New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt evaluated two tough political stories in the Sunday Week in Review, one anti-McCain, the other anti-Palin. While he found the McCain piece fair, he faulted the anti-Palin piece.
In both cases, Times reporters and editors rallied to the defense of the pieces, finding McCain guilty of "demonstrable falsehoods" and Palin of "sometimes petty, peremptory" political leadership in Alaska.
When a newspaper like The Times takes a tough, critical look at a candidate in this year's presidential election, it has to give readers enough solid evidence to make up their own minds about whether it is being accurate and fair. Consider two front-page articles last weekend: I think one delivered the goods and one fell short.
The first, in Saturday's paper, reported that John McCain had drawn "an avalanche of criticism" from Democrats, independents and even some Republicans "for regularly stretching the truth" about Barack Obama's record and positions.
Without relying on others to make the charge, the article declared that the McCain campaign had "twisted Mr. Obama's words" to suggest he had compared Sarah Palin to a pig. It also stated that McCain himself had "falsely claimed" that Obama supported comprehensive sex education for kindergartners, had "repeatedly and incorrectly asserted" that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, and had "misrepresented" Obama's positions on energy and health care.
Hoyt quoted a Times editor:
But the Times article was built on a solid foundation of fact, and Richard Stevenson, the editor directing coverage of the election, said, "We don't want to fall into the trap of false equivalency." He said reporters had seen a pattern of "demonstrable falsehoods, exaggerations, misconstruals or omissions" on the part of McCain that seemed notable, even for a heated presidential campaign. While the article said that Obama's "hands have not always been clean in this regard" -- he "incorrectly" said that McCain supported a hundred-year war in Iraq, "distorted" his record on school financing and took economic comments "out of context" -- the brunt fell on McCain because of his large number of misrepresentations recently.
That is an echo of the notorious memo from then-ABC News political director Mark Halperin during the heat of the Bush-Kerry contest in October 2004, bemoaning the myth of equal accountability of both parties and urging his staff to "step up" and "serve the public interest" by defending Kerry against Bush attacks. An excerpt from the Halperin memo:
....the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.
Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.
We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that.
I'm sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.
It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.
Back to Public Editor Hoyt's column from Sunday:
Jim Rutenberg, one of two reporters who wrote the article, said he felt comfortable describing McCain's false, incomplete or misleading statements in declarative fashion because The Times had independently reported the facts and given them to readers. The false charge that Obama supported comprehensive sex education for kids in kindergarten had been refuted two days earlier in a "Check Point," the newspaper's vehicle for assessing the accuracy of campaign claims. A chart with the Saturday article compared McCain's charges on taxes, energy and health with the facts.
Journalist Byron York actually did some research on the bill and came to an opposite conclusion -- that McCain was right: "The fact is, the bill's intention was to mandate that issues like contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases be included in sex-education classes for children before the sixth grade, and as early as kindergarten."
Hoyt did find reason people might find the Times unfair to conservatives in its negative would-be expose of Palin's political style in Alaska:
I think it presented a series of unflattering anecdotes, some confusing and incomplete, but never made the connection between style and results necessary to judge a politician who was overwhelmingly re-elected mayor and has an 80 percent approval rating as governor.
Hoyt quoted Times reporter Peter Goodman, who worked on the story, saying it was "fair, deeply reported and solid to the point that the McCain-Palin campaign has not challenged a single fact," and Executive Editor Bill Keller, who defended it:
The story demonstrated "a style very personal, sometimes petty, peremptory, and a style that demands a high degree of loyalty," [Keller] said. "That tells you something about somebody who might be president."
—Clay Waters is the director of Times Watch, an MRC project tracking the New York Times.


















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Is this what they are
September 22, 2008 - 20:40 ET by zfIs this what they are resorting to now? Anecdotes? Simplistic overeaching pop-anaylsis of her 'style'?
Democracts themselves have
September 22, 2008 - 20:42 ET by zfDemocracts themselves have made petty an art form.
"...a style that demands a high degree of loyalty..."
September 22, 2008 - 20:48 ET by geoksterAnd this is bad, how exactly?
Or different than the management style of any successful executive? Any organization which does not require quite a bit of loyalty to its leaders will fail in a big hurry.
Unless of course, you are the NYT. Then being disloyal is taken as a badge of honor, allowing you to print top secret and classified information even if it might be harmful to the country and its soldiers who give their lives to protect the rights of any rag that wishes to be disloyal.
hhmmmm... describing a woman
September 22, 2008 - 21:16 ET by MidAmericahhmmmm... describing a woman as 'petty' (sexist term) is the equivilent of calling a black 'uppity' (racist term).
WILL MSM EXPOSE OBAMA TIES TO CRISIS ?
September 22, 2008 - 21:41 ET by john5750Sen. Dodd believes our economy will recover if and only if we eradicate all the "toxic instruments that exist in these [financial] institutions." One would hope Democrat Barack Obama would agree with Dodd, especially as Democrats are viewed by Americans as the Party most committed to addressing and ameliorating financial crises.
But Obama cannot confront this crisis in the manner Dodd desires, for his National Campaign Finance Chairperson, Penny Pritzker, is largely responsible for the creation and lending of the "toxic instruments" Chris Dodd decries as responsible for our current economic woes.
Beholden to Penny Pritzker as well as to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Barack Obama is essentially one of those "toxic instruments" we must shed if we are to recover from the mortgage and sub-prime lending crisis.
Danny Schechter, Leftist media critic and author of Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the ‘Sub Prime Scandal,’ offers a history of the sub prime mortgage. I quote one of the reviews of his magisterial text:
When it began, "subprime lending" wasn’t a term in common usage, let alone understood outside financial circles. One of its late 1990s originators was Obama campaign finance chairperson Penny Pritzker when she served on the Board of the failed family-owned Hinsdale, IL Superior Bank. It cost the FDIC $700 million and depositors another $65 million, while Pritzker made millions on predatory lending now called "subprime" mortgage schemes. One definition is as follows: "the practice of making loans to borrowers who do not qualify for the best market interest rates because of their deficient credit history." Another in the recent environment was to force-feed them to the largest number of homebuying prospects possible.
According to the short history Schecter’s recounts, it is Penny Pritzker who invented the "toxic" financial instrument that has precipitated our current financial crisis. The doyenne of predatory lending, Penny Pritzker is just another Jim Johnson and Frank Raines: both the cause and the symptom of all that is wrong on Wall Street, Penny Pritzker and her position of power on the Obama campaign raises serious doubts about Obama’s ability to reform the institutions responsible for our current economic doldrums.
Pritzker’s involvement in this crisis is not limited to the invention of the sub prime mortgage instrument; she is also largely responsible for the current financial crash. I quote Dennis Bernstein, who cites Timothy Anderson, a finance expert who relentlessly pursued the late Republican Henry Hyde for the latter’s entanglements in the failure of Clyde Federal Saving & Loan:
Though Superior Bank collapsed years before the current sub-prime turmoil that is rocking the world’s financial markets – and pushing those millions of homeowners toward foreclosure – some banking experts say the Pritzkers and Superior hold a special place in the history of the sub-prime fiasco.
"The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages," Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told me in an interview.
"The sub-prime mortgages," Anderson said, "were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds."
In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior Bank of Chicago.
It all stems from the questionable practices of Penny Pritzker and the Superior Bank of Chicago. Prtizker, by the way, is a major bundler for the Obama campaign. Indeed, the scion of one of Chicago’s wealthiest families has raised between $200,000 and $500,000 for Barack Obama’s Presidential bid. Her family also donated over $40,000 to Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign. Now wonder why Obama is opposed to interest rate freezes and a moratorium on sub prime mortgages: most of his campaign cash is from those who have shamelessly profited from our current economic collapse.
Democrats are aware of this problem, and a few are not very pleased. One Democratic member of the House uttered the following when interviewed by a reporter for the conservative American Spectator on 8 Sept 2008:
"How can Obama go out with a straight face and say it was Republicans who made this mess, when it is his key advisers who ran the agencies that made the big mess what it is?" says a Democrat House member who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "It’s his people who are responsible for what may well be the single largest government bailout in history. And every single one of them made millions off the collapse that are lining Obama’s campaign coffers. If the McCain campaign lets this one go, they deserve to lose."
Hopefully the McCain campaign will not ignore this egregious conflict of interest of Barack Obama. And hopefully the Obama campaign will fire and denounce Penny Pritzker for creating the current economic crisis on Wall Street. But I doubt Obama will, for Obama is the recipient of cash from many who are the beneficiaries of the sub prime mortgage scandal: he accepted $1,180,103 from the top issuers of subprime loans during the primaries. And here are the names of a few of Obama’s bundlers who earn their profits in the unscrupulous sub prime loaning industry:
Louis Susman, Michael Froman and J. Michael Schell of Citigroup; Steve Koch of Credit Suisse; Bruce Hayman, David Heller, Eric Schwartz, and Todd Williams of Goldman Sachs; Mark Gilbert, Christine Forester, John Rhea, Nadja Fidelia, and Theodore Janulis of Lehman; and Robert Wolf of UBS Americas.
Beholden to the interests responsible for creating the sub prime mortgage crisis that has rippled across our country and across the world, Obama cannot eliminate those who created the "toxic instruments" Democrat Chris Dodd decries, for he is too dependent on their largesse.
Will Obama return the donations and bundled cash he received from the subprime industry? Will he fire and denounce Penny Pritzker? Or will he simply ignore his complicity with the unscrupulous sub prime mortgage industry and simply give us more "okie doke," "bamboozling" and "hoodwinking?" Even if he does denounce the industry that has financially sustained his campaign, it will be too little, too late: the economy has already collapsed; the foreclosure crisis has already destroyed communities; and families are on the streets.
Barack "Sub Prime" Obama: unable to reform the industries responsible for our current economic crisis, he is anything but ready for prime time. Indeed, Obama is and will remain "sub prime."
John . . .
September 23, 2008 - 00:52 ET by DoktorFranken. . . . Ditto
Odd, but aren't the #1 and #2 "campaign donation" benefactors from the Mae & Mac Dodd and 0bama?
A COUPLE OF THINGS...
September 22, 2008 - 22:01 ET by danybhoyI have a problem with the headline...it has the words "demonstrable falsehoods" & it says NYTimes editorial board...Much of what is printed in the fishwrap that is the NYSlimes is "demonstrable falsehoods", that's not including the total leftwing/liberal/progressive bias that is on display every day in that turd of a newspaper.
What make this worse then it should be, much of the MSM takes their cue from these idiots. Is there any confusion why their circulation numbers are falling through the floor?
"...it's still We The People, Right?" Megadeth
One must admit...
September 23, 2008 - 01:58 ET by wnaegele...'Demonstrable Falsehoods' is something about which the NYT knows a great deal.
'Demonstrable Falsehoods
September 23, 2008 - 02:07 ET by Cool Arrow'Demonstrable Falsehoods' is something about which the NYT knows a great deal.
Who is Jayson Blair?
Democrat lifeguards for 400, Alex
"Don't taze me bro" - Joe Biden