Talk About Breaking News: New York Times Isn’t Liberal, Washington Post Not Biased

 

Recent weeks have seen ombudsmen at both the New York Times and the Washington Post defend their respective newspapers from charges of journalistic bias and a deep-seated, enduring slant to the political left. Defined as “trusted [intermediaries] between…an organization and some…external constituency,” it is the job of  New York Times ombudsman Arthur Brisbane and the Post’s Patrick Pexton to represent “the broad scope of constituent interests” by seeking to present readers with facts and straightforward, impartial reporting.

Of course, anyone with a sense of humor—or any sense at all—will get a real kick out of claims of straightforward and impartial reporting by the Times or the Post. But that is exactly what these embattled colleagues have done in their attempts to defend recent articles responsible for more than the usual show of outrage from the reading public.

On May 10th, the Post printed a story of Mitt Romney’s 1965 involvement in forcibly cutting the hair of fellow Cranbrook student John Lauber. According to the very lengthy article, Romney and a number of friends threw Lauber to the ground and submitted him to a cruel and “vicious hack job.” Of course, Lauber also turned out to be gay. A remarkable coincidence of timing considering Obama’s sudden act of “coming out” in support of gay marriage. As the Post tells it though, these things “… just happened to coincide…”

However, as PJ Media points out, “…the story directly quoted a dead man; it claimed things about him that, being dead, he is in no position to affirm or refute; it mischaracterized the opinion of one of its core witnesses; and the family of the dead man (Lauber) says the story is factually inaccurate.”

The Post’s Pexton responds to such criticism from conservative web sites and large numbers of readers with: “The Mitt Romney bullying story holds up to scrutiny,” even as he defends as quite innocent timing clearly designed to assist the President.

Read More st Western Journalism. By Jim Kouri.