February 5, 2007 -- 3:47 PM EST // //
NEW YORK TIMES MISLEADS READERS TO PORTRAY KERRY AS SAD-SACK LOSER.
This is a bad one. The New York Times has a long piece today that is ostensibly about John Kerry's efforts to reintegrate himself into the Senate now that he's decided not to run for the Presidency. But the piece is really one long, taunting shriek at Kerry: "Nyah, nyah, you're a loser!"
Indeed, so eager is the piece's writer, Mark Leibovich, to make the case that Kerry is a pathetic sad-sack "also-ran" that he basically misleads readers in order to do so. Leibovich writes:
Mr. Kerry ratified his status as Dead Candidate Walking in an emotional speech on the Senate floor two weeks ago. “We came close, certainly close enough to be tempted to try again,” Mr. Kerry said, referring to his 2004 campaign.Only two colleagues attended his announcement, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a fellow Massachusetts Democrat, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada (another, Senator Ken Salazar, Democrat of Colorado, walked in late). “I have concluded this is not the time for me to mount a presidential campaign.”...
His announcement could have been a dignified valedictory moment. But the enigmatic Mr. Kerry is often misunderstood, and several news reports said he had cried when saying he would not run; in fact, he choked up earlier in his speech when talking about an Army captain he had met in Iraq who had been killed.
No matter, the photo of Mr. Kerry breaking down ran prominently in the Drudge Report and elsewhere. It buttressed the notion of John Kerry as the forlorn loser who had finally bottomed out.
This passage is very misleading. The clear implication is that the fact that "only two Senators" were at the announcement should be taken as a sign that Kerry is a pathetic figure. But let's remember what actually happened that day. If you recall, there was virtually no advance notice that Kerry was going to deliver this news on the Senate floor. The news broke on CNN at around 1 P.M., only hours before Kerry spoke, and was only attributed to anonymous sources. It wasn't announced beforehand. Clearly, then, many Senators may not have even known that Kerry's announcement was coming, let alone that they should "attend" it. They likely would already have had other business scheduled for that afternoon. Hence, there would have been no reason for lots of Senators to have been there.
Framing it this way -- as if the fact that "only two Senators" were at the announcement had any significance at all -- is deeply misleading, and tells the reader more about the reporter's zeal to portray Kerry in that light than it does about the event itself.
Secondly, this passage actually appears to suggest that Kerry's speech was misrepresented in news reports because Kerry is "enigmatic" and is "often misunderstood." The absurd implication of this is that this misrepresentation was somehow his fault -- he doesn't make himself clear enough.
Seriously, there's tons more to object to in the piece. Its primary point is simply that Kerry is a big fat loser. Read it and see if you don't agree. This is a performance that can only be described as undignified. But then again, lots of snide throwaway lines -- things that sound vaguely like school-cafeteria-level taunts -- have been snaking their way into the Paper of Record's political coverage of late.
Update: Don't miss Eric Boehlert's take on the media's misreporting of Kerry's "tears."