Off with Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business

Off with Their Heads Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Business

There is a new New York Times. Howell Raines's New York Times. No longer content to report the news, he admits to "flooding the zone" -- and floods it with stories that carry forward his personal crusades and the paper's editorial views. And the Times doesn't stop at slanting the news; it also weights its polls. The surveys the newspaper takes regularly are biased to give more strength to Democratic and liberal opinions and less to those of the rest of us.

The newspaper has become like a political consulting firm for the Democratic Party. Under Raines, it is squandering the unparalleled credibility it has amassed over the past century in order to articulate and advance its own political and ideological agenda. For decades, the Times was the one newspaper so respected for its integrity and so widely read that it had influence well beyond its circulation. Now it has stooped to the role of partisan cheerleader, sending messages of dissent, and fanning the flames of disagreement on the left. Each month brings a new left party line from the paper, setting the tone for the government's loyal opposition.

Reading the New York Times these days is like listening to Radio Moscow. Not that it's communist, of course, but it has become almost as biased as the former Soviet news organ that religiously spewed the party line. Just as Russians did under Soviet rule, you now need to read "between the lines" to distinguish what's really happening from what is just New York Times propaganda.

I have read the New York Times for forty-four years. When I was growing up, my parents read it every morning and the New York Post every afternoon. I still read them both every day. The Times is a New York institution to me, as much a symbol of my hometown as the Yankees, the subway, Central Park, and, yes, the World Trade Center. I think many Americans must share my feelings today: To see it fall into the hands of propagandists, after so many years of dignity and balance, is like watching your father get drunk.

Like every newspaper, the Times rightfully uses its editorial and op-ed pages to articulate its ideas and opinions. But, since the ascension of Howell Raines to the post of managing editor, the newspaper has gone much, much further to push its political perspective. As journalist Ken Auletta pointed out in a masterful profile in The New Yorker, Raines is overt about his desire that "the masthead" (the managing editor, his deputy, and the assistant managing editors) "be more engaged in shaping stories and coordinating news coverage."

Acting like the chief campaign strategist for the left, the Times generally conducts six to eight public opinion polls each year. But lately the Times seems to me to be deliberately misinterpreting and weighting its data to suggest that its liberal ideas have a popularity they don't actually enjoy. The polling seems to have one major purpose -- to help the Democratic Party set its agenda, encouraging it to embrace the Times's own liberalism on a host of issues. Then, from editorials to op-ed articles and a blizzard of front-page stories, the newspaper relentlessly expounds its views, doing its best to create a national firestorm on the issues it chooses to push.

Jack Shafer, the media critic for the on-line magazine Slate, described the new policy to Newsweek on December 9, 2002: "The Times has assumed the journalistic role as the party of opposition" to the current Bush administration. According to Newsweek, "many people around the country are noticing a change in the way the Old Gray Lady [the Times's pet name] covers any number of issues. . . ." The magazine pointed out how Raines believes in "flooding the zone -- using all the paper's formidable resources to pound away on a story."

Other newspapers often try to do the same thing. What is unique about the Times's approach is the sharp departure it represents from the paper's past. Long priding itself on objectivity, political neutrality, and even reserve in reporting news, the Times is renowned as our nation's primary voice of objective authority. As such, it occupies a unique place in our national iconography. But Alex Jones, author of The Trust, a book about the Times, describes the Times's latter-day style of news coverage as "certainly a shift from the New York Times as the 'paper of record.' "

And yet millions of us still rely on the New York Times. It is still the most comprehensive source of news and information about what is going on in the world. It is precisely because it is so important that the bias that increasingly dominates its coverage of news is so disturbing. It's a little like finding propaganda in the World Almanac -- the place you want to go to get the facts and only the facts. If we cannot depend on the Times to tell us fairly, accurately, and dispassionately what is going on, where are we supposed to turn? Will news reading become a task in which we must read four or five partisan sources and average them to get the truth? Is it really worth subverting an institution like the New York Times just to score political points?

Every day's front page is such a mix of hype, hyperbole, and, often, hypocrisy that it takes an expert to sort it out.

While most nations have their national newspapers, American newspapers, with the exception of USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, are all local in orientation. The New York Times, however, leads a double life -- as the most widely read newspaper in the nation's largest city and the most authoritative voice on national news. Seen as a national tower of rectitude, the Times has always enjoyed universal respect for its even-handed impartiality. So it's not surprising that the impact of this Times propaganda offensive was far more widespread than its daily circulation of 1.1 million would suggest. Not only do most opinion leaders in America read the newspaper itself, but the New York Times News Service -- the paper's equivalent of the Associated Press -- sends stories to scores of other daily papers around the country. In addition, its stories are reprinted in the International Herald Tribune and disseminated in every major city in the world, and, of course, are available on the Internet.

Beyond the nominal reach of the paper and its wire service, however, the themes set in the New York Times are crucial in shaping trends in journalism throughout almost every paper in the nation. During my time in the Clinton White House, I tracked carefully the themes that were covered on the front pages of twenty newspapers in swing states throughout the nation. Each week my staff detailed the topics covered in such diverse dailies as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Francisco Examiner, Miami Herald, and other pivotal papers in key states. In addition, we evaluated the number of minutes each of the three networks devoted to each news topic.

That ongoing survey revealed just how closely the themes covered in print and on TV tracked those first articulated on the front page of the New York Times. When the Times spoke, ripples seemed to flow out from the initial news splash it made, touching scores of other, more local, news organs.

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The foregoing is excerpted from Off with Their Heads by Dick Morris. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

Imprint: ReganBooks; ISBN: 0060559284; On Sale: 6/17/2003; Format: Hardcover; Subformat: ; Length: ; Trimsize: 6 x 9; Pages: 368; $24.95; $38.95(CAN)

"...weighting its data to suggest that its liberal ideas have a popularity they don't actually enjoy."

That is to say, they're helping the Democratic Party commit suicide. Useful idiots, anyone? Useful to us...

Reading the New York Times these days is like listening to Radio Moscow. Not that it's communist, of course...

No, really?

The Times has always been slanted. They're just a lot more sloppy and careless than they used to be. Also they seem to have lost what little professional conscience they once had. While they used to bury news they didn't approve of in a one-column squib without headline on page 59 (so they could point out that they had reported it in case anyone complained), now they don't bother to print it at all. And of course no one whose opinion is of any value to them is likely to complain.

The truth is, Dickie Morris is taking a rhetorical stance here. I'm sure he knows that the Times has always been despicable. But like most political operatives he's more interested in results than in stating the exact truth. It is true that the Times has lost its veneer of dignity and now has very little left to recommend it from any point of view.

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