Liberal Reporting?

Liberal Reporting?
Friday, October 29, 2004
By David Asman

The Kerry campaign isn't backing away from the missing explosives story, even though details of the story have yet to be fleshed out.

The original report written on Monday in The New York Times was co-authored by David Sanger, about whom John Kerry had this to say in July: "I believe if you talk with Warren Hoge [another New York Times writer] or you talk to David Sanger, you talk to other people around the world, they will confirm to you, I believe, that it may well take a new president to restore America's credibility on a global basis so that we can deal with other countries and bring people back into alliances.”

The New York Times says its reporting doesn’t favor either candidate. But Bush backers note that the Kerry camp rolled out an ad campaign based on the Sanger story just a day after the story appeared in print, leaving open the question of whether the Kerry camp had advance notice of the story’s appearance. So does The New York Times use reportage to push a political agenda?

The paper’s own, self-appointed critic addressed the question earlier this past summer. New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent asked, rhetorically: “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is. The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage, but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.)”

So saith The New York Times.

And that’s the Asman Observer.