New York Times

New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley celebrates a self-congratulatory documentary about Hurricane Katrina that features NBC anchor Brian Williams.

The liberal Stanley particularly appreciates "In His Own Words: Brian Williams on Hurricane Katrina" (airing tonight on the Sundance Channel) for showing Bush and the federal government in a poor light:

"It's never too soon to replay the blame game. 'In His Own Words: Brian Williams on Hurricane Katrina' on the Sundance Channel serves as a study aid for those who wish to re-examine the government's neglect of the poorest victims of that terrible storm. News programs may have moved on to the damage wrought by Hurricane Wilma, but the devastation along the Gulf Coast was a seminal moment in President Bush's faltering second term."

Professor Cori Dauber interrupts the hagiography to point out that anchor Williams has apparently "forgotten his pledge to 'commute' to the Gulf in order to ensure he stayed completely on top of the story."

For more on the Times' liberal bias, visit TimesWatch.

The New York Times again portrays the far-left anti-war outfit IraqBodyCount as an objective source of casualty counts for civilians in Iraq.

Wednesday's story from Baghdad-based Sabrina Tavernise, "Rising Civilian Toll Is the Iraq War's Silent, Sinister Pulse," is clearly intended as a bookend to the paper's front-page story on the 2000th fatality among U.S. troops in Iraq. Iraq Body Count apparently has not issued a new report, so Tavernise is merely referencing the web site's death clock, based on this database of newspaper clippings.

"The war here has claimed about 2,000 American service members, but in the cold calculus of the killing, far more Iraqis have been left dead. The figures vary widely, with Iraqi and American officials reluctant to release even the most incomplete of tallies….In one count, compiled by Iraq Body Count, a United States-based nonprofit group that tracks the civilian deaths using news media reports, the total of Iraqi dead since the American-led invasion is 26,690 to 30,051."

Tavernise never clarifies how many of the dead are being killed by terrorists killing Iraqi civilians, and ignores the far-left nature of the group doing the tally.

The paper also ignored the leftist politics of IBC when it covered the group's July report marking "25,000" civilian deaths. That report referred to the terrorists who kill Iraqi civilians with car bombs as "unknown agents," innocuously defined as "those who do not attack obvious military/strategic or occupation-related targets." The Times didn't mention that.

IBC is also cited in today's front-page James Dao feature on the 2000th U.S. troop fatality in Iraq. As if to underscore that for some journalists everything is Vietnam, over an otherwise moving spread of small photographs and biographies of soldiers killed in Iraq, a subhead reads in part: "The dead come from all branches of the armed services and represent the highest toll since the Vietnam War."

Of course, an average of over 6,000 soldiers died each year during the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War, compared to 2,000 in two-and-a-half-years in Iraq.

A New York Times editorial this morning referred to the results of the recent Iraq referendum as being “modestly encouraging”: 

“The results of the referendum in Iraq, finally made official yesterday, were at least modestly encouraging, with 79 percent of Iraqis voting in favor of the new constitution.”

To try to put this in perspective, can you imagine 79 percent of Americans agreeing on anything? If a referendum in this nation passed by garnering 79 percent of the votes cast, would any media outlet have the gall to suggest that the result was “modestly encouraging?” Yet, the editorial staff continued:

From avoiding Joseph Wilson's credibility collapse to misreading columnist Robert Novak, the New York Times just can't seem to get the facts of the Plame "scandal" straight.

Tuesday's lead scoop by David Johnston, Richard Stevenson and Douglas Jehl puts Vice President Cheney in the middle of Plame-gate ("Cheney Told Aide Of C.I.A. Officer, Lawyers Report").

The aide in question is Cheney's chief-of-staff, I. Lewis Libby, who is being investigated by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the matter of who leaked the name of C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame.

The paper describes its revelation this way: "Lawyers involved in the case, who described the notes to The New York Times, said they showed that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson [Plame] worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003."

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders has produced its annual World Press Freedom Index for 2005.

The Associated Press reports that "European countries lead the world in providing freedoms to news media, while the United States lost ground."

North Korea retained the last spot, 167, and the U.S. fell to 44.

"The United States dropped more than 20 spots, to 44th place, mainly because of the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller and judicial action that was 'undermining the privacy of journalistic sources,' the statement said."

The top five countries: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway.

Other countries that ranked higher than the U.S.: Canada, France, South Korea, Italy

Beginning in the Middle Ages, there was a widely popular puppet show called “Punch and Judy.” Most of its content and humor were based on two characters flailing away at each other with slap sticks. Today, we have a verbal equivalent of the same thing, occurring in the pages of the New York Times. These protagonists are Arthur (“Pinch”) Sulzberger Jr., boy-publisher of the Times, and Judith (“Judy”) Miller, one-time rising star writer for that paper.

Judy says she told the truth and upheld the values of the Times. Slap! Pinch says she misled her editors and brought the reputation of the Times into question. Slap! Slap! But unlike its medieval ancestor, the Pinch and Judy Show has four participants. And they are not evenly matched.

Times columnist Maureen Dowd (TimesSelect $ required) strikes the first inside blow against Judy Miller in her Saturday column, "Woman Of Mass Destruction," which opens with this piece of poisoned candy: "I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp. The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy -- her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur -- have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types."

Then she puts the knife in: "She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet 'Miss Run Amok.' Judy's stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war."

NYT movie critic Manohla Dargis has mostly praise for the new movie "North Country," starring an un-prettified Charlize Theron, though Dargis admits it's an "old-fashioned liberal weepie" (albeit one "with heart") based on a true story of a class-action sexual harasment suit at a Minnesota mining company.

"For every woman who has been grabbed and groped against her wishes, hounded and worse, told to shut up and smile, told to shut up and take it like a man, told to shut up if you know what's good for you, the new film 'North Country' will induce a shiver of recognition and maybe a blast of rage. A wobbly fiction about a real pioneering sex-discrimination case, the film is an unabashed vehicle for its modestly de-glammed star, Charlize Theron, but, much like George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' it's also a star vehicle with heart -- an old-fashioned liberal weepie about truth and justice."

In his column for the Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Steyn notes that reporters seemed a bit allergic to mentioning that "militants" in Russia (after the latest violence in Nalchik) and elsewhere could be described more clearly as "Islamic militants," but that wasn't something they wanted to underline:

Ah, "Islamic militants." So that's what the rebels were insurging over. In the geopolitical Hogwart's, Islamic "militants" are the new Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22. And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence.

Over at the letters page of Romenesko, former New York Times U.N. Bureau Chief Barbara Crossette complains about the conservative, anti-Kofi Annan agenda of Judith Miller:

Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the "oil for food" scandal at the United Nations -- in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN's refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting -- a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker -- or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair. Ms. Run Amok had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Timespeople were afraid to tangle with her because of that.

The front of Wednesday's Sports section features a profile of Washington Wizards center Etan Thomas by Ira Berkow, "A Center Fakes Right, Goes Left, Speaks Out."

Berkow is proud of Thomas for speaking out against the Iraq war and Bush, stating that Thomas "spoke about his resistance to the war in Iraq and recited his poetry on the subject before hundreds of thousands of people at the Operation Ceasefire rally, held in the shadow of the Washington Monument....Thomas, 27, writes with passion about the necessity of education for young people, argues against the death penalty, laments teenage pregnancy and deplores the insensitivity, as he sees it, of the Bush administration toward blacks. He also skewers the gang mentality of some in the inner city."

Berkow quotes some of Thomas' poems ("The essence of their happiness/Cloaked in a web of lies/As far as their eyes can see/They're doomed.") and his even less coherent political diatribes: "Thomas has been active with causes involving the American Civil Liberties Union and the Congressional Black Caucus, and helped raise money and supplies for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 'Do you really think, had this been a rich, lily-white suburban area, instead of one mostly poor and black, that got hit, the administration would have waited five days to get food or water to those people?' Thomas said. 'When the hurricane hit in Florida, Bush made sure those people got those supplies the next day.'"

Incidentally, the far-left Nation magazine profiled Thomas over a month ago saying almost exactly the same thing.

The Times claims to like it when athletes speak out on politics -- but apparently, only when it's in an anti-Bush direction. When tennis star Jennifer Capriati wanted to support the troops by having Outkast's "Bombs Over Baghdad" played during the warm-up for one of her matches in Miami in March 2003, the NYT's liberal sportswriter Selena Roberts sniffed: "Politics aside, her logic was questionable. How uplifting is a song illuminated by such abrasive lyrics?"

For more bias from the NYT, visit TimesWatch.

Judith Miller denies she went to jail as a "career move."

"I did not go to jail to get a large advance on my next book contract or to martyr myself. Anyone who thinks that I would spend 85 days in jail as a canny career move, or simply because I misunderstood communication, or a lack of such from my source, knows nothing about jail, nothing about me and nothing about the admittedly complicated facts in this case."

Miller is surprised at the skepticism she now faces from fellow journalists. She enjoyed blanket support from her colleagues until more facts from the case began to emerge, including her claim that she didn't recall who it was who gave her the name Valerie "Flame."

The Society of Professional Journalists gave her their First Amendment award in Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Review Journal noted the reaction she got:

Josh Benson's Sunday article for the New York Times on the suddenly-close race for New Jersey governor between Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine and Republican candidate Doug Forrester discusses the outside political celebrities each campaign is calling in: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney on the Republican side, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama for the Democrats.

But while Rove and Cheney are labeled as "two distinctively conservative and polarizing figures," neither Clinton or Obama are labeled as polarizing or even liberal, but instead are "two of Mr. Corzine's more celebrated colleagues." (Moderate Republican and liberal media favorite Sen. John McCain, who will campaign for Forrester next week, is "iconic.")

Hillary Clinton is probably no less polarizing among Republicans then Rove and Cheney are among Democrats. However, when opposition to Hillary Clinton is mentioned in the Times, she's not seen as "polarizing." Instead, her critics are described as haters. That's how reporters Raymond Hernandez and Michael Cooper treated them in an October 15 story on Sen. Clinton's Senate race: "[Sen. Hillary] Clinton still inspires great antipathy among conservative Republicans, who have seen the 2006 Senate race in New York as an opportunity to damage her politically in advance of her possible presidential bid in 2008."

From 1979 until 2003, Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. He was a brutal dictator, a head-of-state who waged war on his neighbors and his own people. He ruled over his people with an iron fist, utilizing torture and murder as weapons of statecraft. The coalition that ejected him from Kuwait in 1991 left him in power, at extreme cost to thousands more Iraqis. He supported terrorism in Israel, paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He provided safe haven for Abu Abbas and other international terrorists. Well, he's finally going to be put on trial for his crimes, and what is the first concern of the NY Times? That he might not get a fair trial.

No bias here, but kind of amusing: The front of Saturday's Sports page featured a picture of the 16-year old golf phenom Michelle Wie taking a free drop of her ball after it was ruled unplayable in the first round of the Samsung World Championship. The headline over the accompanying story read "Wie Knows How to Play, And She Knows the Rules."

Or does she? Monday's sports page declared "Infraction Costs Wie First Payday."

Another free drop that Wie took during the third round on Saturday was ruled illegal on Sunday, after it was determined Wie had perhaps inadvertently moved the ball closer to the hole when she made her drop.

A New York Times article placed prominently on the front page of Sunday’s print edition, written by Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns, played down the success of Saturday’s vote in Iraq concerning that nation’s constitution, and suggested that turnout was lower this time than during January’s elections:

“On Saturday in Baghdad, streets were noticeably bare of pedestrians, polling centers were less busy, and voters exhibited little enthusiasm.

“‘I sense that the turnout will be lower this time,’ said Zainab Kudir, the chief poll worker at the Marjayoun Primary School in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. ‘People feel their needs have not been met. There is no security. There are no jobs.’"

Yet, after many other media outlets reported that turnout was going to surpass January’s final tally, Filkins and Burns posted this at the Times website just moments ago:

Israeli-based Steven Erlanger's "news analysis" from Jerusalem in Friday's New York Times is purportedly about the Israel-Palestinian "road map" toward peace ("Mideast Knot: One Map, Many Paths"), but Erlanger devotes most of his space to sympathy for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Erlanger (who once referred to terrorist Yassir Arafat's "heroic history") does open by noting that Israelis have made complaints to Abbas about continuing Palestinian terrorism, but then gratuitously suggests Israel is being "self-serving" in making the complaints: "....in June, the Israelis say, [suspected suicide bombing organizer Hasan] Madhoun recruited a Gazan woman receiving burn treatment at Soroka hospital to blow it up as a suicide bomber. The woman was caught trying to leave Gaza, with a permit to visit the hospital and explosives attached to her underclothes. The story, confirmed by Palestinian officials, may seem self-serving for the Israelis to tell. But it is a serious factor in the loss of confidence that both Israel and the United States have in the ability of Mr. Abbas to show strong leadership in the face of threats to his own rule."

Erlanger gives this glowing report of Abbas: "Mr. Abbas -- intelligent, proud, committed to nonviolence -- is admired by Israel and the United States, and neither wants him to fail."

(Abbas also has doubts about the Holocaust and once posited a link between Nazism and Zionism -- but such details about the "intelligent" Abbas tend not to make the Times.)

The Times gives Democrats room for hope to take over Congress in 2006. Was the Times as enthusiastic about Republican prospects in 1994?

Robin Toner's Page One New York Times story ("Democrats See Dream of '06 Victory Taking Form") begins: "Suddenly, Democrats see a possibility in 2006 they have long dreamed of: a sweeping midterm election framed around what they describe as the simple choice of change with the Democrats or more of an unpopular status quo with the Republican majority."

But the evidence Toner cites could be a wee bit more convincing: "Already, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and soaring gasoline prices have taken a toll on the popularity of President Bush and Congressional Republicans; new polling by the Pew Research Center shows the approval rating for Congressional Republican leaders at 32 percent, with 52 percent disapproving, a sharp deterioration since March. (The ratings of Democratic leaders stood at 32 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval.)"

In March, the same Pew survey had figures of 39-44% approval-disapproval for Republicans and 37-44% approval-disapproval for Democrats, underlining the fact that Democratic approval ratings have fallen almost as far as those of Republicans, a fact Toner puts in parentheses.

Interestingly, the Times wasn't so hypersensitive to the possibility of an historic Republican takeover of Congress back in 1994, although the same polling group, Pew, released no fewer than three surveys within a month of the 1994 election indicating the strong possibility of Republicans gaining control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

The first sentence of Pew's November 6, 1994 poll stated: "Going into the final days of the campaign, a nationwide Times Mirror survey finds the Republican party with about enough popular support to capture control of the House of Representatives, but not enough to guarantee such an outcome."

Yet despite that strong hint, a Nexis search indicates the Times was silent on Pew's predictions about an imminent Republican tidal wave. [Clarification: According to Nexis, the Times did run a small story in Section B on October 13, 1994, noting the favorable findings for Republicans by the Times Mirror center, findings which were then reported by Pew.]

The results of the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll were released last night, and pressrooms around the nation appeared to be pleased. “NBC Nightly News” reported it this way (video link to follow):

Tim Russert: Brian, not good news for George W. Bush's second term thus far. Only 39% of Americans approve his job. 54% disapproval. That 39% approval is the lowest in the five years of his presidency. And Brian, listen to this: Only 2%, 2% of African Americans in the United States approve of George Bush's handling of the presidency. The lowest we've ever seen in that particular measurement.

The New York Times breaks its weird silence on reporter Judy Miller, with David Johnston's article (a page A16 piece that lacks even a front-page blurb) marking her testimony today to the grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's name.

But the story contains little news, just a run-down of the complicated story of C.I.A. operative Plame and her husband, disgraced anti-Bush diplomat Joseph Wilson, plus a defense from the paper's executive editor as to why the paper can't run a real story on Miller just yet.

Further downplaying the Times connection is the accompanying photo, which features not Miller but another player in the investigation, Dick Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby.

Johnston quotes Executive Editor Bill Keller's explanation for the silence at the Times: "In his statement to the staff on Tuesday, Mr. Keller said the contempt order under which Ms. Miller had been jailed still remained in effect, meaning that she 'is not yet clear of legal jeopardy.'

Remember all those media predictions about the toxic nature of the floodwaters in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina?  Well, it appears that much like their prognostications of casualties, how long it was going to take to drain the city, and the likely devastation to America’s economy, this too was an extraordinary exaggeration.

Here’s a sampling of the press opinions concerning this water made shortly after Katrina hit:

• ABC News reported on September 6: "Thousands of hurricane survivors who spent hours trapped in or wading through floodwaters likely exposed themselves to a wide range of bacteria and other contaminants.”
• Reuters reported on September 7: “The brew of chemicals and human waste in the New Orleans floodwaters will have to be pumped into the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain, raising the specter of an environmental disaster on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, experts say.”
• The Christian Science Monitor reported on September 8: “Chemicals leaking from cars and factories will cause one of costliest environmental cleanups ever.” 

Yet, today:

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller spoke on a wide range of issues during a lunch with members of the Association of National Advertisers.

The Times' top newsman said that the news business is the only industry where "people who make the product are kept from the people who sell it." There is "put up a kind of wall" between the salespeople and the journalists. This is the ideal situation, although "some corporate relations people understand it through gritted teeth." Keller compared this to "the way Presidents respect the Constitution."

Keller had very little respect for bloggers.

"Most of what you know, you know because of the mainstream media," Keller said. "Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That's not bad. But it's not enough."

The New York Times' resident iconoclast columnist (anti-recycling, pro-gas tax) John Tierney unloads on liberal bias in the media in his Tuesday column (sub. req'd). The piece from libertarian-leaning Tierney comes with the usual Times' head-scratcher of a headline, "Where Cronies Dwell," but the text box gets right to his point: "The left has a lock on journalism and law schools."

Behind the TimesSelect paid-content firewall, Tierney writes that while he thinks journalists do try not to impose their personal prejudices on their stories, the real bias resides in what sort of stories they aren't writing. "Journalists naturally tend to pursue questions that interest them. So when you have a press corps that's heavily Democratic -- more than 80 percent, according to some surveys of Washington journalists -- they tend to do stories that reflect Democrats' interests. When they see a problem, their instinct is to ask what the government can do to solve it."

An article in today’s New York Times depicted a grim picture of the future of America’s newspaper industry. Stung by declining circulation rates, most of the nation’s major dailies are laying people off:

“Such rethinking is sweeping newsrooms across the country as the industry faces a wave of job cuts, among them 700 announced since May at The New York Times Company, including its business operations and the various media properties it owns, and 14 at The Hartford Courant. Most recently cuts have been announced at The Boston Globe (a division of the Times Company), The San Jose Mercury News, The Philadelphia Daily News, The Baltimore Sun and Newsday, and over the last few years The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have also moved to eliminate jobs.

“Industrywide, ad revenue is flat, costs are up and circulation is eroding.”

The article went on to discuss how ad revenues at the major newspapers have stopped growing as major retailers have refocused their marketing dollars into other channels such as cable television and, of course, the Internet:

The New York Times ran an op-ed this morning by controversial biographer Kitty Kelley. As the subject matter was George W. Bush, it should not be surprising that this article had nothing positive to say about the president:

“SECRECY has been perhaps the most consistent trait of the George W. Bush presidency. Whether it involves refusing to provide the names of oil executives who advised Vice President Dick Cheney on energy policy, prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, or forbidding the release of files pertaining to Chief Justice John Roberts's tenure in the Justice Department, President Bush seems determined to control what the public is permitted to know. And he has been spectacularly effective, making Richard Nixon look almost transparent.”

At issue this morning is an executive order that Bush signed in November 2001 concerning the release of any former president’s private papers. Kelley sees this as another sinister move by the president:

Regardless of all the carping and whining over hurricane-related contracts going to Halliburton and Shaw Group due to potential ties to the Bush administration, as well as some of the awards being “no-bid,” there seems to be no such outrage if a company has ties to former President Clinton’s administration.

An article in today’s New York Times entitled “FEMA Director Under Clinton Profits From Experience” seems to celebrate former FEMA director James Lee Witt’s new company, as well as how it has profited from damages related to Hurricane Katrina:

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported yesterday that the levees in New Orleans were not overtopped by flood waters related to Katrina. Instead, as was reported by NBC News on September 29, and here on September 30, these levees broke due to construction failures related to the instability of the soil beneath them. Moreover, one of the contractors involved in their construction warned the Army Corps of Engineers about this problem in the early ’90s, but these cautions were ignored.

As yesterday’s Times article stated: “The engineers said the findings, which they warned were preliminary, raised questions about the design of the levees and the testing of the relatively fragile soil during the construction of the walls. They also said that on the 17th Street Canal, the source of the flooding in much of the main part of the city, the flood wall broke in an area where a contractor had complained to the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers that the soil that anchored the wall was dangerously soft.”

And, yesterday’s Washington Post stated: “In the early 1990s, a New Orleans-based contractor filed a legal claim against the Corps alleging that the soil beneath the floodwall on the 17th Street Canal was poor. A judge dismissed the contractor's complaint in 1996.”

These revelations raise an interesting question: Why aren’t the Times and the Post apologizing to their readers for and/or retracting earlier reports by their respective papers that the levee problems in New Orleans were caused by budget cuts implemented by President Bush?

September employment was little-changed despite predictions of 500,000 job losses.

     Remember all those reports filed by the mainstream media predicting doom and gloom right after Katrina devastated New Orleans? Well, the first significant piece of economic data to be released since the hurricanes hit suggests that these media prognostications – as predicted by the Free Market Project on September 6 – had no basis in fact.

     This morning, the Labor Department released employment numbers for the month of September, and they were much stronger than forecast. In fact, they were so strong that the U.S. dollar rallied against most of the world’s currencies in expectation that the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates further than many economists had hoped.

     To refresh everyone’s memory, here is a sampling of what the media were saying about the economy after Katrina first made landfall: