Repeat offender, part 2
Power Line
In "Repeat offender" Paul Mirengoff puts the hit piece by the New York Times on John McCain this week in the context of the Times's Duke non-rape coverage. I think Paul's judgment is that the Times's McCain hit piece is even worse than the Times's disgraceful coverage of the Duke non-rape case. I'm agnostic on which is worse, but Paul raises several relevant considerations and makes a powerful case.
The Times's McCain hit piece can also be fit into the context of its 2004 campaign coverage. In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, my friend Steve Hayes does so in "New York Times vs. John McCain." Steve recalls the Times's absurd performance in the last week of the 2004 campaign:
Beginning on October 25, 2004, with just over a week left
until Election Day, the Times ran 16 articles and opinion
pieces about looting at the al Qaqaa munitions facility in
Iraq. Some of the stories were implicitly critical of the
Bush administration, others were directly so. The Times
dismissed suggestions that the attention on the issue was
politically motivated. But, as National Review's Byron York
asked four months later: "Why was the Al Qaqaa story so
important in the eight days leading up to the election that
it merited two stories per day, and so unimportant after
the election that it has not merited any stories at all?"
Those memories could not have been far from the mind of
Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman, when he rather
surprisingly offered a comment on the current Times
controversy: "I think a lot of people here in this building
with experience in a couple campaigns have grown accustomed
to the fact that during the course of the campaign,
seemingly on maybe a monthly basis leading up to the
convention, maybe weekly basis after that, the New York
Times does try to drop a bombshell on the Republican
nominee...Sometimes they make incredible leaps to try to
drop those bombshells."
Steve concludes: "Indeed."
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