In the Two Weeks Before Horrible Election Day for Democrats, NYT's 'Caucus' Tilted 3-1 Toward the Losing Party
Times Watch monitored the last 15 days of the "Caucus," the paper's daily rundown of brief political items, and found that even as the GOP chugged to a big victory, taking over the House and cutting the Democratic majority in the Senate by two-thirds, the "Caucus" was buoyant with Democratic optimism and withering attacks on Republicans, favoring the losing party by a 3-1 ratio.
Between October 19 and Election Day November 2, the Times ran 52 bites in the "Caucus" section of the print edition - generally short summaries of articles posted on the "Caucus" blog at nytimes.com.
Of those 52 items, covering a range of local, state and national political topics, only six were classified as pro-Republican by Times Watch, while 19 favored Democrats (note that stories that reflected badly on Republicans were tabulated as pro-Democrat, and vice versa). The remaining 27 pieces were classified as neutral. In what was a terrible year for the Democrats, shouldn't those numbers have been at least equal, if not completely reversed?
Two "pro-Democratic" briefs from the October 27 edition were typical: A story on the Rand Paul campaign worker who stepped on the head of a left-wing protester at a Paul rally, under the strong headline "Violence Before Debate In Kentucky Senate Race," complete with a thumbnail photo of the foot-on-head shot. Another strong headline featured in a story critical of Alaska Republican candidate Joe Miller for using the computers of co-workers to vote in an online poll: "Records Reveal Lying."
Those stories appeared in the same paper that ignored credible reports of violence by liberals and union members against conservative protesters against Obama-care at congressional town hall meetings.
