There was an interesting lead editorial in Wednesday's New York Times, forcefully in favor of demands from a black protest group at Princeton University to erase President Woodrow Wilson's name from the university's public policy institute because of his vile racial views and support for Jim Crow. Yet one could ask once again, where was this editorial concern five years ago, when it was leading conservatives like Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg who were making that very same case against the progressive hero Wilson? A man endorsed twice for president by none other than the New York Times itself?
Clay Waters was director of Times Watch, a former project of the Media Research Center. His new mystery is titled Death In The Eye.
It's suddenly acceptable in the New York Times to call liberal hero Woodrow Wilson a racist, now that a black campus pressure group is making demands that Princeton University strike the name of Wilson, former president of the university, from the name of its public policy school. Yet for years, prominent conservatives have reminded liberals of the blatant racism and discrimination practiced by the Democrat (an ID the Times failed to note), and the New York Times ignored those embarrassing facts when coming from the right.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof continued his sanctimony over Syrian refugees with "'The Statue of Liberty Must Be Crying With Shame,'" in the Sunday Review. He led with yet another liberal internet meme, comparing the refugee situation to Mary and Joseph's plight from the New Testament, and downplayed the terror threat with a classic "yes, but" evasion: "Sure, some Syrians are terrorists, but...."
Why do right-wingers "panic "over the terrorist attacks in Paris, the Ebola epidemic, and Obama-care? Because they're bullies and cowards, Paul Krugman explained in his Friday column, "The Farce Awakens." While the news pages of the New York Times have been relatively sober in the aftermath of the attacks by radical Islamists in Paris, Krugman has been his same old nastily sarcastic self, to the sole benefit of his equally smug leftist devotees.
Nicholas Kristof's column for Thursday's New York Times was full of sanctimony and misinformation on the issue of the United States accepting Syrian refugees, in the wake of the atrocities committed by radical Islamists in Paris. Meanwhile the lead editorial accused the GOP of fostering "xenophobia" by calling for a pause in allowing refugees from Syria into the country. But a normally liberal columnist attacked Obama's flatness in the face of Paris and lamented the loss of American spine in the war on terror.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, economist turned Democratic hack, displayed his usual lack of class in the face of human tragedy in a series of nytimes.com blog posts, turning the Paris massacres by radical Islamists into personal attacks on Republicans ("It took no time at all for the right-wing response to the Paris attacks to turn into a vile caricature that has me feeling nostalgic for the restraint and statesmanship of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney"), while also suggesting that in the grand scheme of things they weren't that big a deal after all, except perhaps as a small economic boost.
The New York Times editorial page got around to dealing with the Islamic atrocities in Paris in its lead editorial on Monday, but it was the "xenophobia" of "far-right" extremism in Europe that came in for the most hostility. The same day, Paul Krugman, classless as ever, asserted that "climate change" was a greater threat than Islamic terrorism. And a report from Poland pitted security against "compassion" while covering European concerts over terrorists coming in under the cover of refugees.
The terrorist shootings and bombings that murdered over 100 people in Paris on Friday were carried out by the group known as ISIS (Islamic State), but there was little discussion of Islam in the front-page coverage of the massacres in Saturday's New York Times. The paper demonstrated an unseemly reluctance to talk seriously about the probable identification of the terrorists, despite their own reporting that witnesses heard shouts of "Allahu akbar!" ("God is great!") inside the Bataclan concert hall.
It was an '80s flashback in the New York Times Sunday book review. Serge Schmemann attacked a new book about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin by Garry Kasparov. Schmemann seemed to take personally Kasparov's criticism of Barack Obama and his celebration of Ronald Reagan. Schmemann gave all the credit to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "...ultimately it was Gorbachev, more than any American or other Western leader, who played the greatest role in bringing down the Soviet system." Deeper inside, the Times gave space for veteran liberal journalist Timothy Noah to review a Jack Kemp biography: "If space aliens were to land a flying saucer on the Capitol’s South Lawn, one question they might ask is: Wherever did you get the idea that cutting taxes would increase revenue?"
In the New York Times Sunday magazine, reporter Jackie Calmes issued an unwanted sequel to her 16,000-word summer screed "'They Don't Give a Damn About Governing,' this one focusing on conservative radio host Steve Deace: "Such is the mood on the far right these days....This strain of conservative media, and its take-no-prisoners ideology, have proliferated on websites, podcasts and video outlets, greatly complicating the Republican Party’s ability to govern and to pick presidential candidates with broad appeal."
Republican and Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin easily won the Kentucky governor's race last night, to the surprise of New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg and her headline writers, who wondered if Bevin was a "loose cannon" who would risk the GOP "losing an opportunity" to pick up a seat.
New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse delivered a balanced column Tuesday recounting why reformist, Tea Party-minded conservatives have aligned against more traditional Chamber of Commerce Republicans. But it was marred by Hulse's contemptuous tone ("the anti-chamber crowd") and labeling habits, with Hulse making not one, not two, but six references to "hard-right" conservatives in a 1,050-word story, with two "hard-line" labels for good measure. Yet the Times' uses of the term "hard-left" in U.S. political stories are vanishingly rare.
The election of a new Speaker of the House had the New York Times firing up its reliably crooked labeling machine. On Thursday, reporter and repeat offender David Herszenhorn lamented that "Many Republicans, including members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus who had hounded Mr. Boehner from the speakership, accused him and other party leaders of betraying them with a late-hour deal that was negotiated in secret." Veteran congressional reporter Carl Hulse interviewed former Speaker John Boehner and took his side against his allegedly irresponsible opponents: "Mr. Boehner...eventually became the power structure, only to be forced out by hard-line conservatives he deems 'knuckleheads' for their inability to recognize that compromise is sometimes necessary in politically divided government."
New York Times political reporters Nicholas Confessore, Alan Rappaport, and Maggie Haberman live blogged the third GOP debate, and while the NYT didn't have a problem with the slanted questions from CNBC, they were quite perturbed over the counterattacks from the candidates, a pile-on jump-started by a lengthy and detailed off-the-cuff condemnation by Ted Cruz: "...candidates whine about media bias and lack of substance from moderators, and then often refuse to answer the questions or address policy issues....Rubio [is] continuing his mission to trash the news industry."
Wednesday's New York Times featured "Ted Cruz as Beowulf: Matching Candidates With Books They Sound Like," in which the Times measured the candidates’ debate rhetoric by complexity and eagerly forwarded some unchallenged stereotypes of "simplistic" conservatives: "'Trump has the language of the board room, the language of entertainment,' [professor Sharon] Jarvis said. 'He really speaks to the conservative base who would prefer not to hear complex arguments.'"
The New York Times proudly unveiled on the front of its Sunday May 10 issue an"expose" of nail salons in Manhattan by Sarah Maslin Nir, "The Price of Nice Nails" (Nir also criticized white "gentrification" among Hurricane Sandy volunteers in 2012.) The first part focused on alleged "rampant exploitation" of workers, and is causing major damage to a local industry composed mostly of lower class Asian workers. In her expose, privileged white reporter Nir certainly did her own part for "gentrification," helping heap onerous regulatory burdens on nail salons and hurting the mostly Asian workforce with a set of misleading articles. And the workers are responding with protests at NYT Co. headquarters.
The New York Times' continuing hostility toward the GOP's conservative Freedom Caucus got snide in Sunday's news pages. "The Fights That Ryan Will Face as Speaker, In Plain English" was co-written by veteran congressional reporter Carl Hulse, who never hides his Democratic sympathies, certianly not in this snide, cynical "translation" of a Freedom Caucus-issued questionnaire, which converted standard congressional-ese into the apparently rude and aggressive demands that the "hard-right" caucus is prepared to make on Speaker of the House in waiting, Paul Ryan, including holding legislation "hostage."
Jodi Rudoren and Rami Nazzal reported from the West Bank on the front page of Friday's New York Times: "Palestinians Set Their Rage to Violent Beat." The worst thing that Rudoren, the Jerusalem bureau chief, and Nazzal had to say about a new rash of "protest songs" (!) by Palestinians celebrating the stabbing of Jews is that they are "blunt" and "weak musically." (A sample lyric: "Stab, stab the Zionist – and say God is great!") There are even links to some of the violently inflammatory songs embedded in the online story, so the Times is also spreading anti-Jewish hate speech, including a charming ditty titled "Intifada of Knives"
The New York Times featured more politicized environmentalist doom-mongering from Justin Gillis, the paper's chief alarmist, in "2015 Likely to Be Hottest Year on Record." Of course, the year isn't over yet, but that less-than-compelling news hook didn't stop Gillis from going beyond the stats to work in alarmist environmental and anti-"denialist" political points, while dismissing the inconvenient truth that temperature growth has stalled since 1998. Gillis has made a habit of establishing "historic" warming levels and pollution records that turn out to be rather less than they initially appear.
New York Times political reporter Jennifer Steinhauer filed "Influence of Freedom Caucus Ripples Through Washington" for Tuesday's front page, a long hostile introduction to a page of label-heavy profiles of five congressmen from the Freedom Caucus. Steinhauer's tone was resentful of the success of the new wave of conservative congressmen, alleging they had achieved their goals through "highly gerrymandered districts" and an "intricately coordinated web of conservative media" (as opposed to the coordinated web of liberal media consisting of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post) and had made it "much harder to get things done" in Washington.













