Gray Lady Down

by William McGowan

  “Vicious” was the word Mark Halperin of Time used to describe the story. “It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it cast her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.” It was the Cindy McCain profile, along with the story of an extramarital affair, that Halperin cited when he castigated the press for its “extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage” in the 2008 election campaigns.

  In addition to criticizing his opponent, the Times helped Obama with image management, particularly about his racial background. The fact that Obama had a black Kenyan father and a white American mother who took him to Indonesia for several years when he was a child prompted anxiety about his roots—and his religion. The Times took several different tacks in trying to keep the candidate from appearing as “the Other.” One strategy, typified by the columnist Roger Cohen, was to extol Obama’s multicultural roots. In a column about some of his far-flung relatives, Cohen wrote that “If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. . . . Obama’s bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven. For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance.”

  Another strategy was to emphasize Obama’s alleged connections to the heartland. For instance, Alessandra Stanley wrote about “Obama’s hardscrabble Kansas roots.” But Obama had never lived in Kansas. He was born in Hawaii and returned there from Indonesia to live with his grandparents, who had moved there from Kansas to help Obama’s single mother. In fact, Obama had never even been to his grandfather’s hometown in Kansas until 2008.

  The Times showed the same kind of reluctance to examine Obama’s relationship to Bill Ayers as it had in the case of Jeremiah Wright. Ayers had been a founder of the Weather Underground, the antiwar terrorist group of the Vietnam War era, and had participated in bombings in New York and Washington D.C. After emerging from years underground, he had become an educational activist in Chicago and published a memoir called Fugitive Days, about which the Times wrote a feature article that appeared on September 11. In the ill-timed story, Ayers bragged about his days as a domestic terrorist and stated he “did not do enough.”

  Since Obama and Ayers ran in the same circle in Chicago, and since Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (also a former Weatherman), hosted Obama’s first fundraiser when he ran for his first political office as Illinois state senator in 1996, the association was red meat for those suspicious of Obama. Even centrist organizations like ABC News and Politico said it was a legitimate issue to explore, cutting to questions of Obama’s character and his political and ideological bearings. Yet for some at the Times, the mere asking of the question was “a disgusting spectacle,” as the media reporter David Carr phrased it.

  Less than a month before the election, as the McCain campaign itself began to raise the question, Scott Shane reported in the Times that Ayers and Obama “do not appear to be close.” He soft-pedaled the fact that both had served for almost ten years on the boards of the Woods Foundation and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, two blue-ribbon charities; instead, he bought Obama’s claim that their contact over the years was only “sporadic.” And rather than acknowledge that Obama lied about his connection to Ayers, Shane merely said that he had “played down” the relationship. Conservative media critics called Shane’s report less an investigation than “an inoculation.”

  The New York Times that appeared the day after Obama’s electoral victory was the journalistic equivalent of a ticker-tape parade celebrating victory in a hard-fought war. The Times broke out a 32-page special section, “President Obama,” that was hard to distinguish from a fanzine. “In a country long divided,” Rachel Swarns wrote, “Mr. Obama had a singular appeal: he is biracial and Ivy League educated; a stirring speaker who shoots hoops and quotes the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; a politician who grooves to the rapper Jay-Z and loves the lyricism of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; a man of remarkable control and startling boldness . . . .”

  Writing from Washington on Inauguration Day, Francis X. Clines of the editorial board rhapsodized that Obama’s very name was a “healing mantra.” Dennis Overbye, a science reporter, soon wrote of weeping in relief that the incoming administration would lift the “dark cloud” hanging over “the scientific community in this country.” When Obama vowed to harness wind and solar energy and to “wield technology’s wonders,” Overbye said he “felt the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares.” The Obama administration had a long honeymoon at the Times, which cheered on the new president’s most important foreign policy and domestic initiatives and often appeared to cover for his blunders.

  The paper was especially keen on Obama’s efforts at rapprochement with the Islamic world, giving generous accolades to the speech he delivered in Cairo in June 2009—a speech shaped by political correctness and cultural relativism. Not once did Obama say the words “Islamic extremism” or “jihadism.” Instead, he referred generically to “violent extremists.” His account of the achievements of Islamic civilization was flattering and fallacious, as Victor Davis Hanson pointed out:In the Cairo speech, nearly every historical allusion was nonfactual or inexact: the fraudulent claims that Muslims were responsible for European, Chinese, and Hindu discoveries; the notion that a Christian Córdoba was an example of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition; the politically correct canard that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were fueled by Arab learning; the idea that abolition and civil rights in the United States were accomplished without violence—as if 600,000 did not die in the Civil War, or entire swaths of Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Los Angeles did not go up in flames in the 1960s.

  Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins remarked that the speech highlighted the need for Obama to recognize “the foreignness of foreign lands.” Ajami also took the air out of those who asserted that the speech was a big hit on the Arab street, reporting in the Wall Street Journal that some there remarked that Obama “talks too much.”

  Yet the speech was music to the Times’ ears. An editorial headlined “The Cairo Speech” maintained that eight years of George Bush’s “arrogance and bullying” had made the country unrecognizable. “His vision was of a country racked with fear and bent on vengeance, one that imposed invidious choices on the world and on itself. When we listened to President Obama speak in Cairo on Thursday, we recognized the United States.”

  The Times’ infatuation with Obama continued in its support for his health care agenda, popularly known as “Obamacare.” To be sure, the Times had its truck with the effort. But its criticism did not focus on the shadowy horse-trading behind the bill, nor on how it would affect the deficit, nor on the constitutional issue of the federal government forcing citizens to buy insurance or face a penalty. Its major criticism came from Obama’s left, especially when he backed away from the so-called “public option,” and seemed to be dragging his feet in using his bully pulpit to lobby lawmakers, particularly Democratic representatives who might lose their seats in the midterm elections. When the final bill passed, the Times hailed it in practically messianic terms. Carl Hulse’s front-page story on March 21, “Another Long March in the Name of Change,” likened the passing of the bill to “society-shifting” milestones in the civil rights movement. A report filed by Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn was headlined “Obama Hails Vote on Health Care as Answering ‘the Call of History.’” The editorial page was effusive too. “Barack Obama put his presidency on the line for an accomplishment of historic proportions,” read “Health Care Reform, at Last.”

  Obama’s initial steps toward immigration reform in June 2010 also stirred the Times, which opined that “President Obama’s first major speech on immigration had the eloquence and clarity we have come to expect when he engages a wrenching national
debate.” In a dig at the majority of Americans who want border enforcement before any legalization of the undocumented, the editorial pronounced Obama correct in maintaining that “sealing off that vast space [the border] with troops and fences alone is a fantasy.”

  Even the Obamas’ domestic life in the White House elicited a swoon. In October 2009, the Times Magazine ran a 7,500-word cover story titled “The Obamas’ Marriage,” by Jodi Kantor, who said “the Obamas mix politics and romance in a way that no first couple quite have before.” Then, in November, Kantor was reported to have received a seven-figure deal from Little, Brown for a book on Obama.

  The Times’ cheerleading for Obama was heavily underscored by its unstinting criticism of his chief opposition during his first year—the Tea Party. Although they almost always came across as angry and strident in the Times, the Tea Partiers raised many issues that were perfectly legitimate, such as taxation and immigration policy, and what role the federal government should play in the lives of individual citizens.

  One particularly unfair aspect of the Times’ disparagement of the Tea Party concerned the extent to which race and racism animated the movement. Yes, there were a few ugly moments of churlishness where race may have played a role. But to say that the ranks of the Tea Party were “foul, mean-spirited and bigoted” and that the movement “genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry,” as Bob Herbert did in his March 22 column, was to outstrip the facts. Echoing Herbert a few days later was the columnist Charles Blow, who charged the Tea Partiers with “rabid bigotry” and an underlying white fear over changing demographics. “President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront that future. And it scares them.”

  The Times’ obsession with the alleged racism of the Tea Party was summed up well by the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

  Like race in politics, another subject whose coverage is laced with double standards is affirmative action and “diversity” as it pertains to the civil services and government contracting, and especially higher education. As John Leo has written, diversity has become a kind of “civic religion” at the Times, and it isn’t surprising. “Having made diversity such an obsession in its own newsroom, it is hard for reporters and editors to maintain professional detachment about racial preferences elsewhere in society.”

  The Times has shown predictable bias in its coverage of pivotal Supreme Court rulings involving diversity, especially the ambiguous justification the idea received in the 2003 Gratz v. Bollinger decision regarding university admissions. But its bias may be even sharper toward diversity in the composition of the Court itself. This was especially so during the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, who was nominated from her seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the spring of 2009.

  As a lower court judge, Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican New Yorker, had pushed for quotas for Latino and black policemen. In Ricci v. DeStephano, she wrote a key decision as part of the appellate court that ruled against white firefighters in Connecticut who claimed they had been discriminated against when the City of New Haven threw out a promotion exam because blacks scored disproportionately low. She also had a long string of remarks in her record reflecting a commitment to identity politics that bordered on racial and ethnic chauvinism. In one 2001 speech she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She referenced her “Latina soul” and argued that diversity on the bench was necessary because “inherent physiological or cultural differences make a difference in our judging.”

  These were signs of a judicial philosophy that put race and ethnicity ahead of legal reasoning, and conservatives rightly went after her. But the Times stood as one of her staunchest defenders. When the White House announced her nomination, the headline of a report by Sheryl Gay Stolberg referred to Sotomayor as “A Trailblazer and a Dreamer.” As Sotomayor moved through the Senate confirmation process, Manny Fernandez produced a string of valentines to the judge as “a daughter of the Bronx.” His story about the reaction of students in Sotomayor’s old parochial school at least had a solid peg, but two others following it were built on air. One focused on a lawyer in private practice who served mostly lower-income clients and felt pride in Sotomayor’s life story. The other was a slice of life at the Bronx courthouse, where Sotomayor had never served.

  A glowing biographical take-out of more than 2,000 words, written by three reporters, was headlined “To Get to Sotomayor’s Core, Start in New York—Milestones in Work and Life, Set to a City’s Rhythms.” The piece described the judge’s common touch: the Christmas parties “where judges and janitors spill into the hallway”; her status as “godmother to the children of lawyers and secretaries alike.” The media critic Mary Katherine Ham noted that all this might indicate character, “Unless, of course, Sotomayor approaches her relationships in the same way the New York Times writes about them—collecting blue collar chits and counting friends of color as karmic cool points.”

  In response to complaints about Sotomayor’s racialism, the Times editorial page charged that such grumbling was racism in disguise. Conservative groups and Republican elected officials saw the nomination “as a way to score points off wedge issues that excite their base,” read one editorial. “It diminishes everyone when a nomination process deteriorates into character assassination and ethnic intolerance.” In his column, Bob Herbert wrote, “One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.” Maureen Dowd followed up with a column headlined “White Man’s Last Stand.” Sotomayor would “bring a fresh perspective to the court,” Dowd wrote. “It was a disgrace that W. [George Bush Jr.] appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men.”

  Sotomayor ultimately passed muster. But the case involving the New Haven firefighters, or at least the side on which she had ruled, did not. In the middle of her confirmation battle, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that New Haven had acted illegally when it threw out the promotional exam on which minority firefighters had done poorly. In response, the Times editorial page warned darkly that the decision “dealt a blow to diversity in the American workplace.”

  Given its commitment to the notion that America’s racial past still weighs on the present, it is no surprise that the Times’ reporting on big national stories is heavy on white oppression and black victimization. During the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, the Times performed some great reporting in a chaotic and hysterical environment that had qualities of a Mad Max movie. But it also exaggerated the chaos and violence, used the event as an opportunity to bash President Bush, often gratuitously, and legitimized rumor-based accusations of “institutional” racism. In the process, the Times spared local officials from responsibility, provided a ready platform for racial demagogues, and allowed itself to be duped by a reflexive commitment to black victimology. Paul Krugman maintained that in a larger sense, the president’s “lethally inept” response to Katrina had a lot to do with race, which he called “the biggest reason the U.S., uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping cities in need.”

  A March 2006 profile detailing the fate of an alleged victim of Hurricane Katrina said to be languishing in a New York City welfare hotel, in a purgatory induced by bureaucratic unresponsiveness, underscored the paper’s eagerness to embrace a script based on racial victimization. According to the reporter Nicholas Confessore, the victim, a 37-year-old African American mother of five named Donna Fenton, had been a restaurant manager in Biloxi, Mississippi, a city hit hard by Katrina. Fleeing Biloxi, she and her family, including he
r oldest son’s fiancée, ended up in New York City “with a change of clothes and a tapped out bank account.” The Red Cross placed Fenton with her husband and four of her children in a Queens hotel and gave them a $1,500 debit card. Fenton also got several thousand dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but that was soon used up on clothes, food and transportation as the family sought to put down roots in a new place.

  The focus of the piece was on Fenton’s efforts to secure more aid, including a new place to live. According to Confessore, she had memorized the phone numbers for the Red Cross and FEMA, as well as the city welfare offices: “I call them every day. That’s my job.” Because of bureaucratic ineptitude, filing paperwork was a constant headache; faxes to and from agencies seemed to disappear regularly. “Everything they asked for, I sent in,” Fenton said. “I sent it in the second time, and then I sent it in a third time.” Confessore wrote, “With all the time she spends on the phone, she said, she cannot start the job waiting for her at a Brooklyn check-cashing business.” Twice, Fenton had found apartments “but was afraid to sign leases because she was not sure FEMA’s promised rental assistance would arrive.”

  Donna Fenton’s woes went far beyond bureaucratic frustration, Confessore reported. She had lupus, and had collapsed at a Manhattan welcome center after filling out paperwork from half a dozen agencies and charities. The stress on fleeing Katrina had “worsened her condition, producing an enlarged heart and an irregular heartbeat,” and resulting in “four days in the hospital.” Later, a hotel maid found her unconscious, Confessore said. “More hospital stays followed, six in all, as she battled to control her lupus. Then, in February, her appendix burst, resulting in a two-week hospital stay.”

  Fenton may have been “polite, organized and determined,” as Confessore depicted her, but she was also a veteran con artist. Even as Confessore was filing his heart-tugging reports, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office had had Fenton under investigation for a month, tipped off by welfare caseworkers who had become suspicious months earlier. In fact, Fenton was not a Katrina victim from Biloxi, had never lived in Biloxi, had a long record of fraud and other criminal activity, and was on five years’ probation for a recent check-forging charge. Much to the paper’s embarrassment, very little of what Confessore had reported was true, making this article one of the most egregious instances of journalistic gullibility to afflict the Times since the Jayson Blair scandal.