Conservatives Need Higher Standards

I would think that conservatives, who so often claim to have the Truth with a capital T, would take their self appointed spokespeople to task for some of the stuff that comes out of their mouths.  Pat Robertson’s suggestion regarding the assassination of Hugo Chavez and Bill O’Reilly’s long history of pulling stats out of his ass never seem to have any long term effects on their careers.

I try to stay on top of the right wing talking points with a subscription to Human Events so I get the latest stuff written by Ann Coulter, Robert Novak, and Newt Gingrich via e-mail.   I generally scan the e-mail mail and delete it, but last night, one caught my eye and was bothering me enough to write about it.

It was a column/essay from Ann Coulter with the headline of:  "NYT: Suicide Manual for Dems".  I know the New York Times has had its problems in the past, mostly related to sucking up to the current administration, but I tend to still read Times articles when I want to flesh out my understanding of an issue.  I was curious enough to see what Ms. Coulter had to say about the paper she’s lied about in the past.

Here is the part that was contained in my e-mail with the same subject as her column name:

NYT: Suicide Manual for Dems

By Ann Coulter
Legal Affairs Correspondent, Human Events

Here’s a story that may not have been deemed "Fit to Print": In the six months that ended Sept. 25, The New York Times’ daily circulation was down another 4.51 percent to about a million readers a day. The paper’s Sunday circulation was down 7.59 percent to about 1.5 million readers. In short, the Times is dropping faster than Hillary in New Hampshire. (Meanwhile, the Drudge Report has more than 16 million readers every day.)

One can only hope that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are among the disaffected hordes lining up to cancel their Times subscriptions.

The Times is so accustomed to lying about the news to prove that "most Americans" agree with the Times, that it seems poised to lead the Democrats — and any Republicans stupid enough to believe the Times — down a primrose path to their own destruction.

The reason this jumped out as me is way she massaged stats to make her point and then acted as though her explanation was the correct one. She says "In the six months that ended Sept. 25, The New York Times’ daily circulation was down another 4.51 percent to about a million readers a day."  What she doesn’t mention is that during the same time period The New York Times made all of its current content and much of its archives available for free via its website.

She talks about the number of readers the Drudge Report has as opposed to New York Times in a classic apples and oranges type comparison.  She isn’t even subtle about her spin.  She compares the New York Times daily circulation with visitors to the Drudge Report website.  If you have not visited the Drudge Report site, I would recommend you take a look so you can see what she is using as a comparison to the New York Times.  The Drudge Report is basically a single page with a collection of links out to the work of other journalists.   On very rare occasions the DR has links to its own content.  Right this minute, there are 319 links on the Drudge Report homepage and of those, 308 are links out to content created by other people, including 7 to the New York Times itself.

Ann seems to be getting her numbers from a Media Life Magazine story on how the largest papers in the country are all taking a hit in their circulation numbers.  The article contains that exact 4.51% drop in circulation for the New York Times daily edition and the 7.59% drop for the Sunday paper.  If you look at the full table shown in the article you can see that the New York Times didn’t even suffer the most in this study.  The New York Post, Newsday, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe, Star Tribune Of Minneapolis, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and San Diego Union-Tribune all took bigger hits in circulation percentages for their Monday through Friday editions. (To view the full table of stats use the More>> link at the bottom of this post.)

With the New York Times website, way back in April of 2005, bringing in 555 million pageviews a month or about 18,500,000 a day, we can see that even over two years ago when many people were still using Dial-Up for internet access (I know because I was supporting them in our call center) the NYT’s online presence had the Drudge Report beat.  I can’t find any current numbers, but I can’t image that fewer people are using the New York Times website now than back then.

Ann Coulter, and the rest of the right wing media talking heads really should get their facts together and it should be conservatives who force them to do it.  Like it or not, they are in the foreground when the main stream media covers conservative issues.  I hope that some day, conservatives who really care about the truth and feel that facts support their positions will stand up and do something about the infotainment spokespeople who seem to have hijacked their movement.  Higher standards in terms of what you accept from commentators who claim to speak in your name would help your positions’ credibility a great deal.

From: Big papers take big circulation hits