An editorial in today's New York Times expresses the newspaper's opposition to the death penalty. "We are also heartened by the declining level of support for capital punishment registered by opinion polls in recent years," the Times reports. Hmm. The editorial says the level of support is "declining," but it doesn't tell us exactly what the level of support is. Why could that be?
An article in the metro section of today's Times reports on a poll a year ago by Zogby International that found 75.4% of Muslim Americans think the death penalty is a fitting punishment for "heinous" crimes, compared with, the Times says, "75.2% for Catholic respondents, 81.2% for Protestants and 67.3% for the Jews." A Rasmussen Research poll of 1,000 randomly selected Americans on June 25, 2000, found "70% of Americans continue to believe in capital punishment, even if some individuals are occasionally executed by mistake. ThatÕs unchanged from the 68% who supported the death penalty in an earlier Portrait of America survey conducted in 1999. In fact, 53% believe the death penalty should be imposed more often than it is."
These Times editorials would have a better shot at being persuasive if they straightforwardly confronted the fact that they are arguing against a policy that 70% to 75% of the American public agrees with, rather than spinning such levels of support as "declining."
Getting Passive: The lead, front page news article in today's New York Times, datelined Jerusalem, reports, "A shooting death took place as Mr. Arafat was meeting with the C.I.A. director. A Greek Orthodox monk was killed while driving on a road connecting East Jerusalem to the large Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim. It was a drive-by shooting, initial reports said, and it was believed to be the first on that well-traveled stretch of road." The Times manages to write this without telling readers who did the shooting. If authorities hadn't yet determined that, then the Times could let its readers know that. As it is, the writing that took place was curiously lacking in information.
National Strategy: The "My Job" column of the Workplace section of this morning's New York Times is about an airplane mechanic. The Times could have easily written about a mechanic at Kennedy, La Guardia or even Newark airport. Instead, it finds one at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Just another sign of the Times's national and international ambitions and of the paper's neglect of its hometown readers.