David Shipley – Poster Boy for Media Bias

About a week ago, the New York Times published an op-ed from Barack Obama called “My Plan for Iraq”. John McCain, thinking that the Times was an objective media outlet, submitted an op-ed as well as a counterpoint to Obama’s.

It was rejected.

You can read some good analysis on the whole thing from Don Surber and The Anchoress. Don’s post carries both the column in its entirety and the rejection letter from David Shipley, the man who sent it back. The Anchoress’ post, especially, should be on your reading list this evening because of the evident glee with which she dismantles the capricious decision of the Times’ editor.

I’d like to go in a slightly different direction, though. I bring up the subject of the left-leaning bias in the MSM quite a lot, but I don’t think I’ve seen a better example of it than what happened with McCain’s op-ed. What’s interesting to me is that if you asked Shipley if his decision was biased, he’d be honestly flummoxed by the question. That’s because the bias wasn’t intentional and it wasn’t malicious. It came from his own unchallenged assumptions and just a little bit of innate arrogance.

In the letter to McCain’s campaign, David Shipley, wrote this:

The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.

Of course Obama’s piece offered new information, specifically because it was a brand new position for him. Up until that op-ed Obama’s position was that he would pull the troops out of Iraq immediately because the surge had failed and the Iraqis weren’t meeting any of the so-called benchmarks.

His op-ed was a complete turnaround on all of that. Now, he wants to pull the troops out more slowly and he wants to work with the Iraqi government to make sure that the pullout is backed with competent Iraqi government and security. He will work with the local commanders and the Iraqi government before he made any decisions. All that is one brand-spanking new position.

It’s also almost exactly the same position that John McCain has held since before the surge began.

So while Shipley was delighted with the newness of what Obama was saying, he never noticed that Obama is taking the old position still held by John McCain. In other words, he’s blind to the relative positions of each candidate and entirely focusing on the superficial “newness” of Obama’s new stance.

Hope. Change.

That’s as biased as it gets. Not only is Shipley admitting that new is better, regardless of efficacy, he’s also admitting that he doesn’t have much of an idea of the ground Obama’s now trying to stake out and who is already there.

It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the Senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan.

In other words, Shipley wants McCain not to be McCain but to be Obama. McCain has already laid out everything that Shipley wants and he did it a long time ago.

More than that, though, Shipley wants more from McCain than he got from Obama. Notice how he uses the word “victory” twice. That word does not appear at all in Obama’s op-ed. Neither does the word “win”. The word he uses is much different. He says, in his piece, “That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.” His piece concludes with, “It’s time to end this war.” The words “end” or “ending” appear four times.

Shipley is a man of words. He served for two years as President Clinton’s head speechwriter. He’s written a book of his own. He has a B.A. in English. He was married to looney lefty author Naomi Wolf. He knows the difference between “ending the war” and “victory in Iraq”. He’s moving the goalposts and that’s dirty pool.

But that’s not the only goalpost-shift he makes. He asks McCain for “troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate” when Obama gave none of those things in his op-ed. Obama’s only mention of troop levels is where he says he will “safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months”. That says nothing of troop levels save that they will be smaller over time. But even that 16-month target isn’t firm because in the very next paragraph he says that he will “inevitably need to make tactical adjustments”. He lists no specific troop levels, no firm timetables, and no means to compel anything from the Iraqis. In fact, he’s predicating his entire withdrawal plan on “a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability”.

Barack Obama didn’t provide what Shipley now wants from McCain. That’s bias, it’s arrogant, and it’s wrong. Shipley may reject McCain’s op-ed, but he has no standing to tell him what to write nor what positions to take.

The other thing he does here is assume that there is One True Correct Strategy and McCain’s isn’t it. What if McCain doesn’t believe in “compelling” the Iraqi Government at a time when it is making incredible progress under a huge amount of pressure from within and without? What if McCain believes, as he’s said before, that artificial timetables are a giant red flag to the Islamists telling them where the vulnerable spots are and when to best strike? Too bad, says Shipley. Do it his way or don’t do it at all.

I don’t think that’s intentional on his part, though. I think he simply can’t imagine how anyone would not seriously want timetables or “compelling” pressure on the Iraqi government. He can’t conceive that someone could look at the same facts and reach a different conclusion. You might as well get him to believe that the sun’s going to rise in the west tomorrow. That’s an innate bias born of working in an environment for so long where his beliefs were never challenged and he never had to think outside of his own comfortable box. Since 1990, he’s worked for the New York Times twice, the New Republic, and President Clinton – 18 years where he’s been completely insulated from any viewpoint but that of the left. When conservatives talk about media bias, the problem of the echo chamber is mostly what we mean. Yes, there is the blatant bias of double standards which Shipley exhibits in spades. Mostly, though, we complain that MSM newsrooms are so overwhelmingly populated with liberals that they rarely have their basic notions of reality challenged.

Shipley’s ingrained bias gives him a base set of assumptions which causes him to make the other biased decisions he made to reject John McCain’s op-ed. If he had spoken to one conservative person and voiced these concerns, he would have gotten another point of view – one that would have allowed him to come to a truly objective and bias-free decision.

But he didn’t and now his newspaper is revealed as plainly in the bag for the Democrats. Again.

Other Posts of Interest:

• Vets to Obama: Meet General Petraeus Without Preconditions
• Iraqi Foreign Minister Meets with Obama, Deems Him McCain-like
• Susan Rice, National Security Adviser to Losers, Gets It Wrong Again

Tags: Barack Obama, David Shipley, Iraq, John McCain, Media Bias

Category: Fighting the Islamists, Johnny Mac, Oh, THAT liberal media., The Obamessiah