TimesWatch

When President Obama announced he wanted to deliver his latest speech on the economy to a joint session of Congress on the same night as a GOP presidential debate, House speaker John Boehner politely requested the administration wait one day. Obama acceded, to the chagrin of the left and the New York Times.

Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer devoted a full story to the squabble in Friday’s edition, focusing almost solely on the supposed “disrespect” shown by Republicans to poor, put-upon President Obama: “G.O.P. vs. Obama: Disrespect or Just Politics?”

New York Times online political reporter Michael Shear made Saturday’s front page with his close reading of the oeuvre of Texas Gov. Rick Perry and was predictably disturbed by what he found. “Perry’s Blunt Views in Books Get New Scrutiny as He Joins Race” amounts to a handy bit of opposition research before Perry’s debate debut on Wednesday (contingent on the wildfires in his home state of Texas).

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, believes that climate change is a “contrived, phony mess.” The federal income tax was the “great milestone on the road to serfdom.” And the Boy Scouts of America are under attack by “a radical homosexual movement.”

President Obama’s reaction to the latest lousy employment figures was framed by New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes on Saturday’s front page as “New Urgency in the Battle for Stimulus.” Calmes has long insisted Obama’s first multi-billion dollar economic “stimulus” was a success and did so again:

Nonpartisan analysts and the Congressional Budget Office have credited the first stimulus package with helping to end the recession and keep unemployment from growing even higher than it did. They say the winding down of the federal government’s help this year has contributed to the economy’s stall.

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes spent Labor Day with President Obama in Detroit, who spoke at a heavily union rally featuring speakers from organized labor. One of them, Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, used just the sort of militant rhetoric against the Tea Party that would certainly have been condemned by the Times if coming from Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, or any other conservative politician or activist. Yet Hoffa was completely absent from Calmes’s Tuesday story, “For Obama, a Familiar Labor Day Theme.”

What Hoffa said: "President Obama this is your army!...Everybody here has got to vote. If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong."

An R-rated flick about a bunch of friends having an orgy gets hailed in today's Weekend Arts section as a "friendly, ramshackle comedy" albeit "somewhat laugh-deficient" while a G-rated drama about a young golfer being mentored by a retired pro is panned as a "stultifying hybrid of instruction film and Christian sermon" that "swoons into its own solemn sanctimony."

That's how New York Times film critic Stephen Holden treated "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" and "Seven Days in Utopia," respectively, in the September 2 paper. Both movies debut in theaters today.

Speaker John Boehner politely suggesting that President Obama can be accommodated to give an address to a joint session of Congress a day later than the date he originally requested is "contemptuous," "cynical" and "craven" to the New York Times editorial board.

In their top editorial headlined, "Oh, Grow Up," the Times childishly whined about Speaker John Boehner's "unprecedented" request.

"Speaker Says No, So Obama Delays Speech" is how The New York Times's September 1 front page headline spun the short squabble over the timing of President Obama's upcoming speech before Congress on his job creation plan. "Spat Over Which Day to Address Economy," added a subheadline.

The online version opted for a headline that went lighter on the loaded language: "Obama Moves Jobs Speech After Skirmish With Boehner."

For their part, Times writers Helene Cooper and Jackie Calmes ginned up the perpetual lament of partisan discord in Washington, before going on to portray President Obama as the bigger man for amending his initial wish to speak to Congress next Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern:

Rep. Allen West (Fla.), the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), is considering leaving the CBC after a fellow member of the caucus practically compared Tea Party members to lynch mob members.

Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.) recently told a gathering in Miami that Tea Party members "would love to see us as second-class citizens" and to see blacks "hanging on a tree."

New York Times staffer Jennifer Steinhauer reported the development yesterday on The Caucus blog. Today the Times ran a condensed version of that blog post on page A16 and headlined it "Taking Issue With Criticism," as though Rep. Andre Carson's comments were legitimate critiques of the Tea Party movement.

New York Times media reporter Jeremy Peters issued a warning to young journalists on Wednesday’s front page, “Covering 2012, Youths on the Bus”: There are partisan bloggers out there who are out to embarrass mainstream journalists. Ironic, given that mainstream journalists have been doing just that to conservative politicians for decades.

A group of five fresh-faced reporters from National Journal and CBS News clicked away on their MacBooks one recent afternoon, dutifully taking notes as seasoned journalists from the campaign trail shared their rules of the road.
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Preparing journalists to cover the presidential campaign these days is also an exercise in indiscretion management. In the new dynamic of campaigns, reporters themselves are targets both of political strategists as well as other journalists and bloggers.

In his Wednesday report on federal disaster aid in a time of vast national debt, New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse treated liberal Democrats as the epitome of Washington wisdom and moderation: “Emphasis on Federal Austerity Changes Dynamics of Disaster Relief.”

While self-described socialist Bernie Sanders was only termed an “independent,” Hulse managed to put an ideological label on “Conservative Republicans” who are pushing to actually pay for disaster relief, through off-setting budget cuts.

The New York Times is still stirring up news based on an op-ed published in the paper two weeks by billionaire Warren “Tax Me More” Buffett, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” pleading for the government to raise the effective tax rate on wealthy investors like him.

Buffett’s op-ed went viral among liberals online, and has spread to Europe, according to Wednesday’s Business section story from London by Julia Werdigier, “Tax Me More, Europe’s Wealthy Say -- With an Eye on Deficits, the Affluent Talk About Fairness.” The text box emphasized: “A debate after Buffett called for an end to ‘coddling’ the rich.”

Elisabeth Rosenthal, an environment reporter who has blamed about every problem under the sun on global warming, called on China and India to turn off their air conditioners to save the planet in the Sunday Review – “Oh, to Be Warm In Summer’s Heat.”

Rosenthal's personal temperature preferences (she complains of shivering in air-conditoning crazy Hong Kong) are apparently to be locked in as global policy to fight greenhouse gases.

Is Syria next on Obama’s intervention list? New York Times reporters Helene Cooper and Steven Lee Myers speculate in Monday’s “U.S. Tactics in Libya May Be a Model for Other Efforts.”

The text box works in a typical crack at Bush administration foreign policy: “Using force when justified but not going it alone.”  The implication, common in the pages of the Times, is that Bush somehow went it alone in the invasion of Iraq. For the record, the United States actually led a 30-nation coalition in Iraq (35 countries joined the fight in Afghanistan).

The New York Times so far has issued three corrections to reporter Eric Lichtblau’s August 15 front-page hit piece on conservative California Rep. Darrell Issa of California, but the paper won't consider a retraction because, as the Times's Washingtion bureau chief says: “The article was carefully reported, written, and edited, and we stand by the story both in its broad thrust and, except as noted, in its particular details.”

Lichtblau, who along with James Risen is notorious for printing the sensitive details of classified terrorist surveillance programs on the front page of the Times, is not known for his fairness to conservative subjects; his 2008 book “Bush’s Law” bluntly accused the administration of lying about the “war on terror” (quotation marks are Lichtblau’s).

The New York Times, once again, feigned ignorance regarding “civil rights activist” Al Sharpton’s racially incendiary past. The front of the New York section on Saturday, N.R. Kleinfield questioned why “the provocative civil rights activist” has been silent on the case of International Monetary Fund bigwig Dominique Strauss-Kahn, accused of raping a hotel maid in Manhattan. (The charges were dropped after questions were raised about the credibility of his accuser.)

But an obvious answer – Sharpton’s involvement in the Tawana Brawley case – wasn’t hinted at until the last two paragraphs of the seventeen paragraphs of “Assault Case Spurs Debate, But Sharpton Stays Silent.”

Never let a natural disaster go to waste. In August 2010, New York Times environmental reporter Justin Gillis reacted to that summer's heat waves and flooding with “In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming” on the front page of the Times. So it was no surprise he took advantage of Hurricane Irene in Sunday’s edition, “Seeing Irene as Harbinger of a Change in Climate.”

Gillis’s latest story, admittedly written when Irene looked more dangerous than it turned out to be, was also guilty of disaster hype.

The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?

“Deep Cuts in Social Services” By Conservatives Led to London Riots

“Frustration in this impoverished neighborhood, as in many others in Britain, has mounted as the government’s austerity budget has forced deep cuts in social services. At the same time, a widely held disdain for law enforcement here, where a large Afro-Caribbean population has felt singled out by the police for abuse, has only intensified through the drumbeat of scandal that has racked Scotland Yard in recent weeks and led to the resignation of the force’s two top commanders....Economic malaise and cuts in spending and services instituted by the Conservative-led government have been recurring flashpoints for months...As the budget cuts take hold, risk of unemployment increases and social measures like youth projects are sacrificed, Mr. Beech said, and ‘all logic says there will be an increase in antisocial behavior.’” – London-based reporter Ravi Somaiya on the riots there, August 8.

Norway Terrorist’s “Fellow Travelers,” Gingrich and Rep. Peter King

“Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment....Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target ‘creeping Shariah in the United States’ at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein. – International columnist Roger Cohen, posted to nytimes.com July 25.

There’s some strange respect shown today for one particular multi-billionaire investor in the liberal pages of the New York Times. Friday’s lead story by Nelson Schwartz, “Buffett to Invest $5 Billion In Shaky Bank of America.” introduced Buffett as “Warren E. Buffett, the legendary investor, is sinking $5 billion into Bank of America in a bold show of faith in the country’s biggest, and most beleaguered, financial institution.” Schwartz also called him “the legendary investor” in a March 23, 2008 story.

In all, Times reporters have referred to Buffett as a “legendary investor” at least nine times in its pages over the last five years, not counting several references to him as a “legendary investor” on the paper’s DealBook blog. No other investor has been hailed as “legendary” in print more than once by the Times.

The New York Times’s outgoing Executive Editor Bill Keller received some pushback on his recently posted column that demanded, in rather insulting fashion, that the media more aggressively question the religious views of the G.O.P. candidates.

Times Watch and others noted that his paper was hardly a model of journalistic assertiveness during the spring of 2008, when Barack Obama endured political controversy over the racially inflammatory and conspiracy-minded Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's minister at Trinity United Church of Christ. Keller responded via Twitter on Friday morning:

Yes, Dems should be asked about their faith (and influences) too. We were late to Rev. Wright in '08, but we got there, and did it well.

Bill Keller’s upcoming column for the New York Times’s Sunday magazine, “Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith,” raised familiar liberal paranoia about the conservative religious views of Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry. The official headline for the upcoming print edition: “Not Just Between Them and Their God.” Keller had no time for respectful criticism: "Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a 'cult' and that many others think is just weird."

Keller, the outgoing executive editor for the Times, got off on the wrong foot by mockingly comparing the candidates’ Christian beliefs to belief in space aliens. Then he made the latest in his impressive string of column factual errors, identifying the Catholic politician Rick Santorum as an evangelical Christian.

Linda Greenhouse, former Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, posted her twice-monthly column Wednesday evening, on the dangers of today’s conservative Supreme Court going “Over the Cliff” in defending...the right to free speech. You read that correctly: A liberal Times reporter is faulting a conservative Supreme Court for being on a "dangerous path" and showing "arid absolutism" by expanding the First Amendment's protections to corporations.

Greenhouse jump-started the discussion with a rarely-cited 1978 Court decision, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti:

In the latest in a series of snipes from reporter Ashley Parker directed at Republican candidate Mitt Romney, a brief “Caucus” item in Thursday’s New York Times, “Romney Stands By Corporations Remarks,” suggested Romney’s remark to a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend” made him look like “an out-of-touch millionaire.” But isn't Romney right? (Parker’s article first appeared in a different form online Wednesday afternoon.) The print version opened:

Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts stirred a bit of a tempest when he said on the campaign trail in Iowa that “corporations are people, my friend.” Some called the remark tone deaf, saying it fed into the perception of him as an out-of-touch millionaire.

The New York Times maintained its strange hostility toward center-right French president (and former Bush ally) Nicolas Sarkozy in Steven Erlanger Tuesday’s story from Paris, “Sarkozy Seen as Baiting Socialists With Budget Role.”

Erlanger implied that Sarkozy’s standard political appeals for deficits and balanced budgets (i.e. “the right’s obsession”) were somehow unfair to the opposition Socialist Party. Taking sides, Erlanger lamented the Socialists may be right on the merits but that Sarkozy’s simplistic approach could well prevail: “They have some sensible arguments, but as often in politics, a simple idea often trumps a complicated one. The Socialists recognize the need for fiscal discipline."

Vice President Joe Biden’s defense of China’s one-child policy has yet to be mentioned in the print edition of the New York Times, even though the paper has devoted several stories to Biden’s Asia trip.

Edward Wong on Monday quoted Biden’s remarks on human rights from a Q&A session at Sichuan University, but overlooked the vice president's stunning comment on China’s policy of population control, which has resulted in forced abortion and sterilization: “You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I’m not second-guessing -- of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.”

What's "awkward" about employing construction workers in a recession? New York Times reporter Ashley Parker found hypocrisy where none exists in a brief item in Tuesday’s paper on Mitt Romney adding on to one of his properties, “Room for All 16 Grandchildren.”

Mitt Romney has never claimed to be a middle-class man of the people.

There’s a jubilant undercurrent in Julia Preston’s Tuesday report in the New York Times on Obama’s new policy limiting deportations of illegal immigrants who have not committed a crime, “U.S. Issues New Deportation Policy’s First Reprieves.”

Preston has a reputation for sympathetic coverage of illegal immigration policy. In December 2010 she lamented a Senate vote blocking a bill granting amnesty to illegal immigrant students as a “painful setback.”

Hard to say which was in worse taste: The vulgar, amateurish puns that marked “Youth Quake,” a story in the new Fall edition of the New York Times fashion magazine T, or the subject itself -- a look at the March riots in London (the earlier ones over school fees, not the ones of August) from a...fashion perspective. "What do you wear when protest and mayhem rock your world?" asked the subhead. (Photo by Facundo Arrizabalaga.) 

Perhaps the Times should have given the whole subject a pass in the wake of the even more violent, nihilistic London riots of August. Nonetheless, author Kabir Chibber is responsible for this Times-sponsored journalism:

A Monday New York Times story by Monica Davey, “After Months of Rancor, 2 Governors Alter Tones,” portrayed two first term Republican governors in the Midwest as on the defensive, even though both have emerged relatively unscathed in the face of fierce liberal opposition. Davey focused mostly on Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, though  Gov. John Kasich of Ohio also featured. Davey put the onus on the Republicans to kiss and make up to their Democratic and union opponents, or at least "show, at least publicly, a desire to play well with others."

Earlier this summer, the Midwest-based Davey co-wrote a hostile story on how fiscal conservatism was hurting Indiana, led by Republican governor and then-presidential hopeful Mitch Daniels. Davey also coauthored a story in March 2011 on the aftermath of Gov. Walker’s win in Wisconsin over the unions, portraying the unions’ defeat as a political victory: “In Wisconsin Battle on Unions, State Democrats See a Big Gift.” (It didn’t turn out that way.)

A brief item by Michael Shear in Friday’s New York Times, “Huntsman Makes Bid To Step Out From Crowd,” faulted moderate Republican candidate Jon Huntsman for not sufficiently “standing apart from the pack” of conservative presidential candidates by calling for higher taxes – or in Shear’s words, “revenue increases.”

Shear called it a “missed opportunity,” as if Huntsman should have argued the liberal line on raising taxes solely to stand out from the conservative crowd.

New York Times White House reporter Jackie Calmes, a consistent defender of Obama’s fiscal philosophy (and even the lack of one), announced on Thursday yet another “major address” by President Obama: “Obama to Press Committee on Jobs.”

President Obama will deliver a major address soon after Labor Day seeking to pressure a special Congressional committee to propose new measures to promote job creation as well as larger long-term deficit cuts than mandated, aides said Wednesday.