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Top 10 Lowlights of the New York Times in 2005 Once again, the Times provided a Christmas bounty of material to choose from, whether it was a pattern of biased coverage -- Hurricane Katrina, Cindy Sheehan -- or a single bizarrely biased story. Here is what Times Watch found to be the worst of the worst from another liberally slanted year of coverage, in ascending order of gruesomeness.
#10 The Anti-PBS "Putsch" Floating the idea of cutting taxpayer funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was an easy way to send the Times editorial page into an ideological frenzy in 2005. A November 28 editorial, "Public Broadcasting's Enemy Within," made a rhetorical assault on Kenneth Tomlinson, the former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman who had the audacity to attempt to bring some political balance to PBS, which has long used tax money to fund liberal programming: "As chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson proved to be a disastrous zealot. Internal investigators found he repeatedly broke federal law and ethics rules in overreaching his authority and packing the payroll with Republican ideologues." Most galling, the Times employed the historically freighted term word "putsch" (as in Hitler's 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch) to describe conservatives who would dare to consider cutting taxpayer funding of "public broadcasting": "Defenders of public broadcasting now must guard against still another conservative putsch -- a Congressional move to cut financing for the corporation's $400 million budget of vital aid for local stations. This time, the 'balance' zealots may resort to irony by citing the very chaos wrought by Mr. Tomlinson." The editorial page used the same frenzied tone (and word) on June 15 in an editorial accusing "spiteful" Republicans of (as the headline reads) "Squelching Public Broadcasting." After admitting that federal money makes up a mere 15 percent of public broadcasting's budget, the editors warned "the public's faith and donations could be threatened if audiences sense the Republicans are succeeding with an ideological putsch."
#9 Changing a Soldier's Story: A False "Surprise" Call-Up to Iraq A July 6 op-ed by Army reserve officer Phillip Carter was accompanied online by an embarrassing editor's note apologizing for putting words in Carter's mouth -- changes that made his Bush-critical column much more slanted. In a correction that Times Watch couldn't find in the hard copy of the paper, only online, the Times blushed: "The Op-Ed page in some copies of Wednesday's newspaper carried an incorrect version of the below article about military recruitment. The article also briefly appeared on NYTimes.com before it was removed. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, 'Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday,' nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a 'surprise tour of Iraq.' That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error." The last paragraph of the op-ed originally contained this line falsely indicating Carter had been called up by surprise: "A presidential recruiting speech may not fill every barracks, nor will it keep old soldiers like me from a surprise tour of Iraq, but it would help remind potential soldiers of what we’re fighting for." The corrected op-ed read: "A presidential recruiting speech may not fill every barracks, nor will it induce every old soldier to sign on for another tour, but it would help remind potential soldiers of what we’re fighting for." Nothing about a "surprise tour of Iraq" there.
#8 Judith Miller -- From 1st Amendment Hero To Pentagon Suck-Up Whatever the faults of her overly credulous reporting on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, former Times investigative reporter Judith Miller has a Pulitzer Prize and four books to her credit, and spent three months in jail on First Amendment grounds. Yet that didn't stop her from being tossed aside as a political inconvenience by her colleagues and bosses upon release. She left the paper under a cloud, passing a gauntlet of cold-shoulders from her erstwhile colleagues who accused her, anonymously and not so anonymously, of being a sucker for Bush administration war lies. Reporter Katharine Seelye filed the November 10 house story on Miller's departure in which Miller herself characterizes the "convent of The New York Times, a convent with its own theology and its own catechism" -- perhaps hinting at the liberal religion of the paper. Lynne Duke of the Washington Post interviewed Miller November 9 and unveiled this irony: "Several of Miller's Times colleagues, interviewed before her resignation, expressed bitterness after years of watching her seem to slip-slide away from sanction for questionable behavior, like being too cozy with a particular point of view, being too close to her sources, all of which she denies." As if any of the paper's liberal reporters would ever be sanctioned for being "too cozy" to liberal ideas. Maureen Dowd struck the first blow from within, in an October 22 column, "Woman Of Mass Destruction," which opens with this piece of poisoned candy: "I've always liked Judy Miller," before: "Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet 'Miss Run Amok.' Judy's stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war." The former reporter provides this newsroom grit: "It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like 'Valerie Plame.'" But is Dowd a credible person to decide who and who isn't credible? Just recall Dowd's dishonest deletion of a quote by Bush in a column from May 2003, a ham-handed attempt to make him look naïve about the dangers of Al Qaeda. Even Executive Editor Bill Keller criticized Miller in an October 22 story by Katharine Seelye: "In his first direct criticism of Ms. Miller, Mr. Keller said she 'seems to have misled' the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, when she was asked by Mr. Taubman if she was one of at least six Washington journalists who had reportedly been told that Valerie Plame was a C.I.A. operative."
#7 Loony Labeling What do former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, National Review magazine, and the re-emerging neo-Nazi movement in Germany have in common? According to the New York Times, they are all "far right." "Pataki Takes His Lumps, From the (Far) Right" "You could call a fight for the hearts and minds of the far right in New Jersey -- a state that voted convincingly for John Kerry last November -- something of a Pyrrhic victory." So if National Review and Bret Schundler are "far right," what adjective does the Times use to characterize neo-Nazis? The same one, it turns out. "Germany's Far Right Tries to Put On a Normal Face."
#6 Ignoring Air America The local New York Sun reported August 1 on the emerging scandal at the left-wing radio company Air America. "The top executive at a Bronx youth organization said yesterday that the former director of Air America Radio received more than $800,000 in loans for himself and the radio network from the nonprofit organization while serving as its development director. Some of the transfers, according to the president of the Bronx-based Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club organization's executive committee, Jeannette Graves, occurred when the development director, Evan Montvel Cohen, who for a time served simultaneously as the liberal radio network's director, appealed to the organization for two loans worth $35,000." And what did the Times have to say? Well, not much. As columnist Michelle Malkin wrote, "Air America's pom-pom squad at the New York Times remains silent." After two weeks of no story, even some liberal outlets took notice of the paper's silence. The website for the Columbia Journalism Review wondered where the big name papers were: "What do you get when you cross a controversial liberal media outlet, the continuing fingerprints of its former director who resigned in disgrace, and hundreds of thousands of dollars apparently skimmed from a local non-profit that cares for disadvantaged youth and the elderly? Well, one would think you would have a story with all the elements to at least make the business pages of the major dailies -- but then, one would be wrong." The August 12 Times finally acknowledged the financial scandal in a story buried on page 3 of the Metro section that didn't even make the paper's national edition. Not that the headline or subhead of the story actually mentioned "Air America." Instead it read: "Bronx Boys Club's Finances Investigated -- Officials Look Into Loans Made to a Liberal Radio Network." The words "Air America" presumably couldn't fit into that 15-word space. By contrast, when the conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh announced his addition to prescription painkillers on his October 10, 2003 radio show, it made the front page of the New York Times the very next day, and the paper followed up with several stories referencing Limbaugh's addiction. When the Times finally ran another Air America story, it was a puff piece on the network's female "rising star" hosts Randi Rhodes and Rachel Maddow, headlined: "They Look Nothing Like Rush Limbaugh -- As women and lefties, Air America's rising stars are rarities in talk radio. But perhaps not for long." Not until the seventh paragraph did the Times briefly dip into the scandal.
#5 Hillary's No Liberal! The Times followed a pattern of centering Hillary Clinton politically, perhaps for a run for the presidency in 2008. Far from accurately terming Clinton a liberal, the Times bizarrely insisted several times that she was a "social conservative." Reporter and Hillary-lover-in-chief Raymond Hernandez got the centering strategy rolling February 1 in a story on a Clinton speech in which she feinted to the center on abortion and gay marriage. Hernandez didn't label Hillary as liberal but did call her opponents "conservative," while suggesting the liberal label is an unfair "caricature." "Conservatives have long caricatured Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York's junior senator, as the sort of Democrat whose positions on social issues are out of step with Americans deeply concerned about religious and moral values. But while Mrs. Clinton has been strongly identified with polarizing issues like abortion rights, the picture that conservative Republicans paint of her is at odds with a side of herself she has lately displayed as she enters a new phase of her public life." February 22 brought "Clinton's Popularity Up in State, Even Among Republicans," another rah-rah review from Hernandez: "Remember Hillary Rodham Clinton and the conventional wisdom about how polarizing a figure she is? Well, think again." Again, Hernandez suggested those who dare call Clinton liberal were guilty of "caricature": "The result of these comments has been an emerging image of Senator Clinton that is far different from the caricature that Republicans have painted of her: that of a secular liberal whose stances are largely at odds with a public that they say is concerned about the nation's moral direction." From a July 13 story by Hernandez and Patrick Healy: "In fact, Mrs. Clinton has defied simple ideological labeling since joining the Senate, ending up in the political center on issues like health care, welfare, abortion, morality and values, and national defense, to name just a few." The paper has yet to own up to Sen. Hillary Clinton's liberalism, even though the American Conservative Union gives her voting record a rating of 9, the same as arch-liberal Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. Meanwhile, she garners a 95% rating from the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action. The trend was topped off with a big October 2 profile in the Times Magazine from contributing writer Matt Bai, "Mrs. Triangulation." Taken in by Hillary's centering propaganda, Bai also saw unfavorable views of a liberal Clinton as "caricatures." In fact, Bai suggested that Clinton, who pushed nationalized health care, is in some respects a conservative: "She was raised as a Republican and a devout Methodist in suburban Chicago, and these influences, particularly in the turbulence of the 60's, created two philosophical impulses that were commonly linked in that era. The first is an unshakable notion of right and wrong and an almost missionary zeal for imposing it on others, mainly through political action. The second is a strand of moral conservatism that borders on prudishness….As first lady, it was Clinton's job to placate the party's base, even if that meant obscuring some of her more socially conservative instincts."
#4 Diminishing a Marine's Memory In an October 26 story by James Dao on the "grim mark" of the 2000th fatality among U.S. troops in Iraq, he quoted the last letter home of Cpl. Jeffrey Starr, a Marine killed in Iraq on Memorial Day. The story printed a portion of the letter that fit into the paper's agenda, reducing Starr to a man just waiting to die: "Sifting through Cpl. Starr's laptop computer after his death, his father found a letter to be delivered to the Marine's girlfriend. 'I kind of predicted this,' Cpl. Starr wrote of his own death. 'A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances.'" But Dao left off a vital part of a quote from the Marine -- a portion that showed how committed the Marine was to the cause of freedom in Iraq. Here's the full context of that quote showing how Starr felt about his death: "Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances. I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark." As the New York Post wrote: "There is saintliness in a soldier's prospective acceptance of an honorable death in combat. To diminish such a deed, especially in service of a political agenda, approaches sacrilege. So it was with the manner in which The New York Times last week noted the death of Cpl. Jeffrey Starr, USMC, of Snohomish, Wash., who was killed in Ramadi on April 30 during his third tour of duty in Iraq."
#3 Relaying Reckless Leftist Charges Against Pro-U.S. Bloggers in Iraq Reporter Sarah Boxer achieved instant notoriety in blogging circles for an irresponsibly speculative piece January 18 on a pro-U.S. blog run by Iraqi brothers. Boxer began in a breathless style that probably helped her story garner the top slot of the Arts front page: "When I telephoned a man named Ali Fadhil in Baghdad last week, I wondered who might answer. A C.I.A. operative? An American posing as an Iraqi? Someone paid by the Defense Department to support the war? Or simply an Iraqi with some mixed feelings about the American presence in Iraq? Until he picked up the phone, he was just a ghost on the Internet. The mystery began last month when I went online to see what Iraqis think about the war and the Jan. 30 national election. I stumbled into an ideological snake pit." But her story was rooted entirely in the speculative postings from a far-left group blog called Martini Republic. She explains: "Out of a list of 28 Iraqi blogs in English at a site called Iraqi Bloggers Central, I clicked on Iraq the Model because it promised three blogging brothers in one, Omar, Mohammed and Ali. It delivered more than that. The blog, which is quite upbeat about the American presence in Iraq, had provoked a deluge of intrigue and vitriol. People posting messages on an American Web site called Martini Republic accused the three bloggers of working for the C.I.A., of being American puppets, of not being Iraqis and even of not existing at all." The plot thickened: "One of the principal bloggers there, Joseph Mailander, had some questions for the Iraqi brothers. He wanted to know whether someone in the United States government or close to it had set up the blog. (The Web host, based in Abilene, Tex., is called CIATech Solutions.) And what about the two brothers' tour of the United States? Did the American government 'have a shadow role in promoting it?'" Boxer didn't bother to confirm that the "CIA" in CIATech stands for Complex Internet Applications, and not, as the Martini blog ludicrously implies, the Central Intelligence Agency. Instead, Boxer simply passed that along as Ali's explanation, when the fact could have easily be confirmed by the Times, which is after all supposedly in the business of nailing such things down: "Ali explained the name of the Web host, CIATech Solutions, by pasting in an e-mail message he got from an employee of the company explaining that the C.I.A. in the name is short for Complex Internet Applications and that the company 'has nothing to do with the U.S. government.'" A left-wing commenter's accusation of "fraud" set Boxer up for another round of loaded hypotheticals from a paranoid left-wing P.O.V. "What kind of frauds? One reader suggested that the brothers were real Iraqis but were being coached on what to write. Another, in support of that theory, noted the brothers' suspiciously fluent English. A third person observed that coaching wasn't necessary. All the C.I.A. would need to do to influence American opinion was find one pro-war blog and get a paper like USA Today to write about it. Martini Republic pointed out that the pro-war blog was getting lots of attention from papers like The Wall Street Journal and USA Today while antiwar bloggers like Riverbend, who writes Baghdad Burning, had gone unsung. Surely Iraq the Model did not represent the mainstream of Iraqi thinking?" (The Baghdad Burning blog is also hosted by CIA Tech, which presumably makes it a CIA plant as well.) The story's text box made the story's nasty insinuations explicit: "Does this little blog have friends in powerful places?"
#2 Loving Cindy Sheehan Anti-war Bush-hater Cindy Sheehan's caused a summer squall of anti-war protest that the Times, along with the rest of the media, tried to goad into an actual movement. They did so by trumpeting her status as a passionate, grieving anti-war mother and ignoring her increasingly bizarre anti-Bush and anti-American rantings, as well as the far-left nature of her entourage. Reporter Richard Stevenson wrote on August 8 of Sheehan: "She is also articulate, aggressive in delivering her message and has information that most White House reporters have not heard before: how Mr. Bush handles himself when he meets behind closed doors with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq. The White House has released few details of such sessions, which Mr. Bush holds regularly as he travels the country, but generally portrays them as emotional and an opportunity for the president to share the grief of the families. In Ms. Sheehan's telling, though, Mr. Bush did not know her son's name when she and her family met with him in June 2004 at Fort Lewis. Mr. Bush, she said, acted as if he were at a party and behaved disrespectfully toward her by referring to her as 'Mom' throughout the meeting." But according to a June 2004 edition of the Vacaville (Ca.) Reporter newspaper, Sheehan said: "I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis….I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith….That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together." The Times' generous coverage of Sheehan addressed that point obliquely, when it was brought up at all. The Times also ignored Sheehan's many inflammatory comments about Bush, like this one, as posted on the website Gold Star Families for Peace: "The evidence is overwhelming, compelling, and alarming that George and his indecent bandits traitorously had intelligence fabricated to fit their goal of invading Iraq. The criminals foisted a Lie of Historic Proportions on the world." Anne Kornblut instead called Sheehan "soft-spoken" on August 12: "Ms. Sheehan's constant presence and her soft-spoken, articulate presentation has presented a thorny issue for a White House that prides itself on its strong alliance with active and retired members of the military." Even after Sheehan ceased her vigil in Texas, White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller wrote for the August 22 edition: "There is no sign that Mr. Bush will meet with Ms. Sheehan (he met with her once in a group in June 2004, two months after her son's death, when she said that he was disrespectful for calling her 'Mom'), but he did say shortly after she began her vigil on Aug. 6 that he sympathized with her." When Bush discussed the deaths of soldiers, Bumiller saw the spirit of Sheehan hanging over him: "Mr. Bush made no mention of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American soldier slain in Iraq who has staged a protest outside the president's ranch and inspired antiwar vigils across the country." The Sheehan saga came full circle on December 1. In the middle of a "news analysis" by Bumiller on Bush's speech to the Naval Academy came this eye-roller: "In the view of some of Mr. Bush's advisers, the president lost a connection with the American people in August, when Ms. Sheehan commanded the stage and Mr. Bush spent much of the month out of sight." But it was only through the auspices of the Times and other media outlets that Sheehan managed to command a national audience in the first place.
1# All Wet on Katrina As the massive natural disaster (if not as massive as first assumed by the media) of Hurricane Katrina unfolded on the Gulf Coast in early September, the Times knew just where to lay the blame for the havoc and destruction. Despite ample evidence of congressional, state, and local failures, the Times never suggested blame lay anywhere but with President George W. Bush. In a column for the Los Angeles Times, former Times Executive Editor Howell Raines joined the left wing in using the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to bash Bush. His September 1 column ended with words any extreme Democratic partisan would have been proud to pen: "The populism of Huey Long was financially corrupt, but when it came to the welfare of people, it was caring. The churchgoing cultural populism of George Bush has given the United States an administration that worries about the House of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die in foreign deserts." The most cynical anti-Bush story to appear in the Times came on September 5 from Adam Nagourney and Anne Kornblut, "White House Enacts a Plan To Ease Political Damage." The Times made a pre-emptive strike, as if warning away anyone who would suggest that state and local officials had anything to do with the errors that engulfed New Orleans: "In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove's tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats. 'The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials,' Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. 'The federal government comes in and supports those officials.' That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line." The Times editorial page had the nerve to ask on September 1: "Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?" Perhaps they were reading Times editorials, like one from April 13 that suggested flood control was just a federal boondoggle. "Anyone who cares about responsible budgeting and the health of America's rivers and wetlands should pay attention to a bill now before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The bill would shovel $17 billion at the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and other water-related projects -- this at a time when President Bush is asking for major cuts in Medicaid and other important domestic programs. Among these projects is a $2.7 billion boondoggle on the Mississippi River that has twice flunked inspection by the National Academy of Sciences. The Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs accuse the corps of routinely inflating the economic benefits of its projects. And environmentalists blame it for turning free-flowing rivers into lifeless canals and destroying millions of acres of wetlands -- usually in the name of flood control and navigation but mostly to satisfy Congress's appetite for pork. This is a bad piece of legislation." A September 9 "news analysis" by Richard Stevenson, "The President From 9/11 Has Yet to Reappear," implied Bush was a conservative hypocrite: "…as someone who regularly cites the virtues of limited government, he has been somewhat out of character in unleashing rather than reining in the kinds of social welfare programs he urged the storm's victims to sign up for on Thursday….But most of the rest of his speech was a guide to government assistance programs, including Medicaid, assistance for needy families, food stamps, housing and job training, many of which he has tried to trim in the name of leaner government." Twice in a September 16 story, "Amid the Ruins, a President Tries to Reconstruct His Image, Too," Stevenson cited as fact Bush's "faltering response" to Katrina, while ignoring state and local (that is, Democratic) culpability. "The violence of Hurricane Katrina and his faltering response to it have left to Mr. Bush the task not just of physically rebuilding a swath of the United States, but also of addressing issues like poverty and racial inequality that were exposed in such raw form by the storm. The challenge would be immense for any president, but is especially so for Mr. Bush. He is scrambling to assure a shaken, angry nation not only that is he up to the task but also that he understands how much it disturbed Americans to see their fellow citizens suffering and their government responding so ineffectually." Stevenson found Bush too lackadaisical in pushing liberalism: "When it came to the issues hardest to address and most in need of sustained commitment, new ideas and risk-taking leadership -- the gap between rich and poor, its causes and consequences, its racial components -- he was less effective." While the Times thought -- or hoped -- that Bush's political prospects had been severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina, it found no wreckage of the reputation of Ray Nagin, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans. The headline to Joyce Purnick's September 21 Nagin profile read "A Storm Survivor, Political Reputation Intact," and the text box portrayed him as defiant: "Even in retreat, the New Orleans mayor has his sword raised." Purnick found Nagin admirable for standing up to Washington (and by extension, Bush): "But in New Orleans, Mr. Nagin was seen as putting the blame squarely on Washington and as alerting the world to his city's emergency. Instead of facing political oblivion, Mr. Nagin has emerged as something of a folk hero."
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