…But the building is nice
Reading the New York Times with unusual thoroughness over the holiday weekend, I found myself annoyed, and a little embarrassed, that so much of it was, well, garbage. Worse, it was garbage of the most common and insulting sort: fawning, shallow interviews, dubious, poorly-sourced claims presented as fact, “balance” in the form of risibly false right-wing fear-mongering uncritically typed up, and other articles that, without being egregiously self-discrediting on their face, nonetheless carried the taint of their writers’ compromised integrity sullied by past performance, outside shenanigans, and well-publicized breaches of ethics. Giving no solace to the long-suffering and overcharged reader, Ombudsman Clark Hoyt grudgingly tossed in a piece dismissing the larger journalistic malpractices of the previous week, since they’d been exposed of course by other media. Yeah, MoDo plagiarized. Yawn. Sure, Tom Friedman got paid 75 grand to spout BS. What else is new? He gave it back, later, anyway. Next?
I think it’s this drearily familiar combination of abysmal quality control heavily larded with a haughty disdain for backtalk that is much more dangerous to the future of the NYT and print journalism in general than anything Ann Coulter or Craigslist could accomplish, even if they got together. Disastrous decisions by upper management, like buying out the International Herald Tribune and Boston Globe, then building a splashy new headquarters building, all at the top of the market, show that the Sulzburger blood has thinned out to Kool-Aid consistency from a business standpoint, but cracking open the product shows that selling shit and calling it Shinola, for a higher price every few months, is the real problem here.
The New York Times has become the island of misfit toys; a situation that must be as demoralizing to its rank and file as it is infuriating to its readers. Back in the day, journalists were forbidden to publicly adopt or advocate for any but the most uncontroversial causes, and any that tried to trade on the prestige of their publication in advancing outside careers quickly found themselves in hot water. The New York Times, so conservative and hidebound in earlier years that it was called the Grey Lady, now seems to have morphed into an off-night flophouse for a bunch of celebrity nitwits looking to kill some time and make some easy dough, in between television appearances and book tours. It’s kind of like FOX, only boring. Good luck with that.
After “economist” Ben Stein joined forces with the mouth-breather set to make and of course star in a “movie” that made the laughably obvious point that people who thought the earth was 6000 years old were treated like some kind of dummies at US universities, a dismal failure of right-wing propaganda which was eventually seen by dozens of Americans only because of a fevered, months-long promotion on hate radio and hate religion all over the country, he was still allowed, even encouraged, to write about economics in the New York Times. In what, crayon? I’m no mental giant, but such outlandish cretinism is flatly disqualifying for anyone presuming to write for an educated readership, and if the NYT cared a whit for either its audience or reputation, Stein would have long ago been sent off packing to some nice “Institute,” Discovery, Enterprise, or whatever.
Piling out of the Sunday clown car next comes owly and oily David Brooks, this time with a drippingly disdainful book review (don’t they have qualified, disinterested people for this job?) of a book he obviously hasn’t read, but nonetheless dislikes and wants to smear, since the author purportedly disagrees with him (wonder how much that set you back, Pinch…), but the piece de resistance, as usual, is the absurd “interview” that Deborah Solomon leaves in the magazine each week like a skid mark. Her role is as interesting as it is humiliating; she is able to “get” interviews with the world’s worst and most loathsome, lying, criminal scum, week after week, clearly because of her unique style of inquiry, which resembles that of a five-year-old, grilling her wicked stepmother. Innocent-seeming questions receive curt, angry, answers like “none of your business,” “jump in a lake,” “because I said so,” and “that’s for me to know and you to find out” which are then deferentially typed up with nary a follow-up, so the flat-out lies scattered between almost begin to look like a scoop. The only journalistic “value” involved, which I’m sure is an accident, is the full-length picture of the charlatan in question, which takes as much space as the interview yet is dramatically more informative. This week it was Frank Luntz, Republican snake-oil salesman, looking so gob-smackingly schlumpy and repulsive that the battered and brow-beaten Solomon choked out at the end, “Are you married?” Go for it, Deborah! He only turned down Maureen Dowd because of her personality. And yet another fascist manipulator shows how pathetic, impotent, and utterly unworthy of respect, the “liberal” media is. Doesn’t that five bucks seem like a good investment now?
To be fair, there are many excellent reporters who are occasionally allowed to do excellent work, and their efforts often carry the paper for the clueless gasbags in the upper tiers. But these relentless, high-profile insults to the readers’ intelligence, the daily drip, drip of “Enhanced Revulsion Techniques,” that turn the formerly shocking Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals into misty, fond memories and cause people to lose whatever respect they had for a newspaper, which is the only value it really has, that has brought the NYT to its current pass, to be delightedly picked over by Bill O’Reilly et al. What does the soon-to be-former reader see? Shallow reporting. Wasted money. Wasted space. Arrogant, in-your-face nincompoops spouting pure hogwash. Pentagon propaganda. Nuclear propaganda. At this point, Murdoch need only bide his time, or more likely, not.
The publishers seem to be quite capable of ruining their “Trust” on their own, thank you.
Yo!
Sing it, CH.
Got nothing to add but an enthusiastic Amen.
This one had been building for a while, as I gradually recovered from my nasty spring flu/allergies/vapors that nearly wasted last week. Pain is good for Art. So’s medical marijuana.
(I learned this from literature, rather than personal experience, of course…)
T
You beat me to it, bystander. Can I just throw in a few hallelujahs! and shake my tambourine a little? (I can’t carry a tune in a basket, and even if I could, no one, absolutely no one — not even David Brooks — would mistake me for Sam Cooke.)
Ah, yes, a tambourine, like Veronica in The Archies. Any ideas how to get this into the paws of disgruntled Timesmen?
Please forgive, this is way off topic. But…but…I just saw this terrific PBS program on infrastructure, contrasting Denver’s decision in the 70s — circular 8-lane beltway — with Portland’s. Sigh….
I almost moved to Portland when I retired, but concluded that I couldn’t afford it. I was right, of course, but watching this program actually made me sick at how much happier I would probably have been there. (You gotta remember, I was an early citizen of the People’s Republic of Berkeley, exiled to Santa Barbara for thirty years, ’cause that’s where I found a job. Now I’m in the desert, both literally and figuratively.)
Berkeley still has — and probably always will have — some of the character that it had back in the day, but the rest of the Bay Area has gone automobile rotten, and Berkeley can’t stand against the trend by itself. What amazed me about Portland, on my one visit there, was that it had found a way to be urban, and yet preserve that character which Berkeley once had in spades.
I didn’t know the details, of course, which is why I found this program so fascinating. If only I’d turned north instead of south in 1970….
Ah, well. The path not taken, and all of that.
Cocktailhugs for all….
The decisions made since the 1970′s here continue to bear fruit. The light rail expansions have helped to revitalize close-in neighborhoods, and downtown, Nob Hill, and the “Pearl,” a former industrial district between the two are now linked by streetcar. Zoning requires ground-floor retail and street trees, and encourages awnings for rain protection, so if you’re clever, you can traverse downtown without getting too wet during our famous rainy season (s).
I ended up here by default after college…. free rent at Mom’s and my waiter job still offering good money, and twenty some years later, I look like a genius. By accident, as usual.
Yes WT, Berkeley in the 60’s was an unequaled place and time.
I agree with you that the rest of the Bay Area has gone “automobile rotten”. It’s sad to go back there and see how “plastic” it has become.
Speaking of Portland, I tried the Pacific Northwest for four years (Seattle), and would visit Portland occasionally. I love the character of that city, but (like Seattle) it is always depressingly rainy.
I too am retired in the desert, but often yearn for the good ole days on the coast.
I hope your desert retirement is suiting you well.
Here’s a story on how the NYT had the Watergate story first and blew it. The key ingredient in a paper doing real journalism is leadership. Ben Bradley was a great leader along with the publisher Katherine Graham. The NYT has not had that kind of leadership for some time now.
2 Ex-Timesmen Say They Had a Tip on Watergate First
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business/media/25watergate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
When corporations take the lead, journalism becomes a side show. What these sad corporate clowns don’t understand is that you build a business by taking care of the customers. So if you don’t serve the readers, you don’t survive. To give pundit cronys who only write propaganda and give them guaranteed publishing regardless of how good or bad the writing and reasoning, is beyond stupid. Every pundit should have to earn the right to have each article published based solely on its merits.
I saw that story, and could have thrown it in, but I also could have made the post as long as Anna Karenina.
As you know, I’m a Watergate scholar, and I was aware of several NYT ball-drops, but not that one. There are probably more. Remember, they “held” a story at the request of the Kennedy Administration that would have stopped the Bay of Pigs. They “held” the wiretapping story until a year after the 2004 election. They ran the Judith Miller hogwash. They are nothing more than a hooker in the doorway for the powers that be.
I think that the only reason the WaPo (not poo in those days) uncovered Watergate was because Katherine Graham’s husband, Phil, committed suicide in 1964, and there suddenly arose an uncorrupted publisher. Seems unlikely to happen again.
I didn’t stop by to derail the conversation but this is so sweet. I simply had to share.
Enjoy.
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Bush’s Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to “Erase” Mid-East Enemies “Before a New Age Begins”
By Clive Anderson, CounterPunch. Posted May 25, 2009.
Bush explained to French Pres. Chirac that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Mid-East and must be defeated.
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Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.
The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.
The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.
http://www.alternet.org/politics/140221/bush%27s_shocking_biblical_prophecy_emerges%3A_god_wants_to_%22erase%22_mid-east_enemies_%22before_a_new_age_begins%22/
Well, SOMEBODY noticed.
That David Brooks review was supposed to be his long overdue confessional, but then it got screwed up by a copy editor who changed the first person references into third person refererences.
Brooks, you see, was humbled by Schama’s all-round superiority.
In his newfound humility, Brooks was finally coming clean about his own worst pretensions.
And, so, Brooks wrote and filed:
The copy editor, knowing that the assignment was for Brooks to write about Schama, mistakenly thought that Brooks was writing about Schama, and changed “I” to “He”.
I’m glad you noticed how that review came off… A mixture of “mean girl” jealousy and projection.
How’d you like to be that author? Sheesh. Sometimes they get do-overs in the daily edition for this kind of thing; another money-saving practice, I’m sure.
I’m no mental giant, but such outlandish cretinism is flatly disqualifying for anyone presuming to write for an educated readership, and if the NYT cared a whit for either its audience or reputation, Stein would have long ago been sent off packing to some nice “Institute,” Discovery, Enterprise, or whatever.
You are, however, a very discerning reader and a highly entertaining writer.
Thank you for this post. Whenever I try to make the case that newspapers are having problems for editorial reasons, a whole posse descends upon me… moaning about the internets and how they are ruining the news business. Hogwash! People go to the internet, not only for convenience, but also for substance that is lacking in so many papers.
I saw that Clark Hoyt piece and read those others, too. And then there was that financial news reporter who wrote a book about his own credit problems, i.e., being taken in by mortgage brokers, just like the ones he had been writing about. Only… he forgot to mention his second wife’s two bankruptcies in the book. Ooops!
In one of the UT threads, I posted a link to an interview at Barnes & Noble with Schama that did not get any response there, but maybe someone here will find it interesting. Odd… but there is no mention of Brooks, IIRC.
It’s funny, but every time I read a torpedo review by a sleazebag righty like Brooks, I run right down to Powell’s and buy it, and sure enough, it’s always a great book.
The experienced NYT reader learns when it’s opposite day. Glad you liked the post… Sometimes NYT bashing almost seems like a cop-out, but it seems so much worse lately.
Another nice post.
One thing that gets me is that many folks know that the newspapers are very unreliable but yet they will believe most of what they print. Oh, they will disregard things they know are fiction, but they believe the rest.
Even worse, they will believe garbage printed in a history text as if it were gospel truth knowing it is often based on reports every bit as reliable as the NYT.
Odd, eh?
Well, the key to being informed is not to accept any single source; something I learned studying history in college. However, a combination of primary and secondary sources, and, generally, suing the government for documents does eventually produce pretty accurate history.
As a liberal, I would have to counter that the strategy of the right, exemplified by FOX, is to create completely false narratives, shoehorn every event into that frame, and suppress all contradictions, no matter how glaring. What the NYT does it does out of laziness and incompetence. What Murdoch, Ailes, and FOX does is intentionally mislead, which I think is a little different.