Many in the rightosphere are making much of Clark Hoyt’s Sunday New York Times column about his paper’s lack of speed in reporting several stories that generated a lot of heat in conservative media and on FoxNews:
But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.
That’s the journalistic understatement of that year. I do wonder if the Times picks up on those stories “lacking facts” from left-wing blogs and opinion sites.
Jill Abramson, the paper’s managing editor for news, agreed with him “that the paper was ‘slow off the mark,’ and blamed ‘insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.'”
To remedy all this, the Times has now “assigned an anonymous editor to ‘monitor opinion media.’” Questioning Hoyt’s claim that the paper lacks a liberal bias, Michelle Malkin asks him to “address directly and openly the paper’s own complicity in covering up the ACORN story before Election Day” when the paper had information about financial shenanigans at the controversial left-wing organization.
More often than not, reporters from MSM outlets like the Times don’t seem particularly interested in conservative opinion. In the controversy over whether NBC producer Jane Stone called Alex Rosenwald, media director of Americans for Limited Government “Jew Boy” in an e-mail, she claimed she had merely told him “Take me off this list!” So, her defense of unbecoming conduct is that she, a news producer, asked to be removed from a list which might be a source of information and opinion, you know, news of the events and ideas shaping public discourse.
Guess they’re just not interested in what those free-marketers are saying and doing. That she would want to be removed from a libertarian e-mail list helps confirm the reports Matthew Vadum receives from “fellow right-leaning journalists that getting rude and offensive emails from reporters in the mainstream media is a fairly common occurrence.“
These reporters seem to have become accustomed to leading a cloistered life, cut off from people with opinions at odds with their own.
This is nothing new. It’s been going on in the mainstream media for well over three decades (at least). WIth the passing of William Safire, John Podhoretz reminds us that when that eloquent columnist took a job at the Times, he “was a breakthrough figure—the first professional Republican ideologue of his time to become a mainstream fixture in journalism.”
Indeed, when he was hired by the New York Times to write a column after his tenure as a speechwriter and intimate of the president in the Nixon White House, the shock and horror with which his new position was viewed in the Times newsroom and in the journalistic corridors of Washington were unprecedented in their ferocity. Safire himself said that people would barely look him in the eye in his place of employ for years.
Reacting with ferocity to his appointment? Barely look him in the eye merely because he had a different opinion? If this is how they treated an intelligent conservative and gifted wordsmith, it’s no wonder the Times has missed so many stories picked up in conservative media.
RELATED: Life Amongst The Nattering Nabobs
The Times still doesn’t get it. Their willingness to appoint a proverbial, hall monitor, for conservative “opinion” outlets is absurd on its face. The undercover videos produced by Andrew Breitbart and conceived by Giles and O’keefe were not opinion pieces. They were facts placed into evidence. It would be nice, if the Times et. al. would instead make some attempt to look a little deeper into these facts instead of making them out to be some political ploy designed to take a little sheen off of the President. Which they of course did a great job of.
Everyone knows that if something like this had happened at the Heritage Foundation all hell would break loose. They of course don’t survive to get money from the Feds, but nevertheless, every effort would be made to take such farce up the chain of command and hang as many notable conservatives as possible.
To make this a political issue at first pass makes a sham out of the professional journalist and begs the question, “Who exactly is dealing with facts and who is dealing in opinion?” As I see it, the Times has already passed over any facts that may be there are are well into a recitation of how their opinions usurp any facts we may have to present. Welcome to America, where freedom of the press lies ensconced in the Bill of Rights.
Way to go “Press”! As many leave to seek information and facts from less reputable sources, I will stand by as your opinion becomes increasingly irrelevant.
I think the Newspeak Times does get it, but they’re not gonna report on anything that might besmirch our beloved Chairman of the Presidium. They write, they don’t shovel like the Proles.
If it does not advance the liberal agenda the NY Times is not participating. They have NEVER been the paper of record they have ALWAYS told the news that fit their leftist opinions. I look at WWII and the way they hid the news of the Jews being slaughtered as the perfect example of the lies that have been splattered all over the pages of the NY Slimes. I look forward to the day they are in the dustbin of history and that history will tell the tale of a leftwing rag that wasn’t worthy of the attention it has received.
“I look forward to the day they are in the dustbin of history and that history will tell the tale of a leftwing rag that wasn’t worthy of the attention it has received.”
Jaded. . . you may not have so long to wait. The Times is already in serious financial trouble, and the present financial crisis has placed most media in jeapordy.
I have bothered reading the Times for years. I don’t have to. I read all abou the stuff that led me to stop reading it on the web
For years, the NYT not only denied that homosexuality was anything other than a mental derangement/illness, they also refused to even print the word “homosexual” or “homosexuality”; preferring to use instead the word “deviant” or “deviant behavior”. This policy continued at the Times until the early 1960s. It seems they have a long history of avoiding the coverage of points of view with which they disagree.
Liberals in general, in the media, in government, wherever and everywhere, do not keep themselves informed of opposing views. They hear bits and pieces of it, the NYT version of it, the Limbaugh Sound-Bites, but they certainly do not seek out other opinions. In fact, they reject opposing viewpoints outright (“Fox?!? Are you kidding?!?”).
Conservatives have no choice but to be informed of opposing views ,since so much of the media is spouting nothing but, 24/7.
That’s one of many reasons you can’t have an intellectual political discussion with liberals. They have only the slightest understanding of the opposing view (and they’re always wrong about what it is — but they know it always involves starving schoolchildren, give-aways to the rich, and kicking grandma and grandpa out on their keisters). And that’s if they have any knowledge of it at all (“Repubulican health care reform proposals?!? There has never BEEN a Republican health care reform proposal!!!”).
Being postitively clueless they can’t debate the issues at all, so the conversation ALWAYS turns toward minutia; demands for proof, semantics, sources, name-calling, twisted interpertations, etc.
At least, that’s been MY experience with liberals.
I used to think journalism could be fixed, but it will be buried, by good ol’ competitive capitalism.
Even in an exciting election year, all the major news outlets lost about half million viewers apiece last year. I don’t know there’s anything you can do to make a liberal see another side of things. Whether it’s the screaming “progressives” with signs or Katie Couric, there is just nothing inside their brain that can comprehend anything but their viewpoint without thinking it’s crazy or a personal attack. So few people can just understand disagreements or different viewpoints anymore. I could easily articulate basic assumptions on the left or right, without prejudice, but liberals seem to be so narcisstic (sp?) that they see any viewpoint as their own as dumb, stupid, crazy, hostile or not worth consideration. Even as they see more of their own fired, they can’t comprehend that Fox News exists because there is a marketplace for the other side (that they’ve helped create), not because of vast ring wing corporate conspiracies.
Tim,
Isn’t that fixing Journalism? The old dies to make way for the new?
Burying Don Imus, Anatomy of a Scapegoat by Michael Awkward an African American Imus Fan.
You all have been reading where they are trying to blame the census
takers death in Clay Co.,Ky., on Fox News Pundits and Tea Party and
Town Hall Protesters. There strategy isn’t new Media Matters for
America was monitoring Imus for 2 years to get something they could
target him with to destroy his career. But that’s not exactly news, and
Glenn Beck a frequent guest on Imus in the Morning, is well aware of
what they will try and do to him.
http://youhavetobethistalltogoonthisride.blogspot.com/2009/09/burying-don-imus-anatomy-of-scapegoat.html