{"id":291940,"date":"2017-01-27T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T05:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nyt-apologies-depend-on-whose-lives-are-distorted\/"},"modified":"2017-01-27T06:00:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T05:00:01","slug":"nyt-apologies-depend-on-whose-lives-are-distorted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nyt-apologies-depend-on-whose-lives-are-distorted\/","title":{"rendered":"NYT Apologies Depend on Whose Lives Are Distorted"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ben<\/a><\/p>\n

The kind of reaction the New York Times<\/strong>‘ whatever-did-menfolk-<\/em>do? story got on social media<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Sometimes the New York Times<\/b> recognizes that it made a mistake and apologizes for it. For example, the day after the Women\u2019s March, the Times<\/b> (1\/22\/17<\/a>) ran a story about how the men of Montclair, New Jersey, coped with housework and childcare with all the women away protesting\u2014a premise right out of a 1950s sitcom. After getting a drubbing on social media, the editor responsible didn\u2019t try to defend it: \u00a0\u201cIt was a bad idea from the get-go,\u201d Metro editor Wendell Jamieson told Huffington Post<\/b> (1\/23\/17<\/a>). \u201cWe blew it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freelance reporter Filip Bondy was equally abject: “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said.<\/p>\n

That was not the reaction that a Times<\/strong> editor had when the paper was criticized for misrepresenting the lives, not of couples in upper-middle-class Montclair, but of impoverished food-stamp recipients. \u00a0That story\u2019s headline captured the tone: \u201cIn the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda\u201d (1\/13\/17<\/a>)\u2014along with the photograph of a shopping cart filled with almost nothing but Coca-Cola and orange pop.<\/p>\n

Originally, the piece\u2014based on a USDA report<\/a> on food-buying habits of families that did or did not receive food stamps from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program\u2014claimed that SNAP recipients spent \u201cabout 10 percent\u201d of their food budget on soft drinks; this was later corrected to the actual figure of 5 percent, with an explanation that 9.3 percent\u2014not 10 percent\u2014went to \u201csweetened beverages,\u201d which includes juice.<\/p>\n

\"NYT:<\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/strong> depicts the shopping cart of a bad soda person.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The biggest single food budget item for non-food stamp households, we were told, is milk. As University of Minnesota professor Joe Soss pointed out in Jacobin<\/strong> (1\/16\/17<\/a>), the USDA report found that those non-food stamp families spent 4.03 percent of their food budget on milk\u2014and 4.01 percent on soft drinks. That\u2019s the basis on which the Times<\/strong> distinguished what Soss called \u201cthe bad soda people\u201d from \u201cthe normal milk people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, as Soss noted, the first point emphasized by the USDA report was that \u201cthere were no major differences in the expenditure patterns of SNAP and non-SNAP households, no matter how the data were categorized.\u201d That\u2019s right\u2014the Times<\/strong>\u2019 story about how much junk food the poor ate was based on a study that found that they eat about as much junk food as anybody else.<\/p>\n

The Times<\/strong>\u2019 public editor, Liz Spayd, devoted much of a column (1\/20\/17<\/a>) to the food-stamp piece, which she concluded \u201cdidn\u2019t do much to advance the discussion.\u201d But the editor of the Times<\/strong>\u2019 \u201cWell\u201d section, where it appeared, stood by the article. Tara Parker-Pope claimed that the fact that non-SNAP families ate as much junk food as SNAP families was \u00a0\u201ca central theme in the story\u201d\u2014which was headlined, again, \u201cIn the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which just goes to show\u2014distorting the lives of the poor means never having to say you\u2019re sorry.<\/p>\n

\n

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org<\/a><\/strong>. You can find him on Twitter<\/strong> at @JNaureckas<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

You can send a message to the New York Times<\/strong> at letters@nytimes.com<\/a>, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at\u00a0public@nytimes.com<\/a>\u00a0(Twitter<\/strong>:@NYTimes<\/a> or @SpaydL<\/a>). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.<\/em><\/p>\n

This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The kind of reaction the New York Times‘ whatever-did-menfolk-do? story got on social media. Sometimes the New York Times recognizes that it made a mistake and apologizes for it. For example, the day after the Women\u2019s March, the Times (1\/22\/17) ran a story about how the men of Montclair, New Jersey, coped with housework and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-291940","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}