Top Ten Lowlights of The New York Times in 2006
Narrowing down the 2006 edition of the Top Ten Lowlights of The New York Times to a mere ten entries was a tough task -the paper provided such a wealth of biased behavior throughout the year, from reporters throwing national security secrets onto the front page to publishers going on liberal rants at graduation ceremonies. But we've managed to whittle down the worst from another liberally slanted year from the New York Times, and here is the rundown, in ascending order of gruesomeness.
#10 Spinning Kerry's "Botched Joke"
Back in May, reporter Kate Zernike helped former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry out by unquestioningly rehashing his revisionist account of the Swift Boats Veterans for Truth controversy, while failing to question several inconsistencies in Kerry's counterattack on the group.
Zernike again carried Kerry's water a week before the 2006 congressional election, in a November 2 "Political Memo," when it briefly seemed that a Kerry gaffe might hurt the Democrats. In the process, Zernike revealed herself as perhaps the only person following politics who didn't listen to Kerry's actual "botched joke."
What Kerry actually said at a campaign rally in California: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
Not only did the Times headline, "Flubbed Joke Makes Kerry a Political Punching Bag, Again," give Kerry the benefit of the doubt in assuming he didn't actually mean what came out of his mouth (he claimed he was attacking George W. Bush's lack of education, not the troops'), both the headline and the story managed to botch Kerry's "botched joke."
"But with a single word -- or a single word left out of what was supposed to be a laugh line directed at the president -- Mr. Kerry has become a punching bag again, for Republicans and for his own party."
"A single word?" Try an entire paragraph.
"Mr. Kerry's prepared remarks to California students on Monday called for him to say, 'Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.' In his delivery, he dropped the word 'us.'"
Zernike is implying Kerry actually said "Just ask President Bush," which would lead credence to Kerry's "botched joke" idea. But if Kerry had actually said that, it wouldn't have become an issue at all.
A correction appeared the next day: "Mr. Kerry not only dropped the word 'us,' but he also rephrased his opening sentence extensively and omitted a reference to President Bush. Mr. Kerry's aides said that the prepared text read: 'Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.' What he said: 'You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.'"
Which is what everyone but the Times already knew.
#9 Coddling Illegal Immigrants and the Liberals Who Love Them
#8 Howell Raines Rants Against Fox News
#7 "Racism" Against Democrat Harold Ford Jr.
Apparently bitter about not having everything go the Democrat's way on Election Day 2006, the Times put a racism spin on one of the few GOP bright spots -- Bob Corker's win over Harold Ford Jr. in the Tennessee Senate race.
Even after an RNC ad mocking Ford's appearance at a Playboy party left the airwaves, the Times still pushed the bogus "racism" angle, in Anne Kornblut and Jim Rutenberg's October 27 piece.
"When an advertisement mocking Representative Harold E. Ford Jr. set off controversy in the Tennessee Senate race last week, a question quickly arose: Who was behind the provocative and, critics said, racially loaded television spot?"
An editorial that same day, "Compounding a Political Outrage," bluntly called the ad racist: "Slick as a leer, pernicious as a virus, a campaign commercial transparently honed as a racist appeal to Tennessee voters has remained on the air, despite assurances from Republican sponsors that it was pulled down."
Adam Nossiter's post-Election Day story November 8 blamed racism in Tennessee: "In addition, Mr. Ford was trying to become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction
.Mr. Ford was faced with overcoming the suspicions of rural whites skeptical about his race, his background and his city."
The "racist" ad from the RNC got more play: "The first issue came to the fore in a television advertisement featuring a winking, bare-shouldered white woman intoning, 'Harold, call me.' Produced by the Republican National Committee and eventually disavowed by Mr. Corker, the commercial played on Mr. Ford's reputation as a man about town but also spoke to -- or so critics charged -- age-old white Southern fears of miscegenation."
Nossiter concluded snidely: "The crowd in the room packed with Corker supporters told its own story: It was almost entirely white."
#6 Linda Greenhouse's Liberal Harvard Admission
Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse went to Harvard in June and talked to her fellow alumni about how she broke into tears at a recent Simon & Garfunkel concert and what may have led up to her breakdown -- the perfidy of the Bush administration.
"And of course my little crying jag occurred before we knew the worst of it, before it was clear the extent to which our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other places around the world. And let's not forget the sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism. To say that these last years have been dispiriting is an understatement."
Greenhouse, perhaps aware that her boss, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., had made a similar rant in May (see item #2), didn't seem overly concerned about her future with the paper, simply telling National Public Radio: "I said what I said in a public place. Let the chips fall where they may."
#5 Respectful Hearing Granted to "Bush Caused 9-11" Nuts
#4 Putting the Blame on Israel
The war between Israel and Lebanon began when the terrorist Hezbollah militia crossed the border into Israel, killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two others. While initial coverage was mostly straightforward, the Times' anti-Israel bias became more obvious as the war went on. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Lebanese Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, was hailed as a "folk hero," and the group's followers called "martyrs." The Times also adopted the irritating tic of referring to "captured" Israeli soldiers, as if the soldiers had been taken prisoner in an official conflict, as opposed to being kidnapped by a terrorist group.
Rarely did the Times suggest Hezbollah was to blame for the civilian casualties caused by Israeli air strikes. The Times deemphasized Hezbollah's battle and public relations strategy of ensconcing itself in civilian areas, when Israeli attacks were more likely to result in civilian casualties, and seemed taken aback by Israel's insistence on counterattack.
On July 18, reporter Hassan Fattah said of the Lebanese city of Tyre: "Hezbollah has its footprint everywhere here, from its signature yellow banners to portraits celebrating fallen martyrs."
Sabrina Tavernise was in Beirut while parts of the city were being bombarded and filed a July 25 report: "For the south, which suffered for more than a decade under Israeli occupation, Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, is a folk hero who helped drive out the Israelis."
Tavernise portrayed Hezbollah as a charitable group, like a local Elks club with rocket launchers: "The situation is made all the more complicated by the nature of Hezbollah. It functions as a civil aid group as well as a militia, helping with schools and in hospitals, and in many cases providing essential public services at times in the years of the war when the government was simply not able. It has a savvy media operation, with a spokesman who takes groups of journalists on tours of the devastation in southern Beirut with a truck that blares Hezbollah fighting songs from rows of speakers."
Wouldn't "propaganda campaign" be a more accurate term?
A "news analysis" July 26 by pro-Muslim reporter Neil MacFarquhar carried this description of Israel's counterattack: "The consensus here is that Iran, Syria and Hezbollah were all taken aback by the ferocity of Israel's response to the capture of two soldiers; the seizure seemed to fall within the unspoken rules of limited engagements. Similar operations had prompted prisoner exchanges in the past, the current demand by Hezbollah for ending the fighting."
"Ferocity" is an interesting word to use for Israel's response to what was not only a kidnapping (not "capture") of two soldiers, but the killing of eight soldiers in that same unlawful incursion into Israel.
On August 1 MacFarquhar appeared on Charlie Rose: "I'm in my mid-40s and who grew up in poor countries like Morocco, you know, they will tell you that when they went to school in the mornings, they used to get milk, and they called it Kennedy milk because it was the Americans that sent them milk. And in 40 years, we have gone from Kennedy milk to the Bush administration rushing bombs to this part of the world. And it just erodes and erodes and erodes America's reputation."
MacFarquhar was a repeat offender: On August 7 he praised the leader of Hezbollah. "Now there is Sheik Nasrallah, a 46-year-old Lebanese militia chieftain hiding in a bunker, combining the scripted logic of a clergyman with the steely resolve of a general to completely rewrite the rules of the Arab-Israeli land feud."
And it wouldn't be an article on an Israeli-killing terror group without a nod to its "charity" work: "Aside from Hezbollah's secretive military operations, the state within a state that he helped build with Iranian and expatriate financing includes hospitals, schools and other social services."
#3 Mohammad Cartoon Hypocrisy
#2 Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr's. Left-Wing Graduation Rant
Serving as keynote commencement speaker at the State University of New York at New Paltz in May, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. "apologized" to graduates for the failure of the Vietnam generation to stop the Iraq War and to sufficiently promote "fundamental human rights" like abortion, immigration, and gay marriage.
Here's an extended excerpt of his self-satisfied "apology," which reads like a conservative parody of a 60s' holdover still obsessed with his youthful Vietnam-era antiwar days:
"I'll start with an apology.
"When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. Okay, okay, that's not quite true. I mean yes, the war did end and yes, President Nixon did resign in disgrace but maybe there were larger forces at play.
"Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.
"Our children, we vowed, would never know that.
"So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way.
"You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land .
"You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, whether it's the rights of immigrants to start a new life, or the rights of gays to marry; or the rights of women to choose .
"You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drove policy and environmentalists have to fight relentlessly for every gain.
You weren't. But you are. And for that, I'm sorry."
C-SPAN has posted streaming Real video of the entire address. You can watch the most biased excerpts here.
#1 The Times Cripples Another Terrorist Surveillance Program
On June 23, the Times' notorious tag team of intelligence reporters, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, again revealed details of an anti-terrorist surveillance program while ignoring the concerns and personal pleas for secrecy from the White House. (Lichtblau and Risen also handled the 2005 NSA "domestic spying" scoop.)
This one, "Bank Data Sifted In Secret By U.S. To Block Terror," involved international bank transfers by the bank consortium SWIFT, and its exposure in the Times may well have sabotaged the program.
"Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.
Lichtblau contradicted his own "secret" reporting in an interview on CNN's Reliable Sources July 2: "I'm not claiming I know the mind of every terrorist, but I am claiming to know exactly what President Bush and his senior aides have said. And when you have senior Treasury Department officials going before Congress, publicly talking about how they are tracing and cutting off money to terrorists, weeks and weeks before our story ran. 'USA Today,' the biggest circulation in the country, the lead story on their front page four days before our story ran was the terrorists know their money is being traced, and they are moving it into -- outside of the banking system into unconventional means. It is by no means a secret."
But even the headline to the Times' story used the word "secret," as did the lead sentence: "Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials."
When the heat refused to die, Executive Editor Bill Keller went on the sympathetic liberal talk show circuit to make his case. Talking as if he was executive of a nation, not a newspaper, he explained to CBS's Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation July 2 how he judges whether a national security secret is worth exposing.
"When lives are clearly at risk, we often hold back information. But this was a case where clearly the terrorists, or the people who finance terrorism, know quite well because the Treasury Department and the White House have talked openly about it, that they monitor international banking transactions. It's not news to the terrorists. The scope of the program and its evident successes and the questions about its oversight were news to voters and citizens."
Keller threw out some anti-conservative red meat to his liberal readership base (something his paper did all year in its news pages): "
it's an election year, beating up on The New York Times is red meat for the conservative base. But, I mean, I don't think this is all politics, I think the administration's a little embarrassed. This is the most secretive White House we've had since the Nixon White House, I think, by general acceptance, and I think they're a little embarrassed that they've had so much trouble holding on to their secrets. And making this kind of a clamor, I suspect, they hope will silence people who do talk to the press and maybe intimidate reporters."
The liberal reporters at the Times certainly weren't intimidated by conservatives in 2006.
He also was marvelous during the "Christmas truce".
