Black and White and Read All Over

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 4, 2001 | by Christopher Wavrin

Despite its enviable record, the New York Times doesn't live up to its motto, `All the News That's Fit to Print,' charge critics who accuse the paper of filtering news through a liberal slant.

With the recent announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes comes yet another discussion of the merits of the newspapers that win them. The acknowledged leader among them, the New York Times, has won 81 to date: This year, the paper won two awards: one for beat reporting on loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code, and one for national reporting for a series on race in the United States.

Once declared by Newsweek to be printed on "sacred parchment," the Times has about three dozen more Pulitzers than any other newspaper. The Times' dominant position in the U.S. marketplace is evidenced by its 1 million weekday and 1.7 million Sunday circulation, bolstered by 1,000 reporters and editors located in nine national and 29 international bureaus.

Yet the paper nevertheless has spawned critical columns, books and even a Website. The latest critique comes from William Proctor, a former New York Daily News reporter, in his new book The Gospel According to the New York Times.

"You're basically looking at the Bible," says Proctor, who wrote for the News in the early 1970s. "It's the most significant reporter of events in our culture." As he competed with Times reporters almost 30 years ago, "I came to really respect them and liked what they were doing. In the later eighties and early nineties, that changed. I was noticing a lot of editorializing, a stacking of facts, that appeared to be pushing a point." He began a study of the Times' values and worldview, to "reveal the issues and beliefs that its own editors, management and reporters regard as most important."

Others noticed a change in the Times as well. "I started noticing in the early- to mid-nineties there was a problem," says Ira Stoll, editor of www. smartertimes.com, a Website "dedicated to the proposition that New York's dominant daily has grown complacent, slow and inaccurate." Each day, it publishes a critique of the newspaper's coverage.

Why the shift? "The Times sees itself more as an agent for social change and an advocate of good causes," says John Corry in My Times: Adventures in the News Trade, published in 1993. Corry spent 31 years working his way up from copyboy to columnist and critic at the Times, during which period women were introduced to the newsroom.

Proctor calls such advocacy "culture creep" -- a way of propelling the reader toward a certain worldview through headlines, pictures, strategic selection of facts and prominent placement. His book analyzes more than 6,000 Times articles from the mid-1970s to 1999, from which he picked seven "deadly sins" he says the Times regularly decries: religious certainty, conservatism, capital punishment, broken public trust, the Second Amendment, censorship and limitations on abortion.

The Times will "bombard the public with one particular view," Proctor says. For instance, when James C. Kopp was arrested in France on charges of the 1998 murder of Buffalo, N.Y., abortionist Barnett Slepian, the New York Times put the story atop its front page. Such placement was noted by other observers. "Inside was a `defending abortion rights' editorial," noted pro-life activist Steven Ertelt on the Prolifeinfo.org Website, "and should there be any doubt where the Times stands on this issue (how could there be?), the paper published an op-ed piece by the director of the Boulder (Colo.) Abortion Clinic, who said he received the news of Kopp's arrest `just as I finished performing an abortion for the last patient of the morning.'"

The Times' Washington bureau demurred from commenting on its critics, passing all inquiries to its New York-based spokeswoman, Kathy Park. Even though changes have occurred since 1992, "the newspaper's mission hasn't," she says. "We believe our news coverage is scrupulously impartial. Clearly we would not risk our journalistic reputation -- and our usefulness to concerned readers -- by tolerating departures from neutrality in the news columns. Certainly competition from television news, and now the Web, has led all newspapers, since the 1960s, to strive for broader, richer, more backgrounded approaches to coverage and to add coverage of trends to the mix."

Nevertheless, Proctor is concerned about the direction of the "gray lady," a Times nickname, because of the newspaper's eminent status as a primary source for historians. For instance, the newspaper has crowned Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York "perhaps the most important Democrat in the country." Asks Proctor, "What are the implications for you when one news-media behemoth becomes a virtually infallible cultural bible for movers and shakers on the national and international scene? The arguments presented are likely to seem reasonable. If you haven't really thought through the position, you may buy into it. If you are not aware of what you believe on a number of these different issues, or if you don't have strong beliefs, then it is likely that the mass media will do your thinking for you."