An informative article from the New Yorker, including the telling of an incident between Rove and the NYT prior to the election. Lots of good tidbits here for media watchers.
The main point for me is the reminder that critics of the press on the right are louder and more determined than we are. Get busy, DU!
http://www.newyorker.com/site/subscriptions/arrival.htmlHere's a snip:
As recently as the Administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Republican White Houses maintained cordial diplomatic relations with the Chicago Tribune. In the summer of 2000, the paper published a series criticizing George W. Bush’s administration of the death penalty when he was governor of Texas (in recent years, the death penalty has been the Tribune’s signature issue), and Bush has never given the paper an interview. Last year, the paper did two things that drew furious attacks from conservatives: it published embarrassing material from the previously sealed divorce records of the leading Republican United States Senate candidate in Illinois, Jack Ryan, which led Ryan to drop out of the race and handed the Senate seat to Barack Obama, a Democrat; and the Tribune’s city editor, William Rood, wrote an admiring memoir of his Swift- boat service in Vietnam with John Kerry, at Kerry’s request. Then the paper endorsed Bush, which shouldn’t have been surprising (the last Democratic Presidential candidate it endorsed was Horace Greeley, in 1872, and he was running with the backing of a breakaway faction of Republicans), but it drew an equally furious reaction from the other side. More than two thousand Tribune readers cancelled their subscriptions in protest of the Bush endorsement; it was an especially cruel blow because, in the preceding six months, the Tribune had lost two and a half per cent of its approximately six-hundred-thousand daily circulation.
Those moments stood out, but the paper’s editors seem more troubled by the constant low hum of political objection to what they do. During a day I spent there last month, Ann Marie Lipinski, the Tribune’s editor-in-chief, handed me a copy of a large, ostentatiously grand, and dignified color photograph of President Reagan’s funeral service that the paper had run, showing President Bush speaking from the pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral to a big audience. She asked me if I could figure out what someone might find objectionable about it; I tried for a minute and gave up. “Think!” Lipinski said. “Keep trying. You’re not being paranoid enough here.” I thought some more, and I still couldn’t figure it out. “So, Don Wycliff, our public editor”—whose job is to deal directly with reader complaints—“received five phone calls saying that the Arab sitting in the front row”—indeed, there was a man in a burnous visible in the audience—“is sitting with his legs crossed so that his foot is pointing at Bush, which is a sign of disrespect in the Middle East. These readers interpreted the photo to mean that the Tribune is anti-Bush. Do you know any editor who, upon seeing that picture, in a million years—I mean, look at that picture! There’s a sweep, a unity. It’s a newsworthy photo, and also beautiful. The notion that we’re sitting here looking for that kind of detail is so beyond any evil imagining of mine! I don’t want to suggest that’s the daily level of complaint, but not a week goes by that we don’t get something like that.”
A few days before my visit, the Tribune’s Sunday magazine had published a memoir by a woman who had been unable to get health insurance because she suffers from depression. Lipinski walked across her office to her desk and played back a voice-mail message she had received in response to the story. A woman’s voice said, “I’m really quite disgusted with the article on the uninsured. I think it’s very socialistic. Health care is not a right in this country. We are not Sweden and we are not Canada. I do not like these heart-tugging stories about people who don’t have health care. . . . Are you a socialist? . . . I do not appreciate these insipid little stories that say, ‘Oh, this poor person who doesn’t have health care.’ . . . I know friends and family who are really upset with the leftist tendencies of your coverage.” At this point, the voice-mail system timed out; it sounded as if the woman would gladly have kept going. “I get surprised,” Lipinski said. “Even something like this is seen through a political lens, rather than as, Here’s somebody with a different experience from me.”
I spoke to the heads of several large news organizations, and all of them maintained that they get attacked from both political sides, and agreed that both the amplitude and the frequency of the attacks seem to be increasing. Bill Keller wrote, in an e-mail, “There is a significant liberal antipathy toward the, pardon the expression, mainstream press. . . . Liberals perceive us, or claim to perceive us, as lapdogs of the Bush Administration, instigators of the war in Iraq, sellouts to big business and panderers to red-state prejudices. Some of this is probably disingenuous—calculated Mau-Mauing.” But, if the question is which side is more full-throated, the only editor I spoke to who thought he heard more criticism from the left than from the right in 2004—and that was because of complaints about coverage of the Iraq war—was Leonard Downie, Jr., the executive editor of the Washington Post. Downie had one sit-down meeting with people concerned about the Post’s reporting—a group from the Kerry campaign, who had come to try, unsuccessfully, to influence a story that Michael Dobbs was working on about the claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They had sensed in advance what the piece, which appeared in August, suggested: that Kerry and the pro-Bush group had been less than candid about Kerry’s military service. The other editors seemed more aware of critics on the right—partly because there are more of them, and partly because they represent the winning team in American politics—and they insisted that they try to present the news without bias. Some said that they don’t even know the political views of their colleagues. That raises the question of how, if the reality is what the editors say it is, the perception can be so different.
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