NYT ombud: Trust us, we’re unbiased

With a tough presidential election on the horizon, media outlets relish the demand that the battle will bring for news and feature coverage.  In order to get those readers, though, the media outlets have to be perceived as reliable and trustworthy.  That brings us to a rather humorous column from the New York Times’ public editor — their version of an ombudsman — Arthur Brisbane, in which he addresses the disparity in scrutiny of Mitt Romney over the sitting President in recent Gray Lady coverage.  Brisbane criticized his paper four weeks ago for an over-the-top slam of an investment by the blind trust set up for Ann Romney, and apparently that’s part of his argument that the Times will provide fair coverage of the upcoming general election — despite the suck-up coverage given Barack Obama in his first term.
No … really:

According to a study by the media scholars Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter, The Times’s coverage of the president’s first year in office was significantly more favorable than its first-year coverage of three predecessors who also brought a new party to power in the White House: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
Writing for the periodical Politics & Policy, the authors were so struck by the findings that they wondered, “Did The Times, perhaps in response to the aggressive efforts by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to seize market share, decide to tilt more to the left than it had in the past?”
I strongly doubt that. Based on conversations with Times reporters and editors who cover the campaign and Washington, I think they see themselves as aggressive journalists who don’t play favorites. Still, a strong current of skepticism holds that the paper skews left. Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by collateral factors — for example, political views that creep into nonpolitical coverage.
To illustrate, Faye Farrington, a reader from Hollis, N.H., wrote me earlier this year in exasperation over a Sunday magazine article about “Downton Abbey,” the public television series, in which the writer slipped in a veiled complaint about Mitt Romney’s exploitation of the American tax code.
“The constant insertion of liberal politics into even the most politically irrelevant articles has already caused us to cancel our daily subscription,” Ms. Farrington wrote, “leaving only the Sunday delivery as I confess to an addiction to the Sunday crossword.”
The warm afterglow of Mr. Obama’s election, the collateral effects of liberal-minded feature writers — these can be overcome by hard-nosed, unbiased political reporting now.

Stop it — you’re killing me, Arthur!  Seriously, I can’t quite catch my breath from laughing out loud.  Brisbane gives us two of the most obvious cases of bias and says that this editorializing can be overcome by trusting the same people not to editorialize in news stories in the next six months.  One can imagine Lucy telling Charlie Brown much the same thing right before pulling the football away for the 50th year in a row.
The story on Ann Romney’s blind trust is one good data point that shows the problem doesn’t just lie with “liberal-minded feature writers.” By definition, a blind trust keeps the owner from making or even knowing of the financial decisions made by the trustees.  Ann Romney isn’t the candidate.  How, then, is this a news story in the presidential race?  Mitt Romney cut his ties to Bain in 1999, long before the company invested in the Chinese company in question.  Ann Romney’s blind trust has a “relatively small stake” in Bain Capital Asia fund in question, and she didn’t direct the purchase.  Furthermore, the trustees bought the stake before the fund invested in Uniview.  Does this tell us anything about Ann Romney, let alone Mitt Romney?  Of course not.  But the Times certainly didn’t mind tying both of them to Chinese surveillance.  Spooky!  Who gave that story the green light?  The editors, that’s who, not “liberal-minded feature writers.”
Here’s one data point omitted by Arthur Brisbane in his “trust us” missive: Vicki Iseman.  That was just one example of the NYT’s “hard-nosed, unbiased political reporting” in the 2008 election.  The Times endorsed John McCain in the Republican primary — much as they did today for Mitt Romney — and less than a fortnight later accused him of having had an affair with a lobbyist based on innuendo provided by a couple of disgruntled former low-level staffers.  The story was absurd, and the Times later tried to backpedal furiously from their insinuations by saying that the relationship was merely inappropriate and not necessarily sexual. The paper was roundly condemned for their yellow-journalism story, but I don’t see Brisbane discussing that in yesterday’s column.
The Times also went after McCain for his medical records in May, which he released as planned anyway.  What really went on in that incident?  The McCain campaign excluded them from a media pool during the release of the records, no doubt for payback on their Iseman smear.  The NYT then threatened to write negative editorials about his medical records if they were not added to the pool, which they did when the McCain campaign refused to knuckle under to their extortion threat.  The “hard-nosed, unbiased political reporting” that followed included two separate articles whining about their exclusion from the rather large pool at the McCain event.
So forgive us for laughing at you, Arthur.  You gave it the ol’ college try, but after watching the Times at work four years ago — and before and since then, too — we’re not about to trust the Gray Lady in 2012 to behave responsibly.
Update: Vinny Gambini said it best:

Jon Huntsman: You know the GOP this year kinda reminds me of Communist China

Via Buzzfeed, former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman reminds us why he received the most favorable coverage from the media, and yet consistently polled at or near the bottom of the heap before dropping out of the GOP race.

Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa last August, Huntsman says he was struck by the question “Is this the best we could do?”
Huntsman, the former Utah governor and once President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to China, expressed disappointment that the Republican Party disinvited him from a Florida fundraiser in March after he publicly called for a third party.
“This is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script,” he said.
Huntsman said he regrets his decision to oppose a 10-to-1 spending cuts to tax increase deal to cut the deficit at the Iowa debate lamenting: “if you can only do certain things over again in life.”
“What went through my head was if I veer at all from my pledge not to raise any taxes…then I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining,” he explained. “What was going through my mind was ‘don’t I just want to get through this?’”
That decision, Huntsman said, “has caused me a lot of heartburn.”

His comment comparing the GOP to the Communist Party in China is so outrageously outrageous that you have to wonder whether this was a lame attempt at a joke. He’s now claiming his comment was taken out of context (of course), but I think more than anything this is just sour grapes on Huntsman’s part. He actually embarked on this campaign of running (well) to the left of mainstream conservatism soon after the 2008 election, and really has never let up. What did he expect from the GOP after he expressed support for a third party run by someone more moderate than…Mitt Romney? There is no surer way to ensure Barack Obama is re-elected in November, and given how Huntsman has positioned himself it’s not hard to imagine that he envisions a political climate more receptive to his particular charms in 2016. A big tent is one thing, but it’s generally expected that you remain in the tent if you want to continue as a member of the party.
And what exactly does Huntsman regret about his opposition to any tax increases at the Iowa debate? That he didn’t tell the truth? What, does Hunstman think if he had answered this question more honestly that somehow the outcome of his candidacy would be any different? This can’t possibly be the case and I can only surmise that his real regret is losing a measure of credibility with all those reasonable (non-communist) Republicans, not to mention his friends in the liberal media.
Having closely followed Huntman’s campaign from its outset, I think I can accurately recount the question most conservatives were struck by when they were introduced to his campaign:
Who?
But considering the amount of money spent on Huntsman’s campaign, and his ultimate failure to gain traction with even one single contingent of the Republican party, the real question we should be asking is…why?

Today’s outrage: Romney looking forward to more vacations in … France

Alternate headline: “Confirmed: He’s a RINO.”
No, I kid. Romney’s fondness for France is, I think, already common knowledge among righty activists thanks to Newt running one of the dumbest attack ads of the primaries against him back in January. It’s not purely academic either: He spent two and a half years there in his early 20s on his LDS mission and evidently liked it enough that he’s willing to give this answer even now, despite the fact that “French” has always been a byword for elitism in some parts of America. Kind of nice to see him being unabashedly honest, the political consequences be damned. The lefties at HuffPo and Daily Kos have seized on the clip as evidence of hypocrisy because Romney once criticized The One for taking “elaborate vacations” as president, but watch and you’ll see that that’s a red herring. Romney never says he wants an “elaborate” vacation (unless all French getaways are inherently elaborate) and he never says he’d take vacation there during his presidency. What this is about is clear enough from this aside in ABC’s write-up:

“The best memories were with my wife on vacations from time to time in France,” said Romney, who has been criticized for being “out of touch” and has made several comments that have highlighted his wealth during his campaign.

Just the ol’ “France = elitism” charge coopted for the Democrats’ messaging about Romney’s wealth. (In the dKos post, he’s referred to at one point as “Mr. Car Elevator.”) The GOP had fun using John Kerry’s Frenchiness against him eight years ago, but anti-French sentiment was much higher then because of their opposition to the war. If Romney had to run in an age of “freedom fries,” would he have given this same answer?

Video: Romney sides with Obama in supporting extension of low student-loan rates

Remember that NYT piece last week wondering about friction between Romney and the House GOP as as he tacks towards the center for the general election while they try to hold the line on the right?

Here’s the first wisp of smoke.

“I fully support the effort to extend the low interest rate on student loans,” Romney said at a joint news conference with Florida Senator Marco Rubio. “There was some concern that that would expire halfway through the year, and I support extending the temporary relief on interest rates for students as a result of student loans, obviously, in part because of the extraordinarily poor conditions in the job market.”

In publicly breaking with his own party, Romney is taking away a potential wedge issue for President Obama’s campaign — and giving hope to Democrats that they may find new momentum for the legislation [to extend the rates]. The deadline for the current, low interest rates to expire is July 1…

Republicans oppose the bill in part on the grounds that it isn’t paid for…

Asked whether House Republican leadership would get behind Courtney’s bill, given Romney’s comments, a spokesman for Speaker John Boehner was non-committal.

GOP Rep. Jeff Landry told the Times last week vis-a-vis Romney, “We’re not a cheerleading squad. We’re the conductor. We’re supposed to drive the train.” We’ll find out soon how true that is, but in the meantime read this Daily Caller piece from Friday explaining succinctly what a clever trap this was for Democrats to set. It’s not just that the extension isn’t paid for that bothers Republicans, it’s that lower rates keep the higher-education bubble inflated and keep the Democrats’ pals in academia flush with cash. But with the lower rates set to expire automatically in July, Romney was in a bind. If he sided with Obama, there’d be instant agita within the GOP that our “Massachusetts moderate” nominee is already going wobbly on spending. If he sided with House Republicans, Obama would spend the next week bashing him for hating kids and education and the middle class and all things good and true. In fact, The One actually organized a multistate trip and an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show expressly for that purpose.

Romney chose door number one because he thinks he has a shot at winning young voters, or at least at enough young voters to make Obama’s lift that much heavier in November. One out of every two new college grads is unemployed or underemployed; among 18-to-24 year olds, fewer than 50 percent say they’d like to see a second term for O. Romney’s not going to hand Obama an excuse to get an otherwise ambivalent core constituency excited, especially when the cost of extending the lower rate is “only” $5.6 billion this year. He can agree with him on this and then bash him on bigger spending items (I think/hope). Besides, Romney’s probably looking for a high-profile issue on which to distinguish himself from House Republicans. He’s already praised Ryan’s budget so he’s checked the “fiscal conservative” box; now he’s going to do something for centrists and independents by daring Boehner to undercut him. He likely figures that, with the primary set to unofficially end tomorrow night in Pennsylvania and the general election to start in earnest, the House GOP will be reluctant to kneecap him on a relatively small-ticket item. And if they do, that’s fine: Centrists will feel reassured that he won’t necessarily be led by the right and conservatives will turn out to vote for him against O in November anyway.

Exit question one: Romney will definitely man up and have that “serious conversation” with America about entitlement reform when the time comes, right? Exit question two: Does this mean, contra David Plouffe, that he really isn’t the, er, most conservative nominee since Goldwater?

Hmm: Marco Rubio schedules “major speech” on foreign policy

Every move he makes from now until Romney chooses a VP will be seen through the lens of veepstakes maneuvering, no matter what Rubio’s true motivation might be. That said, it’s hard to believe the timing of this announcement is a coincidence. Today was his first big photo op with Romney on the stump, and speculation about Rob Portman has been much hotter lately than speculation about Rubio himself. This looks like his way of reinserting himself into the conversation and blunting the criticism that he’s not yet ready to be president in a pinch. Foreign policy is as core an Article II function as it gets, so here he comes to show that he’s qualified:

    Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida will deliver what his staff bills a “major speech on the future of U.S. foreign policy” this week, the senator’s office announced Monday.

    Rubio, considered to be a top vice presidential pick for likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney, is set to speak Wednesday at The Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.

    His remarks will focus on “whether U.S. global leadership is sustainable and even necessary in the 21st Century,” his staff said in a statement, without releasing further details.

I’m keen to hear what he says this time because thus far Rubio’s distinguished himself as being a hawk in the neoconservative mold. Watch the second clip below of him making the case for nonmilitary intervention in Syria to help the resistance free the country from Assad. He’s right in line with McCain, Lieberman, Graham and other prominent Senate hawks on that. Is Romney willing to double down on interventionism by choosing him as VP when even a majority of Republican voters lately say they want out of Afghanistan? In one sense, there’s little risk to doing so since Obama’s hands are tied on the issue; the guy who ignored the War Powers Act to join a coalition in Libya isn’t about to knock anyone else for being too interventionist. (So hawkish is Rubio that he passed on a chance to criticize Obama for that in his WSJ op-ed on Libya last year, even though it’s the worst case of overreach in Obama’s experiments with executive power.) The question is, after 10 years of war, are there more votes to be had among centrists and indies by taking a more cautious line? What does having an outspoken interventionist on the ticket do to help Romney?

Should be interesting — especially his thoughts on how much longer to stay in Afghanistan.
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Paul captures 20 of 24 Minnesota delegates in CD conventions

It’s tough these days to be a Republican in Minnesota.  While the party managed to take control of both chambers of the state legislature in 2010 for the first time in decades, the organization is deeply in debt, thanks to mismanagement under previous leadership, and seems at times in total disarray.  A sex scandal in the state Senate leader’s office that forced then-majority leader Amy Koch to give up her position didn’t help either.  The latest stumble has national implications, however:

    Minnesota will send 40 delegates to the Republican National Convention. Twenty of the 24 delegates based on congressional districts were awarded to Texas Rep. Ron Paul in selection processes that concluded this weekend.

    Thirteen Minnesota delegates will be allocated based on the results of a statewide convention in May, according to Paul campaign senior adviser Doug Wead.

    Wead wrote on his blog that GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is an a “panic” after the Paul landslide. Similar efforts to bolster the Texas congressman’s delegate count are underway in Iowa, Colorado, Maine and other states.

    “[A] number of Romney Hawks are now deeply concerned that Ron Paul has already laid the groundwork for similar success in six more caucus states,” Wead wrote.

In Minnesota, delegates get chosen in congressional-district conventions, and they are not bound to any candidate.  I ran for one of these positions in CD-02 on Saturday as part of a “unity slate” backed by GOP candidates for leadership positions in the organization.  None of us even came close to winning; we later found out that the closest anyone else came to winning those slots was more than 100 votes behind the second and third place finishers, who tied.  The same tie occurred when electing alternates.

So what happened?  Paul supporters organized at the local level and got themselves elected as delegates to CD conventions.  They then showed up to the conventions — unlike some others — and played by the rules.  At our convention, there were no disruptions, no demonstrations, no attempts to hijack the proceedings.  The Paul supporters just organized effectively and outboxed the party establishment.  My radio partner Mitch Berg reported that the same thing happened in CD-04, but worries more about what comes next:

    Some of their leadership was motivated by fairly palpable anger over the “way they were treated in 2008″, when quite a few GOP activists gamed the system to keep the first wave of Paul supporters out of power.  To their political credit, they spent their four years organizing, and did a good job of it.

    Less to their credit?  While anger is a good motivator, “anger at the inner workings of a political party” has, I’m going to guess, a short shelf life.   And at least in the Fourth CD, the anger was manifested by ballot.  The twitter stream during the convention indicated that at other districts, Paul supporters booed Dan Severson and Pete Hegseth, whose main transgression was “not being Kurt Bills”, the Paul crowd’s candidate for Senate, or refusing to stand to support John Kline at the 2nd District convention when he was re-endorsed. …

    While the crowd of Paul supporters at the convention Saturday carefully replaced their “Ron Paul” posters and stickers with “Kurt Bills” goodies, and voted to endorse Tony Hernandez by a 190-5-5 margin (after running a skillful campaign to win support from most of the establishment and Paul crowds), I have yet to hear a lot of support for, or even especially much awareness of, races farther down ticket or, more importantly, for candidates who get endorsed even if they’re not on the Paul slate.

    Now, I know that there are a lot of good, committed people among the Paul crowd who are committed to using their positions in the GOP to work for the party, not just a candidate or two.

    But I get a different impression from some of their leadership.  Ronald Reagan once said that if someone agrees with you 70% of the time, it doesn’t make them 30% your enemy.

    And from some of the Paul crowd’s leadership, I do get the impression that, whether motivated by single-candidate zeal or roiling anger over 2008 or one of the mind-boggling number of byzantine interpersonal pissing matches that seems to motivate so much of CD4 GOP politics no matter who the nominee or the cause celebre or what the defining issue is, the Paul crowd’s leadership, in the district and beyond, sees “70% friends” as “30% enemies”.

The Paul campaign wants to believe that they can replicate this outcome in other caucus states, and it’s certainly possible.  But in Minnesota, they had an opening left by a party in serious disarray.  How serious?  They may soon find themselves homeless:

    The Minnesota Republican Party is facing eviction for nonpayment of more than $111,000 in rent at its longtime headquarters near the Capitol.

    Republican Party Chairman Pat Shortridge tried to assure party faithful on Monday that he expects the party will keep its home office, but acknowledged that the party has not paid a full month’s rent for a year.

    “We’re not going to be evicted,” Shortridge said, although the eviction matter is due to be heard in Ramsey County District court next Tuesday. He added that the party is “continuing to negotiate on the back payments as well as on a lease that better fits both our space needs and our budget.”

    The possible eviction is the latest blow for a state Republican Party that is swamped with debt and financial problems. The party, $2 million in arrears on bills and debt related to the 2010 gubernatorial recount, is being investigated by the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board for inaccurate campaign reporting.

This isn’t the fault of Shortridge, who just recently took the party chair position to try to right the ship.  The state GOP has had to focus on rebuilding its fiscal position more than the internal and external politics of the 2012 cycle.  Without that kind of focus, the party didn’t have the resources to deal with the Paul organization, and the delegate wins are one consequence.  That’s actually a minor consequence compared to what will happen if the state GOP doesn’t recover in time to organize for its effort in November to hold their legislative advantages, to say nothing of the mission to replace Amy Klobuchar in the US Senate.

Even if the Paul organization managed to steal a march in the caucus states, it’s not likely to damage Mitt Romney, at least not directly.  Rick Santorum was winning more of the caucus states, so the delegates will mostly come from his column, not Romney’s.  The only real threat will be that Paul delegates might embarrass the party at the convention by staging some kind of organized demonstration, but Ron Paul himself would probably keep that from happening; he wants to build the organization so that his son can use it within the GOP, not to excise Rand from the GOP.  And once again, the Paul supporters in the CD-02 convention didn’t aim at disruption at all — just victory for their cause.

Tragic turn to NC Democratic Party turmoil

We’ve had some fun with the scandal in the North Carolina Democratic Party leadership so far, but the latest update from the Daily Caller takes a turn for the tragic.  The man at the center of the scandal, former executive director Jay Parmley, had been accused of sexual harassment against a former male employee, which the party settled with a sealed agreement.  However, Parmley has also been accused by his former girlfriend of infecting her with HIV, and offering health insurance through the party afterward:

    Rebecca Burgin, a long-time former girlfriend of former North Carolina Democratic Party executive director Jay Parmley, told The Daily Caller that she believes Parmley infected her with HIV.

    Parmley resigned on April 15 amid sexual harassment allegations from a former young male staffer.

    Burgin, a 29-year-old Oklahoman, has shared her story with TheDC, including the revelation that Parmley’s lawyer offered her health coverage, paid for by the Democratic National Committee, to manage her illness. She ultimately declined that offer, fearing it would constitute insurance fraud. Parmley, she said, abandoned her a few months later.

    On April 13, TheDC first exposed allegations, leveled in December by former North Carolina Democratic Party communications staffer Adriadn Ortega, that Parmley showed him a picture of a penis, gave him unwanted shoulder rubs and made apparent sexual advances toward him. Ortega also alleged that Parmley discussed with him in detail his past sexual activity, including “solicit[ing] sex from gay websites.”

    Parmley’s ex-girlfriend Rebecca Burgin told TheDC that Parmley forever changed her life by making her HIV-positive. She’s worried, she said, that Parmley may have done to someone else what he did to her.

Be sure to read it all.  When she approached Parmley about her HIV-positive status, he told her he wanted out of the relationship.  Later, she hired an attorney who got the NC Democratic Party to offer her what was essentially family coverage on Parmley’s employment status.  However, Burgin eventually wondered whether that would be legal at all, since the relationship was over and the two no longer shared a household, and instead opted to pay for COBRA coverage herself.

This makes the scandal much more grim, and it couldn’t come at a worse time for North Carolina Democrats — and Barack Obama.  He’s due to speak in Chapel Hill today, but don’t expect him to discuss gay rights issues, even though Democrats are pushing against Amendment One:

    Two weeks from now, North Carolina will hold a public referendum on what could become one of the toughest anti-gay measures in the country: a far-reaching proposal to amend the state constitution to ban civil unions and domestic partnerships. But President Obama is not expected to touch the subject when he appears in Chapel Hill on Tuesday — even though it is roiling the electorate there.

    Instead, Obama will talk about college loans, his aides said, kicking off a two-day, three-state tour designed to energize the youth vote. His delicate sidestep of Amendment One, a ballot initiative to be decided May 8 that would recognize marriage between a man and a woman as the only legal domestic partnership in North Carolina, is seen by some as another sign that he is not fully committed to gay rights — an interpretation that could dampen the enthusiasm of the young voters he is trying to court.

    “It’s a little bit of a missed opportunity,” said Josh Orol, 20, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leader of a campus movement to defeat Amendment One. “I didn’t expect him to talk at length about it. I know he has come out publicly against it. But I sort of hoped he would at least name-drop a little bit. It’s disappointing.”

I guess Obama is still evolving on same-sex marriage.  The tragic turn in the Parmley scandal won’t make it any easier. In the meantime, keep Rebecca Burgin in your prayers.