New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller:

Some years ago, a colleague tried to sum up the essentials that set us apart from agenda-driven journalists of the right and the left.

The first is that we believe in verification rather than assertion. We put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny. [my emphasis]

You know what’s coming when a Big Media guy starts bragging about Big Media accuracy, right? He’s about to screw something up.

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On the heels of this Summer’s Old Media attack of News Corp’s donation of $1 million to the GOP, we discover that billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft fame has given $1.5 million directly to ABC News so that they’ll cover his personal “news” issue: health conditions of the poor.

Gates has been spreading his money around in more traditional media buys over the last year or so, too. He spent $3.5 million to start a TV production company that is working with PBS to report on global health issues and he’s also spent millions buying newspapers to keep them afloat. Additionally Gates has donated money to journalism schools and other media operations.

But this direct donation to ABC News is a different animal than the other media related spending that Gates has done. This is a direct donation of money to ABC News to buy their attention for Bill Gates’s personal interests. ABC is supposed to be a self contained, independent news agency that funds its own reports governed under its own authority. Gates’s donation really brings this status into question.

As to which program is targeted, ABC is using Gates’s money for its upcoming Be The Change: Save a Life series.

Now it would be different if Gates’s TV production company created its programming and then bought time on ABC to air it. There’d certainly be nothing wrong with that. But this is far different and more troubling. This situation is far different thing than, for instance, corporations donating money to programming on PBS because those are independent productions that PBS merely airs. (more…)

H4Y7XVAZ5KPJAs all sentient readers (and innumerable ex-readers) of The New York Times know, but executive editor Bill Keller seemingly does not, among the things that make the paper so relentlessly irritating is that its left/liberal assumptions are pervasive and inescapable. As my first Diary entry noted, even turning to the food or fashion section one can never be sure of finding refuge from a gratuitous, nasty aside about Sarah Palin, or a bit of offhand rah-rahing for Obamacare, or the conviction that those twin monsters, diversity and multiculturalism, are unquestioned goods.

The sports section is, of course, especially egregious in pushing the paper’s social agenda, enthusiastically embracing the victim mentality in its every twisted guise on the court or diamond or gridiron. Most memorably, there was former Executive Editor Howell Raines’s feminist-inspired jihad against Augusta National and, even more notoriously, the paper’s shameless crusade against the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of rape. (more…)

Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story.  Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”

“Clueless Clark”

Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column:  “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

And they say the Times has no comics section! (more…)