Update: Matt Bai has claimed in the NYT that Daily Kos rhetoric is as violent and reckless as the Republicans' (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/us/politics/09bai.html). Daily Kos people, we need to mount a response! Do we defend ourselves, or not? The purpose of this diary is to get a strong message to his editors that there is a big problem. It is not to get a letter published -- they never publish criticism of their reporting. We need a lot of letter-writers. PLEASE: rec this up, and write letters.
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The addresses to send letters are:
nytnews@nytimes.com
executive-editor@nytimes.com
public@nytimes.com
These are the news desk, the Executive Editor, and the Public Editor or ombudsman, respectively. You can also send something to the letters-to-the-editor page, letters@nytimes.com; however, I believe that is a waste of time, as they never print letters that are critical of their reporting.
I put the letter that I wrote after the jump. I encourage you to try to put something together in your own words, but feel free to use this as something to work off of. See also Warren S.'s comment below for a great short version.
THIS IS THE LETTER I WROTE:
In the public editor's Sept. 4 2010 column, he wrote, quoting from Matt Bai's editor Richard Stevenson:
"A news-page column like “Political Times” carries the “freedom to reach a reported conclusion,” he said. Not to “throw opinion around,” but to “express in a restrained and fact-bound way a conclusion about something.”"
Bai has long since shredded the idea of being "fact-bound". In particular, in search of false equivalence -- wanting to paint left and right, democrat and republican, as equally bad -- he seems to think he is entitled to just make up his own facts, either out of whole cloth or as a monomental distortion of a tiny thread.
For example, his Jan. 4 article, "Victory Alone Does Not Not a Mandate Make", was focused on how the Republicans and tea party may not have the mandate they imagine. For equivalence, he threw in the lines:
"It's also how Democrats elected in 2006 and 2008 came to enact a series of expensive new programs without ever really bothering to explain to the public why such investments were necessary or how they would be paid for."
The problem with this statement is, there were no such programs. Health care reform more than paid for itself, it reduced the deficit. Financial reform wasn't expensive. The stimulus package, the only expensive Democratic initiative that wasn't paid for, was a one-shot stimulus, not a new program; the reason why we needed a one-shot stimulus was explained over and over again; it was meant to be a shot of deficit (unpaid for) spending to get the economy back on its feet. So Bai was just making something up to achieve a false "balance", with no constraint to be bound by any facts.
Much worse is his article today about the shooting in Arizona. He starts with this:
"Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.
Odds are pretty good that neither of these — nor any other isolated bit of imagery — had much to do with the shooting in Tucson. But scrubbing them from the Internet couldn’t erase all evidence of the rhetorical recklessness that permeates our political moment."
This sounds like a nice equivalence of left and right, but the example from the left was an unbelievable distortion. Daily Kos is a site on which anyone -- anyone -- can post a "diary". It turned out that one individual had posted the diary referred to, and that individual had decided to delete their own diary after Giffords was shot (you can find this documented at http://www.dailykos.com/... and http://www.dailykos.com/... Furthermore the diary had not used any violent imagery or suggested any violence -- the phrase "dead to me" is a phrase used in religion when someone has left the faith, meaning you will have nothing more to do with the person, you will act as if they had died -- it does not mean a wish for them to be dead, any more than saying someone is "dead wrong".
So on the left, we have a single individual who decided of their own free will to take down something they had posted, which had not suggested any violence but sounded disrespectful after she was shot. This person had no influence or leadership role on the left.
On the right, we have repeated use by Republican leaders of violent imagery and language, and not a single word from any Republican leaders against such language. The example Bai gives is of the Republican vice-presidential candidate using images of rifle cross-hairs to indicate each of 20 democrats who should be defeated, including Rep. Giffords. Palin had also famously tweeted "Don't react, reload". Sharon Angle, Republican candidate for Senator in Nevada, talked about the need for "2nd amendment solutions". Gifford's Republican opponent Jesse Kelly had an event entitled "Get on target for victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly." Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachman said "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue", speaking about proposals for carbon cap-and-trade. No Republican leader has said a word against any of this.
So Bai makes a false equivalence between the violent official statements of multiple Republican leaders, never opposed by any other Republican leaders; and the actions of one individual with no leadership role, who suggested or implied no violence but used some language he thought in retrospect was disrespectful and so chose to personally delete it. Bai describes these in language that makes them seem equal and equivalent, in order to be able to decry "the rhetorical recklessness that permeates our political moment" with a false equivalency, without having to indict the one side that has actually been reckless. This is not journalism, this is not fact-bound, this is not even responsible opinionating -- this is pure and simple making stuff up, propaganda of the most base form.
Does the NYT have any standards at all? If so, I look forward to your retractions and to action to prevent such gross distortions and false statements in the future.
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NOW GO OUT THERE AND WRITE YOUR LETTER!
Thanks, All
UPDATE: After I wrote this I noticed this previous diary which also presented a letter to NY Times and urged others to write: http://www.dailykos.com/...