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Last week, fresh off running an op-ed by Obama, the NY Times refused to run one by McCain. Power Line posts on the subject. That refusal and McCain’s complaining last week about the biased media coverage of Obama was almost too rich for words. McCain sucked up to the press for years. It’s nice to see him getting the short end of that stick.
Along those lines, Ann Coulter had some thoughts.
ck before the Republican Party was saddled with John McCain as its nominee, The New York Times called him “the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe.” The paper praised him for “working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation” and predicted that he would appeal to “a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field.”
At the same time, the Times denounced “the real” Rudy Giuliani as “a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man” and Mitt Romney as “shape-shifting,” claiming it’s “hard to find an issue on which he has not repositioned himself to the right since he was governor of Massachusetts.”
Here are a few issues I found that Romney hadn’t switched positions on, and it wasn’t “hard”: tax cuts, health care, same-sex marriage, illegal immigration and the surge in Iraq. The only issue on which Romney had changed his position was abortion, irritating people who would prefer for Republicans to refuse to run in places like Massachusetts and New York City in order to preserve their perfect pro-life credentials.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof echoed the editorial page in early February with a column titled: “Who Is More Electable?” In the very first sentence, Kristof concluded that McCain is “the Republican most likely to win the November election.” Kristof touted McCain’s “unusual appeal among swing voters” and cited polls that showed McCain would do “stunningly well” in a general election.
Also in February, CNN produced polls showing McCain doing better than “generic Republican” in a general election, which Jeffrey Toobin said was a tribute to how “well respected” McCain is. Hey, is it too late for us to nominate “generic Republican”?
And on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” from the way Chris Matthews carried on about McCain, you’d think he had caught a glimpse of Obama’s ankle. Matthews said that McCain was “the real straight talker … a profile in courage … more seasoned than the current president, a patriot, of course … honest and respected in the media. He has all the pluses in the world of a sort of a, you know, an Audie Murphy, if you will, a real war hero.”
I guess the party’s over. …
Now is an opportunity to include part one of an item from the Columbia Journalism Review on the present condition of the NY Times. Pickerhead has been holding this for a week or so. It is 6,000 words so part two will be in Pickings tomorrow. This comprehensive review of Pinch Sulzberger’s tenure is more balanced than some of the items that merely celebrate the continuing collapse of the paper. There is not much doubt Pinch has been a disaster, and there’s not much doubt the paper has a more pronounced left-wing bias.
Corporate annual meetings are generally drowsy affairs—a pep talk by management, some PowerPoint graphics, a little predetermined voting, all topped off by a parade of cranks to the microphones to excoriate management about their pet causes. April’s annual gathering of shareholders in The New York Times Company certainly featured all of those ingredients, down to the codger who shuffled in late, grabbed the seat next to mine, and promptly dozed off.
But beneath the surface routine there was an undercurrent of tension. Shareholders in the Times Company have been taking it on the chin recently, to say the least. In the five years between 2003 and the end of 2007, the Times’s stock lost about two-thirds of its value before rebounding slightly this year. As with most newspapers, daily circulation has been steadily eroding for years, dropping about 4 percent in the six months before the meeting. Sunday circulation has done even worse, declining almost 10 percent in those same six months.
The company’s “challenging” (to use CEO Janet Robinson’s word) first quarter of 2008 pointed to an even bumpier road ahead as the economy softens. Some bright spots poke through the gloom, but company-wide revenue was down about 9 percent year-over-year, with newspaper classifieds free-falling almost 23 percent compared to the first quarter of 2007. Despite the steep decline in the Times’s stock, an April report by media analyst Paul Ginocchio at Deutsche Bank concluded it was still overpriced: “We believe NYT’s valuation has been inflated well above fundamental levels, and continue to see a near-term selling opportunity,” his report said. …
… The company’s financial problems are hardly unique in the print world; no one has yet solved the challenge to newspapers posed by the digital revolution. Still, the pall hanging over the annual meeting seemed especially striking given the setting, the sleek new TimesCenter, a 378-seat auditorium appended to the company’s new fifty-two-story Renzo Piano-designed headquarters, a building that cost the company about $600 million. The Times Building is just one of several big outlays the company undertook in recent years, even as its financial fortunes worsened. From 2003 through 2006, the company spent hundreds of millions buying back its own stock only to see its value steeply depreciate. Last year, it chose to substantially raise its cash dividend to shareholders, a principal source of income for members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family that controls the company.
Despite pressure from large shareholders, Times management has also been reluctant to shed some of its under-performing assets, such as The Boston Globe, which the company acquired in 1993 for $1.1 billion, a price that many critics called absurdly high even at the time. That judgment was vindicated last year when the company had to absorb a painful $814 million write-down on the Globe deal and a later acquisition of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. …
Roger Simon comments on the troubles of John Edwards.
… But now that the cat is out the bag, I will say what I wanted to say then. John Edwards–he of constructing a 28,000 square foot home while preaching about the two Americas and remonstrating about the environment–is one of the most reprehensible schmucks to appear on the American political scene in some time. And that’s saying something. That he played this game while his wife had cancer makes it contemptible beyond words. Now we know why he was always primping in the mirror. It is narcissism unbounded. …
Slate wonders why the media is ignoring the current John Edwards story.
Everybody had a good laugh last August when Roll Call broke the story about Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, getting arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for playing footsies in a toilet stall. The late-night talk show hosts mined the material for days; Slate produced a re-enactment of the bathroom ballet; and newspapers, magazines, and cable channels shredded Craig.
The angle taken by most reporters and commentators wasn’t that Craig’s restroom conduct was particularly shameful. The press doesn’t object to same-sex sex at all, nor should it. Craig’s true offense, said the press and the clowns, was hypocrisy, which they consider an inexcusable crime. Craig had supported both federal and Idaho bans on same-sex marriage, had opposed hate crime legislation that would extend protections to gays, and had earned a perfect 0 rating (PDF) from the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobby. And he had denied and denied any and all gayness while trying to recruit some action in a bathroom!
Although the Craig story and the John Edwards story, currently unfolding thanks to the National Enquirer, aren’t directly analogous, they have a bit in common. Edwards, too, may be a sex hypocrite. The tabloid called Edwards a cheater last October and the father of a love child in December, and last night the Enquirer posted a story about Edwards’ visit to his alleged mistress and child at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night. …