Now Liberals will have to believe you when you say the Ties is biased. "Hey, it's right there in the Times!"
Posted on 07/28/2004 7:36:40 PM PDT by farmfriend
The Great Divider
By James K. Glassman
"Is the New York Times A Liberal Newspaper?" asked a headline on Sunday.
The first sentence had the answer: "Of course it is."
If that sounds like a dog-bites-man story, then consider the kicker: The article appeared in The New York Times itself. Its author was Daniel Okrent, who last December became the paper "Public Editor," or ombudsman.
Okrent's skillful, fact-filled piece eviscerates The Times for its coverage of "social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. If you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them," he writes, "you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed."
Okrent says he will get to politics in a few months, and he's right to start with culture, which is at the heart of the red-blue split pundits wring their hands about. It's my view that The Times -- which provides the script each day for the many clueless folks who produce TV news programs -- has been a major perpetrator in dividing the nation.
My guess -- and I admit I have no scholarly data -- is that conservatives today are more tolerant than liberals, whose compassion extends mainly to groups like transgendered vegans, not to those who, in Okrent's words, "The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide, [like] devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews and Texans."
The editorial page, says Okrent, is "thoroughly saturated in liberal ideology," but it's elsewhere that rankles. For example, "On the Arts & Leisure front page each week, columnist Frank Rich slices up President Bush, Mel Gibson, John Ashcroft and other paladins of the right. In the Sunday Styles section, there are gay wedding announcements, of course, but also downtown sex clubs and T-shirts bearing the slogan, 'I'm Afraid of Americans.'"
The publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. "doesn't think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism," writes Okrent. "He prefers to call the paper's viewpoint 'urban.'" The adjectives I would use are parochial, pusillanimous and condescending -- and dangerous. The Times has become the Great Divider.
"It's one thing," says Okrent, "to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls, and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists want to hear."
He adds, "Is it any wonder the offended or befuddled reader might consider everything else in the paper -- including, say, campaign coverage -- suspicious as well?"
Sulzberger had a chance to change the direction of his newspaper after he dismissed top editor Howell Raines last year. But The Times, if anything, is slipping farther from its moorings as America's newspaper of record.
In May study, the Pew Research Center asked journalists, "Is there a news organization you think is especially liberal in its coverage of news?" Some 20 percent of respondents picked The Times. Second was the Washington Post at 4 percent, followed by CNN, CBS and National Public Radio at 2 percent.
But the worst of it is that, at a time of cultural division, The Times should be a healer, or at least an explainer -- not an inflamer and an antagonist toward people with whom the editors have not just a disagreement, but a disdain and a seething antipathy: the hicks and the ignoramuses west of the Hudson. Included in this group is George W. Bush, a graduate of Andover, Yale and Harvard who betrayed his class and became a rube, and religious to boot!
Okrent writes of gay marriage, "On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires." I could add many other key topics The Times treats one-dimensionally: climate change, accounting scandals, obesity, prescription drugs, crime.
Okrent, by the way, is no right-winger. He's won the ultimate jackpot for a liberal New Yorker -- a role in a Woody Allen movie ( "Sweet and Lowdown," 1999). He's been managing editor of Life magazine. He says his cultural views are similar to those in The Times, but he is severely troubled by the turn the paper has taken.
The Times is an important institution that is degenerating into a close-minded small-town paper with a giant megaphone. On the eve of an important election, it's willfully ignoring the great story of our age -- the glorious richness and diversity (intellectual, political, entrepreneurial and cultural) of America. That's a shame and a threat.
This is the smartest thing NY Times could do. State the obvious.
OOOF.
The paper of record is biased?...I'm shocked!...;)
I was in New York City over the weekend and saw the ombudsman article in the Sunday edition of the Times. As I read it, I couldn't believe what I was reading. I also read somewhere in another New York paper that legally the Times had to print what the ombudsman wrote -- can't remember now where I saw that. And I don't know if that is true. In any case, I can't imaginge they were happy to publish the piece. I wonder if they'll pay it any heed.
Short list.
I wonder when the Times was the paper of record...really... 1950? 1940? It surely hasn't been since I started high school in 1964.
Wow! Somebody understands the why Fox News, talk radio, etc are so popular and making so much advertising revenue. Also why Drudge and Free Republic have become the new sources of choice.
The Ombudsman we have at the Sacramento Bee is a reporter from the Times. I like him. He is liberal and state such. He also seems to be more fair than any we have had before. He has address the bias in the Bee and did a good job of it. The Ombudsman are independent. I don't think the papers have to print it but they would half to have a really good reason not to such as it contain racial slurs or things of that nature.
James K. Glassman, the author of this piece has done us a great service, as has the new ombudsman for the NYT.
A great piece to send to liberal friends who believe the NYT is God.
Very well and all, but Pinch rambles through life in a myopic delusion that has all the trappings of grandeur a pampered prince can conjure after a lifetime of sheltered exclusivity.
Not much anyone can do without Sulzberger's walls a come tumbling down. No change in heading expected after this well written article.
Now Liberals will have to believe you when you say the Ties is biased. "Hey, it's right there in the Times!"
co-religionists...That's got to sting.
The younger woman who sits next to me reads the NT Times on line. I just asked her, "What would you do if you found out that the NT Times was deeply, habitually dishonest, and knowingly published things that weren't true all the time?"
She said, "I'd be shocked."
Does anybody know of a compilation of resources or links that could help me make that point?
Anybody have a link to the ombudsman's column?
No coincidence in my opinion that it was written right before he took 2 months vacation....
Never mind. Found it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/weekinreview/25bott.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Thanks and bump! :-)
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