Clay Waters's blog

New York Times intelligence reporter Scott Shane's mock Q&A in Thursday's edition, "What Happened in Libya? Clearing Up a Fierce Dispute," served to shield President Obama from criticism on how his administration described the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, misleadingly emphasizing that Obama "referred to the attack as an 'act of terror' twice" in two days. Shane omitted that Obama and his administration proceeded to blame the attacks on spontaneous protests over a YouTube video, with Obama himself doing so several times in a September 26 speech to the United Nations.

Shane is worried that "what happened in the attack, and disputes over who said what about it, have left many people confused." (Is "confused" code for "criticizing the Obama administration"?) He's the latest Times reporter to insist that Obama "applied the 'terror' label to the attack" in his Rose Garden address on September 12, while admitting "the reference was indirect." The Times' s own managing editors would quibble with that assessment.

The New York Times must be really worried about bolstering Obama's support among women, with a Gallup poll shows Romney pulling even with Obama among women (though reporter Michael Shear strenously downplayed the fact in a Wednesday post by saying that "other surveys -- and Mr. Obama’s top strategists -- disputed that finding.")

In the last three days the paper has played into the Democrats' "war on women" theme, issuing two lead editorials on the dangers a Romney administration would pose to females. Tuesday's lead editorial fixated on the hazard a Romney presidency would pose to the left's beloved Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. On Thursday Romney was accused of having a "1952 sensibility" in "Mr. Romney's Version of Equal Rights – Facing a Gender Gap, the candidate looks at the issues through an out-of-date lens."

Wednesday's banner New York Times headline on the second presidential debate was studiously neutral: "Obama and Romney Mount Biting Attacks in Debate Rematch." Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny's underlying report played it straight, as did Peter Baker in his front-page "news analysis," under the punchy headline "Punch, Punch, Punch."

But while the Obama cheerleading was muted in print, Times journalists let their slant show during live fact-check of the debate, and especially on the TimesCast. Baker wrote for Wednesday's edition:

The second 2012 presidential debate hosted by Candy Crowley got the full court press from the New York Times, with live fact-checking online and a 40-minute TimesCast wrap-up, that found Times reporters wrongly defending Obama and bashing Mitt Romney on a fiery exchange on Libya. Times journalists were highly supportive of Barack Obama's performance and critical of the "peevish" Mitt Romney, who "was arguably showing disrespect for the president," as Jackie Calmes insisted.

Times journalists also falsely insisted that President Obama had called the Benghazi attacks "an act of terror" in a Rose Garden speech the day after, and that Mitt Romney had made a "serious gaffe" when he suggested Obama had not. Yet in fact, as two other Times journalists softly pointed out later in the videocast, Obama was only speaking generally when he said in his Rose Garden speech that "no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation." Of the Benghazi assault, Managing Editor Richard Berke admitted that Obama "didn't say 'it was a terrorist attack.' It was more of a vague quote."

In Monday's New York section of the Times, Michael Grynbaum reported on a local congressional race in Staten Island that Democrats see as ripe for the picking, with a headline that suggested the Democrat indeed deserved to win the seat: "A Seat for the Taking, but First Seeking Traction – Democratic Challenger is Largely Unknown In His Conservative Staten Island District."

Grynbaum pondered that Republican Rep. Michael Grimm's Democratic opponent "remains something of a mystery," then did his best to rectify that by introducing him favorably to New York Times readers.

Atlanta-based New York Times reporter Kim Severson wrote Monday about Christian conservative backlash against a school program started by the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center in which kids "are encouraged to hang out with someone they normally might not speak to," "intended as a way to break up cliques and prevent bullying." ("Seeing a Homosexual Agenda, a Christian Group Protests an Anti-Bullying Program.")

But while the American Family Association was tabled as "a conservative evangelical group" and "a Bible-based cultural watchdog organization," the lefties at SPLC, who go around labeling other nonprofits they disapprove of as "hate groups," get kinder labeling from Severson, who has promoted the group's propaganda before.

The New York Times Sunday Styles profile by Amy Chozick of Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, "A Messenger Who Does the Shooting," reads as a bit behind on current events (many Sunday profile-type pieces are written several days in advance).

It comes off like a snapshot from before Cutter shamelessly politicized the Libya attack last Thursday by suggesting the only reason anyone cared about Benghazi was the Romney-Ryan campaign. And Chozick must have written the profile during that extremely brief time when the Cutter-inspired emphasis on Big Bird seemed hip and clever, not desperate and out of touch.

Two New York Times's liberal columnists are agreed: Repealing Obama-care would have a massive body count. Paul Krugman (pictured) wished readers a happy Monday with his cheerfully titled column "Death by Ideology."

Mitt Romney doesn’t see dead people. But that’s only because he doesn’t want to see them; if he did, he’d have to acknowledge the ugly reality of what will happen if he and Paul Ryan get their way on health care.

New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg penned an obituary in Monday's edition for former Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who died Sunday morning.

Specter served as a liberal Republican for most of his career before switching to the Democratic Party in 2009 in an unsuccessful attempt to preserve his seat. But while Specter battled conservative icon Judge Robert Bork and helped deny Bork a seat on the Supreme Court, it's a later Supreme Court dust-up the Times and liberals refuse to forgive him for: His tough questioning of Anita Hill after she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during Thomas's 1991 Supreme Court hearings.

New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan's Sunday column on drone strikes featured an interesting comment about (media?) bias against Republicans from David Rohde, a reporter kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008.

First, Sullivan criticized the Obama administration from the left:

The Biden-Ryan vice-presidential debate Thursday night brought out the media's "fact check" squads, including the New York Times, which had a squad of reporters evaluating the statements of Joe Biden and Paul Ryan online during the debate. Still, with perhaps 15 reporters on the job Thursday night, the paper still had to out-source a crucial Biden misstatement on Libya to the one-man fact-check machine at the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, the next morning.

The Times boiled down a few of its findings for Friday's print edition under "Check Point" on topics including Medicare, the stimulus, and the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

James Taranto has written at Opinion Journal that this new-style media "fact checking" is "overwhelmingly biased toward the left" and "gives journalists much freer rein to express their opinions by allowing them to pretend to be rendering authoritative judgments about the facts." The Times's debate product doesn't refute Taranto's argument. Reporter Michael Cooper had the top "Check Point" item and per usual found the Republican at fault:

In a surprise, New York Times' Public Editor Margaret Sullivan criticized her paper in a Thursday afternoon blog post for downplaying the congressional hearings into the deadly attacks on the U.S. consulate in Libya. The Times made the interesting decision to put the second day of hearings on page 3 Thursday, in the International section, as opposed to the National section, which begins in the middle of the paper. In contrast, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both put the hearings on the front page, while the Los Angeles Times carried original reporting from Libya (not the hearings) on the front page.

Sullivan asked the Times's editors why they chose to ignore the story in their main section and soon got a response: "there were six better stories."

On Thursday, New York Times campaign reporters Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker filed a relatively positive story on the suddenly resurgent Romney campaign: "Romney Campaign Looks to Capitalize on Image Voters Saw in Debate."

Inside Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters over the past few days, the data pouring in was unmistakable. Aides scouring the results of focus groups and national polls found that undecided voters watching the presidential debate in Denver seemed startled when the Republican candidate portrayed all year by Democrats -- the ultraconservative, unfeeling capitalist -- did not materialize.

New York Times reporter Monica Davey was in Wisconsin on Thursday, playing up the Democratic candidate's Rep. Tammy Baldwin chances in her race for an open Senate seat against former Wisconsin governor, Republican Tommy Thompson. The headline was a puzzler: "A Republican Haven Is Finding Itself Split."

Though Gov. Scott Walker pushed through his public sector union reforms and survived a recall vote, Wisconsin hasn't been a "Republican Haven" for decades. The state has voted Democratic in the last six presidential elections, last voting for Republican Ronald Reagan in 1984 along with all but one other state. Between 1993 and 2011 Wisconsin was represented in the U.S. Senate by two Democrats, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold (Feingold lost to Republican Ron Johnson in the November 2010 election, and Kohl is retiring, leaving the open seat Baldwin and Thompson are fighting over).

Wednesday's lead New York Times editorial, "Conspiracy World – Behind every nonpartisan institution, the right sees the malevolent hand of a liberal cabal," is at least more colorful than the paper's standard editorial offering. It's a liberal hodge-podge of accusations that the right is living in a "world of conspiracy theories"-- but why are John McCain's criticisms (presumably of the State Department over Libya) mentioned in the same rant as conspiracists who think Obama was born in Kenya?

When Republicans began questioning President Obama’s birth certificate four years ago, it seemed at first like a petulant reaction to a lost election, a flush of nativist and racist anger that would diminish over time. But the preposterous charges never went away. As this election cycle shows, many in the Republican Party continue to see the president as the center of a broad and malevolent liberal conspiracy to upend the truth.

As Congress holds hearings on the fatal attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the New York Times placed its partisan political story by Michael Schmidt and Eric Schmitt on page A10 under a neutral, purely political headline, "Before Hearings on Libya Attack, Charges of Playing Politics." The text box was mild: "An inquiry is expected to focus on potential intelligence failures."

The Washington Post at least put Benghazi on the front page, in a story by Anne Gearan under the critical but off-target headline "Deadly Benghazi Attack Could Mar Clinton Legacy" (as if Hillary Clinton's reputation is the key issue at stake, not the four Americans killed). NewsBuster Ken Shepherd critiqued Gearan's story.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch sent a Twitter message on Sunday morning complaining about the Sunday New York Times: "Practically nothing in NYT, predicable nearly unreadable Review section - even unintelligible Maureen Dowd."

Admittedly, the lead Sunday Review article by novelist Kevin Baker was more enticing to liberals, who seem to be section editor Andrew Rosenthal's intended audience: "Republicans To Cities: Drop Dead." (The headline and graphic are meant to mimic the infamous New York Daily News headline from October 30, 1975, after President Gerald Ford denied federal assistance to the city: "Ford to City: Drop Dead.") Baker talked of "radio ranters" of the right wing, bizarrely suggested D.C. was a victim of "lax gun laws," and accused Republicans of racist "dog whistles."

Political writer Matt Bai wrote "Is There Life After Mitt?" for the upcoming issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Besides cheap cracks at Michele Bachman and (again) calling conservatives anti-modern "extremists," there's a definite "Death of Conservatism" vibe to Bai's analysis. Times editor Sam Tanenhaus's 2009 book of that name was forcefully rebutted by the Tea Party movement that same year. How will Bai's analysis fare come the November elections?

On Monday's front page, New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Trip Gabriel used the upcoming vice presidential debate to criticize Obama's performance in his debate with Mitt Romney last week: "Biden Up Next, Obama's Aides Plot Comeback."

The Times didn't flinch from calling out Obama's "disaster" of a debate performance, but did find some excuses for the president, including distractions like the terrorist massacre in Libya (though that didn't stop Obama from attending a fundraiser in Las Vegas the next day). The Times also dropped in this revelation: "Mr. Obama made clear to advisers that he was not happy about debating Mr. Romney, whom he views with disdain."

Bad news, Mitt: You've lost the Big Bird fans in France and Brazil, according to a Friday afternoon post by Robert Mackey, who summarizes big news stories for the New York Times's Lede blog. Mackey, who has written for Al Franken's radio show and been a producer for the left-wing Pacifica public radio network, usually plays it fairly straight in his NYT posts.

But he was unusually passionate while flashing his disdain for the Romney campaign and those Americans who (horrors) think PBS is a drain on the federal government. The Times' knee-jerk reaction to such a puny cut in federal spending was revealing.

So much for sophisticated liberalism. Nicholas Kristof's Thursday New York Times column is titled "Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys?" Despite (or because of) an opening that's almost a parody of simple-minded liberalism, it was the 1# most e-mailed Times story as of Friday morning.

Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly -- empty-handed.

In a bit of a surprise, New York Times reporters Jeremy Peters and Jim Rutenberg filed a longish article on a recently unearthed Obama video from 2007 showing the president in a fiery, racially charged mode and praising his anti-American pastor Jeremiah Wright, a video downplayed or ignored by most of the mainstream media: "Race at Issue for Obama As Right Revives '07 Talk."

Less surprising was the snotty text box: "New fodder for a favorite topic in conservative circles." And the reporters took care to trace the tape's provenance down the conservative media food chain.

The first Obama-Romney presidential debate of 2012 ran under this less-than-informative banner headline in Thursday's New York Times: "Obama and Romney, in First Debate, Spar Over Fixing the Economy." The actual headline to the story by Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg also failed to capture the sense, overwhelming even among the liberal press, that Romney had helped himself with a sharp, energetic performance at the University of Denver: "Feel of Seminar as Accusations Fly From Rivals."

The Washington Post's banner headline was more direct and captured the consensus of the night: "Romney takes fight to Obama," while the story claimed the president "found himself on the defensive repeatedly." Other headlines from around the country captured the same effect.

By contrast, you had to parse the Times to sense that Romney won the night. (One significant Timesman, former Executive Editor Bill Keller, reluctantly awarded Romney the debate on his Twitter feed, calling Romney's performance "shameless but masterful.")

Vice President Joe Biden's latest gaffe came when he asked a North Carolina crowd how Romney and Ryan can "justify raising taxes on the middle class that’s been buried the last four years?" perhaps forgetting his boss has been in charge during that exact time frame (and that the Romney campaign denies it will raise taxes on the middle class). It predictably failed to make the print edition of the New York Times.

Campaign reporter Trip Gabriel did blog about it on Tuesday, but did his best to minimize the damage by suggesting the comment was a "stray sentence" wrenched from proper context: "Republicans Seize On Biden’s ‘Middle Class’ Remark."

On Wednesday, New York Times political reporters Jackie Calmes (pictured) and John Harwood offered a pre-debate fact-check which predictably leaned in Obama's favor (and blamed former President Bush): "A Closer Look at Assertions the 2 Sides Have Made on Economic Issues."

Defending Obama from comparisons to President Jimmy Carter, New York Times intelligence reporter Scott Shane questionably claimed that "the deaths of American diplomats in Libya are not a continuing crisis" in Saturday's "Romney Team Tries Hanging a Jimmy Carter Label on Obama." Certainly not if the major media have a say in suppressing the controversy over how the Obama administration's claims about the attacks differ from the facts.

The New York Times's Sunday Styles section offered some hard-hitting journalism about the toned-up and good-looking First Couple, complete with fabulous photos. Joyce Purnick mock-criticized Michelle Obama for looking so "toned and elegant" in "(Psst: We Feel Bad About Our Arms.)" Text box: "It's time to face the truth: we don't all look like the first lady."

I had expected to keep mum about my problem with Michelle Obama until after the election, but my frustration has gotten the better of me. I can contain it no longer.

I refer not to her politics, but to her arms-- her bare, toned, elegant arms. Enough!

The latest cover story in the New York Times Book Review is a long, pseudo-erudite bashing by Mark Lilla of a conservative book, marinaded in Lilla's selective view of the history of Progressivism in the United States. Lilla, humanities professor at Columbia University, lambastes Charles Kesler's "I Am The Change – Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism." The text box portrayed conservatives as motivated solely by blind rage: "More than a few American citizens are loathing themselves blind over Barack Obama. Why?"

Lilla opened with a standard "clever" bait-and-switch that he probably thinks will shock people, but which most conservatives will figure out long before the end:

The New York Times Sunday Review, run by the ultra-liberal Andrew Rosenthal, again pressed for the Democratic side by running an op-ed that was the #2 most e-mailed Times story as of Monday afternoon, the provocatively titled "The Conservative Case for Obamacare," by J.D. Kleinke, a resident fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

If Mitt Romney’s pivots on President’s Obama’s health care reform act have accelerated to a blur -- from repealing on Day 1, to preserving this or that piece, to punting the decision to the states -- it is for an odd reason buried beneath two and a half years of Republican political condemnations: the architecture of the Affordable Care Act is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas about individual responsibility and the power of market forces.

As shown on Times Watch this morning, New York Times media reporter David Carr may pooh-pooh the idea of liberal bias. But he's a stronger supporter of the First Amendment than some of his Times colleagues, like movie critic A.O. Scott, who ludicrously defended a left-wing journalist's vandalism of the subway poster as "free expression" and even "democracy."

In "The Sweet Spot," a weekly videocast featuring Carr and movie critic A.O. Scott discussed controversial advertisements put up in the New York City subway system by anti-Islamist activist Pamela Geller that read: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."