CJR Campaign Desk says that whatever the New York Times is, it is not a newspaper:
Posted by DeLong at September 19, 2004 12:23 PM | TrackBackCJR Campaign Desk: Archives: Campaign Desk took a look at... when polls go bad... today's brazen display by The New York Times compels us to revisit it. The Times... decides that this [poll] deserves play as its lead story on page one. Why? As nearly as we can tell, the only "why" is... The Times ... commissioned this particular poll.
>A little history: Earlier this week, a Pew Research Center poll taken between September 8 and September 10 gave President Bush a whopping 15-point lead among likely voters. Then on Thursday, Pew reversed itself by announcing that a poll taken from September 11 to September 14 found Bush leading among likely voters by all of one point. And a Harris Interactive poll released the same day found the presidential race essentially tied. Further compounding matters, a Gallup poll released the same day gave Bush an eight-point lead among registered voters and a 13-point lead among likely voters.
Finally comes the new Times-CBS poll, indicating Bush has a nine-point lead among likely voters. Got it? It's Bush by 15 points; no, make that one point; oops, call it a dead heat; no, it's actually a 13-point lead; or is it nine points?
To its credit, The Times does run a sidebar by Carl Hulse inside the paper, offering up pollsters' explanations as to why nothing they say makes any sense. Nonetheless, there The Times is, offering up column one of page one to tout its own poll. Running a sidebar on page A10 that says that all of these contradictory polls should be taken with a grain of salt the size of a bowling ball, but still using your lead story to shill for the particular poll that you happened to pay for, just doesn't cut it.<
This is not journalism; it's self-promotion, and we say to hell with it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/politics/campaign/19state.html
For Many in Missouri, Picking a President Is More a Matter of Values Than Policy
By DIANE CARDWELL
ST. CHARLES, Mo. - Tom Ampleman, a blue-collar union member who lives near this suburb just outside St. Louis, says he voted for Bill Clinton twice and then Al Gore, but he is now grappling with deep religious misgivings about the Democratic Party.
"I haven't declared myself a Republican, but if I had to go in there and vote right now I probably would vote for the Republicans," Mr. Ampleman said recently, sitting in his pickup truck at a public park here.
"I'm not happy with the moral issues at all with the Democrats," continued Mr. Ampleman, who works as a welder at an aerospace company. "The Republicans will hurt me in the long run in providing for my family, but it's probably more important to watch out for the unborn and that kind of stuff."
Missouri, almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, straddles the Midwest, the Deep South and the Great Plains, and has some of the sensibility of each region. Elections can turn on the interests of labor unions, farmers, city dwellers or suburban parents.
But Mr. Ampleman's internal tug of war, echoed in different ways in interviews with dozens of voters throughout the state, begins to explain why Republicans are increasingly confident they can prevail here this year, even as Democrats say they remain hopeful of winning Missouri's 11 electoral votes.
Residents from blighted city neighborhoods and gritty industrial outskirts to the leafy suburban enclaves and vast stretches of rolling hills and open farmland exude anxiety over the economy and the Iraq war that Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, hopes to transform into votes. But they also echo the Christian-influenced social values and distaste for big government and taxes that helped propel President Bush to the White House. In August, a referendum on a proposed amendment to the State Constitution banning gay marriage was approved with 71 percent of the vote.
The cultural divisions run deep, even within families. Take Paula D. Hamilton, an African-American financial adviser who lives in Raytown, a middle-class suburb of Kansas City. Over the years she has swung between parties, and this time around she too is in a quandary.
She says she is impressed with Mr. Bush's strong stance on terrorism but unsure whether the country should have gone to war with Iraq. She finds Mr. Bush's emphasis on religion-based solutions to social problems appealing, but worries about jobs lost during his administration and what she calls an unfair tax burden on the middle class.
"I'm really thinking about who I'm going to vote for," Ms. Hamilton said, after hearing Vice President Dick Cheney speak at a rally in Springfield, some three hours' drive south of her home. "We need someone in our office who doesn't cower down," she continued. But, she added: "I'm looking at the numbers, at how many of our troops are being killed and tortured. I'm just concerned."
Ms. Hamilton said that she would probably not make up her mind until she walked into the voting booth. But her son, Zacqrey Woods, pastor at the Greater Metropolitan Baptist Church in Springfield - "the buckle of the Bible Belt," as he put it - has no such difficulties.
"I can't get past the moral issues, I just can't," said Mr. Woods.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/opinion/19gates.html
Swallowing the Elephant
By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
The moment when the Republican Party lost black America can be given a date: Oct. 26, 1960. Martin Luther King Jr., arrested in Georgia during a sit-in, had been transferred to a maximum-security prison and sentenced to four months on the chain gang, without bail. As The Times reported, John F. Kennedy called Coretta King, expressing his concern. Richard Nixon didn't.
"It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this," King's father said about Kennedy at a church rally. "I've got all my votes and I've got a suitcase, and I'm going to take them up there and dump them in his lap." In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower had received nearly 40 percent of the black vote. (I myself sported an "I Like Ike" button in first grade.) In 1960, Nixon received 32 percent. A few years later, as the civil-rights era heated up and the G.O.P. pursued its "Southern strategy," blacks effectively became a one-party constituency.
But at what cost? Speaking to a National Urban League audience in July, President Bush quoted an Illinois legislator's piquant remark that "blacks are gagging on the donkey but not yet ready to swallow the elephant," and went on to pose a series of questions that black people themselves have been asking: "Does the Democrat party take African-American voters for granted? Is it a good thing for the African-American community to be represented mainly by one political party? How is it possible to gain political leverage if the party is never forced to compete?"
Of course, such questions have an unspoken corollary: Why support a party that has written you off?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/arts/19RICH.html?
FRANK RICH
This Time Bill O'Reilly Got It Right
IF a stopped clock is right twice a day, why shouldn't Bill O'Reilly be right at least once in a blue moon? When Fox News's most self-infatuated star attacked CNN for keeping James Carville and Paul Begala as hosts on "Crossfire" after they had joined the Kerry campaign, he fingered yet another symptom of the decline and fall of the American news culture. "In the wake of the vicious attacks on Fox News for allegedly being `G.O.P. TV,' I expected the media to brutally dismember CNN and the new boys on John Kerry's bus," Mr. O'Reilly wrote in his syndicated column. "But instead it's been the silence of the lambs from the press. Can you say media bias?"
Yes, you can, though it must be said in the same breath that Mr. O'Reilly is only half-right. Fox News isn't "allegedly" G.O.P. TV — it is G.O.P. TV. The campiest recent example of its own bias came during the Republican convention when Mr. O'Reilly played host to two second-tier G.O.P. publicity hounds, Georgette Mosbacher and Monica Crowley, as they whined that a straight-ahead, unexceptional convention photo spread that they had voluntarily posed for in New York magazine wasn't flattering enough. Presenting no evidence whatsoever, the two women (one of whom, Ms. Crowley, doubles as a Fox "analyst") bantered darkly with Mr. O'Reilly about how this "dirty trick" to present unglamorous portraits of them and such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and Al D'Amato was a conspiracy of "radical" and "Upper West Side" Democrats. (We all know what Upper West Side means, ladies.) This was G.O.P. TV raised to not-ready-for-prime time self-parody, lacking only the studio audience to yuk it up.
But is the response to an ideological news network like Fox an ideological news network with a liberal slant of its own? CNN, the inventor of 24/7 news, once prided itself on being a straight shooter. Now it and Mr. Carville have argued that the line wasn't blurred here because the liberal "Crossfire" hosts are unpaid, loosey-goosey Kerry advisers and their show is an opinion-mongering screamfest, not a news program.
And yet our little 'rag', the SF Chronicle, had this balanced reporting:
"Fickle polls give little away
Bush way ahead or just behind -- depends who asks"
9/18/04 with a chart of the various pools
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/09/18/MNGN78R6Q31.DTL