Read All About It, Friends
And so, this morning’s 1-column Page 1 headline read:
Here came a hit piece as surely as Obama Barak has his priorities backward. When the governor breaks his leg, it is a low priority piece unless it is a v-e-r-y slow news cycle, which it is this week. With hundreds of thousands of readers having stopped their subscriptions to the Times in the last several years, the Times has reacted by doing what any desperate person would do, go crazy. Packing a loaded shotgun under each sweaty arm, they light out after Republicans as if they are coveys of pheasants on the first day of a 2-day hunting season. Arnold breaking his leg would give the boys and girls at the Times legitimate cover for nailing Arnold again, for about the 500th time. The last 28 paragraphs of a 39-paragraph story provided the Times with elbow room to savage Arnold for being out-of-state (not off the job) 204 of 1136 days. And (here is where you bring your left palm to the left cheek of your face and the right palm to the right cheek of your face), we are asked to be horrified, mortified and refried beans because when Arnold goes out of state, he does not raise his hand, dial the Times and ask, obsequiously, “Mother, may I?”
Detective, Where Is the Times?
In the fifth paragraph, the Times, raincoat in place, fedora pulled down over its shifty eyes and loose lips, attempted to sink the main ship of state. Luridly, the reporter Pete Nicholas wrote, in a whisper, that Arnold broke his leg last Saturday while skiing with his family in Sun Valley. My breakfast nearly tumbled to the floor. After scoring Arnold for sneakily seeking to “keep his private life out of the public eye,” reporter Nicholas pulled out his personalized hand-held magnifying glass while hunching toward the ground. Where is Raymond Chandler — as dead as Stalin but not nearly as bad as Stalin — when we need him? Reporter Nicholas, a bullyboy but no heavyweight at covering The Guv, deals in the same sliming tactics other Times reporters have been told to engage in when Arnold is the subject.
Plenty of Opinions
As if they had permissive parents, Times reporters are freely permitted to include their opinions in news stories. The traditional distinguishing line vanished shortly after Tribune Co. acquired the newspaper. To accent his main points, reporter Nicholas relied on a tactic used by journalists to leak their opinions into stories. Take an innocent fact and present it in a hushed, condemnatory tone. This suggests ill, if not immoral, motivation, to the reader. For example, reporter Nicholas said, “Few Californians would have known their governor spent hours skiing near his Idaho vacation home this weekend this weekend if Schwarzenegger had not broken his leg.” (My wife and I were coolly reviewing this fact last night before we went to sleep. Two of my sons telephoned to ask if it was true.) Mr. Nicholas overlooks the fact Arnold is a universal celebrity of mammoth proportions. It is natural, healthy and probably necessary for him to seek privacy. Veiling his reportorial voice in secretive tones, reporter Nicholas shrugs off the celebrity explanation. He turns even more smarmy. “Secrecy,” he writes, “carries an added advantage: Minimizing the chance of an unflattering photograph or a spontaneous quote from a vacationing Schwarzenegger that veers off message.” Huh? Liberals never seem to recover from losing elections, do they?
