Jul
24
Party Identification Absence: Mystery Solved? from East Sider
July 24, 2007 |
Ex-Newark Mayor Pleads Not Guilty to Corruption
By KAREEM FAHIM
Published: July 24, 2007NEWARK, July 23 — At his arraignment in federal court Monday, former Mayor
Sharpe James pleaded not guilty to corruption charges.
After scanning this morning's New York Times offering on Newark's ex-mayor, I had a flashback to a lecture by a (literally) communist professor I had in college.
He said visiting Soviet officials marveled at how in our putative decentralized, capitalist, pluralist, free press, the material was so uniform across media and across the nation.
They always asked "How do you do it?"
Well, given that yet again the former "newspaper of record" pointedly failed to mention the political affiliation of an accused politician, I can only assume one thing:
The Times's internal word processing software automatically deletes the word "democrat" by default, if the word "corruption" is elsewhere in the same block of text. Certainly no meatware system could be so consistent.
Sam Kumar remarks:
This inference drawn from one instance is probably false. The tenor of the post is that of a joke, but a propaganda message is clearly being sent here.
George Zachar adds:
This morning's front-page NY Times piece on the misuse of state police for political purposes in Albany, fails to mention the party ID of the suspects or their masters. This is noteworthy in light of East Sider's observation.
Press-as-partisan has a long history in the US. What's different with this cycle is the false-flag pretense of objectivity.
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Mr. Kumar,
It most assuredly is not one instance. On right-wing political blogs it is a running joke to point out all the news stories which fail to note the party of a public official in the first three paragraphs, or until after the jump if that official is a democrat, while republicans such as Vitter as a most recent example have their party affiliatin noted right up front. Contrast Vitter’s treatment with that of William Jefferson, and you will see the phenomenon.
It is a fun game, and happens with high frequency. I have noticed the phenomenon since the mid 80’s which was when I started to pay attention to political news stories.
You can google “name that party” to see a number of recent examples.
Perfectly agree with you sir. Appreciate your sense of humour. Corruption is a very likely disease to democracy. Most democratic countries are suffering a lot from corruption.