The Bernie Madoff of Information
I’ve been traveling for two weeks — a statement which at this point should be accompanied by the shrieking violins from Psycho. What with expired passports, delayed planes, canceled planes and just plain planes, the experience reminded me of that time I was sent to Hell for all eternity. (Records mix-up — long story — happy ending.) In what felt like brief but beautiful waking moments between nightmares, I did get to visit the amazing set of a project I’m on, attend the Manhattan Institute’s terrific Hamilton Dinner featuring Cardinal Timothy Dolan, drop in on the great Greg Gutfeld at Red Eye, and then on the likewise great (or maybe I should say great-great-great) Sean Hannity — and slap my jaded peepers on some friends and family I don’t get to see often enough.
Part of this time, as those of you who were reading carefully may have deduced, I was in New York City — where I discovered something you may find shocking. There are still people who read the New York Times… okay, yes, that is shocking, but that’s not what I meant. Stop interrupting. There are still people who read the New York Times and believe they are getting the news.
I am not making this up. I talked to them myself. I met them in the city everywhere I went. They get their “news” from the New York Times and think they have a clear picture of the world.
For me, the New York Times has now become an organ of leftist disinformation. It scrambles teams of reporters at any trace of scandal on the right, and ignores solid evidence of scandal on the left. It races to cover any sign of global warming, but drags its feet when warming alarmists are revealed to have fudged the facts. It plays down acts of violence and incivility by leftists while allowing columnists to imagine them in rightists. It assigns left-wing reviewers to review conservative books and movies — and assigns left-wing reviewers to review left-wing books and movies as well. It publishes Paul Krugman, who admits he has a lousy record of predicting economic outcomes but never ceases to be certain his exploded theories are correct, who blames violence on right-wing incivility without proof and indulges in left wing incivility also without proof, who claims Europe’s economy is doing great except that it’s failing because of “austerity” (there’s a laugh!), and who all in all will say anything whether it makes sense or not in order to support the death-dealing dead letter of socialism. (To give him his due, he did write a book called The Conscience of a Liberal, which sits next to Intelligent French Theories and Feminist Humor on my shelf of books so thin you can’t see them.)
I used to read the New York Times because my father did. Then I scaled down to the Sunday Times, for the book review and The Week in Review. I think it was during the run up to Bill Clintons first election that I noticed the Times had abandoned even the thin pretense of objectivity they were halfheartedly maintaining. I discovered that National Review had a week in review feature and God’s Word was a much more worthy read on a Sunday morning. I wonder how bad the Times has gotten these twenty years…must be ridiculous now. I would like to quip here, but the leftist bent of the MSM is such a disgrace that I can’t.
Add http://www.steynonline.com to your list. Consistantly amusing and disturbing.
Forty years ago? That’s when my Dad, a collge professor at the time, got sick of reading that the presecution of Soviet Jewry was “alleged” and switched to the Daily News. (I loved it. Three pages of comics!)
persecution
Yes, well said, thank you.
Photo of the many clone-men of the Matrix would have been more precise.
used to read the Sunday NYT almost cover to cover (never have gotten the idea of fashion). 35 years ago it helped make my world less insular.
now, the opposite.
Hey Klavan O.T..C, good to see you’re posting again. We- some of us, anyway, missed your semi-regular insights.
I have a Bookmarks folder in Chrome labeled “Culture” with the following sites:
The New Criterion
Uncommon Knowledge
The Claremont Institute
Klavan on the Culture
Arts and Letters Daily
WSJ Books
City Journal
The American Interest Magazine
Just thought you’d like to know. If you have any further suggestions, let’s have ‘em, since about half those bookmarks come from K.O.C.
Gotta love that Redeye. It was a strange thing…I woke at at 3:30 AM and couldn’t sleep so I started clicking around, found this post, and watched the Redeye vid…and I live in Europe. The point being that I didn’t need to watch the thing at that ungodly hour. But that’s why it’s called Redeye. It must be tricky to keep up with that Gutfeld guy and his super-witty colleagues. Redeye’s got to be the best thing going on TV in that format. Absolutely brilliant. Sort of like a modern version of a screwball comedy. Sort of.
I live near NYC. One of my little private pleasures happens whenever someone ’round these parts gives me an opportunity to say, “Oh, I NEVER read the New York Times.” I take pains to inflect it with the exact same tone of smugness and easy superiority that others use to say, “Oh, I NEVER watch television” or “Oh, I NEVER read that kind of book/go to those movies.” The look on their faces upon hearing that is something to treasure!
Exxxxxxxxxx
actly.
Also if you are around one these people who thinks the New York Times is Bible and you are discussing a news story The New York Times didn’t print it isn’t true implying you are mmaking it up. I remember once The New York Daily News ran an exclusive story about how much electricity the city of New York wastes, coming a few days after Mayor Bloomberg wanted to force New Yorkers to curb their electricity use to fight global warming. I remeber the response I got was “Why I didn’t see that in The Times” So I responded “Well you didn’t because is was The Daily News that broke the story!”
Many years ago, right after one of their scandals, someone had a copy of the Times and asked me if I wanted to read it.
I told him that I wasn’t interested in fiction.
HE kind of liked it. (OK, you had to be there.)
Last week told one of my patients, a nice retired math teacher, that I didn’t read the Times, and she was shocked. The matrix is a good way to phrase it. I don’t live in New York now, and during the last Pres election was amazed for the how my Nassau county Republican family were slowly drawn into the Times orbit. Glad I got away. Definitely most people vote their social sensibilities, not principles.
Isnt that the Jewish comedy club? Couldn’t you get even one Goy to join the fun?
Pinch Sulzberger is a lapsed Episcopalian; he isn’t Jewish in any way.
Reading the Times is a waste of time!
Mr. Klavan – I’ll dispute with you when the NYT became no longer trustworthy – I would say, it was when A.M. Rosenthal stepped down (or was pushed down) from his editorship (sometime in the very early nineties). Afterwards, the NYT become so bad (as has the LSM) that the motto on the front page should have been changed to: All the news we can skew to fit our view.
A better version that I saw some time ago: All the news that fits, we print.
The Times is the daily sociocultural gazette or gospel of Reform Judaism, i.e., the modern secular Jewish religion (that is, religion without the absurd concept of “God.” Oy!). Pretty much everything you’ll read in the Times is what you’ll also hear at schul. “(Leftism) is the whole point of Jewish education,” as a Jewish friend once told me. As an ex-news editor, I can tell you this: The Times is a thought-conditioning system, a “narrative,” a “meme,” not a “news” vehicle. The only news (which it scrupulously wouldn’t carry) is that leftyism needs constant reinforcement against the constant buffetings of reality. What, ObamaCare couldn’t possibly work and is a fiscal disaster to boot? More ObamaCare! Single payer! Free everything for all! The whole enterprise is organized around supporting self-regarding absurdity with a healthy schmear of smug.
In terms of a new and more honest motto for the Gray Lady, how about: “All the news that slants.” Or: “All the slant that fits”?
All the News That Fits Our Views
How about “all the news that’s fit to distort or fit our agenda”? Either way, you got it right. I ditched the Grey Lady thirty years ago because I could no longer stand her persistent Israel bashing, which goes along with the left-wing agenda. I still know a lot of people, Jews at that, who take that rag to be the holy writ. There’s no accounting for human delusion and folly.
The Times went bad before WWII when it had Walter Duranty covering up the crimes of Joseph Stalin. The Times also downplayed evidence of the Holocaust. It has always been the Bernie Madoff of journalism.
I want to second what Walt in DC said. The NYT has been a far left rag since before the mind of man. The fact that PJM is running a “Walter Duranty Prize” should be your first clue. In the 1950s, NYTimes hack Herbert Matthews ran Castro’s US PR shop on the front page of the paper.
The NYTimes is now, and always has been, a leftist propaganda organ. Any pretense of objectivity, or fairness, was just that — a pretense.
I would also like to remind everybody that the NYTimes should never be referred to as the Times, without a geographic modifier. The Times is a newspaper that has been published at London, England, UK since 1785. Its reputation is such that many newspapers throughout the Anglosphere sought to appropriate some of its goodwill by using the name “Times”. All of them should carry a geographic modifier in order to distinguish them from the original. E.g. NYTimes, LATimes, and TimesIndia.
I finally realized the bias and basic false reporting of the NYT’s during the invasion of Iraq. If you recall, the Dept. of War allowed embedded reporters during the invasion.
The reporting coming out of the times was in direct opposition to the truth that was being shown on TV. It was too obvious to ignore that the Times reporting was a completely false narrative.
In other words….complete fallacies and lies!
You right wing, nut job conservatives are always complaining about the press. Somehow you’ve gotten the idea into your heads that journalists are not fair and impartial in their coverage. Let’s just get this clear once and for all (for the sake of the children).
The idea that our media is biased is not founded in reality. Our journalists go through rigorous training to identify and eliminate their biases. Just take a look at this transcript from a recent training:
Journalist 1: Are you biased?
Journalist 2: No I’m not biased, how about you?
Journalist 1: Nope.
Journalist 1: Do you think Fox news is biased?
Journalist 2: Of course. Everybody knows that. Those guys are a disgrace to the business.
Journalist 1: Do you think conservatives are evil?
Journalist 2: Duh!
Journalist 1: Do you think everybody has a right to a job and free healthcare?
Journalist 2: These questions are so stupid. Anybody with a brain knows the right answer to this question.
Journalist 1: Good job. We got a perfect score again.
As you can see, there is nothing to worry about. The real problem is with all of you conservatives who have adopted the wrong ideas. The world always seems biased when you are on the wrong side of it. There’s no bias in admitting what everybody already knows to be true.
I suppose, had there been newspapers in the days of Noah, those downplaying or ignoring Noah’s little “family endeavour” would have been considered accurate, fair, honest in their reporting. Noah’s family surely would have considered them biased, however. Which “view” was upheld by the ensuing events? Noah took his “reality” from a source far higher than his surrounding culture and paid little heed to the known error-based reality surrounding him.
The NYT have appointed themselves to the task of perpetrating the charade of the “left”, with what underlying motive I cannot say. I would venture that a scrupulous following of the money trail would reveal this. They are on about something other than “fair and balanced” reporting.
“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
this is occurring all over the planet, not just newspapers but tv channels, here in sydney the sydney morning herald may as well be a left wing lifestyle magazine, it’s so anti israel and filled with distorted opinions from the green left movement and various, marxist socialists who used to write in english papers until they got retrenched.
our national tv channel the abc is becoming like the bbc, it may as well just call itself hamas tv.
i don’t mind a reasonable mix of left or right issues and opinions but there’s no balance any more, it’s all just propaganda.
I’m sorry to read that. Really. I’ve some firsthand experience with you wonderful Aussies, more than a generation ago……please don’t go Pommie-BBC on me…..I used to be told that the Poms were thrown out of bars.
Who needs the NYT to see newspaper bias…
As a regumalator – guess where
– my friends and family in Cali would regularly report the End of the World courtesy of the LA Times, the SF Chronicle, the SJ Mercury, or some other rag….
I would try to dissuade them – but hey, who would you believe – a bureaucrat implementing the regumalations, enforcing the regumalations, writing compliance guidance for the regumalations, issuing permits or violation notices….
or a Twenty-something journalist with a degree in “journalism” (Agitprop) and a minor in Gay Studies who wrote her dissertation on post-post-heterosexism on the back of Soy Based creamer carton while working in a Marxist-Poetry-Kafka-Coffee house.
eyeroll … eyeroll … go ahead roll your eyes – this isn’t a suggestion – rollllll themmm before they bleed!
From the “whoppers” I heard – if Agitprop were actionable – Burger King could sue these newspapers for IP infringement.
The Big Lies were so Big – you’d have to be the Jolly Green Giant to fall for them.
The “conclusions” were so incorrect – they would have made Madoff blush in shame.
The “facts” were so wrong – just guessing that everything they said was “false” would have place one in the same league as Einstein… or heck, maybe even Spock!
People like you and Gutfeld are my goto guys for sanity.
The NY Times seems to be still in the grips of the prestige it formerly enjoyed, like the aging movie star who doesn’t quite get that her era has faded.
The fact that the bubble they exist in seems to be in tact, the paper still viewing itself as the trendsetter & the opinion shaper, is astonishing, to say the least.
What Pinch (the real one — not the talking paper on “Red Eye”) has done in the past 20 years is give in to what the hard left types in New York have wanted for years in turning the Times into a paper primarily of advocacy journalism.
Their anger over the years at The Paper of Record not being left enough for them spawned first the tabloid PM back in the late 1930s (one which mama Axelrod worked for, BTW) and later led to the founding of The Village Voice and the creation of the alternative weeklies around the country. The Times editors and the ruling Sulzberger-Ochs family members of the 30s through 80s were without a doubt liberal and they also engaged in advocacy reporting at certain moments. But Pinch took the paper into trivial advocacy reporting, starting about the time the paper decided to turn MoDo look on that Page 1 story of Kitty Kelley’s book on the Reagans that alleged Nancy’s affair with Frank Sinatra.
Pinch basically gave into the idea that, as long as it damaged the other side, no story was too minor (or ‘tabloid’) to give major treatment — basically the junk food version of investigative journalism, which at its worst leads to the paper paying out lots of $$$, as with the story they published in 2008 on John McCain’s alleged affair. Like MSNBC, or even “The Late Show with David Letterman”, once you decide that you’re going to target only one side of the political spectrum for your disdain, don’t be shocked when your audience numbers start falling through the floor.
Years ago, my liberal Aunt asked me if I subscribed to the New York Times. I told her that I used to, but my parakeet had died years ago. She gave me the blankest look, but her brother shot coffee out his nose laughing.
Expensive cage bedding, the NYT. Crap in it, and crap on it.
Americans have to accept that many of their beloved news agencies are no more and those shambling things wearing their skins, merely zombies going through the motions as zombies are wont to do.
Bernie Madoff was just stealing money. These people want your country.
And souls.
Not to mention your Coca Cola.
The sad part is the fact that the NYT (and it’s subsidiary the Herald Tribune) are widely read and believed by foreigners.
Try and talk about anything of substance with a Brit, Aussis, or Kiwi and you will hear only what was in the NYT last week.
My favorite bar game while working abroad was asking rebutting the “Bill Clinton is the greatest US Pres ever” meme. It was easy: “Ok. Name a policy. What did he do?”
As an old cartoon (circa late 1960s) once noted, there was a NYT reporter talking to a Pravda reporter:
NYT: We have a motto for our paper — All the news that’s fit to print.
Pravda: We too have motto — All the news that’s printed fits.
No difference anymore.
“…Paul Krugman, who admits he has a lousy record of predicting economic outcomes but never ceases to be certain his exploded theories are correct…”
This may be the last, but probably not, plug I put in for my book “Krugman and Reich, the Clownishness of Bearded Economists”, in twelve most sportive volumes, New York Tomes Books, 2010.
I would remind you that even before WW2 the “Grey Lady” was pushing made up wonders of the USSR while ignoring the deaths of millions in the workers paradise.
The problem is that the NYT is still a great newspaper with fine reporters, and it is also entertaining. There is no question that its editorial bias has recently become increasingly left-wing and also more obtrusive. But how else is one to know what is happening? News Corp. has pared down its reporting to almost nothing, and Fox and family are nothing but a pack of hounds barking in the dark, the fox having long since abandoned the field. The right produces the best commentators (like Klavan) but we don’t have an institutional structure for reporting facts as they occur.
I used to read the NYT every day, starting in the 1960s. About two decades back, they gutted the staff so you do not see true reporting but rather incomplete hack work.
Being a former intelligence offer and security analyst, I know how to spot quality and lies when necessary. The NYT simply does not do clear thorough research anymore, but rather just makes noise.
Come on, Andrew! That article contained links to Paul Krugman articles. Don’t you realize what would happen if someone accidentally clicked on one of them? Etiquette, man!
It’s all in the DNA of The New Yerk Times. From its inception the NYT has indulged in leaking secrets during war time – as far back as both the Civil War and WWII. It runs its own brand of yellow journalism, fake journalism, and today is nothing more than a mouthpiece and a shill. To be believe anything or value its content is way past over.
Terrible. Worst site design ever. I left immediately, came back just to say this.
Matthew Shepard was a young man in Wyoming who was robbed and murdered by two thugs in 1998. They tied him to a fence post where he froze to death. Shepard was homosexual so most people presumed the motive for the murder was hatred of homosexuals. The NY Times printed 145 stories about the case. In 1999, two homosexual men kidnaped, raped, and strangled a thirteen year old Arkansas boy named Jesse Dirkhising. The NY Times did not print a single story about the case. William McGowan, author of “Coloring the News” and the recent “Gray Lady Down”, asked the national editor of the Times to explain the disparity in coverage. The editor did not reply, so McGowan and everyone else is obliged to draw their own conclusion.
Great piece Andrew.
I am a masochist that continues to subscribe to this rag only to see what the other half (actually one-third) thinks.
From front page to op-ed, the “Paper of Record” has turned editorial bias into an art form. The editors are shameless, only a zealous Progressive could read this paper and see any credulity.
The capper for me (which may lead to cancellation) was the front page “scoop!” on Sunday that Ann Romney is actually rich and rides horses.
The horror!!!
In 10 years, the value of the SLIMES CORP haas dropped from 7 to UNDER 1 billion dollars! Cheer up everyone: we are going to live long enough to see the end of this fithy rag!
I love you, dude.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that)
But mostly what they think is that leftism is still liberal…
That bit right there is the whole crux of today’s political problem.
RE: “the New York Times trades on a reputation for solid reporting earned four decades ago”
You give them far too much credit.
“The reason is that the American media in general and the New York Times in particular never treated the Holocaust as an important news story. From the start of the war in Europe to its end nearly six years later, the story of the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times out of 24,000 front-page stories, and most of those stories referred to the victims as “refugees” or “persecuted minorities.” In only six of those stories were Jews identified on page one as the primary victims.” – History News Network, George Mason University
Supposedly they did write about Jewish suffering during WWI (and there was a great deal to write believe me) and got so burned by it that they stayed out of it.
Of course, that doesn’t explain the rest of the “respectable” press…
Whenever I get real mad at the Times (daily), I go to Google Finance and look at NYT’s income statement. Then I feel better. Ditto WaPo.
And another thing: the Times Business Section consists of (a) anti-business stories; (b) “diversity” stories; or (c) general interest stories with a leftist bent. You will never read a story about a business unless it is either being sued by Holder or led by a woman or a black. And the WSJ is not much better!
When I was learning to walk (I’m told) I used to tuck a Times under my arm.
By the time I was 9 I would walk to the corner to purchase the Times for 15 cents.Passer bys saw two legs carrying a paper. In 1952 I started reading the New York Times every day. I found it hard to watch the Jounal become a shill for the New Left. (It had real reporters all over the world. It covered N.Y.’s major industries (publishing and fashion) very well. But it deteriorated percipitusly with “Pinch” and LLYvelt. When a bad play reviewer became a pundet I began to skip the Times at breakfast (I’d be angry the whole day.) Finally I got fed up with the paper’s antisemitism.It had always been anti-Isreal but it shifted to anti-semitism in the 80′s and 90′s.
The tradgedy is there will never be a paper with the depth of coverage the Times had in it’s salad days.
I suspect that what ruined the NYT was the case NYT v. Sullivan. After that, they decided they could print any ol’ careless thing they wanted, because it was all opinion, anyway.
The New York Times has been caught printing fiction far too frequently. Now people have the means to detect the fiction, and the means to challenge it. If they ever decide to start fact-checking their stories again, they’ll thrive.