Gray Lady Up: Jill Abramson’s Reign Begins at the Times
Abramson has also “tried to navigate between goals that sometimes collided — seeking more diversity and trying to promote a new generation of editors, yet not depriving the paper of those with experience and wisdom.” Yes, this is an either/or situation: you either hire and promote based purely on merit, or you don’t. There can be little doubt about which method currently is in favor at the Times. One male correspondent told Auletta, “She plays favorites, it is said. Especially for women.” Hope you didn’t use the company email system to say so, fella! Twenty newsroom jobs are about to be axed.
Ah, but noticing the sharp edges of a woman is itself sexist, a sure sign of a double standard, is it not? Not really. Howell Raines, the editor from 2001-2003, was fired, in part because of his insistently obnoxious personality and in part because of his disastrous decision to hire and prominently place an inexperienced and not obviously qualified young reporter, Jayson Blair, whose name is now synonymous with fictitious reportage. Abramson’s role in publishing some stories whose veracity has also been questioned — the Judith Miller WMD reports on Iraq — is disputed. She says that Miller, though a member of the Washington bureau Abramson managed, was allowed to operate outside normal channels.
One member of the chipper, sunny family that is the New York Times compared Raines and Abramson this way: “Unlike Howell, she is not mean. Jill is a nice, caring person. … She doesn’t enjoy torturing people. So much of her negativity is unintended.” So she tortures people only by accident, or with regret.
Another victim of torture at the Times is fact, which increasingly gets thrown in the iron maiden so that more space can be given to opinion. In an essay on recent campaign books such as Game Change, Abramson derides what she calls the “attitude-driven ‘reports’ on cable TV,” meaning Fox News. But Auletta drily remarks that “The Times today offers opinion on its editorial page, in business-section columns, in political stories only sometimes marked ‘News Analysis,’ and in the Sunday Review, which falls under the editorial-page editor” but used to be part of the news department. The editorial-page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, openly worries that “the news report can be undermined, particularly in the highly partisan, accusatory time we live in, if we mingle news and opinion.” Abramson’s predecessor, Bill Keller, suggests a solution: Even more opinion! Keller says the paper should “get beyond commodity news … to add meaning to it. To help readers organize the information into understanding.”
As for whether Abramson agrees with this view, Auletta drops a hint that the critique of liberal bias “will not be lessened by the elevation of a woman brought up in a liberal-Democratic household on the West Side of Manhattan who worked for liberal Southern Democrats and wrote a book asserting that Clarence Thomas probably lied.” In other words, what Abramson called “attitude-driven ‘reports’” are here to stay.
During the 1st Gulf war I bought the NYT every day to obtain hard information on the military build up and war plans.
I have not even looked at the Times in about 8 years now, it is so hopelessly biased and discredited due to its repeated brushes with shoddy journalism. It has had to discard several “journalists” for making things up. It’s marxist slant permeates its stories which is laughable because of the demonstrably failed record of socialism which it continues to champion. When I come across a Times story on the internet I am automatically suspicious as to its credibility, I assume it is inaccurate. Such is the state of disrepair with this publication. If it is the “paper of record” then journalists have a serious problem with reality.
Come to think of it, that jouralistic belief explains volumes.
Good luck Abramson, your going to need it. Good luck with your managerial style too, you sound like a real princess of a boss.
Sounds like she is going to turn the office into some sort of modern amazonian slave ship. Here’s to the coming Sulzburger chapter 11.
it has been more than eight years since I read a times. and will be much longer befor I do again. I wouldn’t even use them for wrapping fish,
I prefer actual news to the press.
I used to read the New York Times on a daily basis until about 1998 or so. About that time it occurred to me that what I was reading was more opinion than fact. So I went cold turkey, and simply stopped reading the paper. As more and more stories emerged here on PJM and elsewhere about the veracity of what was being reported and the extreme left wing slant of the paper, I began to despise the paper I had once loved. I have since come up with a slogan that fits the paper beautifully: All the fiction that fits our views, that’s what we print as news.
Samizdat – Chapter 11 is too good for the Times. I’d rather see it in Chapter 13.
Jack,
Sounds like you and I had similar experiences in deciding to stop reading the NYT.
Regarding bankruptcy, unfortunately the NYT Corp. probably has secured and unsecured debt in excess of the jurisdictional limits for qualifying as a chapter 13 debtor. I am afraid 11 and 7 are the only chapters available to it.
A long time ago I came up with this slogan:
ALL THE NEWS WE FIT TO PRINT.
Adam – If only it were news. The Times is so factually challenged that most of what it prints is fiction.
Another slogan for the NYT is “All the news that fits our views.
Before we all start hoping for the demise of the NYT, remember that it does still have an important place in society: When those of us west of the Hudson River see someone carrying the NYT, we have a reasonably good idea that we are dealing with some form of liberal hipster doofus.
BIG LOL! I am from the NE, but I was in a Starbucks in South Carolina recently. There was a line, and when I got up to the counter I told the young lady that I wanted to pay for a newspaper. She said “Which one?” I blurted out, “The Wall Street Journal of course. I don’t read that other stuff.” The man behind me said “That a girl!” Whereupon all the other people in line started saying how much they hate NYT….
Lefty doofuses will have to settle for carrying Rolling Stone or Wired.
Paul from Hamburg, remember: to a New Yorker, anything west of the Hudson or south of Lawn Guylunt doesn’t even exist.
I occasionally have to take the subway and casual observance shows the Times is not worth the pixels you are taking up to write about it. There was a time when if you went into a subway car at least one person was reading the Times. If it was a business crowd maybe most of them. Now you can travel for days and never see anyone with a copy. The paper is thin, dead and must have a slim profit if any at all. Jill is there because the office politics is bigger than the paper itself.
I am now a daily subscriber to and reader of the Wall Street Journal, but I was once a daily subscriber to and reader of the New York Times. I, however, became so sick of the lunatic op-eds and editorials, the biased “reporting” and the disloyalty to America in the New York Times that I cancelled my subscription. As one book correctly analyzed, the New York Times is guilty of journalistic fraud. When I now check out the New York Times, it is only to see what idiocy the New York elite leftists are saying.
Hopefully, Abramson will drive the New York Times into bankruptcy and extinction. America will be a better place without the cessspool called the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal became a better newspaper without Abramson.
Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas has shown himself to be a superb U.S. Supreme Court justice.
The NY Times will come back with a roar that will be heard around the world, sir. Remember, put a woman in charge and all will be wonderful. I mean, take Carly Fiorina (please!); look at the wonders she worked at Hewlett Packard!
Here’s hoping the NYTimes, under the leadership of WOMAN, receives the reward it so richly deserves.
Do you mean an Obama bailout?
What turned me against the New York Times was their sense of entitlement (along with the Washington Post) and near breathless glee in their “Pentagon Papers” episode.
I thought, “Who elected them?” …..and, don’t give me any of that “free speech” stuff.
The NYT was the sensationalist “Wikileaks” of that era….and that is not a compliment.
The wonderful thing about Pinch’s multiculturalism combined with his financial acumen in running the paper over the past nearly two decades is by the time he leaves, his legacy will probably include not just the first female executive editor and African-American No. 2 person, but the first Hispanic owner of the Times in Mexican billionaire Carlos Sim, since the Paper of Record figures to be needing more and more of Carlos’ bailout money over the next few years.
I was thinking along the same line when reading the comments and thought when Carlos takes over he will rename the paper, Viva! la Ciudad Times.
Thanks, Mr Kyle Smith;
…..forgot to add above that I liked this….”gynocratic Paper of Record.”
Nice.
A pretty good description of a nut house, as if we needed another one. I suppose it matters somewhere who mangles the news and pimps for the Democrats. But why such garbage should center on the sex of the person at the top matters only to the loons forever in search of new causes. And I mean loons.
Sex matters.
Gender matters.
They “matter” because we’re simply not “wired” the same way. It’s not looniness at all.
It’s pragmatism.
The worst thing about today’s NYT, in my opinion, is not the biased coverage (although that is obviously quite bad.) It is all the stories that they purposely ignore or bury on the bottom of page 14. People who read only the NYT have been ignorant of/uninformed about Solyndra, the NLRB/Boeing story, Black Panther voter intimidation, Fast and Furious, lots of bad news on the economy, and more. I exaggerated when I said I never read the NYT because I force myself to skim it on the weekends. I like their business section ironically enough, and I do believe it is important to get news from varied sources. It is often quite instructive just to compare the front pages of the NYT and the WSJ to see what gets covered when, where, how and how much. On the other hand, there ARE certain stories the WSJ does not cover: a recent long feature on fat infusions to give transgender people ‘curves’ and how some shoddy jobs were shrinking leaving these poor souls deformed was a classic NYT story….
Ofcourse, they are famous for burying the holocaust.
Don’t forget the Ukranian Genocide.
I usually buy the Times on Friday and Saturday for the most difficult crosswords of the week. An added bonus is that those 2 days provide just enough scrap to pick up a week’s worth of shit from my 3 dogs.
The paper’s downfall was all but inevitable when “Pinch” received his nickname. Punch begat Pinch. And he hasn’t even met those expectations.
The New York Times? People still read that thing? These days, the Times is just another reason to read PJ Media every morning. Within a few years, I doubt the Times will even be open, other than as a small Internet web site. Even then it will have serious competition from the Huffington Post. The New York Times will be going the way of the LP vinyl record, as well it should.
The New York Times used to be available in all the airports and hotels, and I would read it when I travelled. That was before the run-up to the war in Iraq, when I started reading MORE of the NYT, and comparing it with other news available online.
The New York Times is no longer a news organization. They don’t do any fact-checking.
The latest humiliation is that the San Diego Union-Tribune fact-checked a New York Times hit piece on Darryl Issa, and then refused to print it, printing instead a story listing the major factual errors, and requesting clarification.
I thought they were on a trajectory to be bankrupt already. I’m not sure if the paywall is back, because I don’t read the website. They don’t inform, entertain, or pay me for my time.
Newsweek sold for a buck, which proves there are some gullible fools and Times readers left.
Rearranging the seats on the deck of the Titanic while the band plays on.
My dog misses the op-ed pages of the NYT.
Has anybody heard this woman speak?
She has possibly the single most repulsive female voice and verbal delivery I have ever heard. I know I’ll burn in hell for just bringing this up, but give it a listen and tell me you’d want to spend more than about ten seconds in her company.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Dg23tQu_Qf4#!
Ken Auletta called it “..The equivalent of a nasal car honk, it’s an odd combination of upper- and working-class…The writer Amy Wilentz, a college roommate of Abramson’s, has said that the accent probably has something to do with trying to sound a bit like Bob Dylan…”
Poor Bob.
Another bitter liberal gorgon with the voice and face she deserves.
You might have warned readers about that video. It’s Jar Jar Binks in drag.
Aaaah! My eyes! My ears!
Wow!
That video brought back a lot of memories…none of them good.
I can’t imagine anyone sitting through the entire interview, 5-seconds was all I could take.
Jill Abramson, and Jane Mayer, have always symbolized to me the how great journalism used to be before the age of PC, and Post-Modernism herd-think.
She talks like she is on dope. Nor is she eye friendly. Obviously cuts her own hair. And does not believe in make up. No wonder the men have fled.
Oh, yes, hers is an annoying voice. I just watched one interviewer ask her the one thing she will change at the paper. She wants shorter stories. 1800 words is sometimes too much. I guess she must be shooting for either the ADD readers or the ones who buy People magazine.
So, a perfect fit. Only budgetary constraints keep this assemblage out of our local library, but I’m afraid that one of our local message-compilers is in the NYT stable (sty? In just the “unkempt place” sense of the word. Too many followers of Mohammed are catered to for a swine-pen… well, that works, too.) so the umbrella has much the same sanitized coverage and holes. Fair enough, sorta. I remember when different biases predominated, and there was no accessible-to-all forum for response by readers. Mixed blessing both ways on that.
I am sure that any competent male employees of the times, who might possibly have been in the running for the post, were it based solely on merit, are none the less celebrating this liberal victory, and are ecstatic at finally overcoming, after a long bitter struggle, their 160 year legacy of sexism.
“hoist with his own petard”.
Jill Abramson is the perfect individual to lead The New York Times into the oblivion that it deserves. The end will take a while, because the splendid work of previous generations of genuine journalists built the tremendous equity in the NYT brand. But every brand ultimately collapses if it is abused, exploited and cheapened (see General Motors, Remington, Kodak, and others). May Jill Abramson’s doctrinaire left-wing advocacy and arrogant personality be forever associated with the financial demise of the NYT.
Back in the 60′s and 70′s, my Dad, a scientist and collge professor, got sick of reading about “alleged persecution of Soviet Jewry” (empahsis on the alleged), and switched to the then-conservative Daily News. The NYT, which I often call America’s premier anti-semitic newpaper for its NYC coverage – forget about Israel – was never what it was cracked up to be. You could tell a newpaper’s political slant (probably still can) just by the reported atttendance numbers at various demonstrations.
The main problem was that it had a lock on the news cycle (see Bernard Goldberg, “Arrogance”). Does it still?
How does the Times manage to meet payroll and when are the laws of economics going to kick in with these guys?
As noted above, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is throwing huge wads of cash at the NYT. If his loot ever runs out, George Soros will happily step in.
It’s easier and cheaper to have opinions than facts.
Forty years ago, as an undergraduate at a university in upstate New York, one of the high points of my week was to sit down with the Sunday NYT and a pot of coffee. It was what I needed to get through the bleak winters of that area. Oh boy, how things have changed.
To call the NYT that is offered today a fishwrapper is an insult to the fish.
I have not bought or read the Times in over a decade, and feel that it’s demise cannot come too soon, Carlos Slim’s billions notwithstanding.
For quite a while I subscribed to the paper daily. Then I got the Sunday edition; I like a paper to throw around my apartment on Sundays and the local paper, the Detroit Free Press, is relentlessly trivial and can be fully read in half an hour or so.
The Times now costs something like $6.00 and I can go to the library, copy the puzzles, and in a half hour or so read anything worth reading from the library’s copy.
It’s too bad; we could use a good national paper and USA Today isn’t it.
Back in the early sixties, Mad Magazine published the comment re the NY Times tagline: “all the news that fits, we print”.
Were they thinking parody or was they prescient?
Just tell her PLEASE don’t mess with the crossword puzzle!!!
From what she sounds like and says, (shorter stories etc), you’ll be lucky to get connect-the-dots from The Weekly Reader or Highlights for Children.
How is this any different than what men have been doing for centuries? A few months of it and you’re already whining?
unlike women they created these institutions. How’s that for one difference?
Or how that these women rode in the name of “equality” (and crying against what “men have been doing for centuries”) when what they mean is “female only”? Created nothing, achieved nothing, but want everything.
“A few months of it and you’re already whining?”
months?
http://www.avoiceformen.com/men/mens-issues/bias-against-men-expands-education-gap/
let’s just say that it didn’t occur to many of us that “empowered” women will behave like the POS they made out the men to be.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/01/feminist-corruption.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=1319665&postcount=39