On the front page of a recent edition of the New York Times Sunday Review there appeared the eye-catching headline "Small Donors Are Slow to Return to the Obama Fold." That immediately struck me as rather bad news for the Obama reelection campaign. I wondered how bad that news was – how did it compare with small donor contributions of the 2008 campaign. I started to read the article, but than I paused – I remembered that the FEC quarterly campaign contributions reports were due on October 15. The Times article appeared on September 25, three weeks before the figures might become available. Did the Times get insider information that allowed it to jump the gun?
I read the article with great interest looking for the figures. There weren’t any! I waited until today to see if the figures released on October 25th would support the Times' allegation. A search of the web and of the Times shows no figures that would support that screaming headline.
What was there in the article that prompted the conclusion about small donors supporting or rather not supporting Obama? Did the Times conduct its own poll? No! The whole article, with its sensational headline was based on a few anecdotal quotes.
A man from Arizona, a Mr. Alasadi said:
When I was pro-Obama in 2008, I was thinking of him as a leader who could face the challenges that we were tackling,... Now I am seeing him as just an opportunistic politician.
Nadine Kurland, 62, of Falling Waters, W.Va., is quoted as saying:
I have been very disappointed in the president, he has not stood up to the Republicans.
After some more quotes like this and some concessionary positive quotes like:
I am happy with him, ... I just feel like the Congress is completely obstructing him.
The Times concedes:
Aides to Mr. Obama said the campaign was well ahead of its 2008 benchmarks. That year, Mr. Obama did not reach one million total donors until February, about a month after he won the Iowa caucuses.
A campaign spokesman said that the number of people who had given more than once to Mr. Obama this year and the number of people who had contributed for the first time were both higher than his total number of donors at the same point in 2007
...which seems to completely contradict the headline and the theme of the story.
So how do we get the sensational headline, which ends up being repeated by the media echo chamber, so that we find the Huffington Post quoting the Times article. As far as I can tell, the headline came first. Then the quotes were sought to support the conclusion.
That is not good journalism and illustrates more than ever that our icon, The New York Times, has clay feet. The editorial page may be liberal, but the news pages are there to draw readers. Sensationalism is the bi-word.
But the Times isn’t satisfied with reporting that the small donor segment has left Obama. Sunday, October 16, sees the headline, “Romney Beating Obama in a Fight for Wall St. Cash" but then concedes:
Mr. Obama continues to dominate Mr. Romney — and the rest of the Republican field — in overall fund-raising. He has raised close to $100 million so far this year for his campaign, three times more than Mr. Romney, as well as $65 million for the Democratic National Committee.
In fact other news reports show the President out-raising all the Republican candidates combined.
But it would be hard to realize this from the New York Times headlines. As far as the headlines of the Times are concerned what we get is small donors aren’t giving to the candidacy of the President. Wall Street donors aren’t giving donations to the candidacy of the President. But the President’s fund raising is greater than all Republicans combined. Well, will the Times tell us where the money is coming from, or does this not make a good headline. Or even worse, does it not fit into the message that has been decided upon without reference to any facts.
Maybe Fox, with its obvious bias, is better than the Times with its deceptive liberalism, or pretended objectivity.
Readers beware!!!! Read critically!!!!
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