Editorial: Times' Bias Shows In Palin E-mail Affair (Great Read)

IBD Editorials ^ | June 17, 2011 | Staff

[Kaslin]

Media: No wonder last week's frenzy over Sarah Palin's old emails went as fast as it came. Not only did it turn out to be the nonstory of the year. It gave objective journalism one of its biggest black eyes yet.

We don't remember anything quite like it. The state of Alaska was releasing more than 24,000 — or 300 pounds' worth — of emails that Palin wrote during her years as governor (2006 to 2009). The documents were a matter of public record, we were told, because Palin often used personal emails to cover state business. Whatever the case, the New York Times was beside itself.

Along with other news organizations, the Times dispatched reporters to Juneau, the state capital, to begin scanning the files as soon as they were available. But it went a step further, asking readers to help with its "investigation."

"In terms of juicy reading, you can't get any better than this," said a New York Times spokesperson in an online call to action. "Since practically everything Palin does is considered news as it is, her personal emails as governor are a veritable goldmine ... .

"So if you've ever had a secret ambition to do some investigative journalism for the Times, see your name credited in the paper, or just gossip incessantly about Sarah Palin, this one is for you."

We have since learned this may be a wave of the future, a natural extension of the "citizen journalism" that has became fashionable in the Internet age. It even has a name: "crowdsourcing."

[Steely Tom]

It was just like Al Capone’s vault, except with a live Republican politician playing the role of the dead Chicago mobster.

[jazusamo]

"This is not a witch hunt," a Times assistant managing editor was quoted as saying.

LOL! The witch hunt that wasn't a witch hunt. Good article.

Go Sarah Go!

[Vendome]

thnx

[Blood of Tyrants]

"Will someone please clue me in on why we're all supposed to be hating this woman so much?" asked another.

Just shut up and get back to hating Palin like you were told to./s

[Tzimisce]

News hasn’t been unbiased for decades.

It’s just reporters are no longer even pretending to be unbiased.

[ansel12]

If the person with these emails were a good liberal, then there would still have been a story, there would have been plenty to write about what they had discovered about the national (and historical, we forget that)figure.

Imagine this exact 300 pounds of intimate documents had belonged to Geraldine Ferraro, the media would have written the story as they found it, they would not have looked, been disappointed at what the historical documents revealed, and then decided that it did not serve their purposes.

[Paladin2]

"It gave objective journalism one of its biggest black eyes yet. "

BS

It gave the DBM/LSM arm of the Communist Party a lesson in projection.

[buccaneer81]

"Perhaps most of all we remember a lunch that IBD founder William O'Neil had on Wall Street with Barron's publisher and editorial director Robert Bleiberg in 1983, just before O'Neil launched what was then called Investor's Daily.

Bleiberg, whose career with Barron's dated back to 1946, was helpful in telling O'Neil what he had learned about the newspaper business.

As the two men got up to leave, Bleiberg told O'Neil one more thing: that at the end of World War II, the USSR planted two agents in the New York Times — and they were still there in 1983, in upper management.

Did the USSR really do that? We can't be sure. But it certainly would explain a lot, wouldn't it?"

[I still care]

Excellent article. Now I am waiting for the Times to search Obama’s emails from the Senate.

Oops. They are gone. And the Times really can’t be bothered with mentioning that.