[HedgeYourBets]

More Hypocrisy From Sulzberger’s Times
8/4/2004
By Jason Maoz, Senior Editor

http://www.jewishpress.com/news_arti...p?article=4014

The transformation of The New York Times is more or less complete. The newspaper long known for a liberal sensibility that sometimes bled from the editorials into the news stories has, over the past decade or so, essentially become the media auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

Above all else, it’s the Times’s antipathy toward the Bush administration that is astonishing to behold — an attitude that has gone from a level of merely adversarial to one of institutional loathing; it has become a living, panting thing that permeates every section of the paper on any given day.

The Times’s zeal for condemning Bush is so reflexive, so unthinking, that little things like consistency get lost in the shuffle. Judah Kraut, a doctoral student in Ancient Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, noted just such a lack of consistency last month on his “Sour Kraut” blog (sourkraut.blogspot.com), and it’s worth some consideration here.

Kraut quotes from page 343 of the 9/11 Commission Report: “It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9/11. For example, a New York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that bin Laden was a terrorist leader, with the headline ‘U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks.’”

Kraut notes: “The Commission’s reference to this headline is telling, but it does not adequately convey the depth of The New York Times’s downplaying of the terrorist threat posed by bin Laden. A more complete picture can be derived from the text of the article to which the headline was affixed. Two sentences in particular stand out: ‘In their war against Mr. bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program ‘Frontline,’ working in cooperation, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them.’”

Kraut makes the point that “Some two-and-a-half years before bin Laden commanded the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil, The New York Times ‘found him [bin Laden] to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them.’ To add insult to injury, we now know — from interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (p.149 in the Report) — that it was during this exact time period, ‘late 1998 or early 1999’ that ‘Bin Laden ... finally decided to give KSM the green light for the 9/11 operation.’”

Kraut then moves in for the kill: “One would expect that the Times, having themselves been duped and having rejected the accurate portrait of bin Laden by ‘American officials’ as ‘the world’s most dangerous terrorist,’ would avoid assigning blame based on 20/20 hindsight — or, at the very least, would acknowledge that the paper, too, had fallen prey to the exact failures it so high-mindedly pointed out concerning the government’s pre-9/11 record.

“Of course, the Times did the opposite. In a blistering editorial that appeared in May of 2002, the Times lamented — among other things — the mounting evidence of ‘monumental ineptitude and bureaucratic bumbling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other federal agencies...’

“Throughout the piece, the Times editors are aghast at how badly the federal government was fooled. It was necessary to ‘determine why Washington failed to recognize that Osama bin Laden was on the hunt in America last summer.’ The paper’s view is adequately summed up (though less caustically) in the second paragraph of the editorial: ‘The entire national security and law enforcement apparatus under-estimated the possibility that the bin Laden network might strike targets in the United States, and various agencies either failed to detect or mishandled warning signs.’

“Seriously. Where could they have gotten that idea that bin Laden wasn’t much of a terrorist threat?”

Jason Maoz can be reached at jmaoz@jewishpress.com.

[NeroASERCH]

The Other Lame "Times"
May 19, 2004
AnnCoulter.com


If liberals won't move on from the prison abuse photos calculated to incite hatred toward the very troops liberals loudly claim to "support," I'm not moving on from the fact that the editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, is instructing journalists on ethics. The editor of the Los Angeles Times telling reporters how to behave ethically is a complete contradiction, like ... oh, I don't know ... giving Yasser Arafat a Nobel Peace Prize or something. You know, just patently silly.

This is the same L.A. Times that engaged in desperate, 11th-hour attempts to sabotage Arnold Schwarzenegger during the California recall election with lurid sex stories from anonymous assistant crudite girls who worked the craft services tables on Arnold's movies from the 1980s and were still trying to break into show biz 20 years later.

This is the same L.A. Times where reporters had to be told in an internal memo (from Carroll himself) to stop injecting opinion in news stories, specifically the practice of prefacing the term "pro-life" with the term "so-called."

This is the same L.A. Times that in recent years instituted racial and gender quotas for sources on "so-called" news – oops, I mean, news stories – which puts reporters in the position of having to round up a black expert on nuclear fusion, a Native American expert on cubism, and a female expert on great moments in football.

This is the same L.A. Times that responded to the largest number of canceled subscriptions in the paper's history from readers enraged by the paper's liberal bias by putting Michael Kinsley, one of America's leading leftists, in charge of the editorial page.

And this is the same L.A. Times that pays unrepentant Castro fan and former North Korea defender Robert Scheer for his hysterical anti-American rants every Tuesday, after hiring him mostly because his wife was on the editorial board.

The title of Carroll's speech was "The Wolf in Reporter's Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America." One has to admit: If you wanted an expert on the practice of partisan pseudo-journalism, you could do a lot worse than the editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Alas, Carroll's speech wasn't the "how-to" lecture dozens of would-be yellow journalists were expecting when they showed up for his presentation. Like the "ombudsman" at the New York Times, Carroll chastised his own newspaper for some small, irrelevant infraction no one would ever complain about while ignoring the paper's consistent Soviet-style reporting that has led thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions.

Instead, Carroll's speech was an attack on Fox News Channel. If conservatives complained about CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Reader's Digest, NPR, etc. etc. half as much as liberals scream about Fox News, even I would say conservatives were getting to be a bore on the subject.

Carroll's case-in-chief of Fox News' "pseudo-journalism" is "The O'Reilly Factor." (Only liberals could force conservatives into defending Bill O'Reilly.) Carroll lyingly says of O'Reilly: "Where, he asked, was the L.A. Times on the so-called Troopergate story?"

In fact, O'Reilly never mentioned "Troopergate." He didn't mention the Arkansas State Troopers. And he certainly didn't mention "so-called Troopergate." He compared the L.A. Times coverage of Schwarzenegger's alleged inappropriate behavior decades earlier with that paper's coverage of the scandals of various Democrats – among them the stunning, contemporaneous sexual assaults by Bill Clinton on identifiable women.

I suppose it's easy to confuse sex scandals involving Bill Clinton – I keep a "Women Bill Clinton Has Raped or Groped at a Glance" file on my Blackberry, just as a time-saver – but O'Reilly was referring not to the 1993 allegations from Arkansas State Troopers, but to the 1998 Clinton sex scandals involving allegations from specific women, such as Kathleen Willey. We know this because while the word "trooper" never passed O'Reilly's lips, he did expressly refer to "Kathleen Willey."

When it came to these Clinton sex assaults, how did the L.A. Times do? Reporter Richard A. Serrano described Willey as "embittered" and said her accusations were "fraught with contradiction" – unlike the truth-tellers who waited 20 years to make anonymous accusations against Schwarzenegger. The Times angrily editorialized that Clinton's impeachment was "grounded not in what is right for the country but what best helps House managers save face." (How anyone can use the expression "save face" in defense of Bill Clinton is beyond my understanding.)

You don't have to enter the "No Spin Zone" to see the "disconnect," as liberals love to say, between the L.A. Times' frantic, wild-eyed search for a woman – any woman, even anonymously – to accuse Schwarzenegger of groping her at some point during the previous quarter century, and the Times' equally determined efforts to discount the many credible accounts of women, all named, who plausibly accused Bill Clinton of raping, groping or otherwise sexually assaulting them.

But Carroll dearly wishes O'Reilly had said "Troopergate" because apparently that's the last time Carroll can remember the L.A. Times going after a Democrat the way the Times goes after Republicans as a matter of policy. The Times' Troopergate story came out in December 1993. But Carroll is still citing that one time over a decade ago when the L.A. Times engaged in nonpartisan reporting, bragging: "At one point, it had nine reporters in Little Rock." OK, but there were 24 reporters on the Schwarzenegger story.

http://www.anncoulter.com/