In a recent interview, Time magazine's Richard Stengel asked former President Bill Clinton why he was not a Tea Party "hero." Stengel's "criteria" were that Clinton oversaw a balanced budget and cuts to the rate of growth of the federal government.
However, as CNN's Wolf Blitzer pointed out to Stengel on Thursday, Clinton did so at the behest of a Republican Congress.
As NewsBusters previously noted, ABC's "This Week" began its Independence Day weekend program disparaging the Founding Fathers as guys who didn't let women vote and allowed slavery.
What followed was a Roundtable discussion about the Constitution which got quite interesting when the host brought up ObamaCare and George Will marvelously asked the group, "Does Congress have the constitutional power to require obese people to sign up for Weight Watchers? If not, why not?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Last week my colleague Eric Ames addressed the bias and some misstatements of fact in Richard Stengel's recent attack on the Constitution/defense of ObamaCare here.
Today, Aaron Worthing over at Patterico's Pontification's ticked off 13 factual errors in the Time magazine editor's piece and systematically addressed each one.
It's an excellent piece. Here's an excerpt that I think addresses some of Stengel's biggest errors:
Regular readers of Time magazine this week found in their mailbox yet another pile of leftist tripe in the vein of "the Constitution is a living document." This week's cover article by managing editor Richard Stengel is a freak show of anti-Constitutional babble including an assertion that the Constitution was not intended to limit government: "If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so...The truth is, the Constitution massively strengthened the central government of the U.S. for the simple reason that it established one where none had existed before."
What does it say about incoming Today show co-anchor Ann Curry that even her friends in the liberal media make fun of her? Time's managing editor Richard Stengel, did just that, in his Saturday speech to students at Wheaton College when he poked fun at Curry's confused commencement speech at that same college last year.
Fans of Newsbusters will recall the geographically challenged Curry got the Wheaton College in Massachusetts mixed up with the college of the same name in Illinois. The mistake actually wasn't that surprising given the fact that Curry once needed her colleague Chuck Todd's help to find the state of Illinois on a map.
As TVNewser's Chris Ariens reported, in his May 21 article, Stengel, a self-described "friend" of the longtime Today snow newsreader, couldn't resist ridiculing Curry:
Appearing as a panel member on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show on Sunday, as host Matthews led the group in discussing potential Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s recent gaffe about President Obama growing up in Kenya, Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel predicted that the eventual Republican nominee would have a "Sister Souljah moment with the Tea Party." Stengel:
Right, what we've seen in presidential politics always, always, always is that pragmatism trumps purity. These guys are now trying to be too pure. What we’re going to have somewhere... I mean, Huckabee, all of these folks are trying to be ideologically aligned with the Tea Party. What’s going to happen at some point is the Republican candidate will have his or her Sister Souljah moment with the Tea Party and say, you know what, we have to-
After Matthews jumped in and asked if Stengel meant "standing up against ... nativism," the Time managing editor agreed, "Absolutely."
Time's managing editor Richard Stengel appeared on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, on Thursday, to promote his magazine's Person of the Year issue and after he cited the reasons for selecting Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, he explained the reason the Tea Party didn't was because they were a group. After host Andrea Mitchell asked him to explain his rationale for not picking the other runners-up, Stengel lamely told her he disqualified the Tea Party because he's "biased in favor of putting a single person on the cover."
However, devoting a Time Person of the Year cover to a group of people is not without precedent. In recent years Time acknowledged "The Good Samaritans" of Bono, Bill and Melinda Gates in 2005, "The American Soldier" in 2003, and in 2006, when Stengel took over as managing editor of Time he put a mirror on the cover of the magazine as he declared "You" the Person of the Year.
Appearing on Monday's Today show to reveal the finalists for his magazine's Person of the Year issue, Time's managing editor Richard Stengel hyped that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is "changing the way we look at" diplomacy, the "perception of secrecy" and hailed he had "an enormous year." Stengel didn't bother to attach a value judgment to Assange and the negative effect he's had on national security, but Today co-host Matt Lauer did remind Stengel that Assange was "embroiled in some personal scandal."
As for another finalist, the Tea Party, Stengel explained the rationale for putting them on the list is that they tapped into a generalized "feeling of frustration that people have of distrust for authority, of distrust for centralized leadership. That's almost a theme of the whole year." Neither Stengel nor Lauer pointed out the Tea Party also represented a backlash to Barack Obama's liberal policies.
On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, during a discussion of whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, panel member and conservative columnist Andrea Tantaros cited the Media Research Center - parent organization to NewsBusters - as she paraphrased the most recent Bozell Column and its reaction to Time magazine editor Richard Stengel’s defense of Assange. Tantaros:
The editor of Time magazine told Charlie Rose on PBS that he thought that Assange was an idealist, and he went on in this letter in Time magazine to say that it's not our job - the media's - to protect the interests in that way, meaning national security. And Brent Bozell, the Media Research Center wisely pointed out, it's very different, though, when journalists are captured. The government doesn't take that stance.
Moments later, Tantaros noted the double standard in the left’s treatment of the Valerie Plame CIA leak, and Jim Pinkerton of the New America Foundation brought up the Climategate leak of documents from East Anglia University:
On December 7, the notorious radical mastermind of “WikiLeaks,” turned himself in on a sexual assault charge in London. But in the liberal media, the condemnations are few. There are no real enemies to the media elite’s left, especially if they can be (very loosely) identified with journalism. Julian Assange may be highly motivated to cripple American “imperialism,” but his relentless efforts to disrupt American foreign policy is a good thing when the media are manipulating the government’s reaction by choosing which leaks they will publish and promote.
Time magazine editor Richard Stengel, for example, told Charlie Rose on PBS that Assange is an “idealist” that “sees the U.S. since 1945 as being a source of harm throughout the planet,” but he’s not really opposed to him. He put Assange on the cover of Time with an American flag gagging his mouth and feigned a position of balance. In his “To Our Readers” letter, Stengel conceded Assange is out to “harm American national security,” but there is a public good unfolding, in that “the right of news organizations to publish those documents has historically been protected by the First Amendment.” Our founding fathers, Stengel huffed, understood that “letting the government rather than the press choose what to publish was a very bad idea in a democracy.” He tapped the reader on the chest: “I trust you agree.”
Americans the world over could die because of these intelligence betrayals. But hip, hip, hooray for the freedom of speech that got them killed?
Time magazine's managing editor said Sunday with respect to the decision to publish intelligence information recently exposed by WikiLeaks, "Our job is not to protect the U.S."
Chatting with Howard Kurtz on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Richard Stengel claimed that irrespective of the harm these released documents did to America's national security, "Our job is to publish and be damned" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Time magazine's news judgment is truly puzzling. With just weeks to go before a crucial midterm election, their cover story package is ten pages stuffed with “The Secret World of Extreme Militias.” Voters are poised to sweep a pile of Democrats out of office from coast to coast, and they're camped in Zanesville, Ohio with a right-wing militia that claims 300 members as the nation's number one news story? (Katie Couric tweeted on Wednesday that she was eagerly reading it.) Time editor Richard Stengel announced they gave new hire Barton Gellman six months in the field chasing the whisper of a possibility that some new Timothy McVeigh might emerge and vindicate this bizarre investment of effort. Just weeks after they asked on the cover if America was Islamophobic, it's clear that once again, Obama's sinking popularity reveals an ugly America that can't accept the gift they elected.
While Gellman opened with the usual hackneyed portrait of a Midwestern militia on wacky military exercises against an undefined enemy, it's clear that their deep anxiety over Obama is the main thread. A militia resurgence “now is widely seen among government and academic experts as a reaction to the tectonic shifts in American politics that allowed a black man with a foreign-sounding name and a Muslim-born father to reach the White House.”