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Previously, I pointed out that Paul Krugman got his facts wrong on two of the three examples he used in a much-cited column to allege that Reagan used “tacit race-baiting.” But what of the third example? “During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a ‘strapping young buck’ buying T-bone steaks.”

I traced the source to a February 1976 New York Times article by reporter Jon Nordheimer about Reagan’s Florida primary campaign. The article states that Reagan made no direct appeals for antiblack votes, and said explicitly he didn’t welcome them. However, Nordheimer added, sometimes “the impression is left, perhaps inadvertently, that he comes close to an indirect appeal in this regard.” The example he gave is that the previous night, Reagan gave a speech in which he repeated a favored anecdote about people being upset when they see a healthy young man buying a steak with food stamps. However, Nordheimer wrote, in Ft. Lauderdale this young man became a “strapping young buck,” a phrase he didn’t use in New Hampshire and other states with small black populations. “Young buck,” the reporter adds “to whites in the South denotes a large black man.” Reagan soon denied any racist intent, stating that when he grew up in Iowa in the 1920s, a young man of any race could be describe as a “young buck.”

I’m not sure what to make of this. Except in the context of Reagan’s remarks, I’ve never heard of [or at least don’t recall hearing of] “young buck” being used as a racial term, and I’ve read lots of racist drivel from the South in [...]

While fifty years later, much of the MSM still refuses to acknowledge that JFK’s assassin was a Communist loser, somehow it’s also apparently not cricket to point out that his brother RFK was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist.

So let’s review. Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian refugee with Jordanian citizenship. He murdered Kennedy because the latter promised to send advanced fighter planes to Israel. The PLO terrorist group Black September demanded his release in exchange for hostages in 1973, recognizing that he was “one of theirs.”

Yet of 5755 hits for “Sirhan Sirhan” in the ALLNEWS database on Westlaw, only four of them refer to him as a “Palestinian terrorist” or “Palestinian extremist;” three of these sources are the Jerusalem Post, and one is the New York Jewish Week. In mainstream publications, you actually get phrases like this, “Black September terrorists who kidnapped the Western diplomats in a failed plot to free Palestinian terrorists in European jails and Sirhan Sirhan, the killer of Robert F. Kennedy,” as if Sirhan Sirhan, a terrorist and a Palestinian, on the same “trade of for hostages list” as other Palestinian terrorists, was somehow not a “Palestinian terrorist.” An even better one, from the Huffington Post: “[RFK] was gunned down in a hotel kitchen by a 24-year-old Palestinian whose motives have never been determined.” (Ironically, sources from the Arab world (e.g.,) seem more likely to acknowledge the real dynamic, though with the message that the U.S. and assumedly RFK got what was coming to it and him for supporting Israel).

As I was growing up, the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, were always portrayed as a resulting from a “culture of violence” and “hatred” that showed that America was going nuts in the 1960s, first because of the [...]

This is really amazing to me. The New York Times and the Washington Post each manages to publish a piece on the Kennedy assassination, by two different authors, focusing on what they see as the right-wing extremist environment in Dallas in 1963, and while never saying so directly, implicitly blaming Kennedy’s assassination on that environment. [UPDATE: The Washingtonian magazine is more explicit: “The city of hate had, in fact, killed the President.”]

Look, guys. Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK. Oswald was a Communist. Not a small c, “all we are saying is give peace a chance and let’s support Negro civil rights” kind of Communist, but someone so committed to the cause (and so blind to the nature of the USSR) that he actually went to live in the Soviet Union. And when that didn’t work out, Oswald became a great admirer of Castro. He apparently would have gone to live in Cuba before the assassination if the Cubans would have had him. Before assassinating Kennedy, Oswald tried to kill a retired right-wing general. As near as we can tell, he targeted Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy’s anti-Castro actions.

The attempt to at best distract us from who the killer was and why he killed JFK, and at worst to pin the blame on entirely innocent people for inciting Dallas opinion against JFK (or perhaps to imply that the right-wingers plotted the assassination), even though those innocents were exactly the type of people Oswald hated, is just pathetic, and the Times and Post should be embarrassed for publishing these pieces. The Post piece is especially embarrassing because it explicitly links Dallas “right-wing extremism” circa 1963 to the modern “Tea Party,” as if to say, “if the Tea Party had been around in 1963, one of its members would [...]

The Washington Post reports that the paper and associated media properties will be sold to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. [...]

A new report on media coverage of the presidential campaign from the Pew Research Center looks at the balance of positive and negative coverage of the major presidential candidates. Among the report’s findings:

The study reveals the degree to which the two cable channels that have built themselves around ideological programming, MSNBC and Fox, stand out from other mainstream media outlets. And MSNBC stands out the most. On that channel, 71% of the segments studied about Romney were negative in nature, compared with just 3% that were positive-a ratio of roughly 23-to-1. On Fox, 46% of the segments about Obama were negative, compared with 6% that were positive-a ratio of about 8-to-1 negative. These made them unusual among channels or outlets that identified themselves as news organizations.

(Hat tip: Slate) [...]

Clive Crook offers two commentaries on the current rage of “fact checking” political arguments: One with a heavy dose of satire, and one without. [...]

Arthur Brisbane, the NYT‘s public editor for the past two years, wrote his final column this weekend. In that column, he commented:

I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

According to Politico, NYT executive editor has a different view:

Times executive editor Jill Abramson says she disagrees with Brisbane’s “sweeping conclusions.”

“In our newsroom we are always conscious that the way we view an issue in New York is not necessarily the way it is viewed in the rest of the country or world. I disagree with Mr. Brisbane’s sweeping conclusions,” Abramson told POLITICO Saturday night.

“I agree with another past public editor, Dan Okrent, and my predecessor as executive editor, Bill Keller, that in covering some social and cultural issues, the Times sometimes reflects its urban and cosmopolitan base,” she continued. “But I also often quote, including in talks with Mr.