Pravda on the Hudson becoming more and more like its model

The New York Times lies all the time, we know that. But here is a lie that stuns even the Times watchers at Powerline, and stuns me too. Remember when Obama in a presidential debate several months ago said he would without any pre-conditions meet with radical Muslim leaders including the president of Iran, and Hillary rebuked him for his naivete? Well, the Times now accuses McCain of engaging in a partisan attack on Obama by claiming that Obama said that. Obama said it in a nationally televised presidential debate, and the Times is bald-facedly claiming that he didn’t say it.

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Jim N. writes:

One thing I’ve never quite understood. Why don’t rival newspapers take each other to task for their errors, particularly when they are obvious, calculated lies? Why doesn’t the Post or some other competitor point out, citing the pertinent evidence, that the Times is an unreliable news source? That would seem to make sense from a free market, business standpoint. Moreover, it appears to be the way papers in America operated for the first hundred years or so of our history.

I see four possible reasons:

1. They’re afraid that if they attack their rivals today they’ll be attacked in return later on.

2. As in the advertising world, they think their audience will consider it bad form and turn away.

3. They’re afraid of the loss of advertising revenue from gun-shy advertisers.

4. They’re all more or less marching to the beat of the same drummer.

I suspect it’s number three more than anything, which to me points up a certain myopia in the hardline laissez faire school of economics: free markets may dependably determine what is economically beneficial, but they’re generally helpless to serve any other of man’s needs. Libertarians would argue, echoing your point about birthrate fluctuations, that this isn’t so; that eventually some entrepreneur will get smart and successfully buck the trend, resulting in a shift in loyalties from the Times to the challenging paper(s), but again: How long must we wait, O Lord? How long?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 12, 2008 03:34 PM | Send