The Label Giveaway

One way the Times reveals its biases is with the political labels it applies to others. One recent Times story referred to Judge Robert Bork as "an ultraconservative." Wouldn't it have been sufficient simply to describe him as conservative? Then a Times news article by David Sanger, who actually has been providing some strong and appropriately skeptical coverage of the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, referred to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as "a conservative think tank." That erroneous description was deleted in later versions of the story, according to the website newsdiffs.org, which tracks such changes. At least they didn't call the Washington Institute "ultraconservative." David Bernstein points out that the description "ultraliberal" appears rarely, if ever, in Times news copy outside quotation marks.