New School Politics

If you're a first time visitor, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, which will keep you up to date with all the latest New School Politics posts. Thanks for visiting!

Since the negative article was published on the front page of the Wednesday Times, the backlash has been overwhelming against the story. An article from today’s Daily News covered not only the backlash but also the response of the Time’s executive editor.  It sounds a lot like he is blaming readers too:

The embattled executive editor of the New York Times defended its John McCain story Friday with a novel explanation for the flood of critical e-mails the newspaper received: slow-witted readers.

“Personally, I was surprised by the volume of the reaction,” Bill Keller wrote in a Times Web site Q&A forum. Readers posted 2,000 comments and sent in 3,700 questions.

“I was surprised by how lopsided the opinion was against our decision, with readers who described themselves as independents and Democrats joining Republicans in defending Mr. McCain from what they saw as a cheap shot,” Keller added.

The problem, Keller went on, is that readers didn’t get it. “Frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story.”

That point, he said, was that McCain, “this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances, also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation.”

Not only is the paper’s top editor arrogant in his defense, he does not actually address the substantive grievances raised about the story first among those being why the article featured a completely unsubstantiated implication of sexual impropriety with a lobbyist.

The rest of the story did little more than summarize past questions about potential conflicts of interest between McCain and certain lobbied interests on no more than a few occasions. It did not break any story younger than the eight-year-old story of the female lobbyist and went all the way back to the Keating Five controversy back in the late ’80s.

The common denominator among the few of these stories is that not one iota of malfeasance has ever been brought to light in the decades they have been known to the public. The Times’ front page article did not change that–at all. And its nothing more than arrogance and wishful thinking on the part of Keller and the Grey Lady to suppose that fault over the matter lies, not with the editorializing of news, but with the readers.

At the end of the day, however, this story may be a blessing in disguise for McCain who has trouble exciting conservative Republicans. But if the “liberal media” has it out for the presumptive nominee then he must not be so bad (the enemy of my enemy is my friend). For instance, conservative talk show hosts, who have spent the past month or so discrediting McCain’s ideological credentials, have rallied around him on this issue as have donors. Essentially, the Times story gave conservatives something to get excited about. And whereas funding for Republicans had been hard to come by of late, this controversy has been the fountainhead of new donations:

 Team McCain has parlayed The New York Times anonymous-source hit on the GOP front-runner into a cash bonanza.

A campaign fund-raising letter ripping the “particularly disgusting” Times story and pleading with contributors to fight back “was the most successful to date,” a top McCain aide said Friday.

The aide gave no numbers, but the McCain campaign reported raising $11.7 million last month - topping the $6.8 million he collected in the previous three months combined.

The Republican National Committee sought to piggyback on McCain’s success with a similar fund-raising letter of “outrage” at The Times. That prompted a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser defending The Times.

Last 5 posts by Ryan

• Scarcity, Shmarcity - June 26th, 2008
• The Greatness of Southpaws - June 26th, 2008
• Step One: Open mouth... - June 23rd, 2008
• Sobering Statistics and Economic Commentary - June 11th, 2008
• Obama: Humbly setting out to save the world - June 8th, 2008

Popularity: 39% [?]

The On the arrogance of the New York Times and how it helps McCain by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.