Profiles in Liberal Media Bias: The New York Times, Part 1

While on a retreat last year, I was heading into the dining room for breakfast and passed a table where a group of attendees had their noses buried in various sections of the Sunday New York Times. “Oh, get that left-wing rag out of here!” I joked. “Hey,” one of them yelled back, “your ‘Karl Rove Times’ is over there!” Well, I thought, at least he acknowledges that the NYT is the left-wing analogue of his imaginary Karl Rove Times. Acknowledgment of a problem is the first step to recovery!

That the “Grey Lady” has a liberal bias problem is not the recent concoction of some vast right-wing conspiracy: “The NYT today is deliberately pitched to the so-called liberal point of view, both in its news and editorial columns.” These words were from Herman H. Dismore, a NYT reporter and editor for over 30 years, in a book he wrote in 1969.

Bob Kohn, by trade a lawyer and executive in the entertainment business, wrote an eye-opening book called Journalistic Fraud: How the New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted (2003). Whereas most books on media bias have been written by insiders (Bernie Goldberg comes to mind), Kohn’s gives the consumer’s perspective, illustrating how that once respectable and authori­ta­tive news source has devolved into a propaganda tool whose primary goal is longer to report news, but to promote the left-wing worldview and the Democrats who espouse them.

Now, I am not in the news business (perhaps someone reading this blog is), but I get the jist of what a journalist is supposed to report, namely, the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of an event. Kohn explains in turn how the NYT, under the leadership of far-left editors-in-chief since the 60’s, distorts each of these points to directly or subtlely spin supposedly objective news.

In a series of posts, I will attempt to summarize this important 300-page book. It is essential to keep in mind that all examples come not from the NYT’s editorial pages, but (often front page) news stories.

 

1. Distorting the Lead (Kohn’s Chapter 3, pp. 45–74)

• Slanting the Who

Compare:

“U.S.to Vaccinate 500,000 Workers Against Smallpox.

WASHINGTON, July 6 [2002].—The federal government will soon vaccinate roughly a half million health care and emergency workers against smallpox …, federal officials said.”

Vs.

“Many Balking at Vaccination for Smallpox.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 [2003].—President Bush’s plan to vaccinate 500,000 health care workers against smallpox is getting off to a slow start …”

 

Get it? When it’s a good plan, the Who is the abstract “U.S.” and “federal government.” You might as well think that the U.S. surgeon general came up with it. But when the plan starts turning to crap, then it’s Bush’s plan.

Compare that to this positive article, where the Clinton administration is named several times:

“Clinton Plans $25 Million Initiative on Infectious Diseases

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 [1998]—President Clinton will soon propose a $25 million initiative to combat the spread of infectious diseases, … Administration officials said today.”

 

However, if news will paint Clinton in a negative light, here’s how the NYT reports it:

“U.S. Failed to Act on Warnings in ‘98 of Plane Attack

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 [2002]—The United States intelligence community was told in 1998 that Arab terrorists were planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center, but the F.B.I. and the Federal Aviation Administration did not take the threat seriously, a Congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks found.”

 

We heard a lot from Democrats about the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing. It was supposedly the “smoking gun” that the Bush administration knew what al Qaeda was planning. All we heard for months was, “What did Bush know and when did he know it???”

So, when it was determined that al Qaeda’s plan to fly planes into the WTC was known as far back as 1998, the NYT attributed the intelligence failure to the abstract “United States intelligence community” and the F.B.I. and F.A.A. And so, no one ever thought to ask, “What did Clinton know and when did he know it???”

 

• Slanting the Why

“Bush Signs Bill Aimed at Fraud in Corporations

WASHINGTON, July 31 [2002]—In a sign of how profoundly the nation’s business scandals and volatile stock market have rocked his administration, President Bush signed a sweeping corporate fraud bill …”

 

The clause at the beginning of the lead is not objective news but the writer’s own editorial observation. Even worse, it gives the reader the impression that the business scandals occurred during, and even because of, Bush’s policies vis à vis the corporate world. But it did not, as Kohn explains:

“[V]irtually all of the activity that lead to those business scandals—the false reporting of financial statements by a handful of corporations and the failure of the SEC and Justice Department to discover these activities—occurred during the eight years of the Clinton administration.” (p.52)

 

More examples of reporters injecting their personal opinions right at the beginning of the lead, thereby swaying the reader’s opinion from the very start:

“Senator Releases Documents on Gore Aide’s Enron Ties

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 [2002]—In a parting shot at Democrats today, Senator Fred D. Thompson released documents …”

“Bush, in Shake Up of Cabinet, Ousts Treasury Leader

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 [2002]—Wrestling with a shaky economy and criticism that his administration projects a muddled message on how to respond, President Bush today dismissed his Treasury secretary, Paul H. O’Neill, …”

 

Coming Up: Part 2. Distorting the Headline