That "liberal media" canard
How the scoops mentality trumps ideology
That "liberal media" canard
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Conservatives typically view The New York Times as "ground zero" of the so-called "liberal media" - a cartoon characterization, given what happened during the run-up to the Iraq war, and again in the wake of the '03 American invasion, when the paper aided and abetted the Bush war team by running a series of bogus WMD stories on page one. The Times' credulous reliance on con man Ahmed Chalabi (a Dick Cheney buddy) was ultimately so embarrassing that the paper finally had to come clean by writing an expose about itself (albeit, long after the damage was done).
That sorry episode came to mind on May 21 of this year, when The Times led page one with a story that trumpeted a leak from the Pentagon; apparently, the paper had purportedly learned that prisoners released from Guantanamo and transferred abroad were flocking back to terrorism in alarming numbers. According to the Times headline that day, "1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad," or, as the first paragraph in the story put it, 1 in 7 released detainees "returned to terrorism or militant activity."
That translated into a 14.3 percent recidivism rate, and the timing of the story couldn't have been worse for the Obama administration. That very day, Obama delivered his speech defending the closing of Guantanamo - with Dick Cheney delivering the opposite message to a conservative think tank audience. Cheney, naturally, jumped all over the Times story; citing the headline statistic about recidivist terrorists, he worked a fresh line into his speech: "One in seven cut a straight path back to their prior line of work." Once again, The Times was essentially giving aid and comfort to the Bush administration - specifically, to the guy who really ran it.
And once again, the story was flat wrong.
This past weekend - more than two weeks after the print story ran - The Times finally took steps to clean up the mess. On Saturday, it ran a lengthy "editor's note" which admitted that the "1 in 7" statistic was way off base. Actually, said The Times, it would have been far more accurate to report "that about one in 20 former Guantanamo prisoners described in the Pentagon report were now said to be engaging in terrorism."
Well, that's very different. One in 20 translates to a 5 percent recidivism rate - a far cry from 14.3 percent. (And as for that 5 percent figure, here's a bit of perspective: According to the Justice Department's own figures, the recidivism rate for American prisoners - as measured by the rate of rearrests within three years of release - is typically in excess of 60 percent.)
Then, yesterday, Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt lowered the boom in his Sunday column: "The article...was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed." The editors accepted the Pentagon's statistical spin "and failed to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war." (Ouch.)
Hoyt laid it out succinctly: The Times failed to distinguish between those ex-prisoners whose recidivism had supposedly been "confirmed," and the larger group of former prisoners who were merely "suspected" of having gone to the dark side. When the Times story was originally being prepared, editors didn't know that the Pentagon had set up two different categories. Apparently the Pentagon leakers didn't tell The Times that the "suspected" cases were based on unverified and single-source tips - "a standard The Times would not accept for its own reporting," according to Hoyt. The Times didn't learn those crucial details until much later, after the full Pentagon report was released.
Nor, in its original story, did The Times take into account the very real possibility that some of those who had purportedly "rejoined jihad" were actually innocent people who got radicalized during their incarceration at Guantanamo...and then joined up for the first time once they were freed abroad. The Times itself has written such stories in the past.
Bottom line: The Times took a leak from the Pentagon, wrote it wrong, and Dick Cheney happily gave it his seal of approval.
If The Times was supposedly intent on advancing a "liberal agenda," wouldn't it have killed the story rather than trumpet a 14 percent recidivism rate that undercut Obama's case for prison closure? But of course it wouldn't do that. The paper thought it had a scoop. Mainstream reporters think in terms of scoops, not ideology (which also helps to explain why the paper fell for Ahmed Chalabi).
So much, yet again, for the "liberal media" canard.
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The latest iteration of the "liberal media" canard is the claim (common among thought-challenged conservatives) that newspapers are dying because readers are sick of paying for the "liberal media."
Then how do conservatives explain what happened in Philadelphia last week? The Bulletin - arguably the region's strongest conservative voice - ceased print publication and threw its people out of work. If papers are dying supposedly because of a "liberal" ideology, then how come a paper featuring the likes of Pat Buchanan, Chuck Norris, and Oliver North has ceased to exist?
Could it be that market forces and technology matter a whole lot more than ideology? Those who peddle the "liberal media" canard might want to ponder that.
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Meanwhile, let's say a few good words about Fox News (seriously).
Lest you didn't notice, Saturday marked the 65th anniversary of D-Day - arguably the most pivotal event in our democracy, considering what the consequences of failure could have been. A viewing of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers would have been appropriate, but I'll put my money on this Fox News interview of Arthur Seltzer, an 84-year-old D-Day vet now living in a suburb of Philadelphia. The video is worth watching in its entirety. What we owe this guy, and millions of others, cannot be put into words. So I won't even try.
With a third of the country reliant on Ruppert Murdoch for his """News""" the idea of a Liberal Media is ridiculous— Ed_Tilton- Echoing our thoughts, from the Washington Post: "Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued. The infatuation matters because Obama's ambitions are so grand. He envisions the greatest growth of government since Lyndon Johnson. The Congressional Budget Office estimates federal spending in 2019 at nearly 25 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). That's well up from the 21 percent in 2008, and far above the post-World War II average; it would also occur before many baby boomers retire. Are his proposals practical, even if desirable? Maybe they're neither? What might be the unintended consequences? All "reforms" do not succeed; some cause more problems than they solve. Johnson's economic policies, inherited from Kennedy, proved disastrous; they led to the 1970s' "stagflation." The "war on poverty" failed. The press should not be hostile, but it ought to be skeptical. Mostly, it isn't. The idea of a "critical" Obama story is one about a tactical conflict with congressional Democrats or criticism from an important constituency. Obama's rhetoric brims with inconsistencies. In the campaign, he claimed he would de-emphasize partisanship -- and also enact a highly partisan agenda; both couldn't be true. He got a pass. Now, he claims he will control health-care spending even though he proposes more government spending. He promotes "fiscal responsibility" when projections show huge and continuous budget deficits. Journalists seem to take his pronouncements at face value even when many are two-faced. The cause of this acquiescence isn't clear. Most journalists like Obama; they admire his command of language; he's a relief after Bush; they agree with his agenda (so it never occurs to them to question basic premises); and they don't want to see the first African American president fail."— Vandy
- There are two sides to every coin. Personally, I severely fault the media for not doing a better job of questioning the run-up to the war. Prior to that time, I really wasn't interested in politics, and I must admit, I was pretty ill-informed. All of a sudden, I read we need to go to war with Iraq. I remember thinking, "Huh? What is that about. Bin laden is in Afghanistan." So I turned to newspapers and online sources. I went everywhere -- NYT, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe. I couldn't find any of the reasons we were going to war with a country that hadn't attacked up. I found no sources cited to substantiate bin Laden's connection to Hussein (and now we know there was none). So in that case, Bush got a major pass -- and we're paying for it heavily, in my opinion.— NigeltheMastiff
- OK 1 in 7 is 14.3 percent but 1 in 20 is 5 percent NOT .5 percent, big difference.— DadofThree
- Is it me or has CD75/XiJah/Jwad cloned him/herself or developed even more personalities?— Tony_From_PA
- Can we please do a honest survey: How many of the righties have actually left the North American continent, not counting the Carribean? How about the lefties?— Tony_From_PA
- Nigelthemastiff- In you research did you happen to listen to George Bush's speech were he said " the war on terror begins with Al Qaeda but does not end there until all state sponsored terrorsism is ended "..... Husein violated 17 UN Resolations. In the aftermath of 9-11 we were no longer going to fiddle faddle with Iraq and toothless UN Resolutions. By sending $ 20,000 to the families of suicide bombers in Israel, Hussein was the poster child for state sponsored terrorism. And do not forget that it was the policy that caused Libya to come forward with declarations that they wanted to end their nuclear program. Under your line of thinking I would ask what Hitler had to do with Pearl Harbor.
- Obama's approval rating under Real Clear Politics poll average is now at an all time low of 59%. Will Dick discuss that? No. Do you see that discussed in the left-wing media? No. More evidence of leftist media bias.— CD75
- I'm a leftie, and I've been to England (my best friend lives there) a number of times, Scotland, Switzerland, Bermuda, Belize, St. Martin and St. John.— NigeltheMastiff
- Except that Hitler had actually started a war. And we were allies with the Europeans, so we went to war to help them. Iraq didn't attack us. They invaded Kuwait and we rightfully went in to help there. I disagree with the notion of pre-emptive war. I just think it's wrong.— NigeltheMastiff
- Sorry, I was in a hurry and I wasn't making much sense. I mean that I can understand going into Kuwait when they invaded it. I can't understand attacking a country that's just posturing. Of course Hussein was awful, but look at all the awful people committing the most appalling atrocities in Africa. We haven't done much of anything there. And frankly, if the tables were turned, how would we like it if a country attacked us because they thought we would be better off with their form of government or because they thought we might, perhaps, down the road attack them?— NigeltheMastiff
- z— James TL
- All you people complaining about 'liberal media' haven't ever even seen an example of genuinely liberal media. Try Mother Jones sometime, or the New Yorker, or even the New Republic. The New York Times isn't remotely liberal - look at Paul Krugman's endless attacks on Obama, going back to the beginning of the primaries, and of course Judith Miller's stellar reporting on WMDs for the Bush team - Weapons of Mass Disappearance, anyone?— yoda
- A good example of how our politics has become skewed to the right end of the spectrum is the assertion that universal health care is a leftist agenda. Everywhere in the world it has been mainstream for decades, and here it was first proposed by President Truman. Yet even the media seem to believe it is a far-liberal or leftist idea.— liberal
- Once again, the righties blithely ignore mathematics, or really just plain arithmetic, when they proclaim their "shock" at the rising rate of unemployment even though the monthly job losses are down. Guys--the rate of unemployment has to go up until jobs go into the positive column. Given the massive loss of jobs over the past year or so, this has got to take a while, whoever is president, socialist or otherwise.— liberal
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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All commentaries posted before April 18, 2008, can be accessed at www.dickpolman.blogspot.com.
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