How the New York Times got the president's marriage initiative wrong

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subject: How the NY Times got the president's marriage initiative wrong

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Marriage of Convenience
How the New York Times got the president's marriage initiative wrong.
by Claudia Winkler
The Weekly Standard
02/18/2004 12:00:00 AM


WHEN THE PRESS GROTESQUELY DISTORTS YOUR ISSUE, don't get mad, set the
record straight--clearly, affirmatively, with documents and web links at the
ready, so that people can check your accuracy for themselves.

That philosophy informed an impressive presentation yesterday morning at the
National Press Club by defenders of the Bush administration's initiative to
promote healthy marriages by funding pilot projects in marriage education
for interested couples and individuals. Tired of the din that has arisen
since mid-January erroneously portraying the initiative as new, politically
motivated in an election year, a sop to the religious right, and somehow
deviously connected to the issue of same-sex marriage, the
marriage-education vanguard came to Washington from half a dozen far-flung
states to make their voices heard.

Their effort may even do some good. This miscellaneous alliance of social
workers and social reformers, scholars and teachers, liberals and
conservatives, blacks and whites, have been working together so long and so
intelligently to develop ways of promoting marital stability in the
interests of children, their parents, and society at large that they were
able to spring into action when the uncoordinated chorus of distortion
mushroomed overnight. It's an interesting story.

IT ALL BEGAN ON JANUARY 14, when the New York Times ran a front-page story,
above the fold, headed, "Bush plans $1.5 Billion Drive for Promotion of
Marriage." The authors were Robert Pear and David D. Kirkpatrick, the latter
newly assigned to a year-long beat covering that exotic species,
conservatives. The two were apparently on unfamiliar ground. Relying on
unnamed "administration officials," their first sentence announced "an
extensive election-year initiative to promote marriage," possibly to be
touted in the president's impending State of the Union. The initiative, the
story continued, had been in the works "for months," cooked up by the
administration and "conservative groups." The third sentence made the link
with "pressure from conservatives eager to see the federal government defend
traditional marriage" in the wake of the gay-rights court decision in
Massachusetts.

This was a remarkably misleading series of assertions. There was, in fact,
no new Bush administration initiative; the old marriage initiative
(announced in February 2002, passed by the House in May 2003, costing
$300,000 a year, about a third of it to evaluate program effectiveness) was
not mentioned in the State of the Union; and the backers of marriage
education are, if anything, predominantly liberals concerned about the
welfare of children and struggling mothers and fathers, with no common views
on religion or homosexuality. To be sure, the body of the story included
some accurate reporting, but the political misframing of the issue was
picked up by journalists across the country.

Especially columnists. In fact, the Times's own Maureen Dowd set the tone
the very next day ("Not satisfied with colonizing the Moon, scouting for
Martians and civilizing Iraq, President Bush is lavishing more gazillions on
another audaciously quixotic plan. He wants to become the national yenta").
A flood of editorials and other opinion pieces recycling the Times's
distortions continued to bash the administration even after the State of the
Union was silent on marriage.

Not everyone, it turned out, was willing to buy this. Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, a sociologist long active in the marriage movement and
co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University,
undertook an analysis of the Pear-Kirkpatrick article and its progeny in the
media. This backgrounder is one of the documents released at yesterday's
briefing. It's worth quoting a closing paragraph:

What had heretofore been in fact a serious, ongoing, and largely bipartisan
discussion of an important policy question--Is offering marriage-supportive
programs to low-income couples one important aspect of welfare reform and a
legitimate goal of public policy?--is now at risk of becoming profoundly
misunderstood by the public, and perhaps even by some legislators, as just
an election-year gimmick seeking to play upon passions connected to same-sex
marriage.

Also released yesterday is the report "Can Government Strengthen Marriage?
Evidence from the Social Sciences," commissioned by the National Fatherhood
Initiative, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, and the Institute
for American Values. Along with the media backgrounder and details on the
participating organizations and individuals, this report is available at
www.marriagemovement.org <http://www.marriagemovement.org> .

WHAT THE WEBSITE CAN'T CONVEY is the personal commitment of those invested
in the project of helping people form and sustain healthy marriages, from
the intellectuals to the workers in the trenches. To take just one of
yesterday's varied cast of speakers, Marline E. Pearson (a self-identified
"liberal Democrat and feminist") teaches relationship skills at Madison Area
Technical College in Wisconsin. "I bristle when I read that this is going to
push people into bad relationships," she said, noting that bad relationships
are already commonplace. "I have spent my whole life in domestic-violence
prevention. Our training aims at helping people develop good interactions
and recognize bad ones and exit them, then go back and repair them. How do
two people keep their friendship going over years?"

It's fair to insist that such preventive training be tested for
effectiveness, and it's reasonable to debate whether it should be part of
public assistance to young single mothers. What seems a loss all round is
for the conversation to be derailed by innuendo and misrepresentation.

Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.


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