Weapons of Mass Distortion: The New York Times’ Deck of Weasels
By Doug Schmitz on 06/11/03
<font size=4>As exasperating as it was to watch Baghdad Bob propagandize in front of the Iraqi TelePrompTers during Operation Iraqi Freedom, sadly, it’s equally impossible to believe anything that comes out of the pages of The New York Times these days – especially when the ‘Old Gray Lady’ turned herself into a brazenly anti-war manifesto before, during and even after the war.
Although The Times was proven wrong about the war time and time again, ‘the newspaper of record’ is still in deep denial. After all, with The Times – as part of the Blame-America-First crowd, the first casualty of war is the truth.
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In fact, on June 3, Newsmax.com’s Carl Limbacher reported that The Times is so desperate to slant the Iraqi war – without ever acknowledging factual errors in its detestable reporting – that The Times took great pains to hand pick embittered family members of U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in the conflict:
“The Times is beset with examples of inaccuracies and outright bias in its reporting, but it simply will not give up in its determination to present the Iraq war as a failed mission, even if it means exploiting the grief of the bereaved families of the 40 men killed since May 1.”
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Undoubtedly, on a daily basis, The Times have shown to have problems with the truth.
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Moreover, despite the recent Jayson Blair debacle, it sure isn’t The Times’ first offense for egregiously covering for incompetent and blatantly biased staffers.
So it comes as no surprise that The Times has long been a veritable breeding ground for inept reporters who literally reek of anti-American, anti-Semitic and pro-Communist, leftist ideologies.
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After all, The Times has put up with the embarrassing likes of liberal demagogues Maureen Dowd, Rick Bragg, Chris Hedges, Paul Krugman, Adam Clymer, Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof – to name a few – for many years.
Much like the Bush Administration’s Most Wanted Terrorists’ deck of cards and Newsmax.com’s Deck of Weasels, The Times certainly has its own Deck of Weasels (a.k.a., weapons of mass ‘disinformation’).
What’s more, when the lines between The Times’ front pages and its op-ed pages increasingly blur as its reporters continue to mesh their distorted political views into their writing, these same reporters are also discovering that what goes around, comes around:
TIMES WEASEL #1: HOWELL RAINES
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“In the end, Howell Raines sowed the seeds of his self-destruction with a bruising management style that left him with few allies in his hour of crisis,” Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz recently observed.
“His relentless drive and determination, great strengths in an editor, also alienated wide swaths of the New York Times newsroom, as people felt excluded and in many cases shoved aside by his autocratic rule.”
Aside from the following liberal reporters, perhaps the biggest weasel of them all is Raines. Although Publisher and Chairman Arthur Sulzberger and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd are equally as guilty, Raines was the one who directly supervised and covered up for Blair.
According to the Media Research Center (MRC), a watchdog group that exposes liberal bias in the news, Raines actually flunked his own litmus test for reporter duplicity when he railed against the Boston Globe in 1998 for its handling of columnist Mike Barnicle.
By MRC’s account, Barnicle had lifted several quotes from comedian George Carlin’s book without giving Carlin credit.
Here’s what Raines hypocritically told The Globe:
“If you have to choose between a worthy but erring colleague and the newspaper itself, you choose for the paper. After all, all the members of this profession know the rules when we sign up. They are rules based on a tradition of trust that cannot be ignored without stirring anxiety in the newsroom and suspicion among the readers.”
Now, compare that to what Raines told his staff after making excuses for Blair for doing the exact same thing Raines accused The Globe and Barnicle of doing:
“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter. I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities…Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? 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 [last October]. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
Ironically, Raines’ words – pummeling The Globe’s management team for what he is now guilty of – are coming back to haunt him as he spent nearly a year pampering a spoiled, undeserving fraud who eventually caused as much collateral damage at The Times as the leftist drivel of Dowd, Krugman, Hedges and Clymer.
Raines said he didn’t “consciously” favor Blair. What then, did Raines do it unconsciously? This would, of course, explain how Raines’ liberalism has intrinsically influenced his managerial decisions, as well as his news judgment.
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In fact, columnist Norman Liebmann recently observed: “In my humble opinion, corruption is a natural by-product of liberalism,” and like Raines’ leftist heroes, “Bill Clinton lowered the nation’s moral base, and Hillary Clinton kicked over its pedestal.”
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By all accounts, Raines needs to resign because he’s created a situation that is far beyond his repair. It’s now time for someone more qualified and honorable to take the helm.
As Newsmax.com’s Carl Limbacher admonished: “It’s your move, Howell Raines. Suddenly the membership policies of a private Georgia golf club don’t seem so all-important anymore, do they?”
The bottom line with Raines is, as Jude Werra, president of Jude M. Werra & Associates, a Brookfield executive search firm, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Tanna Johnson-Elie, that Raines’ poor leadership is what’s at issue in the Blair fiasco:
“When you hire someone, management has stewardship responsibility over that individual. We’re talking about professional guidance and career development,” Werra says. “How does an individual learn ethics and good judgment except by following the lead of those who are coaching him?”
Johnson-Elie spoke of her own experience when her editors approached her about having only three errors in just one year.
Although Johnson-Elie’s mistakes were accidental, she stressed that good editors helped her become more attentive to her unintentional errors. <font size=4>If Raines had been more focused on guiding Blair rather than on quotas, she said, perhaps The Times wouldn’t have had to make “more than 50 corrections over his four-year career at The New York Times.”
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The bottom line with Raines is, observed Slate’s Jack Shafer, if Times Publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr. ever hopes to regain readership respect, he will take his father’s lead, Arthur Sulzberger, Sr., when he booted out former editor and “head-strong tyrant” A.M. Rosenthal in 1986, and “get rid of [Raines] and ask the new editor to make the paper even greater, and he’ll ask him to make the newsroom a happy place again.”
But as good as Shafer’s accounts and insights into Raines were, he was wrong on one account. In placing blame, Shafer said it wasn’t the newspaper that was wounded; it was Raines, who was allegedly “pricked by a thousand lances – from the right wing, which lusts to destroy the paper’s authority.”
No, Shafer is wrong. We on the Right are not responsible for The Times’ ignominy. If something goes awry on the Left, it should get exposed. Equally, if something is askew on the Right, it should be exposed. That’s objective journalism.
But Raines – and Raines alone – is the one who wounded The Times, and Raines alone is responsible for its current situation.
Now that Sulzberger, Sr. finally did the descent thing by coming out of retirement to get rid of Raines and Boyd, the question that begs to be answered is: Will the political correctness and liberalism – that has long infected the ‘Old Gray Lady’ since Raines’ and Boyd’s tenure – end with interim Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld?
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Truth be told, Raines poisoned the inkwell at The Times with his liberalism. And now he’s paying the price.
“As readers of the Times, however, our view is that what we have been seeing on its front page in recent years is less straightforward reporting and more advocacy journalism,” said a June 6 Wall Street Journal editorial. “In this sense, the scandal over Jayson Blair’s fabrications is symptomatic of a broader credibility problem that won’t vanish merely because Mr. Raines does.”
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But maybe it’s also time the elder Sulzberger kicked out his incompetent heir-apparent.
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