A Little Perspective On The Times Furor
And Newsbusters isn't alone in reacting, shall we say, passionately. Sen. Jim Bunning said the Times committed "treason," while a letter writer to the Los Angeles Times said the people responsible for running the story at the Los Angeles Times and New York Times should "see some hard time in prison." President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Rep. Peter King all referred to the decision to run the story as a disgrace. National Review wants the Times to lose its press credentials. As Howard Kurtz notes, radio commentator Tammy Bruce compared the Times to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. "Even by modern standards of media-bashing, the volume of vitriol being heaped upon the editors [of the New York Times] is remarkable," writes Kurtz.
One thing that we've been debating here at Public Eye today is to what degree all this passion actually reflects the mood in America when it comes to this story. That is: A small segment of the population cares passionately about this story, but does the rest of America? At Technorati, the blog search engine, "New York Times" is only #15 on the list of the most popular searches, 13 spots below "Star Jones." There are any number of explanations for this, such as the fact that some people use "the" before the name of the paper when they search for the Times, or the fact that the Times story is the older of the two. But it is interesting that the story doesn't seem to be capturing the imagination of blog searchers the way it seems to have captured the imagination of media commentators and politicians. At CBSNews.com, Star Jones is presently the subject of the #1 and #3 stories on the site, while the Times saga isn't even a top story.
Again, you can't read too much into this. We don't know what most people in America are talking about, really, and neither technorati nor CBSNews.com, with their self-selecting audience, tell us all that much. There are a number of variables at play that render the Star Jones comparison far from definitive. That said, we just kind of wanted to throw out there the point that its possible that the righteous indignation worked up by a small slice of the population may not translate to the wider population. Yes, to people inside the media/political bubble, the Times story seems like the most important thing going right now, bar none. But on stories like this it's worth remembering that these debates are going on among an extremely small group of people in relative terms. Tempting as it may be, it seems like a mistake to extrapolate too much about what it means in a larger sense.