New York Times plays dumb about Dick Armey and FreedomWorks
November 09, 2009 8:55 am ET by Eric Boehlert
In its Sunday magazine, the Times offered up a very cushy, flattering profile of conservative activist and former GOP House majority leader, Dick Armey. Readers learn that Armey, now the point person for FreedomWorks, which helped whip up the health care mini-mobs this summer, is a deep thinker and an all-round good guy.
But I couldn't help notice two instances early on the in the piece when the Times played quite dumb while tiptoeing around embarrassing facts about Armey and his FreedomWorks organization. Here's the first one [emphasis added]:
Now, in his role with FreedomWorks, which helped stage a big march on Washington in mid-September, he is again at the center of the opposition...The stated purpose of the march was to “defend” liberty and reduce the size of the federal government. (According to an unofficial estimate by a city official, the march drew between 60,000 and 75,000 people; organizers claimed a much higher number.)
"A much higher number"? I suppose that's one way of putting it, if you're trying to go out of your way to be nice to Armey and FreedomWorks. Because trust me, the facts are no nearly so benign.
The truth is that yes, the official estimate of the Sept. 12. rally was between 60,000 and 75.000. But in terms of what FreedomWorks organizers claimed, it wasn't "much higher." It was more than 20 times higher. Approximately 70,000 showed up in D.C. to protest Obama, yet that day a FreedomWorks leader went on stage and claimed there were 1.5 million people protesting in the streets. That wildly inflated number was then bumped up to 2 million. Both numbers were completely manufactured; just made-up nonsense.
In other words, Armey's FreedomWorks helped organize an anti-Obama rally. Then on the day of the protest FreedomWorks spread wild lies about the size of the crowd, but the Times didn't think that fact was worth mentioning in its profile of FreedomWorks leader Armey. And of course, the Times didn't think it was worth asking Armey about why his org lied about the rally.
Here's the other rather egregious example from the Times profile:
Armey himself has been traveling the country in support of favored political candidates, not all of them running on the Republican line. In a special election in upstate New York, he backed a third-party candidate for Congress over a Republican whom he did not consider sufficiently conservative on economic matters.
Here's what Times readers were never told about the Upstate New York race: Armey's candidate lost.
The Armey piece ran on Sunday. The Upstate N.Y. election was five days earlier on Tuesday. But in its profile of Armey and FreedomWorks, which went all in on the N.Y., race, the Times never tells reader that Armey's guy lost; that Armey's candidate actually helped flip an historically Republican district to the Democrats.
How would the Times' Armey puff piece have changed if the newspaper had been upfront about the Sept. 12 rally and the botched Congressional race? I suspect if readers knew that Armey's FreedomWorks brazenly lied about the protest crowd, many of them would say to themselves, 'Gee, this guy's a little nuts.'
And if readers knew FreedomWorks had been embarrassed in the Upstate New York race, they'd probably say to themselves, 'Gee, this guy isn't very effective.' Which, I suppose, is probably why both facts were left out of the Times article.
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I wonder myself why these so called liberal papers do this. The Washington Post had a two page puff piece on Orly Taitz in the last month, but say they do not have enough space to give a complete score for a golf tournament.
In the second, I have to give them a pass until I get more info, because I think most Sunday inserts to newspapers are printed quite a number of days ahead of time, and so that story easily could have been submitted before the voting occurred.
If the story was submitted after the election, then yeah, I agree, the omission of that data is offensive and wrong.
If that's the case, then this article mentioned above wouldn't have been able to include the election results.
In addition, the NY Times takes ads for its paper 3-4 days before the ad should run. In the Sunday magazine, it's 3 weeks before the ad should run.
I found one source that says that back in 2007, the Sunday magazine goes to print on a Friday for delivery 10 days later, on the following Sunday. I don't know if that's still the case.
Lastly, it looks like the Sunday magazine is published by Donnelly in Pennsylvania, not by the NY Times in NYC. That also leads me to believe that it's completed earlier than the rest of the paper.
I still don't know for sure that no updates about the election results are possible, but I suspect they aren't.
But I find articles like this one somewhat unappetizing because the tone becomes almost whiny. You're not upset that the reporting was inaccurate or full of spin, but instead that this article didn't take the opportunity to really stick it to a conservative figure.
I'm sorry, but you shouldn't take someone to task for accurate reporting just because you feel that they didn't do enough to paint the person they're interviewing as a complete and total a-hole. If they paint a rosey picture of this guy and you disagree, then make a counter argument, but complaints like this only make you seem petty that the media isn't adopting your PoV as fact.
I think that in many cases omission of relevant info is even more important is even more valuable.
It's not petty at all.
The issue is that these guys get more credibility than that they deserve.
So, when the media ignore a good thing about Obama, MMFA covers it. When they hype a bad thing, or invent a bad thing, they cover it. When they hype a thing that's not good about a righty, or invent a good thing that's really a bad thing, MMFA covers it. When they ignore a bad thing that a righty did, they cover it.
It's all important.
It's not accurate reporting if they leave off relevant info.
And you should note that I made a legit criticism of Boehlert above - because he failed to recognize that the Sunday New York Times Magazine was already completed before the election results were known.
Let's look at the first point that he tried to make. His issue is not that the paper lied or somehow spun it to make Armey look good. His issue here is that the Times, after accurately reporting that there were around 70k protesters and that conservatives falsely bumped it up, didn't then proceed to draw a line directly to Dick Armey and try to make him look like the person overtly responsible for the misleading number.
There's no proof that Armey came up with the 1.5 mil number or that he bumped it up, yet MMFA is insisting that the Times somehow dropped the ball by not explicitly tying that number to Armey. If I were Boehlert, I'd choose my battles a little more carefully.
I told her about the subway system counting tickets and coming up with about 70,000 participants. She hadn't heard about that and she agreed that was a pretty sensible explanation for why 70,000 was a pretty solid number.