The New York Times is apparently employing RW think tanks to write its news articles

[brentspeak]

The following article is not labeled as "opinion" by the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/weekinreview/02jad.html?ref=us

The Spill vs. a Need to Drill

By JAD MOUAWAD
Published: April 30, 2010

snip

But whatever the magnitude of the spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, it is unlikely to seriously impede offshore drilling in the Gulf. The country needs the oil — and the jobs.

snip

But are there acceptable alternatives?

“A fossil-fuel free future isn’t inconceivable but it is decades away,” wrote Samuel Thernstrom, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, on The Times’s Room for Debate blog. “Meanwhile, we can’t drill our problems away, but drilling still has a role to play.”

[uppityperson]

1. More on the author and there is editorializing in the article but no, NYT doesn't.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/jad_mouawad/index.html?inline=nyt-per
"Jad Mouawad is the airline correspondent for The New York Times. From 2004 to 2010, he covered the global energy industry, reporting on oil and gas developments around the world, OPEC politics, and renewable energy.

Before joining The Times, he was a reporter for Bloomberg News in Paris for four years, writing about business, telecom, and the Middle East.

Mr. Mouawad was born in Beirut, Lebanon. He graduated from Brown University in 1995 and later earned a master's degree in political science from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. He lives in New York City."

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Sadly, this trend has been ongoing since the first Bush stolen election.

THIS kind of crap is why calling the NYTimes a LIBERAL paper is so sickening. They are anything but that.

There were articles in the NYTimes during the last 10 years that could have been written by Karl Rove or
Frank Luntz themselves.

I cancelled my subscription years ago..and have not missed it.

The irony is that now their audience is not the liberals that once read their pages, and
due to that, they will probably lose much of their readership to the newly minted "Greater New York"
section of Rupert Murchoch's latest conquest, the Wall Street Journal.

I think the irony here is that if they had bothered to keep their "liberal" bent, and kept those readers,
they would not have to worry about losing them to the WSJ.

They made their bed, now they have to lay in it.

[whyverne]

3. Well if the gulf becomes a gigantic cesspool of deadness.

Yeah, you might as well keep drilling then I guess.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. But it is "analysis" and you conveniently forgot to mention the...

quote from the NRDC, balancing the one from EI.

Aside from ration cards for plastics, heating oil, and gasoline, do you have any solution to the increased use of petroleum products worldwide?

Not windfarms or biofuels 20 years in the future, but something that could be an alternative starting next month. Next year even.

(And they say ony teabaggers and rightwing blowhards attack with selective quoting.)

[Overseas]

6. But the point is-- had we started when they gave us this same excuse 30 years ago,

we would be in a much better condition today-- economizing on fuel usage through all the ingenious conservation and sustainable technologies we would have been able to have up and running more broadly by now.

The oil boys stalled us with those same excuses decades ago, and our national energy plans subsidize fossil fuels with all kinds of tax breaks that allow them billions in profits. And friendly deregulation to make their lives even easier-- coastal smaller businesses be damned.

Had we funded alternative renewable energy and conservation technologies with as much devotion as our fossil fuel giants, we would have a much better balance of energy use today. So that we would not have to begrudge poorer countries the oil they want to catch up a bit to our lavish lifestyles.

We still have lots of exciting options but they need funding and that would be a great deal more productive for our country than tax breaks for oil giants that don't bother to use the best available safety technology for deep well drilling.

We really need deversification and decentralization of our power sources. That is important to our national economic survival. It has also deserved to be a bigger part of our national defense for decades now. But that logical plea has been shoved aside by the fossil fuel giants and other multinational corporations serving their quarterly profits rather than our countries' long term health.

[TreasonousBastard]

7. But we didn't, and Carter's intiatives were laughed at by half the country without...

any help from oil and coal lobbyists. Rush Limbaugh wasn't even around then to take him on.

So, coulda, woulda, shoulda is all very interesting, but just what are the available solutions NOW?

[BeFree]

14. Obviously there are few

Conservation (bad word) is the first and wisest response. But conservation is lacking in profits.!! So too, is solar found lacking.

Coulda have spent a few extra bucks to make sure this well didn't blow.
Ahhh, but that would mean less profits. We're in a hole, eh?

[Overseas]

15. Oh no, Carter was laughed at with major help from Right Wing PR.

Papa Ron was introduced-- it was "Morning In America"-- we didn't need to mess with constraints of any kind. Junk bonds. S&L bailouts.

Major PR assistance. Major right wing campaigning. Party hearty!

Instead of celebrating the amazing ingenuity of conservation and renewable resource technologies and leading the world in that way back when-- conservation and alternative technologies were depicted as having to give up our comforts.

Major PR and right wing tactics were at work-- http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html

[brentspeak]

9. Oh, it's an "analysis"

Balanced, too!

:eyes:

Like a Fox News "analysis", it was "balanced" by a prefacing quote from an environmentalist group which, the writer says, is given to "railing" ...with the last word given to an industry front-group (one that is not labeled as such as it should have been).

Enlighten us here why would any respectable news analysis worth its salt would quote the American Enterprise Institute for any reason.

As Mark Twain said: It is better to keep one's mouth shut...

[Hannah Bell]

16. I heard that shit since the 60s. phoney then, phoney now.

[jotsy]

5. I've boycotted this place as a source and rarely rec threads when their articles

are used as the meat of a post.

In support of Bradblog, his Velvet Revolution, and reverence for ACORN, I denounce them as much as they have any truth on matters of mass relevance. The Breitbrat bunch belong behind bars for the way they do what they see as the job, but the publication referenced to here has a much greater responsibility to its own reputation and history to serve the needs of a contemporary public, rather than be reduced to a megaphone for the machine we call a corporatocracy which rules both realms of the major political parties.

[Captain Hilts]

12. The NYT has been at the forefront of exposing and explaining the financial crisis. Still is. nt

[jotsy]

13. I prefer at this point to rely on other sources, tyvm.

The Center for Responsible for Responsible Lending
Naked Capitalism
DU's own Stock Market Watch, always available with links to even more.

I'm not asking anybody to do anything different, one of my favorite articles to refer to for info on the class warfare issue is from the summer of '05, published by this establishment and I choose not to suggest it as part of a stand I choose to take. For me it is a question of falling down on the job and then being in absolute denial that that is the case. This infraction has impeded my trust for what they have to say across the board.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

8. Ah, geez.

This is a Week in Review piece. Week in Review is opinion and analysis. It's not hard news.

[TreasonousBastard]

10. Of course, but any excuse to slam the Times seems to OK. Common Dreams...

Alternet and the Daily Show are the only real news.

(Did I forget the God and Goddess of evening cable TV?)

[uppityperson]

11. aw come on, you're ruining all the fun.

I know, it's opinion, analysis, editorializing