I’ll probably be one of the few people to say this, but Kurtz may have saved the franchise of the New York Times with the credibility of his reporting and of his paper, the Washington Post. He was one of the early guys to officially start chronicling everything that was wrong over there. Twenty-five years ago, this never would have happened. The people at the managerial level in the mainstream media go to work for two equal reasons: profit and ideology. When they saw that opinion-laced presentation was a winner, they peppered their news with opinion.
Now the trend is swinging back towards straight journalism. The problem with the Times is that you can’t believe what’s in it, and that was the case long before Jayson Blair. I’ve attached coverage of the most infamous example of this bias from last summer: the story that President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger criticized Bush on the Iraq war. (The paper eventually ran a correction.) Donald Luskin also has a column in NRO, in which he documents the many misstatements and errors of the Times’ Paul Krugman. Luskin points out that every press release the paper has issued since early 1999, before Raines, read this way: “The company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting, and distributing high-quality news, information, and entertainment.”
This is directly peggable to that Little Pinch, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. He brought the transformation of opinion from editorial pages to the news pages. That’s not what journalism is about. It’s about telling people who aren’t where you are what happened – without ideology. As Luskin writes, creating utopia would be a worthy goal of the Ford Foundations, but advancing “utopia” isn’t what the people who invested in the Times thought they were doing with their money. Luskin: “It’s especially ironic coming from a newspaper where a business columnist ? Gretchen Morgenson ? regularly lacerates “greedy” CEO’s for not putting their shareholders first.” Again: this is the kind of reporting you only get from the so-called new media.
Read Rush’s Original Coverage…
<BR>(Arrogant Howell Raines Rides Again; NY Times Distorts Kissinger, Rice – 8.19.02)
Read More of Rush’s Wisdom…
(…right here in the Essential Stack of Stuff)
