Let’s pretend for a minute I actually read the NYT instead of get tipped to its idiocy by other blogs.
I haven’t read any newspaper in years, and it is completely possible I’ve never read a dead-tree copy of the Times. I have, of course, read them online, but only when tipped by Drudge or someone else about a particularly asinine (that’s a high bar for the Slimes) story.
Ok, so here goes:
I was reading an interesting editorial about Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the New York Times (reg required) when I was pulled up short by a couple of things.
At last week’s oral argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, probably the term’s most important case, the outcome was all but decided when Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke. He strongly suggested by his questions that he would join the four moderate justices in rejecting the Bush administration’s position on a key aspect of its war-on-terror powers. That would be enough, because these days, the law is pretty much what Justice Kennedy says it is.
(boldface mine)
So there is no center, left and right, only conservative and moderate? And if Ginsberg is moderate, what would a liberal justice vote like? I don’t know if this is just liberal mind set, or intentional spin by the liberal writer. “Hey, we are the moderates, and the Republicans and conservatives are far right.” Does the writer really think that, or is he spinning for the audience, like if he keeps saying it, it makes it so. TV news readers regularly refer to “conservative Senator” Orrin Hatch and “conservative commentator” George Will or Michelle Malkin, but never do the same for Cynthia “Eva Gabor” McKinney or Eleanor Clift.
Can you even have a right and a center if there is no left? If nothing else, just comparatively, at least 4 justices are more liberal than their counterparts. Its just annoying that this kind of game is constantly played in the Times.
and secondly:
But Justice Kennedy has often broken with conservative dogma.
Yes, even right-moderate Kennedy sometimes adheres to “dogma” in his decisions, presumably, but often breaks out of that rigid mindset to vote the correct way. Presumably conservative justices don’t rule according to their lights vis a vis the law and the Constitution, they do it out of a pedantic slavery to “conservative dogma”.
Actually its the left that is rigid in its ideology and intolerance, which puts radical liberal causes above the rule of law. I don’t mind when liberals write a piece with their “dogma” on their sleeves. Its this insidious underhanded stuff that bugs me. They slip it in as accepted fact in otherwise factual pieces, even in editorials, and its annoying.
The funny thing is Conservative is not a pejorative term, even though liberals have long tried to make it so, while liberals have been forced to rebrand themselves as “progressives” and deny their beliefs, and to make obfuscations like this to frame themselves “moderates”.
Actually, I personally think of a “moderate” as a wishy-washy namby-pamby fence-straddler who won’t take a stand either way and requires lots of hyphens to describe.
This one’s a real laugher. At Media Matters they are making the argument that Sunday talk shows skew conservative. Let alone the fact that since the Republicans control all branches of the government and any initiatives or real policy is Republican conceived, led and executed, of course since they have the power to make the news they are the ones being featured. If anything, the oppo party gets too much room to air their negativity. Do we really need to hear Nancy Pelosi’s reaction to Bush’s newest initiative?
Barring that however, Media Matters’ conclusions, at least in the matter of “neutral” journalists seem suspect. They don’t publish a complete list so we can decide for ourselves, but we have to believe them when they deem a journalist “neutral”:
Since journalists breakdown is at 90% Democrat and 10% Republican, such a large percentage of purely neutral reporters is risible. How would you even find that many conservative journos? I’d be very interested in seeing the actual list of “neutral” reporters and the chance to research some of their stories and detect their “neutrality” for ourselves. Also, I have a great deal of doubt they are supporting the administration on much, if anything.
The entire exercise is part of the leftyblogz effort to fight the accepted and obvious fact that the majority of the American media news outlets, be it papers, networks or Public Radio, skew left and push liberal talking points, paint the Iraq War and the WOT as a failure and Bush as stupid and incompetent if not downright evil.
Luckily the American public is smarter than that and is not buying it. But that won’t stop the reporters from continuing to claim they are unbiased (or “moderate”) and the lefty-blahgz from backing them up with pretty graphics like these.