Reasons to Boycott the New York Times
By Bethany Stotts | October 9, 2008
Over the last few weeks, various media outlets have repeated the mantra that the McCain campaign desires to talk about anything but the economy, avoids the issue, or doesn’t give “specifics.” Today’s New York Times article provides the most transparent example of misleading, if not false, reporting to date. It also gives Americans another reason to Boycott the New York Times, an initiative that Accuracy in Media is spearheading.
“As the financial crisis continued to engulf the nation, Senator John McCain devoted most of two campaign appearances to lusty attacks on Senator Barack Obama and gave less attention, and offered very few specifics, to the economic woes of American voters.”
What “few specifics” did the presidential candidate give about the economy? The article gives the reader a clue:
“In both appearances Wednesday…McCain’s stump speech followed the same pattern: In broad, quick strokes, he reiterated the economic proposal he raised at his debate with Obama on Wednesday night—a “home ownership resurgence plan,” in which the government would buy mortgages directly from homeowners and mortgage services and replace them with what he called “manageable” mortgages.
After that, he raced through promises of jobs, tax cuts, lower prices, better health care, a spending freeze and a balanced federal budget by the end of his first term. With that done, McCain then launched into the core of his speech, a lengthy, full-throated and crowd-pleasing criticism of Obama’s record, character and judgment.”
Apparently jobs, balanced budgets, tax cuts, and mortgage relief don’t count as specific policies to help an ailing economy.
“McCain has never been comfortable talking about the economy, and in these final weeks of his nearly two-year, second-time quest of the presidency, with polls showing him losing increasing ground to Obama, McCain and his advisers have made the calculation that negative attacks will move at least some voters.”
The author, Elisabeth Bumiller, later writes that “Much of
McCain’s addresses on the economy are delivered to voters through the prism of
his attacks on Obama” and points to how his speeches connect Obama to the
“narrative of bad mortgages that had been backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac.”
Would news reporters be willing to write that Obama delivers
his lectures “through the prism of his attacks on” Bush and McCain? Not likely.
Yet, Obama has repeatedly attributed the economic crisis to the deregulation
and mismanagement of the “last eight years.” Obama said during the Tuesday debate:
“And I believe this is a final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years, strongly promoted by President Bush and supported by Senator McCain, that essentially said that we should strip away regulations, consumer protections, let the market run wild, and prosperity would rain down on all of us. It hasn't worked out that way, and so now we've got to take some decisive action.”
And again:
“And so while it's true that nobody's completely innocent here, we have had, over the last eight years, the biggest increases in deficit spending and national debt in our history. And Senator McCain voted for four out of five of those George Bush budgets.”
And again:
“That is a fundamental difference that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That's what we've been going through for the last eight years. It hasn't worked. And we need fundamental change.”
But Bumiller doesn’t take time to discuss that.
She does, however, take time to highlight that Sarah Palin
and McCain speak to “conservative and almost all-white crowds that come to see
McCain and Palin.” She also points outs the County
Chairman’s use of “Barack Hussein
Obama.”
According to
one diversity and racial ethics specialist (also a former reporter),
injecting off-point racial demographics
into a story is a sign of poor journalism.
The story was reprinted for the International Herald Tribune
(the “global edition” of the Times) and promoted on the MSNBC “First
Read” page.
Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer for Accuracy in Academia, and can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
8 Comments | Post a Comment
Which is to say that I wish this website would drop its cover—the fiction that it’s primarily engaged in a noble search for truth, which is hardly the case. “Fairness, Balance and Accuracy in Reporting” suggests that somehow an “objective view” will emerge from all of this discussion. Their argument isn’t against spin; it’s against Democratic spin, which the website hopes to replace with a Republican (really, conservative) view of things. That’s the premise hidden here. Or not hidden, as the case may be. Even glancing at the résumé of one of your writers—Matt Barber—will disclose his association with Christian projects whose avowed goal is to influence American cultural and political life. AIM isn’t about creating a “no-spin zone”—it’s about negotiating a space in which to deploy its own agenda. While such a conclusion is hardly earth-shattering, I wish this website would just own up to it. You’re really fooling nobody.
David Goodis,
I don’t know what planet you occupy but any objective observer can see the palpable leftist bias of most of the mainstream media and in particular, the egregious bias of that fountain of slime, the New York Times.
You haven’t brought up any argument directly related to this article. Your whole argument is based on the credentials of the writers.
If this is the basis of your comments, then the New York Times and other neo Communist media outlets fail this test in spades.
Nobody is trying to fool you. You are fooling yourself if you aren’t aware of the pervasive leftist bias. Remember what happened to “unbiased” Matthews and Olbermann.
I’m not arguing that there’s no bias in the mainstream media. I’m arguing that this website is mainly interested in spinning information in the other direction, which is plainly apparent. The line, “AIM isn’t about creating a ‘no-spin zone’—it’s about negotiating a space in which to deploy its own agenda” refers to that.
On my planet, people read sentences and respond to their content.
David Goodis is most likely “an obamaton”. There are hundreds of them trolling every website on the net doing “damage control” (aka planting lies and “doubt” to protect their messiah - the Grand Obamaton). Like everywhere else no substance. It is useless to discuss anything with their kind—they have an agenda. Goodis (not his real name of course) forgot to sign off with “I am Barack Obama and I approved this message” for those people “who cling to guns and religion”
@David Goodis On my planet, people read sentences and respond to their content.
If this is your standard, you should be consistent about it.
Why not read the article and see if it has merit or it doesn’t rather than blindly impugning the motives of the writers.
If you have some criticism of the points of the article, than please indicate them.
Otherwise, since you agree that the New York Times displays bias, it is perfectly valid for anyone to criticize their slanted and mendacious point of view.
David, if you read the article above, you will see that Obama’s attacks on Bush and McCain are delivered “through the prism of” his account of the current economic crisis—the criticism of Bush and McCain is enclosed within a general discourse on the economy—even at the sentence level—and not the other way around. Bethany Stotts doesn’t see this; because Obama isn’t presenting his discusson “through the prism of his attacks on Bush and McCain,” one can’t ask the mainstream media to point up something that isn’t happening.
And, if you look closely at the Times article quoted above, you’ll see that it makes plain that McCain quickly went through his economic discussions before launching his personal attacks on Obama, which apparently made up the bulk of his talk. If McCain didn’t spend the majority of his speech that way, prove that he didn’t. Don’t point up references to hastily-delivered information in order to make some serious claim about it. The strategy “See! Told you! It’s there!” might work with a fifth grader, but you can’t expect an adult to be pursuaded by this kind of argument.
If this is the basis on which to reject a media account, it’s too weak an argument.
Oh, by the way, “obamaton” isn’t nearly half as amusing as “Cadaverick.” You guys really need better joke writers.
October 9 at 5:13 pm | #1 | Link
Reason number one to boycott The New York Times:
1. To continue the conservative mass psyops campaign aimed at discrediting any news sources other than their own.
So that
2. Dissatisfied viewers migrate to Fox and other conservative outlets, whose coverage is “fair and balanced.”