Studying an NYT Article

Here's a New York Times profile of Democratic Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, the Congressman who believes that preventing abortions is way more important than health care reform. Jodi Kantor wrote this and it appeared on the front page of yesterday's Times, single column, above the fold. I found this article very interesting because it is an example of how a newspaper of record like the NYT does puff-pieces. Obviously the NYT has to be more discrete than Entertainment Weekly when it is heaping praise on someone, so it promotes Stupak's image by giving us ostensibly neutral declarative sentences about him.

In the article we find that Stupak is a tough man who endures "things others find unbearable" like the knee surgeries he suffered as a hero cop and the death of his son. He comes from a great state with harsh winters and beautiful summers. He enjoys football and beer. He drives his elderly Oldsmobile, a defunct American-made middling-price automobile brand, long distances to commune with his constituents. He stands strong on his principles even though this makes others hate him.

Who could hates such a fine American? The fact that Jodi Kantor doesn't bother to offer even the most cursory details in answer to this inevitable question is what makes it most obvious that this is a puff-piece. Apparently Congresswoman Denise Slaughter is one of the haters. Who is she? Well... she is a Democrat from New York, she is co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, and she refused comment for this article. Also she hates the stoic hero defined in the above paragraph and might have been rude to him once. Apparently that's all we need to know.

Diana DeGette, the other hater who was willing to comment, provides Kantor with the fig-leaf of balance. After spending the front 2/3s of the article--which I believe is all most people read anyway--telling us what a great guy Bart Stupak is, she provides a short passage explaining the alternative viewpoint that he is actually a tool of religious interests and is grossly misrepresenting the extent of his mistreatment by the party mainstream. It's instructive to compare a couple of passages:

his freshman year in Washington, [Stupak] requested but did not receive a seat on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. "I had one or two members tell me I’d never get on because I’m right-to-life," he said.
...
two years after being elected, he joined the Energy and Commerce Committee, and now serves as chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Stupak's claim of committee members blacklisting him for his anti-abortion views is obviously belied by the fact that he got the seat anyway. Is there in fact anything unusual at all about a freshman Representative's request for an appointment to an important committee being denied until his second term? Probably not.

Here's another direct quotation I thought was particularly interesting:

"If he prevails, he will have won an audacious, counterintuitive victory, forcing a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a measure that will be hailed as an anti-abortion triumph. If party members do not accept his terms — and many vow they will not — Mr. Stupak is prepared to block passage of the health care overhaul."

This passage has a really interesting failure of parallelism. The amendment's success is Stupak's success--in fact his "audacious ... victory" and "triumph"--whereas the bill's defeat is a neutral proposition, defined simply as other party members not accepting his terms. Victory is his child, defeat is an orphan.

Now to the question of the blog post.
Why was this published at all? The information it contains about the actual content of this fight is limited to two paragraphs, one containing a generalized summary of what Stupak's amendment does, the other explaining that there are now more conservative Democrats like Stupak in Congress. The NYT has already had any number of articles about the efforts of anti-abortion Congresspeople to use health care reform as a vehicle for promoting their cause.

Given my above analysis the answer to my question is clearly that the NYT chose to publish a transparent puff-piece for Bart Stupak, but why? According to Jodi Kantor's Wikipedia entry she has a history of pursuing low-content personal interest stories, but still, why put this article on the front-page? I don't understand the reasoning, but then again, this is the newspaper that not long ago hired Bill Kristol as an opinion columnist.