Boston Globe

Old Media business reporters have a definitionally-incorrect habit of labeling single industries or economic sectors as being "in recession," when the term, as defined here, can only describe national economies or the world economy. Two examples of this are New York Times reporter David Leonhardt's description of manufacturing as being in recession in February 2007 (laughably incorrect, in any event), and the Times's employment of the term "housing recession" 25 times since October 2006, as seen in this Times search (with the phrase in quotes).

But if I wanted to be consistent with this routine form of journalistic malpractice, I would characterize the newspaper business -- at least in terms of the top 25 in the industry's food chain -- not as being in recession, but instead as going through a deep, dark, painful, protracted depression.

The left-wing blogosphere's outrage against ABC ["Boycott Fig Newtons!"] over its allegedly unfair questioning of Obama during Wednesday's debate has seeped over into the MSM in the form of Derrick Z. Jackson's Boston Globe column of this morning. While the headline moots the matter in the interrogative "Tough questions or just plain bias?", there's no doubt as to the answer in Jackson's mind. Just two paragraphs in, the columnist unleashes [emphasis added]:

In some 1,600 words of transcript, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos tried to eviscerate Obama in Philadelphia on Wednesday.

We no longer educate in the United States of America. No, instead of making to educate our children we emot-ucate them. It's all about our children's tender egos, their vaunted self esteem, their itty bitty feewings. We don't want them to know or understand so much as we want them to "feel good" about themselves. If they don't know during what years the civil war was fought, that's OK as long as they think they are "good people" anyway. If their math skills are substandard, who cares as long as they really like themselves?

The Boston Globe, for its part, seems to agree that everything is better when our students "feel better." As far as real life's lessons go, as far as hard work, good grades, educational standards go... well, not so much. No, it’s "group therapy, "liberation", and "collective defiance" meant to make kids "feel good" that the paper seems to feel is a story worth pursuing.

Just when you thought the conflagration over James Carville's Judas analogy might be dying down, here comes Derrick Z. Jackson to pour gasoline on the flames with a return-fire Judas shot of his own.

Readers will recall that when Bill Richardson endorsed Obama, Clinton fan Carville chose Good Friday to say:

Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.

Offered the chance to apologize or withdraw his remarks, the cantankerous Cajun declined, choosing instead to rub in his remarks:

I was quoted accurately and in context, and I was glad to give the quote and I was glad I gave it. I’m not apologizing, I’m not resigning, I’m not doing anything.

Enter Obama fan Jackson with his column of today, On race, Clinton misses the call, in which the Boston Glober sees "signs that [Hillary] will continue to skate the thin ice of race politics and risk the Democratic Party falling through." He saves his Judas shot for last [emphasis added]:

In a multicultural extravaganza, the Boston Globe celebrated the Chinese New Year, the "year of the rat," by giving us a nice list of "famous" Americans who are "rats." (Rats are those born in the years 1912, 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, and 1996) The Globe defined a "rat" as someone who is "charming, clever, hard-working, intelligent, practical, and social," this according to "Chinese astrology." Well, the Globe is here to tell us that "rats" are really great folks. But, looking over their list of American "rats" will reveal not a single conservative or Republican name. Apparently, the Globe can't find any conservative "rats" who are "charming, clever, hard-working, intelligent, practical, and social." On the other hand, do we really want to be considered as "raty" as the Globe's favorite Dems?

To celebrate this famouse (sorry, famous) holiday coming out of their favorite communist nation, the Globe does their best to give us a nice warm feeling about "rats"... at least certain ones, anyway.

NewsBusters readers are painfully aware of the media's utter disdain for President George W. Bush, and their ad nauseum ad hominem attacks on his intellect, his oratory skills, and his policies.

Since the 2008 presidential campaign began on November 8, 2006, you haven't been able to swing a dead cat without hitting a press report about Republican candidates needing to do everything within their power to distance themselves from Bush.

With that in mind, waking up to the following headline in the Boston Globe Saturday shocked me almost as much as if I caught Santa crawling up my chimney (emphasis added throughout):

Prior to her "tear" question, which Mika Brzezinski asked only minutes before on MSNBC, CNN’s Kiran Chetry did direct one tough question to Hillary Clinton on Monday's "American Morning," concerning the Boston Globe’s endorsement of Barack Obama and the paper’s criticism of her campaign. "'The Boston Globe' endorsed Senator Obama, saying about you, in fact, 'her approach is needlessly defensive, a backward glance at the bruising political battles of the 1990s.' Is 'The Globe's' statement fair?"

Hillary tailored her response to make it about the debate over the economy.

It must be wonderful to be a Democrat and know that your indiscretions are very unlikely to get much attention by media minions only willing to cover the crimes and shortcomings of folks on the opposite side of the aisle.

Take for example James Michael McHaney, an aide to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) who NewsBusters reported had been arrested last Friday for trying to lure a thirteen-year-old boy into a sexual encounter.

Not only did this get buried on Friday so as likely not to take focus away from Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) looking regal and presidential during that day's hostage crisis in New Hampshire, but also once the Associated Press deigned to actually inform subscribers on Monday that something potentially nefarious had occurred, press outlets either continued to ignore the subject, or buried it nicely so that precious few would be made aware of it.

On the television side, according to LexisNexis, the only outlet which felt this newsworthy was CNN which aired its only report on this matter during the 6:00 AM EST "American Morning" Tuesday:

Consider yourselves warned. Should conservative and Republicans hold fast to strong stands on illegal immigration in the coming election year, and if they ultimately do well at the polls because of it, look for the Boston Globe to lament the tactic as a cynical "wedge issue," rather than a reaction to valid concerns from the electorate.

The Boston Globe editorial board may be sharpening their knives for the coming election season with a November 25 editorial, "A wedge issue for our times." The Globe laments that immigration is proving a "radioactive" issue and in one passage made an odd characterization of how Democratic New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's backpedaling on illegal immigrant drivers licenses "rescued" Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) from twisting in the wind over her contorted answer on the topic of licenses for illegals.

Writing a reaction yesterday afternoon, Jay Tea at Wizbang lashed out at the Globe:

On Monday, NewsBusters asked, "How soon before someone in the media blames the cyclone in Bangladesh on global warming, the war in Iraq, President Bush, or all of the above?"

On Saturday, the Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Jackson came very close.

In his column entitled "Hesitance on the Warming Front," Jackson was quick to blame everything but nature for the planet's most recent natural disaster (emphasis added throughout):

Should I be worried? I just agreed with something Neal Gabler said. On yesterday's Fox News Watch, the liberal media critic opined that the MSM is backing Benazir Bhutto over Pervez Musharraf in the current Pakistan crisis -- and not for the loftiest of motives.

And could Hillary fall prey to the scenario that brought down Michael Dukakis?

View video here.

It is understandable, but not forgivable, that business reporters at Old Media newspapers might think that the economy is in bad shape. They first have to get past how poorly most of their employers are doing. The industry as a whole has not been doing well, and it's been that way for quite some time.

This table illustrates that point (September 30, 2007 figures are at this post, which originally came from this Editor & Publisher article, which will soon disappear behind its firewall; March 31, 2005 figures were estimated in reverse using annual percentage changes reported as of March 31, 2006, because older data I thought would remain available no longer is):

The United States is not the only country turning out spoiled children, ungrateful for the blessings of life in their land. Cuba is suffering from the same affliction, to judge by "My father's 'crime'" by Yan Valdes Morejon, which appears in today's Boston Globe.

Morejon's column turns out to be just one long complaint. Rather than giving proper thanks for all the wonders of the workers' paradise, like members of our MSM regularly do, it's filled with this kind of kvetching:

"Character is destiny." -- Heraclitus, pre-Socratic philosopher

Which tells you more about what kind of president a candidate would make:

a. Her positions on the nursing shortage, Social Security and internet decency; or

b. The way she responds under pressure?

I'm guessing that, like me, the great majority of people would opt for "b."

Ah, but the sensitive souls of the Boston Globe editoral board aren't the great majority of people. Their editorial of this morning, "A debate, not a prize fight," is one long vote for 'a.'

Do you find it amazing that the same media doing everything possible to ignore global warming skeptics whilst almost exclusively focusing attention on entities advancing climate change hysteria (i.e. Al Gore) are constantly accusing the Bush administration of censorship regarding this issue?

The most recent example of such absurdity transpired when assertions were made about nefariously edited Senate testimony given last Tuesday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Julie Gerberding.

Though many in the media credited the Associated Press for breaking the story, it appears this conspiracy theory might first have been hatched by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.), as according to LexisNexis, the following announcement posted at the website of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works was published by US Fed News at 2:46AM EST Tuesday:

Most everyone on the center-right knows the media are biased in a leftward direction, much fewer on the left are able to see this phenenomenon--skewed stories are are just saying the truth after all. Because of this, it's always refreshing to see a liberal news organization sit down and notice something that's left-biased such as the Boston Globe did recently when it correctly observed that ABC's "View" is skewed against conservatives and religious people.

The paper made this observation in a profile of Elisabeth Hasselbeck, "View's" sole conservative who is going to be leaving the show for two months' maternity leave.The profile is also remarkable in that it notices the sheer amount of hatred that is heaped upon a woman who is by anyone's standard a soft-spoken and nice person:

When it comes to global-warming alarmism, it takes a lot to make Al Gore look moderate. Even the IPCC, the UN group that shared the Nobel with him, predicts on average a sea-level rise only 1/12th as high as the 20 feet by 2100 that Gore has forecast.

But when it comes to sky-is-burning scaremongering, the former Veep has met his match in the person of Paul Epstein. The scenario he sketches in his "Looking back"column in today's Boston Globe is so wildly alarmist that you could imagine a sci-fi movie Hollywood honcho rejecting it as too implausible.

As far as Epstein's concerned, the apocalypse can't wait till 2100 He looks back from only next year to predict the following litany of environmental disasters:

This morning's column by James Carroll, the Boston Globe's resident gushy liberal, is so predictable you wonder whether it might have been produced by a liberal-column-generator software program. You know the kind: insert issue, names of political players, a few factoids, and let the program spit out the boilerplate of a standard leftist diatribe.

I mean, as soon as you knew that Carroll was writing a column about Ahmadinejad's visit to the U.S., could there be any doubt as to where he'd come down on the controversy surrounding the Iranian president's desire to visit Ground Zero? And Carroll doesn't disappoint. Naturally, this was just one big Kumbaya moment squandered:

A few random thoughts:

-- Did you notice no one asked President Bush at his press conference today about Dan Rather suing CBS? I wouldn’t argue that Bush should be asked to critique the liberal media in a routine press conference, but he WAS the target of Rather’s atrociously phony National Guard story.

Instead, CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux was desperately attempting to fuse together the Jena 6 protests and the GOP candidates’ failure to accept debates in hostile liberal territory. Whenever race relations seep into the news, do reporters just have to jerk their knees like Kanye West and assume Republicans hate black people?

-- Boston PBS superstation WGBH clearly has too much money (too much electricity?) on its hands. Our Brent Baker asked: Is this helping to solve global warming?

Regular readers of this space know that MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski is one of our favorites, serving up heaps of grist for our mill with her regular injections of liberal opinion into her newsreading on "Morning Joe," as here.

We'd been searching for an apt nickname for Brzezinski, and as of this morning, Mika herself has supplied one. Meet "Bubbles" Brzezinski. Mika was reading headlines from the morning's crop of newspapers, when she came across an item from the Boston Globe.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Boston Globe: "Many colleges ignore SAT writing test." I find this very interesting because SATs were not my strong suit. I probably would never have been allowed to go to college if it was based on just my SAT scores. But apparently hundreds of universities, including several top schools, are ignoring or paying little heed to students' scores on the writing section of the SAT in admissions. I never had a writing section, just bubbles.

View video here.

If you're the Boston Globe, there's no day like 9-11 to suggest negotiating with terrorists. For that's what the Globe appears to propose in its editorial of this morning, "Toughness after Sept. 11."

The gist is that in response to 9-11, President Bush's "aggressive foreign policy" and his "version of toughness" have had "tragic and unpredictable consequences," including "tens of thousands of civilians dead" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the trampling of civil liberties at home.

So what does the Globe propose as the alternative to toughness? The editorial approvingly notes that "Churchill sought rapprochement with the Soviet Union following Stalin's death in 1953. Reagan realized he could negotiate with the Soviet Union after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power."

And here I thought liberals were the ones who love to glorify those "hard-working average Americans." The mythic salt of the earth who sit around the supper table discussing the need for universal health care, or whatever, before getting up in the morning, grabbing their lunch buckets and heading off to work hard and play by the rules.

Isn't it supposed to be those mean-spirited conservatives who denigrate those same folks as irresponsible?

And yet . . .

Proving that there's no elitism like liberal elitism, the Boston Globe emits an astonishing editorial this morning, analogizing those with less-than-ideal credit to a bunch of drunks who can't resist the handout of a bottle.

SPOILS

1. a. Goods or property seized from a victim after a conflict, especially after a military victory. b. Incidental benefits reaped by a winner, especially political patronage enjoyed by a successful party or candidate.
2. An object of plunder; prey.
3. Refuse material removed from an excavation.
4. Archaic The act of plundering; spoliation.

Something about the weekend seems to bring out the socialist in the New York Times. Last Saturday and Sunday I described how the Times and its Beantown-subsidiary Boston Globe published an op-ed and editorial exemplifying classic liberal-think.

The Gray Lady is back at it again today with its editorial, "The Employment Tea Leaves." In perhaps the most revealing essay of all, the Times makes clear its view that the fruits of Americans' labor, risk and ingenuity are mere "spoils" to be distributed at the whim of politicians.

Previous Post: Part 1 -- Evaluating EPI's "Stagnant Wage" Claims

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The first sentence of CNN/Money's Labor Day report entitled "GDP Growth Not Reaching Paychecks" certainly had entertainment value (bold is mine):

The economic expansion that began six years ago has failed to benefit most workers, according to a report from the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, released Monday.

Clearly, CNN/Money blindly accepted at face value this description found at EPI's "About" page:

The Economic Policy Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that seeks to broaden the public debate about strategies to achieve a prosperous and fair economy.

Interesting. I can call myself "the world's fastest human," but that doesn't make me that person.

You're a liberal. You've identified a problem -- the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States; a net loss of 4.6 million jobs over the last 20 years. You've even done a decent job of identifying the causes of the problem: "Companies lose market share to foreign low-cost producers . . . or move their operations overseas in search of lower wages . . . or apply production techniques that require fewer workers."

So, what's your solution? Measures like reducing taxes and regulation to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive, perhaps? Of course not! Remember, you're a liberal. No, your solution is what you yourself describe as a "massive" new welfare program for affected workers and communities that will contribute to making U.S. manufacturers even less competitive and destroy even more jobs!

That is the approach proposed by Gary Chaison in his Boston Globe column of this morning, Disaster relief needed for manufacturing:

Whether an accident or intentional, the placing of a picture of President George W. Bush laughing next to the headline "Children May Lose On Insurance" is rather deplorable, especially since the picture was not from the article in question.

However, that's what occurred at Google News' Health section Wednesday morning when the featured article was the Boston Globe's piece by Alice Dembner discussing how "[t]housands of Massachusetts children from low-income families could be denied health insurance under new rules imposed by the Bush administration late last week."

Yet, for some reason, the picture above right, from an article published Tuesday at the website OverTheLimit, was placed next to the Globe's headline, and was actually about a story in the New York Times Monday (emphasis added, h/t reader Lloyd Hohn):

Dispatch from the Department of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics, MSM Division . . .

Today's New York Times contains an article about sleight of hand. Elsewhere in the paper, the Times engages in some statistical prestidigitation of its own.

You're the New York Times and its minor-league subsidiary, the Boston Globe. You obtain government data showing that Americans' incomes have risen every year since 2002. So how do you spin it in your headline? If you're the Times: Average Incomes Fell for Most in 2000-5. The Globe had its own gloomy take: More Americans making ends meet with less money.

What-t-t? How did the papers manage this statistical shell game? How did they transform income growth into income decline? Read the opening sentence of the Globe article:

I don't know James Carroll, but if I were a friend or family member I might truly be concerned. His Boston Globe column of this morning, American Disconnection, is a disjointed lament about the state of the world and his feeling of disconnectedness, invoking the anomie of his youth. What makes it interesting for present purposes is the way in which Carroll, the prototypical MSM liberal, looks at the world, sees a litany of wrongs, and naturally concludes . . . It's All America's Fault.

Carroll seeks to reassure us, and no doubt himself, that "my adult connections are strong, and ever more interesting . . . My friendships are intact. Boredom is a word of absolutely no relevance in my life, nor has youthful moodiness left a stamp on me." He even claims that "I was part of a large, happy family." This from someone whose alienation from his Air Force general father was so intense he famously wrote a book about it: An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us.

Carroll recites his bona fides of psychic health as a prelude to admitting:

Last week's economic report couldn't have been much rosier. The economy grew at a faster-than-expected rate, faster than any time in over a year. But far from sparking runaway prices, inflation actually moderated.

But that didn't stop the Axis of Gloom, AKA the New York Times and its Beantown subsidiary the Boston Globe from publishing op-ed items this morning finding the cloud on the silver lining. A lugubrious Times editorial laments:

By the end of last week, any lingering hope that the housing downturn would be contained had vanished. As this week begins, signs of contagion seem to be everywhere . . . The fallout of housing-related turmoil is also likely to extend beyond financial markets.

The editorial ends with a call for closer monitoring of hedge funds.

Over at the Globe, liberal economist Robert Kuttner [pictured here] emits a sky-is-falling column "The crash that could come."

Just in time for worldwide concerts to draw attention to the planet’s imminent doom at the hands of anthropogenic global warming, a new find in Greenland suggests that much of the hysteria in Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” has absolutely no basis in scientific fact.

Even though this study will likely get little to no attention from a media in full fawn mode over Gore and his Live Earth concerts, the findings throw a huge monkey wrench into alarmist warnings of climate-related devastation to the planet and species offered as reasons for developed nations to radically change behavior.

As marvelously reported by the Boston Globe Friday (h/t Benny Peiser, emphasis added throughout):