White House Pushes Back, Details Bias in Times Page 1 Hit Job

Change font size:  A |  A

In a pointed news release, the White House has punched back at the tendentious “White House Memo” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg that appeared on the front page of Thursday’s News York Times. Headlined “Setting the Record Straight: The New York Times Mistakes Its Own Blindness for Presidential ‘Invisibility’,” the White House press office notes even more factual flaws and omissions than reported yesterday by the NewsBusters contributing editor Clay Waters in his own lengthy TimesWatch critique of the same piece, which portrayed President Bush as detached from the government’s reaction to the current economic slowdown.

Stolberg’s snarky third paragraph cast the President as a neglectful globetrotter while Senators have their sleeves rolled up working on solutions:

Now Mr. Bush is in Eastern Europe, one of eight foreign trips he is taking this year. As he delivered his farewell address to NATO on Wednesday, Senate Democrats and Republicans were holed up in the Capitol, scrambling to produce a bill to help struggling homeowners, the kind of government intervention Mr. Bush had cautioned against.

For a man who came into office as the nation’s first M.B.A. president, Mr. Bush has sometimes seemed invisible during the housing and credit crunch.

The White House fired back:

Since August 2007, President Bush has appeared at public events where he has discussed issues pertaining to the economy or housing at least 28 times. In the meantime, since the start of 2008, Congress has been on recess almost as many days as they have been in session....

President Bush has repeatedly called on Congress to ensure the long-term health of our economy by making the tax relief that is now in place permanent. If Congress allows the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire, 116 million taxpayers will see their taxes go up by $1,800 on average, and we will see an end to many of the measures that have helped our economy grow – including the 10 percent individual income tax bracket, reductions in the marriage penalty, the expansion of the child tax credit, and reduced rates on regular income, capital gains, and dividends.

Towards the end of her story, Stolberg uses typical journalist jujitsu to conflate an editor’s choice of front-page material with the priorities of everyday Americans:

While Mr. Bush may be talking, Americans do not seem to be listening. When the president visited a debt counseling center on Friday in Freehold, N.J., it did not generate major headlines. But the papers were awash with the news that Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania had endorsed Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president.

Of course, holding the President responsible for the media’s ongoing fixation on Barack Obama is beyond ludicrous. And, as the White House effectively pointed out, even though last week’s event was held in the New York Times’s backyard, the paper failed to send a reporter.

The New York Times criticized President Bush for failing to generate headlines for his visit to Novadebt counseling center in Freehold, N.J. to meet with mortgage counselors and discuss the housing market, asserting “the papers were awash with the news that Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania had endorsed Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president.” The “newspaper of record” further claims “Mr. Bush has sometimes seemed invisible during the housing and credit crunch.”...

The New York Times neglects to mention that it failed to send a reporter to cover the President’s housing event in Freehold, N.J. -- a town inside its own circulation area.

Good comeback. Given the rest of the media’s propensity to adopt stories from the Times as their own, it’s also valuable evidence of the partisan agenda that’s dominating the New York Times this election year.