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.
