Perception versus reality – it’s a point that needs to be made until the cows come home.

Did you know that on Tuesday of this week Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, addressed a joint session of Congress? Did you know that not one word of that address, nor even any mention that the event even occurred, appeared in the following day’s national edition of the New York Times?

Aside from a photograph of President Bush and Mr. Karzai on its front page, and a caption mentioning that the two had a news conference in the Rose Garden, the June 16 edition of the New York Times contains not a single word about what Mr. Karzai said to Congress, to Bush or to the American people.

Why the cover up?

Here is the text of Mr. Karzai’s address to Congress. If you actually click on that link, you’ll find that you must pay a subscription fee to read the full text of the speech. That link, by the way, was only one of three links on Google News regarding Karzai’s appearance before Congress. The other two were this abbreviated AP wire story and this pitiful UPI wire story. [Editor's note: Karzai's speech in full is posted at Foxnews.com.]

I could not find any coverage in print of the long list of issues President Karzai took special care to raise about the progress in Afghanistan – 30 percent growth in the Afghan economy, dramatic progress in the country’s infrastructure, schools, health-care system and most important, in Karzai’s view, the outstanding progress the country has made in restoring basic civil rights to women.

How did I learn all of this? I just happened to catch Fox News’ live coverage of the president’s press conference; otherwise, I would never have known about Karzai’s address to Congress. And I consider myself a news junky!

The New York Times’ treatment of Karzai’s visit is not the tip of the iceberg – it’s the larger part of the iceberg, the part beneath the water that the public never gets to see.

Also lying beneath the surface, virtually unseen, is one of the greatest economic booms we’ve seen in 30 years. But a recent poll shows just how that reality has diverged from public perception of reality. According to a recent survey sponsored by the Associated Press, 57 percent of the public believe the nation has lost jobs in the last six months. That’s the perception. What’s the reality? Exactly the opposite! During the last six months, the economy generated nearly 1.2 million new jobs.

How could the American people be so misinformed?

The Times typically relegates good economic news to the inside of its business section, almost always using a wire story, rarely assigning any of its own reporters. They made an exception when the extraordinarily strong May payroll numbers came in: The story appeared on the front page, but only under a one-column headline.

Compare that to the four-column headline appearing Thursday, “Panel Finds No Qaida-Iraq Tie,” a story which is being widely criticized as a complete distortion of the facts. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq was directly involved in the 9-11 attacks, but there were “clear ties” – not “no ties” – between al-Qaida and Iraq before we took military action against Saddam Hussein. The Times reported the exact opposite of the truth in its banner headline.

How could the American people be so misinformed?

It’s a question that the New York Times and editorial boards across this country have a responsibility to ask themselves. Where is the Times’ public editor, Daniel Okrent, when you need him?

Last week in this space, I suggested that Bush’s re-election bid will depend not on reality itself, but on the public’s perception of reality. In the face of a booming economy and dazzling progress toward democracy in Iraq, the media elite have been working overtime to maintain a false perception of bad news on both fronts.

You see this effort most demonstratively on what appears, and what does not appear, on the front page of the New York Times and the nightly wisecracks uttered by the likes of Dan Rather.

In face of the journalistic crusade against him, Bush’s re-election prospects will depend on one thing: a shift in the debate from one based on false premises (e.g., how to fix a bad economy or clean up the mess in Iraq) to one based on the truth (i.e., the economy is booming and Iraq is on track). But what, I asked, will it take to effect such a monumental shift in perception?

The next day, Ronald Reagan passed away.

Today, as we put to rest one of America’s greatest presidents and celebrate one of our greatest presidencies, suddenly, the country is reminded of our greatness again. Suddenly, we’re optimistic about the future. Suddenly, things are going to be all right. And we’re not getting these feelings from the press, or even from President Bush. It’s coming – unfiltered – straight from Reagan, just like it did 20 years ago.

Reagan’s passing was a disruptive event for the media, and I predict it will mark the tipping point in the all important war over public perceptions.

For months, the economy has been creating jobs at a record clip – 1.1 million since last August. Inflation remains negligible and the unemployment rate is lower than the average rate of unemployment during the Clinton years. All sectors are doing well – even the manufacturing sector is enjoying its best output in 30 years.

In a few weeks, Iraq will have its sovereignty and the means to start fixing its own problems – problems, thanks to President Bush, that are minor in comparison to those it suffered under Saddam Hussein. In place of one of history’s worst tyrants will be one of the Middle East’s only democracies.

But rather than focusing on the good news, and putting the setbacks in context, the press has been brooding on stories like car bombings and the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib – which glorified the front page of the New York Times for over 20 straight days last month (with no appreciable new news to report beyond the shock of the initial photographs).

Granted, the story was a self-inflicted wound in Bush’s perception battle with the press. And because the photos served so well in making us feel ashamed, the press splattered the photos on their front pages while largely ignoring the context.

Even though we’re in the midst of a war, it was not the press who broke the story – it was our own military. The Pentagon deserves praise, not scorn, for quickly disclosing the story and for launching a prompt and thorough investigation, already resulting in trials and convictions of several of those accused.

And what the photos depicted was – I’ll say it – a fraternity prank in comparison to the atrocities committed by Saddam, whose henchman once put the body of a butcher, imprisoned for criticizing the Baathist regime, through a meat grinder before returning the remains to his family. You won’t read that in the New York Times and, for the same reason, the barbaric beheading of Nick Berg by al-Qaida operatives in Iraq didn’t get one-tenth the play that the prison scandal did on the front page of the Times.

By manipulating the context, the press has succeeded in creating the perception that all is lost in Iraq. The effect has been palpable. Opinion polls show the public even beginning to question their previous overwhelming support for military action against Saddam.

Think about it: a massive shift in public opinion, largely as a result of a set of shameful pornographic photos. Oh, if Hitler only knew what he could have done – with the help of our own media – to so easily thin America’s resolve for war!

Then, Ronald Reagan dies.

Instantly, we regain our perspective.

The week-long mourning for President Reagan, and the glowing encomiums the Gipper is receiving today, provides a poignant counterpoint to the doom and gloom the media elite have strived so hard to produce. Our reflection upon Reagan’s life will, I submit, work to properly align perceptions with reality.

What America needs every now and then is the reminder that Ronald Reagan delivered so well in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis: that despite the setbacks which befall every nation, America has every reason to feel good about itself. We are getting just such a reminder this week.

And with that reminder, we have every reason to feel good about what we have accomplished in the past three years. No one can deny that the booming economy is the result of Bush’s tax cuts – history has shown repeatedly that they work, just as Bush promised they would. And no one can deny Bush’s role in causing regime change in Afghanistan and then in Iraq – as they are trying to deny Reagan’s role in regime change in former Soviet Union.

President Bush, like President Reagan before him, has shown, in word and in deed, what America can do for itself and for the world if our leaders simply embrace a vision of liberty and are not afraid to act on their convictions.

Earlier this week, CBS’ Dan Rather suggested the press is devoting too much time to covering the mourning of Ronald Reagan this week: “There is other news,” said Rather, “like the reality of Iraq.”

If Dan Rather and his brethren in the elite media would only cover that reality – rather than attempting to convey false perceptions – I’m sure the Gipper wouldn’t mind there being far less attention paid to him this week.

But until then, let our mourning for Reagan and our celebration of his life remind us that “it is morning in America” and “the best is yet to come.”

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In his re-election campaign, Bush is fighting a two front war: one against the Democrats and one against the false perceptions being created by the mainstream media – lead by the New York Times, which has turned its newsroom into the journalistic party of opposition. Let me explain with a true story which I’m afraid to say is not altogether uncommon.

A retired friend of mine – an elderly gentlemen who I see at the health club every day – gets nearly all his news from the New York Times. He has been a longtime Republican, but lately he is having grave doubts about President Bush’s foreign and economic policies. I asked him how he can think that, and he tried to explain to me – entirely unarmed with specifics – how poorly things are going in Iraq and how poorly the economy is doing.

I took a few moments to inform him about some of the more important accomplishments over the past 18 months:

• The elimination of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and its replacement by a democratic government.

• The removal of Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s worst tyrants and mass murderers since Hitler and Stalin, and the threat he posed to Israel, its Arab neighbors in the Middle East, and more directly to us through his weapons of mass destruction programs (yes, we found – in Iraq – the strains of viral agents, sarin gas, the laboratories that produced them, and the long-range missiles to deliver them!)

• The ongoing reconstruction of a country which 35 years of brutal dictatorship had left in ruins, including the creation and dissemination of a new Iraqi currency, the establishment of a central bank, the $10 billion in oil exported by Iraq in the past year, the schools built, the hospitals repaired, all leading up to this week’s selection of a new Iraqi government and the imminent sovereignty of a nation naturally impatient to shake loose the occupation, but grateful for what we’ve done for them.

I reminded him that he is old enough to remember the grief Harry Truman was getting over the reconstruction of Germany in the aftermath of World War II. He didn’t remember the headlines, but Mark Levin, writing for National Review, dug out some beauties from the pages of the New York Times: “Germans Reveal Hate of Americans” (Oct. 31, 1945), “Loss of Victory In Germany Through U.S. Policy Feared” (Nov. 18, 1945), and “Germans Declare Americans Hated” (Dec. 3, 1945). The second of those New York Times articles lead with the following paragraph:

Grave concern was express today by informed officials that the United States might soon lose the fruits of victory in Germany through failure to prepare adequately for carrying out its long-term commitment under the Potsdam Declaration.

Sound familiar?

I then told my friend some facts about the economy that I’m sure he hadn’t read on the front page of the New York Times lately:

• The economy has created 1.1 million jobs since last August. In the manufacturing sector alone, new factory hiring has jumped to a 31-year high. Unemployment has fallen to 5.6 percent, a rate that has been bested in only two of the last 22 years, and is lower than the average rate of employment during the Clinton years.

• During the last 12 months, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product grew at its highest rate in two decades.

• Home ownership has reached a record high of 68.6 percent, 5 percent above a decade ago.

My friend, who reads the New York Times religiously, was aware of none of this, though he was quite aware that the price of gasoline is at a 20-year high – which, adjusting for inflation, is just not true. My friend, it seems, is hopelessly misinformed – yet, because what I was telling him was so inconsistent with the sense he was getting from the “newspaper of record,” he actually had trouble believing me.

What we have here, folks, is a failure to communicate. As far as the Times is concerned, it’s a failure to communicate the truth.

In a piece I wrote for the Weekly Standard last week, I pointed out how the Augusta National Golf Club managed to successfully beat back an attempt by the New York Times to bully the club into changing its tradition of all-male membership. Early on, the club made a crucial decision: to win the battle, they had to take the press head on, making criticism of the media itself part of the story. “Stopping the New York Times dead in its tracks,” said the club’s publicity manager “was critical to the overall effort, because the Times sets the agenda for the broader media world.”

The club was right, and eventually succeeded in shifting the story from how the Times wanted it positioned – sex discrimination – to something the Times had long thought it was immune from – questions about the paper’s journalistic integrity.

There is a lesson here: The New York Times is mounting a relentless campaign to defeat President Bush this fall. Concealing reality, they are creating in their news pages the perception of a failing economy and the collapse of our foreign policy. If the New York Times provided its readers with reality, giving our victories their due and putting our setbacks in perspective, Bush would be looking forward to a landslide this fall.

Quite simply, what the Bush campaign must do to win re-election is follow its own prescription for winning the war on terror: adopt an uncompromising resolve, an aggressive battle plan, and an enlightened understanding of who the enemy is. In other words, it’s time for Carl Rove to take off the gloves by making the press – and the false perceptions they are striving to create – the issue. In that way, the debate will shift from a false premise (e.g., bad economy and how to fix it) to a premise that favors Bush: the truth (i.e., the economy is doing well).

It is going to take a loud voice to cause such a monumental shift in the debate, but who else could better make the case than a president who already believes that so-called straight news articles are laced with opinion?

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an editor’s note chastising itself for its “less than rigorous” coverage of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The good news is the Times is finally coming around to responding to criticism of its own news reporting. The bad news is it is only responding to criticism it has received from the left.

The really bad news is the Times just shot a warning across the bow of any reporter or editor who would even think about reporting facts that might support the Bush administration.

But, first, it’s fair to ask, what exactly did the Times do wrong? When the Times published last year its notorious mea culpa regarding the journalistic fraud of Jayson Blair – its disgraced reporter who fabricated news – the Times was dutifully correcting straightforward lies that had appeared in its pages. It was a service to accuracy in reporting. (How they got into that mess is another story).

By contrast, what Times Executive Editor Bill Keller did this week in his editor’s note is a devastating blow to objectivity in journalism. Let me explain.

In covering information regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction prior to the war in Iraq, the Times reporters simply used sources who they and their editors believed reliable at the time. (These were many of the same sources who the Bush administration also believed to be reliable). Moreover, the identities of many of these sources were usually disclosed and quoted fully on the record by the Times – giving the public and other news organizations an opportunity to investigate their credibility.

The Times then published news articles about what their reporters saw and heard. It is hard to believe any of these reporters intentionally slanted the news in favor of the Bush administration – if they tried, it is not likely they would have gotten away with it at the most-edited left-wing newspaper in the world. So, where’s the fraud?

Given the standards established by the Times’ coverage of other stories, it is not altogether clear how the Times reporters or editors were at fault here. Keller seems to think the information the Times published about WMD “should have been presented more cautiously.” In addition, when certain reports were later proven suspect, the paper’s “misgivings appeared deep in an article on Page A13″ – in other words, they buried the correction.

What’s so unusual about that? The Times does it all the time. Consider, for example, what happened to former Securities Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt.

The Times published a front-page story – based on an anonymous source – that Pitt failed to disclose critical information to his fellow commissioners prior to their vote on an appointee to an accounting board. The article was followed by a seven-day crusade of front-page articles regarding the incident – a major embarrassment to the Bush administration and Republican candidates occurring just prior to the midterm-2002 elections. The media firestorm that resulted culminated in Pitt’s resignation on the eve of the election. (Only God knows how the Times-driven scandal may have influenced the voters).

Two months later, the congressional investigation launched as a result of the Times’ “reporting” completely vindicated Pitt from any wrongdoing. The report of the General Accounting Office stated that Pitt never had the information that the Times accused him of withholding. How did the Times correct their error? By burying Pitt’s exoneration – in a near unintelligible way – at the bottom of a story that actually bore the headline, “Government Report Details A Chaotic S.E.C. Under Pitt” (Dec. 20, 2002). Talk about rubbing salt into the wound!

The Times coverage of the Pitt pseudo-scandal occurred at the same time as the paper’s WMD coverage. Yet, has Keller scolded his reporters and editors for relying on “sketchy information,” for being “too intent on rushing scoops into the paper,” for not presenting the information they had “more cautiously,” and for burying the correction when they were later proven wrong?

The premise of Keller’s apparent contrition about WMD is that his reporters got it wrong – that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and therefore prior reports suggesting otherwise were wrong. We know the Times got the Pitt story wrong – dead wrong, dead as a doornail wrong. But did the Times reporters really get the WMD story wrong?

According to former weapons inspector David Kay, the United Nations has found (a) recipes and equipment that would have allowed Saddam Hussein to resume production of biological weapons on short notice, (b) reference strains of a wide variety of biological weapons, (c) a prison laboratory for testing biological weapons on humans, and (d) long-range missiles capable of delivering WMDs to locations as far as Israel and Southern Europe.

The only thing missing are the so-called “stockpiles,” though we have an audiotape (which Secretary of State Colin Powell played during his presentation at the United Nations) of an Iraqi officer demanding another officer “evacuate” a stockpile of nerve gas that was in his possession. Most recently, we discovered the direct presence of sarin gas in Iraq. (Of course, the Times buried the story. The Times’ omission of mass destruction was pointed out in William Safire’s recent column, “Sarin? What Sarin?,” May 19, 2004).

Unlike the erroneous coverage of Harvey Pitt, it is not altogether clear that the reporters or editors at the Times covering the WMD story were wrong at all – reporters get details wrong all the time, and when an error is discovered, they report it on the corrections page. Yet, on the big picture – regarding the presence of WMD in Iraq – the Times’ reporting seemed right on track.

It seems, therefore, that Keller’s editor’s note had little to do with making amends for bad journalism. Some may believe Keller was motivated by a need to appease its left-wing audience, who get upset about anything appearing in the Times that might be supportive of the Bush administration’s policies.

But I rather think it was a very clever means of launching a front-page, election-year crusade against the Bush administration’s justification for the war. At the end of the note, Keller raises the specter of forthcoming “aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight,” the record being “the pattern of misinformation” about Iraq’s weapons.

Using its news pages to attack President Bush is one thing – that is to be expected from the Times. The real genius behind the editor’s note, however, is how it has threatened the newspaper’s staff into lockstep conformity with the Times’ propaganda machine.

What Bill Keller has done – quite masterfully – is to scare the truth out of the Times reporters and editors: Those who are not “skeptical” or “cautious” enough regarding events and information that do not support the Times’ political leanings are in for a real scolding. Nice going, Mr. Kelly.

Only a day after we discovered the brutal slaying of an American in Iraq, the New York Times made sure its front page became a platform for those charging it was Bush’s fault.

The beheading of Nick Berg did something that the Times rarely does: It put things into perspective. While likening the abuse of a handful of prisoners in Iraq to a fraternity prank may unduly minimize the disgraceful acts of a few soldiers, the horrific murder of Berg put the prison abuse scandal in its proper context.

Unfortunately, it was not a context that happened to serve the Times’ political agenda. While the Times played up the prison abuse scandal, it is not only downplaying Berg’s murder by al-Qaida, it is happily playing up attempts to blame the Bush administration for the atrocity.

To the Times, Berg’s beheading – the most blatant human-rights abuse in recent memory – was worthy of some front-page real estate, but no where near the square footage accorded the prison abuse scandal. Compare the front-page of the May 6 Sunday Times with the front page of the Times on Wednesday, May 12, and you will see which story the Times thinks is more important.

On Sunday, six photographs depicting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners were shown in a space measuring six inches by seven inches, covering two-thirds of the front-page above the fold. They appeared below the headline, “In Abuse, a Portrayal of Ill-Prepared, Overwhelmed G.I.’s.” The message: In typical liberal style, the perpetrators of the prison abuse were not the ones responsible for their actions – they were just the victims.

On Wednesday, the astounding news about Berg’s murder may have unavoidably been the lead story – “Iraq Tape Shows The Decapitation of An American” – but its placement was muted compared to the attention given in the Times to the prison abuse scandal.

Rather than receiving a four-column, three-column or even a two-column headline, the Berg story was squeezed into a one-column story, the amount of room usually provided to stories reporting good news on the economy or victories in the war on terror. Contrast that treatment with the front-page the very next day, which sported a lead story under a two-column headline, “Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited In Top Qaeda Interrogations.” (No, that was not story about how well the CIA is doing their job).

Accompanying the story on Berg’s execution, the Times printed a photograph of Berg sitting in front of his executors, but the small three-and-one-half-inch by four-inch photo appeared below the fold. On the same front page, the Times thought that a huge five-inch by eight-and-one-half-inch photo of an armored vehicle silhouetted by an Iraqi building ablaze was more deserving of an above-the-fold placement.

On page A11 of that issue, the Times ran a story about the odyssey of Nick Berg, who traveled to Iraq seeking business opportunities, “defying State Department warnings.” The story was accompanied by a photograph of Berg’s distraught father being comforted by his son David.

The following day, there was good news in Iraq – an Iraqi Counter Terrorist Force, trained by the U.S. in Jordan, successfully aided U.S. Special Forces in an attack that lead to the capture of munitions that could be used for the manufacture of hundreds of roadside bombs. It was another step in the direction of Iraqi self-rule, but you wouldn’t find it on the front-page. Rather, the front-page of the Times that day bore the headline, “Family Charges Military Failed Slain Civilian.”

Now, our hearts go out to the family of Nick Berg – who must be under an unusual amount of strain, especially given the worldwide attention to the brutality of the murder. But al-Qaida was responsible for the murder, its unusual brutality and the dissemination of its horrible video – not the U.S. government or its military. Berg was warned not to go to Iraq and, while there, was specifically offered a ride out of the country – an offer he refused. Now, rather than putting the family’s distress in perspective, the Times runs with the family’s anger: “U.S. Officials Failed to Protect American, Family Says.”

What’s next? Congressional investigations on why the Bush administration didn’t force Nick Berg out of Iraq?

How about a story on the reaction in the Muslim world to the vicious execution of Nick Berg?

Instead, we read, “Lawmakers See Iraq Images And Are Shaken by Scenes.” How about their reaction – anyone’s reaction – to the videotape of Berg execution, particularly the 30 seconds during which his head was being sliced off?

Perspective and context – that’s what objective journalism is all about.

Former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, while being interviewed last week on the Karen Grant radio show on KION, was asked whether he had read “Journalistic Fraud: How the New York Times Distorts the News,” a book by this columnist which documents hundreds of articles slanted by the Times in favor of the paper’s left-wing ideologies and political allies.

Blair said he was quite familiar with “Journalist Fraud” (pun intended) and added that the book has been quite popular among the Times’ staffers. Many of the Times’ reporters, he said, have read the book because they were curious about how the book treated articles that ran under their bylines.

The book, and this series, have gone to great lengths to document how the New York Times slants each of the six basic elements of a news report – the “who, what, where, when, how and why” of a story – to favor their political allies. And we have shown, in particular, how they slant the “who” of a story to protect the legacy of Bill Clinton and the political prospects of Hillary. If it’s bad news for Clinton, the Times conveniently neglects to use the word “Clinton” in the article.

In “CIA Was Given Data On Hijacker Long Before 9-11″ (Feb. 24, 2004), the Times reported that an opportunity to nab one of the 9-11 hijackers long before the attack was missed by “American officials.” Of course, the failure occurred during Clinton’s watch, but the word “Clinton” does not appear in the 1,165-word article.

In “U.S. Failed to Act on Warnings in ’98 of Plane Attack” (Sept. 19, 2002), the Times reported that the “United States” (presumably the entire population) was aware that al-Qaida was planning an attack involving an aircraft flying into the World Trade Center three years before it happened. Mysteriously, however, out of the 1,500 words of this article, the word “Clinton” was not among them.

Last Sunday, in a front-page story that ran under the headline, “Inquiry Into Attack on the Cole In 2000 Missed Clues to 9-11″ (Apr. 11, 2004), the Times reported that “the government” missed the significance of a series of clues that might have lead to the capture of two of the 9-11 hijackers. The “government” at the center of the intelligence failure, of course, was the Clinton administration, but again, the word Clinton was not used in this story even once.

A pattern?

By contrast, in virtually all of the recent articles published by the Times regarding the investigations into the causes of 9-11, accusations of failures by the current administration invariably identify the culprit as “President Bush” or “the Bush administration.”

The New York Times is well aware of its influence over other news outlets. Over 650 news organizations around the world receive the New York Times News Service. As a result, hundreds of print, television, radio and Internet news organizations base their own reports on articles written and slanted by the reporters and editors of the New York Times.

Imagine how the tone of the current controversy would differ, however, if these news organizations were reading on the front page of the New York Times headlines such as: “Clinton Investigators Lost Opportunity To Arrest Two 9-11 Hijackers,” or “Clinton National Security Team Had Data On 9-11 Hijacker,” or “Clinton Failed To Act On Warnings Of Plane Attack.”

If Jayson Blair can be believed – that many of the Times reporters have read “Journalistic Fraud” – then how can we explain the recent crescendo of bias in the news pages of the Times? It seems that the embarrassment of being caught red-handed has had no effect whatsoever on these people.

On the contrary – and this is my greatest fear – rather than being a deterrent against slanting the news, “Journalistic Fraud” may well have become a style manual for the liberal news reporter. If that is the case, then being a New York Times best-seller, at least among the paper’s staff, is the most dubious distinction a book of this kind could have.

Because the New York Times refuses to print it (or even refer to it) and in case you missed it elsewhere, the following are excerpts from a conversation that former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke had with several news reporters in August 2002 about the Bush administration’s efforts to combat terrorism prior to 9-11:

Clarke: “I think the overall point is, there was no plan on al-Qaida that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.”

“[T]he Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998. And there were a number of issues on the table since 1998. And they remained on the table when that administration went out of office … And in January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.”

“[T]he Bush administration decided then, you know, in late January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we’ve now made public to some extent. … The second thing the [Bush] administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.”

“[T]hat process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after al-Qaida.”

[T]he newly appointed deputies [in the Bush administration] – and you had to remember, the deputies didn’t get into office until late March, early April. The deputies then tasked the development of the implementation details, uh, of these new decisions that they were endorsing, and sending out to the principals.”

“Over the course of the summer – last point – they developed implementation details, the principals met at the end of the summer, approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance assistance.

“And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with al-Qaida over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al-Qaida. That is in fact the timeline.”

News Reporter: What is your response to the suggestion in the [Aug. 12, 2002] Time [magazine] article that the Bush administration was unwilling to take on board the suggestions made in the Clinton administration because of animus against the – general animus against the foreign policy?

Clarke: I think if there was a general animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the same team in place. That doesn’t sound like animus against, uh, the previous team to me.

News Reporter: You’re saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

Clarke: All of that’s correct.

News Reporter: Were all of those issues part of [an] alleged plan that was late December and the Clinton team decided not to pursue because it was too close to …

Clarke: There was never a plan, Andrea. What there was was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table.

News Reporter: Had those issues evolved at all from October of ’98 ’til December of 2000?

Clarke: Had they evolved? Um, not appreciably.

News Reporter: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you’re saying is that there was no – one, there was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of ’98 were made in the spring months just after the [Bush] administration came into office?

Clarke: You got it. That’s right.

News Reporter: Now the five-fold increase for the money in covert operations against al-Qaida – did that actually go into effect when it was decided or was that a decision that happened in the next budget year or something?

Clarke: Well, it was gonna go into effect in October, which was the next budget year, so it was a month away.

News Reporter: That actually got into the intelligence budget?

Clarke: Yes it did.

News Reporter: Just to clarify, did that come up in April or later?

Clarke: No, it came up in April and it was approved in principle and then went through the summer. And you know, the other thing to bear in mind is the shift from the rollback strategy to the elimination strategy. When President Bush told us in March to stop swatting at flies and just solve this problem, then that was the strategic direction that changed the NSPD from one of rollback to one of elimination.

Rather than reporting facts which bear upon the credibility of Clarke’s recent testimony, the New York Times preferred to spin Clarke as “an impressive, reasonable witness” who was being subject to “a furious round of denunciations from the White House.”

Perhaps if the Times stopped telling lies about the Bush administration, the White House would stop telling the truth about Mr. Clarke.

Earlier this week, CBS New posted the results of the most recent New York Times-CBS News poll on its website. It was doubly good news for President Bush. CBS broke the results down into two articles carrying the following headlines: “Poll: Bush Moves Ahead of Kerry” and “Poll: Few Favor Same-Sex Marriage.”

The results posed a challenge for the Times. Do they report the good news for President Bush on its front page, as they generally do with their other polls or do they reach into their bag of dirty tricks? I’ll give you one guess.

Here’s the headline the Times used to report the results on its front page (March 16, 2004): “Poll Shows Concerns About Course of U.S.”

Regular readers of this column know I’ve written a book on how the Times regularly manipulates opinion polls to reflect poorly on President Bush. The Times slants the polls in two ways: by manipulating the questions they ask and by manipulating the answers they get. Here, once again, they employed both techniques.

The poll showed that in a race among Bush, Kerry and Ralph Nader, President Bush zoomed ahead of Kerry by 8 full percentage points. Without Nader, the Times called the race “effectively tied,” but the poll showed Bush leading 46 to 43 percent. Should Kerry pull ahead by three percentage points, we’ll see whether the Times calls the race “effectively tied.” The survey also showed that 59 percent of the public agreed with President Bush’s proposal for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.

In other words, Bush’s on a roll! Yet, the times opened the article with the distorted conclusion that, based on nothing I could find in the survey questions or answers, it is “a time of growing concern among Americans that the nation is veering in the wrong direction.” This, the Times concluded, again with no basis in the data, was a troubling sign for President Bush’s re-election prospects.

In fact, no where in the New York Times nor on the CBS News website is there evidence that anyone was ever asked by the survey whether they think there is “growing concern” about the “direction” of the country. If Americans are feeling the country is going in the wrong direction, could it be the result of liberal agenda to permit gay marriages? But, of course, that’s not a question addressed by the poll.

It is a classic propaganda technique to seek out Republicans who could be quoted, or manipulated into being quoted, as saying something against Bush or his policies on the theory that attacks against Bush are much more credible if they come from Republicans than from partisan Democrats. Naturally, then, the article quoted three Republicans saying something negative about the Bush campaign. Of course, the Times couldn’t find a single Democrat to say anything negative about John Kerry. Imagine that!

While 59 percent agreed with Bush’s proposal for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, an astounding 78 percent were against allowing same sex marriages – 78 percent! That was the real news of this poll, yet the result was buried in the last line of the article and twisted in a way that actually sounds like it was good news for the same-sex marriage movement:

And while the public supports an amendment to allow marriage between only a man and a woman, 22 percent said they supported gay marriage while another 33 percent said they supported permitting gay couples to form civil unions.

Huh? That’s horrible news for the gay community. I happen to support civil unions and I’m shocked by these results.

More important, how could the Times possibly conclude that the newsworthiness of these results was the country’s “wrong direction” and that it was bad news for Bush?

The Times then tried to tie Bush’s opposition to same-sex marriages – which the poll suggest is quite mainstream – to ideological extremism.

After a month in which Mr. Bush called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, he is viewed in sharply ideological terms.

But the poll showed only 50 percent of the public view President Bush as a “conservative.” This is astoundingly low, because George Bush actively labels himself as “compassionate conservative.” Meanwhile, as Kerry avoids the term “liberal” at all costs, an amazing 39 percent of the public consider him a “liberal.” And Bush’s attempts to label Kerry, and Kerry’s attempts to avoid the label, have only just begun.

There’s more. The Times asked whether the use of images from 9-11 (where 3,000 Americans died) should be used in the campaign. But where’s the question about the use of images from Vietnam for political purposes? John Kerry has been exploiting the deaths of 57,000 American soldiers for political purposes, but where’s the question? Is it appropriate to use in political commercials images from a war in which 57,000 Americans lost their lives?

The Times asked whether or not “Bush’s policies” reduced the number of jobs. What about asking whether or not the Clinton recession reduced the number of jobs? Or whether or not the devastating impact of 9-11 on the economy reduced the number of jobs?

Jayson Blair’s book is out, but his lies pale in comparison to the lies and distortions spewing forth from today’s news pages of the New York Times.

New York Times Rule No. 1: If it’s good news for Bush, don’t use the word “Bush” in the lead sentence. Instead, use “American officials” or “United States.” Corollary to Rule No. 1: If it’s bad news for Clinton, don’t use the word “Clinton” in the article at all.

Of the six basic elements of a news report – the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” – the “who” is invariably the most important fact of the story. That is why manipulating the “who” is one of most effective techniques of injecting a liberal bias in a news article – a technique the New York Times uses repeatedly to assail President Bush and to protect the legacy of Bill Clinton (and the presidential aspirations of Hillary).

Last week, the Washington Post reported “Annan To Back U.S. On Iraq Plan” (Feb. 19, 2004) – a story about the decision by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to endorse the Bush administration’s position that direct elections could not be held in Iraq by June 30. The same story was reported by the New York Times as, “Annan Is Said To Have Doubt On Iraq Vote,” a slant so ambiguous that it could suggest a divergence of opinion between the secretary general and President Bush, the exact opposite of the truth.

And because the Times abhors reporting news favorable to President Bush, the lead sentence of the article actually went out of its way not to mention “who” Kofi Annan was endorsing:

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 18 – Secretary General Kofi Annan will endorse the view that the interim Iraqi government to take office this summer cannot be chosen by direct elections …

Endorse “the view”? How about: President Bush’s view!

For the New York Times, manipulating the “who” to mute good news for Bush is as common as manipulating the “who” to mute bad news for Clinton.

Earlier this week, the Times reported “CIA Was Given Data On Hijacker Long Before 9-11″ (Feb. 24, 2004). According to the report, German intelligence officers provided the CIA with information concerning the roommate of 9-11 hijacker Mohammad Atta. The Times called it a “missed opportunity for American officials” to unravel the 9-11 plot.

While the Times accurately reported the “when” of the story – “two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington” – you had to do the math to determine that this “missed opportunity” occurred when Clinton was president. A missed opportunity for “whom”? For “American officials,” according to the article. Not President Clinton. Not the Clinton administration.

In fact, in this 1,165-word article about this miserable national security failure of the Clinton administration, the word “Clinton” does not appear even once! Imagine the effect on the Clinton legacy if the lead sentence were changed to reflect the all-important “who” of the story:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 – American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers in 1999, but the Clinton administration appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American and German officials say.

By contrast, here’s is how the Times sanitized the lead for the Clintons:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 – American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United States appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American and German officials say.

Who failed? The “United States”! Yup, it was the entire “United States” who failed to pursue the lead aggressively – not the Clinton administration, not Clinton’s national security team, nor the intelligence community under the Clinton administration!

When referring to another intelligence failure – one relating to the government’s handling of information about a January 2000 meeting in Malaysia involving two of the 9-11 hijackers – the article again failed to make it clear that the failure occurred during President Clinton’s watch. In addition, the Times completely ignored a related story which it reported over a year earlier: “U.S. Failed to Act on Warnings in ’98 of Plane Attack” (Sept. 19, 2002).

In other words, the Clinton administration was aware that al-Qaida was planning an attack involving an aircraft flying into the World Trade Center three years before it happened. Fortunately, the editors of the New York Times had the presence of mind to again use the words “United States” instead of “Clinton administration,” and they ensured that, out of the 1,500 words of that story, the word “Clinton” was not among them.

That President Clinton was out-to-lunch on national security issues is well known to the Times. It was widely reported that James Woolsey, the CIA director during the Clinton administration, found it almost impossible to get an appointment to see President Clinton. When a private plane crashed on the White House grounds, there were jokes at the CIA that it was Woolsey trying to get a meeting with the president.

Yet, the intelligence failures of the Clinton administration either go unreported or, when they are discovered, the word “Clinton” is nowhere to be found. Imagine the media firestorm which might have ensued had the headlines properly told the story: “CLINTON INTEL TEAM HAD DATA ON 9-11 HIJAKER” and “CLINTON FAILED TO ACT ON WARNINGS OF PLANE ATTACK.”

With such headlines in the “newspaper of record,” would anyone seriously consider President Bush’s handling of pre-9/11 intelligence a campaign issue? No doubt the Times considered the impact that such headlines might have upon the “Clinton” brand, as Hillary plans her 2008 presidential bid.

If a journalist were seeking the most credible evidence of the Bush administration’s success in establishing peace in Iraq, what could be better than a memo to that effect written by the No. 1 person in charge of the insurgency in Iraq? That’s a question that the editors of the New York Times apparently failed to ask themselves this week.

The 2004 presidential election season is officially under way and the effort by the New York Times to engineer the defeat of George W. Bush has been breathtaking. It seems the Times well understands that no matter how well the economy is doing or how well the war on terrorism is being waged, if the American public can be duped into believing otherwise, the Democrats have a shot at the presidency. The challenge for the Times is that the news has not been cooperating.

Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading the front page of the New York Times, the economy is furiously on the mend, with activity – especially in the manufacturing sectors – growing at record pace. No longer can the press frame the recovery as “jobless.” Today’s unemployment rate is below the average rate of unemployment during the 1970s, 1980s and, yes, even the 1990s.

Nevertheless, when you read an article about a Democratic presidential candidate blasting the Bush administration on the economy, you are not likely to see the Times injecting the true facts – what journalists call the “context” – nor even a quote from a Republican refuting the charge. These articles tend to read like press releases issued by the Democratic contenders.

By contrast, when good news on the war against terrorism is reported, the Times invariably spins it against the president. Sometimes, the headline writer ices the cake with a creative head-fake.

Check out this headline in last Monday’s Times (Feb. 9, 2004): U.S. SAYS FILES SEEK QAEDA AID IN IRAQ CONFLICT

What do you suppose that article was about? Reading the headline again and again won’t help. A good headline is supposed to summarize the story. This one obscures it.

Given that only about 15 percent of those who read a headline go on to read the rest of an article, most readers of the Times would never know what this news report was actually about: a recently-discovered, 17-page memo written by the leading al-Qaida insurgent operating in Iraq basically declaring that their efforts to disrupt U.S. plans in the region are failing miserably. (For that perspective on the story, see David Brook’s excellent commentary, “The Zarqawi Rules,” Feb. 14, 2004).

But even if you went on to read the whole article, the good news is not what the Times would have you take away from the story.

Here was the article’s lead sentence:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb 8 – American officials here have obtained a detailed proposal that they conclude was written by an operative in Iraq to senior leaders of Al-Qaeda, asking for help to wage a “sectarian war” in Iraq in the next months.

 

Thus, according to the Times, some obscure terrorist “operative” in Iraq sent a “proposal” requesting foreign aid to stir up more trouble. For those readers who didn’t immediately turn to the sports page, the article went on to note that the document would constitute “the strongest evidence to date of contacts between extremists in Iraq and al-Qaida.”

It is startling that the Times chose to report this important memo in the context of whether there were links between al-Qaida and Iraq prior to the war, a mere political question raised by the Democrats, rather than for what the memo clearly pronounces on its face: that the United States is beating the crap out of the al-Qaida and their allies in Iraq wherever they turn.

Yet, continuing its political theme, the article then strangely opined that the document did “not speak to the debate about whether there was an al-Qaida presence in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era.” It didn’t? Several column inches below that statement, the article revealed that memo’s author, Abu Musab al-AZarqawi was the very person whom Secretary of State Colin Powell identified before the U.N. last February as the head of an al-Qaida-liked terrorist network which had been harbored in Iraq by Saddam Hussein.

Thus, the memo, by virtue of the identity of its author, actually supports the Bush administration’s claim of ties between Iraq and al-Qaida, both before and after the war. More important, the document clearly supports the administration’s position that, despite the daily reports of violence reported on the front page of the New York Times, we are winning the peace in Iraq.

No, the debate is not about whether there was an al-Qaida presence in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era. It’s about whether the articles like this can be dismissed as bad journalism or considered evidence of clear, intentional bias against the Bush administration. This is the question the editors of the New York Times must ask themselves when reporting on Iraq or the U.S. economy.