FOR REALISM AND DIVERSITY IN LIBERAL JOURNALISM AND AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
This Week’s Quotation
A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything. — Max Eastman.
Imaging Hillary Clinton
During the 2006 US Senate election in New York, The New York Times will market Mrs. Clinton as the candidate of democracy and “the people” and her Republican Party opponent as the candidate of stealth authoritarians and “special interests.” Mrs. Clinton will be seen as speaking to issues that most concern people, while her Republican opponent will be seen as trumpeting issues that will get her elected. Mrs. Clinton is of the mainstream; her Republican opponent hovers at the edge of the mainstream, on the political right. Against the backdrop of such imagery voters are likely to identify with Mrs. Clinton and accept her policy positions and rebuff the Republican candidate and distrust Republican policy prescriptions. Click Here
THE NEWS AS A POTEMKIN VILLAGE:
New York Times reportage illustrates a journalism that is practiced according to behaviorist and postmodernist assumptions about the malleability of reality and which believes it appropriate for the press to serve a statist elite and its self-described progressive agenda. Click Here
NEWS NOT FIT TO PRINT: Why is The New York Times losing readers? Click Here
THE RAGING LADY: Carrying the liberal elite’s banner forward. Click Here
This Week’s Stories
Weeks left until the Times endorses Mrs. Clinton for the US Senate: 36
Deconstructing New York Times reporting and editorial templates on the 2006 senatorial election campaign between Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and her Republican challenger. Click Here
February 5, 2006
The Language of Liberalism
Why is Mrs. Clinton Raising So Much Money? Click Here
Mrs. Clinton Stands Up for New Yorkers. Click Here
The Two Minutes Rage
George W. Bush and Global Warming. Click Here
Preserving The Historical Record:
Preventing The Times from Re-Inventing Mrs. Clinton
Mrs. Clinton’s Double Agents. Click Here
Carrying the Water for Mrs. Clinton: Times’ Imaging of Mrs. Clinton in 2000
TAKE THE RAGING LADY TEST! Think you know the principle of tolerance? Click Here
FLOODING THE ZONE: The New York Times and “Cognitive Mapping.”Click Here
“New Democrat” Hillary Rodham Clinton announces her candidacy for the US Senate. Click Here
See This Week’s Essay on Liberal Journalism! Click Here
Liberal Journalism
What’s happened to the journalism profession? What’s happened to American liberalism? Current journalistic practices go against everything Joseph Pulitzer stood for. The press should be about, as Pulitzer said, “accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.” Liberal journalism ought to be about individual liberty and pluralism in politics. But instead it’s all about empowering one elite.
Liberal journalists have moved away from their traditional beliefs that government should be restrained and power corrupts all people to the attitude that government needs to be magnified and power only corrupts some people.
This Week’s Essay: The Republicans: A Party Divided, Part II
ABOUT THE RAGING LADY: Criticizing the liberal elite’s “Angry Enabler.” Click Here
FOR JOURNALISTS ONLY: Click Here
MR. KELLER’S “OCTOBER SURPRISE” Click Here
“Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq,” a story in the New York Times on Monday, October 25, 2004, represented a basic tactic of liberal media activism — The “October Surprise.” In “October Surprise” a newspaper prints a negative piece about a non-liberal candidate very late in the campaign season. The piece has the effect of rallying voters against the candidate, who does not have the time to respond effectively. Although the Times isn’t expected to utilize the ploy in coverage of Mrs. Clinton’s 2006 Senate race, readers should still be aware of the device.
THE “VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY” Click Here
Noted liberal organizer Saul Alinsky observed that fundamental change can occur in a political system only when people are breathing a certain kind of political air. Specifically, the climate must be polarized, or must allow for people and ideas to be pitted against each other. David Brock in his The Seduction of Hillary Rodham calls Mrs. Clinton “Alinsky’s Daughter.”
Saul Alinsky and the Liberal Revolution. Click Here A young Hillary Rodham interviewed Alinsky for her senior thesis at Wellesley, and Alinsky’s ideas play a major part in the work. Unfortunately, observers will never know what Hillary said about Alinsky or his tactics.
The Enemies Among Us. Click Here Racists and sexists and right-wing conspirators, Oh My!
Polarization and Foreign Policy. Click Here Polarization is even applied by Timesmen to the coverage and opinion of critical foreign policy issues.
The New York Times on Samuel Alito. Click Here The smearing of a good man. Want to do something about it?
WHAT MAKES ARTHUR SULZBERGER TICK?Click Here
His New York Times Company biography plays him as an ordinary guy who made good, and insinuates that he worked his way up through the journalism profession from humble beginnings as a reporter for The Raleigh Times. But he is in fact a son of wealth and high privilege, and is well insulated against the polarizing tactics his newspaper employs. An investigation of three men who’ve probably helped shape the political mindset of Arthur Sulzberger.
The Silent Publisher. Click Here It is time for Arthur Sulzberger to drop his political posturing and reassure readers that his first and foremost concern is not the de-legitimizing of his political opponents but providing accurate and unbiased information that can enhance their lives.
PHILOSOPHICAL INDIVIDUALISMClick Here
It is the individual alone, and not a newspaper publisher or a pressure group boss or a Hollywood entertainer, or society as a whole, who knows what will bring her happiness. Yet less and less do the instruments of elite opinion-making — the Establishment media and the public schools and the entertainment industry — honor the concept of Individualism.
MRS. CLINTON, BILL KELLER AND THE KU KLUX KLANClick Here
The name Ku Klux Klan is synonymous with cruelty, conspiracies of silence and murder. The refusal of the New York Times to tell readers about, and condemn editorially, the November 15, 2005 feting by a group of Democratic senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, of a former Klansman –- and in the Frederick Douglass House, no less — confirms that the Newspaper of Record will do nothing to jeopardize the imagery of Mrs. Clinton as compassionate toward the historical plight of African-Americans. Is this what Dr. King intended? Is this what liberalism is supposed to be about?
THE TIMES AND MRS. CLINTON: A CHRONOLOGY Click Here
When Jeanine Pirro announced she would run against Mrs. Clinton for the Senate, a Times editorial on August 10, 2005 led the reader to believe the newspaper would be impartial in the race. The piece said plaintively “Now we may have a race everybody will be watching.” Bernard Goldberg has said Arthur Sulzberger “remains unapologetically dedicated to using the paper’s influence to impose his notion of the way America ought to be on all the rest of us.” Arthur Sulzberger may criticize Mrs. Clinton occasionally, but never to the point of backing to her opponents or otherwise obstructing her political ambitions. In October 2006 he’ll endorse Mrs. Clinton.
Carrying the Water for Mrs. Clinton during the 2000 Campaign. Click Here Chronology of Times coverage and opinion in support of Mrs. Clinton.
The Raging Lady Library. Click Here Key New York Times articles and editorials on Mrs. Clinton, 1999-2005.
GOOD FOR THE ELITE, BAD FOR YOU Click Here
They send their children to the finest private schools although they support keeping the children of the poor and the middle class in America’s public schools. They trumpet energy conservation for ordinary people while they live in grand air-conditioned mansions and travel in SUVs and private jets. They are for tolerance except when it is they who act intolerantly. On the question of political power, they favor scrutinizing the activities of their opponents, because they fear ambition in opponents for its potential for abuse, while they are for empowering themselves, because they appreciate ambition in themselves for its potential to create. What is to be done?
Senator Edward Kennedy — Demigod. Click Here Readers of The New York Times, calling upon all they know about human beings and gods, about the objective world and the metaphysical world, must wonder where it is that Senator Edward Kennedy resides.
The Times and the Liberal Elite during the 2004 Election. Click Here Politically convenient “embarrassments,” free speech for Michael Moore and Linda Ronstadt, and Mrs. Clinton on Paul Fray and Mahatma Ghandi. Pieces on Ernest Hollings, Sarah Jessica Parker and John Kerry also.
Why Mr. Keller Won’t Tell You About Liberal Privilege. Click Here Has The New York Times ever told you Michael Moore lives in a neighborhood with no African-Americans? Does it tell you Al Franken doesn’t hire blacks? Has it told you Hillary Clinton works to avoid paying taxes?
ACTIVIST JOURNALISMClick Here
When one catalogues the reportage and editorials of The New York Times, he or she cannot help but be struck by the newspaper’s open use of tactics like labeling and the double standard. Instances of political correctness in opinion and the coverage of events by the Newspaper of Record.
National Security as a Partisan Political Tool: The New York Times on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. Click Here The “George Bush Saddam Hussein” and the “Arthur Sulzberger Saddam Hussein.” (Also see “Polarization and Foreign Policy” Click Here.)
Shifting the Labels in Falluja. Click Here When does a Saddam loyalist or an Islamic extremist become a nationalist insurgent?
Disenfranchisement and the 2003 California Recall Election. Click Here How you can tell whether voters have been disenfranchised.
The Times and the “Chilling Effect” Metaphor. Click Here One of the Times’ most popular metaphors.
THE POLITICAL UTILITY OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING Click Here
An analysis of Times reportage and editorials shows that the newspaper’s leadership considers the device of tolerance not as a moral or philosophical guidepost that is universally applicable but rather as a political sword to be utilized to de-legitimize the opponents of the Democratic Party.
The Times and Race during the 2004 Election. Click Here Race is always a predictable part of Times coverage and opinion.
Diversity at The New York Times. Click Here How much diversity is there at The New York Times?
“A Pause for Hindsight”. Click HereAn editorial you’ll never see in The New York Times.