It looks like the McCain campaign may be spoinlin' for a fight with the New York Times over an article posted online last night, covering his record on ethics choices.
What are the media ethics ramifications of this? To get you started, read this perspective from the Poynter Institute.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
McCain and the New York Times
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3 comments:
I agree with the points raised by the Poynter Institute's analysis of the New York Times article. Is the story really about McCain's history of "questionable judgement?" or is the Times really just resurfacing questions or a possible affair? I understand a lead is supposed to pull in the reader and make them want to read more, but by beginning AND ending their article with, as Poynter puts it, McCain's "most salacious" judgments/actions, it is hard to take-away any information from the story besides that of his rumored affair.
The New York Times needed to be clearer about their actual intent in running such an article. If their main point was to address McCain's encounters with Iseman, then make the whole article about that topic. The way this story was written makes it look like the Times was trying to disguise what they wanted to communicate about the alleged affair among other reported instances of his "misjudgment."
I didn't even get past the lead before I objected to this article. "Go to war" with the NYT? This is just another example of Republicans using the word war too loosely. "War on terror," "War on drugs"; How do you go to war with the New York Times, Mr. McCain?
I personally thought that the article was a blatant cheap shot at Senator McCain. Almost everything published in that article was heresay and a bunch of inconclusive data. It seems to me that this was a liberal news source trying to attack a conservative candidate during a hotly contested political battle. The New York Times is much better than that, at least I hoped so. Nothing in that article is proven, yet it is detrimental to McCain's reputation and his good record. The paper needs to wait until they have conclusive evidence before they do something like that. If they find out that the information is true...by all means go ahead and publish the facts. But this seemed like a calculated move by the Times.
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