Sure, it's primary season and sure, she's not my candidate (I hope to do a post later this week on why I think Barack Obama is the person best equipped to return America to greatness), but on a weekend when Obama and Oprah stage the largest political primary rally in modern American politics, the
New York Times is looking horribly biased for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Check out the multimedia items on the Politics Page (left): An interactive time line of HRC's career is followed by a video detailing her career in Arkansas. And if you don't think Chelsea looks adorable, the below-the-fold video compares her and Oprah's appearances this weekend as a
mujer y mujer fight. It was the
Times' strategy all weekend to make Ms. Clinton's decision to campaign with her mother seem as important a story as the Oprah and Obama appearances. It's the sort of fallacy of false comparison that
Fox News employs when they call themselves "fair and balanced".
I've heaped praise on the
Times for showing how blogs can be integrated into hard journalism, but lately the editors have been too liberal with using
The Caucus, their "politics blog" to cover stories that ought to be reported on, as opposed to editorialized about. Particularly, the
Times' frequent use of running a
Caucus blog entry on the
Times front page is troubling; the distinction between opinionated blogging and objective reporting gets further blurred when you can't easily distinguish them on the page.
In the past few years the paper has eased attitudes about allowing reporters to introduce their own personality into the pieces they file. It's something that seems to have started in the Style section and has slowly crept through the whole organization, though the World section remains immune. Often, it's improved the writing. If you're doing a story about Brooklyn mommies and the person writing it is a mother, that perspective adds interest. It's a strategy culled from magazines and used judicially and given context, reflects the needs of readers.
Somewhere along the way, this style infected
The Caucus and to some extent, the
Times' traditional election coverage. There ought to be a clear bright line between blogs like The
Daily Kos or
Andrew Sullivan and
The Caucus, if only because the Times editorial staff uses
The Caucus to break news so often. By using the blog to both break news and comment on it, the Times is forcing its readers to parse opinion from fact; a tedious and aggravating task. I have no problem with editorializing a story, but first tell the damn story. Pieces like "
Oprahpalooza in South Carolina" are too skewed, too riddled with personal asides and opinion to be useful journalism and the New York Times should stop presenting it as such.
Labels: politics
Sure, it's primary season and sure, she's not my candidate (I hope to do a post later this week on why I think Barack Obama is the person best equipped to return America to greatness), but on a weekend when Obama and Oprah stage the largest political primary rally in modern American politics, the New York Times is looking horribly biased for Hillary Rodham Clinton.