NYT Again Hits Miami's Anti-Castro Exiles
Wednesday's front-page story on anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami by Abby Goodnough, "Florida's Zeal Against Castro Is Losing Heat," shows how the paper loses its respect for aggrieved minority groups when they trend Republican [1]: "But if Mr. Castro's grip on Cuban Miami remains strong, the fixation is expressed differently these days. The monolithic stridency that once defined the exile community has faded. There is less consensus on how to fight Mr. Castro and even, as Cuban-Americans grow more politically and economically diverse, less intensity of purpose."
Goodnough stacks the deck with unflattering anecdotes about the Cuban-Americans, including one that appears to hail [2]from 1992: "In the past, Cuban-Americans boycotted The Herald and smeared feces on its vending boxes to protest what they considered pro-Castro coverage. This city where raucous demonstrations by exiles were once as regular as summer storms has seen few lately. One theory is that the people whose life's mission was to defeat Mr. Castro and return to the island one day - those who fled here in the early years of his taking power - have grown old and weary."
Goodnough gives backhanded praise to a less "belligerent" exile group while dredging up more unflattering images: "The subtler approach is gaining favor. Cuban-Americans have grown more politically aware since the Elin Gonzlez episode, many say, when their fervor to thwart the Clinton administration and the boy's return to his father in Cuba drew national contempt. Americans who had paid little attention to the policy debate over Cuba tended to support sending Elin home, polls showed, and were put off by images of exiles blocking traffic and flying American flags upside down in protest. 'Elin Gonzlez was a great lesson, a brutal lesson,' said Joe Garcia, the former executive director of the Cuban-American National Foundation, a once belligerent but now more measured exile group."
During the battle over sending immigrant Elian Gonzalez back to his father in Communist Cuba, a Times editorial [3] from April 14, 2000 showed an atypical lack of respect for mass protests of minority groups, calling up unflattering images of foreigners the paper's liberal editors generally avoid like the plague: "The relatives, and the hundreds of supporters who daily encircle the great-uncle's home to shield the boy, make it look as if South-Florida's Cuban-Americans believe in mob rule."
For the rest of Goodnough, click here: [4]
Changing a Soldier's Story: A False "Surprise" Call-Up to Iraq
A Wednesday op-ed by Army reserve officer Phillip Carter is accompanied online by an embarrassing editor's note [5] apologizing for putting words in Carter's mouth, changes that made his Bush-critical column even more slanted. Yet the correction appears to be nowhere in Thursday's New York Late Edition hard copy.
The Times writes online: "The Op-Ed page in some copies of Wednesday's newspaper carried an incorrect version of the below article about military recruitment. The article also briefly appeared on NYTimes.com before it was removed. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, 'Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday,' nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a 'surprise tour of Iraq.' That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error. A corrected version of the article appears below."
Indeed, the last graph of the op-ed originally contained this line indicating that Carter had been called up by surprise: "A presidential recruiting speech may not fill every barracks, nor will it keep old soldiers like me from a surprise tour of Iraq, but it would help remind potential soldiers of what were fighting for."
The corrected op-ed online now reads: "A presidential recruiting speech may not fill every barracks, nor will it induce every old soldier to sign on for another tour, but it would help remind potential soldiers of what were fighting for."
The New York Late Edition hard copy has no sign of a correction or editor's note, though it does take space to clarify another burning issue: "Because of an editing error, an Op-Ed article yesterday about activist justices on the Supreme Court misstated the date the court started. Its first official business began in 1790, not 1791."
As liberal Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum notes, even the editor's note doesn't get it right: "It's true that Phil was 'recently called up to active duty,' but under the circumstances that still makes it sound like he was called up involuntarily. He wasn't. He volunteered."
"Hubris," a commenter at Drum's site, jokes: "I guess you can't blame the NYT; when people don't voluntarily enlist the desired phrases, an editor must start conscripting words."
Hillary Clinton's Suddenly Not-So-Special Olympics Push
Jim Rutenberg is with Mayor Mike Bloomberg in Singapore after his failed bid to win the 2012 Summer Olympics for the city of New York (a story accompanied by photos, painful in their irony, of celebrating Londoners).
Not until the jump to Rutenberg's front-page story is the presence of Sen. Hillary Clinton in Singapore mentioned, with her presence educed to a single line in paragraph 24 or the 28-paragraph article. Yet it was headline news in yesterday's Times when she joined the bandwagon to Singapore to drum up support for NYC's bid. A story [6] co-written by Rutenberg and Lynn Zinser received this starry-eyed headline: "New York Olympic Team Puts a Star on the Pedestal."
Judith Miller's "Not a Diplomat," Says Undiplomatic Clymer
Lorne Manly's "Woman in the News" profile of Times reporter and new liberal heroine Judith Miller (of Valerie Plame-gate fame [7]) includes this interesting quote: "Adam Clymer, a Times reporter from 1977 to 2003, said Ms. Miller had always been a hard-working and tough reporter. But her manner can be demanding and bossy, he added. 'She's not a diplomat.'"
The sour Clymer is one [8] to talk [8] about diplomacy.
Also odd is a line from Thursday's massive editorial, "Judith Miller Goes to Jail," in which the editorial board compares Miller to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks: "By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order. This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King."
To read the rest of Manly's profile, click here: [9]
For the full editorial, click here: [10]