I used to be addicted to The New York Times. If I were out of town and had to spend the entire day tracking down a copy, I would consider it time well spent. But then I went to Afghanistan, where history was happening.
The Times' coverage of events I witnessed wasn't so much wrong as it was irrelevant. It wasn't until after I got back that three stories made me ask myself why anyone should read a newspaper that makes one more ignorant for having read it:
- At the Embassy, we would receive regular press releases of the discovery of the killing fields of hundreds of thousands of Kurds murdered by Saddam with the Weapons of Mass Destruction which The Times now says he never had. I ran a Nexis search in August of 2006 and found that The Times had run 1503 stories that mentioned Abu Ghraib and only 7 stories about Saddam's genocide. There is no way to defend such unbalanced coverage. All of those deaths should have raised a question about what happened to the WMD. And it would also moderate the anger of buffoons like Michael Moore, who seems to believe that pre-invasion Iraq was a peace-loving democracy.
- The Pentagon released a 600 page report translating documents from Saddam's secret police showing that he funded, trained and supplied most of the strongest terror networks around the world, including elements of Al Queda. The Times buried this in two paragraphs in the back of the paper. Since the Afghan government was a mere landlord to Al Queda, charging it rent to stay in the country, Saddam's contribution to world terrorism was far greater and the invasion more justified.
- A young Marine named Starr was killed in Iraq, leaving behind an eloquent letter to his girlfriend telling her that he had died for a worthy cause. The Times got hold of the letter and rewrote it to make him sound bitter and disillusioned.
It was this last story, a ghoulish and disgraceful attempt to steal a dead man's honor that made me resolve never to buy another copy of The Times or, given the option, to patronize any of its advertisers. I'm not alone. The reviewer of Mr. McGowan's book in The Weekly Standard asked why it mattered any more, that The New York Times was, in essence, a dead man walking.
But Mr. McGowan did not write this book for people like me or the reviewer of The Weekly Standard. He wrote it for people who haven't yet made a break with The Times and might help the paper to find itself again. I hope they read it. Mr. McGowan will show such people just how much they have been mislead and how much needs to be done to turn the paper around. He covers a series of issues and shows how the bias of The Times distorts the facts. He does it all with the sensitivity of a scorned lover. Those of us who feel more betrayed than scorned will have a more negative reaction to these stories than Mr. McGowan has, but his love of what The Times used to be strengthens his message.
Still, there are some points of the author's indictment, which I find too negative.
On race, for instance, he decries the double standard which Times' editors admit they use in hiring minorities, but as he shows, nepotism rules the top job at The Times: the paper will hire the best publisher it can find, as long as his name is Sulzberger. Under the circumstances, I find it rather endearing of the institution that it will apply the same double standards to those at the bottom of the food chain as it does to those at the top.
More seriously though, the real reason for the double standard is the sort of racism only leftists are capable of. They don't care about crimes committed by blacks because most of it is committed against other blacks. To mention black on white when they have ignored black on black crime would be truly racist, so they ignore that too. What the outside world sees as a racial bias in favor of African-Americans has ulterior motives. Blacks on The Times have a legitimate beef about how they are treated.
Also, Mr. McGowan spends too much time talking about The Times' editorial page. The editorial page on any paper should be a free fire zone and the left wingers who criticize Fox News for its non-news political commentators are just as wrong as the right wingers who decry The Times' columnists. In fact, we conservatives should consider ourselves lucky that The Times has such an undisciplined stable of columnists. In forty years of talking politics with readers of the New York Times, I have never heard anyone quote Frank Rich or Bob Herbert or Gail Collins or any of the other columnists. The Left hates Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly because people listen to them. Why should the Right complain about columnists no one reads?
The only exceptions to this are Tom Friedman and the conservative columnists because they seem to be the only ones who try to convince the reader, instead of beating him into submission. The rest are a hopeless bunch. Frank Rich gets his only publicity by saying stupid things which outrage rightwing writers for other publications; he is Peck's Bad Boy and if he were ignored as he should be, he would disappear without a trace. Maureen Dowd is never quoted for the substance of what she has to say but only for the peculiarly immature way she says it. As for Paul Krugman, he reminds one of the crazy man you used to run across on the subway of pre-Giuliani New York: after you read his column you feel the need to wipe the spittle off your face. Imagine the damage The Times could do if they had columnists anyone ever read.
Finally, there is too much emphasis on Pinch Sulzberger as the root of all evil. This attitude is common with both the disaffected insiders and the alienated outsiders. But even if Pinch were the Village Idiot, he presides over an institution of well educated and intelligent people. There is no indication that he is a dictator. He is either too weak to stop the rot at the paper or he is willing to go with the flow, but either way, there is more to it than a rogue publisher. In fact, Mr. Sulzberger hired Bill Keller and Sam Tanenhaus, two recent cases mentioned by Mr. McGowan of editors being hired who initially brought cheer to the critics of The Times only to disappoint them later. At least Pinch tried. There is a dynamic at the paper which will brook no dissent and will co-opt any independent thinker. This is a dysfunctional dynamic better left to sociologists, but Pinch Sulzberger is clearly not solely to blame.
In fact, the old Times was not such great shakes either. Mr. McGowan clearly documents how The New York Times Book Review was corrupted in 1979, the height of what the author sees as the golden age under Abe Rosenthal. It was Rosenthal who turned his back on the Outer Boroughs of New York City, telling a journalism class that "Our readers are more interested in what is going on in Beirut than they are in The Bronx and we give them what they want."
And the greatest crime the paper committed was its role in making the Vietnam War inevitable. Influenced by a Communist agent and professional agitators, their coverage pressured JFK to break with Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem. As a human being, JFK lacked a moral compass and like all such people, was therefore overly dependent on what others had to say about him. Unfortunately, President Kennedy cancelled the White House subscription to the New York Herald Tribune because the paper dissed him on the editorial page. If he hadn't done that, he might have read Marguerite Higgins' more accurate reporting debunking The Times' reports. Instead, he murdered Diem, the first time in American history that we deposed a loyal ally, throwing Vietnam into chaos and sending shock waves throughout the developing world. Even before JFK himself was murdered three weeks later, Cambodia broke its relations with us and declared nonaligned status, specifically citing our involvement in the coup. 58,000 Americans and countless others died for the sins of The New York Times. That makes all of its other journalistic crimes mere misdemeanors by comparison.
Any newspaper that champions the rights of both homosexuals and the Muslim extremists who want to murder them can have only one coherent goal: that of being the voice of the anti-establishment. The Times has always been the voice of the establishment and is willing to relinquish that role, so we are in a transitional period when the voice of the establishment is repositioning itself as a sort of daily edition of The Nation for rich people or The Village Voice for the lumpen bourgeoisie. I doubt that most writers for The Times will miss being the voice of the establishment. Oh, it's nice to be the voice of authority, but that brings with it certain responsibilities. It requires one to take a stand, to defend difficult decisions and be prepared to live with them, and to accept responsibility for one's actions and non-actions. The Times doesn't want to do any of that. It's far easier to attack people who do.
So every reporting period, The Times loses more readers who want to read a paper that behaves like the establishment's paper should. But there is no reason to believe the readership will continue to drop and it is very likely that The Times' new target market will learn how to read and will come to love "The New New York Times" for its video game reviews and its alternate life styles travel articles. For the rest of us, we now have cultural pages in The Wall Street Journal which are better than The Times ever had even at the height of its powers. And those who love New York can now read the Journal's metro pages which in a few short months have become better than those in The Times with a 160 year old tradition.
You would almost want to cheer The Times on, if it weren't for its role in turning liberalism into the last refuge for crooks, kooks and fools.
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