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The debut today of new New York Times "public editor" Clark Hoyt is inauspicious. Like his two predecessors, he manages to discover a fact pattern that shows clear political bias by the Times, yet at the moment of truth fails to call a spade a spade and lets the paper off the hook. The issue in focus is why the Times didn't play the story about the attempt by terrorists to blow up JFK Airport on page one. It's easy enough to expect that the paper downplayed it either (1) to deprive the Bush administration of credit for a victory in the war on terror, or (2) to minimize the war on terror itself, a signature Republican issue. Hoyt writes,

It?s the same question I had when I picked up The Times and The Washington Post on Sunday morning. The J.F.K. story led The Post. On The Times?s front page, there was a one-paragraph promo to the story inside.

Hoyt concludes,

Do I think political motives were at work? I can?t read minds, but I believe after talking with these editors that they were focused on the substance of the story, the facts. They were mindful of a history in which terrorism cases have been blown out of proportion. [emphasis added]

So which is it? The facts? Or the assumption that the Bush administration can't be trusted, and so its victories must be minimuized? The next sentence in the same paragraph resolves the contradiction:

They were trying to make the right call based on solid journalistic grounds.

Which can only mean the treating victories of the Bush administration is "solid journalistic grounds."

Update [6/11/2007]... Reader D. Forbes Tuttle writes,

You quote Hoyt stating, "They were mindful of a history in which terrorism cases have been blown out of proportion."

As stated, it is a claim upon history, an assertion of universal knowledge--a sort of conventional wisdom. But where is the evidence? It resembles the big lie of propaganda. There is an arm's length laundry list of examples of Islamic terrorism perpetrated globally that most observers can cite from memory (I won't cite them here). While the memory of terror plots broken up in the planning stage is invariably shorter--due to the smaller window of media exploitation, e.g. NYC landmarks case, Lackawanna Six, Millennium plot at LAX, et. al. What would even constitute one terrorist case "blown out of proportion"? Much less a history of such to be mindful?

This isn't so much political bias, or anti-Bush bias, as it is a blind spot--a denial that a war has been declared by Islamic terrorists (al Qaeda) against the West and against infidels.

While Hoyt can explain away certain reporting or editorial decisions as based on journalistic grounds, i.e. journalists making judgments, the first pass on the writing of history is taking a terrible beating, as the Times omits the fact of the war--as if it disappears if they don't report it.

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