Once again, the New York Times is setting up a false debate over healthcare policy, contrasting White House-style "pragmatism" with left-wing "ideology." The lead of Sheryl Gay Stolberg's piece today (12/18/09):

In the great healthcare debate of 2009, President Obama has cast himself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, willing to compromise in exchange for votes. Now ideology -- an uprising on the Democratic left -- is smacking the pragmatic president in the face.

In this worldview, "ideologues" are those who push for reforms--including single-payer--that they believe will lower costs and offer more comprehensive coverage. "Pragmatists," meanwhile, are moving in the opposite direction, toward higher costs and less coverage, in order to theoretically win the political support of some conservative lawmakers.

Using language like this doesn't tell you much about the debate in Washington, but it speaks volumes about where the New York Times is coming from.

Printing a letter to the editor from Leila McDowell (8/26/09), the New York Times has "Another Look at Obama's Speech to the NAACP"--from the group's on vice president of communications.

McDowell starts with the fact that the "Times distinguished itself from most major media by virtually ignoring the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, which was started in New York"--and then, "when the Times finally did send a reporter...the resulting article ("Obama Gives Fiery Address at NAACP," July 17) focused on personal responsibility," even though "that was the least prominent part of Mr. Obama's speech":

What was noteworthy was his discussion of racial disparities, the barriers facing African-Americans and the policies to redress social gaps.

This is a theme President Obama has rarely spoken about with such depth.

Urging personal responsibility in our communities is as traditional as shouting "Amen!" to the preacher's sermon in black churches and civic organizations.

What is new is the president's forceful articulation of the disparities we fight every day. Personal responsibility will not remove the barriers that a legacy of racism and exclusion has left for millions of African-Americans.

"The familiar refrain of personal responsibility," though "an important issue... articulated by black preachers long before Mr. Obama," is, McDowell writes, "an old story and standard fare." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dedrick Muhammad on Obama's NAACP Speech and 'Tough Love'" (7/31/09).

Steve Benen of Political Animal points out a couple of strange questions posed by corporate journalists--one to each of last year's major presidential candidates. In this post, Benen quotes an unnamed New York Times reporter (apparently either Sheryl Gay Stolberg or Steven Lee Meyers) basically red-baiting Barack Obama: "The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?" The same reporter, or maybe a different one--I guess they were speaking ex cathedra--later pressed Obama: "If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal?"

In a later post, Benen ponders Fox News' Chris Wallace asking John McCain, "You ever feel like saying 'I told you so'?" (McCain declined to do so, though he said, "I'm sure that would be a pleasant feeling.") As Benen notes, it's not clear what McCain told us, or what in the first six weeks of the Obama administration would cause us to reevaluate it. But as he says, the implication is clear: "Looking back at the presidential campaign, McCain was right about...something."

Fox sometimes points to Wallace to show that they're not out of the mainstream of corporate media.  The scary thing is that they might have a point.

Having already caught "the infamous GOP talking point that the stimulus package contains gobs of cash for saving marsh mice" having "found its way into a New York Times story, without the paper mentioning that the claim is untrue," blogger Greg Sargent (Plum Line, 2/24/09) now finds that "earlier drafts of the story did describe the claim as 'misleading'--but Times editors removed that description from the copy":

A reader tells me that he emailed the author of the story, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, to discuss the omission. Here is part of her reply to him in her email, which I obtained:

I did write in the story I submitted that the assertion was misleading, but I’m sorry to report that language was removed by editors and that I didn’t notice the deletion. My initial text read like this:

“….as Republicans decry, often misleadingly, what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh mouse preservation.” [Sargent's emphasis]

So the words “often misleadingly” were removed by editors.

Often such editing decisions are made in haste or to save space. But this was only two words, and it’s worth recalling that the notion that there was millions in the bill to save the marsh mouse in Nancy Pelosi’s district isn’t just some garden variety talking point. It has been a major component of GOP push-back for weeks, repeated by high profile GOP officials in all sorts of settings.

Stolberg's contention that "wording as published was not inaccurate" is refuted by the simple observation by Sargent that "the story doesn’t note that there are no such funds in the bill"--to the contrary, "the paper removed its own reporter’s assertion that it was 'misleading' before publishing." Besides, we all know how much corporate media economic reporters love news about critters....