As I noted a few years ago, New York Times Los Angeles bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer has a penchant for lacing her stories with cutting rhetoric about liberals. It's all too reminiscent of Maureen Dowd, whose derisive coverage of Bill Clinton and other Democrats helped vault her to the paper's op-ed page.
The latest example of Steinhauer's approach appears in her report today on new limits on the number of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. Late in the article, she works in a gratuitous and unfunny crack about supporters of medical marijuana smelling like patchouli oil:
In a crowded, vaguely patchouli-oil scented [Los Angeles City] Council chamber, advocates for medical marijuana peppered Council members with threats of lawsuits and election challenges.
Similarly, her profile of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi back in 2006 parroted conservative codewords, saying Republicans viewed Pelosi as "an Armani-clad elitist who will help push lawmakers toward an agenda of multicultural, tax-raising appeasement," and misleadingly claimed Pelosi "favors... schools without prayer and death with taxes." The last two phrases are GOP spin -- Pelosi actually opposes organized prayer in schools (not all prayer) and the estate tax (whose elimination Pelosi opposes) only affects a tiny percentage of the Americans who die each year. (The Times later edited the sentence online to correct these problems.)
Soon afterward, Steinhauer again parroted Republican rhetoric, calling California a place where "American values are said to go to die" and writing that the state has an image as "a hotbed of liberal lunacy."
If Dowd ever retires, I bet she's on the short list.
The New York Times routinely parrots liberal codewords and laces their stories with cutting rhetoric about conservatives. There must be dozens every week. You can see some examples at TimesWatch
Yet Brendan focuses on a reporter who presented a conservative POV 3 times in the last 4 years. This post may tell us more about Brendan Nyhan than about Jennifer Steinhauer
BTW Maureen Dowd has been far more derisive of conservatives than liberals. E.g., I recall a civil rights case where Clarence Thomas's opinion included both a trenchant legal analysis and a more emotional portion written from the POV of a black man. Dowd was evidently unaware of the former, because she blasted him for not including a legal analysis in his opinion. No correction was ever run.
This may be the column I'm recalling. In any event, it's a good example of Dowd's derision toward conservatives.
Posted by: David | January 27, 2010 at 11:07 AM
Agreed, saying that we have a death tax is wrong, because lots of people die without being taxed. But the same is true of calling it an estate tax, since most estates are not taxed by the federal government. Query: what then should we call it?
Bonus question: Since plenty of income is not taxed by the federal government (one-third of the people who file Federal tax returns pay no federal income tax, and many others have income but are not required to file a return), is it wrong to refer to "income tax"? What should we call it?
Extra credit if your answers include the phrase "Soak the Rich."
Posted by: Rob | January 27, 2010 at 11:27 AM