Sunday, April 13, 2008

Is the NY Times spinning Obama's "bitter" remarks?

Jinc Regular Insufficiently Sensitive alerted me to a Classical Values lengthy, informative post which begins - - -


Obama's remarks about bitter Pennsylvanians clinging to God and guns made the front page of today's [Philadelphia] Inquirer.

Curiously, even though it's a Pennsylvania story, they ran a NY Times piece which does not appear at the Inquirer's web site. I figured it would be easy enough to find the piece (after all, I only wanted to quote a few words), so I Googled part of the first sentence -- "The Democratic nominating fight took a sudden turn..." All the links point to this piece by Katharine Q. Seelye and Jeff Zeleny, but I've been opening it up repeatedly, and the "sudden turn" language seems to have dissappeared. What gives? Did some reporter goof? Are they now trying to throw Obama a lifeline? I just want to know why the Times called the Obama remarks a "sudden turn" in the first paragraph and now they don't.

I thought that maybe I should analyze the now missing language. The entire first paragraph that stares at me from the Inquirer is now missing, but some dutiful Freeper (perhaps bitter about being called bitter) supplied it:

The New York Times ^ | April 13, 2008 | KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JEFF ZELENY
The Democratic nominating fight took a sudden turn with Senator Barack Obama's comments about small-town Pennsylvania voters providing an opening for the Clinton campaign to raise anew questions about Mr. Obama's ability to lure working-class voters.
Sheesh.

You know things are getting really bad when you have to go to the Free Republic to find the text of what's on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer!

The "sudden turn" language still appears in links to a few news aggregators like this and this but even that is disappearing, and I had to resort to the Google cache.

Thinking maybe the first paragraph had been dropped, I Googled the language from the fourth paragraph -- "the furor represented something of a last minute gift." Once again, the links pointed to the same Times piece, but the words were nowhere to be found.

Hmmm...

I had to go into full-blown, teeth-pulling mode, but I finally found the text which was nearly identical to that in the Inquirer at a site called the Ebolowa blog. Normally, I do not lift entire stories, but in this case, I had to work so hard to find it that I thought I should place it below so that interested readers can click to read it.

I'm curious about the mechanism here. Perhaps someone can explain to me how so much language could be first reported, then summarily dropped. Is the Times now acting like the BBC and changing stories when activists complain? Or are these stories put out through the news wire, allowing subscribing news outlets to run them in the print editions only, with the Times then changing them later? ...

The entire post is here.

Thank you, IS.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Got some action going on at the N&O blogs.

Anonymous said...

Re: Another PA quote:
“Get me more white people”

Excerpt form the Carnegie Mellon University newspaper, the Tartan, of a Michelle Obama event in Pittsburgh:

"While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama's event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama.

The Tartan's correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, 'Get me more white people, we need more white people.' To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, 'We're moving you, sorry.”

More at Politico.com-"...staging of events like this -- even a campaign whose supporters chant "race doesn't matter...."

Anonymous said...

John -

The NYT needs to change its masthead logo from, All the news that's fit to print, to, All the views we want to mint.

Jack in Silver Spring

Anonymous said...

John -

Don't know what happened to my comment from yesterday, but just to repeat what I said (as best as I can remember) - the NYT needs to change its masthead logo from, "All the news that's fit to print," to "All our views we want to mint."

Jack in Silver Spring