Yet NPR was hardly the only media institution that embarrassed itself last week by exhibiting lackluster professional standards. To take another example, the New York Times finally decided that New Jersey governor Chris Christie has become more credible and popular than a GOP politician has any right to be, and set out to cut the admittedly ample governor down to size.
The resulting front page article, “Christie’s Talk Is Blunt, but Not Always Straight,” was alternately petty and wrong. The Times asserted that Christie is inaccurate to say public workers in New Jersey pay “nothing” for health care costs—in fact, the Gray Lady pronounced, those workers have contributed 1.5 percent of their salaries to health care costs since 2007. Compared with the expensive health insurance premiums private sector workers have paid for decades, this paltry contribution might as well be “nothing.” To call Christie dishonest is a lawyerly cheap shot.
The Times also attacks the governor for wrongly asserting that “dozens” of states lack collective bargaining rights for public workers. However, 24 states and the federal government do limit collective bargaining rights for public workers. Not that the Times lets necessary context get in the way of attacking Chris Christie.
The Washington Post joined in the media follies too, publishing an article with the web headline, “Japanese Americans: House hearings on radical Islam ‘sinister.’” The article, labeled as “news,” explicitly compared Homeland Security chairman Rep. Peter King of New York’s long-overdue hearings on Islamic radicals in America to the indiscriminate internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. Suffice it to say, most Americans are rightly concerned about Islamic terrorism, and their fears are unlikely to be allayed by the media’s preoccupation with politically correct hyperbole.
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