But as Drew Westen, a liberal psychology professor at Emory University wrote in The Times on Sunday, puzzling about what has happened to his former hero’s passion, the president never identifies the villains who cause our epic problems.
It’s unclear, Westen wrote, whether that reflects his aversion to conflict or a fear of offending donors, or both. . . .
AS THE VISUAL OP-ED COLUMNIST FOR "THE NEW YORK TIMES," CHARLES BLOW TALK ABOUT CHARTS AND GRAPHS. "I REALLY DO SEARCH FOR DATA FIRST AND SEE IF IT SAYS SOMETHING INTERESTING, SOMETHING THAT KIND OF AGREES WITH AN OPINION THAT I HAVE OR SOMETIMES SURPRISES." "Q&A," SUNDAY NIGHT ON C- SPAN.
Since the tragedy in Tucson, the New York Times has started an all-out campaign for gun control, with a relentless number of pieces -- news, editorials, and op-eds. In its advocacy, even the news stories are heavily biased by selectively quoting only academics who support pro-gun control positions. These seemingly unbiased sources are then contrasted with opposing views from clearly biased people on the other side, such as an NRA spokesman or a right-wing politician. The implied conclusion: scientific evidence favors gun control, but self-interest stands in the way.
Take two recent news stories by Michael Luo (here and here). He quotes seven academics who agreed with the New York Times position, but no one on the other side was even interviewed. Talk about misrepresenting academic opinion. The overwhelming majority of studies actually supports the claim that more guns mean less crime. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals, criminologists and economists studying right-to-carry laws have produced 18 national studies showing that these laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicate no discernible effect and none finds a bad effect from the law. One would never guess that 294 academics from institutions as diverse as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA released an open letter to Congress during 1999 warning that new gun laws were “ill advised.”
A frequent claim in these recent New York Times articles has been that more guns mean more gun deaths (see also here). . . .
In the span of 48 hours, the New York Times was blasted for a story a White House official deemed to be “100% inaccurate,” and then embarrassed by a dishy new book by former car czar Steven Rattner that describes how the White House orchestrated an exclusive background interview with him and a Times reporter, and was rewarded with an article showing President Barack Obama “just as the White House had hoped.” . . .
Only someone at the New York Times would claim that their paper was not “anywhere close” to Fox News on bias. What was surprising was the source of this trashing. Clark Hoyt, the just retired ombudsman of the New York Times, supposedly served as the conscience of the paper, mediating questions of whether the paper fairly and unbiasedly covered the news. If anyone at the Times is going to warn the paper that they have gone too far, it is the ombudsman.
Yet, when Mr. Hoyt recently appeared on C-SPAN’s Q&A with Brian Lamb, he held little back.I watch Fox News from time to time, and I’m always fascinated by its view of the world compared to the view of the world you see in other media outlets that I would not consider partisan. The stories they choose to highlight, the way they are described, and I’m not even getting to [Bill] O’Reilly or some of the unabashedly opinionated parts of Fox News. I do not believe the New York Times is anywhere close to that.
Even worse, . . . .
After being late on Van Jones and ACORN -- two stories pushed aggressively by Fox, talk radio and conservative blogs -- NY Times public editor Clark Hoyt describes the paper's "slow reflexes" when covering both stories in today's column: "Tuning In Too Late."
When I spoke with Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet nearly two weeks ago about these issues, he told me that there isn't a specific Times staffer watching the blogosphere, but that reporters should follow sites relating to their own beats.
But now the Times top editors, Hoyt writes, have decided to "assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies."
Conservatives may think the Times' slow response is by design -- that the paper is less willing to jump on stories that could potentially damage Democrats. And the Times helped that perception along in 2008 with its controversial, front-page story insinuating an affair between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman, while sitting out the John Edwards infidelity story weeks after news broke.
But there's more at play than claims of liberal bias, as Mike Allen and I wrote earlier this month:The dearth -- and tardiness -- of coverage by the traditional media is explained in part by the fact that most reporters for establishment news organizations do not follow the conservative media. They tend to consider many of the more outlandish charges from the right to be plain loony -- which they often are.
And ACORN has long been an obsession of the right, with some of past criticism taking on racial overtones. So reporters, being used to tuning out charges against ACORN, were slow to realize that this was a time when the group’s opponents had the goods.
In a shocking genuflection to the gun lobby, the Senate has voted to deny Amtrak its indispensable $1.6 billion federal subsidy unless it allows passengers to transport handguns in their checked luggage. The budget support would be stripped in six months unless Amtrak scraps the gun ban that it wisely adopted five years ago after the terrorist railroad atrocities in Madrid.
The majority vote was bipartisan and not even close, with 27 Democrats and one independent (the ultraliberal Bernie Sanders from gun-friendly Vermont) joining all 40 Republicans versus 30 opponents. The hope is that the House or President Obama will ultimately reject the Amtrak measure, but security-wary citizens cannot count on that as the gun lobby choreographs political cravenness. . . . .
Amtrak has none of the hermetic procedures where airport passengers are screened shoeless at detectors while their checked baggage is separately secured. Trains stop at stations and passengers come and go. Amtrak presently has a system of checking passengers and screening baggage at random, much the way New York police monitor mass transit.
If the Senate wants to pass a bill on Amtrak, it should provide the money to hire more security guards and create a real passenger rail system. Generally, it should just stop its demeaning homage to the gun lobby.
Up to now, the Census Bureau had defended ACORN's involvement, explaining it was one of 80,000 unpaid volunteer groups that the bureau hoped would be able to raise local awareness. But in his letter, Groves said it no longer had confidence that ACORN was effectively managing the partnership.
ACORN fired two employees who were seen on hidden-camera video giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman who pretended to be a prostitute. Fox News Channel broadcast excerpts from the video on Thursday. On the video, a man and woman visiting ACORN's Baltimore office asked about buying a house and how to account on tax forms for the woman's income. An ACORN employee advised the woman to list her occupation as "performance artist."
In a statement, ACORN Maryland board member Margaret Williams said the video was an attempt to smear ACORN, and that undercover teams attempted similar setups in at least three other ACORN offices. Williams said no tax returns were filed and no assistance was provided.
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995. . . . .
The article cited a “backgrounder” that laid out the coalition’s public stance, published in the early 1990s and distributed widely to lawmakers and journalists. However, the article failed to note a later version of the backgrounder that included language that conformed to the scientific advisory committee’s conclusion. The later version was distributed publicly in 1998, but existed in some form as early as 1995, according to an online archive kept by Greenpeace. The amended version, which was brought to the attention of The Times by a reader, acknowledged the consensus that greenhouse gases could contribute to warming. What scientists disagreed about, it said, was “the rate and magnitude of the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’ (warming) that will result.”
Sen. Warner made reference in his opening statement to the story on the front page of the New York Times this morning. Absolutely incredible. The largest corporate carbon polluters in America, 14 years ago, asked their own people to conduct a review of all of this science. And their own people told them, “What the international scientific community is saying is correct, there is no legitimate basis for denying it.” Then, these large polluters committed a massive fraud far larger than Bernie Madoff’s fraud. They are the Bernie Madoffs of global warming. They ordered the censoring and removal of the scientific review that they themselves conducted, and like Bernie Madoff, they lied to the people who trusted them in order to make money. . . .
Mr. Obama’s unusual decision to inject himself into a statewide issue during the height of his presidential campaign was a reminder that despite his historic ascendancy to the White House, he has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics. It is a world he has long navigated, to the consternation of his critics, by engaging in a kind of realpolitik, Chicago-style, which allowed him to draw strength from his relationships with important players without becoming compromised by their many weaknesses. . . .
February 20, 2008
EDITORIAL
New York Times
Packing Heat in the Parks
A sound and bipartisan public lands bill is being held up in the Senate in behalf of the gun lobby’s attempt to overturn decades-old safety regulations barring people from carrying loaded guns in national parks.
Owners are now required to keep their guns unloaded, disassembled and stored when in national parks and wildlife refuges. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is threatening to block the public lands bill unless it includes his amendment to allow the packing of live firearms in the parks..
There is no justification for such a change. Senator Coburn’s office is reduced to offering a scenario out of a “Death Wish” movie: “Guns locked in your trunk are of no use when a rapist is attacking your family.” A coalition of retired park rangers has warned that wielding live firearms would increase the risk to public safety and more easily empower game poachers than family vigilantes
The Coburn amendment is another attempt by the gun lobby to extend laissez-faire gun rights to college campuses, churches and workplaces even as the nation suffers firearm fatalities and rampages that take 30,000 lives a year. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is right to oppose it as a poison-pill intrusion into the lands bill, which — among a multitude of useful and largely noncontroversial provisions — would authorize new wilderness areas and safeguard historic and cultural sites from coast to coast.
The temptation for lawmakers to pander to the gun lobby is never-ending, and 47 senators are on record in favor of tolerating loaded weapons in the parks. But at least their position was expressed in a plea to the Interior Department, where a hearing process would presumably encourage open public debate. The Coburn amendment is the gun culture’s dangerous end run around the public interest.
BERLANGGANAN VIA EMAIL
