Posted on 06/06/2003 7:10:01 AM PDT by aculeus
The Krugman Truth Squad is going to talk about more than Paul Krugman today, even though his op-ed in this morning's New York Times offers more than the usual number of juicy opportunities for hilarious lie-busting.
As you know, there's been a key development in the battle against liberal bias in the media — what I call "the conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid." The conspiracy was dealt a severe blow Thursday when Howell Raines resigned from the Times. (Raines, the paper's executive editor, was the man who hired Paul Krugman in the first place.)
The proximate cause of Raines's resignation — and that of managing editor Gerald Boyd — is the Jayson Blair scandal. But there are deeper reasons that had been developing below the surface ever since Raines took the helm twenty months ago.
One is Raines's autocratic and divisive management style, which the Times itself admitted in its own coverage of the fallout:
... some of the newspaper's reporters and editors said they told [Times publisher] Mr. Sulzberger that the newsroom's disaffection with Mr. Raines was so deep as to be most likely irreparable ... "The morale of the newsroom is critical," Mr. Sulzberger said earlier yesterday. The ability of reporters and editors "to perform depends on their feeling they are being treated in a collaborative and collegial fashion." Bully for the Times for going beyond the superficial excuse of the Blair scandal. But of course, there's something else at work here — something that the Times is not yet prepared to admit. Raines had to step down because the Times's relentless and reckless ultra-left wing agenda was destroying the world's greatest newspaper franchise.
Raines was the instrument of the destruction, with his rogues gallery of radical liberal op-ed screedsters and his capricious and exploitive "flood the zone" campaigns against Enron, Augusta, the war in Iraq, the peace in Iraq, Bush's tax cuts, and all the rest.
But Raines is not, ultimately, to blame. He is no more than the creature of publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. — the scion of the family dynasty that owns the Times who elevated Raines first to editorial-page editor in 1992 and then to executive editor in 2001, specifically because of his sympathy with Sulzberger's leftist viewpoints (according to Ken Auletta's 2002 New Yorker portrait of Raines). Sulzberger's liberal views extended not just to editorial positioning, but to the very mission and managerial style of the New York Times Company itself, of which he is chairman.
Arthur Silber, of the Light of Reason blog, points us to the "mission statement" that appears as the last sentence of the boilerplate paragraph at the bottom of every Times Co. press release. It's on the release announcing Raines's resignation. It has appeared on every press release since at least early 1999, long before Raines was named executive editor. It reads:
The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment. Consider all that is revealed in just 18 remarkable words. First, the "core purpose" to "enhance society." Perhaps such a thing would be a worthy goal for the Ford Foundation, but the shareholders of this for-profit corporation should be quite concerned by this apparent elevation of utopianism above earnings. It's especially ironic coming from a newspaper where a business columnist — Gretchen Morgenson — regularly lacerates "greedy" CEO's for not putting their shareholders first.
To "enhance society," Sulzberger officiated over an aggressive affirmative-action program that first elevated and then protected Jayson Blair — a mistake that has forever tarnished the 152-year old newspaper's brand image. But the "enhance society" end justifies even Blair's fraudulent means. After all, the mission statement specifically calls for "creating" news. And isn't that exactly what Blair did?
"Enhancing society" is exactly the kind of thing that Paul Krugman believes "plutocrats" — especially inheritors like Sulzberger — should be doing. Krugman wrote last year,
The influential dynasties of the 20th century, like the Kennedys, the Rockefellers and, yes, the Sulzbergers, faced a public suspicious of inherited position; they overcame that suspicion by demonstrating a strong sense of noblesse oblige, justifying their existence by standing for high principles. It's chilling to imagine someone like Krugman sitting in judgment of what is required for people to "justify their existence." (One immediately has visions of Robespierre and the guillotine.) Yet this is exactly the judgment that Sulzberger submitted himself to. But he's wising up — and just in time, before the dollars-and-cents judgment of the Sulzberger dynasty decides it's "off with his head."
Other newspapers are getting the message, too. Two weeks ago, John Carroll, the editor of the ultra-liberal Los Angeles Times, sent a memo to staff forcefully forbidding liberal bias in news stories. Carroll wrote with astonishing candor,
I'm concerned about the perception and the occasional reality that The Times is a liberal, politically correct newspaper ... The reason I'm sending this note to all section editors is that I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere, Los Angeles, that is suffused with liberal values, but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of The Times. So, Raines is out. Retired executive editor Joseph Lelyveld has come back on an interim basis to manage a transition to new leadership. What happens to Krugman and the rest of the Howell Raines Menagerie?
My guess is that nothing happens, immediately. And I suspect Krugman will get away with his misinformation campaigns for a good while longer, as the Times will no doubt wish to focus its reform effort where it will count the most — the news. We will see the paper's "core purpose" return to reporting the news, rather than "creating" it. The spin will be that the editorial pages are just opinion, so they're fine as they are. There will be change there — a key "retirement" here, a new and more moderate voice there. Maybe there will be some new source-citing requirements and fact-checking guidelines. All to the good.
But at least for the near term, if I know Krugman, he'll turn up the volume on his ultra-liberal ranting and raving, just to show that he has nothing to apologize for and nothing to fear. But don't worry — Raines or no Raines, the Krugman Truth Squad remains on active duty.
— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.
Is THIS it? It actually does seem like a simple news story, no rhetorical jabs.
Here's how it was "hammered," according to the MRC:
In the wake of the resignations of the top two editors at the New York Times, NBC News looked at declining trust in the media overall and identified two culprits: Conservative, pro- corporate bias and the Fox News Channel.
In a NBC Nightly News piece on Thursday night, reporter Jim Avila noted that "media watchdogs complain almost daily of bias, charging that some stories are deliberately ignored." His sole soundbite for that point: a representative of the far-left group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, who charged that public cynicism toward the press is fueled by "the whole corporate climate, where people feel they're being sold to rather than informed."
Then, over video of the Fox News Channel, Avila blamed it too: "And some experts say opinion-based journalism, so popular on cable TV, undercuts credibility."
As opposed to the opinion-based journalism of NBC News and the rest of the news media, as if there were no bias in the media until FNC came along a few years ago.
The June 5 NBC Nightly News led with a story by Andrea Mitchell about the resignations of Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd and then Tom Brokaw went to Avila in Chicago for a look at how the public views the media.
Avila began with a Spokane artist who sees routine mistakes in stories about him and then Avila recalled how "a 2002 Pew Research study shows that only 35 percent of the public trust news organizations to 'get the facts straight.'"
Next, Avila gave a soundbite to a man in restaurant who doesn't believe all he reads in newspapers and Avila confirmed he has "plenty of reasons" to think that way. Avila reminded viewers of NBC's own Dateline NBC simulated truck explosion controversy, the case of Janet Cooke at the Washington Post in 1981, Stephen Glass at the New Republic who "imagined" stories in 1998 "and Mike Barnicle's factual carelessness for the Boston Globe."
Avila didn't mention that NBC has helped rehabilitate the ethically-challenged Barnicle by making him a fill-in host and regular commentator on MSNBC.
Avila asserted: "Jayson Blair is just the latest example of journalistic fraud chipping away at an industry built on trust. How bad is it? Denver's Rocky Mountain News, a subscriber to the New York Times News Service, no longer automatically runs stories based on Times's unnamed sources."
John Temple, Editor of the Rocky Mountain News: "Somehow, standards seem to erode in their newsroom."
Avila turned to bias, but only saw it from the right: "But it's not just mistakes, say critics. Media watchdogs complain almost daily of bias, charging that some stories are deliberately ignored."
Steve Rendell, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting: "The cynicism that people have about media isn't just about Jayson Blair and Mike Barnicle. It's about the whole corporate climate, where people feel they're being sold to rather than informed."
Avila: "And some experts say opinion-based journalism, [over video of the Fox News Channel showing FNC putting its logo on screen as music played] so popular on cable TV, undercuts credibility. Viewers now charge bias against any news they don't agree with."
Greg Mitchell, Editor and Publisher magazine Editor: "They often disagree with stories because they don't agree with the political outlook or the revelations that are in those stories."
Avila concluded: "And journalistic missteps like those in the New York Times only give ammunition to those who believe even true stories are fiction."
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