Fearless Critic: CJR -- Hopelessly out of Touch
Extraordinarily strong words, but may be closer to the truth that it originally seems. CJR correctly points out that the anti-Bush stories were real news, and deserved the reporting. Mr. Duffy (the Fearless Critic) also correctly points out a lot of stories which could have had (did have?) big headlines The problem here is there is no "standard" for what is a big story and what is not. Every one of the anti-Kerry stories he mentions, I had heard about and read up on. Does that mean it was a big story? And an individual will always think that their side of the story is being underrepresented compared to the opposition. Is the problem here that stories are not correctly being represented, or just a matter of personal belief? Part of the issue in Mr. Duffy’s comparison is the comparative sizes of each of the stories. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not the Swift Boat accounts linkage to the Bush campaign was or was not as big a deal as MoveOn, America Coming Together, etc being tied to the Kerry campaign. My opinion is that given the message that the Swift Boat folks communicated, and the Bush campaign’s subsequent “fervent” denial, the two organizations being closely linked was a bigger story. But that is just my opinion. And to satisfy Mr. Duffy, I doubt there would be a single source that he would trust to measure the story size and then measure the story coverage. Balance in the news room is a good idea, but it will not make anyone on the right trust the NYT or anyone on the left trust the Washington Times. 