New York Times News

The Poor, Powerless, Most Influential Newspaper On Planet Earth

3:42 pm EST July 10th, 2011 | Media | 7 Comments

There is a story today about how the unemployed have been globally ignored by the people who set the agenda. This story appears in print on page “BU1″ of the New York Times.

In a completely unrelated bit of trivia, the New York Times happens to be the most influential news organization in the world. On the left or right, the Times sets the agenda for the rest of the press. Whether its circulation is up or down for the year, the Times sets the tone.

So, a story lamenting a missing story is below the front page of the Times.

Imagine if the plight of the unemployed was on A1 of the Times. Imagine if they had done so for the last few years?

Then this story would probably not have made the cut because the plight of the unemployed would be national news, thanks to… The New York Times.

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Matt Bai Starts The Media For Huntsman Campaign

2:53 pm EST June 17th, 2011 | Media, Politics | 1 Comment

Matt BaiJon Huntsman Jr. has no shot at the Republican nomination. Period. If his only demerits were his relatively moderate positioning (if not positions) he would be viable, but he is a former Obama administration official attempting to head today’s Republican party.

That’s a little like former FEMA head Michael Brown running against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 and thinking anybody would vote for him.

But that doesn’t deter the media, and especially not professional center-mush cheerleader Matt Bai who has a column on why we ought to take Huntsman seriously you guys.

As Bai almost always does, he gets in a dig at Democrats:

Democrats and some commentators tend to see the Republican Party right now as a kind of wild, barren land where nothing thoughtful ever grows.

Yeah, where would we get an idea like that? It isn’t as if there is a Republican electorate seriously pondering the end of Medicare, Palin/Bachmann as legitimate candidates, or that the President is a secret Muslim bent on subjugating America to global government. Right?

If you wonder why the coverage of the right from outlets like the Times has such a poor connection to reality, it is because writers like Bai refuse to acknowledge the movement and its party for the extremist beast it is.

In their world, because Lindsey Graham chats them up real nice at a dinner party, there’s no way they could be the reality-denying luddites those mean old Democrats make them out to be. For the mainstream press, the thought is unthinkable.

And that’s why a writer like Bai pretends this away and pens silly columns about how the primary electorate in the Republican party unlike every other election year is really this time going to be sweet and moderate and not crazy at all so they will vote for a moderate-ish Mormon former Obama administration member.

If you think otherwise, you’re one of those mean old Democrats.

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Bill Keller Reduces Judy Miller’s WMD Lies That Killed Thousands To “Some Bad Stuff”

10:31 pm EST June 6th, 2011 | Media | 10 Comments

Section 60 At Arlington
Section 60 At Arlington, Where The Soldiers Who Died Because Of “Some Bad Stuff” Are Buried

Our media is never accountable.

Esquire: Do you leave with a sense of anything left undone, any particular regret?

Bill Keller: There is a fairly long list of things that I’ve done that were stupid.

Esquire: Such as?

Bill Keller: I came in well aware that we had published some bad stuff about WMD in Iraq. I should have written a fulsome mea culpa and put [Judy Miller] on a leash. Instead I waited a year to do that. I should have just taken that thing by the lapels and done it sooner. And I would confess that some of the shots I’ve taken at various people or news outlets were a little intemperate. But on the whole I feel a sense of satisfaction.

The NY Times repeatedly allowed their influential front page to be used as a propaganda vehicle for the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. The false information in the NY Times helped lay the groundwork for the botched invasion of Iraq that killed thousands of Americans and Iraqis for no good reason.

Bill Keller thinks this is “some bad stuff” from the safety of his Manhattan offices, and waited forever for an explanation of what happened (while standing behind Miller during the CIA leak investigation).

It’s not just journalistic malpractice, it’s morally bankrupt.

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Write A Negative Story About The NRA, Get Racist Hate Mail

9:30 am EST January 26th, 2011 | Conservative | 72 Comments

Michael Luo of the New York Times wrote this story about the NRA

In the wake of the shootings in Tucson, the familiar questions inevitably resurfaced: Are communities where more people carry guns safer or less safe? Does the availability of high-capacity magazines increase deaths? Do more rigorous background checks make a difference?

The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done. And there is a reason for that. Scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the National Rife Association has all but choked off money for such work.

“We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” said Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was for about a decade the leading source of financing for firearms research.

This morning he revealed the response from the right:

They are who we thought they were.

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Trend Stories Are Dumb. This One Is Especially So.

11:09 am EST January 21st, 2010 | Media | 3 Comments

I hate “trend” stories in the New York Times. They’re usually not really trends (metrosexual) or stupid trends that should die. Today’s trend story is the SHOCKER that photoshoots show fashion models lying down.

Stop the presses! And this will soon be behind a paywall where we can all ignore it.

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NY Times Preps For Irrelevancy

9:45 am EST January 20th, 2010 | Media | 3 Comments

Not only is the way the NY Times is planning to implement a paid strategy for its web site stupid (most people will just bail after they hit their “free” limit), but it is shortsighted. The Times is not a special niche publication like the WSJ, but – until now at least – the most important and influential paper in the world. After our experience with Judith Miller printing Cheney’s WMD propaganda on the front page, I of course think that’s a bad thing. But you would think the Times would want to retain that cachet. This strategy is a great way to end that.

Die mainstream media, die.

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“These concerns appear to be unfounded.”

3:01 am EST August 10th, 2009 | Media | 35 Comments

NY Times Building

This is why I hate journalism in its modern execution. The NY Times has a round up on health care reform (why they waited until August to do something like this only God knows) and in the section discussing conservative concerns about euthanasia and government funding for abortion, the best the NY Times – the most important newspaper in the world – can muster is “These concerns appear to be unfounded.”

Why must the media always be so mealy-mouthed? Why can’t they just say “this is untrue”? I don’t want the press to be an organ of either party, and when my guys stretch the truth they should investigate the claims and come to a conclusion pro or con then as well.

This is the kind of refusal to perform basic journalism that allowed the Times to help lead the nation into war in Iraq, among other mistakes.

“These concerns appear to be unfounded.” doesn’t cut it and its why the media is dying.

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Alessandra Stanley Is A Mess

4:47 pm EST July 24th, 2009 | Media | 4 Comments

Sure, she’s a media critic and not a news reporter but Alessandra Stanley’s errors are beyond ridiculous.

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NY Times Carries GOP Water. Again.

12:41 pm EST July 24th, 2009 | Media | 25 Comments

The NY Times has a thumbsucker today about alleged overexposure by President Obama in the media. Now, the idea that the President of the United States is someone who tends to make news is never a problem with the media unless its a Democrat but what is even worse is the way the Times frames this story.

But longtime Washington hands warn that saturation coverage can diminish the power of his voice and lose public attention.

Ah-ha! Who are these Washington hands? Political veterans with no political axes to grind, I bet!

“I’m really perplexed. It’s unbelievable,” said Karen Hughes, Mr. Bush’s White House counselor. “They’ve taken his greatest political asset — his gifts as a communicator — and totally diluted them. It’s been especially notable in the last couple weeks.”

Um, what? That’s Karen Hughes, one of the top puppeteers that told Bush what to say and when to say it during his disastrous presidency. Karen Hughes has a mighty unhealthy relationship with the George W. Bush legacy, and it was her who allegedly help ghostwrite Bush’s “autobiography” A Charge To Keep. Surely there’s someone other than a Bushie hack that is concerned over this so-called overexposure.

“It’s a risk of overexposure,” said Joe Trippi, a political consultant.

Ah, well then… But wait!

Trippi continues:

“If you use it all up on health care, you may not be able to use it on something else. But if you’re going to risk using it all up, this is the one to risk it on.”

So Trippi doesn’t comport to the article’s main thesis. In fact, he says that using political capital to pass health care reform is a good thing.

The rest of the article cites no other Washington insider types on this issue. The sole voice of criticism is from Karen Hughes, a republican insider with a major role in crafting the public relations of the failed Bush administration (she also failed miserably in PR at the state department, a move that probably led to Americans being hurt or killed in the long run). The only place Hughes seems to have succeeded with PR is in getting NY Times reporter Peter Baker to carry her water.

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State The Obvious, Get A NY Times Column

9:33 am EST April 2nd, 2009 | Media, Sports | 9 Comments

Doug Glanville in the NY Times Op-ed:

Take a close look at the recent World Baseball Classic and you’ll see how far the sport has come in a short period of time. It is no longer a homogeneous, closed circle of local athletes, but rather an entire world of cultures.

Only 60 years ago, Jackie Robinson broke through a glass ceiling for African-American ballplayers, but since then there’s been a quiet inflow of many other cultures that has also changed the game dramatically.

Is this really an original thought? Surely in the last 60 years people have taken note of the cultural diversity of baseball – the fact that it has legions of fans in South America and Japan. Every year players come in to the league from those locales. It isn’t anything new.

And he winds up:

Because baseball’s power is unique. No game reflects the cultural diversity of our country on a day-to-day, team-by-team level as well as baseball.

Look, I know baseball fans love to rhapsodic about their game, but the exact same cultural diversity is true of the other two major sports in the country – football and basketball. Heck, even golf is more diverse than it used to be.

I wonder if sometimes the Times publishers don’t see any connection between lagging revenues and painfully obvious columns like this.

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