–Rochester, NY—
I wrote a few weeks ago about how CNN had lied to us. Since that time, two more similar points have come to light.
Former ANBC newsgeek Peter Coluins is now telling us that Peter Jennings, the Anchor edited stories to put a better spin on the outlook of the Sandanistas.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archive\200305\NAT20030501c.html
After the revelations of CNN lying to us about another group of socialists, Saddam and Company, this should come as no shock, even assuming you knew nothing about Daniel Ortega. Just one more example of how the leftist dominated press has been lying to us. But, of course, there’s more. MUCH more.
You will recall that mentioned prominently in the piece of last week, was the New York Times. The case against ex-Times employee Jayson Blair is heating up at this point, and all the facts aren’t in… this is written based on the facts we know so far. I advise you to read up on this subject… I won’t waste your bandwidth repeating it here, except in very brief: Blair has been found to have been writing about things that didn’t happen and other associated charges, all raising questions about the validity of his stories.
I’d been watching this business with Blair, for several weeks. I’ve always suspected that Blair wasn’t the only problem, and that his situation was revealing of a systemic issue within the paper, but also of the so-called “mainstream” newsgathering in this country.
Now, I said last week that this would be a column on the left playing the race card. I said that because the Blair case certainly looked like it was developing into that. As the facts have developed since last week, however, it’s become more than that.
Was race an issue? A US news online poll certainly seems to suggest it was; around 75% answered that Blair got away with it because he was a rising-star minority. More than this, Andrew Sullivan has Times executive editor, Howell Raines, saying to his staff at an internal meeting, the other day:
“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts [Blair] appeared to be a promising young minority reporter,” Mr. Raines said. “I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities.” “Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?” he added, a moment later. “Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
Raines, of course is being only partially truthful, here. Reports and internal Times documents have surfaced that suggest MANY different managers tried to have Blair removed from writing for the Times. Blair remained. Why?
Of COURSE race was part of the issue. And this incident does seem to be directly in line with the fears expressed by those who object to ‘affirmative action’. But race was only a part of the issue, and I expect this statement of Raines is a play of the most cynical kind. Raines knows that most of his core is liberal. So, the admission, coated with “But Ma, I did it to help that poor black man” will, Raines thinks, go down much easier. Yet, this while this admission will strike sympathy in the breasts of many liberals, the fact is it makes a victim of Mr. Blair.
Says Brent Bozell:
“But it’s clear that Blair’s meteoric rise – a young man who didn’t even graduate from the University of Maryland, from humble internships to the national desk in four years – was not following the average career trajectory of an American reporter. Many journalists work their whole lives dreaming of someday joining the New York Times. It’s time to ask whether Blair would have ever been promoted into the position where he caused maximum damage if race wasn’t a factor in his career.”
Blair as usual got a pass on all the transgressions for one reason only; He was black and was thus immune to the rules. Black Columnist Thomas Sowell seems to agree:
“Having gotten away with so much, Blair knew that the rules and standards that applied to others would not be applied to him because he represented “diversity.” He just pushed it a little farther than it would go.”
This whole incident seems to me emblematic for what happens when liberals have their say in issues of racial ‘diversity’. That said, though, there’s a deeper and more urgent issue, here. I doubt we can hang the credibility of the Times, or the current lack thereof, on Howell Raines alone. Nor can race be the sole issue here as the management of the Times seems to imply in their dissembling. Granted, that race and the headlong rush of the left for what is laughably called “diversity”, before it’s even properly defined, is a large bit of the puzzle.
However, race is part of this Blair business, only insofar as the liberal’s mantra crosses racial issues. In short, racial diversity as a goal is a mere excuse for what was really afoot; Liberal bias. Yes, mistakes will happen. This sort of complete collapse however requires a systemic pattern. It is a bias that’s been festering for years before John Corry exposed it in his book “My Times”. To get some
measurement of this bias, let’s look at Raines. Back in 94, puked up this hairball:
“Reagan couldn’t tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.”
Oh, yeah. Really unbiased, this one. While the rest of the press had real news to deal with, the Times gleefully ignored the real world, and focused all of its energy and righteous indignation instead, on induced Raines screeds against Augusta National Golf club and it’s policy regards women players. Remember, now, this is the same Raines who back on 1998, when he was the editorial page editor, wrote and
posted a column, going after the Boston Globe’s editors… ironicly, the Globe being a Times owned paper… for saving the ass of then Globe columnist Mike Barnicle. He said at the time:
“Public respect for newspapering is wounded when rules that would be
enforced with doctrinal ferocity among the mass of journalists are lightened for a star who has great value to the paper. If you believe, as I do, that if you have to choose between a worthy but erring colleague and the newspaper itself, you choose for the paper.”
Clearly, Raines in this case held something higher than the paper on this round : liberal politics. Under his liberal leaning “leadership” what is the staff, in turn doing? Exactly what’s apparently expected of them: Tilting to the left. Consider the case of Times columnist Maureen Dowd, where she misquotes President Bush:
Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. “Al Qaeda is on the run,” President Bush said last week. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated… They’re not a problem anymore.”
Now, here’s the entire quote, including the words Dowd removed, and the Times allowed her to remove:
” Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our
country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half
of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In
either case, they’re not a problem anymore.”
Notice the difference? In what Dowd posted, it’s clear she’d like us to think that the President is of the impression that al Qaeda isn’t a problem anymore. Of course he didn’t say, or mean that, but the Times didn’t tell us that. The thread in each of these is the same… a liberal bias, within the Times, that was fed from the top.
I’m not surprised that I’ve been unable to dig up much of Jayson Blair’s output to his regular column in the op-ed pages. But can it be that Raines turned a blind eye to his transgressions because they liked his political stand on things, as they have always seemed to like Doud’s political leanings?
Consider the overtly leftist stand of the paper as regards the war in Iraq. We were told repeatedly how the war would be a quagmire, and that it would isolate us in the Arab world. To show how wrong that ‘news’ was, let’s check the op-ed pages in the Arab News:
http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=26165
“There is much in US policy to condemn; there are many aspects of Western society that offend and where necessary, Arab governments condemn. But anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism for their own sake are crude, ignorant and destructive. They create hate. They must end. Otherwise there will be more barbarities.”
Hmmm. Since the leftists running the Times proven so wrong, perhaps we’ll hear soon about how Blair wrote all those anti-war screeds, too, huh?
Look, let’s give them some credit, since it’s due: I applaud the public examinations the Times has engaged in thusfar. However, they do not go far enough, and so far, they expend too much effort on protecting the guilty… protecting the leadership of the Times, and I’m not just talking about Blair. Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger
argued that Blair was the only one to blame, here, of course.
“The person who did this is Jayson Blair. Let’s not begin to demonize our executives—either the desk editors, or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.”
In other words, Raines is saying that finding out who did what and exposing those faults is “scapegoating’, at least when Times Managers are focused on.
Think about this. Let’s say that a major oil company is found to be lying to the public. Would the media, the Times particularly be all over it? Why is the management of the Times exempt from level of scrutiny, this level of acid, about it’s own transgressions? The answer of course is that any snake is immune to it’s own venom.
Let’s see… ABC, CBS CNN, and now the Times have all been caught tilting stories to the left. And this is just what they’ve been publicly caught at. Lord knows what they’ve NOT been caught at. But the Smart Americans have known all along.
And Liberals simply can’t understand why Fox News is doing so well.
(Chuckle!)
