May 13, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Things like this strike me as weird: EJ Dionne makes an unverifiable statement that Bush is being given a pass on things that Gore would have been pilloried for.
The unverifiable statement itself doesn't strike me as weird; I am forever being inundated by people from both ends of the political spectrum shouting "you can't tell me that if Gore were president, he wouldn't have been treated differently!" Whatever, chum. The Psychic Friends Network just cut me off for nonpayment.
What strikes me as weird is the example Dionne chooses: the New York Times.
I mean, what is the mechanism of this Bush favoritism supposed to be? He can hardly claim, as conservatives do, that reporters and editors are slanting stories because of bias; they're Gore guys, through and through. Nor can he claim that it's because they're pandering to their readership, which is nearly as liberal as the paper itself. Advertisers? Maybe. But its advertisers are New York people and companies, which are still very liberal. The risk of alienating them by sucking up to Bush has got to be at least as great as the risk of alienating them by slamming him.
Why then? Because the folks at the Times are just stupid, or mean?
Posted by Jane Galt at May 13, 2003 5:32 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksBecause of the "chill wind" and fear of John Ashcroft.
Jane Galt writes of the NYT:
[T]hey're Gore guys, through and through.
I agree that it's almost certain that more of the NYT staff* voted for Gore than for Bush in 2000, but I don't think you can make the case that Gore got consistently better treatment than Bush in the pages of the Times. In particular, Times reporter Katharine Seelye was merciless in her coverage of Gore, repeatedly misquoting him to make him look a liar. (In particular, the story that Gore took credit for having discovered Love Canal is based on Seelye's reporting in the Times; recordings of the event confirm that Gore made no such claim.) She was far kinder when she covered Bush. This is not to say that Bush never got a bad whack from the NYT, but on the whole Gore did not do well at their hands.
I agree that it's hard to understand how the political leanings of the NYT staff can be reconciled with the whacks on Gore. Eric Alterman has suggested that the press is sensitive to accusations of liberal bias and so they're harder on their own side. Mickey Kaus has suggested that the press disliked Gore personally and this dislike trumped their political sympathies. I don't know who's right, but it's too facile to say that the NYT staff must have been pro-Gore because the staff leans left.
(* Referring here to writers, editors, etc., not pressmen.)
I didn't mean "they're endorsing Gore"; I'm just pointing out that they are all, with vanishingly few exceptions, yellow-dog Democrats. I doubt you'd find more than a handful of Bush voters on the staff.
Alterman's rationale strikes me as thin in the extreme, a justification for his already thin thesis. Do you know any large group of people which is, year in and year out, capable of collectively bending so far backwards to be fair that they end up being consistently biased towards the other side?
I think it has to do with public stereotyping of the two parties. The Dems are the mommy party; the Repubs are daddy. People know this. So, the politicians of both parties tend be able to take on their constituencies, if they want. The caring Clinton can reform (democratic) welfare. It took Reagan to blow apart his party's attachment to fiscal responsibility.
A small aspect of stereotyping is that the Dems are now the party of liars. This has somewhat to do with real policy; selling socialism requires lying (or at least creative use of data) at some level. But it also has a lot to do with Clinton. In any case, Dems will be held to a higher level of truth-telling for the foreseeable future, because they were the ones that fibbed us into big government, and Monica.
Bush gets away with the big lies because the American people still trust the Republicans. At least, more than they trust the Dems.
Clearly the press is owned by The Corporations, and The Corporations know that war and rapine and such are in their interests. Down with profit!
"An ideologue -- one who thinks ideologically -- can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. They are derived from the ideology, and not subject to the facts."
-- James Burnham, Suicide Of The West (1964)
Folks, IDEOLOGY is behind uniforms. Why do people not see that media outlets are king makers? And, they tout their favorites. And, Bush is HATED. He's not an elite. Do you know the level of anger it takes to make as many misteps as our media are taking?
Reminds me that H.L. Mencken, with much more talent, sided with Germany, against FDR. And, shattered his reputation.
One thing about artists is that they need to follow their abilities ... just like warriors ... even when it takes them to stupid decisions.
Great comment by Victor Hugo about Napoleon. At Waterloo. He said statuary wasn't needed to commemorate that battle at all. Just a lottery ticket. It was the place the 'man of calculus,' (Wellington, who brought his plans down to the minutest details, including escape routes), met Napoleon here. And, Napoleon NEVER planned! He just used his genius. So the quote goes: The Man of Calculus defeated the Man of Genius on this battlefield.
Artists rarely see the flaws in their thinking. Geniuses grow wary of the common intellect. And, they NEVER account for the fact that they can be dead wrong. (Becuase then they wouldn't take the risk. And, they wouldn't be 'artistic.')
Sometimes everything we think has been said and done before. Hope this helps ya figure things out. Hope ya realize just because you think you have a "Just Cause" ... which is all the South had against Lincoln ... that the losses just don't roll up to your door. (The North have every advantage!) So does Bush. So do the average Americans who may yet give Karl Rove the Nifty-50 Award come November 2004. (Hope so.) But what do I know?
Believe it or not, I could care less about press bias. It's well established that CNN coddles up to dictators, that the NY Times has a liberal axe to grind, that the Washington Times is a front for the hard right, that Fox News can't get enough "alerts." Nobody ever said that a free press is synonymous with an unbiased press. Get over it.
That being said, saying the NY Times is soft on Bush is like Baghdahd Bob railing on Al Jazeera for being too soft on America. It just doesn't compute.
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