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August 14, 2007

Bare-knuckled bias at the NYT

Rick Richman
The New York Times today carried three news stories and an editorial on Karl Rove's decision to leave the White House.  On page one, in the first paragraph of the lead story, Jim Ruternberg and Seven Lee Myers write [emphases added throughout] that:
The decision ends Mr. Rove's role as the president's longest-serving and closest aide, and the one who most personified the bare-knuckle brand of politics Mr. Bush favors.
I was curious about whether the Times had ever described someone else -- say James Carville -- as personifying a "bare-knuckle brand of politics."  So I put "bare-knuckle" and "Carville" into the Times' search engine covering all stories since 1981.  And sure enough, four articles answered my query: 
            In a February 20, 2006 article, reporter Elizabeth Bumiller referred to:
Ms. [Mary] Matalin, a former campaign manager for the first President Bush who was known for her bare-knuckled outbursts.
I had not known of Matalin's proclivity for "bare-knuckled outbursts" (I even have trouble trying to visualize what one looks like).  But apparently she's been known for them since at least December 23, 2002, when Elizabeth Bumiller reported that: 
Other Republicans have winced at some of Ms. Matalin's more bare-knuckled outbursts, including the time during the collapse of Enron that she fire-hosed the press as ''scandal addicts'' and said the scandals of the Clinton administration were far worse.
The term "bare-knuckled" and "Carville" appeared in two other Times articles.  On January 21, 1998, reporter Francis Clines reported on the deposition of President Clinton in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones:
After weighing first-hand the challenge presented on Saturday by Ms. Jones's lawyers, the President was described as in a mood of high confidence about the case and high resolve to box it off from his job.  One of his defenders, however, commented anonymously that while the deposition was encouraging for its lack of bare-knuckled surprises from the Jones's team, there was no denying that Mr. Clinton's forced tangent from White House business has provided a demeaning, demoralizing notation in the legacy ledger.
The last reference was in another article by Francis Clines, on March 1, 1998, reporting on "Monica and More; From Just Lurid To Truly Vile":
FOR a while, the Monica Lewinsky story could not have seemed any more sensational and basic, built around allegations of sex and mendacity in the Oval Office.  But now it may be getting even closer to the facts of life in Washington.  It has begun peeling away at the dirty little secrets of how the capital scandal-hunting culture works, and with such a bare-knuckled vehemence on the part of the antagonists that the result may be even less uplifting for the nation than the original scandal story.
So:  there are bare-knuckled politics, bare-knuckled outbursts, bare-knuckled surprises and bare-knuckled vehemence, but none of them associated with James Carville.

My subsequent search for "bare-knuckle" and "Begala" returned zero results.

Rick Richman is editor of Jewish Current Issues. 

Posted at 02:14 PM | Email | | Share Share
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