I come from a long line of newspapermen. My great grandfather worked with Charles Dana on the New York Sun and I have a line of cousins who have been writing foir newspapers ever since. My first job in college was as a printer’s devil on The Newark Star Ledger. Through all of those years, The New York Times was thought to be the gold standard. I used to be addicted to The 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 its coverage of three stories made me ask myself why anyone should read a newspaper that makes one more ignorant once you’ve read it:
- At the Embassy, we would receive regular press releases of the discovery of the bodies 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 have also moderated 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 Qaeda. The Times buried this in two paragraphs at the bottom of a page in the back of the paper. Since the Afghan government was a mere landlord to Al Qaeda, charging it rent to stay in the country, Saddam's contribution to world terrorism was far greater and the invasion of Iraq even more justified than the invasion of Afghanistan.
- A young Marine named Starr was killed in Iraq, leaving behind an eloquent letter to his girlfriend telling her why he believed 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. In a Weekly Standard book review of Gray Lady Down, a well written critique of The New York Times by William McGowan, the reviewer asked why it mattered any more, that The New York Times was, in essence, a dead man walking.
But The New York Times still matters because a number the country’s decision makers think it still matters. Granted, that number is increasingly shrinking, but for the foreseeable future, decisions affecting us all will be made under the influence of The Times. And the bias of the Times renders any decision based on its reporting second rate at best, just as a general can have the best army in the world, but will lose a battle if he relies on poor intelligence.
Bill Keller, the Managing Editor of The New York Times, recently attacked viewers of Fox News for being “the most cynical people on Planet Earth.” If you replace the harsh word “cynical” with the near synonym “skeptical,” that is hardly an insult. Indeed, skepticism should be the stock in trade of journalism. Since the readers of The New York Times are the most gullible people on Planet Earth, Keller shouldn’t really throw stones. His own glass house is too vulnerable.
The tragedy is that The New York Times has some of the best reporters in the country. I am convinced that the real author of The Times bias is the editors and the feature (i.e., soft news) writers, not the serious journalists. Unfortunately, by the time the real reporters get their news in the paper, it is edited into, and surrounded by, pure mush. Take the three instances above which turned me off The Times forever. They are all classic propaganda techniques, but only one of them is the fault of a writer, and a feature writer at that:
• The overemphasis of the Abu Ghraib scandal is the standard “big lie” tactic that if you repeat something enough times, you can blow it out of proportion;
• Similarly, by almost completely ignoring the genocide committed by Saddam and his active worldwide support for terrorism, The Times showed that you can bury even the most important news;
• And even though the willful distortion of Corporal Starr’s last letter home was the fault of a writer, The Times still defends this repugnant act, similar to the way they fought to prevent Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize from being taken away after it was revealed that he deliberately faked his reporting on behalf of Josef Stalin.
And that last historical footnote about Duranty should remind us of another thing about The Times: it was never as good as it thought it was. Mr. McGowan’s book 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. And 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." There is a book about how The Times downplayed the Holocaust and many other books about how the paper has distorted its reporting. Gray Lady Down is only the latest in a damning series of books.
And the greatest crime the paper ever committed was its role in making the Vietnam War inevitable. Influenced by a Communist agent and professional agitators, The coverage of South Vietnam by The Times pressured President Kennedy 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 in 1962 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, the President 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 the US and declared nonaligned status, specifically citing our involvement in the coup. Poor President Johnson was forced into a war he didn’t want so that we didn’t lose the support of all developing countries. 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.
Still, conservatives ought to count themselves lucky that such a powerful voice in the media has gone out of its way to destroy itself. Generally, the editorial page on any paper should be a free fire zone, free from criticism for its writers’ views left or right, but The Times has such an undisciplined stable of columnists that, aside from their annoyance value, they accomplish nothing for their ideology. They neither convert the undecided nor shore up their allies with facts and figures. 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 Thomas Friedman (sometimes) 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, who has recently either jumped or been pushed off the paper, got his only publicity by saying stupid things which outraged rightwing writers for other publications; he was always Peck's Bad Boy and if he had been ignored as he should have been, he would have disappeared long ago. 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.
It is common to blame Pinch Sulzberger, the current publisher for the collapse of The Times’ credibility. More likely it is the accumulation of the paper’s sins for many years which have finally caught up with it. Like Little Red Riding Hood in James Thurber’s version of the fairy tale (Red pulls a Colt .45 out of her picnic basket and plugs the Big Bad Wolf), it is not so easy to fool little girls (or newspaper readers) these days. Although Pinch is clearly a weak man, he is merely a symptom and not the cause of the collapse of The Times’ credibility. Even if he were the Village Idiot, he presides over an institution of well-educated and intelligent people, who could change things if they were so inclined. In fact, Mr. Sulzberger hired Bill Keller and Sam Tanenhaus, two recent cases mentioned by Mr. McGowan of editors being hired who initially brought hope to critics that The Times had changed course, 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 psychiatrists to dissect, but Pinch Sulzberger is clearly not solely to blame. What is clear is that this is no way to run a newspaper.
Think of the damage done by anyone who relies on The Times for their news. One reason that President Obama has made such a hash of his Middle Eastern policy is that The Times has muddled its reporting. President Obama has based his anti-terror policy on the premise that Iraq was the unnecessary war and Afghanistan was the necessary war; in other words, he is following the party line of The Times. But when one fights an abstract like terrorism, one doesn’t try to hold real estate. One goes after the bankers, the trainers, the suppliers and the main forces. In other words, Iraq was the necessary war. We have now committed the main strike force of the United States against the Taliban, which may be bad guys, but have not ventured to take their terror outside of Afghan borders. Just as in Vietnam, where we fought a war for real estate while the guerillas fought a war for time, President Obama has again taken his eyes off the ball. As Tallyrand said about the ancient regime in France, the foreign policy decision makers in the Democratic Party have forgotten nothing and they have learned nothing. That’s what happens when you read The Times.
Nor does The Times have anything approaching a coherent view of the world. Any newspaper that champions the rights of both homosexuals and the Muslim extremists who want to murder them can have only one goal: that of becoming the voice of the anti-establishment. The Times has always been the voice of the establishment and appears to be willing to relinquish that role, so we are in a transitional period where 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 (the latest figures show that The Times lost an additional 34,000 daily readers and 37,000 Sunday readers, despite the fact that the circulation calculations had been reformulated specifically to artificially inflate the circulation figures of all newspapers). 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 its 160 year old tradition.
Back in the 1990s, I wrote The Times to ask why Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force Lieutenant General and a figure in many Republican Administrations was always called “Mr. Scowcroft” in The Times, while Barry MacCaffery, President Clinton’s Anti-Narcotics Czar was always “retired wounded war hero, General Barry MacCaffery.” I received a letter from an Assistant Managing Editor for The Times who informed me that The Times calls people what they want to be called and that, apparently, General MacCaffery wanted to be called “retired wounded war hero, General Barry MacCaffery.” It was the first sentence of the letter that I remember most. The Editor asked me why, if I thought The Times was biased, I just didn’t read it anymore. Sadly for The Times, their readership is following his advice.
NOTE: THIS IS A REVISED VERSION OF A REVIEW OF GRAY LADY DOWN THAT I ORIGINALLY POSTED ON AMAZON.COM
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
