An opinion piece disguised as a news piece

(Please scroll down for Sunday PM update II)

Where else but the NYTimes? Check it out here and let me know what you think. I want to elaborate more on the biased nature of this article when time permits. This is media bias at its most classic.

Logging off now but will be back on later today to release comments and perhaps do some light posting before going out tonight.

Sat. PM Update: Check the headline of this Washington Post piece. “Dry tears’?? Just one more example of overt liberal media bias.

Sun. PM Update: I just got done writing a mini-dissection of this article, tried to save it, and lost my connection in the process. The dissection is gone :( but the comments section in the post makes most of the points I wanted to quite well – I had attempted to expand on them when my connection was lost. Grr! I’m going to eat my lunch, and come back and attempt my dissection again in a little bit.

Sun. PM Update II: Ok, let’s try this again. The tone was set from the outset with the headline and that was a tone of the President deliberately ignoring news of troop deaths, as though it’s standard operating procedure for the President to talk about troop deaths at Rose Garden appearances that are designed to focus on the economy – or for that matter, as though the President should stop everytime news of another troop death is announced and acknowledge it publicly. We know he doesn’t do that, nor should he – nor should any other president for that matter. Troop deaths are obviously going to happen in a war, but what the media (and no doubt the writer of this piece) would like for the President to focus on is not the overall picture, but the casualties of war. The media’s philosophy has been for the last several decades “if it bleeds, it leads” and apparently they believe the President ought to follow their obsession with negative news coming out of Iraq including any and all bombings – especially those that involve US troops or Iraqi children.

A particularly interesting part of the article was this one:

The intensity of the public relations effort was especially striking given the news that the White House was citing. The gain of 215,000 jobs in November was certainly healthy and signaled that the hurricanes had not dented the economy much, but would not typically be the kind of development that would lead to a Rose Garden appearance by Mr. Bush. During the eight years of the Clinton administration, the economy generated an average of 240,000 jobs a month.

The writer throws in a ridiculously irrelevant comment about Clinton in the latter part of that paragraph, while oddly acknowledging in the first part of it the key reason why the WH thought it was so important to hold the Rose Garden appearance in the first place: in the aftermath of the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, many thought the economy would tank. It hasn’t, and recent economic figures indicate that it’s sailing along nicely in spite of what happened in the Gulf in August and September with the hurricanes. How Katrina was going to affect the economy was big news back in September, but now obviously it’s not – at least not to the writer, who would rather the President focus on a discussion of troop deaths – than anything else. I’m not sure why the mention on Clinton’s ‘average jobs created’ comment, considering the fact that Clinton did not face back to back hurricanes of the magnitude of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which also means he didn’t have to worry about how the economy was going to recover from back to back hurricanes of that size and strength. So why the Clinton mention? Well, perhaps it’s just the writer’s way of ‘reminding’ us of ‘how good’ we had it under Bubba, even though Bubba did not come into an economy that was sinking, nor did he face a terrorist attack on the scale of 9-11, nor did he have to deal with two hurricanes which hit not far apart from each other, wiping out entire cities and putting one partially under water.

And some people wonder why the American people think the economy is in the tank? Your evidence is in this opinion piece, disgused as a legit news article.

Related: Rob at Say Anything notes an AP opinion piece disguised as a news story. Sigh. (Thanks for the tip, Baklava)

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