Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

I read, listen to or watch the news to find out what's been happening locally, in the nation or in the world.

I don't read, listen to or watch the news to hear some "reporter"'s interpretation, opinion or bias on the issue.

Reporters will skew a news story so that it is favorable to their bias and agenda. If they're going to do "fact checking", they'll do so in an inconsistent manner according to who the candidate is or what the issue is.

I have personal experience (not as a candidate) of "reporters" manipulating through editing of interviews and reporting with an agenda to make the final news item sound almost totally opposite of what actually occurred. They have their idea of what the story should be before they even start, and they'll end up with their outcome when they're done. I don't trust them at all.

I don't have an issue with fact-checking as long as it's separated from the reporting and as long as it's done consistently to all candidates and all issues, without bias or an agenda. However pigs will be flying to the moon when that happens.

Where were the MSM "fact-checkers" hiding in '08 when BHO was campaigning?

What we're trying to get to the bottom of is if newspapers should simply be providing a megaphone for the chosen few to say things like, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators" or if assertions like these need to be challenged.

In the example of Romney claiming that Obama apologizes for America, whether or not Obama in fact apologizes for America or has ever apologized for America does not change the fact that Romney claims that Obama apologizes for America.

The New York Times (NYT) is a paper in distress, if what people said in the NYT CEO severance package thread is true. It is a nationally circulated paper, which means it must compete against every local rag in the country - at a disadvantage, since, other than for New Yorkers, the NYT does not provide local news coverage - and it must also compete against other nationally circulated papers like USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times tries to do that by differentiating itself with a different slant from the others.

But the other example given, of concluding alongside a reader that Clarence Thomas knowingly withheld some information rather than misunderstood a procedure, is worrisome. Unless the NYT has staff with psychic powers able to directly read Thomas's thoughts, how can it make a judgment like that? I would certainly think that, if you should make the news for whatever reason, you would not want news articles casting judgments on you in that manner, and, if you are a NYT supporter, you should be able to see how such rushes to judgment can endanger the paper itself by opening it up to lawsuits.

IMHO, it depends on what the newspaper (or any other news outlet - TV, radio, Internet) chooses to be. Is their format or objective to report the news or is their objective to report and interpret the news (including fact-checking). Unfortunately, the latter appears to be the norm.

My point is just that I don't consider fact-checking to be interpretive. Yes you can selectivly fact check, but certainly no more so than you can selectively publish stories to begin with.

The Times‘ ‘conservative’ editorialist David Brooks is neither especially conservative (he voted for Obama) nor especially talented as a columnist, though his book Bobos in Paradise is lively pop anthropology. Give credit to The Washington Post, which has the ideological self-confidence and sense of fair play to employ Charles Krauthammer, an unusually muscular and lucid conservative who is capable of genuinely threatening the paper’s complacent liberal reverie.

Whole books have been written about the Times‘ political biases (here), and the Times‘ own public editor has succinctly enough answered the question as to whether the Times is a liberal newspaper: “Of course it is” (here).l In recent years, however, the Times’ biases have ever more blatantly trumped its journalistic ethics, a state of affairs unthinkable in the days of Abe Rosenthal.

“We don’t do hit jobs,” one editor assures a source while the cameras of Page One roll. “That’s not the business we’re in.” It is the business you’re in, at least these days. Exhibit A is the assassin’s bullet of a piece the Times published during the 2008 election in which it suggested, without anything you’d call evidence, that John McCain had been romantically involved with a lobbyist (here). The article is a slimy stew oflanonymous rumor and innuendo. Even liberal stalwarts like The New Republic and The Washington Post derided its malice andlirresponsibility. The article was all the more outrageous given the Times‘ refusal to investigate John Edwards’ very real affair at a time when he was a frontrunner for the Democratic VP slot. The female victim of the Times‘ smear filed a $27 million lawsuit, and the Times eventually issued a groveling apology (here). What was most remarkable about the article was that it appeared in the paper at all.

This story, and a similar recent attack on Rep. Darrell Issa (here), are far more damning than the more notorious Blair or Miller scandals, in my opinion. The latter represent institutional mistakes; the attacks on McCain and Issa represent institutional policy: a deliberate suspension of the usual journalistic ethics to further a partisan objective. As an amateur student of journalism, I can’tlguess what motivateslthe Times‘ self-destructive tilting at windmills that have the capacity to tilt right back.lHas the Times becomela raving and delusional Quixotelor is there some underlying financial logic tolits self-repositioning as a rag of the left?lThe answer is unclear.

Page One has literally nothing to say about any of this. It admits that the Times, like nearly every other newspaper in contemporary America, is teetering on the edge of the abyss. It details plunging stock prices, newsroom layoffs, and stumbling attempts to devise new revenue models in the age of the Internet. These technological and macroeconomic challenges are very real, but Page One ignores the fact that Times has maximized its own vulnerability by systematically alienating more than 50% of its potential market (conservative and Red State types) and by producing a newspaper that’s so hard to enjoy at the sentence level, whatever one’s politics.

David Carr: middle-America as a land of "low sloping foreheads."
If Page One has a protagonist, a hero with whom we’re supposed to identify, it’s David Carr, a former Minneapolis crack addict turned Times media reporter last seen insulting middle-America as the land “of low sloping foreheads” on Bill Maher’s show (see a Carr lowlight reel here)

Hiding behind the 'what if they don't do it fairly' completely skirts the issue again.
What we're trying to get to the bottom of is if newspapers should simply be providing a megaphone for the chosen few to say things like, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators" or if assertions like these need to be challenged.

Agree, and I do NOT think newspapers and 6 o clock news should be a megaphone for the chosen few...ideally, I would like to see someone like Judge Napolitano, who is knowledgeable, reputable and has a strong distrust of the status quo, to report and interpret political news with a basis in "How does this make things better for the common citizen" and/or "How is this another step in the direction of tyranny/police state". In my imagined scenario, he would only talk about politics and law and corporations...all the other bullshit like weather, sports, celebs that currently gets mixed in with MSM news would be avoided and left for the shitty MSM.

So, to answer the OP, Yes, I think the Times should start moving towards what I described above.

It's not even the need to interpret as much as its simple fact checking that's needed.