In 2000 the NYT forbade Krugman from saying bush was lying

[cthulu2016]

A litle aside that says a mouthful...

January 13, 2012, 9:00 am
Paul Krugman
Untruths, Wholly Untrue, And Nothing But Untruths

I was deeply radicalized by the 2000 election. At first I couldn’t believe that then-candidate George W. Bush was saying so many clearly, provably false things; then I couldn’t believe that nobody in the news media was willing to point out the lies. (At the time, the Times actually told me that I couldn’t use the L-word either). That was when I formulated my “views differ on shape of planet” motto.

...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/untruths-wholly-untrue-and-nothing-but-untruths/

[snagglepuss]

1. I saw this in another thread. Absolutely shocking that the Times was explicit.

This comment needs to be front and center as it puts the lie to the constant BS that the media is 'librul'.

[cthulu2016]

5. Yes, I think Prosense posted the blog entry

I wanted to focus on the speciffic parenthetical jaw-dropper, but the whole piece is good and worth everyone's attention.

[EFerrari]

14. This is in response to the pubic editor asking if the NYTs

should be the arbiter of truth, i.e., by reporters calling out lies or not calling them out.

Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?


http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/should-the-times-be-a-truth-vigilante/

Unreal.

[BeyondGeography]

2. Not surprised...The Times' coverage of the 2000 campaign was a signature moment in their decline

They helped deliver the White House to W., legitimizing all the nitpicky bullshit that the Cons were throwing at Gore. This was back when their imprimatur still mattered a little, and they squandered it. An ideal jumping off point for Judith Miller/WMD a couple of years later.

[EFerrari]

15. Followed by 2004, when thousands of people mailed the Public Editor

demanding that the Times cover Ohio, and we were told there was no story there.

And then, the Times did not cover the sabotaging of the Ohio recount.

[ProSense]

3. In 2010,

the NYT offered an excuse for not calling waterboarding "torture"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x361953

[zipplewrath]

7. Basic problem with the modern/current definition of "objective"

The functional defintion in our media is to imply that all points of view/assertions/explanations are equally "valid". Nothing could be further from the truth. Opinions from "biased" sources should be treated as just that. Information from biased sources should be scrutinized more than objective sources, not the same.

It's not about "taking sides". It is about presenting information with the proper context, and presenting biased information in the same context as objective information distorts both sets of information.

[tclambert]

20. Well said.

In times past, journalists, real journalists, had a motto: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

[City Lights]

4. Explains a lot, doesn't it?

.!. to the NYTimes.

[Uncle Joe]

6. I'm convinced the corporate media enabled Bush to power while slandering/libeling Gore primarily

because Al Gore was indeed the leading political champion for opening the Internet to the people.

As the Internet grew, the owners and upper managment; came to see it as a direct threat to their monopolistic, top down, one way business model of information distribution and dissemination to the people.

The corporate media knew their power, influence and wealth would wane as a result of this democratization of information, so they played Zeus to Gore's Prometheus but instead of sending a vulture to eat an eternally healing liver, they sent their pundit mouthpiece buzzards to dine on Gore's credibility with a continous near two year war of slander and libel ie: "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" etc. etc. etc. while they gave a corrupt, incompetent Bush a free pass to the White House.

The corporate media could never bring themselves to give Gore credit for his legislative achievements and vision, just derision in spite of the revolutionary, First Amendment magnifying power of the Internet.

Countless people have died as result and corporate supremacists have gained major advantages over the people from this betrayal by the corporate media against any concept of a public duty or good.

Thanks for the thread, cthulu.

[FredStembottom]

23. Reasonable surmise, Joe.

I will never forget the skewed coverage of that election!

[leveymg]

8. The real lie is that Bush and Reagan were too dumb, drunk or senile to know they were lying

When The Times lies, it's the official record. They've been changing history often and repeatedly for decades.

[saras]

9. The NYT has been CIA since Nixon. They print the truth often enough to sustain their reputation...

...when they squander it on important CIA cover stories. The Bushite plunderers found this wonderfully effective (although corrupt) mechanism and gutted it to sell the metal to a scrapyard.

[JackRiddler]

18. Untrue.

The NYT has been CIA since CIA.

http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

[bullwinkle428]

10. Big Media in general totally pulled the wool over the eyes of so many

in this country with regards to Bush...

[cthulu2016]

11. ...

[Dawson Leery]

12. The corporate media made sure to do everything they could

to had the 2000 election to Bush.

[fishwax]

13. wow

I'm surprised to hear it, and yet I feel I shouldn't be. Perhaps I'm more surprised to see it made public than I am that it happened.

[senseandsensibility]

16. Please read the whole Krugman piece

Of course the NYT deserves scorn, but the info about Romney's stump speech is appalling as well. He really needs to be called on it.

[tclambert]

21. Yes, it reveals that Romney lies about his own first name. It's Willard!

[jsmirman]

17. The question of "should they challenge 'facts'" is so shocking

I hardly know what to say.

YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FUCKING JOURNALISTS, HELLO!!!!

There's nothing partisan about demanding that someone tell the freaking truth.

To seek the truth, to inform...

What in hell are "facts" anyway? No such thing! They call those "lies."

This would be comedy if it weren't so serious.

I tend not to go along with any broad conspiracy theory about this. I think they are so cowardly, so cowed by Republican cries of "unfair!" any time they insist on controversial stuff like, "the earth is round," so uncertain of what the hell it means to be a journalist, that this pitiful plea for a clue is the result.

And they wonder why no one's found any particular value to their product in the internet age. Feckless losers who obviously went into the profession just to see their names in print.

[tclambert]

22. Part of it is cost cutting. When corporate vultures took over the media, they laid off fact checkers

because they cost money. It's so much more efficient to just quote what people say, or reprint their publicists' press releases, than spend lots of person-hours trying to verify the content of what people said. So he lied? It's still true that he said it. So superficially the paper didn't lie in reported that he said it.

[Gregorian]

19. Don't rock the corporate boat.

Imagine, if this is the long standing benchmark in journalism, what the remainder of so-called media outlets are publishing.

It's total garbage. What the hell is the fourth estate there for, anyways?

I think this is really a massive story. We already knew this, but now we "know" it.

[spanone]

24. followed by judith miller and her utmost support of going to war with iraq

[Festivito]

25. Oh, LEFT-WING MEDIA, there you go again.

.... oh .... crap.

The right-wingers who own it are crap.
The left-wingers who know better still print crap.
The idea of a left-wing press is crap.

We're all in a big and smelly pile a crap, but we can't figure out why, can we.

[Major Hogwash]

26. It was as if we were living on a different planet that year.

I was totally shocked that no one was calling out Bush as a huge liar on many of the issues that year.
I got so angry about it, I wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to my local newspaper about him.
And they refused to print it!
At first, they gave me half a dozen reasons why they wouldn't print it.

So, I resubmitted my letter about 4 more times until they did print it, about a week before the election.
I could not believe the ridiculous arguments the LTE editor was giving me in our e-mail exchanges for not printing it sooner.

[surfdog]

27. Oh the irony

The times won't let him call out a liar , but will allow him to call this recovery a depression , and in fact let him redefine the words "recession and depression"

He can post all the lies he wants in the paper , just can't use the word liar

What a hack