for the demand for phone records and for the appointment of Inspector Javert as special prosecutor. But it's probably not a coincidence that we're seeing an offensive against press freedoms during an administration that has a Brezhnevian fondness for secrecy.”
Bush is Brezhnev? Funny, wasn’t it Jimmy Carter who kissed Brezhnev on both cheeks as he oppressed millions in concentration camps, and the Republicans who crumbled the Soviet empire? Speaking of mangled metaphors, it’s been almost exactly a year since the Times editorial page compared the critics of CBS’s cinematic hatchet job on Ronald Reagan to Soviet commissars:
"CBS was wrong to yield to conservative pressure and yank it….[Reagan's] supporters credit him with forcing down the Iron Curtain, so it is odd that some of them have helped create the Soviet-style chill embedded in the idea that we, as a nation, will not allow critical portrayals of one of our own recent leaders."
Kristof concluded with a different tyrannical twist: “In May, Iran's secret police detained me in Tehran and demanded that I identify a revolutionary guard I had quoted as saying "to hell with the mullahs." My interrogators threatened to imprison me unless I revealed my source. But after a standoff, the Iranian goons let me go. Imprisoning Western journalists for protecting their sources was too medieval, even for them. Let's hope the U.S. judicial system shows the same restraint as those Iranian thugs.”
For the rest of Kristof’s column, click here.
• Nicholas Kristof | Valerie Plame
The Holy Sacrament of Caffeination
In Wednesday’s “Dining Out” section, William Grimes discusses the coffee drinker’s wish that they could make a quality caffeine shot at home: “The first coffee of the day is a make-or-break moment. A robust, flavorful cup can clear the mind, cheer the soul, and boost self-confidence. A watery, bitter brew almost guarantees gloom.” Then he gets cute: “Small wonder that the corner Starbucks has become a kind of beverage wayside chapel, restoring the spirit with sacramental espressos, cappucinos, and lattes.” What next, coffee out of a chalice?
For the rest of the Grimes home-coffee probe, click here.
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org