While the United States was waging its war on terrorism, the New York Times waged a crusade against a 300-member golf club, publishing over 40 articles and editorials over a four-month period in 2002 condemning the male-only membership policy of August National, the club which hosts the annual Masters golf tournament.
That crusade reached its crescendo when a "news" story appearing on the front page of the Times declared, "CBS Staying Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta" (Nov. 25, 2002). That appalling piece of journalism – one which reported the "news" of what CBS had not done and which speculated on what the CBS executives were "apparently" thinking on the subject – turned out what appears to be the opening salvo in another journalistic crusade: the war against CBS News.
That front-page news was quickly followed by an editorial published the next day ("The Masters Business") in which the Times called upon CBS to boycott its television coverage of the Masters tournament (without, by the way, calling for the Times' own sports reporters to join such a boycott).
Then, just when it thought it was safe to broadcast the Masters, CBS found itself to be the target of another shocker broken by the Times: "To Interview Former P.O.W., CBS Offers Stardom" (June 16, 2003). In that article, the Times reported that CBS offered Pfc. Jessica Lynch, in exchange for a highly sought-after news interview with her, a television movie, a book deal and even dangled the possibility of a chance for Pfc. Lynch and her friends to be co-hosts on an MTV music special. Later that week, CBS became the butt of criticism in a Times editorial titled "Wooing Private Lynch" (June 18, 2003).
Recall, it was also the New York Times who broke the story about CBS' intention to broadcast a two-part TV mini-series called "The Reagans." The Times had gotten its hands on a shooting script, revealing many of its most controversial details which, according to the Times, "stepped squarely" into the spirited debate about the historical legacy of President Ronald Reagan ("Grumbling Trickles Down From Reagan Biopic," Oct. 21, 2003). CBS later decided to pull the plug on the mini-series, relegating its broadcast to a cable channel of a sister company, costing CBS millions of dollars in potential advertising revenue.
If I suggested at that time that the Times had established a journalistic beat to focus on the foibles of CBS, you would have thought I had lost my marbles. Yet, then came last week when the Times sent the executives at CBS into a tear with: "Michael Jackson Is Said to Get $1 Million for CBS Interview" (Dec. 31, 2003). Ending a tough year for CBS with a figurative New Year's Eve dirty bomb, the Times quoted an unnamed source for the claim that CBS had in effect paid $1 million to pop star Michael Jackson in exchange for an interview for the television news magazine "60 Minutes."
The news, if true, would mean that CBS breached what is considered a sacred separation between its entertainment division and its news division, branding CBS with a shameful charge of "checkbook journalism."
CBS quickly fired back, charging the Times printed a "colossal lie" (USA Today, "Jan. 5, 2004). The Times not only stood by its story ("Our story is balanced and accurate"), it even taunted CBS when its culture editor weighed in with the observation, "The truth hurts" (New York Observer, "Lost In Neverland," Jan. 6, 2004).
The feud – a Happy New Year's surprise for conservative pundits – raises two questions: (1) Has the Times been waging a crusade against CBS? and (2) Was the Times' story about CBS' alleged $1 million payment in exchange for an interview accurate?
Earlier this week, Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and I were asked to appear on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" to share our observations on these questions. Certainly, there is no question that an open and heated feud is going on between CBS and the Times – and no doubt, as Brent suggested, the credibility of both organizations has been called into question in recent months. Brent went a step further to suggest, partly in jest, that the Times has been engaging in a "jihad" against CBS. Given the recent history of Times reporting on CBS, one could well reasonably come to that conclusion.
Like Brent, I have no idea whether the charge against CBS News is true. But I have a hard time believing that the story was part of a conscious crusade against CBS. After all, CBS is the Times' partner in the CBS /New York Times opinion polls (at least it still was at the time of this writing).
Nor was the story evidence of liberal bias – of course, if this apparent crusade was directed against Fox News, I'd have reason to suspect otherwise. For the most part, I reserved my observations for the narrower question: Was the Times' article about the $1 million payoff accurate?
Without the facts, we can only rely on a forensic approach, and a close examination of the Times' articles reveals a serious problem: the paper's reliance on an anonymous source calls into question the reliability of the charge. It is reminiscent of what the Los Angeles Times did to Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the publication of multiple charges of inappropriate behavior made by people hiding behind the cloak of anonymity to make their attacks.
According to the "New York Times Manual of Style and Usage,"
[A]nonymity is a last resort ... [and] must not become a cloak for attacks on people, institutions or policies.
Moreover, its story on CBS appears to have violated its own usage manual when it quoted the source directly, rather than paraphrasing CBS' accuser:
The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.
The Times directly quoted its unnamed source as saying:
"In essence they paid him" for the interview, the Jackson associate said of CBS, "but they didn't pay him out of the '60 Minutes' budget; they paid him from the entertainment budget, and CBS just shifts around the money internally. That way '60 Minutes' didn't pay for the interview."
The question that needed to be asked by the reporter was: How is an associate of Michael Jackson supposed to know which budget a CBS executive used for authorizing expenditures? By quoting the source, with no evidence the source had personal knowledge of the budgets, no apparent corroboration of his story, nor any additional evidence relating to what budgets the alleged $1 million was drawn from, the Times allowed someone – who perhaps may have an axe to grind against Michael Jackson, CBS or both – to not only use the credibility of the "newspaper of record" as a platform to launch his attacks, but to do so using precisely the words of his choosing.
At the end of the day, I find it hard to believe that the New York Times is intentionally trying to undermine the credibility of one of its liberal colleagues in the war against President Bush and his agenda. What we have here, more likely, is not biased journalism, fraudulent journalism nor checkbook journalism – it's just bad journalism.