The NY Times narrative deconstructed.

Spin of the Times: Bias cloaked as front-page news

By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

It’s no surprise to anyone who pays attention that mainstream media tilt their coverage in favor of Democrats and leftish ideas. But it’s not confined to endless puff pieces about the president, or the ignoring of unpleasant facts.

Often, it’s more subtle — as when the general thrust of a news story advances a particular narrative even when the facts within the story don’t really support it. For that sort of thing, you have to go to the acknowledged experts, the reporters and editors of The New York Times. And as Obama fights for re-election, you can expect to see a lot more of it.

Readers of last Sunday’s front page, for example, were informed that “In Hopeful Sign, Health Spending Is Flattening Out.”

Hopeful? Well, maybe. The article is full of caveats and to-be-sures like this: “The growth rate mostly slowed as millions of Americans lost insurance coverage along with their jobs. Worried about job security, others may have feared taking time off work for doctor’s visits or surgical procedures, or skipped nonurgent care when money was tight.” Or this: “Some experts caution that there remains too little data to determine whether the current slowdown will become permanent, or whether it is merely a blip caused by the economy’s weakness.”

But, we’re told, “[M]any other health experts say that there is just enough data to start detecting trends — even if the numbers remain murky, and the vast complexity of the national health care market puts definitive answers out of reach.”

At this point, an editor might have spiked the story, commenting that all we’ve got are dueling experts who admit that they don’t really know what’s going on amid their “murky” numbers.

While that might have been good use of editorial discretion, it wouldn’t have advanced the narrative about cost declines, which is this: “If so, it was happening just as the new health care law was coming into force, and before the Supreme Court could weigh in on it or the voters could pronounce their own verdict at the polls.”

There’s your narrative: ObamaCare is working, and the Supreme Court should back off. Oh, and voters, don’t be mean to the Democrats who rammed this down your throat.

Despite the fact that, once you’ve gotten through all the caveats and battling experts and murky data there’s not much actual evidence of that — at best, some hopeful supposition, mostly from people with an investment in ObamaCare — the key point shines through: ObamaCare should be saved. It’s working! The rest is just plausible (well, sort of plausible) deniability.

The Times’ narrative-steering is present again in a Monday front-page story entitled “Experts Believe Iran Conflict Is Less Likely.” This story was previously headlined “Chances of Iran Strike Receding, U.S. Officials Say,” but mysteriously changed.

Here, once again, a forest of qualifications means that the story doesn’t really report much. But while we hear that some people say that nobody knows what’s happening, and some people are pessimistic that the Obama administration’s efforts will bear any fruit at all, the main narrative thread, the impression that the reader is left with is that the Iranians are acting mature and flexible, and those meanie Israelis may not have an excuse to launch an attack after all.

A Martian reader, in fact, might conclude that the Israelis — whose judgment, we’re told, may have been “distorted” by “messianic feelings” — are the religious fanatics, while the Iranians “appeared more flexible and open to resolving the crisis than expected.” Thank goodness for those reasonable Iranians. Good thing they’re not crazy religious types like those Israelis!

Again, the plausible deniability is there, but the spin is one of Iranian reasonableness and Israeli intransigence — liberally lubricated with the suggestion that super-smart US diplomats (the source for the story, remember, as the original headline illustrated, before they were transmogrified into unidentified “experts”) have everything well in hand.

If you pick these stories apart, you can identify the useful information (not much) and separate it from the narrative-polishing (a lot). But if you’re a casual reader, which most readers are, you’ll pick up the narrative and not notice that it isn’t really backed up in the story. Which is, of course, the point, especially in an election year.

Critics have been pointing out this sort of spin for decades, but it’s worth noting it again, because it hasn’t gone away. In fact, with the decline of editorial standards at many mainstream media outlets, it’s gotten worse. These two Times stories weren’t “analysis” on the opinion pages; they were front-page stories presented as important facts.

Fortunately, savvy readers are catching on. But until the Times is shamed into balance, let the voters beware. Especially between now and November.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. His book “The Higher Education Bubble” hits stores soon.