Posted on 08/31/2004 10:26:37 AM PDT by jmstein7
This is a petition that has been filed with the Patent and Trademark Office by a concerned group of citizens to cancel the New York Times trademark "All the News That's Fit to Print":
I. Preliminary Statement
The New York Times’ trademark "All The News That's Fit To Print," is subject to cancellation under § 14 of the Trademark Act of 1946 (The Lanham Act).
The evidence that the New York Times does not publish “all the news that’s fit to print,” including an explicit admission by its Public Editor, is overwhelming. Nonetheless, the New York Times continues to deceptively use the mark “All the News That’s Fit to Print” to advertise and market its product. Such deceptive use of a mark is indisputable and absolute grounds for cancellation under Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act.
The First Amendment is not at issue here – i.e. the New York Times’ right to enjoy freedom of the press is not at issue. What is at issue is the deceptive use of a mark connoting journalistic objectivity, i.e. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” to market and sell a product that is clearly not objective journalism.
II. Injury
The injuries resulting from the New York Times’ deceptive mark – a mark that purports to guarantee consumers objective journalism – are severe and grievous. “Readers [of the New York Times] experience[] emotional embarrassment and mental anguish when they recognize[] that they [have] been duped by a paper claiming to release only news that [is] fit to print, . . . [b]ut the harm of a misinformed and misguided public on matters directly affecting democratic self-governance is even more egregious. . . . One cannot underestimate the harm of a misinformed and misguided public on matters directly affecting democratic self-governance.”
The deceptions perpetrated by the New York Times “pollute[] the marketplace of ideas by harming readers' beliefs, opinions, and subsequent actions. It misguide[s] their voting decisions, and affect[s] issues such as their comfort with their government officials and their government's pursuit of war.”
“As a matter of public policy, and in accordance with the concurring opinion of Justice Byron White in Dun & Bradstreet v. Greenmoss Builder, Inc., ‘it makes no sense to give the most protection to those publishers who reach the most readers and therefore pollute the channels of communication with the most misinformation.’”
These injuries are magnified and aggravated by the fact that the New York Times is a publication with an extraordinary, disproportionate impact on the marketplace of information that reaches far beyond the mere borders of its printed pages. As of March of 2004, the New York Times had a total circulation volume of 1,133,763 copies daily. However, the circulation volume of the paper itself does not reflect the paper’s total impact on the marketplace of information. The Company “publishes The New York Times, The Boston Globe and 16 other newspapers; owns eight network-affiliated television stations and two New York radio stations; and has more than 40 Web sites, including NYTimes.com and Boston.com.” Columns appearing in the New York Times are syndicated throughout this extensive media network. Further, network and cable news anchors tend to lead with stories substantively taken from the front page of the New York Times. Thus, the reach of the New York Times and its incalculable power to influence the marketplace of information and ideas evince a media juggernaut beyond that of any other single information source in existence.
III. Official Admission of Bias
Daniel Okrent, the Public Editor of the New York Times, the agent specifically authorized to speak on behalf of the paper to the public, has explicitly stated that the New York Times is not an objective news product. There is no disputable issue of fact here – posing the rhetorical question of whether “The New York Times [is] a Liberal Newspaper,” Okrent explicitly and unequivocally stated “[o]f course it is.” However, this admission against the paper’s interests was buried on the second page of section four of the paper – hardly prominent enough to warn readers that they are not purchasing an objective news product.
Admittedly biased news cannot, by its very definition, be all the news that’s fit to print.
Continuing, Okrent avers
I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall . . . but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.
But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.
This admission is shocking, damning, unambiguous, official, and undeniable. Despite this overt and incontestable admission of bias, the New York Times outrageously continues to market itself deceptively using a mark of objectivity.
IV. History of Fraudulent Practices – the Jayson Blair Affair
Pennsylvania State University professors of law Clay Calvert and Robert D. Richards have done an excellent job documenting the now-infamous Jayson Blair scandal that rocked the New York Times and exposed a history of fraudulent practices:
Bill Kovach, chairperson of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism write that "journalism's first obligation is to the truth," a fundamental part of "a largely unwritten code of principles and values to fulfill the function of providing news" that "news professionals have developed" and to which "everyone agrees." n116 They note that the "disinterested pursuit of truth" is the "first principle of journalism."
The Times and Blair repeatedly violated the principle of truth. . . . The Times has admitted that it published Blair's articles even though he wrote "falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history." As such, the Times lacked ordinary care and caution in its pursuit of truth, as its columnist William Safire indicates:
Apparently this [twenty-seven]-year-old was given too many second chances by editors eager for this ambitious black journalist to succeed. As he moved to more responsible assignments, some editors failed to pass along assessments of his past shortcomings while others felt the need to protect the confidentiality of his troubles.
Safire's comments make clear that other goals took precedence over the pursuit of truth. Safire also reveals that the Times's editors failed to pass along crucial information about Blair's problems to others at the newspaper. Even more telling, in its massive mea culpa over the Blair fiasco, the Times wrote that "Mr. Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth." The same article also exposes the negligent supervision that allowed Blair and the Times to violate this cardinal tenet of journalism. The May 11, 2003 article articulated, "His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.'" This statement makes clear that the Times actually knew about Blair's propensity for violating truth, yet continued his employment for more than one full year after newsroom administrators learned of his problems.
Still, the evidence goes further to support a setting that allowed for the dissemination of falsehoods. In October and November 2002, "public officials and colleagues were beginning to challenge Blair's reporting." Yet the Times continued to print Blair's pieces and admitted that "a failure of communication among senior editors" allowed Blair and the newspaper to spew out further false information to an unsuspecting public. Moreover, Blair "attracted in-house attention by logging nearly [fifty] corrections in four years." Despite this attention and the enormous number of errors, the Times continued to publish the work of a man whose "mistakes and sloppy reporting" dated back to his days at the University of Maryland's student newspaper. In sum, both Blair and the Times clearly violated ordinary care and caution in the standard journalistic practice of truth-telling. . . .
Professor Louis Alvin Day of Louisiana State University writes that "the fabrication of stories or quotes" is "unpardonable in the practice of journalism." The Times, however, admits that it supervised and retained an employee who continually violated the ordinary, reasonable, and well-accepted practice of non-fabrication. As the Times wrote, Blair "fabricated comments. He concocted scenes."
It is clear that the ordinary practice, standard, and custom of journalism is not to publish plagiarized material. As Professor Clifford Christians and his colleagues write, "Plagiarism is unacceptable in news. It is a convention of reporters personally, the policy of newspapers and news magazines, and of radio and television news, as well." n131 The Society of Professional Journalists, for instance, admonishes journalists in its ethics code to "never plagiarize."
Of particular help here is the Times's own code of conduct, Ethical Journalism: Code of Conduct for the News and Editorial Departments. This document includes a section called "Our Duty to Our Readers" in which the newspaper establishes its own duty of care, in accord with that of the general practices and customs of journalism. That section provides, in relevant part, that "staff members who plagiarize or who knowingly or recklessly provide false information for publication betray our fundamental pact with our readers. We will not tolerate such behavior."
Yet as this Article demonstrates, the Times violated its own code and standards concerning the publishing of plagiarism, concomitant with those of reasonably prudent journalists and editors. It tolerated Blair's behavior by permitting him to report and publish his stories, even though it knew, or should have known in the exercise of reasonable care, that he would plagiarize.
In sum, the Times's failure to adhere to ordinary practices of journalism - specifically truth-telling, non-fabrication, and non-plagiarism - proximately and actually caused harm to the newspaper's readers and to the general public.
The public has been “duped” by a paper claiming to release only news that was fit to print, when in fact the paper actively concealed the unfitness of Blair's news for more than a year.
V. Manufacturing Fraudulent Stories by Falsifying Public Polling Data
The deliberate bias practiced at the NYT is far more invidious than the mere inclusion of stories that fit the editors’ liberal agenda and exclusion of stories that do not – which is per se hardly “All the News that’s Fit to Print.” The New York Times is also guilty of using a deceptive practice commonly known as “push polling” – intentionally falsifying the results of public opinion polls – in order to publish the “results” as “news” in an attempt to sell newspapers and increase circulation by generating interest in its (false) stories regarding its (push) polling results.
As evidence, and for example, consider the period from January 2002 through the elections of November 2002. In this period, the data makes it clear that the New York Times engaged in “push polling” by using methods called “weighting up” and “weighting down” in every single poll to produce falsified results. These falsified polling results, subsequently, formed the bases for news stories printed for the purpose of selling newspapers.
What the Times did was to interview Republicans, Democrats, and Independents for their surveys. After the results were in, the Times used multipliers to artificially alter the results, weighing up the Democrat responses and weighting down the Republican responses, artificially forcing the actual results from between one to five points in each survey. Such adjustments can serve a legitimate purpose (actual correction for sampling errors, e.g.), but what the Times did – actual demographics notwithstanding – was to adjust Republicans down and Democrats up in EVERY SINGLE POLL, creating an intentionally slanted result.
So, for example, in the Times poll of January 21-24 2002, the actual sample turned up 328 Democrats (or 31.7% of the sample) and 307 Republicans (or 29.7% of the sample). But in reporting its results, the Times used a falsified multiplier to count each Democrat interview more than once and each Republican interview less than once. The result was to make the poll 3.1% more Democrat than it should have properly been.
This weighting has a substantial impact on the public message of each Times poll, e.g. understating President Bush’s approval ratings and overstating doubts about the war on Iraq, and generating stories based on these falsified results for sale to the consuming public.
This intentional tampering with poll results is not merely a correction of data flaws. Looking at published Times polls, this fact becomes obvious. In December 2001, the Times weighted its data to get 31.7% Democrats and 30.4% Republicans. In January 2002, it ended up with 33.5% Democrats and 28.4% Republicans. In July 2002, the Times’ weighted survey turned up 34.2% Democrats and 28.4% Republicans, etc. Each month, the survey produced a different final result than the raw data suggested, and always biased in the same general direction. This is not mere coincidence.
It is not statistically probable, or possible, for the Times to presuppose that the number of Democrats and the number of Republicans could have varied so continuously and predictably. This is not legitimate weighting for demographics. The Times does not weight data for race or other demographic characteristic – it only weighs based on party. And, most suspiciously, the Times has weighted its results to make them more heavily Democrat in EVERY SINGLE POLL since 9/11. The fact that the Times always manages to make its results more heavily Democratic strongly indicates more than a random byproduct of demographic weighting; it strongly indicates a deliberate effort to bias and falsify its polling results.
The Times takes polls, adulterates the results, publishes the adulterated results, writes editorials based on the adulterated results, reports the news to suit its adulterated results, and prints all the tainted and adulterated news products to the public.
What the Times has done is intentionally falsified its data to give the public a false impression and to write stories – for sale to the general public – that fit the editorial viewpoint of the Times. The Times has, and continues to, sell to the public a false, fake, fraudulent news product under the deceptive mark “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
VI. Conclusion
Advertising, marketing, and selling the New York Times as “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is clearly false and, more importantly, deceptive. Clearly and unambiguously, the Times’ use of the mark “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is deceptive as per Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act. Therefore, as per Sections 14 and 2(a), the United States Patent and Trademark Office must cancel trademark registration 2136993.
The New York Times, despite power and venerability, is not above the law.
BUMP!
Most excellent. *genuflect* Keep up the great work!
*snicker
In addition, despite expenditures totalling over a hundred of dollars over a period of some years, I am not and have never been "Zestfully" clean. Consequently, I demand that the USPTO take appropriate action.
Possible new motto for The New York Times: "When you can't find the facts to back up your position, just make 'em up."
"Zestfully" clean is a different type of mark.
Maybe Zestfully clean isn't as clean as you would like to be.
The New York Times - the finest in fiction
The New York Times - thought police daily.
It'll never fly but, yes, definitely, *snicker.
Great summary of the NY Slimes the past year or so.
It's nice to see the lawyer's mind can be used for good.
You are much appreciated here at FR.
BTTT!!!!!!!
:^)
This "complaint" to the USPTO is completely pointless. Are there any objective definitions of "all the news" or "fit to print"? They didn't have full coverage of the Rangers v. Hearts game, either - does that mean that they don't print "all the news", or that this sporting event isn't "fitting"?
The NYT's slogan is meaningless puffery, on an order with claims that Gilette is the best a man can get, that one is not fully clean unless one is Zestfully clean, or that when beer drinkers aren't drinking beer, they're drinking O'Douls. The USPTO will rightly dismiss the complainant as a crank.
How was the Ohio bar?
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