Comments on: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

By: Linda Seebach

Linda Seebach — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:05:10 +0000

Bias in the wire services,including the NYTimes, is a far more serious problem than anything individual papers display in their own reporting. For most newspaper readers, what the wire services say is the only information they get in their papers about national and international stories. (Few papers outside state capitals are large enough to have bureaus there, let alone in Washington or outside the U.S.)

The local and regional papers have very little leverage over accuracy or consistent slanting of these stories because where else are they going to go?

And these are the stories where the reporters’ and editors’ political views are most likely to influence coverage, deliberately or not. Notice the examples people choose in their comments.

Some earlier commenters appear not to know that the NYTimes, like the
Wall Street Journal, is printed at a number of locations around the country, so it is no more expensive to deliver from those plants than it is for the local papers that use the same presses. National advertisers pay more for a larger total audience, no matter where it lives, and the regional editions have localized ads.

By: bandit

bandit — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:57:58 +0000

Sliming Republican candidates will be deemed of utmost importance. The GOP should be very worried. How would that be any different from the MSM campaigning, I mean reporting, now?

By: Matt Smith

Matt Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:51:47 +0000

Benjamin Franklin published a newspaper when Philadelphia already had many available. Franklin’s newspaper was, by far, the most read of his day. Why? Franklin knew you could not be biased either left or right. He wanted his newspaper to appeal to everyone. And as a result, it did.

Pinch will either supply the leadership to change the approach of the NYT to match Franklin’s model of success or simply become another out-of-business newspaper like many of Franklin’s competitors….My guess is a slow and painfull death.

By: Kerry

Kerry — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:08:29 +0000

Frank M. said,”Those who celebrate the slow decline of the print media and the leading newspapers in particular may rue the day when our only source of original reporting are a handful of wire services.”
Sir, you are assumming no better products will arrive to fill the breach. I await the day when I needn’t ask of the original reporting I no longer read in my local paper, “I wonder if this is accurate?” A tangential example, the phrase ‘warrantless wiretapping’ is used over and over to describe what more accurately should be called ’sigint’, signals intelligence. Because the United States has the sine qua non of cell phone capability, a call from Abu al has Zubrick in Yemen to Abu al has Tzseezic in Pakistan can actually pass through equipment in the U.S. A very different creature than a call from Potosi Missouri to O’fallon Illinois. Which one needs a warrant? Which is a “wiretap”? Until these sorts of mischaracterizations cease in newsprint and electric media “original reporting”, I will cheer these declines. Shoddy products deserve to be driven from the marketplace.

By: formerpublisher

formerpublisher — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:19:09 +0000

David,

You shouldn’t really be all that worried about the “sharp decline.”

There isn’t much of a real decline. You see, for the past 20 years, newspaper publishers have been defrauding their advertisers with fake circulation numbers. This allowed them to raise advertising rates.

Some of them got caught recently, some of them got sued recently. Now, the public companies are walking the fraud back.

This doesn’t represent a staggering loss of readership. It merely represents what the readership was all along. You know – prefraud.

Where’s the SEC on this issue?

Nowhere to be found.

By: La Russophobe

La Russophobe — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 03:32:26 +0000

I put up some additional observations about the Times reporting on itself here http://publiuspundit.com/2007/11/gray_lady_down_1.php in case anyone is interested, including two links to other recent outrages (Driscoll, NRO).

By: La Russophobe

La Russophobe — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:51:39 +0000

I just noticed that the NYT link you have is to a 2006 story, while the link I posted previously is to 2007. Maybe that explains the difference?

By: Kieran McAuliffe

Kieran McAuliffe — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:50:31 +0000

To quote Roger Kimball…
“Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s inadvertently comical publisher.”
The sorry and funny story of the New York Times
could be turned into a musical for Broadway.
How about a title such as TIMES UP!
But who would you choose to play Arthur?

By: Ennis

Ennis — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:04:07 +0000

David,

They would do that anyway, hun.

The thing that none of the dinosaurs in the MSM have figured out is that they are no longer the gatekeepers of information. Their gate started crumbling with the Monica Lewinski affair and was totally blown down by al Qaida on 9/11.

The more they continue to act as the Democratic party’s propaganda machine the faster and faster they will hemorrhage readers/viewers. I am a good example of this. 10 years ago I watched TV, went to movies and read magazines such as Time and Newsweek. I have not touched a copy of Time or Newsweek in probably a good 5 years. I finally got disgusted with the crap coming out of the MSM that I canceled my Dish TV subscription in January. Now the only time my TV is turned on is to watch a movie on DVD. And you know what? I do not miss it at all! The last movie I saw in the theatres was “300″, the one before that was “The Return of the King”. I can count on one hand the movies in my DVD collection that have been made in the last 7 years. The Incredibles, the LotR trilogy, 300 and the first two X-Men movies.

I am not the only one. I now know more people who do not own a TV then do. I also do not know anyone who has a subscription to Time or Newsweek.

No hun, if anyone should be worried it is the MSM and the companies that own them.

By: Curtis

Curtis — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:43:59 +0000

Roger, those fellows (meaning the boys and the girls) don’t quite get the notion that they frequently make fools of themselves.

What to do about it? It beats me. In a general sense, that’s a puzzle. In a private sense, meaning how I look at it, it’s easy … just ignore the poor folks.