New York Times' Objectivity Challenged in FTC Complaint

By Jeff Gannon
Talon News
August 11, 2004

A Hofstra law student has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against the New York Times alleging the publication's use of the slogan, "All the news that's fit to print" is false advertising and constitutes a deceptive practice. He claims that the Times' use of "push-polling" is a violation of the FTC Act.

Jonathan Stein said he filed the complaint because he believes the NYT has abused its power and abdicated its responsibility to be objective.

He told Talon News, "The New York Times has enormous power to shape public opinion and the FTC must review the paper's claim that it is an objective news source."

He accused the NYT of using "push-polling" to obtain results that support a particular position or affect public opinion with the wording of the questions. Stein claimed that the paper has been "weighting" poll numbers so that the results slant in favor of liberals and Democrats. He said that multipliers are applied to the samples that unfairly skew the outcome, consistently giving Democratic responses more weight, and Republicans less weight.

Stein asserts that news articles generated using the tainted results mislead its vast reader base. Besides its daily circulation of 1.13 million, NYT Company also publishes The Boston Globe and 16 other newspapers; owns eight network-affiliated television stations and two New York radio stations; and has more than 40 web sites, including NYTimes.com and Boston.com. Columns appearing in the NYT are syndicated throughout this extensive media network.

Additionally, the NYT's unique position as "the newspaper of record" influences news coverage across the country. Network and cable news anchors tend to lead with stories substantively taken from the newspaper's front page. Stein says that the reach of the NYT and its incalculable power to influence the marketplace of information and ideas "evince a media juggernaut beyond that of any other single information source in existence."

He says that for this reason, "The sheer power of the NYT to influence opinions all over the world, covert editorial bias at the NYT threatens to poison the entire worldwide stream of information."

In a July 25, 2004 editorial published in the NYT, Daniel Okrent, the paper's Public Editor, poses the seemingly rhetorical question of whether the NYT is a liberal newspaper. His answer was "of course it is."

Stein says that Okrent's explicit admission of liberal bias was buried in section 4, page 2 of the paper -- hardly a prominent position and hardly enough to alert potential readers or a passerby who may only read or see the front page headline that the NYT is not an objective hard-news product but an admittedly biased source of information presented with subjective liberal bias.

He says that the slogan "All the News that's Fit to Print" considerably exacerbates the misleading and deceptive notion of objectivity. Viewers of news shows and web sites that repeat stories from the pages of the NYT, along with the news anchors selecting the stories, are equally deceived. Stein concludes that the entire stream of information reaching the public, and informing public opinion, is deceptively poisoned and polluted by covert subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.

His complaint is similar to one filed on July 19, 2004 by MoveOn.org and Common Cause against Fox News' use of the phrase "Fair and Balanced."

Earlier this year, Stein filed an ethics complaint against Sen. John Kerry and Secretary of the Senate Emily Reynolds over the payment of unearned salary to the Massachusetts senator in spite of his absence from the chamber for much of 2004. The Senate Ethics Committee recently dismissed his complaint.