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02.14.07
Echidne asks a few good questions: why is William Donohue such a welcome guest in many political talk shows? Why does The New York Times allow itself to be used as his mouthpiece?
Donohue, as you probably know, is the sanctimonious blowhard who took to the airwaves in recent weeks in an effort to swiftboat the John Edwards campaign. He set out to defame the names of two women, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister, who had begun to blog for the campaign. Donohue called Marcotte and McEwan “anti-catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots,” which sounds harsh until you realize that, as Echidne points out, he has said the virtually same thing about everyone from Ann Landers to Bill O’Reilly. At The Daily Kos, Ciccina has catalogued a comprehensive list of Donohue’s quick-trigger intolerance.
Given Donohue’s history of bigoted speech — which includes numerous examples of anti-semitic, anti-gay rhetoric — we should be asking The New York Times and other media outlets why they allowed themselves to be used in a campaign that eventually that put the personal safety of these bloggers at risk.
After all, it’s not as if Donohue has been secretive about his motives or desires. In a recent Women’s Wear Daily profile , Donohue bragged about his ability to manufacture controversy:
BILL DONOHUE: THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE’S ATTACK DOG
In December 2005, a reporter from the Washington Post asked the Catholic League’s president, William Donohue, if he was offended that President Bush’s season’s greetings card did not specifically mention Christmas.
“At first, it didn’t bother me,” Donohue recalled in a recent interview. “I said, ‘So what. All presidents have had cards like this.’”
But when told by the reporter that everyone from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bill Clinton had at least one Christmas card where they mentioned something religious, Donohue pounced.
The following day, in the Post’s page-one story, Donohue rebuked the most conspicuously Christian president in 25 years for not being Christian enough. “This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” he said in the article.
“Good Morning America” booked Donohue for an interview. And the next year, the Catholic League’s president received an invitation to the White House Christmas party.
“Basically, I got rewarded for attacking him,” Donohue happily concluded. “Here at the Catholic League, we’ll give you an opinion on the weather if you want it.”
It’s this ability to manufacture controversy that has brought a moribund advocacy group firmly into the black and turned Donohue into catnip for the press. For talk show bookers and reporters on deadline, he’s a never-ending sideshow who comes ever ready to hurl expressions of indignation and opprobrium at anyone who might have offended him. As prejudice against individual Catholics has receded, Donohue has simply turned up the volume, taking aim at everyone who questions the church’s official positions on homosexuality, abortion and birth control, lapsed Catholics included.
Last year, Donohue urged Sony to put a disclaimer at the beginning of “The Da Vinci Code.” Then came Madonna - “Just when I thought we’d gotten rid of her,” he lamented - who yanked his chain when she decided to sing part of her concert against a cross. Just before Christmas, Donohue chewed out the film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein yet again for their decision to open the horror film “Black Christmas” on Jesus’ birthday. It’s at least the third time he’s attacked the filmmakers, the others being for the movies “Priest” and “Dogma.”
“It’s not so much the plot of ‘Black Christmas’ that bothers us,” Donohue told the New York Post’s Page Six. “It’s the fact that the Weinstein boys are back again, choosing a title and an opening date to make their latest statement.”
Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for the Weinsteins, said of Donohue: “He’s helpful to have. He raises money by getting his name in the paper, the movie gets press and the columnist gets an item. Everyone wins.”
But the same thing that keeps Donohue in the press prevents him from becoming truly respectable within the religious community, where his antics are a source of frequent consternation.
Mark Silk, director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College said, “He’s a thug. He reverts to bullying because he thinks that’s what the job entails.”
Rev. Mark Massa, a Jesuit priest and co-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, accused Donohue of being unable to differentiate between healthy debate and real religious bigotry. “Not everyone who criticizes the church is anti-Catholic,” he said.
The editors at the Catholic weekly magazine America seem to agree. In 2000, they chastised Donohue for denouncing movies he hadn’t even watched. “While being first may increase one’s chances of attracting media attention, there is a danger that the Catholic League reinforces the stereotype that the Catholic Church is at best unreflective and at worst unfairly biased and paranoid,” wrote Rev. James Martin. “In the long run, this may do more harm to the church’s reputation than a short-lived movie or play.”
Bitch Ph.D. argues that Donohue’s bullying tactics constitute abuse, and I’m inclined to agree: this episode has all the trappings of a Salem witch-hunt.
At the Frameshop Jeffrey Feldman has some specific suggestions about what we can do to prevent this from happening again the future:
Effective immediately, Frameshop is calling for the following actions to be taken against Bill Donohue and his followers:
- All Democratic and Republican Party leaders should jointly condemn the threats to sodomize, rape and murder of Amanda Marcotte by Bill Donohue and his followers.
- The IRS should immediately investigate the non-profit status of Bill Donohue’s Catholic League under the suspicion that his organization has violated its 501(c)(3) status.
- The Attorney General of the City of the New York should immediately inquire as to the connection between Bill Donohue’s and his followers who threatened to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte.
- The FBI should track down the men who issued the threats to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte .
- All media outlets must cease to invite Bill Donohue on the air.
Good suggestions, all. Here’s some information about implementing action number 2.
As Richard Blair points out at The All-Spin Zone, “Republican smear attacks against one Democratic candidate are attacks against all Democratic candidates.”
That this particular attack involved a widespread, misleading, defamatory personal campaign of harassment against two women whose positions Donohue routinely distorted, and that mass media outlets publicized without correction or contextualization, is an outrage.
It’s Salem all over again.
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By Matt
posted in Politics, Media Criticism, Blogs, Internet, Technology, Religion, Journalism, Newspapers, Magazines, The New York Times, Gender, William Donohue
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10.13.06
Today, I watched Oprah interview Frank Rich, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist, on her show; Rich is on tour promoting his new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina.
It was a cultural moment whose significance (like Oprah’s influence) should not be underestimated. You can read excerpted transcripts from the show on Oprah’s site, which includes a primer on developing critical literacy. Rich, who was, as always, an astute, eloquent, and observant speaker, described the deceptive selling of the War in Iraq and the ways in which those initial untruths have haunted the war (and the Bush Administration) ever since.
Speaking about media coverage of the war, Rich said:
The problem in Iraq is that it is so unsafe. A very brave war correspondent for the Times said two weeks ago that 98 percent of the country—and in Baghdad in particular—reporters can’t go to because it’s just too dangerous. More reporters have been killed in this war than any modern war. At a certain point, a place like the New York Times or ABC News has to say, you cannot get killed for the story. That in itself tells us something that the country is so unsafe that we can’t cover it. We rely on Iraqis to cover it and the Iraqis often are so frightened of being seen working for Americans that they won’t reveal their identities to their own families as journalists.
Oprah’s show was telecast only a day after a new report in The Lancet (free registration required) revealed just how superficial our knowledge of the war in Iraq really is. The Lancet study estimated that 665,000 “excess deaths” (see Majikthise’s post on the methodology) have occurred in Iraq since the U.S. invasion:
We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.
Think about that number for a minute. Or, devote a second to thinking about each one of those deaths.
What, you don’t have 655,000 seconds to spare?
According to this site, a city with a population of 655,000 people would rank as the eighteenth largest city in the U.S. — above Baltimore.
And to George W. Bush, it’s all just a comma.
655,000 excess deaths. A city bigger than Baltimore. It boggles the mind.
Rich didn’t mention the Lancet study, which was mostly likely published after the show was taped. But he did talk about the television coverage of the war. He noted that the networks presented us with long shots of bombs exploding, but that we never saw the street-level effects of those bombs. It was like a fireworks display, he said. Another guest, Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, added that no country would be able to sustain war if citizens were able to see its real consequences.
One woman got up and said that she had never thought about the television coverage in that way — that she had never considered the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and babies who died in those attacks.
655,000 excess deaths: it’s long past time for Americans to start thinking about that.
Postscript:
It’s exactly the type of person who hasn’t thought much about the Iraq War that Oprah’s show is able to reach.
Oprah mentioned during the broadcast that when she did a show, before the beginning of the Iraq War, that asked “Is War the Only Answer,” she got the worst hate-mail of her entire career in television. One correspondent called her an “incredible treasonous bitch.” Another said, “I wish you would choke on the ashes of 9/11.” One person told her to “take your hairy black ass back to Africa.”
I think it’s important that readers of this site thank Oprah for doing this show. In one hour of broadcast television, she brought Frank Rich’s analysis of “truthiness” into more living rooms than most bloggers could ever hope to reach. Please write to her here.
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By Matt
posted in Politics, Books, Movies, Music, Television, Media Criticism, George W. Bush, War in Iraq, Journalism, Newspapers, Magazines, The New York Times, Bush Administration, Oprah
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09.27.06
You can try to find the word “torture” in this New York Times article on the Republican “Detainee Bill,” but you won’t be able to locate it. You’ll see only vague wording about “a new approach” and “wring[ing] information from terrorists.”
Hey — if the senators voting on this bill aren’t going to think about what it really entails, why should journalists have to?
Make them.
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09.15.06
NPR’s “Here and Now” featured an excellent discussion this morning on the topic of How the U.S. Media Covers Torture.
It was an examination of a new article in the Columbia Journalism Review called Failures of Imagination. The article provides more evidence that U.S. newspaper editors buried important news stories about torture that, had they been given adequate attention in 2003, might possibly have prevented the later abuses at Abu Ghraib:
[ New York Times reporter Carlotta] Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.”
Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”
Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.)
“Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.”
Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)
Gall, who is British, chalks up the delay to reluctance to “believe bad things of Americans,” and in particular to a kind of post-9/11 sentiment. “There was a sense of patriotism, and you felt it in every question from every editor and copy editor,” she says. “I remember a foreign-desk editor telling me, ‘Remember where we are — we can smell the debris from 9/11.’”
[. . .]
The skepticism back in 2003 about Gall’s findings wasn’t limited to the Times. The evidence of homicides got only a short mention on CNN and a brief write-up inside The Washington Post. The biggest follow-up came not in any American paper but in the Sunday Telegraph of London.
“There was no great urge to follow up,” Gall says. “Nobody went to the doorstep of the pathologist or anything like that, until of course Abu Ghraib. And I don’t know why.”
The next time you hear a conservative talking about “the liberal media,” ask him or her whether newspaper editors were right to bury reports of torture in 2003. Not that it will make any difference . . . the conservative fantasy of “the liberal media” is antithetical to everything we know about the reality of coverage of the War in Iraq.
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By Matt
posted in Politics, Media Criticism, War in Iraq, Journalism, Newspapers, Magazines, The New York Times, Conservative Ideology, Abu Ghraib, Torture, Bush Administration
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08.15.06
New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame has confirmed that the paper had the NSA Wiretapping story days before the November 2004 Presidential race was decided, but sat on it because editors thought that its publication could affect the outcome of the election.
According to Calame, Executive Editor Bill Keller has provided a shifting series of rationales for the publication delay:
Internal discussions about drafts of the article had been “dragging on for weeks” before the Nov. 2 election, Mr. Keller acknowledged. That process had included talks with the Bush administration. He said a fresh draft was the subject of internal deliberations “less than a week” before the election.
“The climactic discussion about whether to publish was right on the eve of the election,” Mr. Keller said. The pre-election discussions included Jill Abramson, a managing editor; Philip Taubman, the chief of the Washington bureau; Rebecca Corbett, the editor handling the story, and often Mr. Risen. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, was briefed, but Mr. Keller said the final decision to hold the story was his.
Mr. Keller declined to explain in detail his pre-election decision to hold the article, citing obligations to preserve the confidentiality of sources. He has repeatedly indicated that a major reason for the publication delays was the administration’s claim that everyone involved was satisfied with the program’s legality. Later, he has said, it became clear that questions about the program’s legality “loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood.”
[. . .]
Holding a fresh draft of the story just days before the election also was an issue of fairness, Mr. Keller said. I agree that candidates affected by a negative article deserve to have time — several days to a week — to get their response disseminated before voters head to the polls.
Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings argues that, while it might have been reasonable for the paper to give the Bush administration a day or two to respond, it had an ethical, moral, and journalistic obligation to publish the story before the election:
The press has obligations not just to the administration, but also to their readers. If a story seems likely to affect an election, that’s presumably because a lot of readers think that it’s important — the sort of story that would actually affect their vote. That being the case, newspapers have an especially strong obligation to get their facts right. But it also means that it is especially important to publish those stories — at least if you believe in democracy. If a newspaper does not have “several days to a week” to get a response from the administration, then both the paper and the administration should make do with a day. If the administration can’t give a response within whatever time frame they are given, the paper should run the story while noting that fact. But to adopt a policy that essentially guarantees that literally nothing a President or his administration do during the last week of a campaign will be covered if it’s damaging to them would be insane.
In this particular case, the Times could have given the administration ample time to respond. It could have consulted outside legal experts to determine whether the NSA program was legal, and if it had doubts it could have explained them. It had every opportunity to publish the story fairly. It did not do so. And by failing to do so, it failed in its duty to inform us of facts relevant to one of the most important decisions we make as citizens. The Times was wrong to think that holding the story was required by “fairness” to the administration, and wrong again not to recognize that publishing it was required by fairness to its readers.
Obviously, the Times was unwilling to put itself, and its reporters, in the crosshairs of the Republican attack machine. At the moment of truth, it shrunk from the spotlight and kept its head down. By sitting on the story, the paper chose to commit a powerful act of journalistic weakness, rather than a powerful act of journalistic courage.
But that hasn’t stopped the paper from crowing about its integrity. Consider this claim, from a June 2006 editorial:
Our news colleagues work under the assumption that they should let the people know anything important that the reporters learn, unless there is some grave and overriding reason for withholding the information. They try hard not to base those decisions on political calculations, like whether a story would help or hurt the administration.
Right. Perhaps its time for another correction.
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08.08.06
Tom Watson has put up an excellent post, Anti-Feminism on the Left, that criticizes Maureen Dowd’s most recent NY Times column (TimesSelect) for its sniping, anti-feminist tone:
Well, you see Maureen, about that tone. You wouldn’t use it on a man. You used it because Mrs. Clinton is a woman, the first in U.S. history with a real shot at the Presidency. Now, the points she raises are mostly valid - to see how it’s done without snarling “bitch” in the gutter, read Bob Herbert’s column the next day. He nails Mrs. Clinton for her war positions, and hits damned hard. But there’s no gender implications in his prose. Herbert treats Mrs. Clinton as if she’s the real deal, someone worthy of detailed public attack. In other words, as a man.
As I wrote in Tom’s comments, I can’t bear to watch Dowd repeat her petty 2000 election act six years later. Perhaps the only saving grace here is that with the advent of TimesSelect, Times columnists have much less reach than they used to. Thank Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. for small favors.
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07.17.06
The New York Times reports this morning that President Bush used an expletive while talking to British Prime Minister Tony Blair:
He went on to say the U.N. should directly enlist the Syrians to intervene. “I feel like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen,” he said to Mr. Blair, referring to Syria’s president, Bashir Assad.
“See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” Mr. Bush said.
The web edition of the Times initially reported Bush’s word as “[expletive]”; it has since put the word “shit” onto its web page, figuring, I guess, that you can’t write an entire article about a curse word without revealing what that curse actually was.
The Times also tells us that Bush made the remark while he “thoughtfully chewed on a roll.” I ask you to watch the video for yourself, and decide whether you would describe his mastication in the same way. To me, he looks like a cow chomping on a piece of cud. Don’t they teach table manners at Andover?
The incident is perhaps a minor one, but it nevertheless reveals something about Bush’s “diplomacy.” Recent Time cover stories notwithstanding, it appears that “cowboy diplomacy” remains the lay of the land.
James Wolcott argued recently that the real problem on the world stage has to do with the overproduction of testosterone — or, as he put it, “male arrogance and insanity sheathed in metal.”
In light of today’s diplomatic incident, I find it hard to disagree — the current warmongering and posturing does seem emblematic of “brute expressions of patriarchal force.” And, though Wolcott’s post does reify traditional gender stereotypes, it’s hard to complain about that at a time when many world leaders are living up to them.
Update: Here’s Billmon’s take on today’s events.
Update 2: I’d like to note that the NYT article linked at the top has been rewritten completely since I wrote this post . . .
Update 3: Eli has the perfect follow-up to this post. Bad touch! Bad touch!
What a freaking creep.
Update 4:
Wolcott: Roving Hands
But Bush has always been a taker, not a giver. He wasn’t giving Merkel a massage, he was taking possession of her, letting everybody know, “This little lady’s mine.” I wonder what Merkel’s husband thought of Bush’s handy familiarity. I can’t imagine Laura Bush was too thrilled.
Dowd: Animal House Summit
No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of the free world, he brings the same DKE bearing and cadences, the same insouciance and smart-alecky attitude, the same simplistic approach — swearing, swaggering, talking to Tony Blair with his mouth full of buttered roll, and giving a startled Angela Merkel an impromptu shoulder rub. He can make even a global summit meeting seem like a kegger.
[. . . ]
He treated Tony “As It Were” Blair like the servant in “The Remains of the Day,’’ blowing off his offer to help with the Israel-Lebanon crisis, and changing the subject from substance to fluff at one point, noting about his 60th-birthday Burberry gift: “Thanks for the sweater. Awfully thoughtful of you.’’ Then he razzed the British prime minister, who was hovering and wheedling like an abused wife: “I know you picked it out yourself.”
After doing his best to undermine the U.N. and Kofi Annan, W. talked about the secretary general like a fraternity pledge he wanted to send out for more beer or a keg of Diet Coke: “I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.’’
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06.26.06
In his review of Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012, Jarhead author Anthony Swofford writes:
Pinchbeck’s thinking suffers from the deep navel-gazing that comes so naturally to this son of urban humanist materialist liberals, the very class he disparages for their atheism, passivity and greed. Not that he is off the mark. Most of the people who once sang Beatles anthems and marched for civil rights are now more concerned with the stock market and real estate — not to mention the quality of the new sod job at the golf course — than with world peace or the welfare of indigenous peoples. But haven’t we known this for at least two decades?
– The New York Times Book Review, June 18, 2006
Based on this passage, which of the following statements appear to be true?
A. Liberals have really deep navels.
B. Urban humanist materialist sods tend to be liberal.
C. David Brooks better watch his back.
D. All of the above.
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09.20.05
The columns of many writers at The New York Times are syndicated in newspapers around the country that don’t charge for access. John Tabin noticed this, and just created a new blog called Never Pay Retail, which is dedicated to tracking down alternate versions of recently published columns.
Seems like a slight oversight in the TimesSelect plan, no?
UPDATE 9/21/05: As commenter Mr. Snitch notes, it looks like the NYT has plugged the hole.
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09.20.05
Letter From the Editor
 Taking inspiration from TimesSelect, today tatteredcoat.com launched a new subscription service, TatteredSelect, an important step in the development of The Tattered Coat.
Subscribers to TatteredSelect have exclusive online access to many of our most influential posts in exciting categories such as Caption This Photo, Cat Blogging, Friday Random Ten, and Parse This™. In addition to reading our stimulating prose, TatteredSelect subscribers can stimulate themselves and others through comments and Tattered Talk™.
All of our inane ramblings, ostentatious wordplay, and hokey humor will remain free to readers of tatteredcoat.com, as will our doctored graphics, hotlinks, and popular colorized-photo contests.
As part of TatteredSelect, The Tattered Coat is also opening up its paltry archive of articles reaching back eight months and eventually back to the blog’s founding in November 2004. TatteredSelect subscribers are also welcome to read the author’s dissertation drafts, provided they have sufficient quantities of Maalox and codeine on hand.
For almost a year our readers have asked for seamless access to The Tattered Coat’s historical archives; sadly we will not make this available as part of TatteredSelect, because yesterday’s news can already be found on website of The New York Times, provided readers are “Haves.” The “Have-Nots” can find all the historical information they need on McDonald’s souvenir cups, Cracker Barrel candy boxes, and Bazooka Joe gum wrappers.
TatteredSelect subscribers can also benefit from several online services. Readers can avoid work by striving to comment on each and every Tattered Coat post. Recent Comments is a powerful alert service that keeps readers abreast of the latest comments on the blog. Live blogging of important events such as Eagles games and the Oscars will keep busy readers up-to-date.
TatteredSelect costs $49.995 and will be free for RSS subscribers to the blog.
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