To: SectionEds
Subject: Credibility/abortion

I'm concerned about the perception---and the occasional reality---that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and elsewhere as requiring "so-called counseling of patients." I don't think people on the anti-abortion side would consider it "so-called," a phrase that is loaded with derision.

The story makes a strong case that the link between abortion and breast cancer is widely discounted among researchers, but I wondered as I read it whether somewhere there might exist some credible scientist who believes in it.

Such a person makes no appearance in the story's lengthy passage about the scientific issue. We do quote one of the sponsors of the bill, noting that he "has a professional background in property management." Seldom will you read a cheaper shot than this. Why, if this is germane, wouldn't we point to legislators on the other side who are similarly bereft of scientific credentials?

It is not until the last three paragraphs of the story that we finally surface a professor of biology and endocrinology who believes the abortion/cancer connection is valid. But do we quote him as to why he believes this? No. We quote his political views.

Apparently the scientific argument for the anti-abortion side is so absurd that we don't need to waste our readers' time with it.

The reason I'm sending this note to all section editors is that I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole), but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times.

I'm no expert on abortion, but I know enough to believe that it presents a profound philosophical, religious and scientific question, and I respect people on both sides of the debate. A newspaper that is intelligent and fair-minded will do the same.

Let me know if you'd like to discuss this.

John (Carroll)

''They have a theory of getting them while they're young,'' says David Brock, a former college conservative who graduated from Berkeley in the mid-1980's. After spending almost a decade as an activist in the conservative movement (during which he published the 1993 liberal-bashing book, ''The Real Anita Hill''), Brock had a change of heart. In 2002, he published a book, ''Blinded by the Right,'' about his former life as a conservative-movement insider. ''People are searching for their identity in college,'' he says. ''The right try to instigate polarization so that it looks like the right wing is the alternative to the left. This is what happened to me. I went to Berkeley because it had a liberal reputation. But I became disillusioned with some of my experiences with the left on the campus and I had a knee-jerk reaction -- or I was looking for an alternative -- and there was the right. There really wasn't anything in the middle.''

Besides the flag, the other potent symbol for today's young conservative movement is Ronald Reagan. Because they are too young to recall any of Reagan's live TV appearances (Mitchell, for instance, was born in 1982), today's college students tend to see the former president purely as his image makers tried to present him when he occupied the Oval Office: as a Norman Rockwellian, mist-shrouded icon of Better Times -- an idealized figure of myth. The Washington-based groups know this, and they play on it. When the Leadership Institute, a group formed by a right-wing activist, Morton Blackwell, recruits on campuses each fall, it prominently displays at its sign-up table a huge poster that includes a photograph of Reagan.

(Charles) Mitchell is one of those who has fallen under the spell of the former president. His dorm-room bookshelf holds no less than four Reagan biographies, from which he is given to quoting, as if from Scripture. ''If you study what Reagan wrote and said and believed,'' Mitchell explains, ''it didn't change from at least the 1960's on. People always attack that and say he was intellectually lazy. I don't think so. The guy believed in something. He came to the presidency with three big goals: defeating communism, lowering taxes and recovering the economy. And that's what he did.''

Regular speakers on campus include Phyllis Schlafly, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ann Coulter, Katherine Harris and Christina Hoff Sommers, author of ''Who Stole Feminism?'' and ''The War Against Boys.'' These women preach that the preponderance of women's-studies classes and the proliferation on campuses of Take Back the Night marches, sex and dating rules and rape-awareness lectures -- all of which are aimed at making women feel empowered on campus -- in fact do precisely the opposite: they infantalize.

One Bucknell conservatives club member, Allison Kasic, buys it.

...

''Conservatives are inclusive in a way that liberals are not,'' she says, voicing a central theme of the Independent Women's Forum ethos.

...

It can be disorienting to hear conservatism advanced as the ideology that frees women, but such is the skill with which the right has reframed the issues for the campus crowd, and such is the degree to which the left has allowed its own message to drift into rigidity and irrelevance for many college-age women.

In fact, much of what (Denise) Chaykun -- and indeed most any campus conservative you meet -- says is something that someone told them to say. This is not to doubt their passion and belief, but it is to be realistic about the language and tactics they've developed to communicate those beliefs.

While it's true that Mitchell and his fellow club members are far closer to 80's right-wingers like D'Souza and Coulter, there are also crucial differences. Many of those Reagan-era conservatives announced their politics on campus with their dress and grooming, the men sporting aggressively conservative Clark Kent haircuts, blue blazers, red ties, loafers; the women tended to wear skirts and heels -- openly adopting the uniform of the Youth for Reagan army. Today, most campus conservatives who hope to be effective won't dress like George Bush or Dick Cheney. The idea is to dress like a young person.

In less than two years, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club established itself as one of the most visible and influential student groups on campus.

Just how influential is clear when you talk to Bucknell faculty members. Geoff Schneider, an economics professor at Bucknell, says that the conservative group's constant charge in The Counterweight, that the university is infected by political correctness and that professors seek to indoctrinate students with a liberal agenda, has had an effect in the classroom. ''As the conservatives have become more prominent, other students are more prone to believe that they are being indoctrinated,'' Schneider says. ''So the openness of a number of students to new ideas and new ways of looking at things has actually moved in a disturbing direction. Students are much more willing to write off something as 'liberal talk' -- oh, I don't need to think about that, that's just ideology -- as opposed to thinking, in a complex way, about all of the different ideas and evaluating them.'' Kim Daubman, a social psychology professor, concurs. Recently she taught a class in which she talked about the theory that news coverage of warfare in Iraq could lead to a rise in homicides in the United States. ''I could see the students rolling their eyes,'' she says. ''I could just hear them thinking, 'Oh, there she goes again!'''

While professors like Schneider and Daubman worry about the potential for conservative activists to stifle intellectual openness among students, they also grudgingly admit to admiring the right-wingers' passion. ''A lot of faculty members talk about the lack of commitment that most students have to anything,'' Daubman says. ''It seems that they're about getting a credential and being able to get a good job. That's why you hear faculty say about the conservatives club: 'At least they believe in something. At least they've got convictions.'''

Bragg freely admits he did little firsthand reporting for the June 2002 story about Florida oystermen that prompted an editor's note last week. That note said credit should have been shared with freelancer J. Wes Yoder, who was hired by Bragg as a volunteer assistant and spent four days in the town of Apalachicola. "I went and got the dateline," Bragg said. "The reporting was done -- there was no reason to linger."

"KRUGMAN: ...of course, it's an enormous expense. The administration's own estimate -- we're now told we don't know how they get this -- is that this thing is going to add half a million jobs in the next year. Now you take that or leave that, but a $674 billion plan for 500,000 jobs, even with fuzzy math that's more than $1 million per job. Something is wrong here.

"COLVIN: Well, but it's going to go for longer than just this one year, right?

"KRUGMAN: Well, yeah, but then the question is, if we're thinking about the long run, we've got to ask ourselves how are we going to pay for this thing?"

Back then Krugman was working with a smaller number of jobs expected to be created, so the lie was $1 million per job, not $500,000. But it's the same lie, and Colvin immediately caught Krugman at it when he asked "it's going to go for longer than just this one year, right?"

And how does Krugman respond? Does he talk about liquidity traps and IS/LM curves and all the other econobabble he's spewed up in all his apologiae? Does he even simply say "No, Geoff, I can't explain all the details but those jobs will vanish after one year."

No... he admits it! He says, "Well, yeah, but then the question is..." ...is...something else.

He admitted it!

Now let's see what's wrong with Luskin's dishonest claim. Let's just note the obvious: Colvin's question was phrased in such a broad and general way that there was very little reason to think that the question had anything to do with a failure to "divide by ten." Especially, let's remember that this debate was on January 31, and Luskin didn't make his "divide by ten" criticism until April. So back then, nobody was even thinking about this ridiculous criticism, which was completely incorrect anyway (as we've already shown here and see below)

Take whatever percentage of the American population you assume to be genuinely against racism -- 90%, 95%, whatever. They still have the problem of not knowing but thinking they know what's in their fellow Americans' heads. Blacks and whites readily misinterpret each other, seeing condescension, suspicion or resentment in innocent acts as well as in acts whose biggest mistake is trying too hard to be innocent of prejudice.

Hedges, a war correspondent, criticized military heroic ideals that grow during war. The fervor sacrifices individual thought for temporarily belonging to something larger, he said.

Hedges sympathized with U.S. soldiers. He characterized them as boys from places such as Mississippi and Arkansas who joined the military because there were no job opportunities.

“War in the end is always about betrayal. Betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and idealists by cynics,” Hedges said in lecture fashion as jeers and “God Bless Americas” could be heard in the background.

After his microphone was again unplugged, (College President Paul) Pribbenow told Hedges to wrap it up.

Ninth Circuit Judge Richard Clifton conceded in his written opinion that the decision ''may seem anomalous'' because it meant that defendants who brandish toy guns could be convicted of armed bank robbery while those who have real guns hidden in their pants could not.

This is an instructive story to keep in mind whenever we are told that companies should look especially hard to find employees that will move the company toward greater "diversity." In the first place, if companies are looking especially hard for people of one color, then they are going to overlook and show less interest in people of another color. That is the point, right? Second, if your company has told you, a manager, that it wants to find qualified people of a particular color, then you inevitably are going to put your thumb on the scale whenever a candidate of the "right" color appears. Don't want to disappoint the boss, you know.

Either way, you will not be hiring the best people. Sometimes the best person will also happen to be the "wrong" color, and so he won't get hired. Other times, the person of the "right" color will seem to be suitable, but only because you are looking so hard to find someone of that color.

Mr. Blair was a first-class head case who was given a golden opportunity and responded by spreading seeds of betrayal every place he went. He betrayed his readers. He betrayed his profession. He betrayed the editors who hired and promoted him. But there was no racial component to that betrayal, any more than there was a racial component to the many betrayals of Mike Barnicle, a columnist who was forced to resign from The Boston Globe in 1998 after years of complaints about his work.

"Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter," Mr. Raines said. "I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities."

"Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?" he added, a moment later. "Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."

How is the war on terror going? You know about the Riyadh bombings. But something else happened this week: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a respected British think tank with no discernible anti-Bush animus, declared that Al Qaeda is "more insidious and just as dangerous" as it was before Sept. 11. So much for claims that we had terrorists on the run.

Still, isn't the Bush administration doing its best to fight terrorism? No.

...

I've written before about the Bush administration's amazing refusal to pay for even minimal measures to protect the nation against future attacks — measures that would secure ports, chemical plants, nuclear facilities and so on.

Senator Bob Graham has made an even stronger charge: that Al Qaeda was "on the ropes" a year ago, but was able to recover because the administration diverted military and intelligence resources to Iraq. As former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he's in a position to know. And before you dismiss him as a partisan Democrat, bear in mind that when he began raising this alarm last fall his Republican colleagues supported him: "He's absolutely right to be concerned," said Senator Richard Shelby, who has seen the same information.

In Washington today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described as "hyperbole" an article in The New York Times on Wednesday describing new rules of engagement under which American military forces in Iraq would have the authority to shoot looters on sight.

"We have rules of engagement — have had, do today," Mr. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news briefing. "They've not been changed." The current rules permit "the use of whatever force is necessary for self-defense or for other selected purposes," he added.

Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the Third Infantry Division, whose forces are now patrolling Baghdad, said today that "there are no `shoot to kill' or `shoot on sight' orders concerning looters."

Mr. Bremer, asked about the article in The New York Times about the policy toward looters, said he would not comment on the military rules of engagement, except to say that they were "robust" enough to cover any contingency.

Asked specifically if he had said that he supported shooting looters, Mr. Bremer replied, "No, I read that story and it looked rather colorful to me, more colorful than is my normal habit."

By late yesterday afternoon the administration seemed to be backing away from this crazy policy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was still doing his macho act, telling a Senate subcommittee that the forces in Baghdad "will be using muscle to see that the people who are trying to disrupt what is taking place in that city are stopped and either captured or killed."

But Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, of the Army's Third Infantry Division, told reporters in Baghdad that his troops "are not going to go out and shoot children" who might be stealing, say, wood or cement from a factory.

Stay tuned. This controversy is one more screaming example of the need for the U.N. to be handed the major responsibility for administering Iraq. This is not an appropriate mission for the U.S., and we're making a hash of it already.

Before I end this I want to point out one other quality of the American soldier: his sense of justice. After a grueling fight, a company of infantrymen was resting and opening their first mail delivery of the war. One of the young soldiers had received a care package and was sharing the home-baked cookies with his friends. A photographer with a heavy French accent asked if he could have one. The soldier looked him over and said there would be no cookies for Frenchmen. The photographer then protested that he was half Italian. Without missing a beat, the soldier broke a cookie in half and gave it to him. It was a perfect moment and a perfect reflection of the American soldier.

[A] funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view -- something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."

Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard -- too hard, its critics say -- to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.

What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors — the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.

In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire — which includes Fox News and The New York Post — is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service — which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated — from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.

Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can.

Mr. Blair's Times supervisors and Maryland professors emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom.

During his 10-week internship at The Times, in the summer of 1998, Mr. Blair wrote 19 news articles, helped other reporters and never seemed to leave the newsroom. "He did well," recalled Sheila Rule, a senior editor who oversees the internship program. "He did very well."

But Joyce Purnick, who was the metropolitan editor at the time, recalled thinking that he was better at newsroom socializing than at reporting, and told him during a candid lunch that after graduation he should work for a smaller newspaper. "I was telling him, 'Go learn the business,' " she said.

At summer's end, The Times offered Mr. Blair an extended internship, but he had more college course work to do before his scheduled graduation in December 1998. When he returned to the Times newsroom in June 1999, Ms. Rule said, everyone assumed he had graduated. He had not; college officials say he has more than a year of course work to complete.

His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now."

The most left-wing of the broadsheets is The Independent. To many American Web-based readers, it's most famous for a bogus story about a purported massacre in the Jenin refugee camp a while ago. Its lead correspondent, Robert Fisk, is so adamant in his hard-left politics that when he was attacked by a mob in Pakistan in 2001, he wrote a column explaining his sympathy with the mob. That column, in turn, resulted in the addition of the word "fisking" to the vocabulary of weblog readers; "fisking" means a line-by-line deconstruction of an especially illogical article or column. As in, "Matthew Hoy gave Paul Krugman's column a thorough fisking."

Perhaps the most disheartening development of the war -- at home, anyway -- is the number of liberals who have allowed Bush-hatred to take the place of thinking. Speaking with otherwise perceptive people, I have seen the same intellectual tics come up time and time again: If Bush is for it, I'm against it. If Bush says it, it must be a lie. Their opposition to Bush has made liberals embrace principles -- such as the notion that the United States must never fight without U.N. approval except in self-defense -- to which the Clinton administration never adhered (see Operation Desert Fox in 1998, or the Kosovo campaign in 1999). And it has made them forget that there are governments in the world even more odious and untrustworthy than the Bush administration.

That same tendency to blame America for the moral shortcomings of others unfortunately permeates the left and the Democratic Party. I wish it were otherwise, but I got the first whiff of it after Sept. 11 when some people reacted to the terrorist attacks here by blaming U.S. policy -- in the Middle East specifically but around the world in general.

Had we not supported Israel, had we not backed the corrupt Saudi monarchy, had we not been buddies with Egypt, had we not been somehow complicit in Third World poverty, had we not developed blue jeans and T-shirts and rock music and premarital sex, the World Trade Center might still be standing and the Pentagon untouched.

But this was the mass murder of innocents -- pulled off, incidentally, by non-poor young men who had not spent their lives scavenging for food scraps. The attacks were not in self-defense, or even in revenge for something America had done, but a fanatical, insane and futile blow directed at modernity.

You can see why this would be a big scandal. Oh sure, Bennett hasn't actually held public office in over a decade. But still it's news when it turns out he's been violating the law.

Only he hasn't been violating the law. According to The Washington Monthly, "Bennett has made dozens of trips to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas"--places where gambling has been legal for decades.

But still he's a hypocrite, right? After all, he often argues that gambling should be outlawed. Actually, he doesn't. The Washington Monthly reports that "Bennett and his organization, Empower America, oppose the extension of casino gambling in the states." But apparently they take no position on casino gambling where it's already legal. And while he "has opined on everything from drinking to 'homosexual unions' to 'The Ricki Lake Show' to wife-swapping," gambling "has largely escaped Bennett's wrath."

So maybe Bennett has a conflict of interest. After all, the gambling industry has one of the most vigorous lobbies in Washington, the American Gaming Association, and its president, Frank Fahrenkopf, is a former Republican National Committee chairman. But there's no apparent connection here either; Bill Bennett is not a gambling-industry lobbyist.

OK, but even if Bennett's gambling is entirely legal and above board, he's squandering money on which his family depends, right? Well, uh, no. The Washington Monthly quotes Bennett as saying: "I don't play the 'milk money.' I don't put my family at risk, and I don't owe anyone anything"--and then acknowledges that "the documents offer no reason to contradict Bennett on these points."

So maybe this all comes down to that old Washington adage that the coverup is worse than the crime. Yeah, that must be it--except that Bennett isn't covering up anything. He freely acknowledges that he gambles "for fairly high stakes."

What, then, is all the fuss about? It seems to be nothing more than that Bennett thinks and writes a lot about virtue, and he indulges in a vice. In other words, the crack reporters at Newsweek and The Washington Monthly are shocked, shocked to learn that human beings are fallible. This may be news to them, but not to most people.

Incidentally, Bennett's gambling isn't news either. Time reported in 1996 that he had won a jackpot in a Las Vegas casino and that, while "sheepish," he acknowledged that he does gamble. Newsweek's reward for teaming up with The Washington Monthly is to get scooped by its main rival by seven years!

We're reading various things about cuts to veterans benefits in the budget. What proposals are out there coming from the House and the Senate and also what is the administration looking for as far as cuts go?


There have been no cuts. It's really quite unfortunate that some have chosen to talk about cuts. Only in Washington, D.C., perhaps, when you get a 7.7 proposed increase is it somehow equivalent to a cut. I inherited a budget of $48 billion. That was in 2001. The budget that President Bush submitted to the Congress for 2004 that takes effect October 1 is for $63.6 billion, a 33 percent increase in the three years that we've been in office that the president has provided increases to the VA. The current fiscal year, 2003, we received an increase of $2.6 billion in health care alone, the largest increase ever given to the VA in its history. So there really have been no cuts.

On April 14 in Vermont, for example, mourners gathered for the funeral of 21-year-old Marine Cpl. Mark Evnin, killed in action on the drive to Baghdad. A thousand people attended the rites at Ohavi Zedek Synagogue in Burlington, at which the Marine's grandfather, a rabbi, presided. Reporters related how the Marine Corps League color guard and local firefighters flanked the walkway into the synagogue, where mourners included the Roman Catholic bishop and the governor.

Crowds lined the streets in salute--some with flags, some with signs--everywhere the funeral procession passed. But what struck the Burlington Free Press reporters most were all the strangers who had been impelled to come to the cemetery to honor the young Marine. One of them was a mother who had brought her two young children and stood holding two American flags. "Every single man and woman out there is my son and daughter," she told the journalists. "He could have done a lot with his life. But he gave it to the nation."