From: AdmrlLocke@aol.com Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2000 12:35 AM To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: GrammNet: NR on "Gagged at the Globe" GrammNet Issue 7/12/00 Dear Friend of Liberty, If you're a longtime reader of GrammNet, you know that I spend a good deal of time exposing and debunking liberal bias in the news media. While I've run Gr ammNet for merely five and a half years, I've been aware of liberal bias in the news and entertainment industries since the early 1970s, when the major news outlets crucified Richard Nixon, and Norman Lear depicted the right to bear arms as merely another foolish foible of Archie "Meathead" Bunker. I have long argued, however, that "the liberal media" do not constitute some sort of conspiracy, contrary to what some on the right believe. I've argued rather that the news profession has typically attracted people who "want to make the world a better place" rather than people devoted to objective news reporting; indeed, the whole professionalization movement in journalism, beginning roughly a century ago, was lead by Progressives who saw their mission as using news to implement their desired statist policies. Thus for the past century journalists generally have viewed gradually increasing government power (except over their profession) as positive, until the profession's support for Big Government became part of their background, generally unnoticed and unacknowledged. During the past twenty or thirty years, successful electoral challenges to the Progressive status quo of continuously growing government power appear to have frightened members of the media as well as liberals generally. Tolerant in their ascendancy, Progressive-liberals have responded to our challenge by becoming increasingly shrill, intolerant, and obvious in their bias. I believe that while the majority of liberal members of the news media continue to allow their bias to skew their news reporting unconsciously, with increasing frequency I see such gross and obvious examples of liberal bias that I cannot help but believe they are deliberate and conscious. One such example crossed my desk just last night, courtesy of Steve Ertelt, Director of Montana Right to Life, originating from National Review Online. As you can read in the second piece below, the Boston Globe, a liberal media bastion, has dismissed conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby, ostensibly for a lack of diligence, but almost certainly, in reality, for having the temerity to challenge some of the most sacred shibboleths of the Progressive-liberal mindset. In response to the Globe's dismissal of Jacoby, I have written a letter urging the paper to abandon the intolerance of current liberalism, and recapture the tolerant spirit of liberalism prevalent in the 1960s. You can find a copy of my letter below. I urge you to write your own polite and thoughtful letters. A deluge of reason might just persuade the liberals at the Globe to rethink their biased actions. Even in the likely event that we do not persuade the Globe to rescind the dismissal of Jacoby, the dismissal contains a silver lining. The dismissal continues the trend of increasingly blatant liberal media bias. The increasing blatancy actually makes our job of exposing liberal bias easier. Back in the late 1970s when I first started challenging bias in the news, almost nobody else I knew could recognize the bias. After more than two decades, and with a big push from Rush Limbaugh, millions of Americans join me in recognizing the prevalence of liberal media bias. The more biased and blatant liberals in the media get, the easier they make it for us to demonstrate the bias to our fellow Americans. Sincerely, David B. Levenstam, CPA, MT, MA Bush/Cox in 2000! GrammNet is an independent newsletter, not affiliated with Senator Gramm. To subscribe to GrammNet, email me at AdmrlLocke@aol.com, with a message to the effect that you'd like to subscribe. GrammNet back issues available at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3390/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Boston Globe Ombudsman: I'm writing to urge the Boston Globe to reinstate conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby. Even when I do not agree with Mr. Jacoby's columns, they present thoughtful and challenging conservative views which help balance the liberal e ditorial stance of the Globe itself. The Globe's stated reasons for firing Mr. Jacob seem merely to veil what appears to be the real reason for his dismissal: the Globe's intolerance of Mr. Jacoby's conservative views. In the world into which I was born, liberals represented intellectual tolerance. Liberals challenged "the Establishment," offered new ways of thinking and championed the right of the individual to free expression. I have watched with dismay over the past four decades as liberals, challenged in both government and the news media, have gradually become increasingly less tolerant, until today liberals have become the dominant force behind efforts to ban books, control the speech of private individuals, and punish people for what they merely think rather than for what they actually do. I urge the Globe to take a stand against this creeping liberal intolerance and in favor of traditional liberal intellectual tolerance by reinstating Jeff Jacoby. Sincerely, David B. Levenstam, CPA, MT, MA -------------------------------------------------------------------------- conservativeinfo - Subscribe to the Conservative Information email list at http://conservativeinfo.listbot.com Washington Bulletin: National Review's Internet Update for July 10, 2000 http://www.nationalreview.com By John J. Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru GAGGED AT THE GLOBE The Boston Globe has asked conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby to resign and forced him to take a four-month unpaid leave. His offense: writing a recent column on the fates of the signers of the Declaration of Independence that resembled an item that had been circulating on the web. Renee Loth, editor of the Globe's editorial page, says Jacoby's failure to acknowledge this resemblance was "a serious violation of the relationship between the Globe and its readers." Please. The e-mail contained erroneous information. Jacoby researched it and came up with a column reflecting the same idea-viz., that a lot of the signers had paid a price (or at least not been rewarded) for their convictions-but with accurate information culled from the historical record. A fastidious columnist would have mentioned that other writers had written similar accounts many times before, and that a recent item on the web had prompted his interest in doing it this time. But it's hard to see that he was under any great ethical obligation to do so. (An aside about NRO editor Jonah Goldberg: He recently attempted the same thing as Jacoby, and in our view has no more to apologize for. His passing along the e-mail last year-while noting that he took no responsibility for its accuracy-strikes us as worse, but still forgivable in light of the looser conventions of the web.) It would be easier to take the Globe's action against Jacoby at face value if a) the paper were not hyper-liberal and, as Michael Barone once put it, "as partisan as Col. McCormick" and b) Jacoby had not previously come under fire there for his conservative views. In 1997, Jacoby wrote a column suggesting that Christians who object to homosexuality are not morally equivalent to Nazis or Ku Kluxers. This inspired the paper's ombudsman to write a column calling the column "offensive" and "a high price to pay for freedom of the press." At the moment, it looks like Jacoby's the one paying a high price for exercising that freedom. The Globe's phone number is (617) 929-2000. The fax is (617) 929-2098. Letters (polite ones, of course) to the ombudsman can be sent via email to ombud@globe.com.