More Proof of How Far the Old Gray Lady Had Fallen

One instance in which the media unfairly caricatured a president was at a grocers’ convention in Florida during the first President Bush’s re-election campaign. I was among the pool reporters watching the president, who was unfailingly gracious in public, praise what his hosts claimed was a dramatic new supermarket scanner. The New York Times, on its front page, ridiculed him, claiming it to be yet another example of how out-of-touch he was with average American voters. In fact, the invention was new; it could instantly read a bar code that had been ripped up into small pieces and scattered over the scanner. The newspaper declined to post a correction, and its account lives on.

The NYT has its narrative and no amount of truth can penetrate that wall. President Bush was smart enough to fly jets. Smart enough to run an oil business. Smart enough to be President twice but to the Times and its readers, he will forever and always be that "moron in the White House".