And your contention is that if the Times doesn’t engage in the cited behavior all the time, it’s perfectly OK?
Your DeLay citation does not indicate where it appeared in the paper - National Briefing section or elsewhere (all you indicate is that it was originally all or part of an AP dispatch). You do not indicate whether it is the complete citation. And yes, purt near everybody sentient (about politics, at least) would know DeLay is a Republican (ditto Bush, Cheney etc.). The Dems I mentioned are relatively obscure outside their states.
I’ll concede you one point - you prevously said we needed more than half a dozen stories (since clarified by you to be twenty-four minimum). Still a ridiculous requirement.
I think most of us would agree that ethical standards for politicians require avoidance of even the appearance of wrongdoing. A nationally distributed newspaper like the N.Y. Times should be held to the same standard of behavior.
No, of course that’s not my contention. My contention is that if they don’t engage in the pattern in a consistent fashion, I’m very skeptical about imputing a motive to their behavior. You’re th eone suggesting that they’re trying to, I dunno, hide Democratic scandals or something; if you’re right, they’re amazingly incompetent about it, since they keep forgetting to do so.
It was in one of the national briefings for the past week, I forget which one. I quoted the item in its entirety. I found it by substituting the dates from the cite you gave me, since I was unable to navigate my way to their national briefings page. If you’re convinced that there’s a pattern, it doesn’t behoove you to keep making up new rules for it (e.g., they only do this for obscure politicians).
You need to concede me another point: I said that 10 articles, 8 of which demonstrate the pattern you’re claiming, and which you acquired in a systematic fashion, would be a good start. 30 articles would get you toward the point of statistical significance, and it’s hardly a ridiculous requirement that your pattern show statistical significance. Otherwise, it comes across like conspiratorial nonsense.
Sure, media ought to avoid the appearance on wrongdoing, but this doesn’t even appear like wrongdoing to me. It appears like someone desperately digging for bias, about two steps removed from examining the names of reporters for numerological significance.
Former Congressman Ballance is probably kicking himself for not using this defense at trial.
“Never mind the evidence presented here. My client had other opportunities to dip into the public till - and didn’t take advantage of them! Members of the jury, this refutes the prosecution’s entire case!!”
This is an astonishgly lame argument, and I am incredulous that you would attempt to use it.
As I said previously (to another poster): Why are you laboring so hard to pretend that there’s nothing amiss here?
The fuck are you smoking? This is a ridiculous analogy, because:
Stealing from the public till even once is wrong, whereas
Eliding mention of political affiliation is only a problem if it’s done in a consistently biased fashion.
Or is it your assertion that if, of the ten thousands of articles NYTimes has published, they’ve elided political affiliation once, they’ve committed a sin indicative of bias?
When you’re trying to demonstrate a pattern, it kinda helps to have a pattern, you know. Your astonishment is due to your lack of comprehension, not due to any lameness of my argument.
And you again insist it must be OK to foul up, as long as you don’t do it all the time.
Sorry, I don’t think I can make further headway against such deluded stubbornness.
Is this a lie on your part, or just a gross misunderstanding? I think you need to step back, carefully reread my points, and re-evaluate. I won’t be around tomorrow much, which should give you plenty of time to take a deep breath and apologize for your misrepresentations of what I’m saying.
Oddly, this is the classic politicians/public figure’s response when caught saying something dumb.
Spoken like a true newsman.
I guess you must have been on deadline and in a frenzied hurry to respond, otherwise you would have picked up on the fact that Ballance was a Congressman convicted in the misuse of federal tax money, not a “state official”. And Shelley was a rising figure in the Democratic Party, felt to be on track for greater things. If you haven’t yet figured it out, the party affiliation of a politician caught with his hand in the cookie jar is a central piece of information. “Who cares” is not what we want to hear from a journalist. Left Hand, I have no idea why someone normally level-headed as you has gotten so heated up about this as to make inane arguments and then lose track of them so badly. I suggest you take your own advice - step back and think about why it should be so vital for you to deny so absolutely.
It has nothing to do with being a “true newsman” to recognise that bad decisions get made under time pressure and that people who are geographically removed from a story can minimize its significance. These two facts have nothing to do with journalists in particular. They are just human nature. And sometimes human nature plays a part in making mistakes.
Look, I’m not saying that it was the correct decision to leave out the party identification. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was not a conscious, reasoned decision at all. I’m just trying to explain to you that there are plenty of reasons why these things happen that have nothing to do with some kind of attempt to hide the party affiliation of a politician in trouble.
Not to mention that no one with half a brain would even think that a bone-headed scheme like that would work. One thing all editors know is that party affiliation will get noted somewhere at some point. There’s no way that leaving out a party affiliation in one case is going to result in hiding that fact from the public, so no one’s going to even try doing that.
I’m saying that this is a matter of carelessness and circumstances, so don’t even pretend that I’m trying to defend a decision to leave out party affiliation and that I’m taking the position that it’s not important. I’m not going to rise to that kind of bait.
And yet as my post previously showed. NYT’s other coverage of the same guy and same story did mention party affiliation. Someone obviously didn’t get The Great Liberal Media Conspiracy Memo.
It is mildly interesting that you have found three (IIRC) instances of this one section of the NY Times leaving out party affiliation for Democrats in trouble. You seem to treat it like the modern media, however, where three instances of something makes a significant trend (“Is your child at risk for a D&D suicide!!!” “We have an epidemic of teachers fucking students!!!”.)
Not being able to review the Times or the section in question (because I don’t want to register), all I can do is concede that you have observed something that is mildly interesting, but may mean nothing at all. What you really need is the number of times a scandal is reported about a republican and about a democrat. Then you need the number of times that affiliation is left off for republicans and for democrats. Then you can determine the odds ratio for affiliation being left out for democrats relative to republicans and test whether their is a significant difference based on party affiliation.
I doubt that you have the interest in pursuing it that far, however. But that’s what you would need.
Jackmannii, you do realize that at this very moment the New York Times is suffering a full-blown credibility crisis over Judith Miller’s shoddy reporting of Iraq’s WMD capabilities in the run-up to the war? Right? You are aware that that’s going on?
So if you want to talk about what lying hacks they are, why not focus on THAT? Instead of this silly niggling about something that is, at worst, a typo?
But that lying was all about furthering the BushCo Agenda.
Being an unthinking mouthpiece for Republican War Hysteria and helping out a CIA agent for political revenge and then grandstanding about your non-existent principles is all for the Greater Good.
Failing to mention some political hack on the other side of the country’s political ID in a couple of articles while mentioning it in others is obviously the work of Satan.
This thread has a high quotient of posters not reading or comprehending previous posts.
Nope. I intimated that you said something dumb. Another example: Edward Bennett speculates about the effect of mass abortion of black babies reducing the crime rate. Dumb statement. Edward Bennett is not dumb; at least he appears to be rather intelligent.
Is the distinction clear now?
As I said earlier (and was obvious), this was not started as a thread to indict “the liberal media”, but to note a specific failing on the part of the N.Y. Times. If someone wants to debate the former issue, there is another current Pit thread that would seem optimal for that purpose. If you want to accuse the Times of some other sin that you feel is more important, start a thread of your own.
I’ve only quoted the relevant portion of your post: you really seem to have no idea, and worse, you’ve demonstrated an unwillingness to reread the posts and understand the argument I’m making, instead of the idiotic argument you wish I were making. Since you’re responding to a fantasy instead of to my posts, I’m done here until you change your tune.
If someone else can explain the concept to him in smaller words, I’d appreciate it.
Who’s Edward Bennett? Any relation to William Bennett?
Was that just a brain fart on your part, Jackmanni, or a deliberate red herring to try to throw us eeevul lib’ruls off the scent of the REAL RW pundit?
Is a CNN article on Janklow, the South Dakota Republican who did a Ted Kennedy/Laura Bush and got 100 days. That’s 100 days more than Ted and Laura got. It does mention about 7 or 8 paragraphs down that the fellow is a Republican. I remember at the time that this happened that my fellow liberals were upset that news outlets were not mentioning or burying his party affiliation, and I have heard similar complaints about various local officials charged with corruption and sex crimes of various sorts who invariable turn out to be, gasp, Republicans because the locals know it.
It is inexcusable in any article about a politician not to mention party affiliation when the politician is first mentioned, except for maybe the President, whether the article is about crime or opening the local flower show. It is bad journalism to fail to include that information.
Now I knew Shelley was a democrat because he was my assemblyman at one time, but gee, the rest of the country didn’t. But the New York Times is the most overrated paper in history. The scandals with reporters Jason Blair and Judith Miller, and the smears against Wen Ho Lee etc. are inexcusable.
Checks on Janklow and another Republican politician involved in scandal (Ed Schrock of Virginia) in the Times garner conflicting results.
I actually found two National Briefing articles updating Janklow’s problems with pardons and drunk driving, and neither mention his political affiliation.
In Schrock’s case, however, the fact that he’s a Republican gets heavy play:
I’ve already alluded to Republican Jack Ryan of Illinois whose party was referred to in a Times story in the same venue.
So maybe the Times’ justification is that it doesn’t mention the party affiliation of an allegedly sleazy politician in that particular section unless said politician is in the midst of an election campaign or is expected to run for something soon. This would then constitute poor journalistic practice rather than outright bias.
I’m not fully convinced this is the case, but we’ll see what other evidence is forthcoming.
