Three recent stories by newly minted New York Times congressional correspondent Karoun Demirjian on the fight to pass the National Defense Authorization Act demonized Republicans for opposing radical social agendas Democrats are pushing on the military. She also appeared on tax-funded PBS to rant against alleged GOP racism.
Demirjian’s coverage of the debate over the NDAA, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives on Friday, documented the fight through an anti-Republican prism beginning Wednesday with “Republicans Press Culture War Fights on Defense Bill, Imperiling Its Passage.” The hostile labeling kicked off from the lead:
Hard-right House Republicans are pushing to use the yearly bill that sets the United States military budget and policy as an opportunity to pick fights with the Biden administration over abortion, race and transgender issues, imperiling its passage and the decades-old bipartisan consensus in Congress around backing the Pentagon.
Republican leaders have scheduled votes beginning on Wednesday on the $886 billion measure, but as of Tuesday evening, they had yet to dissuade their ultraconservative colleagues from efforts to load it up with politically charged provisions to combat what the G.O.P. calls “wokeness” in the military.
The word “ultraconservative” appeared without quote marks, as if an undeniable reflection of reality. By contrast, the term “woke” appeared in scare quotes.
Her Thursday front-page story contained hostile labeling in the headline itself: “Far-Right Republicans Seek to Defund Ukraine,” a pattern that repeated in the story, which smelled of exasperation with Republicans for daring to question liberal stands on abortion and transgender issues. "Far right," "hard right" and "ultraconservative" were all employed:
….the far right’s insistence on casting votes on the matter anyway has further imperiled the defense legislation and transformed what is ordinarily a broadly supported measure that provides the annual pay raise to U.S. military personnel and sets Pentagon policy into a partisan battleground that has placed Republican divisions on display.
Her lead story Saturday, “Republicans Ram Divisive Measure to House Victory,” went into labeling overdrive, using “ultraconservative” twice alongside other colorful descriptions.
Republicans on Friday rammed through the House a deeply partisan defense bill that would limit abortion access, transgender care and diversity training for military personnel, setting up a showdown with the Senate…..
The House passed the measure on a vote of 219 to 210 with nearly unanimous Republican support, a significant victory for the far-right faction that forced a reluctant Speaker Kevin McCarthy to open the bill to an array of social policy prescriptions...
….
Some Republicans, particularly those in competitive districts, could also pay a political price for embracing legislation that would restrict the rights of women and transgender people and downplay problems of racism in the military….
Reporters love those kinds of wishful-thinking sentences. The name-calling by Democrats was indistinguishable from Demirjian’s purportedly objective reporting:
“Extreme MAGA Republicans have hijacked a bipartisan bill that is essential to our national security and taken it over and weaponized it in order to jam their extreme right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, told reporters on Friday.
….
In the end, only four Republicans voted against the bill -- all right-wing lawmakers who apparently believed it was still not conservative enough….
Demirjian was relatively more muted during her appearance on the PBS News Hour Friday evening, but joined with host Amna Nawaz in using an outdated description used by a Republican on the House floor to suggest race-obsessed bureaucracy was needed to squelch Republican racism:
Nawaz: You know, I have to ask about one of the provisions you mentioned, to cut the DEI, or Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Office. During the floor debate last night, one Republican congressman, Eli Crane, actually used an offensive and outdated term to refer to black Americans. He said "colored people." Doesn't that seemed to undercut the Republican argument that these kinds of DEI trainings and that office is needed?
Karoun Demirjian: … the onus is on them to kind of walk the walk. And if people like Eli Crane are using the terms that they do, it really undercuts the argument that they're making and makes it look like they're actually, you know, trying to roll things back.
No one asked the NAACP -- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- whether their name implies racism and rollback.
