Gray Lady Down (12 page)

One particularly egregious case of double standards involved a McCain op-ed piece backing “the surge” in Iraq that the
Times
rejected shortly after it had run one against the surge by Obama. The
Columbia Journalism Review,
hardly a right-wing publication, said that the
Times’
“tenuous arguments about [the] newsworthiness” of McCain’s op-ed fed “the paper’s reputation as a vehicle for thinly veiled liberal bias.” In a cable segment on the issue, the former Clinton press aide DeeDee Meyers said it was a “legitimate question” to ask how “balanced” between the two candidates the coverage was. Even some Timesmen were scratching their heads. On the cable show
Hardball,
the paper’s political writer John Harwood said: “The question is how different is the standard when you are talking about a nominee of a major party to be president of the United States.... I was surprised that they did not take it, especially having just run Barack Obama.”

But it was the
Times’
disparate treatment of the candidates’ personal lives that most clearly underlined a pro-Obama bias. Exhibit A was the front-page investigative report that was intended to be a window into McCain’s reputation as a reformer, a reputation he made after an early fall from grace involving the “Keating Five” banking scandal. But the story quickly became notorious for insinuating that McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist more than thirty years his junior—without ever citing anything resembling journalistic proof, except the accusation made by one admittedly “disgruntled” former staffer. At least 20 out of the article’s 61 paragraphs concerned the alleged romantic relationship. The McCain campaign denounced the “gutter politics” of the
Times
and its “hit and run smear campaign.” The article also drew criticism from the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, who scorned editor Bill Keller’s explanation that the story was about McCain’s reckless behavior and potential conflicts of interest, not about an affair.

A late-campaign profile of McCain’s wife, Cindy, reflected the same hostility. Written by Jodi Kantor, whose reporting on Jeremiah Wright had been understanding to an extreme, the story was a hatchet job of the first order and catty to boot. Kantor claimed that Cindy McCain was not liked by other congressional wives and was so neglected by her husband that her parents occasionally bought her presents on his behalf. In an effort to impeach her truthfulness, Kantor criticized Cindy’s assertion that she had gone to Rwanda during the genocide for relief work when she had “only” gone to the Rwanda-Zaire border. It was later learned that Kantor, in trying to get a take on what kind of mother Cindy McCain was, had actually gone on Facebook to contact some of her daughter’s friends.

“Vicious” was the word Mark Halperin of
Time
used to describe the story. “It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it cast her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.” It was the Cindy McCain profile, along
with the story of an extramarital affair, that Halperin cited when he castigated the press for its “extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage” in the 2008 election campaigns.

In addition to criticizing his opponent, the
Times
helped Obama with image management, particularly about his racial background. The fact that Obama had a black Kenyan father and a white American mother who took him to Indonesia for several years when he was a child prompted anxiety about his roots—and his religion. The
Times
took several different tacks in trying to keep the candidate from appearing as “the Other.” One strategy, typified by the columnist Roger Cohen, was to extol Obama’s multicultural roots. In a column about some of his far-flung relatives, Cohen wrote that “If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. . . . Obama’s bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven. For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance.”

Another strategy was to emphasize Obama’s alleged connections to the heartland. For instance, Alessandra Stanley wrote about “Obama’s hardscrabble Kansas roots.” But Obama had never lived in Kansas. He was born in Hawaii and returned there from Indonesia to live with his grandparents, who had moved there from Kansas to help Obama’s single mother. In fact, Obama had never even been to his grandfather’s hometown in Kansas until 2008.

The
Times
showed the same kind of reluctance to examine Obama’s relationship to Bill Ayers as it had in the case of Jeremiah Wright. Ayers had been a founder of the Weather Underground, the antiwar terrorist group of the Vietnam War era, and had participated in bombings in New York and Washington D.C. After emerging from years underground, he had become an educational activist in Chicago and published a memoir called
Fugitive Days,
about which the
Times
wrote a feature article that appeared on September 11. In the ill-timed story, Ayers bragged about his days as a domestic terrorist and stated he “did not do enough.”

Since Obama and Ayers ran in the same circle in Chicago, and since Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (also a former Weatherman), hosted Obama’s first fundraiser when he ran for his first political office as Illinois state senator in 1996, the association was red meat for those suspicious of Obama. Even centrist organizations like ABC News and
Politico
said it was a legitimate issue to explore, cutting to questions of Obama’s character and his political and ideological bearings. Yet for some at the
Times,
the mere asking of the question was “a disgusting spectacle,” as the media reporter David Carr phrased it.

Less than a month before the election, as the McCain campaign itself began to raise the question, Scott Shane reported in the
Times
that Ayers and Obama “do not appear to be close.” He soft-pedaled the fact that both had served for almost ten years on the boards of the Woods Foundation and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, two blue-ribbon charities; instead, he bought Obama’s claim that their contact over the years was only “sporadic.” And rather than acknowledge that Obama lied about his connection to Ayers, Shane merely said that he had “played down” the relationship. Conservative media critics called Shane’s report less an investigation than “an inoculation.”

The
New York Times
that appeared the day after Obama’s electoral victory was the journalistic equivalent of a ticker-tape parade celebrating victory in a hard-fought war. The
Times
broke out a 32-page special section, “President Obama,” that was hard to distinguish from a fanzine. “In a country long divided,” Rachel Swarns wrote, “Mr. Obama had a singular appeal: he is biracial and Ivy League educated; a stirring speaker who shoots hoops and quotes the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; a politician who grooves to the rapper Jay-Z and loves the lyricism of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; a man of remarkable control and startling boldness . . . .”

Writing from Washington on Inauguration Day, Francis X. Clines of the editorial board rhapsodized that Obama’s very name was a “healing mantra.” Dennis Overbye, a science reporter, soon wrote of weeping in relief that the incoming administration would lift the “dark cloud” hanging over “the scientific community in this country.” When Obama vowed to harness wind and
solar energy and to “wield technology’s wonders,” Overbye said he “felt the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares.” The Obama administration had a long honeymoon at the
Times,
which cheered on the new president’s most important foreign policy and domestic initiatives and often appeared to cover for his blunders.

The paper was especially keen on Obama’s efforts at rapprochement with the Islamic world, giving generous accolades to the speech he delivered in Cairo in June 2009—a speech shaped by political correctness and cultural relativism. Not once did Obama say the words “Islamic extremism” or “jihadism.” Instead, he referred generically to “violent extremists.” His account of the achievements of Islamic civilization was flattering and fallacious, as Victor Davis Hanson pointed out:

Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins remarked that the speech highlighted the need for Obama to recognize “the foreignness of foreign lands.” Ajami also took the air out of those who asserted that the speech was a big hit on the Arab street, reporting in the
Wall Street Journal
that some there remarked that Obama “talks too much.”

Yet the speech was music to the
Times’
ears. An editorial headlined “The Cairo Speech” maintained that eight years of George Bush’s “arrogance and bullying” had made the country unrecognizable. “His vision was of a country racked with fear and bent on
vengeance, one that imposed invidious choices on the world and on itself. When we listened to President Obama speak in Cairo on Thursday, we recognized the United States.”

The
Times’
infatuation with Obama continued in its support for his health care agenda, popularly known as “Obamacare.” To be sure, the
Times
had its truck with the effort. But its criticism did not focus on the shadowy horse-trading behind the bill, nor on how it would affect the deficit, nor on the constitutional issue of the federal government forcing citizens to buy insurance or face a penalty. Its major criticism came from Obama’s left, especially when he backed away from the so-called “public option,” and seemed to be dragging his feet in using his bully pulpit to lobby lawmakers, particularly Democratic representatives who might lose their seats in the midterm elections. When the final bill passed, the
Times
hailed it in practically messianic terms. Carl Hulse’s front-page story on March 21, “Another Long March in the Name of Change,” likened the passing of the bill to “society-shifting” milestones in the civil rights movement. A report filed by Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn was headlined “Obama Hails Vote on Health Care as Answering ‘the Call of History.’” The editorial page was effusive too. “Barack Obama put his presidency on the line for an accomplishment of historic proportions,” read “Health Care Reform, at Last.”

Obama’s initial steps toward immigration reform in June 2010 also stirred the
Times,
which opined that “President Obama’s first major speech on immigration had the eloquence and clarity we have come to expect when he engages a wrenching national debate.” In a dig at the majority of Americans who want border enforcement before any legalization of the undocumented, the editorial pronounced Obama correct in maintaining that “sealing off that vast space [the border] with troops and fences alone is a fantasy.”

Even the Obamas’ domestic life in the White House elicited a swoon. In October 2009, the
Times Magazine
ran a 7,500-word cover story titled “The Obamas’ Marriage,” by Jodi Kantor, who said “the Obamas mix politics and romance in a way that no
first couple quite have before.” Then, in November, Kantor was reported to have received a seven-figure deal from Little, Brown for a book on Obama.

The
Times’
cheerleading for Obama was heavily underscored by its unstinting criticism of his chief opposition during his first year—the Tea Party. Although they almost always came across as angry and strident in the
Times,
the Tea Partiers raised many issues that were perfectly legitimate, such as taxation and immigration policy, and what role the federal government should play in the lives of individual citizens.

One particularly unfair aspect of the
Times’
disparagement of the Tea Party concerned the extent to which race and racism animated the movement. Yes, there were a few ugly moments of churlishness where race may have played a role. But to say that the ranks of the Tea Party were “foul, mean-spirited and bigoted” and that the movement “genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry,” as Bob Herbert did in his March 22 column, was to outstrip the facts. Echoing Herbert a few days later was the columnist Charles Blow, who charged the Tea Partiers with “rabid bigotry” and an underlying white fear over changing demographics. “President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront that future. And it scares them.”

The
Times’
obsession with the alleged racism of the Tea Party was summed up well by the
Wall Street Journal’
s James Taranto: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”