Some have attacked their motives, or denied their right to dissent. Not me. My problem with them has nothing to do with their right to dissent, which is beyond question. The real problem is simpler, and far more dangerous: their premises are misjudged, their comments based on ignorance, their arguments simply wrong.
There is a new New York Times. Howell Rainesâs New York Times. No longer content to report the news, he admits to âflooding the zoneââand floods it with stories that carry forward his personal crusades and the paperâs editorial views.
And the Times doesnât 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 governmentâs loyal opposition.
Reading the New York Times these days is like listening to Radio Moscow. Not that itâs 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 âbetween the linesâ to distinguish whatâs 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 âthe mastheadâ (the managing editor, his deputy, and the assistant managing editors) âbe more engaged in shaping stories and coordinating news coverage.â
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 donât actually enjoy. The polling seems to have one major purposeâto help the Democratic Party set its agenda, encouraging it to embrace the Timesâs 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: âThe Times has assumed the journalistic role as the party of oppositionâ to the current Bush administration. According to Newsweek, âmany people around the country are noticing a change in the way the Old Gray Lady [the Timesâs pet name] covers any number of issuesâŚ.â The magazine pointed out how Raines believes in âflooding the zoneâusing all the paperâs formidable resources to pound away on a story.â
Other newspapers often try to do the same thing. What is unique about the Timesâs approach is the sharp departure it represents from the paperâs past. Long priding itself on objectivity, political neutrality, and even reserve in reporting news, the Times is renowned as our nationâs 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 Timesâs latter-day style of news coverage as âcertainly a shift from the New York Times as the âpaper of record.â â
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. Itâs a little like finding propaganda in the World Almanacâthe 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 dayâs 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 lifeâas the most widely read newspaper in the nationâs 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 itâs 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 Serviceâthe paperâs equivalent of the Associated Pressâsends 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.
I once asked George Stephanopoulos why he thought so many other venues tracked the Times so closely. âThe New York Times still rules,â he replied.
No longer content simply to report the news, the Times now seems to want to make and shape it, focusing attention on issues and topics that advance its liberal views. In the period since 9/11, the Times has been particularly active, grappling with the conundrum that had liberals flummoxed all yearâhow to respond to the growing national conservatism in the face of the al Qaeda attack.
Facing a Republican president with record-high approval ratings, determined to bring terrorism to heel, the Times puts its polls, its editorials, and its front page to work, marshaling one strategy after another to regain the momentum the left lost after September 11.
Using polling to feel its wayâjust as a candidate for president mightâthe newspaper seems to consciously choose a particular political strategy and then uses all its resources to beat the drum persistentlyâmanipulating its story placement, choice of photos, headlines, article topics and language, editorials, and op-eds to push its point of view. If the specific issue chosen by the Times isnât at the top of the publicâs mind, the newspaper resolves to put it there, by running daily front-page articles with bold headlines, slanted âpush polling,â and urgent editorials. And when that doesnât work, it simply gives up and chooses new targets.
Mickey Kaus of Slate has accused the Times of moving away from its classical mandate to âfollow the newsâ to a âmandated-from-above-throw-the-whole-staff-into-the-story news campaign.â
Kaus attributes much of this development to the rise of Howell Raines to the position of managing editor at the Timesâon September 5, 2001, just six days before disaster struck. Kaus asserts that Raines has injected his âslightly intemperate, self-righteous populismâ into both the Editorial Page and the paperâs news coverage.
Raines, fifty-nine, is a self-styled southern populist, who, according to Newsweek, âcut his teeth at a time when the Southern papers were still charging the barricades of segregation.â His early career was marked by an assault on the racist values that dominated his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. (Bill Clinton, chafing under the Timesâs editorials attacking him, told me that Raines has it âin for me because Iâm a Southerner who didnât have to leave to make good.â)
A confident, unapologetic liberal, Raines sees journalism as an opportunity to crusade by capturing a story and pushing it into the public consciousnessâagain and again and again. Strutting around Manhattan, ostentatiously clad, as Auletta describes it, in the âwhite panama hat of a plantation owner,â he insists on putting his own imprint not just on his newspaper but on the minds of its readers.
As Raines told Auletta, âTarget selection is key. And then you have to concentrate your resources at the point of attack. [John] Geddes [the Timesâs deputy managing editor] has another term for my style, which is âflood the zone.â Iâve been in journalistic contests where I was up against real formidable oppositionâŚ. If Iâm in a gunfight, I donât want to die with any bullets in my pistol. I want to shoot every one.â
At the root of the Timesâs âflood the zoneâ strategy is an adroit use of opinion polling to develop a national strategy and to convince politicansâparticularly those on the leftâto embrace it as their own. Borrowing heavily from the techniques of Clintonâs permanent campaigns of the 1990s, the newspaper used survey research to identify the hot-button news issues and then developed them into stories, features, and editorials.
But a close analysis of the New York Timesâs polling reveals that the data itself was far from unbiased; indeed, it was often weighted, twisted, and slanted to advance the newspaperâs liberal point of view. Rainesâs Times used techniques reminiscent of âpush pollingââwhere consultants stack the questions in surveys to give the impression of more public support than they, in fact, can musterâto get the results it wanted.
OFF WITH HIS HEAD!
Push Polling at the Times
As Mark Twain once wrote, there are three kinds of lies: âLies, damn lies, and statistics.â Itâs a sentiment that cannot have gone unnoticed at Howell Rainesâs New York Times.
Going beyond simple news coverage, the Times joins with the equally liberal CBS television networkâs news department to commission periodic surveys of public opinion. These polls, conducted by telephone, are typically reported in front-page stories, and they tend to shape the political debate for weeks afterward.
Most senators and congressmen take polls only during election campaigns. Even then, their surveys tend to focus on their personal approval ratings rather than on broad issues of public policy. And, of course, the surveys are conducted only in their particular states and districts; they donât involve national samples.
While todayâs White House probably polls frequentlyâI polled every week for Clintonâit generally doesnât share its findings broadly within its own party and obviously never gives data to the other side. The Democratic and Republican National Committees poll from time to time, but the average member of Congress has little access to national polling, except for what he or she reads in the newspapers. As the most prestigious of all news organs, when the New York Times announces a poll, politicians everywhere sit up and listen.
Knowing its power, the Times has lately begun using polling techniques pioneered by partisan political survey research firms, testing themes for liberal candidates and probing for weak spots in conservative positions and the Bush administrationâs image.
Thereâs only one problem: The Timesâs polls are slanted!
A close evaluation of the newspaperâs polls between 9/11 and Election Day 2002 reveals that the Times weights its data artificially, tilting its numbers to the left.
Hereâs how it works: The newspaperâs pollsters interview Democrats, Republicans, and Independents to conduct the survey. Then they weight up the Democratic responses and weight down the Republicansâ, pushing the numbers to the left by between one and five points in each survey.
Weighting isnât always wrong. Itâs often a valid way to correct for errors in the sampling. Surveys are conducted by telephoning a random sample of voters. Generally, those conducting the survey donât know if the people they are calling are Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, young or old, rich or poor, black or white. When the results of the survey come back, the pollster often finds that he or she has too many of one group and not enough of another. So the practice of weighting was developed to rebalance raw data to reflect more accurately proportions of gender, race, ...