Posted on 09/01/2002 12:36:08 PM PDT by Torie
The Opposition How the New York Times replaced the Democrats
At the beginning, few clued-in readers noticed any change. The new executive editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, took over last September and was immediately embroiled in the biggest New York story in decades. The coverage of the 9/11 massacre was superb, detailed and thorough - exactly what the American elite demands of its paper of record. Some cavillers griped that a newspaper with the enormous resources of the Times was bound to do a good job of covering a massive story on its doorstep, but credit should go where credit's due. The new editor got off to a flying start.
And then the rot began to set in. A year later, the New York Times has gone from being America's most reliable (if sometimes p.c.) compendium of news to being one of the most suspect media entities around. In the last month, critic after critic has piled on. The newspaper has become, in George Will's words, "the incredibly shrinking Times, reinventing itself along the lines of a factional broadsheet of the 1790s." Another conservative, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, told the Washington Post, "The question of the New York Times is now in play. The degree to which they seem in their news columns to be leading the charge against the war has struck everyone, including people like me, who are not big complainers about the news media." Even leftists who routinely deny the notion of liberal media bias in America have conceded the shift. The Village Voice's media writer, Cynthia Cotts, admitted recently, "No one denies the Times is flying in the face of Bush's war plans." In the face of this chorus, Howell Raines, as is his wont, refused even to address the complaints, even when asked by a major paper like the Washington Post.
Why on earth should anyone else care? The answer is, in fact, a critical one for assessing the current American debate about war against Iraq. Ever since September 11, polls have shown that a hefty majority of Americans favor a military effort to prevent weapons of mass destruction being used by Saddam and his allies against American allies and the homeland itself. In the middle of the summer, as president Bush examined specific war plans, polls showed 70 percent approval. The Democrats, terrified of a popular president and the long-standing taint of being unreliable on defense issues, were largely silent. That's when Raines saw his window of opportunity. Beginning in July, he used the most authoritative front-page in America to run a series of inflammatory non-stories about the impending conflict. On July 30, the Times' front-page story detailed how war "could profoundly affect the American economy." Duh. Two days later, after the first day of Senate hearings on Iraq, the Times headline was: "Experts Warn of High Risk for American Invasion of Iraq." In fact, the hearings that day had been dominated by defectors' scary tales of Saddam's imminent nuclear capacity. Every other major outlet - even the Guardian! - led with that troubling news. The Times buried it. Two days later, the Times ran a piece of man-on-the-street interviews from Arizona. At a time when polls showed 2-1 support for war, in a state more ferociously Republican than many others, the Times barely found a single voice in favor of war. The headline? "Backing Bush All the Way, Up to but Not Into Iraq." The story fast became a national joke.
It was slowly becoming clear that Raines was intoxicated with the power of his position - and you can see the temptation. The Times has influence even beyond its reach as a national paper for the most influential people in the most powerful country on earth. Its news columns are syndicated to hundreds of local and regional papers, and its front page acts as a starting point for much of television news. Some of this clout has been weakened by the growth of non-liberal cable news and by the Internet. But nothing yet competes with the Times for cultural and political clout. In retrospect, it's amazing how Raines' mild-mannered and talented predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, remained indifferent to power-trips, producing an excellent paper with minimal in-house drama. But Raines is a different character: a left-liberal ideologue who was promoted to executive editor (the top job) having run the leader page. (He was also, to his credit, a ferocious opponent of Bill Clinton, a fellow-Southerner with whom Raines had a simmering personal rivalry.) In British journalism, Raines' is a familiar career path - from editorializing to editing. But in American newspaper journalism, where the editorial section is proudly insulated from the news reporting, it was a novel direction. Raines made the usual promises that he wouldn't skew the news, but the evidence of each day's front-pages was overwhelming.
Sometimes, this even meant straightforward lies. A front-page story proclaiming an astonishing 7 degree 30-year rise in average temperature in Alaska was followed up by an editorial and a column blaming global warming and Bush's inaction. It took outside bloggers to reveal that there was no evidence for this alleged rise, that the real rise was far smaller, and the Times had to correct itself a few weeks later. Then there was this classic recent correction: "An article on Aug. 8 about speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney defending the administration's stewardship of the economy referred incorrectly to the 2001 recession and to the direction of the stock market on Aug. 7. Economists agree that the recession has ended, not continued. The Dow Jones industrial average rose the day of the speeches, by 182 points; it did not decline." So the paper of record actually got wrong the question of whether the economy is in recession and what the Dow did on a particular day. How did such a thing happen? Here's the original text, as noted by blogger Mickey Kaus: "[Cheney] credited the administration's tax cuts with helping the country to 'climb out of the recession and to weather the terrible financial effects of Sept. 11,' although the recession has not abated and the stock market today continued its decline [my italics]." In other words, the Times bungled obvious facts in order to lob a cheap shot at the vice-president. Oity it came back and hit Raines in the face.
The latest ideological gaffe came when the Times blared the news that Henry Kissinger had now joined the ranks of those "warning [President Bush] against going to war with Iraq." In fact, Kissinger, in his usual treacly and opaque prose, had abandoned his long-standing defense of murderous tyrants in favor of pre-emptive action against weapons of mass destruction. Yes, he had some caveats - but none of them could credibly place him in the anti-war camp. Again, this was obvious. But Raines zeal to stop the war bulldozed factual accuracy away.
Why, one has to wonder, would the Times risk its long-standing reputation as a liberal-but-fair paper of record in order to lurch to the left of the Guardian? Since Raines won't speak to the general press (he acts like the Pope in his public relations), it's hard to know for sure. Part of it, perhaps, is to do with his generation of liberals. They are still scarred by Vietnam. They see every war as a replay of that hell and assume war-critics always have the moral edge over any war supporters. It was therefore no surprise that the Times ran a front-page news analysis just before the fall of Afghanistan, predicting a "quagmire." And since there are almost no non-Democrats among the paper's reporters and columnists, they can get caught in an echo-chamber of liberal prejudices and assumptions. Raines is also a Southern white liberal from Alabama, a man eager to prove - even to the point of excess - that he isn't some Southern bigot. He won a Pulitzer for an excruciating, guilt-ridden memoir of his black nanny when he was a kid. So he over-shoots.
But there is also a creepy, paranoid hatred of the current president that is difficult to miss among the chief columnists at the paper. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, almost universally, they hate Bush in the way that some extreme conservatives once hated Clinton. Payback, perhaps. For one of its most virulent Bush-haters, former theater critic Frank Rich, the war on Baghdad is entirely devoted to distracting Americans from the failure to deal with 9/11: "[W]hat the administration is mainly hoping is that a march on Baghdad will make us forget about Al Qaeda, wherever it may be lying in wait." That's perilously close to accusing the president of treason, of committing American troops to combat for the cynical purpose of domestic p.r., deliberately ignoring a current, more dangerous threat. The Times' error-prone economics columnist, Paul Krugman, also regularly calls the president a cynical liar, and a member of a criminal corporate elite deliberately engaged in robbing the American people in order to enrich a few wealthy friends. These major voices are not simply anti-Bush for good, defensible reasons. They have entered the realm of conspiracy theories, knee-jerk suspicion and profound cynicism about an administration thrust into one of the most dangerous national security crises in decades. More conservative voices have been purged. After criticising the new direction of the Times as early as last January, I was subsequently told that Raines had barred me from further contributions to the paper. That's entirely his prerogative, of course. But it helps reveal the closed mind now running the most influential paper on the planet.
Recently, there have been signs of improvement. In what Times-watchers viewed as a stunning and rare internal rebuke, the man who lost out to Raines in the race to become the new editor, Bill Keller, penned an op-ed two weeks ago, all but chastising his boss. "The three Republican foreign policy luminaries who have been identified in the press as skeptics „ Mr. Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Henry Kissinger „ spend much of their time courting well-paying clients who would rather not rock boats in the Middle East," wrote Keller. He went on: "I say 'identified as skeptics,' but in the case of Dr. Kissinger that should be 'misidentified.' The Äber-realist's recent commentary in The Washington Post, which some have construed as cautionary, seems to me to be as forceful an endorsement as Mr. Bush could want of a pre-emptive military ouster in Iraq „ and sooner rather than later." When a top Times-man concurs with conservatives in criticizing his own paper's grotesque distortion of the truth, you can see that it's not only outsiders who are worried by the damage Howell Raines has done. In the last week or so, to be fair, the war coverage has been far fairer and more factual, although it's anyone's guess how long that will last.
So when you hear talk of a growing debate about the Iraq war in America, it's useful to know who exactly instigated it and who the major players are. One of the most remarkable things is that the Congressional Democrats have been extremely quiet in this debate. They know the risks both of getting on the wrong side of a popular war president and also of skewing the national discussion to matters of terrorism and war. They want to keep the country talking about corporate excess and prescription drug benefits, the issues that will benefit them in the upcoming Congressional elections. Some of them are actually disturbed by what the Times has accomplished. They fear that war is inevitable and that if the debate about it dominates national discussion this autumn, the Republicans could win back the Senate and gain in the House. The real opponents of the war in America are therefore outside the elected political branch, and are really three-fold: the New York Times, the men who left Saddam Hussein in power in 1990 and who are thus partly responsible for the current crisis (Scowcroft, Powell), and gun-shy military brass, who also opposed the first Gulf War. The three have worked in tandem during the dog days of August to prevent a war. And they have made great headway, as polls have shown a slow decline in public support. But so far, this has been a phony war - between newspaper ideologues and security has-beens defending their own complicity in Saddam's survival. Soon, the real debate will take place. The president will speak. The Congress will vote. And the war, despite Howell Raines' posturing and hysteria, will, barring unforeseen events, almost certainly follow.
September 1, 2002, The Sunday Times of London copyright © 2002 Andrew Sullivan
Most certainly. Thanks, Jean.
Who was it that said, the other day, that there is nothing worse than a Southern liberal (someone on Fox News?)? And Raines is a Southern liberal.
He is destroying the paper - and for that we should all be happy. In the old days, the NY Times and the Washington Post ruled the roost and they could hide their liberalism. Now there are too many media outlets and it's no longer easy to hide.
I stopped my subscription to the Times years ago and it doesn't seem like I'll be changing my mind any time soon.
September 14th is the day the President fires back. I'm waiting patiently.
I'd ping my Sullivan list, but I left on vacation with my laptop, but forgot to forward all of my ping list. D'OH!
Pinging my lisis will resume Monday, Sept. 9.
Sullivan really nailed little Howell's butt to the wall. I wish this had appeared in the Washington Post. Hehehehe... The fact that Sullivan is no longer allowed to contribute to the NY Times because he doesn't walk in lock-step says it all.
Indeed, shows how much editors at the 'vaunted' Gray Lady 'relish' lively debate. ;^)
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