Censorship at it's height. NY Times.

[Kilmer17]

I cant believe this........actually I guess I can. It was this kind of bias and censorship at CNN and the majors that have led to FoxNews kicking all of their asses.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11469-2002Dec4.html

N.Y. Times's Golf Handicap

Columns on Augusta Killed For Being Out of Line With Paper's Editorials

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By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, December 5, 2002; Page C01

The New York Times has killed two sports columns about the controversy over Augusta National Golf Club's refusal to admit women members because the writers differed with the paper's editorial page.

After a Times editorial last month urged Tiger Woods to boycott the Masters tournament over the issue, Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist Dave Anderson wrote a piece saying that Woods should play because the Augusta National dispute wasn't his fight. Anderson's editors spiked the piece.

"I was disappointed that they felt that way, but the editorial page is sacrosanct there," Anderson said yesterday. "I always thought you could still disagree with it. But in this case I couldn't."

Managing Editor Gerald Boyd told the staff in a memo that "part of our strict separation between the news and editorial pages entails not attacking each other. Intramural quarreling of that kind is unseemly and self-absorbed."

Asked why a differing viewpoint by a sportswriter would be dismissed as "intramural quarreling," Boyd said in an interview: "It's not whether he had a different view from the editorial. It's how he executes it. If it's his opinion versus the editorial board's opinion, it becomes self-absorbed."

Boyd wrote the memo after the scrapping of the columns was disclosed by New York Daily News reporter Paul Colford.

The other spiked column, by sportswriter Harvey Araton, compared the Augusta National ban to the elimination of women's softball from the Olympics. Boyd said in the memo that "the logic did not meet our standards."

Alex Jones, a former Times reporter who now runs Harvard's Joan Shorenstein media center, called the decisions "appalling." But he said that "historically, the only thing that's been verboten for a Times columnist is to be critical of a New York Times position directly. I think it was a mistake in judgment. The appearance of a conflict of interest is damaging to the Times."

Brent Bozell, chairman of the conservative Media Research Center, said that "you would think a newspaper would encourage debate within its columns." Instead, he said, the attitude seems to be "you can have an opinion at the New York Times as long as it reflects the opinion of the editors."

Most newspapers do not have such policies -- at least not explicitly stated -- although sensitive columns are sometimes killed when they touch on internal matters or a paper's corporate interests.

Philip Taubman, the paper's deputy editorial page editor, said he knew nothing about the Anderson and Araton columns being killed because of a perceived conflict with the editorial page. "We would never dream of doing anything like that," he said. "We don't know until the next day's paper what the newsroom's sports columnists are saying about anything."

The muzzling incidents come as Times Executive Editor Howell Raines finds himself under growing media fire for pumping up the Augusta National issue and, in the view of some critics, imposing a left-leaning agenda on the nation's largest metropolitan daily.

Raines, a former editor of the paper's liberal editorial page, has been something of a lightning rod for criticism. While he helped the paper win a record seven Pulitzers this year, all but one for aggressive coverage of the war on terrorism, conservatives have accused him of using the news columns to mobilize opposition to military action against Iraq. There has been no reported instance, however, of editors refusing to run any column taking a contrary view on the situation in Iraq.

The Times's drumbeat of Augusta National stories grew louder on Nov. 25, when the paper ran a front-page story about the network that carries the Masters, headlined "CBS Staying Silent in Debate on Women Joining Augusta." That was the paper's 32nd piece on the controversy in three months. On Tuesday, the Times gave Page 1 play to an article headlined "Former Top Executive at CBS Resigns From Augusta."

"Increasingly," Newsweek said this week, "the Times is being criticized for ginning up controversies as much as reporting them out."

Boyd was adamant in the interview that the paper has nothing to apologize for. "We're writing about discrimination at one of the nation's most prestigious golf clubs and involving one of the world's most prominent tournaments. It's an important story, economically, socially, politically, gender-wise, racially. I don't know what it means to write too much about it.

"What we have done is to stay with the story, no doubt about it," he said. "I always thought that was the mark of good journalism."

Taubman said that Augusta National's ban on women "was highlighted by the news department, and we made our own decisions about when to chime in. Despite the views of some outsiders, it's not a coordinated campaign. There's a perception that's misplaced that sometimes the news department and editorial department get together and decide they're going to jointly pursue some issue. That's not the way we do business."

Slate's press critic, Jack Shafer, who has been chronicling the Times's heavy coverage, said the paper "has gotten a little carried away with this crusade. . . . When they run a headline 'CBS Stays Silent,' it's the New York Times grasping for some sort of news lead. We could write a column, 'Howell Raines Stays Silent,' because he's not a man who will pick up the phone and talk to his critics."

Bozell maintained that "nobody cares" about the Augusta National flap "except for a couple of people at the National Organization for Women and the New York Times."

The Boyd memo said columnists in the news pages have "wide latitude to speak with an individual point of view," but that unlike op-ed columnists, who are independent of the news staff, "all newsroom writers are subject to our standards of tone, taste and relevance to the subject at hand. We are an edited newspaper: that is one of our strengths."

Sportswriter Anderson said the spiked column began roughly like this: "Please, just let Tiger play golf. He's a golfer. It's not his fight. He has no obligation to get involved in this controversy." Anderson said he mentioned the Times editorial calling for Woods to skip the Masters because "I felt I had to."

Shafer remains skeptical. "If the editorial page becomes pro-New York Yankees," he said, "does that mean Dave Anderson won't be able to write a pro-New York Mets column?"

[fansince62]

the Times abdicated its leadership as a responsible reporter of the news a long time ago.

[Henry]

Yikes. That's pretty bad.

Funny, when I heard the powers that be at the Times had stepped inregarding this issue, I thought they were going to tell their writers to tone their anti-Augusta pieces down. Silly me.

[NavyDave]

Is this really a newsflash?

Heck you can put the Washington Post there too but their sport reporters are proud liberals so there wont be any controversy there.

Augusta should give a membership to Senator Dole or some some hot big boobed heterosexual babe (Pam Anderson,Britney) to the chagrin of NAG National Associaton of Gals in comfortable shoes.

[Kilmer17]

Give it Martha Burk herself. Let her pony up the cash and endowment reqd for membership.

[NavyDave]

Nawww people are there to golf not use an airsickness bag

[The Evil Genius]

Here is an update Kilmer...looks like calmer heads have prevailed.

New York Times publishes two previously rejected sports columns on Augusta debate

Sat Dec 7, 9:07 PM ET

By TARA BURGHART, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - The New York Times on Sunday published revised versions of two previously rejected sports columns about the Augusta National Golf Club's men-only membership policy.

Executive editor Howell Raines said the paper's editors had asked the writers, Dave Anderson and Harvey Araton, to resubmit their work and reassured them their opinions were not at issue, The Times reported Saturday.

The columns appeared on The Times' Web site Saturday night; a spokeswoman said they will be in Sunday's print editions.

Earlier this week, the Daily News reported the Times had killed the columns because they disagreed with the stance taken by the newspaper's editorial page.

Under Raines, the Times has devoted extensive coverage to Augusta's refusal to accept women as members. The paper's editorial page has criticized the club, which holds the Masters tournament every year, and suggested that three-time champion Tiger Woods sit out in protest next April.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anderson, who has written that Augusta should admit women, argued in his column that just because Woods is a mixture of minorities including African-American and Thai, he is "not obliged to take a sociological stand. It's not his responsibility."

"If he did boycott, it would be laudatory but it also would be phony. It would not be him," wrote Anderson, noting that Woods has said that Augusta should have female members.

Araton's column questioned the importance of the Augusta debate, referring to Augusta's chairman, William "Hootie" Johnson.

"There are a whole lot of Hooties out there, and many with the power to inflict far greater damage on women in sports than the chairman of a world-famous golf club for corporate shakers and cranky old men," Araton wrote.

Raines said the editors decided to kill Anderson's column because it appeared to indulge in a squabble with the newspaper's editorial board that made the paper look self-absorbed. Araton's column, he added, was scrapped due to problems of structure and tone.

"There is not now, nor will there ever be, any attempt to curb the opinions of our writers" or to "get them to agree with the editorial page or any other section of the paper where an opinion is expressed," Raines said.

[Henry]

Here you go. From Today's Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32909-2002Dec9.html

Teeing Up For the Wrong Cause

By Anne Applebaum

Tuesday, December 10, 2002; Page A29

Perhaps it's because I lived for 10 years in London, where professional women long ago discovered the secret of competing with men who belong to all-male eating clubs (they go to restaurants). Perhaps it's because I don't play golf. In any case, until this weekend, I couldn't see why I should care one way or the other about the New York Times' extended campaign to force the Augusta National Golf Club to admit female members in advance of the Masters golf tournament next April -- a campaign that (infamously) involved censoring two of the paper's sports columnists when they disagreed with the newspaper's editorial line, and has now led Treasury secretary nominee John Snow to resign his Augusta membership.

Having now read the formerly censored columns, which appeared over the weekend, I find my lack of interest turning into genuine indignation at the amount of ink spilled on this issue. One of the columns argues that the leader of the campaign against Augusta, Martha Burk, should apply her talents to more important projects -- such as rescuing women's softball, which is threatened with elimination from the Olympics.

This was worth censoring?

Leaving aside all the world's more obvious afflictions -- crime, poverty, terrorism -- it does seem there are also a few more significant women's issues that a group such as Martha Burk's National Council of Women's Organizations (NCWO) could profitably interest itself in (and a newspaper could sensibly campaign upon) other than the admission of a handful of millionaire women to a men's golf club or the continued existence of Olympic women's softball. The systematic rape of Iraqi women comes to mind, for example, as well as female circumcision: Recent figures from the World Health Organization estimate that 138 million women around the world are still subjected to genital mutilation, including some in Britain and the United States. The situation of Afghan women, who are still illiterate and lacking health care, is another issue of desperate importance. But although the subject is featured on the Web site of the NCWO, alongside the Augusta golf club, there are no linked letters from Burk, no evidence of a media campaign, just the standard call for "more attention to this subject, please."

I can see, of course, that an American women's group such as the NCWO (which says it represents some 6 million women) might not want to handle these kinds of subjects, far away from home as they are and involving the sort of women who might not even want to join the National Council of Women's Organizations, once they had been liberated. But closer to home there are less extreme problems that nevertheless torment middle-class women too. Washingtonians laughed at Jack Grubman, the star Wall Street analyst who was allegedly willing to upgrade a stock to get his twins into a New York preschool. Even here, however, it is possible to call up a preschool in September and discover that the class list is already closed for the following year: I know, I've done it. Yet although the paucity and variable quality of preschools and day care is of enormous concern to women -- particularly the ones who can't afford preschool at all -- the early education advocates are the people pushing for higher standards and expanded funding, not women's organizations.

All of which goes a long way toward explaining the polling statistics on American women's views of feminism, which have been fairly consistent over the past couple of decades. Ask women whether they are feminists and no more than a third ever say yes (only 28%, according to a Time/CNN/Yankelovich poll in 1998). But ask people -- men and women -- whether, for example, they think men and women should be paid equally, and the majority say yes.

The explanation: Women no longer associate feminists and feminism with the causes they care most about, like equal pay. Which is hardly surprising, given the degree of interest that major women's organizations have shown in the membership of an archaic club whose 300-odd members pay up to $50,000 a year in dues, just to have the privilege, every so often, of hitting a small white ball across a manicured green lawn.

Let the CEOs of Augusta have their private club. Most American women would be far too busy juggling their working lives with their families and their friends and their other financial obligations to join them anyway.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company