-Caveat Lector- "I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the REPUBLIC for which it stands, one Nation under God,indivisible,with liberty and justice for all."
visit my web site at http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon My ICQ# is 79071904 for a precise list of the powers of the Federal Government linkto: http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/Enumerated.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 10:17:48 -0700 From: Media Research Center <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MRC Alert Special: Dean Not Liberal, New NYT Editor Very Liberal ***Media Research Center CyberAlert Special*** 1:15pm EDT, Wednesday July 16, 2003 > Media Reality Check. "Howard Dean: Not a Fierce Liberal Force? Media Brand Vermont Governor 'Populist,' 'Anti-War,' and a Magnet for 'Middle-Class Resentment'" > Column on the New Executive Editor of the NY Times: "Cut from the Raines Cloth" Reprints of two fresh articles from the MRC: 1) A Media Reality Check produced by the MRC's Tim Graham and distribute by fax on Tuesday, "Howard Dean: Not a Fierce Liberal Force? Media Brand Vermont Governor 'Populist,' 'Anti-War,' and a Magnet for 'Middle-Class Resentment.'" The text of the July 15 report: Here's one sign the media are beginning to take Howard Dean's presidential campaign seriously. The "liberal" label has been dropped from coverage, and in some stories, denied. In this week's Newsweek, Howard Fineman never described Dean as liberal, but did find him on target: "As an early foe of war in Iraq, he made acerbic comments that now look prescient." Here are some other examples of the trend: > Time. The July 14 Time chronicled "How Dean Is Winning the Web," but never called Howard Dean liberal. They did note that the "primary" he dominated at "left-leaning" MoveOn.org may be questioned because the runner-up was "the very liberal Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio." Reporter Chris Taylor wrote: "Once viewed as a no-hoper for the nomination, notable only for his vehement opposition to the war in Iraq, Dean is increasingly forcing his party's other candidates to adjust their strategies as they figure out how to slow his momentum." Dean's supporters aren't ideological, just "a seam of online middle-class resentment...made up of passionate and often disgruntled believers." > CNN. On Inside Politics, anchor Judy Woodruff sought out Peter Freyne of the Vermont alternative paper Seven Days to tackle the notion that Dean's too liberal. Freyne claimed: "His entire time in Vermont politics...there was never a sentence in any newspaper in the state of Vermont that contained the word 'liberal' and 'Howard Dean.'" (See box.) SUSPEND Reprint for the box text: A fiscal conservative? The Cato Institute gave Gov. Dean a "D" for fiscal matters in its report card last year. They noted: "He supports state-funded universal health care, generous state subsidies for child care, a higher minimum wage, liberal family leave legislation, and taxpayer-financed campaigns....After 12 years of Dean's so-called 'fiscal conservatism,' Vermont remains one of the highest taxing and spending states." To access the report: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa454.pdf RESUME Reprint: > Washington Post. A July 6 front-page profile by Evelyn Nieves was headlined "Short-Fused Populist, Breathing Fire at Bush." The word "liberal" did not appear until three-fourths the way into the story, and then only in a quote of denial: "'His being called a liberal is one of the great white lies of the campaign,' said Tom Salmon, a fellow Democrat and governor of Vermont for two terms during the Nixon-Ford era. 'He's a rock-solid fiscal conservative.'" Nieves allowed Dean to deny the tag: "'I think it's pathetic that I'm considered the left-wing liberal,' Dean said. 'It shows just how far to the right this country has lurched.'" Nieves noted: "Over and over on the campaign trail, he tells audiences that he is a fiscal conservative who believes balanced budgets serve the cause of social justice." > Boston Globe. On June 23, the Globe also dwelt in denial. Reporter Sarah Schweitzer wrote "Dean's record isn't radically left-leaning" because "he advocates a balanced federal budget" and "received top ratings from the National Rifle Association and supports the death penalty in some cases." > Centrist? Others have dubiously claimed Dean was a moderate governor. On the June 23 CBS Early Show, co-host Hannah Storm said to Dean: "You have opposed the war on Iraq. You oppose the President's tax-cut package, and yet you are a centrist governor. So where does your constituency fall on the political spectrum?" On ABC's This Week July 6, reporter Michel Martin replied to Paul Gigot's insistence that Dean was driving the other contenders left by claiming: "The irony being, of course, that he wasn't a terribly liberal governor. He was in fact, a moderate." Some have touched on Dean's hard-left appeal. On the June 22 NBC Nightly News, anchor Dawn Fratangelo even called it a "very liberal campaign." The next night, ABC's Dan Harris noted that moderates argue Dean is "bad for the party" and "will force the other Democratic candidates to move to the left." But these labels and themes are becoming the exception, and not the rule. END Reprint of Media Reality Check > 2) "Cut from the Raines Cloth: No change at the Times," a column today on National Review Online by Clay Waters, Director of the MRC's Times Watch project, about the antipathy for conservatives displayed by Bill Keller, the new Executive Editor of the New York Times. Clay's piece is online at: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-waters071603.asp The text of the July 16 column by Clay Waters: Attorney General John Ashcroft talks like an ayatollah, Republican Sen. James Inhofe is an intolerant, xenophobic ultrapatriot, and retired Republican Sen. Phil Gramm is just plain mean. And, oh yeah, Al Gore won the 2000 election but had it snatched away by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. That's the mindset of newly appointed Times executive editor Bill Keller, based on the reading of two years' worth of Keller columns for the Times. To his credit, Keller has worked his way up the Times ranks. After joining the paper's Washington bureau in 1984, he went to Moscow and ended up heading the bureau there (winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1989). Yet his reporting from Moscow betrayed a weakness for liberal labeling bias, the kind where a reporter, after identifying the bad guy on the scene, labels him a conservative. In Keller's case, that led to strange sentences like this one from a December 24, 1990, story: "One reason Mr. Gorbachev has kept his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party along with the presidency, aides say, is to retain control of the party's network in the military. But part of the implicit bargain is that he pay close attention to conservative Communist opinion." (Aren't conservatives the ones constantly criticized for being overzealous anti-Communists?) Keller eventually became Times managing editor in 1997, second in command to executive editor Joseph Lelyveld. Losing out to Howell Raines in 2001 in his bid to succeed Lelyveld, Keller received a twice-a-month column as a consolation prize, which he has taken full advantage of, bashing conservatives on the domestic front and President Bush on foreign affairs. Any columnist writing on a regular basis is bound to commit something to print that will sound regrettable in retrospect. Yet in a span of less than two years, Keller reliably manufactured eyebrow-raising statements. In his new job, will Keller be able to do what Raines either could not or would not -- temper his ideological leanings? It would be impressive, because while Raines was indeed a liberal activist, Keller may have even less love for conservatives. Here is Keller's charming description of Republican Sen. James Inhofe from "America's Most Wanting," his column of November 2, 2002: "Mr. Inhofe is a dimmer version of Jesse Helms -- an intolerant, xenophobic, might-makes-right ultrapatriot." In "Mr. T., Mr. G and Mr. H," from January 12, 2002, Keller likens three Republican senators to the Taliban: "Senators Helms, Gramm and Thurmond have in common the fact that they harnessed their collective century of seniority to the Taliban wing of the American right." A reluctant hawk, Keller backed the Iraq war in the most condescending way imaginable. His February 8 column sported the headline "The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club." In a March 22 piece titled "Why Colin Powell Should Go," Keller huffed: "Even if you believe that this war is justified, the route to it has been an ugly display of American opportunism and bullying, dissembling and dissonance." Keller then recycled the "conservatives are frightening" cliché: "I can't count the number of times in the past two years I've heard -- occasionally from my own lips -- the observation that the Bush administration would be a much scarier outfit without Colin Powell." Most recently, in a column penned after the Supreme Court upheld racial preferences in college admissions, Keller backed race discrimination while getting in a cheap shot at Justice Clarence Thomas: "'A cynic,' protested The Wall Street Journal, 'might conclude that yesterday's decisions mean universities can still racially discriminate, as long as they're not too obvious about it.' Yes, just so. The editorial might have added that this is pretty much what the first President Bush did when he appointed a black jurist of questionable distinction to the Supreme Court, insisting all the while that it had nothing to do with race." By Keller's lights, Al Gore is an environmental visionary who had the presidency stolen from him by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. On August 10, 2002, Keller wrote: "[Gore] was a visionary on the environment. His alarums about global warming have now been confirmed by President Bush's own Environmental Protection Agency -- and, oh yes, by the melting of Alaska." Keller admits Gore's "calculating repositioning" made him less likable to voters and says: "In short, he ran a bone-headed campaign." But then Keller adds: "A bone-headed campaign he WON, don't forget. He got 537,179 more popular votes, and only lost the Electoral College thanks to a lot of well-documented funny business. The best estimate of the various investigative post-mortems was that an honest statewide recount would have awarded Florida to Mr. Gore and denied Antonin Scalia the role of American kingmaker." Really now? Keller's easy conviction that "Gore won" is contradicted by his paper's own reporting. On November 12, 2001, Times reporters Ford Fessenden and John Broder reported on a review of the Florida vote conducted for a consortium of news organizations: "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward." Can Republicans and conservatives expect a fair shake from this man? Since Keller apparently doesn't consider Bush a legitimately elected President, there's plenty of room for doubt. END Reprint of column For the latest liberal bias in the New York Times: http://www.timeswatch.org -- Brent Baker >>> Support the MRC, an educational foundation dependent upon contributions which make CyberAlert possible, by providing a tax- deductible donation. Be sure to fill in "CyberAlert" in the field which asks: "What led you to become a member or donate today?" For the secure donations page: https://secure.mediaresearch.org/Donation/Order/MediaResearch25-27/mck-cgi/mrcdonate.asp To subscribe to CyberAlert, send a blank e-mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, use the link at the very bottom of this message. Send problems and comments to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can learn what has been posted each day on the MRC's Web site by subscribing to the "MRC Web Site News" distributed every weekday afternoon. 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