NB/TimesWatch's Clay Waters on NYT Bias Against McCain

Printing an unsubstantiated extramarital affair allegation and questioning John McCain's citizenship status were just two of the more blatant examples of the New York Times's bias against the Republican presidential nominee, MRC's TimesWatch.org Director Clay Waters told FNC's Bill Hemmer on the September 23 "America's Newsroom."

Beyond that, the day-to-day coverage shows a persistent bias on the part of the Times. Waters, a contributing editor to NewsBusters, was on the program to comment on remarks by a McCain communications director Steve Schmidt lashing out at the Times. Below is an excerpt of the transcript [audio here]:

BILL HEMMER, host, "America's Newsroom": Give me some numbers, give me some facts, did you do a percentage breakdown?

CLAY WATERS, director, MRC's TimesWatch.org: I actually did a slight percentage breakdown. I did a month of looking at it, after Obama won the Democratic primaries. I looked at a month of stories, the ratio was pretty stunning. It was three-to-one positive-negative for the Obama coverage.

HEMMER: How do you gauge that, Clay?

WATERS: Well, it's just one person looking at the coverage, see who they quote, who they don't quote, what kind of slant they use in their terminology. Like the race, they're always accusing McCain of playing the race card. The Britney Spears-Paris Hilton ad, somehow the Times managed in their news reporting to suggest that there was a race factor there, and you remember the op-ed controversy, where Obama wrote this pro-withdrawal op-ed for the Times, and then McCain--

HEMMER: He submitted his and then they chose not to write [sic] it, that was the first thing that popped into my mind, just based on memory. They actually what, sorry?

WATERS: Exactly. They made this excuse that it wasn't in the proper format that they were looking for. But they were actually asking him for a timetable. The whole thing about McCain's strategy for Iraq, like it or not, is he doesn't advocate timetables. There was even a magazine story that managed to denigrate his prisoner-of-war record a little bit. It said, you know, we like his brave service in Vietnam, but maybe because he was a prisoner-of-war he didn't get the correct liberal line on Vietnam. He didn't realize that the Vietnam War was corrupt and doomed from the start.