It's the Media, Stupid.
Buzzflash Editorial: It's been a long, long time since you could look at the front page of the New York Times and believe that you were being provided with a balanced political perspective on the news, let alone issues like Republican corruption and deceit. Despite
how many "liberals" love the "gray lady" for its
cultural coverage, a smattering of liberal columnists,
its extensive number of stories, and its traditionally
liberal editorial section, its news coverage has been
compromised again and again by a nod to the Republican
Party "Lee Atwater" propaganda team. If the NYT is the
epitome of the liberal media, as the right wing
claims, we are in big, big trouble. But we know that,
don't we?
Break the Bush Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News
Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/06/edi04039.html
June 1, 2004 SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND
EDITORIAL ARCHIVES
It's Time for Regime Change at the New York Times
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
While at least half of this nation is demanding regime
change for America in 2004, liberals who can't start a
Sunday until they hear the thud of the New York Times
hit the ground should wake up.
Regime change in the media should begin with the New
York Times.
Yes, the New York Times editorial board has maintained
its traditional liberal stances, for the most part.
We'll grant you that, particularly in comparison to
the generally pro-Bush Washington Post editorial board
(with some indignation finally starting to show up
there over the Iraqi war crimes issue).
But even the New York Times editorial board supported
the war in Iraq, and it has, until just a few weeks
ago, been generally devoid of a sense of outrage over
the dishonest, lying, treasonous, inept, and corrupt
Bush Administration. So, we're not about to let
America's "paper of record" off the hook.
Even so, if the New York Times editorial policies,
have been, in general, somewhat liberal, its news
section has often been an insidious vehicle for
Republican spin since, at least, the early 90s.
Make no mistake about it, the current NYT admission
[LINK] that it might have abandoned some basic
journalistic principles in its reporting of fiction as
fact in regards to the Iraq War -- most noticeably in
the blatantly uncorroborated confections of Judith
Miller [LINK] -- is as disingenuous as the articles
that they want us to believe they are admitting should
not have been posted in the first place.
First of all, the NYT posted an editor's note
acknowledging the highly flawed reporting only AFTER
the White House, for reason's still not fully clear,
decided to brand Chalabi, their erstwhile puppet, as a
man who betrayed them. Whether this charge is true or
not -- or whether it is just a way that the Bush
Cartel is setting Chalabi up to APPEAR not to be a
puppet of the White House or whether it is all just
Neo-Con/CIA infighting -- is irrelevant as far as the
NYT admission of "flawed" journalistic standards.
What is important to remember, for the moment, is that
the NYT was forced to acknowledge as fundamentally
flawed articles that the infamous Judith Miller and
other staff members wrote, because when the Bush
Cartel discredited Chalabi, the NYT, in essence, was
caught with its pants pulled down. On May 20, the Bush
Cartel (or the CIA in defiance of the Defense
Department Neo-Cons) had Chalabi's offices raided and
then started leaking like a sieve accusations of
possible Chalabi/Iranian cooperation [LINK]. So, six
days AFTER the Chalabi raid, the NYT ran an admission
of journalistic failings on May 26th. [LINK].
If the NYT, as it claims, found belated fault with the
Bush Cartel "spin" articles, why did it wait until
after the Chalabi "outing" to run a mea culpa? And why
did it bury the acknowledgement -- as its own public
editor observes -- on the inside pages, instead of on
the front page where it ran most of the breathlessly
reported ("It's Judith Miller time") Bush
administration pro-Iraq war propaganda stories? [LINK]
Good questions indeed. But it doesn't stop there. The
NYT served as an essential Bush administration tool in
persuading the American public that the Iraq war was
necessary. Judith Miller, for instance, would print a
"thinly" source Saddam WMD article and then Cheney and
others would refer to it. This implied that even the
NYT had documentation of WMDs, when it was actually
the Bush Cartel surrogate, Chalabi -- his cohorts, and
Bush administration officials -- who were feeding the
lies to Judith Miller and other NYT reporters in the
first place. And the NYT continued to run stories
supporting Bush Cartel claims about Saddam and WMDs
even after the war started.
Make no mistake about it; the NYT was to the Iraq War
what Matt Drudge was to the Clinton impeachment. It's
that simple.
As Editor & Publisher Magazine noted:
Strikingly absent from the [NYT] editors' note is any
flat-out admission that the Times as an institution
allowed the line to become indistinct between the Bush
Administration's claims and the newspaper's own
reporting. There is no admission that the nation's
leading print outlet bears some responsibility for the
march to war.
So this sentence does not exactly ring true: "It is
past time we turned the same light on ourselves." For
little light is provided on what actually happened.
The New York Times became a "player" in a three-way
echo chamber.
The public aside, Times reporting influenced the
executive and legislative branches of government, as
well as the Administration using the newspaper to get
its story out. Exile groups "gamed" both, with grave
consequence.
[LINK]
And, like the Bush Administration to whom the NYT news
section is so often tied at the hip, for the most
part, there are, as we have noted, no consequences to
the admission of responsibility. No one has been fired
or reprimanded at the NYT. No personnel changes appear
to be in the offing.
It would be easy to single out Judith Miller as the
chief culprit -- and she was the most visible
cheerleader for the Bush claims. But, as the NYT
public editor noted in his May 30th analysis of the
paper's Iraqi journalistic malfeasance, the problem
represents an institutional failure. Miller should
seek employment in the White House or Department of
Defense press secretary offices, but others should
also leave the NYT if its reputation is to be
restored.
In more ways than one, the NYT mimics the "hold the
team together whatever its incompetencies and
failures" philosophy of George W. Bush. Remember how
Bush visited the Pentagon, allegedly viewed photos of
torture and abuse of Iraqis by American military
personnel and contractors, and then emerged to
announce that Rumsfeld was doing a "superb" job?
Sounds a lot like the NYT dealing with journalistic
malpractice.
Make no mistake about it; the NYT tries to continue to
appear to be a liberal newspaper in its news coverage.
It tends to take a secular perspective on choice,
race, and gender issues, for instance. But being
"modern" and "urban" has not precluded the NYT from
being, in general, insidiously pro-Republican and
anti-Democratic Party in its presidential news
coverage, whatever specific exceptions it can offer to
the contrary.
The DailyHowler.com is the best chronicler of the
outrageously sneering and biased news coverage the NYT
(and Washington Post) have shown toward Democratic
presidential candidates and Bill Clinton. But you
don't need a daily scorecard. Just remember that it
was the New York Times that kept alive a Whitewater
story that was a non-story and blew on its embers
until Kenneth Starr was able to find a sexual act to
try and bring down Clinton. At that point, the NYT
passed the baton to the Washington Post, which became
a regular outlet for Starr's slimy leaks, although the
NYT still continued to give disproportionate coverage
to the trumped up impeachment efforts. It never fully
acknowledged its errors in being led by the nose down
the fruitless Whitewater and impeachment path by rabid
Republican leakers who pedaled Richard Mellon
Scaife-funded "research" to the NYT. If only the NYT
had and would apply such passion and resources to
exposing the REAL abuses of democracy undertaken daily
be the Bush administration.
And let's not forget that in one its few investigative
efforts over the past few years, the disastrous Wen Ho
Lee attack job on the Clinton administration blew up
in its face. Nor can we willingly accept how the NYT
acted as if Bush were legitimately elected, instead of
intensely investigating and analyzing the theft of a
presidential election.
And the NYT played a key role in propagating the
ridiculous caricature that Al Gore was a liar, while
it did little to expose the truth about George W.
Bush's disastrous and dissembling history as an
individual and as governor of Texas. As the "paper of
record," one of its most fundamental failures has been
allowing a gaggle of its political reporters to go
along with the Republican tactic of propagating
caricatures of Democratic presidential candidates.
When has a NYT political reporter written repeatedly
about the chronic lying of the Bush administration?
Where's the proportionality that marks good
journalistic news judgment?
It's been a long, long time since you could look at
the front page of the New York Times and believe that
you were being provided with a balanced political
perspective on the news, let alone issues like
Republican corruption and deceit. Despite how many
"liberals" love the "gray lady" for its cultural
coverage, a smattering of liberal columnists, its
extensive number of stories, and its traditionally
liberal editorial section, its news coverage has been
compromised again and again by a nod to the Republican
Party "Lee Atwater" propaganda team. If the NYT is the
epitome of the liberal media, as the right wing
claims, we are in big, big trouble. But we know that,
don't we?
Turning the NYT back into a "liberal" newspaper
requires more than a commitment to "fully intend to
continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the
record straight."
Sloppy journalism that exceeds the error threshold of
cub reporters isn't an accident. You can be sure of
that.
Forced mea culpas are no longer sufficient from the
NYT.
What the New York Times needs is regime change.
It needs a publisher and news editor whose first
duties are to the democratic process in America -- and
to political coverage based on truth, policies and
competence, not on caricature and administration spin.
It needs regime change that will re-institute the
tradition of investigative reporting that uncovers the
wrongs done by political figures who violate the
public trust. It needs regime change to meet White
House pronouncements with skepticism, instead of
plastering them on the front page with several column
headlines. It needs regime change to send reporters to
the White House who can challenge WH babble that
doesn't pass the smell test, instead of passing on the
horse manure as news to the American public.
Why isn't there one reporter like Helen Thomas, a
courageous elderly journalist who is persona non grata
at the White House because she dares to challenge the
official spin, covering the White House for the New
York Times?
May the New York Times be reborn into a newspaper
that, to paraphrase a famous muckraking journalist,
afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.
May it return to its role, in its news section, as a
voice for democracy, the engagement of public policy
debate, uncoverer of corruption, investigative
journalism, and seeker after truth and justice.
But just as you can't clean up the stables of the
Defense Department with Donald Rumsfeld in place, only
regime change at the NYT will do the job.
Judith Miller should go, but so should all the
individuals responsible for a "corporate culture" at
the New York Times that has failed democracy.
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL