Sometimes the one-liners under the headlines that appear in the NYT's RSS news feed can be most instructive. I saw one today that prompted this letter to the Times' Public Editor:
Dear Mr. Hoyt:
Good God, sir, when will you people get it? You appear to be still under the spell of the long-debunked trope that "America is a center-right nation."
I'm referring to the RSS feed for your news articles, which, as a subhead for the story "Congressional Memo: For Democrats, Cracks in a United Front" states "Unlike centrist colleagues, Senator Charles E. Schumer, right, is pushing a public option."
This is brazen if disingenuous distortion of the truth. If the concept of "centrist" has any meaning at all, it means "aligned with the majority of the voting public," and your own story notes that "[recent] polls [including some done for the Times in the last week] show significant support for a public option despite months of criticism from Republicans, who describe it as a government takeover of health insurance." (A fine example of "he said, she said" waffling, I note in passing.)
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You don't say what you mean by "significant," but figures I've seen indicate that roughly 3/4 of the public wants a public option (in spite of the Democrats' inept marketing of the concept).
So, let's see: Schumer's pushing for something that a large majority of Americans want makes him a flaming liberal, while those in the minority position are somehow "centrists."
Could you please get all of your reporters and editors to erase "America is a center-right nation" from your collective memory banks, and focus on the plain facts in front of you for once?