Rampant Bias by the New York Times, LA Times, and the Chicago Tribune in the 2008 Presidential Race May Cost Election

Historians will some day look back and note the “efforts” of three of the largest U.S. newspapers, the LA Times, New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune to manipulate the 2008 Presidential election in order to get their candidate, Barack Obama, elected.

Together they’re the Barack Obama Trifecta, using their considerable resources as three of the ten largest papers in the United States in getting their man elected as President. Recently the New York Times wrote an “expose” on Senator McCain’s wife, the Chicago Tribune published a glowing endorsement of Obama, while the LA Times “reported” a “look” at Sarah Palin’s “years in college”.

At first blush the articles seem fairly ethical in regards to journalistic standards, yet DBKP took another look at the stories and found evidence of outright bias against the McCain-Palin ticket: the New York Times article was a “hit piece” about Cindy McCain, the LA Times wrote about Sarah Palin’s college years as “forgetable” but neglected to relay the fact that Biden had been caught in a serious incident of plagiarism while in Law School, and perhaps the most serious transgression of unethical standards by a national newspaper with the seventh largest readership in the country: an admission by the Chicago Tribune editorial staff in their “glowing” endorsement of Obama that they had personally “asked” Obama to run for President in 2006.

The recent article about Cindy McCain in the New York Times was stunning: the paper called Mrs. McCain a “political liability” who would “walk on broken glass” for McCain during the campaign. She “played a role in the Keating Five” and was caught “stealing drugs”. She has a “fortune” that “sets her apart from other Americans”–nevermind that the last Democratic nominee for President, John Kerry, his spouse is worth an estimated billion dollars–Cindy McCain wants to be like “another blonde”, the now tragically deceased “Princess Diana”, miscarriages, and other other assorted sundry. Contrast this skewed piece about Cindy McCain to the one article published by the Times about Michelle Obama touting her work against racism, her ability to settle differences, her upbringing, and her “complicated image”. The entire piece was constructed in an attempt to “soften” Michelle Obama’s image whereas the Cindy McCain article was engineered in an attempt to portray her in a light so unfavorable that even long time Times readers weighed in:

To the Editor:

I am perplexed as to why you decided to feature such a mean-spirited, unkind article about Cindy McCain. I have been a dedicated New York Times reader for decades as well as a lifelong Democrat and a current Barack Obama supporter. So I am questioning your judgment as a friend rather than as an enemy.

The LA Times published its latest jibe at Sarah Palin: Sarah Palin’s college years left no lasting impression:

What can we learn about our political stars from impressions they made in college?

Sen. John McCain is remembered as a passionate contrarian who won the hearts of his classmates at the Naval Academy. Sen. Barack Obama, who attended Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School, is remembered as a daunting scholar and calming influence. Sen. Joe Biden, who had a brush with plagiarism at Syracuse University College of Law, is remembered fondly by professors who found him charming.

Readers actually learned little about the true circumstances surrounding Biden’s tenure in schools but we learned a lot about the journalistic standards of the Times: glossing over Biden’s Law School days as “charming” while underreporting Biden’s bout with stealing other people’s work in order to graduate from Law School.

Biden’s Lazy, Hazy Law School Days

The current meme of the Times and other papers endorsing Obama is that Biden was a “good choice”: an “experienced” hand in foreign affairs, as well as a trusted long time Senator. What the MSM isn’t reporting is that it was revealed during the 1987 Presidential primaries that Biden was caught plagiarizing not only Neil Kinnock, the former head of the Labor Party in the UK’s past life, but also a much more serious incident during his tenure at Law School. According to an article published by the New York Times in September, 1987, Biden addressed the issue of his Law School plagiarism calling it a “mistake”:

“Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., fighting to salvage his Presidential campaign, today acknowledged ”a mistake” in his youth, when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school.”

The Times also reported that Biden’s school records contained “poor grades” in both college and Law School as well as “mixed evalutions” from teachers.

Contrast the current article about Palin’s college days cited by the paper as “forgetable” while calling Biden’s former stint at Law School as “charming” while downplaying or omitting that Biden had been a “poor student” at both college and Law School with incidents of plagiarism and, well, we’ll let our readers draw their own conclusions as to the Time’s motivation.

The most stunning admission this week by a paper in regards to bias towards John McCain in this election goes to the Chicago Tribune, the seventh largest paper in the nation, with a daily readership of over 600,000. The Tribune recently published its endorsement of Obama. Within the editorial staff’s warm and fuzzy tribute to Obama was this admission: the paper wrote that it had “encouraged” Obama to run for President in 2006:

“On Dec. 6, 2006, this page encouraged Obama to join the presidential campaign. We wrote that he would celebrate our common values instead of exaggerate our differences. We said he would raise the tone of the campaign. We said his intellectual depth would sharpen the policy debate. In the ensuing 22 months he has done just that.”

And what has the Chicago Tribune been up to in the past 22 months in regards to the Presidential election? DBKP decided to take a look at just some of the stories published by the Tribune in regards to the Presidential race and Barack Obama and John McCain and here’s what we found:

On October 17, the Tribune endorsed Obama.

Obama’s relationship with his mother and grandmother in “Mother, grandmother both inspired Obama”.

Barack Obama to visit ill grandmother Madelyn Dunham
Race suspended as he travels to Hawaii

Obama has date with Grant Park

Catholics for Obama: No qualms about abortion issue

And this piece about Obama and socialism:

Socialists, Obama No Socialist, published by the Chicago Tribune:

John Bachtell, the Illinois organizer for Communist Party USA, sees attempts by Sen. John McCain’s campaign to label Obama a socialist as both offensive to socialists and a desperate ploy to tap into fears of voters who haven’t forgotten their Cold War rhetoric.

“Red baiting is really the last refuge of scoundrels,” Bachtell said. “It has nothing to do with the issues that are confronting the American people right now. It’s just a big diversion.”

Is it a case of “red baiting” and a “big diversion”, the assertions that Obama is “socialist”? DBKP found where not only does Obama frequently “sound” socialist but that he actually was a member and endorsed by a socialist party, the Socialist New Party, when he announced his candidacy for Illinois State Senate from the living room of Bill Ayers. Ayers is the guy who was a former member of the Weather Underground who wrote in his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, that he and his gang of domestic terrorists “hadn’t done enough” during the Vietnam War when they bombed the Capital and the Pentagon. DBKP has written extensively on Obama’s past: Barack Obama, Socialist, Member of Socialist New Party.

Not only hasn’t the Tribune “investigated” Obama’s ties to a Socialist Party but they’ve attempted to paint Obama’s prior relationship with Bill Ayers as, in the words of Obama, “tangential”, while portraying a “kinder gentler” Ayers.

We do have to give kudos to John Kass for his article in the Tribune about Ayers:
Daley Reins in radicals- the Chicago Way.

Kass reported that Marilyn Katz, a go-to guy for “good guy” Ayers quotes, is a former member of another violent anti-Vietnam war protest group, the Students for A Democratic Society. Yet, Kass further perpetuates the meme that Obama’s relationship with Ayers consisted of “school reform”. DBKP has written several articles on the Ayers-Obama relationship which is far more intricate than “neighborhoods” and “school reform meetings”.

Not only did Obama have a “relationship” with Ayers but Obama gave his first speech against the Iraq War at a rally put together in 2002 by none other than Marilyn Katz:

NPR’s Don Gonyea found a couple of people who were there in 2002 listening to the speech and as Faulker might have scribbled, people heard the same thing and told it differently.

According to Gonyea’s report, event co-organizer Marilyn Katz said “the crowd was pretty much transfixed.” On the other hand, U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute President Juan Andrade Jr. said:

There was nothing magic about it…There was nothing about that speech that would have given anybody any sense that he was going places. We were just glad that he was one of those who was willing to step up at a time when very few people seemed to be willing to do that.
–Huffinton Post

In yet another example of “six degrees of separation”, Marilyn Katz has been friends with “guess who” for 30 years? In an article about David Axelrod, Obama’s political advisor, and former Chicago Tribune reporter, we found this quote:

“It is also a Chicago thing. To a jaundiced eye from the East, Carl Sandburg’s “city of big shoulders” is an unexpected locus of optimism — a community whose leading citizens believe fervently in civic progress and the ameliorative power of politics. “Chicago is a place where the impossible becomes possible,” argues Marilyn Katz, a public relations consultant and political operative who has worked with Axelrod for 30 years. “We don’t have New York cynicism.”

Axelrod has known Obama since Obama was 30 years old and an activist. Yet while Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, has “worked” with Marilyn Katz, who was a former member of a violent anti-Vietnam War group, Students for a Democratic Society, for 30 years and has also known Obama for 15 years, Obama claims he had no idea, Katz’ buddy, Bill Ayers, was a former member of the Weather Underground. This is after both Obama and Ayers spent time and gave considerable money to ACORN under the aegis of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. It also begs the question: if Axelrod has known Obama for 15 years and his rise in politics, then its quite possible that Axelrod may have been privy to, or present at the Ayers’ fundraiser. At that point in time, wouldn’t Axelrod have also known about Ayer and Dohrn’s past and relayed it to Obama? These types of questions aren’t being asked by the Chicago Tribune.

“Axelrod has known Obama longer than any of his other close political advisers and, other campaign officials say, is now Obama’s chief strategist and someone he “trusts implicitly.” Axelrod has been intimately involved with the staffing of the campaign (David Plouffe, who was a partner in Axelrod’s consulting firm, is now Obama’s campaign manager), with its strategy and pacing and with the scrubbing of its message and language. Because of the vastness of the operation, Axelrod has had to hire other media consultants to help him develop commercials; his own role, he says, will be as “keeper of the message.””

The Tribune hasn’t interviewed Ayers, nor questioned Obama in regards to the extent of his involvment with Ayers, instead they’ve published “puff” pieces such as Bill Ayers’ turbulent past contrasts with quiet academic life, Friends, Daley defend ex-radical, Obama neighbor”.

The Tribune, in the guise of reporting the “news” has instead, shown a penchant for vigorously defending Obama:

“Republican presidential contender John McCain attacked rival Democrat Barack Obama Monday for being “born of the corrupt Chicago political machine” just as Illinois lawmakers approved a new ethics law driven by Obama’s call for help from a powerful old Springfield ally.”

The Tribune, in it’s endorsement of Obama, failed to note that not only was Obama a registered Socialist who held his first fundraiser in the living of Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, both former members of the Weather Underground, in his first election for Illinois State Senate, but also manuevered to question the “legitimacy” of voter signatures on petitions. The upshot: Obama ran uncontested, everyone else was disqualified:

In his first race for office, seeking a state Senate seat on Chicago’s gritty South Side in 1996, Obama effectively used election rules to eliminate his Democratic competition.

As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.
–CNN

To date, neither the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, nor the New York Times has actively investigated the Obama-Ayers connection, nor Obama’s ties to a Socialist party, instead they’ve spent their considerable resources touting Obama while putting out hit pieces on McCain and Palin. They’ve painted Ayers as a “quiet scholar” and “school reformer” even quoting persons such as Marilyn Katz, another former member of a violent anti-Vietnam War protest group who is heavily involved in PR work and Chicago politics. Ayers published a memoir in 2001, while both he and Obama served on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge board. A memoir which admitted bombing the Pentagon and the Capital Building while claiming his group “didn’t do enough”. The Tribune has turned a blind eye to Ayers and now we know the reason why: the Tribune is willing to manipulate the news in order to elect their candidate, Barack Obama.

We have to give the Chicago Tribune credit: they’ve openly admitted they “asked” a politician, Obama, to run for President in 2006, then set about to get him elected by using their paper as an free PR machine for Obama. As for the New York Times, they’re openly anti-McCain as well as their “sister”, the LA Times. Their “open” advocacy of Obama does suggest that they believe their candidate needs all the “help” they can muster in the guise of “fair” and “balanced” and “professional” journalism.

It’s not hard to imagine the extent that voters have been influenced by the slanted reporting in play by the big three. This is more than just a disservice to voters, this is journalist malpractice. The paper is supposedly in the business of “informing” voters, not pushing an agenda, which is the case. The papers have downplayed any serious questions about Obama, especially in regards to his ties to a domestic terrorist and a socialist party. They “chose” a candidate and then used their considerable weight to construct their candidate and his candidacy. In essence, they’ve shaped this presidential election, not just in the general, but also the primaries, against opponents such as Hillary Clinton, so you really can’t call this merely a Republican, conservative bias but an egotistic endeavor by the editorial staff, a plan to get a personally handpicked candidate elected.

If Barack Obama were truly everything the paper’s editorial staffs believe he is, then he wouldn’t need them following along in his footsteps, carefully crafting his image with stories designed to bolster him but also skewed to damage his opponents. Obama wouldn’t need “damage” control nor his wife’s image “softened” for potential voters.

The paper’s attempts to shill Obama to their readers while claiming voters can rely on them for “concise” and “reliable” info in order to ascertain who to vote for in the upcoming Presidential election is unethical and dangerous: these people obviously believe in regards to the next U.S. President, “they know best” as long as voters find out “the least” in regards to the facts about Obama.

By LBG

Image – Weather Underground