On October 15, Bob Dole gave a major speech in California attacking Bill Clinton’s character. The next day’s Washington Post reported it atop the front page. But the New York Times buried its story about the speech on page A15, choosing instead to run not one, but two news analyses about the speech on its front page, evidently considering its own interpretation of the news more important than the news itself.
That’s not surprising. For truth be told, the Times has been utterly out of it this election season. Part of the problem seems to be partisan news judgment by the editors in New York. On October 12, for example, the editors put the rah-rah headline “President Wins Tomato Accord for Floridians” on the front page, while the Post made the decision more on newsworthiness when it put this minor story on page 12 under the more straightforward headline, ” U.S., Mexico Reach Tomato Accord.”
The Times has shown itself comically unsophisticated to boot. On Sept. 29, it ran a breathless frontpage story featuring the astonishing revelation that while Jack Kemp had been a supply-sider in the 1980s, Bob Dole had not!
Worst of all, the Times has wildly overemployed the cheapest of all tricks, the mood-of-the-people piece. That’s when a reporter interviews 12 ” average folks” and miraculously discovers that the mood of the people confirms all of the reporter’s pre-existing prejudices. This is a newspaper version of the focusgroup fraud Andy Ferguson wrote about two weeks ago.
