[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Either this demonstrates a severe liberal bias in the media, or a mass epidemic of attention-deficit disorder amongst American journalists. [/quote]
Or a NON-STORY. It seems to me, after reading at least 3 posts from you on the so-called “discrediting” of Wilson that there is no “there” there.
I guess that you would be happy if the NYTimes would include, in it’s ‘pro gay’ coverage, that they include a sentence about how some in middle America and some religious conservatives think homosexuality is “evil” and an abomination? Gee, that sounds fair and balanced.
I just LOVE how supposed “free market” worshipping Republicans never consider that the rules of free market economics also covers the media market? Maybe if nobody wanted the “NYTimes bias” then nobody would pay to read the paper and it would collapse, or be eclipsed by another “paper of record” with a conservative bias that everyone seems to clamor for here?
What’s wrong with the NY Post, just read the NY Post then. Do you hear me complaining about the slanted coverage of the Wall Street Journal? How many real liberals do they have in their op-ed section?
Your whining about the NY Times is worse than all of the complaints about FoxNews not being fair or balanced, combined. Complaining about the Times is an obsession for you. I’ll let you in on a little secret… not that many people read the New York Times. Sure, more people than the Washington Times (LOL) but more people get their news from TV and radio and the internet, than they do from reading newspapers.
[quote]Lumpy wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
Either this demonstrates a severe liberal bias in the media, or a mass epidemic of attention-deficit disorder amongst American journalists.
Or a NON-STORY. It seems to me, after reading at least 3 posts from you on the so-called “discrediting” of Wilson that there is no “there” there. [/quote]
Lumpy, as usual, you are missing the point. If it were such a non-story, why did they run so many stories about the accusations? The contrast between the number of stories on the accusations, versus the number of stories in the same sources when the accusations were disproved, is striking.
[quote] When a paper is claiming to be the American paper of record, it in incumbent on that paper to attempt to balance its news coverage. This is unbiased reporting, and it used to be considered the goal, even if it was difficult to obtain perfectly in practice. The NY Times has ceased even trying – its whole paper is the opinion section.
I guess that you would be happy if the NY Times would include, in it’s ‘pro gay’ coverage, that they include a sentence about how some in middle America and some religious conservatives think homosexuality is “evil” and an abomination? Gee, that sounds fair and balanced.
I just LOVE how supposed “free market” worshipping Republicans never consider that the rules of free market economics also covers the media market? Maybe if nobody wanted the “NYTimes bias” then nobody would pay to read the paper and it would collapse, or be eclipsed by another “paper of record” with a conservative bias that everyone seems to clamor for here?
What’s wrong with the NY Post, just read the NY Post then. Do you hear me complaining about the slanted coverage of the Wall Street Journal? How many real liberals do they have in their op-ed section?
You’re whining about the NY Times is worse than all of the complaints about FoxNews not being fair or balanced, combined. Complaining about the Times is an obsession for you. I’ll let you in on a little secret… not that many people read the New York Times. Sure, more people than the Washington Times (LOL) but more people get their news from TV and radio and the internet, than they do from reading newspapers.[/quote]
Actually, Lumpy, the complaining is because they won’t acknowledge the bias, not because it’s there. If they are claiming – which they generally are – to be unbiased sources for news information, but they are really slanting the news in a liberal fashion, that is what the complaint is about. If they want to come out and say, yes, this is news from the liberal perspective, people will stop complaining.
As to the WSJ editorial page: What part about biased opinion seems to you to be a contradiction? Didn’t I just spend time above explaining that bias in the opinion section wasn’t the complaint?
Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
By DANIEL OKRENT
Published: July 25, 2004 In the New York Times
OF course it is.
The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left - and there are plenty - generally confine their complaints to the paper’s coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy.
I’ll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed. …
Anyone who has ever harbored suspicions that there’s such a thing as a liberal media need only to have been in Washington last week to observe how thousands of minority journalists treated the two headliners to their conference: President George Bush and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.
Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry addressed ? separately ? the UNITY conference, a gathering of four minority journalists associations. Mr. Kerry spoke first and was received warmly. Before and after he spoke, most in the audience gave him a standing ovation, and his remarks were repeatedly interrupted by applause.
President Bush got a tepid reception the next day. Many stood when Mr. Bush entered the room, but they seemed to do so almost dutifully. Throughout his prepared remarks about both domestic and national security issues, there was a smattering of applause from specific quarters of the room. Then came the question-and-answer session in which Mr. Bush made a few flubs, as when he bungled a query about tribal sovereignty for Native Americans. After each gaffe, there was snickering.
That is completely unacceptable. No matter who is in office, the presidency deserves more respect than that. Besides, journalists are supposed to be objective. They’re supposed to be impartial. Their job is to be referees, not cheerleaders for one team or another.
No doubt, Mr. Bush should have been more prepared. But the people in that room should have also been more professional.
Homeland Security Given Data on Arab-Americans
The Census Bureau has provided specially tabulated population statistics on Arab-Americans to the Department of Homeland Security, including detailed information on how many people of Arab backgrounds live in certain ZIP codes.
The assistance is legal, but civil liberties groups and Arab-American advocacy organizations say it is a dangerous breach of public trust and liken it to the Census Bureau’s compilation of similar information about Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The tabulations were produced in August 2002 and December 2003 in response to requests from the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland Security.
One set listed cities with more than 1,000 Arab-Americans. The second, far more detailed, provided ZIP-code-level breakdowns of Arab-American populations, sorted by country of origin.
The categories provided were Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian and two general categories, “Arab/Arabic” and “Other Arab.” . . .
Census tabulations of specialized data are legal as long as they do not identify any individual.
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said the data sharing was particularly harmful at a time when the Census Bureau is struggling to build trust within Arab-American communities.
“As this gets out, any effort to encourage people to full compliance with the census is down the tubes,” he said. “How can you get people to comply when they believe that by complying they put at risk their personal and family security?”
In 2000, the bureau issued a formal apology for allowing its statistical data to be used to round up Japanese-Americans for internment during World War II.
Disturbing, right? Well, hold on a second. It turns out that there is an important piece of information that the Times is not telling you: All of the information disclosed has been publicly available from the Census Bureau’s own website http://www.census.gov/ for years. As this e-mail http://www.epic.org/privacy/census/foia/census_emails.pdf
from the Census Bureau explains, the information had been released to the public already and was “merely packaged . . . in a more usable format” for Homeland Security. You can access the data yourself from this page http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/sumfile3.html
As best I can tell, all the Census Bureau did was run a few queries from their own public website and then e-mail the information to the Department of Homeland Security. The Times story doesn’t tell you this, though; instead, it rather artfully describes the information as “specially tabulated.” Yes, it was specially tabulated; Census Bureau employees ran the queries from its public data and put it in tabular form just for Homeland Security. Ergo, specially tabulated.
Why didn’t the Times tell its readers that the information was publicly available? One reason may be that the group that fed the story to the Times wasn’t very clear about this, either. The disclosure became public thanks to a FOIA request made by Electronic Privacy Information Center http://www.epic.org
, aka EPIC. EPIC’s page about the Census Burea disclosure http://www.epic.org/privacy/census/foia/default.html
bears a significant resemblance to the Times story, and uses almost identical artful wording. Here is how EPIC reports the story:
Department of Homeland Security Obtained Data on Arab Americans From Census Bureau
EPIC has obtained documents revealing that the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry. The special tabulations were prepared specifically for the law enforcement agency. There is no indication that the Department of Homeland Security requested similar information about any other ethnic groups. The tabulations apparently include information about United States citizens, as well as individuals of Arab descent whose families have lived in the United States for generations.
One tabulation shows cities with populations of 10,000 or more and with 1,000 or more people who indicated they are of Arab ancestry. For each city, the tabulation provides total population, population of Arab ancestry, and percent of the total population which is of Arab ancestry.
A second tabulation, more than a thousand pages long, shows the number of census responses indicating Arab ancestry in certain zip codes throughout the country. The responses indicating Arab ancestry are subdivided into Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian, Arab/Arabic, and Other Arab.
. . .
During World War II, the Census Bureau provided statistical information to help the War Department round up more than 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans and confine them to internment camps.
I called up EPIC and spoke with Associate Director Chris Hoofnagle
, who confirmed that (to his knowledge) all of the information the Census Bureau disclosed was publicly available from the Census Bureau website.
Maybe I am missing something, and if so, I would be happy to retract this post and to apologize for the misunderstanding. But if I’m not missing anything, doesn’t the story seem to rest on a rather sneaky misrepresentation of the facts?
ABC, CBS & NBC Gave 75 Stories to Bush ?AWOL? Charge, 9 to Claims Kerry Embellished War Record
TV Gives No Respect to Swift
Boat Vets for Truth
Back in February, the three broadcast networks were obsessed with the story of President Bush?s National Guard service. But in May, when John Kerry?s former Navy colleagues from Vietnam went to the National Press Club to charge that Kerry?s tales of heroism as a Swift Boat commander were highly exaggerated, those same networks acted as if their job was to bury the news, not report it.
Back on May 4, ABC and NBC ignored the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?s press conference, while CBS?s Byron Pitts claimed the veterans had merely ?unleashed decades of bitterness.? His Evening News story ignored Kerry?s record, but challenged his critics: ?If you think this is just a concerned group of veterans, think again.?
Even though the Swift Vets have now published a book, Unfit for Command, and sponsored a TV ad, the networks still aren?t investigating their charges. MRC analysts examined ABC, CBS and NBC?s morning and evening news shows. They found 75 stories this year questioning Bush?s National Guard service, but only nine detailing any of the Swift Vets? anti-Kerry charges, an eight-to-one disparity. But the networks? double standard runs far deeper than the amount of coverage:
? Partisanship: The ?AWOL? story got its legs February 1 when Democratic boss Terry McAuliffe appeared on ABC?s This Week to declare how he wants a debate in which ?John Kerry, a war hero with a chest full of medals, is standing next to George Bush, a man who was AWOL in the Alabama National Guard,? and reporters began badgering the White House to prove McAuliffe?s charges false. But the hint of a GOP connection to the Swift Vets has reporters holding their noses. The first mention of the Swift Vets on NBC Nightly News came on August 6 when Andrea Mitchell complained the groups? anti-Kerry ?ad is paid for by Bush contributors using a loophole in the McCain- Feingold law.? Mitchell?s story did not examine the vets? charges against Kerry, just complained about the fact that they could get them on TV.
Evidence. Reporters put the onus on Bush to prove the critics wrong. ?Given the absence of any witnesses who could fill in those gaps and corroborate the President?s recollection,? ABC?s Terry Moran insisted on February 10, ?the issue is not going to go away.? CBS was even more demanding (see box).
But holes in Kerry?s record aren?t treated as suspicious. On the issue of Kerry?s first wound in 1968, then-Coastal Division 14 Commander Grant Hibbard says Kerry came to his office asking for a Purple Heart for what amounted to a scratch. As recounted in Unfit for Command (page 38), ?I told Kerry to ?forget it.? There was no hostile fire, the injury was self-inflicted for all I knew, besides it was nothing more than a scratch. Kerry wasn?t getting a Purple Heart recommendation from me.? But when the issue became news in April, the networks made it a one-day story, even though the records Kerry released failed to include the paperwork supporting the Purple Heart award.
? Enthusiasm. On February 10, White House reporters badgered Press Secretary Scott McClellan for 30 minutes, demanding detailed proof that everything Bush said in the past was true. But the networks now call the Swift Vets? ad ?ugly,? and reporters? demand is for Bush to condemn it, not Kerry to factually rebut it.
? Rich Noyes
? For more on how the networks have failed to cover the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, see the August 12 CyberAlert.