Why Is The New York Times Casting Aspersions on “self-described independents”?

The New York Times and CBS jointly published
an
interesting political poll this morning, showing (among other
things) that Republicans hold a narrow 42%-39% advantage in the
upcoming midterm elections, that President Barack Obama’s approval
rating (41%) is the second-lowest that this particular poll has
detected over the past two years, that half or more of
Republican-leaners under the age of 45 support legalizing marijuana
and same-sex marriage, and that (in the
words of Mediaite’s Noah Rothman, anyway), “partisan
Republican voters are more willing to compromise a range of issues
than their Democratic counterparts.”

But what caught my eye wasn’t the numbers, it was the loaded and
unintentionally telling adjectives the paper used to present them.
Here’s how the related
article begins; bolding will be mine, for emphasis:

Republicans are in a stronger position than Democrats for this
year’s midterm elections, benefiting from the support
of self-described independents, even
though the party itself is deeply divided and most Americans agree
more with Democratic policy positions.

Though “self-described” is technically accurate here, it is also
a gratuitous modifier. Why remind readers that the
“independents”—in contrast to the “Democrats” and “Republicans” and
“Tea Party supporters” in the same article—arrive at their
categorization through a conscious act of self-branding?

A
search of the phrase on the paper’s website provides a possible
clue. “Self-described” is often deployed to indicate that the
person in question is delusional, comically egotistical, proud of
something dubious, or all three. “Jason
Itzler, Self-Described ‘King Pimp’ Drops Names in
Court,” comes the top search result when filtered by relevance
(a follow-up article on the King Pimp is
number two). “The
Artist as Bully and Self-Described Sex Machine,” is the fourth
item, followed by “self-described snob” at fifth
and
sixth. While the phrase is often used neutrally (as in the
Dalai Lama being “a
self-described Marxist“), even there it’s in the service of
providing attribution to what would otherwise be a potentially
contentious claim.

You can plausibly read the NYT’s lede as hinting that the main
reason these divided and otherwise unpopular Republicans are eking
out a lead over Democrats is that they are attracting the support
of people who are either fooling us or themselves. Such a parsing
exercise looks a lot less paranoid after considering the first
sentence of the second paragraph:

The independents in the poll —
a majority of whom were white or male or under age
45 — continued to sour on President
Obama’s job performance.

A-HA!!! So these self-describers are actually just a bunch of
white males who don’t like the black president. Much like the

dangerous nutbags in the Tea Party that the Times keeps warning
us about.

But those of you who graduated from 3rd grade math have probably
already discovered the flaw in the paper’s emphasis. A large
majority of EVERYBODY in the United States–including the subsection
within the New York Times newsroom–is “white or male or
under age 45.” According to the Census, 47.7% of U.S. residents are
male,
60.5% are under
45, and 72.4% are “white.” By my cocktail-napkin calculations,
that means as many as 90% of Americans belong to at least one of
these three categories (please correct me in the comments). With
about the same amount of relevance, the Times could have re-written
that sentence as: “The independents in the poll — a majority of
whom
believe in God — continued to sour on President Obama’s job
performance.”

There are plenty of other odd wording-choices in the article
(such as this gross oversimplification: “Republicans hold their
edge despite the fissures in their party over whether it is too
conservative or not conservative enough”), which all serve as a
reminder that even the hardest of numbers are subject to the most
elastic of interpretations and prejudice.