NY Times's Kit Seelye Speculates Baselessly -- In Paper's News Pages -- That Hillary Is Trying To Keep Obama Drug Issue Alive
December 14, 2007 -- 10:33 AM EST // //
Isn't it an article of faith that you never find baseless speculation in the news pages of The New York Times? Well, it's time to jettison the idea. Because in today's paper, reporter "Kit" Seelye injects pure speculation into the Times news pages, saying outright -- based on a highly questionable and selective reading of the facts -- that the Hillary campaign is trying to keep the Obama drug issue alive.
This comes in an article Seelye published today about how both Hillary and Mike Huckabee have apologized to their rivals in recent days, Hillary having apologized to Obama because her New Hampshire co-chair brought up Obama's past drug use:
in the aftermath of the apologies, both the Clinton and Huckabee campaigns kept the original slurs alive through a series of interviews, raising questions about the sincerity of their apologies, especially in the heat of a wide-open campaign with the first voting less than three weeks away.The single bit of proof offered for this is that her adviser supposedly brought up the drug question on Hardball last night. Here's how Seelye reports on that:
On Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Clinton’s top adviser, Mark Penn, appeared on MSNBC with Mr. Obama’s top adviser, David Axelrod, and John Edwards’s top adviser, Joe Trippi. They argued with one another, and it was there that Mr. Penn dropped the word “cocaine,” saying that the Clinton campaign had not raised the issue of “cocaine use.”It's hard to overstate how reckless this representation of the facts is. Seelye simply tells you that the advisers "argued" without saying what they argued about -- and then says Penn dropped the "cocaine" word, suggesting he brought up the drug question out of nowhere.
But if you watch the actual exchange, which is posted over at Taylor Marsh's site, you see that virtually the entire segment was about the drug flap, and that they'd been talking about the drug thing for literally minutes before Penn said "cocaine." Even if you want to read something into Penn using the word "cocaine," rather than "drug," failing to tell readers that this whole conversation was about the drug flap is a blatant misrepresentation of what happened. And no, slugging this a "news analysis" doesn't make it okay -- this is a factual misrepresentation, and it is the key piece of evidence offered to support the entire speculative premise of the piece, i.e., that the Hillary camp wants to keep this alive.
Look, a lot of people probably think the Hillary camp does want to keep this alive. I happen not to think this -- it's obvious to me that they see this issue as a big loser for them and want it to go away -- but lots of folks probably think they do want to. And few people will care about this because Penn is such a loathed figure. But it matters when crap like this is published, and even Penn and the Hillary campaign deserve to be treated by The Times with a modicum of fairness and journalistic integrity. And in this case, they weren't.
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