The Election of Unintended Consequences
- 02.23.2008 - 2:15 PMThe New York Times is learning about unintended consequences. Having run a shoddy piece about John McCain’s supposedly questionable judgment, the paper now finds itself having to defend its own integrity.
In response to overwhelming reader disapproval, Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote:
I was surprised by how lopsided the opinion was against our decision, with readers who described themselves as independents and Democrats joining Republicans in defending Mr. McCain from what they saw as a cheap shot.
The boomerang effect of this non-scandal and the way it has redistributed sympathies recalls another recent phenomenon that unfolded this primary season: the Clintons’ failed exploitation of identity Democrats. Hillary decided that winning the Democratic nomination was a crude matter of mathematics. Getting all of the white vote and most of the Hispanic vote would do the trick, and playing on those groups’ prejudices would secure their support. She and Bill intentionally isolated the white vote, pandering to a section of the electorate they thought would somehow fear Obama’s nomination. Not only did she begin to lose support amongst blacks (which presumably, she thought she could survive), but whites and Hispanics saw the effort for what it was and were repelled. In two months time, the Clintons gave Obama heaping chunks of every demographic group.
Could it be that the McCain flap marks the beginning of the New York Times’ trip Hillaryward? Times sales are already ailing, and if the paper continues to dig in on this discredited position it won’t help matters.
As for the Democratic candidates, they should note there’s another boomerang on its return: the Iraq war. The more Obama and Hillary attempt to garner partisan credibility by distancing themselves from the war that’s being won, the worse that boomerang will sting one of them in November when McCain gets his due for always supporting the effort. The law of unintended consequences is taking no prisoners this election season.
| »Back to Contentions | »Back to Commentary |
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:51 PM
The disgraceful attempt by the New York Times to harm John McCain reveals the lunacy of the journalistic “elite.” I am convinced that none of the reporters involved in this story is overtly lying. It would be very easy for them to pass a lie detector test. They have truly conned themselves into believing their work represents objective and balanced journalism. These individuals reside in a leftist echo chamber. Just about everybody they deal with on a daily basis shares the identical worldview. Dissenting voices are casually dismissed as the mutterings of the “radical right.” In other words, we should be perhaps even fearful of them. They have become intellectual lunatics who are a danger to both themselves and Western Civilization. We must do everything possible not to subsidize their employers. The First Amendment provides them the right to publish—but we are not obligated to purchase their products.
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:10 PM
Evidently no one at the NYT has ever even heard of, let alone read, Groupthink by Janis. It looks like the Times is irrevocably broken, unless some of those outside investors can dislodge ‘Pinch’s’ death grip on the paper *AND* introduce more than a few dissenting voices not only among the editorial staff but for sure among the reporters.
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 PM
I think what most people don’t realize is the precarious state of the NYT company finances. The company is now worth $2.74 Bn in stock value, which also includes the Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune, 17% of the Boston Red Sox, a mJOE radio station and bunch of loacl papers . Their major competitor, the Wall St. Journal is now owned by a company with 20 times the financial resources and has stated that they intend to go after the core New York business of the TImes. And the Times Co. is heavily in debt, to the tune of well over a billion dollars.
So the Times company needs to keep its core lefty base, or they are toast within a few years. Expect journalistic ethics to go even further out the window as the company fights for its survival.
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:53 PM
Bill Keller’s response to the blow up over the McCain article hints of a certain institutional insularity not only at the Times but also among other media. (I’m speaking as a former wire-service reporter and newspaper copy editor who recognized this insularity after leaving journalism and looking back.) As an example, I was in a bar in a major city, sitting several tables away from a group of journalists from a major newspaper (no, I won’t identify it). They were getting loud and one became profane. This was way-back-when, and the bartender told the profane journalist to watch his language. Several more f-bombs later, the bartender frog-marched this guy out the front door. He departed protesting, “You can’t do this! I work for the XXXXX.” Mr. Keller’s surprise at the reaction to the Times’ obsenity indicates a similar mindset to that of his drunken colleague years ago.
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:02 PM
The NYTimes decent into left wing, agenda-driven,biased news reporting is hardly a recent tack by this disgraceful excuse for a news organization. Does anyone remember the Times’s Pulitzer prize winning ace reporter Walter Duranty, who shilled for the Soviets and his idol Joeseph Stalin during the 1930’s while the very same regime was busily starving the peasants in the Ukraine in order to create their paradise on earth? And how about the traitorous release of the Pentagon papers in the late 60’s? And most recently the unhelpful release of the Treasury department’s top secret terrorist financial tracking program to the public? We’re looking here at serial traitors whose main mission is to undermine the security of all Americans. The editors and owners of the Times long ago should have been prosecuted under espionage and treason laws.
February 23rd, 2008 at 4:49 PM
I must admit that I have had reservations about John McCain since his days of the “Keating Five” investigation, and was prepared to believe there was some impropriety, who knew what, in the current non-story about false allegations made in 2000.
I then heard from Mr Bennett, his current attorney, who was on the investigating staff of the Senate Ethics Committee looking into these allegations in 2000. After 1 1/2 year investigation,
the committee concluded that there was no wrongdoing, and that Sen. McCain was an honorable man who had not violated any rule or the public trust.
I then read the report of Lanny Davis blogged on Huntington Post. Lanny was a Yale Law School classmate of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and was one of the chief apologists and defenders during MonicaGate. He was lawyer for the lobbying firm retained to get pressure put on the FCC to allow sale of a radio station in Pittsburgh, a long story. He and the others on the lobbying team tried to get John McCain to intervene with the FCC, he being Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee at the time.
Bottom line, Mr Davis reports John Mc Cain wouldn’t intervene on their behalf in spite of the intense lobbying effort. His Committee staff sent a letter requesting SOME decision be made by the FCC, one way or the other, after a 3 year delay. Lanny Davis’s conclusion: John McCain was completely honorable and did not violate the public trust.
If these leading Democrats are asserting John McCains rectitude, then the NYT is completely FOS. Both were available for interview, if the NYT was serious. which they are now clearly not.
John Mc Cain was not my choice. I preferred Mitt. I now can support John McCain without reservation, send him money, and do campaign work for him.
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:01 PM
To be succinct, the NY Times candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton, has a few skeletons in the closet. Yet four of the NY Times reporters dedicate countless hours to a front page hit piece against McCain based on rumor and innuendo. Of course a similar piece against Clinton (or Obama for that matter) is no where to be seen. It is one thing to practice shoddy journalism. It is another to do it in such a transparently partisan way. Should we now start calling the Times “The Democrat’s Paper of Record”.
February 23rd, 2008 at 5:43 PM
2008 will stand as a year of firsts in our political history, for a number of reasons. 2008 will also stand as the year the New York Times as a purveyor of anything but biased and slanted jounalism. Along with the BBC, the NYT has long been taking on water; the week of Feb 18, 2008, will be noted as the point when the latter slipped below the waves forever.
February 23rd, 2008 at 6:41 PM
I don’t know where I first heard this, but for years now my friends and I refer to the NY Times, the Wash. Post, the LA Times, and the traditional TV networks as the “media wing of the Democratic Party.”
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:23 PM
“(I’m speaking as a former wire-service reporter and newspaper copy editor who recognized this insularity after leaving journalism and looking back.)”
Henry, you mean that you only recognized it after looking back, right? That while you were in it, you were blind to it, but it became obvious when observed from a distance?
I think that might explain why so many reporters seem so clueless about how left-biased much (but not all) of the major media is. In story selection, if nothing else. Every word in any particular story could well be true but the selection and slant of stories can make the news totally one-sided nonetheless.