David Tell, opinion editor
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THE NEW YORK TIMES has lately come under a barrage of media criticism, not all of it from "the right," about the extent to which editorial bias has infected the paper's hard news columns. And already some of that criticism has been directed specifically against the paper's A-section reporting on its own, proprietary public opinion research (commissioned in partnership with CBS News). So what I'm about to offer isn't exactly without precedent. The bias in question, however, may well be without precedent; I can't remember anything quite like it, at least. "Poll Says Bush Needs to Pay Heed to Weak Economy," written up by Times correspondents Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, and awarded pride of place--the front-page lede--in yesterday morning's edition, isn't just slanted (or misleading or imbalanced or overstated or any other word commonly applied to such things). The story is an outright fraud, a falsehood, a work of fiction.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. In their most recent effort to limn what the "public says," Times/CBS News researchers have surveyed 668 Americans (over three days, October 3-5). And from the resulting Times story, you'd think all 668 of those Americans have said the same thing, over and over again. "Public Says Bush . . ." has a single theme, introduced immediately in the sub-heds ("Many Fear Loss of Jobs; Poll Finds Lawmakers Focusing Too Much on Iraq and Too Little on Issues at Home") and then hammered away relentlessly over the 33 paragraphs--plus boxed chart--that follow.
"A majority of Americans
say [sic] that . . . President Bush and congressional leaders are spending too much time talking about Iraq while neglecting problems at home," Nagourney and Elder advise us in their first sentence. No hard numbers in support of this judgment appear on page one, but just before the story makes its jump to page A14, we do get to meet 42-year-old Gladys Steele of Seattle, identified as a "politically independent" homemaker. Ms. Steele, speaking as Everywoman, apparently, says "Bush is spending way too much time focusing on Iraq instead of the economy, and he's doing it as a political move."
After the jump, Nagourney and Elder remind us that Democrats have "grown glum about the upcoming election," imagining that the Bush White House has "successfully drowned out domestic issues"--read: Democratic issues--with all this talk of war. "But," the authors continue, the new Times/CBS poll "suggests" that voters are actually "more concerned about the economy and domestic issues than with what is happening with Saddam Hussein, presenting the Democrats a glimmer of hope." Here, too, no statistical substantiation is offered for this conclusion, though we're led to believe one does exist: "On a number of measures, the poll suggested that politicians in Washington were out of step with the concerns of Americans. Again and again, in questions and in follow-up interviews, respondents talked more about the economy than Baghdad and expressed concern that leaders in Washington were not paying enough attention to the issues that mattered to them."
Along with Gladys Steele, Nagourney and Elder mention two other Americans who think Congress and the president should de-emphasize foreign policy in favor of home-front economic security. Michael Chen, a 30-year-old independent in Beaverton, Oregon, says "There is no balance right now. . . . No one is talking about how to solve the economic downfall." And another independent, 44-year-old Geoff Crooks of Lincoln, Nebraska, says "We are paying way too much attention to Iraq."
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