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Times Watch for
August 16, 2004
Sharon’s “Hysterical Opposition”
to Hope in the Middle East?
James Bennet files a long Sunday magazine profile of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, “Sharon’s Wars.” Bennet, who just stepped down as Jerusalem bureau chief, showed a consistent pro-Palestinian bias in his reporting, and his interview with Sharon marks no change, from the unflattering close-up on the cover to the article’s subhead, which reads: “He alarms the West, enrages the Arab world and is now under attack from his own right wing.”
The rest of the article does little to soften up the cartoon portrait of Sharon as warmonger: “It was not so long ago that Sharon and his memories of blood were the stuff of history and hysterical opposition to everything that seemed hopeful--to the Oslo peace process, to the negotiations that brought Palestinians to the verge of statehood and Israelis to the verge of the safe, welcomed society they dreamed of. When the Palestinian uprising brought his view of reality back into fashion, Sharon was ready. It was his chance to further, if not finish, the job he began after Latrun: defining Israel's boundaries and its very identity.”
Even the blurb for the magazine’s table of contents almost calls Sharon an extremist: “His decisions to build a barrier against the West Bank Palestinians and to uproot Israeli settlements in Gaza have left him vulnerable to constant threat not only from Palestinian militants but also from his own extremist right.”
Bennet’s actual article contributes to the labeling bias: “Far-right ministers who hoped Sharon was bluffing or who thought they could restrain him were realizing he would not be stopped, and they were starting to bolt.”
He insists: “Whether arising from hubris, hard experience or superior judgment, Sharon's ferocious pursuit of his own visions for Israel and the region previously brought him into collision with American administrations.”
Near the end Bennet notes: “Sharon views Jews around the world and in Israel as under threat from rising anti-Semitism. Two days before I saw him, the World Court in The Hague condemned as illegal those segments of Israel's new barrier that stand inside the West Bank. Sharon saw the decision as pure evil. I asked what he thought it would take for Israel to be fully accepted in the world.”
After Sharon’s comment, Bennet takes the side of the notoriously anti-Israel World Court, while suggesting Israel itself is somewhat to blame for anti-Israel feelings worldwide: “It may be that the world is blind to the anti-Semitism that feeds its criticism of Israel. But Sharon appears blind--maybe willfully so--to the rising anti-Israeli-ism in what he sees as anti-Semitism. The World Court did not rule against Jews. It ruled against Israel, and the fact is that the barrier is built partly on occupied land.”
For more of Bennet’s long profile of Sharon, click here.
• James Bennet | Israel | Labeling Bias | Magazine | Palestinians | Ariel Sharon
Maureen Dowd, Sensitive as Ever
Maureen Dowd pushed her new column collection “Bushworld” on Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher show on HBO. Maher questioned Dowd about Laura Bush’s recent comments on stem-cell research: “Why is she an expert on something so technical?"
Dowd replied with her usual grace and sensitivity: "Because Karl Rove thinks that if the Bush White House gets four million more evangelical votes than they did last time it ensures Bush's re-election, which means he's not his dad. And so they've dragged poor Laura Bush out to go, for this, what Lee Atwater used to call the extra-chromosome conservatives."
(Having an extra chromosome is an actual condition that results in Down syndrome.)
• Laura Bush | “Bushworld” | Columnists | Maureen Dowd | Religion | Stem Cells
Bush Deregulates As Iraq Burns
Saturday brings a long front-page Joel Brinkley investigation on regulatory policy in the Bush administration, and its opening vignette strangely involves a particularly bad day from Iraq in April: “April 21 was an unusually violent day in Iraq; 68 people died in a car bombing in Basra, among them 23 children. As the news went from bad to worse, President Bush took a tough line, vowing to a group of journalists, ‘We're not going to cut and run while I'm in the Oval Office.’ On the same day, deep within the turgid pages of the Federal Register, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a regulation that would forbid the public release of some data relating to unsafe motor vehicles, saying that publicizing the information would cause ‘substantial competitive harm’ to manufacturers. As soon as the rule was published, consumer groups yelped in complaint, while the government responded that it was trying to balance the interests of consumers with the competitive needs of business. But hardly anyone else noticed, and that was hardly an isolated case. Allies and critics of the Bush administration agree that the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq have preoccupied the public, overshadowing an important element of the president's agenda: new regulatory initiatives. Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others.”
Brinkley ties those two seemingly unrelated strands together in the form of an accusation from an unlabeled liberal environmentalist: “Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, says he does not think the administration could have succeeded in rewriting so many environmental rules, for example, if the public's attention had not been focused on national security issues.”
While the Sierra Club is an “advocacy group,” and the Naderite group Public Citizen is later benignly called “a consumer and driver-safety group,” a conservative policy group is stuck with a warning label: “Stuart M. Butler, senior domestic policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation….”
For the rest of Brinkley on Bush regulatory policy, click here.
• Joel Brinkley | George W. Bush | Economics | Iraq War | Labeling Bias | Regulation
Reporter, Heal Thyself
Sunday Magazine Q&A reporter Deborah Solomon questions Yale economist Ray Fair about his econometric computer model of the upcoming presidential election, which predicts an easy Bush victory in November:
She isn’t happy with the findings, asking Fair: “But the country hasn't been this polarized since the 60's, and voters seem genuinely engaged by social issues like gay marriage and the overall question of a more just society.”
Fair’s reply, though murky, seems to discount the importance of Solomon’s issues: “We throw all those into what we call the error term. In the past, all that stuff that you think should count averages about 2.5 percent, and that is pretty small.”
Solomon is offended: “It saddens me that you teach this to students at Yale, who could be thinking about society in complex and meaningful ways.”
She then treats him as suspect, asking: “Are you a Republican?” He hems and haws but eventually says he’s a Kerry supporter. She replies, “I believe you entirely, although I’m a little surprised, because your predictions implicitly lend support to Bush.”
(Of course, Times reporters have previously lent implicit support to Democrats by trumpeting their campaign prospects—only to see those candidates lose.)
Solomon’s question hails from the “people who live in glass houses” territory: Is Solomon (who admitted last year to Roberta Combs of Christian Coalition that she voted for Al Gore in 2000) saying that one’s personal political biases inevitably affect one’s professional work? And is that really an idea a liberal journalist like Solomon should embrace?
For the rest of Solomon’s questions, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Ray Fair | Liberal Bias | Polls | Deborah Solomon
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org