Correspondence
Correspondence IS THE TIMES'S TIME UP? AFTER READING Christopher Caldwell's "The New York Times's Meltdown" (May 26), I would like to see that lion of the liberal media suffer a fate it has...
...Interim President, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law New York, NY THERE IS A BREATHLESS QUALITY to J. David Tell's "An Appearance of Corruption...
...Since readers buy papers for news and not agendas, this choice is also a matter of red or black ink...
...For that matter, anyone who owns a television set knows better...
...All the news that's fit to print" just doesn't mesh with "All the bias we can get away with...
...Indeed, there is a voluminous, public record on all of the issues that Tell writes about...
...schwarz and Krasno were Brennan Center-financed television broadcasts rather than letters to the editor, their texts would be flatly illegal under the McCain-Feingold "sham ad" provisions both gentlemen favor—at least as interpreted by the court whose proceedings each cites in Brennan's defense...
...Return the money, improve the product, and rebuild your name...
...Krasno's current silence on this matter is eloquent...
...It is certainly vulnerable to a variety of critiques about its methodology and findings...
...No wonder opponents of reform would rather level baseless criticisms at the Brennan Center's study than talk about the discredited campaign system they are defending...
...From a marketing-strategy perspective, the Times's editors now face a clear choice between pushing agendas on the one hand, and selling news on the other...
...The question, instead, was always: 7 percent of what?—and whether the what was an appropriate measure of McCain-Feingold's constitutionality...
...For now, suffice it to say that neither man has raised a single "genuine issue" of substance with anything I've written...
...But that is an argument for another day...
...Among the things they will discover—contrary to the impression created in Tell's piece—is that the 7 percent figure reported in Buying Time was correct, the Brennan Center's momentary uncertainty notwithstanding...
...This is about the consequences of a defective manufacturing process...
...David Tell's "An Appearance of Corruption" (May 26) ignores that reality to tell his version of the story...
...In that context, Kollar-Kotelly, as accurately recounted in my piece, was unprepared to trust Brennan's conclusions...
...In other words, two out of every three political ads in the run-up to Election Day are "altogether genuine issue broadcasts...
...This is about selling a product that is different than advertised...
...Buying Time was intended to provide a constitutional rationale for McCain-Feingold's Title II advertising restrictions...
...Unless the Times returns to its old ways, this scandal will not be its last...
...You may also fax letters: (202) 293-4901 or e-mail: editor@weeklystandard.com...
...No one is obligated to believe my version of the story, but I think anyone interested in determining the truth would certainly want to consider it...
...That she agrees with him on the evils of unregulated large-dollar donations to political parties speaks to the justice of McCain-Feingold's Title I "soft money" restrictions, but not to anything involving the Brennan Center's research...
...These materials are readily available at www.campaignlegalcenter.org and elsewhere on the web...
...How many more encounters with scandal will it take for the New York Times to rediscover the reason why it became an American institution in the first place...
...Second, it is important to consider the nature of the criticism...
...Yet the attacks on Buying Time focused largely on process and personalities, not the merits of the evidence or arguments...
...As Judge Richard J. Leon (appointed by the current President Bush) wrote: "I find that although the Buying Time studies contain some flaws and shortcomings . . . those shortcomings do not detract from the studies' credibility and reliability...
...Every subscriber should receive a full refund for every paper in which Jayson Blair authored a false story...
...The study of TV advertising that I undertook was extensive and complex...
...There are serious issues at stake in this case about what the campaign finance system should look like and how the First Amendment should be applied...
...If I'm wrong—and I don't think I am—the most convincing evidence would be a demonstration of my mistake(s), not just this questioning of my motives and ability...
...schwarz Jr...
...SCHWARZ JR...
...Much" seems a bit off the mark to me, and "vast majority" strikes me as perfectly incredible...
...Me, I would prefer that Schwarz and Krasno be permitted to circulate their sham objections to my work in any forum they might choose, and with anyone's money they might be blessed to waste...
...All letters should be addressed: Correspondence Editor THE WEEKLY STANDARD 1150 17th St., NW, Suite 505 Washington, DC 20036...
...But Tell does summarize the gist of many of the attacks aimed at my research in Buying Time, a focus of the litigation over the constitutionality of the new campaign finance reform law...
...Moreover, I concede in advance—never having challenged the point, really—that readers will find in that trial record some confirmation, after a fashion, that Kras-no's number "was correct...
...Tell makes much of the Brennan Center's mission, arguing that our motives undermine the validity of our findings...
...Most late-campaign political commer-cials—the "vast majority," Frederick A.O...
...In the whole of a 4,700-plus word article, I recall including just two small paragraphs on Buying Time's partisan motivations, largely consisting of verbatim quotations from subpoenaed Brennan Center documents and deposition testimony...
...The first is the old saw about there being "two sides to every story...
...Anyone who has read the district court's opinions or the briefs in the case knows better...
...This course has exposed the New York Times brand to a great risk, and now the inevitable results are coming back to haunt the paper...
...He did so, however, for reasons I further pointed out—reasons schwarz understandably neglects to mention: Properly reanalyzed, Leon thought, Buying Time, its ostensible "findings" to the contrary notwithstanding, actually helped establish that the original McCain-Feingold "sham ad" provision was constitutionally "defective...
...A special fund should be established to compensate the rest of us who purchased the paper from a newsstand or other vendor...
...Two simple points suffice as a response to this barrage...
...FREDERICK A.O...
...Judge Leon wrote, "while I agree that the primary purpose of the Buying Time studies was to further campaign finance reform, I do not find that this fact skewed the results of the study," and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly similarly relied on our research...
...AFTER READING Christopher Caldwell's "The New York Times's Meltdown" (May 26), I would like to see that lion of the liberal media suffer a fate it has endorsed for others these many years through its reporting and editorial pages—litigation...
...Frederick A.O...
...But I will throw him a bone: I endorse his request that interested (and unusually obsessive) Weekly Standard readers make their own extended first-person excursions through the McConnell trial record, which is where I got nearly all my material in the first place...
...In recent years, the Times has crossed the Rubicon from implicit bias to overt activism...
...That Buying Time 1998 eventually reported a much lower number—7 percent— was likely, Gibson thought, the product of undisclosed data manipulation...
...The Blair affair is particularly telling in this regard—it lays bare not only the consequences of an activist newsroom, but also its underpinnings...
...It was this sub-category of TV spots that Buying Time purported to study...
...I invite him and THE WEEKLY STANDARD's readers to examine it...
...No, I do not believe that two-thirds of all late-campaign political commercials are "altogether genuine issue broadcasts," and I have nowhere indicated otherwise...
...The plaintiffs originally planned to do just that, announcing their intention to replicate parts of the study to demonstrate its errors...
...As such, those ads are already regulated, and are subject to no new restrictions by the McCain-Feingold legislation...
...As we've already seen, the Brennan Center calculates percentages by methods previously unknown to mathematical science...
...THE WEEKLY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor...
...As detailed in my article, though, the man's competence with a calculator was never the question...
...MICHAEL W. MITCHELL Raleigh, NC AS A MARKETING STRATEGIST, I've been following the New York Times's downward trajectory with particular interest...
...The federal court decided otherwise...
...Getting to the heart of the matter, Judge Kollar-Kotelly found that big donations "are given with the expectation that they will provide the donor with access to federal officials, that this expectation is fostered by the national parties, and that this expectation is often realized...
...schwarz might say—are sponsored by candidates and their parties directly...
...For example, Tell approvingly quotes a statistic claiming that 64 percent of political television ads that name a candidate in the final weeks of an election and target that candidate's constituency are not intended to influence the election outcome...
...JONATHAN KRASNO Yale University New Haven, CT David Tell responds: Just to put things in proper perspective right off the bat: If I were a candidate for federal office rather than a journalist, and the above complaints from Messrs...
...suggests that I have concocted a misleadingly narrow-focused "version" of the academic and legal controversy over Brennan's Buying Time studies—one that makes far too "much" of the project's self-acknowledged bias in order to cast "baseless" suspicion on its research findings, the "vast majority" of which have been vindicated by the McConnell v. FEC trial court...
...No person has been libeled...
...So much innuendo, so little time...
...They never produced such a report...
...The new reform law is directed, instead, against corporate, union, and non-profit airtime purchases meeting certain specified content and scheduling criteria...
...They are worthy of serious debate, not the one-sided parody that Tell provides in his article...
...New York, NY CAMPAIGN CORRUPTION IN THE MAY 2 DECISION regarding the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign reforms, two of three judges validated the vast majority of findings from the Brennan Center's study of political television advertising, relying on our research to form many of their conclusions...
...The First Amendment is not implicated here...
...As a lawyer, I think a large and expensive class action against the New York Times would be a reasonable and appropriate method for compensating those who purchased a false and misleading product...
...MARC E. BABEJ President, Reason-Inc...
...It doesn't take a political scientist to recognize this is nonsense...
...According to James Gibson, an expert witness for the plaintiffs during the McConnell trial, the earliest raw data collected by Brennan's Arizona state University student volunteers indicated that 64 percent of political broadcasts prospectively banned as "sham" by the McCain-Feingold bill would in fact have no detectable campaign-related purpose...
...Krasno, the author of that 7 percent figure, does not specify which of the breathless innuendos in my one-sided parody he finds most irritating, so I am forced to keep panting about all of them, I suppose...
...Alert readers will already have noted that schwarz's invocation of Judge Kollar-Kotelly is irrelevant to the dispute at hand...
...I also recall quite carefully pointing out that Judge Leon, more generously disposed to Brennan than his two colleagues, was indeed prepared, as he explained in his May 2 opinion, to accord Buying Time "some" evidentiary weight...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 38
