Since it’s getting increasingly more difficult to tell the difference between news in the New York Times and parodies in The Onion, I thought I would perform a public service by giving you the opportunity to hone your source-spotting skills.

Here’s how a recent article begins about a “curious disparity” that, until now, you probably haven’t worried about very much. Is this an example of what the Times regards as news that’s fit to print, or is it an Onion parody?

Baseball’s Praised Diversity Is Stranded at First Base

About 40 percent of the players in Major League Baseball are black, Hispanic or Asian, and the sport is seen as a leading example of diversity, yet a curious disparity has emerged in a corner of the game.

Among baseball’s 30 teams, only 23 percent of the third-base coaches are members of minorities, compared with 67 percent of its first-base coaches. The disparity has existed for decades but it is now about twice as large as it was in 1990, based on an analysis by….

You guessed The Onion, right? I mean, who else would write in apparent seriousness (as the article in question does a few paragraphs later) that “diversity among the third-base coaching ranks has been in decline for the past five years, from a peak of 12 in 2005 to 7 this season, and the racial disparity between first- and third-base coaches has increased,” an underrepresentation deemed so dire that it was accompanied by a sidebar with a graph showing “A Gap in the Coaching Boxes” of 43 percentage points and noting that “[t]he  disparity between the percentage of minority first-base coaches and minority third-base coaches in Major League Baseball is greater than ever.” (more…)

I have written here several times recently about the all too visible partisanship of the Washington Post, but Karen Tumulty’s lead article on Sunday (August 8), “In Va.’s 5th, incumbent Democrat Tom Perriello sees voter frustration firsthand,” takes the cake. Or perhaps it’s simply that as a resident and voter in Virginia’s 5th District I can see her slant more clearly and hence resent it more.

Her bias appears right away:

CHARLOTTE COURT HOUSE, VA. — The crowds that have been showing up for Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello’s town halls have been smaller and more polite than the angry throngs he saw during last August’s raucous congressional recess.

Catcalls about socialism and death panels have given way to substantive and pointed questions — about the intricacies of the new health-care law and financial regulations, finding alternative energy sources, and that most perennial of Virginia problems, traffic.

Gale-force outrage — both the real kind and the kind manufactured for television — has faded this August. There is still the occasional outburst: On Saturday, the Lynchburg Tea Party Patriots hastily called a rally outside a Perriello town hall in Fork Union to demand that he vote against $26 billion in aid to state and local governments when the House reconvenes briefly this week.

(more…)

At least that’s what the wise man of the Washington Post, David Broder, has asked.

David Broder, sage of the center, has long (very long) been the quintessential middle of the roader, Mr. Moderate, the Dean of Conventional Wisdom, David Gergen without the unctuous smarm. But now that the Democrats under Obama have veered sharply left, Broder’s position just to the right of them no longer seems so moderate, or sensible.

Broder mentions with evident approval that “there’s more talk these days in White House circles about measures that might attract bipartisan support” and quotes a White House “insider” (it takes one to know one) who says, “If you asked the president what he would really like for Christmas, it would be a smart loyal opposition.” Then comes the moderate, sensible, centrist Broderism: (more…)

Eugene Robinson, the name-calling scourge of all critics of Obama who writes one of the anti-conservative columns at the Washington Post and serves the same function on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” has just provided another example of what post- — or in this case, Post- — partisanship looks like in Obama’s Washington.

According to the Post-partisan Robinson, Arizona’s embattled S.B. 1070 “amounts to a prescription for racial profiling on a scale not seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow laws in the South.”  It is “anti-Latino” and “patently unconstitutional.” Those who support it are “xenophobes” and “demagogues … who delight in turning truth, justice and the American way into political liabilities.”

It appears as though the vituperative Mr. Robinson hasn’t gotten the message — stated by pre-presidential Obama on the Rick Warren show in 2008, repeated (with increasing shrillness, as it has turned out) ad nauseum during the campaign, and just recycled on “The View” this week — that “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”

As one can clearly see, there is never any shortage of political invective in Eugene Robinson columns, but there frequently is a severe fact shortage. In the column under review (“Immigration Helps Dems Long Term,” July 30), for example, he asserted that: (more…)

On Sunday the Washington Post ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, issued an interesting apology for his paper’s failure to write about the Department of Justice’s handling of the Philadelphia New Black Panther Party case.

After summarizing the case and the controversy over it, Alexander admitted,

The Post didn’t cover it. Indeed, until Thursday’s story, The Post had written no news stories about the controversy this year. In 2009, there were passing references to it in only three stories.

That’s prompted many readers to accuse The Post of a double standard. Royal S. Dellinger of Olney [Maryland] said that if the controversy had involved Bush administration Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, “Lord, there’d have been editorials and stories, and it would go on for months.”

“To be sure,” Alexander said, “ideology and party politics are at play,” although he seemed to be referring only to liberal bloggers, “Fox News and right-wing bloggers,” “Congressional Republicans,” Sarah Palin, etc. No admission, that is, of ideology or party politics at the Post.

To his credit, Alexander chastises the Post for not covering the controversy and concludes by telling his colleagues, “Better late than never. There’s plenty left to explore.” He even suggests some topics: (more…)

Do you know — and more important, do your Representatives and Senators know — that the just-passed Dodd-Frank financial reform bill will unleash a tsunami or racial quotas on financial regulatory agencies and, inevitably, on the financial industry itself?  Not if you rely on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their network news equivalents.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute, a veritable one-woman truth squad on this issue, raised the alarm here, here, and here, and her warning was discussed by Andy McCarthy of National Review, Carl Horowitz on Townhall.com, and on several blogs — Hot Air, Professor Bainbridge, and my own Discriminations. But aside from an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal last month, not a peep from the mainstream press.

How odd, since this bill has been sold as necessary to prevent another financial meltdown and yet, insofar as that meltdown was precipitated by a burst housing bubble produced at least in part by the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie, et al. forcing lenders to offer mortgages to borrowers who couldn’t afford them, the new legislation threatens to institutionalize and magnify those very abuses. As Ms. Furchtgoff-Roth explained, Section 342 of the bill creates at least 20 “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” to ensure that “race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.” (more…)