Gray Lady Down Read online

  A dozen years later, in the 2007 article, the Times did finally get around to acknowledging the problems at St. Christopher’s—problems in its racial philosophy and also in its operational administration. But by then the damage had been done. “Children with St. Christopher’s, city records show, were abused or neglected at disturbing rates,” the article reported. “Family Court judges and lawyers cited the agency for years for ineptitude in handling children’s cases. In 2002, St. Christopher’s got so few children adopted that the city gave it a grade of zero in its performance scoring system. And from 1999 to 2005, seven children whose families had been involved with St. Christopher’s wound up dead.”

  To be sure, the Times’ approach to the black family has undergone welcome change, as its retrospective on St. Christopher’s shows. In a mid-2005 column headlined “Dad’s Empty Chair,” Bob Herbert wrote: “I don’t have the statistics to prove it, but black kids would be tremendously better off if the cultural winds changed and more fathers felt the need to come home.” For Herbert it was an easy call: “Moms are crucial. Dads too.” Yet if we—and the Times—are at what the sociologist Kay Hymowitz calls a cultural inflection point that portends change, “the lost generations of ghetto men, women, and children” could be forgiven if they found “cold comfort” in this much-overdue shift.

  A double standard has been manifest in how the Times treats black political figures, going easy on black demagogues such as Louis Farrakhan and machine politicians such as New York City’s first black mayor, David Dinkins. And it has practically given a gold-plated free pass to New York’s premier racial agitator, Al Sharpton.

  No matter what his sins against the civic fabric—Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, the Harlem Massacre at Freddy’s Department Store—Sharpton has been rehabilitated on a regular basis. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1993, the Times Magazine ran a cover story called “The Reformation of a Street Preacher.” Omitting his more incendiary remarks during the 1991 Crown Heights riots and his controversial actions at other racially fraught moments, the magazine said that Sharpton was now “softer, more focused, more intellectually polished.” His comments about “white interlopers” had certainly raised the rabble in the 1995 Harlem Massacre, which culminated when a black militant set fire to a Jewish-owned department store next to a black-owned record business that was losing its lease, after which he shot a number of the department store’s employees, resulting in seven deaths in addition to that of the gunman, who took his own life. But the Times threw another life preserver to Sharpton, who was “Buoyant in a Storm” according to a report by Charisse Jones. Ignoring the damning evidence of his role in the massacre, Jones said that Sharpton was playing the role of “consoler, conciliator and political jouster.” She even let Sharpton claim the victim’s mantle: “In my life I’ve had to walk alone sometimes.... I’ve been lied on, I’ve been talked about, mistreated, stabbed and indicted. But through it all, I’ve learned to trust in Jesus. I’ve learned to trust in God. It’s only a test.”

  More recently, in 2008, Sharpton attached the loaded term “greedy” to Anthony Weiner, a New York City councilman (now a U.S. congressman) who is Jewish. The slur elicited no response from any Times columnists or its editorial board. As the urban historian Fred Siegel observed in the wake of the Harlem Massacre, “After each major outrage, Mr. Sharpton draws in the press and some selected rubes, and assures them that this time he’s really reformed.” And the Times—along with other media—effaces the facts of Sharpton’s role from the public record “Stalinist-style,” stuffing them down a “memory hole.”

  It’s one thing for the Times’ double standards to throw a lifeline to a race hustler like Al Sharpton, allowing him to secure respectability as a national civil rights leader despite an ongoing record of racial arson. Yet it was something else when the Times became a pep squad for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. When John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, said during the campaign that the Times was “completely, totally, 150% in the tank” for Obama, he was dismissed as a biased observer. But the charge itself sticks. Mark Halperin, a straight shooter from Time magazine, uses the New York Times’ reporting as Exhibit A in making a case that coverage of the 2008 campaign was “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.”

  Halperin did not analyze the underlying reasons for that bias, but looking through the Times’ coverage it is absolutely clear that the favoritism is racial. The first and foremost example of favoritism toward Obama in the New York Times was the protective coverage it offered regarding his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama had belonged to Trinity United for nearly two decades, and credited Wright’s sermons as a major factor in bringing him to Christianity. Obama was married there and his two daughters were baptized there too. Wright blessed Obama’s house, and Obama says that one of Wright’s sermons furnished the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope.

  In a sermon delivered on the Sunday after September 11, 2001, Wright notoriously told his congregation that the United States had brought on al-Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism:We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

  Other sermons included charges that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill black people, and that Israel and South Africa invented an ethnic bomb that would kill Arabs and blacks but spare whites and Jews. Wright endorsed Louis Farrakhan—anti-Semitism and all—and traveled with him to visit Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He called the United States “the U.S. of KKK A,” and recommended that the slogan “God bless America” be changed to “God damn America.”

  Yet even with all this material so readily available, when Obama disinvited Wright from making the invocation at the official launch of his presidential campaign in March 2007, the Times reported on Wright’s radical comments in a way that blandly euphemized them, and characterized Trinity United as a “mainstream” church, scrubbing the more extreme aspects of its Afrocentric theological bearings. A follow-up article by Jodi Kantor at the end of April referred to Wright as “a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.” Kantor referred to Wright’s “assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government,” but left out the “God damn America,” and instead of reporting that Wright believed and preached that the U.S. government invented AIDS as a tool of racial euthanasia, she merely said that “Like conservative Christians, he speaks of AIDS as a moral crisis.” Of the controversial 9/11 remarks, she simply wrote that “On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies.”

  Kantor also gave Obama a wide berth to contextualize Wright’s remarks and explain how he was probably “trying to be provocative.” Reverend Wright was “a child of the 60s,” Obama noted, “and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through.... He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.”

  In March 2008, almost a year after Kantor’s airbrushed pieces, ABC News broadcast the most incendiary of the clips from Wright’s sermons it had secured, including “No, no, no, not God bless America; God damn America!” This triggered a media frenzy, putting Obama in the harshest spotlight he would face in his campaign.

  The Times duly reported on the controversy, and finally reported Wright’s inflammatory remarks about 9/11, although it didn’t directly quote “God damn America” in any news story and didn’t addr
ess Obama’s blatant lies about not knowing of Wright’s offensive statements. Even some Obama backers, such as Gerald Posner, were dubious: “If the parishioners of Trinity United Church were not buzzing about Reverend Wright’s post 9/11 comments, then it could only seem to be because those comments were not out of character with what he preached from the pulpit many times before.”

  The “no-go” zone that the Times erected around Obama also encompassed “black liberation theology,” to which Reverend Wright was committed. On the Trinity United website, Wright cited James Cone, a professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, as the one who “systematized” this strain of Christianity. Cone had written, “If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.” In the Times, however, black liberation theology came off merely as something “different” from what whites were used to hearing.

  According to Jodi Kantor’s first article in 2007, black liberation theology “interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.” A longer analysis by Michael Powell in May 2008, headlined “Race and the Race: A Fiery Theology under Fire,” called Reverend Wright a “man of capacious learning and ego,” and “one of the foremost adherents of this [black liberation] theology.” Powell quoted James Cone in a jocular mood, chuckling as he remarked, “You might say we took our Christianity from Martin and our emphasis on blackness from Malcolm.”

  For his part, Obama would not give up Wright. But as pressure mounted, he and his campaign decided that Obama should make a major speech on race in America, a speech which some later saw as one of American political history’s great orations, while others dismissed it as a “subject-changing speech.” There was some criticism of the speech at the New York Times. Maureen Dowd saw through the lofty rhetoric and charged that it was pitched to superdelegates queasy about Obama’s spiritual guide, the virulent racial pride, the separatism, the deep suspicion of America and the white man—the very things that Obama’s “postracial” identity was supposed to transcend. Dowd, almost alone, underscored the fact that Obama had now reversed his previous statement that he had never heard any of Wright’s controversial remarks while he sat in the pews. But she also lent a note of tough-love support: “Leaders don’t need to be messiahs.”

  Yet almost everything else the Times ran on the speech was celebratory, with the editorial, op-ed and news pages so harmonically converged that it was hard to tell the difference. There was no notice, let alone evaluation, of Obama’s equating his grandmother’s private prejudices with the systemized racial hatred that underlay Wright’s comments and worldview. Nor did anyone at the Times note the speech’s central contradiction, as Rich Lowry did, that “In the end, Obama made the case for the respectability of a man who is a hater—and did it, amazingly enough, in a speech devoted to ending divisiveness.”

  Janny Scott’s starry-eyed “news analysis” called it “a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.” While it acknowledged the country’s troubled racial past, she wrote, “the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American—delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes.” Scott also quoted Obama supporters and longtime activist-intellectuals like John Hope Franklin and a tearful Julian Bond, but her analysis featured no one with a less triumphalist point of view.

  Under unremitting pressure, although not from the Times, Obama eventually gave up on Wright and cut his ties to Trinity United Church of Christ. Wright made a series of appearances where his fury was noticeable and bizarrely expressed. In late April 2008, for instance, he gave a televised sit-down interview with Bill Moyers, a speech to the NAACP, and a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. In his publicity trifecta, he claimed that attacks on him and Obama were really attacks on the black church. He refused to apologize for his “God damn America” remark and also refused to retract his claim that AIDS was an invention of the U.S. government, citing the Tuskegee experiment to argue that the government was “capable of anything.” Along the way, he also compared U.S. troops to the Roman legions who murdered Christ.

  The Times barely covered the Moyers interview and the NAACP event, but finally, after the Press Club appearance, did a front-pager on the publicity spree. Yet the effect of the piece, written by the television reporter Alessandra Stanley and headlined “Not Speaking for Obama, Pastor Speaks for Himself, at Length,” was to trivialize the issues raised by the whole controversy. “Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous, but most of all, he was all over the place, performing a television triathlon of interview, lecture and live news conference that pushed Mr. Obama aside and placed himself front and center in the presidential election campaign,” Stanley wrote. “And he went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics.”

  Meanwhile, the Times’ coverage of the McCain campaign was riddled with unfair political characterizations and cheap shots, delving into the personal lives of the candidate and his wife, Cindy, with journalistic ethics worthy of the National Enquirer. Part of the problem was the depth of coverage, as well as the tone. A careful analysis by the TimesWatch website of the coverage from June 5 to July 5 found that of the 90 stories the Times did on Obama, 40 (44 percent) could be classified as positive portrayals, while only 13 (14 percent) were negative, for a positive-negative ratio of 3:1. The remaining 37 were described as neutral. During the same month, the Times published 57 stories on McCain, of which only 9 were positive (16 percent), compared with 24 negative (42 percent) and 24 neutral. This made for a positive-negative ratio of nearly 1:3, the opposite of Obama’s positive ink.

  The Obamamania of the Times also surfaced in stories about political rallies along the campaign trail. Obama’s were portrayed as something like transcendental be-ins, with huge crowds, exhibiting political intelligence as well as diversity. By contrast, McCain’s rallies were depicted as being filled with “Weimar-like rage,” as Frank Rich described it, alluding to pre-Nazi Germany.

  The Times went disproportionately hard on McCain’s campaign advertising as well. Ads that questioned Obama’s honesty were dismissed as either misleading or a breach of the civility that McCain had originally pledged. Ads that questioned the politically explosive subject of Obama’s association with the former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers were criticized as the hack work of right-wing zealots and an echo of the Swiftboat crew from 2004.

  One particularly egregious case of double standards involved a McCain op-ed piece backing “the surge” in Iraq that the Times rejected shortly after it had run one against the surge by Obama. The Columbia Journalism Review, hardly a right-wing publication, said that the Times’ “tenuous arguments about [the] newsworthiness” of McCain’s op-ed fed “the paper’s reputation as a vehicle for thinly veiled liberal bias.” In a cable segment on the issue, the former Clinton press aide DeeDee Meyers said it was a “legitimate question” to ask how “balanced” between the two candidates the coverage was. Even some Timesmen were scratching their heads. On the cable show Hardball, the paper’s political writer John Harwood said: “The question is how different is the standard when you are talking about a nominee of a major party to be president of the United States.... I was surprised that they did not take it, especially having just run Barack Obama.”

  But it was the Times’ disparate treatment of the candidates’ personal lives that most clearly underlined a pro-Obama bias. Exhibit A was the front-page investigative report that was intended to be a window into McCain’s reputation as a reformer, a reputation he made after an early fall from grace involving the “Keating Five” banking scandal. But the story quickly became notorious for insinuating that McCain had had an affair with a lobbyi
st more than thirty years his junior—without ever citing anything resembling journalistic proof, except the accusation made by one admittedly “disgruntled” former staffer. At least 20 out of the article’s 61 paragraphs concerned the alleged romantic relationship. The McCain campaign denounced the “gutter politics” of the Times and its “hit and run smear campaign.” The article also drew criticism from the paper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, who scorned editor Bill Keller’s explanation that the story was about McCain’s reckless behavior and potential conflicts of interest, not about an affair.

  A late-campaign profile of McCain’s wife, Cindy, reflected the same hostility. Written by Jodi Kantor, whose reporting on Jeremiah Wright had been understanding to an extreme, the story was a hatchet job of the first order and catty to boot. Kantor claimed that Cindy McCain was not liked by other congressional wives and was so neglected by her husband that her parents occasionally bought her presents on his behalf. In an effort to impeach her truthfulness, Kantor criticized Cindy’s assertion that she had gone to Rwanda during the genocide for relief work when she had “only” gone to the Rwanda-Zaire border. It was later learned that Kantor, in trying to get a take on what kind of mother Cindy McCain was, had actually gone on Facebook to contact some of her daughter’s friends.