New York Time bias bungles story of Bernie and Hillary in Portland

First, a disclosure. I’m an active supporter of Bernie Sanders for President and I am seeing media coverage through that lens.

What I see is coverage of his campaign by The New York Times that has been stunningly biased.

Item: Sanders draws the biggest crowd of any candidate yet. It happened right here in Portland on Sunday. Somewhere in excess of 25,000 converged on the MODA Center. The Times noted that the crowd was large but doesn’t point out that it is far and away the largest yet for any candidate. Instead the Times focuses on characterizing Sanders’ base as narrow — predominantly white and liberal. The paper ignores that Sanders support is also overwhelmingly young, enthusiastic and committed. We are talking about ENERGETIC. The Times also fails to see that Sanders is staking out positions well to the Left of Hillary Clinton on “youth” issues like college debt.

Item: A study in contrast goes unreported. The Times ignores that four days prior to Sander’s big rally in Portland, Hillary Clinton quietly comes to town and heads straight to Dunthorpe, an exclusive sanctuary for the wealthy where homes are mansions often gated off and hidden from the public. There Clinton gathers a reported 140 supporters capable of ponying up the required $2700 to hob-nob with Hillary. Clinton stashes the cash, says not one word to the citizenry beyond Dunthorpe, and leaves. It’s on to the next deep-pocketed, secluded enclave. In short, Clinton is practicing political business as usual. While she was pandering to the rich in Dunthorpe, Sanders’ scruffy local team works out of a warehouse scrambling to rent the cavernous MODA Center. The young organizers fill the place. There is no entry fee. The overflow spills out into the surrounding plazas in the thousands.

Item: Hillary’s poll numbers, which still run around 50 percent, are in steady decline.  Her “negatives” poll high and reveal a lack of basic trust. Sanders’ numbers continue to climb. He’s above 20 percent and rising. If Clinton is the “front runner,” as the Times likes to remind us, she’s starting to fade (as The Times fails to report). Moreover, this campaign is just “out of the starting gate.” Will Hillary even make it to the “finish line?” Ignoring the question, The Times focuses on an prospective Biden-Clinton contest. Sanders isn’t mentioned.





(Update, Aug. 12: A Boston Herald poll released yesterday shows Sanders moving ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire.)

I see another dimension to this. The New York Times brings a myopic East Coast bias to events on the West Coast. The Times portrays events here as suspect, slightly bizarre, misguided and removed from East Coast perceived wisdom, in this case political perceived wisdom. If 25,000 people pack the MODA Center to hear Bernie Sanders, it is just another West Coast aberration. The real “truth” resides in New York and Washington, D.C.

We’ll see about that….

An Ocean of Ink

Quakers made the front page of the New York Times last Friday.

Was the story about the Religious Society of Friends' on-going struggle for peace?

Was it about the effectiveness of the Quaker lobbying group, the Friends Committee on National Legislation?

Was it about the fact that there are far more Quakers in East Africa than there are Quakers elsewhere?

Was it about the "timeliness" of the Quaker testimonies: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community and Equality and how they speak to today's world?

It was not.

The story was about a "tense" division between the Friends Seminary (in essence a Quaker preparatory school), tucked away in lower Manhattan, and the New York Quarterly Meeting, a Quaker religious governing body.

Excuse me if my eyes glaze over. The story may have been of interest to a relative handful of Times' readers. Quakers no doubt read it with raised brows.

As a journalist and as a Friend, I was saddened because I realized that the Times editors had just blown their quota of front-page Quaker stories for a decade. Quakers deserve better (see above).

On Sunday I was still grumbling about the story and the Times' definition of front-page news. In the course of being with Friends at our meeting house, I had occasion to consider Quaker founder George Fox's revelatory vision of an "Ocean of Light." In his journals, he describes his epiphany this way:

I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.

I've always related the Ocean of Light to Quakers' silent worship. Our worship room happens to be graced with a large, central skylight. The light well draws the sun's warmth and light into our worship. Light and silence; silence and light.

I have more trouble with the image of an "ocean of darkness and death." Death is as real as life. And darkness defines light. Indeed I have found as I have grown older that the prospect of death increasingly defines and enriches what I do with life. Could death recast "life"?

So what is this "ocean of darkness"?

Suddenly, with the Times story on my mind, it came to me. INK! It is a pitch-black sea of ink.

An ocean of stories about petty (or not-so-petty) conflicts written with barrels of ink. It is the ink that each morning greets me with the terrible news of the world and puts me in a sour mood until I push aside these black dispatches. It is the ink that obsesses over the foibles and tragedies of humanity. It is ink that so often blots out and ignores the light of love.

I confess that I smiled as this strange, inky thought came over me. I knew I would likely write about it, using the Internet's equivalent of ink. These very words you are reading may not be an "Ocean of Darkness," but they do constitute a puddle of black even as, I pray, they may reflect some light.

And so, dear reader, contemplate the "Ocean of Light" in the purity of silence....

The Homeless and the "Homely"

Details about this nation’s big, dirty secret of inequality seeps out in odd ways in the media.

Today, the ugly disparity oozed around the edges of a New York Times story about how developers of stratospherically high-priced New York City apartments and condos hire and fire sales reps at whim.

Poor dears.

The Times reporter barely acknowledges the real story within the story: the sales prices the ultra rich fork over to put lavish roofs over their less-than-humble heads.

According to the story, some folks with unseemly gobs of money pay as much as $35 million for these places. Some units have 6,000 square feet of space. What goes on in such expanses? How are they furnished? How many housekeepers does it take to maintain them? What are the taxes on them? What’s the write-off that the rest of us pick up? How often are they left vacant as owners jet from country estate to mountain chalet to pleasure yacht?

Turns out that to sell some of these urban indulgences in the recessionary market, prices have been “slashed.” That can mean that they go for “only” $10 million or so.

“Cheap” to the super rich is a price in the high seven digits. In the real world most of us live in, that kind of money could house dozens, perhaps hundreds.

Inequality, thy name is the scouring homeless on the streets and the super-rich “homely” dwelling in clouds of excess.

On starting the day: Good faith or a dancer's lost limb?

I’ve often wondered about how I start my days. Today was pretty typical.

I put the water on for the coffee then retrieved the newspapers from the stoop. I’m an old-fashioned guy, but I could have easily clicked in to the computer. Later I did just that.

As usual, the headlines set the tone for my Wheaties and Grapenuts.

“Employers’ health care maze” read the Oregonian’s main headline.

Another read, ambiguously, “Vatican reveals its procedures for abuse.”

The front of the New York Times offered:

“Civilians Killed as U.S. Troops Hit Afghan Bus”

“Leg Lost, Dancer Is Caught Between Caregivers.”

All this before my first cup of coffee. Bitter stuff.

It took Thomas Jefferson to bring me around.

Today is Jefferson’s birthday, a matter of singular note in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. The Almanac’s extended entry quoted Jefferson, writing John Adams, on the very topic of how to start my day.

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus (“A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man”) and Thucydides (“Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured”), for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier."

As substitutes for The Times and The Oregonian, I’ve considered Marcus Aurelius and Lao Tzu, among others.

Imagine starting the day with one of these:

Here’s Aurelius: “Whenever you notice someone else going astray, immediately turn and examine how you yourself have gone astray” or “For each thing you do, stop and ask yourself if death is to be feared because it deprives you of this.”

Try Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: “Those who are of good faith I have faith in. Those who are lacking in good faith I also have faith in. In so doing I gain in good faith.” Or “Much speech leads inevitably to silence. Better to hold fast to the void.”

We can be grateful that Jefferson, born on this day in 1743, chose to live at great distance from “Leg Lost, Dancer Is Caught Between Caregivers.”

We should be equally grateful for following his path.

Kicking the kickback culture

Three or four years ago, I required my journalism students to subscribe to The New York Times print edition, which they received at a special student rate. As it turned out, the Times gave me the same special rate too, even though I was a regular subscriber.

That made sense, just as textbook companies provide teachers with “desk” copies of required texts.

But as my students turned more and more to the web for information and because the Times offered its content free on-line, I dropped my requirement that they subscribe to the print edition. I did require them to read the Times on-line.

I still get the Times at a reduced rate, as a “professional courtesy.”

Today in the mail I got a notice encouraging me and my fellow college teachers of “politics, economics, communication or freshman English” to make the print edition “part of your course.” The flier suggests requiring students to subscribe at the education rate of $2.25 per week. If the Times weren’t available on-line, the subscription looks like a deal, at least to those of us who still prefer to hold paper in our hands. That’s less than the price of a latte a week, and less fattening.

But here’s the eyebrow-raising part of the flier: if we require the print subscription of our students, we teachers get a free “complimentary” copy of the Times on weekdays.

All we have to do is send the Times a copy of the course syllabus that shows the Times as required reading.

Strange, but visions of “health care reform” and drug company junkets for doctors came immediately to mind. Requiring the Times subscriptions seemed like prescribing medication that isn’t needed or is more expensive.

In the case of a many students, the requirement would be seen as an unnecessary, added cost to their already financially burdensome college years.

How can the New York Times fault health care in this country, when the newspaper itself is willing to cut deals with teachers that are not that far removed from what Abbott Labs, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline do with doctors?

The Times should help eliminate our kickback culture — through example.

Hybrid-itis

As I read today about Honda’s new push to produce hybrid vehicles, it struck me that I am a hybrid reader and that we are all caught somewhere in hybrid-itis.

The traditional American auto industry and the raditional information media (formerly known as newspapers and television newscasts) are both on the wane and being transformed by new, energy-efficient technologies.

The American auto industry is in a death embrace of the internal combustion engine (and to oil companies — did someone say “auto/oil cabal”?). Detroit, which is joined at the hip to the likes of Exxon /Mobil and Chevron, is in its death throes.

Today Ford announced that it will not hit its target of profitability by 2009. Why are we not surprised? Unlike Honda and Toyota, Ford has merely dabbled in non-gasoline consuming technologies. Dearborn and General Motors still rely on dinosaur SUVs and pickups. Only good ole boys are buying.

It’s utter speculation but I’m convinced that the oil companies must give Detroit some kind of kickback to offset the massive losses the auto-makers seem committed to making—all in the name of gasoline consumption.

The news industry’s is loosening its tie to the printed and has been more nimble. It doesn’t seem to have suicidal links to Big Pulp, the paper industry. Still, as I’ve noted before, the news business's transition to the web isn’t going to be easy. It’s still unclear where revenue will come from to support quality journalism. Foundations? Readers?

But enough about them. What about us?

Take me, for example. I still drive a standard Toyota RAV4 (yes, there was once an leaseable all-electric version, vis. the film “Who killed the electric car?")

Partly because of the price of gas and partly because I’m on a walking jag (the 10,000 Steps Program), I find myself using the RAV less and less. I walk and take the bus whenever I can. Defying death, I also use my scooter, weather permitting. It gets 70 mpg. Filing its small tank costs $3.50 max.

My guess is that when Honda unveils its hybrid Fit next year, I may pop for one. I’ll probably have to give the RAV away, or pay someone to take it. It gets 23 mpg.

And I am, unlike most of my college students, a hybrid reader. I retrive two newsprint editions (The Oregonian and the New York Times) from my driveway each morning. I've taken to reading the New York Times both on-line and in print. The Oregonian’s web site, Oregon Live, still leaves a lot to be desired, so I get most of my local news in print. That is certain to change in the next year or so.

Change is what it is all about — and just in time.

The internet and hybrid automobile technology (with plug –in, all-electric cars to come in a year or two) will be necessities, if only because of their less polluting energy efficiency. And yes, all-electric energy in the post-Bush world (eight months and counting!) will come from non-polluting solar, sea and wind generation.

Thoughts of my being a hybrid reader lead to the fact that we are hybrid consumers. We have hybrid-itis.

It will pass.

Hybrid, as the name suggests, is a half-way, mixed status. It will last until we fully create and support a sustainable world.

Is Obama lying about the Northwest?

The New York Times is reporting that Oregon will be a “battleground state” in the expected presidential match-up this fall between John McClone (that’s not a typo) and Barack Obama.

First of all, forget the “battleground” hype. The battlegrounds of importance in this election are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here at home, we desperately need to lower the political/journalistic rhetoric about the campaign.

What we have is an election, not a war.

Let’s presume that “battleground” means that both sides believe they have a chance of winning in 14 up-for-grabs states.

If this state is a toss-up, then somebody is blowing smoke. Oregon is big-time Blue. You can take it to the bank. A slam-dunk. Put it in the freezer. Like a rock for the Ds.

Got that? (It’s proof are plenty of non-war metaphors available)

The only way Oregon is going for McClone is if Obama chooses Jeremiah Wright as his running mate — or Hillary Clinton.

Geez, if the campaign strategists can have this one so wrong, what about all those other “battleground” states? Do they think the voters have been sleeping through the Bush years?

Maybe the Obama people just don’t want us to get all cocky here in the upper left-hand corner. Amazingly, the campaigns also include Washington on the “battleground” list.

What kind of rubes do they take us to be?

Come to think of it, if the Obama folks are so out of touch with us, maybe McClone and the Bushites behind him have a chance here after all. Why else would they think they had a chance?

How’s this for a headline and lead?

McCain claims Obama is lying
about Pacific Northwest
being a toss-up

John McCain told a Portland audience today that Northwesterners are being duped by an Obama campaign that purports McCain has a change of winning in the region.

“I’m here to give you some straight talk," McCain told a unenthusiastic crowd of five in Pioneer Courthouse Square. "My opponent is lying to you, and we know you are still going to vote for him! We don’t have a prayer here.”

The speech was seen as a new tactic in the beleaguered Republican's presidential campaign. McCain campaign aides said the strategy is to bolster McCain’s underdog status and to win the sympathy vote.

An Obama spokesman responded that the Illinois senator really does believe that the two states are up for grabs. “There are a lot of really stupid people here who cling to the Bush recession, the war and $4/gallon gas prices. Don’t ask us why, but that’s what the polls show. It could be mindless nostalgia, a batch of bad IPA, tainted salmon or Hanford radiation seeping into the groundwater."

"Whatever. . . ,” he added.

Strangelets and Graupel

The day began with snow again and a weird word, “strangelet,” in a front page story in The New York Times.

Seems that a couple of scientific skeptics fear that a giant proton accelerator/smasher that will be switched on this summer in Switzerland (they should stick to clocks and chocolate) could produce a black hole and suck the planet into nothingness.

Or, under cheery Option B, the accelerator/smasher could produce something called a "strangelet" that would, and here I quote the Times, "convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called ‘strange matter.’"

Strange matter, indeed. What on Earth are these Swiss physicists thinking?

Well, the skeptics have actually taken the matter to court in Hawaii to have it all looked into by a judge. Sounds vaguely like a protest junket to me, but whatever it takes.

So that’s where it stands with the “strangelets.”

(Red Electric reader Gary Gilbert wrote after this was originally posted and suggested this information on "the precautionary principle" as being relevant to the above. I agree.)

Then, as strange as strangelets came the weather forecast in The Oregonian calling for “graupel.”

Here is Matt Zaffino, TV weather, oh-so-nice guy, writing in the paper, telling us to expect graupel. According to Matt, this stuff, and I quote," forms under the same process as hail, but it begins with snowflakes instead of raindrops. Updrafts in the clouds carry the snowflakes upward, adding ice. They fall when they're heavy enough to overcome the updraft."

And sure enough, around 4 p.m. we got graupeled. The stuff is kind of like Styrofoam hail, which is a whole lot better than a Swiss-made black holes or strangelets.

Forging a stage to plunge into battle

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, from Section V, An approach to style:

Rule 18: Use figures of speech sparingly. … When you use metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don’t start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.

From the Front page of Sunday’s New York Times:

Senator Barack Obama won a commanding victory over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, forging a coalition of support among black and white voters in a contest that sets the stage for a state-by-state fight for the party’s presidential nomination.

In a bitter campaign here infused with discussions of race, Mr. Obama’s convincing victory puts him on equal footing with Mrs. Clinton —with two wins each in early-voting states — and gives him fresh momentum as the contest plunges into a nationwide battle over the next 10 days.

Metaphor, figure or speech and cliche tally:

“commanding victory”
“forging a coalition”
“sets the stage”
“fight”
“equal footing”
“fresh momentum”
“plunges into battle”

Feeding your car; starving your family

In the news this morning, three stories passed like the proverbial ships in the night.

They shouldn’t have.

Story #1, on the front of the Oregonian’s Metro section, was about how Oregon law now requires gasoline stations in this part of the state to pump fuel with 10 percent ethanol. The reason, according to the story, is that we are trying to wean ourselves from reliance on Middle Eastern oil and to cut down on carbon emissions.

So far so good.

The story is mostly about how the ethanol gets to the pump and what the change will mean to the performance of our vehicles. Not until the story's last two paragraphs do we learn about the environmental costs of this supposedly environmentally friendly fuel. “Recent academic, economic and environmental reports have criticized corn-based ethanol because energy-intensive methods are used to grow the crop and because increased demand for the fuel can push up prices for food with corn ingredients.”

That journalistic after-thought takes us to two stories on the business page of today’s New York Times, one above the other on the section’s front page.

The top story has the headline “Amid doubts, Europe may ban some biofuels.” So the buried information in The Oregonian makes the headlines in the New York Times story. The Europeans are ahead of our oh-so-green state when it comes to skepticism about biofuel. But then Europe doesn’t have a politically-powerful, well-greased, on-the-dole farm lobby like ours. The Times story reports that studies are showing that “growing the crops and turning them into fuel can result in considerable environmental harm.”

The fertilizer used to grow corn is made with petroleum-based produces. Those tractors used to till the increased corn acreage burn oil etc. The “Corn Rush” is also chewing up grasslands and forests.

And then there is the problem that feeding the population explosion of cars (here, and increasingly in China and India) is driving up the price of food. That’s the second story on the Times’ business page. Headline: “Commodities Relentless Surge — Chinese and U.S. demand push food and minerals steeply higher.”

And all this just in time for a recession. We are looking at a perfect economic storm.

Take meat prices, which are soaring. That’s because the price of the corn used to feed cattle is skyrocketing as it is being used as car fuel, not human fuel, In other words, corn is ending up in our cars’ tanks and not in our stomachs.

And the price jump doesn't stop with corn. As the Times story notes, “The prices of other grains are going up as their acreage is supplanted by corn.” Hops and barley, for instance. Check out the price of a pint of IPA at the corner pub.

As one commodities researcher put it, “You are trying too feed people, cattle and cars, so you have this global fight between food and energy.”

Meanwhile, back in Oregon our lawmakers, urban and rural alike and uncharacteristically in league, are steering us to fill up with ethanol-laced gas.

How long will it take them and us to figure out it’s a bad idea?

The hope is that a plug-in electric vehicle (Toyota and GM plan to start selling them in two years) will ride to the rescue, using power provided by sun, wind and, yes, Oregon coastal waves.

Early morning with E.B. White

The other day both newspapers, The Oregonian and The New York Times, were late arriving on our driveway.

Or maybe I was early coming downstairs.

It doesn’t matter who or what was to blame; the result was the same. Sitting in my study, a cup of coffee warming my paws, I suddenly found myself without news.

Savor this moment, I thought. And I did.

Then I reached out to grab the first book that fell to hand from the bookshelf that crowds my maroon recliner.

I found myself clutching “Essays” by E.B. White and suddenly my day took on a decidedly different hue.

No Iraq, no George W. Bush, no Iowa campaigning, no teenage fatalities on rural highways, no stock market slides or Blazer losses.

Instead, I found myself back in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies with the transparent and congenial prose of the author of “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.”

I nosed around among the essays reading unassuming yet beguiling leads.

“The Winter of the Great Snows” began: “Somebody told me the other day that a seagull won’t eat a smelt.”

“The Sea and the Wind that Blows” started: “Waking or sleeping, I dream of boats — usually of rather small boat under a slight press of sail.”

And “Riposte” began: “To come upon an article in the Times called ‘The Meaning of Brown Eggs” was an unexpected pleasure.”

Which takes me back to where I began — with White’s essays themselves presenting a pleasure and relief from what I expected to find in The Oregonian and The Times.

How far he took me from what we consider “news.” So much so that his offerings became the real news of the day. How could I have stayed informed without it?

How do I manage on all those days when the newspapers arrive “on time”?