biased or not, it's a bad headline
The NYT has been featuring a story all day long whose headline reads, "Longtime Confidante of President Has Never Been a Judge." The story is being broadcast at the top of it's RSS feed, meaning it's the at the top of the list on news readers such as google news.
I'm not going to go screaming bias, but you can see how it could be interpreted as such and is exemplary of the trend that has conservatives hating the mainstream media. It states the facts clearly and concisely in ways that suggest a negative opinion of the situation. Studies have shown that many people read only headlines, that headlines set the tone of what a reader remembers, and that they're very important. Reading this headline, you're likely to come away thinking this nominee is 1.) unqualified and 2.) nominated only because she's a "longtime confidante" of the president.
The story is their headliner about the President's Supreme Court justice nominee - it's not a story about some late breaking discovery that she'd never been a judge before, or that it's suddenly been discovered that she's a close confidante. Equally dubious headings in the opposite direction would say things like "President appoints legal veteran" or "Former State Bar President appointed to Supreme Court." These headings state simple facts in a positive direction, and leave out the important details the other focused on.
On issues as charged as this one is sure to be, it's irresponsible for the media to go pushing headlines to look so much like blatant bias, especially for a periodical as well respected as the NYT. A simple "President appoints new justice" would have been fine.
UPDATE: Then they published "Nominee known for working hard away from the limelight", which has the opposite effect. I point this out to show that I'm not trying to accuse the NYT of truly being biased here.
UPDATE: It's also stupid that I can't link in these articles in a readable way - they require you to login - but links from google work just fine. Weird. Try these - they might work:
Bad Headline
Second article
posted by RJ @ 6:35 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I noticed that they did include the pertinent fact that the last "non-judge" was some unknown confident named William Rehnquist. What good did he do? I bet no one has ever read an opinion from him? He is just another example of why you need pre-judges in the court, they won't make a difference if they aren't.
Maybe a better headline would have been:
"Nominee has no judicial experience - but either did the last chief justice"
or:
"We're so liberal it is unbelievable!"
xdoabdz - word verification and the next head of the UN.
I'm going to have to give you this one, redhurt--CNN and the New York Times were both taking a shot at Bush with their headlines. There was no need for "Bush nominee has never been a judge." That's like saying that when a lieutenant governor or AG runs for governor, the headline should be "Governor candidate has never been a governor." Irrelevant.
HOWEVER, if Kerry had been elected, and picked a judge, and FoxNews had run the headline "Kerry picks ass clown for Supreme Court," I wouldn't accuse them of being biased...I'd accuse them of being stupid and wrong and uninformative and sensational. Just preference, though, I guess. I mean, I guess newspapers are supposed to be objective, and the opposite of objective isn't wrong, it's biased, or subjective. I don't know...it still bothers me that we use terms like partisan and biased instead of wrong.
I guess that's because I'm a realist, and people like hans-georg are relativists who don't believe in absolute truth.
Ba-zing!
Yeah. Bias is a tough term these days. Through the efforts of both the right and the left, the term has become a passe criticism bordering on uselessness. I tend to stick with "useless" or "irresponsible", depending on context. In this case, I think the headline was irresponsible.
In America we have idealized the middle ground. For better or worse, if you want to be respected as a source of information you need to be seen as objective and unbiased. The MSM should be doing its best to create respectable headlines that preserve the integrity of their institution. Instead, they tend towards sensationalist headlines intended to sell papers, get clicks, etc.
I think my second post shows that statements like "The NYT is liberal" are too simple to be true. The organization is too large, too diverse and too clever to fit into the neat-and-tidy category of "liberal."
Are you implying that liberals are small group of identical, incompetents? Hmm... Feinstein, Schumer, Kennedy, HRC.. yeah, that would seem about right...
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