Tag Archives: NYT

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The New York Times, supposed bastion of the supposed liberal media, today admitted to having bought much of the Bush administration’s line about Iraq – weapons of mass destruction, Ahmed Chalabi, Saddam’s ties to terrorism, and more – hook, line, and sinker. Well, they may only be owning up to the hook and the line. But it’s a start:

In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge. The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on “regime change” in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

Right-wing critics of the Times have, I’m sure, already begun framing the Times admission of conservative bias as merely another sign of its liberal bias. But the record speaks for itself. And among those who should take note is the Times Public Editor, “an advocate for Times readers,” who spent his first column warning against the tendency of reporters to be overly critical of those in power. Today’s mea culpa from the Times is just a further demonstration of how backwards he – and an entire cottage industry of “liberal media watchdogs” – have it.

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When it starts like this…

I think I can explain what happened, but first I have to tell you about this wild typing race I recently had with an 8-year-old Indian girl at a village school.

…you know it’s Thomas Friedman. In this particular case, he’s spinning his wheels trying to reframe Indians’ overwhelming rejection of the neoliberal economics of the BJP as a request for more globalization. As a neoliberal evangelical, Friedman has no choice but to believe that the persistence and expansion of an underclass under globalization is a result of too much government interference in the economy (read: corruption), rather than too little (read: social welfare). Color me unconvinced. But maybe that’s just because I’ve never been to “India’s Silicon Valley” and had a typing contest.

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Perhaps the most interest feature of the Times’ write-up of today’s debate is the short shrift given to half the candidates, who in the earlier draft were mentioned only as “other candidates” until the last paragraph which noted that Kucinich “has no chance” and that Sharpton “complained” about being ignored. The longer version up now is slightly, although not significantly better on this count. Kucinich and Sharpton at least made it into the photo – given that Sharpton was sitting right between Kerry and Edwards, it would have been hard to find any other way to take it.

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Over at the New York Times (quasi-)blog, Matt Bai is trying to take a bold stance against conventional wisdom by arguing that Howard Dean’s campaign did not, in fact, leave any lasting legacy for American politics:

Dr. Dean can hardly claim to have laid the rails for some powerful engine of change. His campaign, as he never tired of reminding us, was about “taking the country back,” which seemed another way of saying it was basically about winning.

It’s a nice try, but in this case the conventional wisdom (if that’s what it is – I thought the conventional wisdom, at least over at the Times, was that Dean was an unstable fanatic leading hordes of dateless college kids) is right. Bai’s basic argument, it seems, is that Dean didn’t run on a signature issue and therefore was only creative tactically but not ideologically. I think he’s wrong on two counts. First, as Dean himself has argued, the seeming unanimity among the Democratic candidates now obscures the fact that a year ago few were arguing that blasting Bush’s broken promises in Iraq, in public schools, and in the workplace was the Democrats’ route to success. Healthcare in particular was an issue that, while urgently important to millions of Americans for decades, Howard Dean put back on the map for a party largely convinced that because a zealous corporate lobby was able to tank a half-hearted moderate healthcare reform ten years ago it was relatively hopeless to try to cover most Americans.

Second, Bai is wrong to argue that Howard Dean’s tactics amounted to nothing more than really wanting to win. The significance of what Dean embarked on is demonstrated, as I argued at the time, by the incredulity of the New York Times magazine in trying to report what was driving his campaign. “Ordinary Americans convinced that there could be a connection between a broken political system and the challenges they’re confronting in their own lives? Must be like of some kind of Alchoholics Anonymous meeting. Why are they talking so much about themselves? Don’t they know only people who run for office are important?” An organizing model, like universal healthcare, is not a new idea. But what they have in common is that the Democratic party of the past couple decades has in large part left them to rust. And Howard Dean, for all his mistakes – like relying on Northeastern college students to canvass in Iowa rather than cultivating a stronger core of organizers from the state – helped bring them back to life.

There’s been a lot of talk recently among Democrats, particularly those committed to John Kerry, about how Howard Dean “brought people into the party.” That’s true, but it’s only half of the story, and in that sense is wishful thinking by those who want the Democratic party to stay the course of the past decade. Howard Dean, despite a conservative record of his own, chose that he could get farthest by being a vessel for a popular movement that existed before him and will continue after him – and in so doing, he took an important step towards bring the Democratic party back to the people.

The Wall Street Journal is closer to the truth than the New York Times on this one: “the most consequential loser since Barry Goldwater.”

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That liberal media, at it again:

Representative Dennis Kucinich has every right to keep campaigning despite his minuscule vote tallies, but he should not be allowed to take up time in future candidate debates. Neither should the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is running to continue running, not to win

Kucinich and Sharpton were, of course, perhaps the two most interesting candidates in those debates. And their presence raises the burning issues muffled by the consensus of the Democratic establishment. Lieberman’s presence, for that matter, should force the four NYT-approved candidates to argue for a vision of the Democratic party as meaningfully to the left of the Republicans – practice that could only help them.

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Democracy.
A Jewish state.
The West Bank and the Gaza strip.

Given demographic reality, Israel can have any two out of three.

Meir Kahane pushed Israel to give up the first; Tony Jundt recently stirred up controversy in this country pushing for giving up the second. The reason I call for Israel to keep the first two and give up the third is because it’s the only solution that’s received majority support on both sides. Now the New York Times is suggesting that Sharon’s right-wing Likud party is coming to the same conclusion. I would love to believe that they’re right.

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This NY Times piece – “Mr. Inside Embraces Mr. Outside, and What a Surprise” is one of many analyses that will no doubt proliferate over the next few days trying to explain Gore’s endorsement.

I think Purdum is on the right track in noting Gore’s drastic shift to the left since the 2000 election, as well as his series of strident condemnations of Bush policy over the past months. These have been, by turns, gratifying and maddening, I think it’s safe to say, to those of us who were exasperated with Gore for leaving so little ideological distinction between himself and Bush during the actual campaign. Gore’s piece in the Times after the Enron scandal tying corporate malfeseance to Bush’s corporate politics made the right case – but it’s a case that, contrary to what that piece also said – Gore never made on the campaign trail. Those conservatives who think (occasionally rightly) that they can convince American voters that the main fault line in their politics is between civil and uncivil politicians have tried to use Gore’s move to the left as evidence that he’s bitter and angry at his personal loss. I think it’s much more that Gore, like Clinton and other New Democrats, recognize the appeal of Old Democrat values and so fall back on them once out of office both to bring nobility to their legacy and to convince themselves that they at least lost because they stood for something and not because they didn’t. Dean’s aggressive condemnations of the failings of this administration fit the message that Gore has claimed for himself since 2000. So it’s shouldn’t be surprising to see him endorsing someone who’s ready to carry that message forward – and to see him endorsing the candidate who’s running the kind of campaign now that many wanted him to run four years ago.

What Purdum’s analysis for the Times fails to mention, however, is what may really be the most compelling reason for Gore to endorse Dean now: he’s winning. Gore, in the same way as, say SEIU, gains power from picking late enough to choose the one who’ll win and early enough to be as formative in that victory as possible. Gore specifically, however, has the chance by endorsing Dean to merge their narratives – one populist fighter has the election narrowly stolen but four years later another arises to take it back – and drown out the alternative – the New Democrat establishment fouls up an election and it’s left to a populist outsider to ride in four years later to fix it.

Purdum asks whether this will hurt Gore’s credibility, and I think the answer is no more than Gore’s already hurt his credibility by governing and campaigning from the center and then moving to the left since. More importantly, he asks whether this will hurt Dean’s candidacy, and I don’t think it will measurably. Dean has successfully enough framed himself as an outside-the-beltway candidate, and campaigned that way long enough, that I think this will come off more as the beltway coming around to the Governor of Vermont than the other way around. More fundamentally, I think candidates can be effectively criticized, in extreme cases, for not repudiating deeply objectionable folks who endorse them, but that otherwise criticizing them for who endorses them is difficult to pull off. I think that Al Gore’s endorsement will give Dean’s critics on the left about as much ammunition as Jesse Jackson Jr.’s, Ted Rall’s, Molly Ivins’, William Greider’s, et al gave his critics on the right: not a whole lot, in the long term. Speaking as one of those critics on the left, that Dean got Gore’s endorsement says to me just that he’s an effective organizer. Gore endorsing Dean may give some added momentum and visibility to Sharpton and Kucinich’s campaigns, which could only be good for the Democratic party, but I don’t see any of the other candidates positioned at this point to use it to frame themselves as the independent choice.

What this endorsement does, as I see it, is move a slew of voters to consider Dean – or to consider him seriously – who hadn’t before, and deflate much of the criticism from DLCers and others of Dean as unelectable or out of the mainstream. Much as Jackson’s hashkachah (certification, roughly translated) marks Dean kosher for some to his left, Gore’s will mark him kosher for some to his right. And it may mean that the Democratic establishment is learning not only the lesson of 2002 – what happens when you offer no viable alternative – but also the lesson of 1972 – what happens when the party leadership abandons the party’s candidate.

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Today marks the debut of the New York Times’ Public Editor. This is a concept with which I think few “small d” democrats could take issue, and I’m curious to see how his eighteen-month term plays out. I think it’s fair, however, to express concern, given the Times’ and the rest of the media establishment’s tendency to lend much more credence to the Times’ critics on the right than to its critics on the left, with whether Okrent’s aspirations

to represent you effectively when you have a complaint about The Times’s integrity

will cover the full spectrum of the Times’ readership. Okrent’s suggestion that the media risks

…the boiling resentment toward men and women in power that can arise…

in journalism – that the media is too muckracking – suggests that the bias of a corporate media establishment too often in bed with a corporate political establishment isn’t the top one on his list.

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The New York Times Magazine, in its cover story, makes an awkward, leering, occasionally illuminating, mostly misguided attempt to understand the grassroots movement that (deserved or not) has built around Howard Dean. What’s most stunning is the incredulity and confusion with which the Times confronts the prospect that politics could be built around – and create – communities, and that it could arise from and inform personal narratives in ways other than serving as a tool for the performance of privilege. Much of the article is full of accounts of bad break-ups meant to make these folks look pathetic and descriptions of personal eccentricities meant to make them look perverse:

He stripped to his underwear, lay on the floor in a fetal position and remained there for days, occasionally sipping from an old carton of orange juice. ”I was completely obliterated,” he says. ”I didn’t know something like that could actually cause physical pain.” Johnson’s friends kept calling, trying to think of something that would get him out of the house. Finally they hit on one: Howard Dean.

This paragraph, however, is perhaps more absurd:

It felt as much like a support group as a political rally. As they did at Clay Johnson’s meet-up in Atlanta, everyone went around the circle describing what drew them to Dean, usually in very personal language. Bob and Eileen Ehlers haltingly explained the problems their children, in their 20’s, have with health insurance, while Tony Evans nodded sympathetically.

That the most reputable newspaper in the US sees people choosing to get involved in campaigns based on personal experience and personal struggles as pathological is sad. That this is seen as a bleeding heart newspaper is just absurd.

There’s also Howard Dean as siren:

Long before Howard Dean was considered a plausible candidate for president, he seemed to emit some sort of secret call that made people, many of them previously apolitical, drop everything and devote themselves to his campaign.

Yet the Times also acknowledges that whatever this strategy is, it seems to be working:

By organizing its national network of Yogis, Howards, Dykes and Disney Employees for Dean, the campaign built an alternative to institutions like the D.L.C. Dean has raised $25 million, mostly through small checks — the average donation is $77 — and those checks have placed Dean at the top of the Democratic fund-raising pack. Dean’s opponents have begun to mimic the trappings of his campaign. Many of the Democratic candidates now have blogs. Even President Bush has one, though comments from the public — an essential element of Dean’s blog — are not allowed.

The article’s close suggests a glimmering, even at the New York Times Magazine, of understanding of what a grassroots campaign could be:

”What’s happening is an unusual and unprecedented correspondence between the campaign and us,” she says. It takes me a moment before I realize that when she says ”the campaign,” she doesn’t mean the people running the headquarters in Burlington. She means the people she’s going to visit in her Airstream.

I doubt I’m the only one who’s skeptical of quotes from supporters like

”But the strongest thing was that I could tell he is a good man,” Brooks says gravely. ”And if a good man were president, it would change everything in ways we can’t even imagine.”

But more important to me than whether Howard Dean is a good man is whether he’s a good organizer – and so far, he’s outpaced every one else by a long shot. Reading this piece reminded me of a recent essay in which Sam Smith wrote:

Come with me for a moment to the time of when politics was so much a part of New York City that Tammany Hall had to rent Madison Square Gardens for its meetings of committeemen – all 32,000 of them. . In contrast, when the Democratic National Committee decided to send a mailing to its workers some years back, it found that no one had kept a list. The party had come to care only about its donors.

We got rid machines like Tammany because we came to believe in something called good government. But in throwing out the machines we also tossed out a culture and an art of politics. It is as though, in seeking to destroy the Mafia, we had determined that family values and personal loyalty were somehow by association criminal as well.

…politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King or George Will. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude. So the first non-logical but necessary thing we must do to reclaim democratic politics is to bring it back into our communities, into our hearts to bring it back home. True politics, in imitation of baseball, the great American metaphor, is also about going home. Yet like so much in our national life, we are only going through the motions, paying ritualistic obeisance to a faith we no longer follow. In fact, we have lost our way home. We must not only make politics a part of our culture but make our culture a part of our politics.

I share much of Sam Smith’s – and others’ – skepticism both about what Dean’s record portends for working people and about the depth of his commitment to a new new American politics that would include much of the strengths of the old one. But at least he’s a good enough organizer, and an innovative enough politician, to merit incredulous, confused pieces in the New York Times Magazine.