Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story. Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”
Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”
Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column: “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”
And they say the Times has no comics section!
Since Keller’s promise to pay attention to the sorts of stories the Times had hitherto missed, is anyone really surprised that the paper has continued to virtually ignore almost every other story that’s engaged conservatives? On the czar front alone, after missing out on Green Jobs Czar Van (“Republicans are assholes“) Jones, the paper’s gone on to pay scant attention to Safe Schools Czar Kevin (pro “fisting”) Jennings and Science Czar John (compulsory abortion) Holdren. Then there’s Hugo Chavez fan Mark Lloyd – technically not a czar, just the FCC’s “Chief Diversity Officer” — who’s been especially enthusiastic about Chavez’s deft handling of his Venezuelan media critics.
How is it all these potentially juicy stories failed to come to the Times‘ attention? Maybe Bill’s new editor in charge of monitoring right-wing media fell prey to one of the paper’s recent rounds of layoffs. Or maybe no one informed “Editor X” that his potentially best source — Glenn Beck — is no longer on CNN, but consigned to a channel he can’t bring himself to watch. Or maybe – more likely –this person is simply another Times careerist, and just doesn’t know how to make the case that such stories are actually hugely consequential, and not simply the gaseous emanations of the right-wing fever swamp.
In any case, Bill Keller clearly needs a much, much better source. Which is where I come in. For, unlike “Editor X,” I am actually credentialed for the job. Because, unlike anyone collecting a Times paycheck, I have perspective. I can cite with indignation the number of times Abu Ghraib appeared successively on the front page (32!); I involuntarily snicker when Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman is seriously cited at a dinner party; I expect to find hard left propaganda even on the sports and food pages. More to the point, I’m keenly aware that for every story the Times covers badly, there’s at least another important one they’re not covering at all.
If Bill Keller is truly interested in embarking on the long march toward regaining a modicum of trust from those of us on the dark side, I’m here to help him take those first tentative steps. Obviously, when it comes to important stories overlooked or underplayed by the Times there’s an embarrassment of riches. But as the new decade gets underway let’s begin with a single subject: Barack Hussein Obama.
Why? Because as every conservative knows, for all the thousands of column inches the Times has devoted to Obama over the past three years, from the very start the paper has gone to enormous lengths to protect him. Indeed — again, widely known, (at least on the right) — there is no question the Times had the goods on Obama’s radicalism a full year before the campaign even began. Rolling Stone magazine ran a February, 2007 profile originally, bluntly, entitled “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama” (tellingly, speaking of objective reporting, a year later, as Obama’s campaign was taking off, the magazine changed the title in its online edition to “Destiny’s Child”). Whatever the title, the piece prominently featured Jeremiah Wright in full raving lunatic mode, leading Obama’s team to disinvite him from his presidential announcement. The Times‘ Jodi Kantor, soon to prove herself among the paper’s lead Obama accolytes, wrote a story on the Wright disinvite, in which it was apparent how potentially dangerous Wright was to Obama’s candidacy.
Yet neither Kantor nor any other Times reporter followed up on this story of enormous consequence until over a year later — by which time Obama was well along toward the nomination. (By way of contrast, there was the Times‘ front page “expose” of McCain’s non-affair with a lobbyist.) Throughout the campaign — when questions were raised about his inexperience, his ties to Chicago corruption, his long relationship with ACORN or Bill Ayers — the paper continued to run interference for Obama, minimizing or explaining away whatever bad news could no longer be ignored and effectively burying much of the rest. But arguably the most damaging aspect of this extended display of journalistic malfeasance was the Times‘ failure — its refusal — to examine this guy’s ideas in anything approaching depth. So besotted were these supposedly cynical, clear-eyed journalists with the notion of history and their role in making it that the matter of who Obama actually is and what he believes, how he might go about implementing those beliefs and what that might mean for the country and the world, all of that slipped through the cracks. And, as Jeremiah Wright might put it, now that the chickens are coming home to roost, all of us are dealing with the consequences of that egregious failure.
As the president’s cratering supports indicates, the realization is finally setting in that his biography alone will not get us through the tough times ahead. Of course, many on the right have already zeroed in on the consequences of Obama’s stunning free pass from the legacy media. As Lisa Schffren wrote in The American Thinker: “… Barack Obama is about as completely manufactured a political character as this nation has seen. His meteoric rise, without the inconvenience of a public record or accomplishments, and the public’s willing suspension of critical evaluation of his résumé allowed his handlers and the media to project whatever they wanted to on his unfurrowed brow.” In Townhall’s “After the Swoon,” Marvin Olasky notes that even some on the left are starting to feel a vague, confusing sense of discontent: “One well-networked D.C. journalist, Elizabeth Drew, recently reported in Politico that those who once held ‘an unromantically high opinion of Obama’ and were key to his rise are now concluding that the president isn’t ‘the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought.’ She wrote that late last year ‘a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man.'”
Yes, Bill, it’s too late to repair much of the damage. But even now, giving Obama’s worldview serious extended treatment — we’re talking front page treatment, with at least as many reporters looking into his past as you sent up to Wasilla after Sarah Palin — would be of great value; not least to the paper itself in beginning to restore a bit of its tarnished credibility. As an American citizen with so much at stake, don’t you want to finally find out who Obama, behind the veneer, really is? To have some sense whether he has what it takes to handle the many, many looming crises? The past is always prologue, right?
Oh, one last thing. How about an apology for the Times‘ failure to properly cover Obama up to now? Feel free to use your mea culpa over Iraq as a model. Take my word for it, Bill, that would be much appreciated. It’s the very least you owe us.