Some people are so much superior that, when they gaze at their own navels, they abs where there is only lint and flab. And so goes the New York Times missing the target.
A week or so ago, a story about ACORN's corruption broke. Why wasn't the newspaper of record on this story? Does “media bias” explain the inattention?
The Times' public editor spends several paragraphs rationalizing the failing, before obtaining this concession:
Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.”
Isn’t that something? The reason the Times missed the ACORN story was because they are too good for you flyover state rednecks. They don't listen to the radio you listen to; or read the websites you read. Nevertheless, they are not biased against you. Got it?
What was the Times’ solution:
She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.
Shouldn’t news reporters be monitoring FoxNews and talk radio, anyway? Isn’t news about – well – the news? An unbiased reporter shouldn’t view reading FoxNews as slumming it.
It gets even more amusing:
Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”
God forbid that you mouth breathers start e-mailing a Times reporter. Remarkable.
Given that I blog about media bias, you probably think I'm a "FoxNews" or "talk radio" guy. Hardly.
I don't read FoxNews, listen to talk radio, or watch any news programs. I get into heated arguments with my best friend – a talk-radio listener – about how beneath him talk radio is. He should be embarrassed, I tell him, that he listens to that stuff. Instead, I read the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and San Francisco Chronicle. For news aggregation, I read the Drudge Report.
The Times article was the kind of stuff psychologists must love. In protesting too much about their unbiasedness, the Times revealed deep class or political biases. The biases are so deep that news reporters don’t monitor the same media that tens-of-millions of Americans rely on. The bias is so deep that the reporters don’t want to hear from “those people.” The bias is so deep that the Times’ can't even surface it - even when they try.
