The New York Times coverage of this presidential race has been almost universally slanted against Kerry, but the last two editions have passed beyond the egregiously misleading into the outright false.
Exhibit A:
ADAM NAGOURNEY and JODI WILGOREN 9/26/04: "[Bush's] management style is crisp and insular, and it does not change between easy days and tough ones."
NEWSWEEK 9/6/04: "Then came 9/11. After hearing the news of the attacks, he may have looked addled, even frightened, while he was reading "My Pet Goat" to Florida fourth graders in that endless seven minutes..."
Exhibit B:
ADAM NAGOURNEY and JODI WILGOREN 9/26/04: "Unlike Mr. Bush, who was a governor and a business executive before he ran for president, Mr. Kerry -- who has spent the past 20 years as a legislator, with a staff of perhaps 60 -- has little experience in managing any kind of large operation.
BOSTON GLOBE 6/18/03: "For almost 21/2 years in the late 1970s, Kerry guided the transformation of [District Attorney John J. Droney's ]office. ...he reformed a plodding, hidebound operation. ...With a $3.8 million infusion of federal funds he helped obtain, Kerry nearly tripled the staff, and many of the new hires were women. He launched initiatives that were innovative at the time: special units to prosecute white-collar and organized crime, programs to counsel rape victims and aid other crime victims and witnesses, and a system for fast-tracking priority cases to trial. He also directed the investigation that led to the first conviction of Somerville's Howie Winter, one of the state's notorious gangsters. Despite his administrative duties, Kerry managed to try some cases and won convictions in a high-profile rape case and a murder."
Exhibit C:
ADAM NAGOURNEY 9/27/04: "Mr. Bush never actually said "mission accomplished," but stood in front of a banner that contained those words."
GEORGE W. BUSH, 6/5/03: "America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished,"
The problem seems largely centered around two "reporters," Adam Nagourney and Jodi Wilgoren.
Why is this important? The New York Times is the principal news source for much of America. When they lie about John Kerry, it hurts his chances among voters who try to stay informed. We have to fight this. Write letters, complain, do what you have to.
Update [2004-9-29 11:17:58 by HeavyJ]:I wrote bascially the above in an email to Daniel Okrent, the public editor at the Times, and got this reply from Arthur Bovino:
Dear Mr. [HeavyJ],
We do not see anything about your first concern that merits a correction, but we raised your second concern with a senior editor who noted that these are completely different appearances by President Bush. The speech that you cited from the Web was a month later than Bush's "Mission Accomplished" appearance on the ship. And it is clear in the Nagourney piece when Mr. Nagourney uses the word "never" he means President Bush didn't speak those words in that appearance on that day. Mr. Nagourney doesn't mean to be saying that Bush never -- anywhere -- spoke the words "mission accomplished."
Mr. Okrent has said that he will be writing about The Times's coverage of Senator Kerry and President Bush at some point between now and the election in November. I will keep your message on file for him to consider when he is ready to write.
I hope this is helpful. Thank you for your message and your vigilance.
Sincerely,
Arthur Bovino
Office of the Public Editor
To which I replied:
Dear Mr. Bovino,
Thank you very much for your fast reply. I am certain that you are inundated with calls, faxes and emails, and I honestly appreciate your taking the time to answer each one. I also understand that this political season has aroused partisan feelings more than any other in modern memory, and reportage must struggle to remain objective and fact based.
Unfortunately, you ignored my most salient and most urgent concern, and your paper’s most glaring error. The Sept. 26 front page article by Mr. Nagrourney and Ms. Wilgoren states:
“Unlike Mr. Bush, who was a governor and a business executive before he ran for president, Mr. Kerry -- who has spent the past 20 years as a legislator, with a staff of perhaps 60 -- has little experience in managing any kind of large operation.”
I point out, again, this article from the Boston Globe on 6/18/03:
"For almost 21/2 years in the late 1970s, Kerry guided the transformation of [District Attorney John J. Droney's] office. ...he reformed a plodding, hidebound operation. ...With a $3.8 million infusion of federal funds he helped obtain, Kerry nearly tripled the staff, and many of the new hires were women. He launched initiatives that were innovative at the time: special units to prosecute white-collar and organized crime, programs to counsel rape victims and aid other crime victims and witnesses, and a system for fast-tracking priority cases to trial.”
Let me also quote from a July 18, 2004 L.A. Times article:
“Droney gave his top assistant a relatively free hand. And Kerry made one of his most important changes almost immediately…. He hired a full-time grant writer to go after the funds. Nearly $4 million flowed to the office in a single year, and the money helped expand the staff to more than 100 lawyers.”
Finally, The New Yorker of May 3, 2004:
“There were only about two dozen prosecutors in the office when Kerry took over as first assistant, and, within three years, he had built that number to almost a hundred.”
Again, the quote from Mr. Nagourney and Ms. Wilgoren in their front page, Sunday edition article, on September 26, 2004:
“…Mr. Kerry -- who has spent the past 20 years as a legislator, with a staff of perhaps 60 -- has little experience in managing any kind of large operation.”
Either the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times, and the New Yorker are factually incorrect, or the New York Times is. There is simply no third possibility.
Perhaps Mr. Nagourney and Ms. Wilgoren have come upon information which shows that John Kerry was not, in fact, an Assistant District Attorney responsible for a staff of over 100 in the late 1970s. Perhaps this explosive scoop will be revealed in future editions of the Times. I have my doubts.
Kudos for reading this far, Mr. Bovino. I suppose that we will have to agree to disagree on Mr. Nagorney’s clarity whan he wrote: “Mr. Bush never actually said "mission accomplished….” I, for one, will have to take the word “never” much less literally when it appears in the New York Times. There will always be invisible parenthetical qualifiers, enabling statements such as “Saddam Hussein never allowed U.N. inspectors into Iraq,” (until he did), and “The Yankees have never won a World Series,” (this century).
Also, regarding Mr. Nagourney’s writing: “[Bush's] management style is crisp and insular, and it does not change between easy days and tough ones," you see nothing that merits a correction. Let me note what I see: an entirely fact-free, completely unattributed opinion that sits in the middle of an article which is purportedly “campaign news.” Do the reporters who travel with Kerry’s campaign have a personal insight into Bush’s management style? Is it someone’s sentiment, if not the reporters? Whose?
Can we expect more of these bizarre, clairvoyant editorial comments in the news for the next several weeks? For example, “John Kerry, looking very French, (unlike Mr. Bush, who projects the very image of American virtue), campaigned in Florida today,” or “Terrorist killers, hating the freedom that Ayad Allawi stands for and hoping to boost John Kerry’s election chances, set off a car bomb in Baghdad today.”
Mr. Bovino, my overall point is this: the New York Times reporters who cover the Kerry campaign are incredibly slipshod. They do not check facts, and can’t be bothered with more than the most cursory examination of the candidate’s biography. They take Republican talking points about Mr. Bush as fact. They are, absurdly, given “above the fold,” front page prominence in the Times, the paper I once considered the paper of record.
Thank you again for your courteous reply."