Clark Hoyt on the NYTimes "Missing" Van Jones and ACORN

Clark Hoyt, NY Times' Public Editor

When I lived in Paris, France I subscribed to the International Herald Tribune which, at that time, was a joint operation between the Washington Post and the NY Times.  When I moved back to the States I subscribed to the NY Times figuring I’d already been reading their stuff for several years.  I cancelled my subscription in 2008 during the presidential race because of all of the stories they were “covering” badly.  Now there is an interesting article in the NY Times about Van Jones, ACORN, and why they seem to “miss” these stories:

ON Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”

What the article didn’t say — but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew — was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes. The young woman in streetwalker’s clothes and her companion were actually undercover conservative activists with a hidden camera.

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Is this article to be believed?  I’m sure the NY Times is like any large bureaucratic organization with its fiefdoms and turf wars but this doesn’t change the fact that ACORN received over $7 billion in Federal aid and they are big enough to be on people’s radar, especially those of journalists who are employed by the NY Times.  But the interesting admission here is that people who watched FOX News and read or listened to Conservative commentators already knew about ACORN and its problems.  It took something as dramatic as a fake hooker/pimp video to make it into the NY Times’ pages after politicians had already begun to distance themselves from that organization.

The article continues:

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

I have to admire Mr. Hoyt for grabbing the bull by the horns however he’s a little late in this regard.  There is more in this regard (bias) then we can explore here but needless to say you may do all the reading you want at Times Watch where there is page after page devoted to stories, with links, showing how much (or how little) coverage Conservative issues get on their pages.  One example is a poll conducted by the NY Times regarding Obamakare:

A New York Times/CBS News poll released Saturday that showed broad bipartisan support for President Obama’s health care reform, over-sampled Obama voters compared to McCain voters, critics say.

The poll, administered June 12-16, found that 72 percent of respondents favored the creation of a government health-insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.

But critics including pollster Kellyanne Conway say the results are inaccurate because they are heavily skewed toward those who voted for Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Out of 895 respondents, 24 percent were Republicans, 38 percent Democrats, and 38 percent were independents, according to a June 20 release from CBS News. While the release says the sampling was conducted at random, those numbers are significantly below the 32.6 percent who identify themselves as Republican according to a May survey from the nonpartisan Rasmussen Reports.

But Conway says the over-sampling of Democrats was consistent throughout the poll.

It is this type of intellectual dishonesty that gives people (myself included) the evidence which demonstrates that the NY Times is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.  The NY Times itself admits it missed the boat on Van Jones (ignored the boat is more like it) and the same is true with ACORN.  After all, if that paper can smear John McCain on Page One by suggesting he had an affair with a staffer, why can it not report on ACORN or Van Jones?  And why do they keep in their employ the plagiarizing journalist Maureen Dowd?

Mr. Hoyt is to be admired for what I view as his honesty regarding his employer, however I believe he cannot go further in connecting the dots because, let’s face it, heavily criticizing your employer in its own pages isn’t a great career move.

Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism sums it up best when he said:

“If you know you are a target, it requires extra vigilance.  Even the suspicion of a bias is a problem all by itself.”

There will be a follow-up piece on this issue Monday, be sure to check it out.

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