Saturday, January 06, 2007
No Front-Page Headline for Newly Elected Speaker Pelosi
To the editor of The Los Angeles Times:
Your newspaper has an idiosyncratic sense of news, to put it mildly.
The day after the unprecedented and historic election of a woman to be Speaker of the House, the headline for your main lead story read, "U.S.-Iraqi Assault Hits Sunni Haven," and your front-page photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi headed a story with the following title: "Bush Shows Democrats Another Side." The two Pelosi stories were consigned to pages 10 and 11.
The Iraq story headline gave the erroneous impression that U.S. and Iraqi troops were really on the move against insurgents in Diyala province (the text of the story revealed they're actually having a difficult time), and the Bush story merely showed that the President knows he is in trouble and is trying to placate Democratic leaders with military plane rides and Christmas Day phone calls, not with any substantial consultations on policy.
Apart from your front-page photograph of Speaker Pelosi the day after she made history, the Times did not give her the courtesy of a front-page story.
At least five of the largest daily newspapers in the U.S. greeted
Speaker Pelosi's election with front-page headlines (The New York Times,
Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Denver Post).
Why not the Times?
-Clive Leeman
# posted by Berkeley Forum : 2:06 PM
