Posted on 08/20/2005 10:35:53 AM PDT by Pikamax
'NY Times' Editor Rips Book Review in Own Paper
By E&P Staff
Published: August 20, 2005 1:30 PM ET
NEW YORK In what must be a first, the editor of The New York Times has written a letter to the editor ripping a recent book review in his own paper.
The lengthy broadside by Bill Keller, executive editor, appears in tomorrow’s edition of The New York Times Book Review. Others, including Bill Moyers and Eric Alterman, join Keller in protesting the review of several recent books on the media by conservative legal scholar Richard A. Posner that appeared on July 31.
Keller calls the Posner essay “mostly a regurgitation, as tendentious and cynical as the worst of the books he consumed,” and charges that he “weirdly” makes almost no distinction “within the vast category of American media, between those that are aggressively partisan and those that strive to keep opinion sequestered from news, between outlets that invest in serious reporting and those that simply riff on the reporting of others, between the sensational and the more high-minded, between organizations that hasten to correct errors and those that could not care less, between the cartoonish shout shows on cable TV and the more ambitious journalism of, say, the paper you are holding in your hands.
“Then he swallows almost uncritically the conventional hogwash of partisan critics on both sides: that '’the media’ (as accused from the right) work in tireless pursuit of a liberal agenda, and that they have (as accused from the left) become docile house pets of the Bush administration because they fear offending the powers that be.
“Finally, to explain the workings of this undifferentiated ‘media,’ simultaneously liberal and supine, he applies his trademark theory of market determinism. Whether conspiratorially or instinctively (Posner is unclear on this), the media have changed course in response to economic threats. The liberal news organizations, he says, have become even more liberal in order to protect their market share — to secure their base — in times of mounting competition from blogs and conservative cable upstarts. At the same time they have grown more timid for fear of offending the '’social consensus, however dumb or even vicious the consensus.’ (He may despise the media, dear reader, but Posner doesn't think much of you, either.)
In his view, the news media are '’just satisfying a consumer demand no more elevated or consequential than the demand for cosmetic surgery in Brazil or bullfights in Spain.’ In this, Posner the polemicist is sadly consistent with Posner the federal appeals court judge, who has been notably hostile to the idea that the First Amendment affords journalists special protections. …
“The saddest thing is that Judge Posner's market determinism leaves no room for the other dynamics I've witnessed in my 35 years in newspapers: the idealism of reporters who think they can make the world better, the intellectual satisfaction of puzzling through a complicated issue, the competitive gratification of being first to discover a buried story, the pride in striving to uphold a professional code of fair play, the quest for peer recognition and, yes, the feedback from attentive and thoughtful readers. He makes no allowance for the possibility that conscientious reporters and editors are capable of setting aside their personal beliefs or standing up to their advertisers (and the prejudices of their readers) to do work they believe in.”
There is why he hates him, the judge doesn't think that reporters are special people.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
If Mr. Keller is trying to convince us that various segments of the news media are not biased and prejudiced, he is wasting his time and ours.
Bill Keller is one of the most biased and rabidly anti-catholic persons on the scene today. In an article on the opus ed page in May about 3 years ago, he ranted on and on about John Paul II and his various sins - the usual litany - abortion, homosexuality, married and women priests etc. He should recuse himself for writing anything about or for catholics.
Reporters aren't supposed to be idealistic and to make the world better. They're supposed to report what's going on to the public and let the public make their judgments accordingly.
the quest for peer recognition
And there we have another major failing, although a human one. Everyone wants to be liked. For "journalists" it appears to trump the truth.
He makes no allowance for the possibility that conscientious reporters and editors are capable of setting aside their personal beliefs or standing up to their advertisers (and the prejudices of their readers) to do work they believe in.
Facts not in evidence. Well, I suppose if the work you believe in is to see your political ideology destroy all others, it may be true. But if you mean fair and unbiased reportage this is a milk-through-the-nose statement.
So whose fault...the Jews or Bush?
" the editor of The New York Times has written a letter to the editor ripping a recent book review in his own paper."
I wonder if he stamped the letter and mailed it, or just put it in his Out box and immediately moved it to his In box. And I wonder if he threatened to cancel his subscription?
By the way, I am sure the editor has written to himself before, but he previously would sign it with a fake name and then publish it. He must have forgotten this time.
The problem in a nutshell. And he thinks it's the solution.
Ah yes, the New Yorks Times - so professional...
This is just too funny. Perhaps, Bill Keller should use the wonderful journalism he is touting to review his own paper's reporting. I am a former Democrat, not a "crazy far right conservative" who was raised on Long Island reading the NYT as gospel. It has fallen far from those haughty years. The bias of the Times can be seen as much in the stories that they refuse to report as it can in the ones that they do. Further, any time I see agreement from Bill Moyers, I can only presume the opinion is tainted. Moyers has been revealed as an idealogue himself and exposed as using NPR to his own economic advantage.
Perhaps, this is just an effort at the Times to pretend to be "balanced". Well, they will have to demonstrate that in their reporting, before I'll consider it.
These sanctimonious twits will get a clue when hell freezes over.
Here's an excerpt from Posner's piece -- no wonder they hate him!
Bad News
By RICHARD A. POSNER
THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues.
The industry's critics agree that the function of the news is to inform people about social, political, cultural, ethical and economic issues so that they can vote and otherwise express themselves as responsible citizens. They agree on the related point that journalism is a profession rather than just a trade and therefore that journalists and their employers must not allow profit considerations to dominate, but must acknowledge an ethical duty to report the news accurately, soberly, without bias, reserving the expression of political preferences for the editorial page and its radio and television counterparts. The critics further agree, as they must, that 30 years ago news reporting was dominated by newspapers and by television network news and that the audiences for these media have declined with the rise of competing sources, notably cable television and the Web.
The audience decline is potentially fatal for newspapers. Not only has their daily readership dropped from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to 37.5 percent in 2000, but the drop is much steeper in the 20-to-49-year-old cohort, a generation that is, and as it ages will remain, much more comfortable with electronic media in general and the Web in particular than the current elderly are.
The New York Times makes no efforts at being objective, but spins the news to fit their liberal world view as much as anybody.
Dumb move. I fail to see how this can accomplish anything but give more publicity to Posner's review and further reveal the unprofessionalism of the current administration at the Times.
The Times used to be a newspaper run by rabid leftists with professional standards. It has gradually declined into a leftist newspaper without any standards and completely lacking in professional judgment. But what else can you expect from a corporation run by the likes of Pinch Sulzberger and Bill Keller?
No wonder they fired A. M. Rosenthal and kept Maureen Dowd. Dowd did a better job of servicing her boss.
There isn't anything I can add to this, Pika. Your post #1 says it all. Rush is right too: they're funniest when they're out of power.
What a baby! He actually cites eric alterman and bill moyers as proof of an unbiased media! Talk about someone living in a hermetically sealed dream world.
Serves 'em right. Those who earn their bread under the First Amendment have been loathe to even consider a minimum of respect to the Second Amendment.
And extremely dangerous when in power. Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, Bill Clinton and Al Qaeda.
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