Posted on 09/27/2009 3:31:55 AM PDT by reaganaut1
ON Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”
What the article didn’t say — but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew — was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes. The young woman in streetwalker’s clothes and her companion were actually undercover conservative activists with a hidden camera.
It was an intriguing story: employees of a controversial outfit, long criticized by Republicans as corrupt, appearing to engage in outrageous, if not illegal, behavior. An Acorn worker in Baltimore was shown telling the “prostitute” that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an “independent artist” and claim 15-year-old prostitutes, supposedly illegal immigrants, as dependents.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
In actual fact, the public editor does not say the Times was “clueless and partisan,” only that it’s actions could be misinterpreted that way.
Later in the article he comprehensively denies the charge of partisanship playing a role in how this story was covered.
So why wasn’t the unbias Times as careful with the bogus John McCain affair story as they were with ACORN?
Thanks. I never click through to the Times. I don’t want even the whiff of giving them an opportunity to make a dime off of me.
Yeah, we wouldn’t want the Times to “appear” to be a partisan, biased, propaganda tool for the Democrats.
Sorry, NYT, that ship has already set sail.
It is hilarious when a dedicated NYT reader gets a headline like “Uproar Forces Resignation,” and his immediate response is “What uproar?”
There has been nothing about any uproar in the Times.
For a couple decades now I’ve noticed a tendency in the media to not only think they “create the news,” but that they create reality. In their minds, nothing has happened till it has been reported in the NYT.
My parrot wants a a different liner....
Close, but... he didn't actually call them "clueless and partisan", he worried that they might appear so:
a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to [stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs] or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.
Gimme a break! Stories detrimental to a leading Republicans or conservative figures find their way into the Times no matter how thinly sourced. For instance, Kitty Kelly's trashy gossip about the Bushs. Readers of the NYT must have been startled to find out Mary Mapes had been fired from CBS. They carried the allegations against Bush on the front page, but buried the back story about the bogus documents as long as they could.
Rather than a connection to the real world outside of Manhattan, the New York Times has become a cacoon, protecting its readers from information that might upset their world view.
Some poor Leftist has been sentenced to the Gulag. LOL.
“If you know you are a target, it requires extra vigilance,” Rosenstiel said. “Even the suspicion of a bias is a problem all by itself.”
It really isn't complicated. Subjectivity is simply the unexamined assumption of one's own objectivity. If you do not assume your own objectivity, then in each article you write you will, explicitly or at least implicitly, acknowledge possible reasons why the opinions you express might reflect your own self interest. For example, I am posting on FreeRepublic.com. FR bills itself as a conservative site. If I weren't a conservative, I probably wouldn't be posting here, so the reader is alerted to the fact that I want facts congenial to conservatism to be true.The Associated Press and The New York Times are interested in making the Associated Press and The New York Times seem important, and one of the ways they do so is to claim that the Associated Press and The New York Times are objective. And to heap flattery on those who support that claim, and to deride those who do not. Far from alerting readers that the Associated Press and The New York Times are indeed objective, that proves that the Associated Press and The New York Times are too busy hyping themselves to spare any energy to assure that in fact they are unbiased.
So long as the Associated Press and The New York Times promote their own objectivity as something to be taken for granted, they cannot actually be objective.
Too little, too late...
Exactly, I read that article in full and it is really sad. The NYTimes is not worth reading and their excuses are pathetic.
And the funniest thing in the article is the NYTimes has a new editor to monitor the real news organizations like FNC and various blogs, but he won’t say who so this editor does not get bombarded with e-mails. That’s right a supposed newspaper trying to avoid tips about potential stories.
No he didn't call the clueless, partisan toilet tissue "clueless" and "partisan" - - he merely said it risked "appearing" that way. I wouldn't give any of these mice any credit, including Hoyt, who no doubt had to have this column cleared by the very people he pretends to criticize.
Ironically, the mice at the NY Times are in actuality protecting themselves. If they don't see it, and they don't publish it, then they don't have to scrunch their eyes shut and shake their heads while chanting, "Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah..."
Their school age children were. How do you possibly consider yourself a professional in the news business and "miss" stories that well publicized? Not buying it.
There also seems to be a serious denial of the obvious - yes, the NY Times is biased, yes, it is reluctant to print stories that reflect poorly on the present administration, and yes, everyone who has looked at the thing dispassionately has noticed. The Times is not clueless, it is in a state of self-paralysis brought on by ideology. Certainly there is room for news organizations with a stated, self-admitted bias, there always has been, but there is no room for news organizations that don't print the news. The word for that is "useless."
This is too funny. Almost a week late and their excuse was they just didn’t notice the news on TV, radio, internet ...
And they want to be taken seriously?
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