Anyone who still believes liberal media bias doesn’t exist needs only to read Maureen Dowd’s sloppy, GOP hate-filled columns as further proof.
For example, according to the MRC, in a Feb. 15, 1990 front-page story describing the rift between Sununu and EPA chief William Reilly, Dowd relied almost entirely on unnamed sources, including “people familiar with the relationship” between Reilly and Sununu, “officials,” “those close to Reilly,” “Mr. Reilly’s aides,” “Mr. Reilly’s long-term supporters,” “one environmental lobbyist,” “an EPA official,” “administration supporters,” “White House officials,” “some environmentalists,” “some party analysts,” “some in the Bush inner circle,” and “one Bush insider.”
If records for Dowd’s sloppy journalism were kept, MRC’s Brent Bozell commented, this one (about Sununu and Reilly) would top the list, aside from the Blair blunder tally.
Ironically, Dowd is now embroiled in a scandal of her own that could very well rival the Blair discomfiture, when she was recently called on the carpet about a deliberate misquote in a column she wrote last month about Bush’s latest comments concerning the war on terrorism.
On May 28, New York Daily News columnist Zev Chafets reported that Times flack Catherine Mathis admitted that Dowd’s recent column criticizing Bush is being “looked into” after questions were raised about whether Dowd had deliberately misquoted Bush’s recent speech.
In fact, Chafets wrote, “if Dowd intentionally misrepresented the President’s words, she is guilty of a journalistic offense much worse than [reporter Rick] Bragg’s intern problem, or even Blair’s fantasies.”
According to columnist Frank Salvato, Fox News reported that Dowd removed a section in order to “tailor the president’s words to fit her needs.”
Here’s what Dowd changed about Bush’s quote:
“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.”
Opinionjournal.com’s James Tartanto said Dowd’s use of ellipses in quoted material is entirely legitimate, “but not when it changes the meaning. Many a blogger noted that Dowd did just that, and did so quite egregiously.”
Now, here’s what Bush actually said, according to the official White House transcript with the portion Dowd omitted (in bold):
“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.”
Contemporaneously, in previous columns, Dowd also relentlessly lampoons President Bush and the rest of the GOP. For instance, Dowd frequently pokes fun of Bush’s facial expressions and speech patterns, which seemingly provides enough political fodder for her so-called columns to last her all week.
(But where was Dowd when Clinton was committing contemptible acts of treason and lawlessness while he held his nation hostage for eight years? Dowd had purposely remained silent about Clinton’s crimes and typically ran PR for the prevaricator instead of exposing him for the political fraud that he was – and still is.)
Finally – and most recently – concerning Dowd’s culpability concerning her distortion of Bush’s quote, congratulations need to be given to the Lufkin Daily News in Lufkin, Texas, for dumping Dowd as a columnist last week.
Tartanto reported on May 30 that, to Daily News editor Marc Masferrer, The Times’ recklessness has reverberated all over the news industry. And as Tartanto wrote, unlike The Times, the Daily News is doing something about it:
“The New York Times’ considerable credibility problem is now our problem, as well,” Masferrer wrote of the Blair fiasco – and the more recent Dowd debacle:
“But unlike the Times, which has been engaged in a torturous exercise of naval [sic] gazing and self-flagellation, with its accustomed arrogance, since it was revealed that one of its younger reporters had committed all sorts of journalistic sins, we are doing something about it, and fast.
“Until she explains to our satisfaction her own ethical transgression--an apparently deliberate distortion of a comment by President Bush--you will not find the work of Times columnist Maureen Dowd on this page.
As Tartanto rightfully observed:
“Without a Dowd, the Lufkin Daily News will be a better paper. Dowd…has adopted a new journalistic technique – we call it “dowdification” – that makes strategic use of ellipses to distort the meaning of a quote. Alert reader Brad Westmoreland uses this technique on Dowd herself, dowdifying her latest column to produce this insight: “The president was . . . found . . . to do the right thing . . . all of the time . . . Bush . . . is . . . ideal.”
In Dowd’s case, journalistic crimes don’t pay, they cost – as evidenced by the Daily News doing the honorable thing by discontinuing Dowd’s nonsensical columns.
Eventually, Dowd’s blatant distortions of people who don’t fit her political ideology – namely Bush and the rest of the GOP – ended her run in a newspaper that admirably decided to take an editorial stand against such abhorrent “reporters.”
Masferrer concluded his letter, on the newspaper’s Web site, by telling subscribers: “…we will always do our best to make this newspaper, your newspaper, a place where the likes of Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg and Maureen Dowd will never feel at home.”
In the end, as an op-ed columnist, Dowd has every right to her opinion. Of course, Dowd can opine in her op-ed pieces. That’s not the issue. But only if she’s not distorting, spiking and editorializing quotes from sources she loathes, namely Bush and the GOP.
Concerning Dowd’s politically motivated hostility toward Bush by daily crucifying his character, columnist Gene Lyons observed that under what he calls “the Clinton rules,” things were different, and it was mainly The New York Times and Washington Post that made them so:
“Did Times columnist Maureen Dowd alter a statement by Bush to make him appear more callow and boastful? Clearly, she did. Under the Clinton rules, however, such trickery was commonplace…”
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