New Doc on Gray Lady Ignores Paper’s Institutional Bias
What’s missing beyond the obvious bias debate is a shout out to the blogs which keep newspapers honest. Yes, your friendly neighborhood blogger can’t embed in a war zone, although some, like Michael Yon, do just that. And where would news aggregator sites be without a paper like the Times to provide the necessary links?
But bloggers can hold reporters feet to the fire when their accuracy falters. They also bring unique skill sets your average reporter and his editor might lack. Who stood a better chance of understanding the nuances of Twitter in the WeinerGate scandal, a general assignment reporter or a blogger who works the social media beat because it’s his passion?
Page One touches on some of the newspaper’s bigger headaches, from the Jayson Blair scandal to reporter Judith Miller’s reportage on weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. Naturally, the former is dealt with briefly, and the latter lets some talking heads attack the paper from the left.
If there’s a breakout star in Page One it’s David Carr, the husky-voiced media reporter who is the paper’s loudest defender and most charismatic talent. He’s a curmudgeon and a bright wit, a tireless worker and a recovering drug addict. The newspaper is his life, and his full-throttled defense of it can’t help but stir one’s emotions.
Carr embodies the old-world journalist trying to adapt to our Facebook age, admiring some of the newer wrinkles but bemoaning them all at once.
“Is that a bridge to the future? Oh, wait. It’s the gallows,” Carr cracks when news of the first wave of iPads hits.
And then we get the occasional comment from The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel.
“I think we’re in a dangerous moment in American journalism,“ vanden Heuvel says in summing up the Times’ plight. It’s a sure sign of the film’s own biases that it would call upon such a far-left scribe as a voice of reason.
That doesn’t diminish the bigger messages afoot. Even those who deride the New York Times for its biases will acknowledge the role large newspapers play in the media landscape.
Page One raises the key issues facing journalism today that will affect the way consumers get news in the next decade. If the film had tackled the paper’s ideological blinders, a more accurate version of the problem would have emerged.
The lefties are unable to recognize their own bias because they feel that anyone to the right of Marx is a TEA Party extremist.
Davd Carr and the NY Times = Vladimir Posner and Pravda.
Please, give me a break here.
McGowan, Gray Lady Down addresses just this problem.
http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Down-Jayson-America/dp/1893554910
Attempting to talk about an institution’s biases with persons embedded within that institution is supremely difficult. The old line “water to a fish” comes to mind. Either the fish realizes on his own that he must be swimming through something, and elects to investigate its properties, or nothing happens and nothing changes.
Ultimately, what the Times will require if it’s to survive is a huge, illuminating blast of humility, most especially in its high editors. A bias of any sort in a news organ separates that organ from its audience attitudinally: the Elect preaching down to the Groundlings. For the paper to realize that it’s losing audience because the Groundlings have rejected that relation and have gone to seek less arrogant news sources is a humbling thing — and a paper with the Times’s exalted reputation will have a very hard time accepting it.
The New York Times is just trying to cling to its former reputation, even though now it is nothing more than a mouthpiece for liberal Democrats. And that dirty little secret is out now, so people naturally are looking at other sources for their news, expecially when it comes to them for free over the Internet. The Times is also being left in the dust by people like Andrew Breitbart, who is probably set to become the William Randolph Hearst of the Internet and of the 21st century. The Times still thinks it’s 1968, when in fact the 21st century is what’s putting it out of business.
I quit reading the New York Times after my heart attack. The paper’s biases ruined too many days. I could accept the fact that it was anti-Isreal. It always was. I couldn’t take its anti-semitism. As I never took Allen Rich seriously as a theater Critic, why should I take him seriously as an commentator on politics. I finlly gave up when its MiddleEast reported said “Sure Hezbollah was throwing Fatar members literaly off the roof, but think how the Palestinians have suffered.”
I would’ve called it “Gray Gardens Down”, the story of former aristocrats so lost in their own world view they they can’t figure out why the boy from down the street they sent to put a coin in Facebook’s slot never returned.
The Gray Lady has become the Red Hooker, the Pravda of the Democrat Socialist party, printing all the news that’s fit for the ears of Stalinist ideologists, ignoring anything that does not support its frank bias. Does the documentary mention that it can no longer get funding from US banks or financial institutions and is now paying high interest to Carlos Slim, the ruthless Mexican robber baron who will probably wind up with ownership?
Those who gleefully anticipate its early disappearance are sure to be disappointed. The cachet is too great for that to happen. Regardless of the destiny of its print edition it will continue as a news service and columnist syndicator, compete with AP and Reuters for international news, and serve the Malignant Socialist Media and the 30% or more of the electorate who have abandoned reason and judgement and would willingly replace our constitution with the Communist Manifesto.
Why are generals always prepared to fight the last war? They were trained by those who did fight the last war! It would seem, the Gray Lady must die to be born anew. Or it must just die and be gone.
Dem-Libs Behaving Badly: Sweeney, Susman, Et al
In Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, Ann Coulter draws direct parallels between the French revolutionists of the eighteenth century and twenty-first century American liberals. Our libs engage in comparable destruction, mindlessness, and disrespect for order and civility as did French mobs over 200 years ago.
We witnessed a prime example of such liberal behavior in Madison, Wisconsin when unionistas like the SEIU caused massive damage to the Capitol building to pressure Republican Governor Scott Walker into backtracking on his commitment to restore sanity to the Badger State’s finances. We saw it in the strong-arm tactics used to suppress legal town hall protests against Obamacare. It regularly occurs in vicious commentaries by the likes of MSNBC’s Ed Schultz.
(See previous posts on those behavioral gems.)
Those instances, however, pale in comparison to “official” Democrat liberal exhibitions of grossly disrespectful incivility and vile partisan insults. Dem-libs in positions of authority don’t usually tear up buildings or beat up lawful protestors or openly wish conservatives would kill themselves. They let their flunkies handle that end of the abuse spectrum but are very adept at a variety of other abuses.
American “progressives” from state houses to the State Department recently showed their true colors. Cases in point on the state level are New Jersey’s Democrat Senate President Stephen Sweeney and on an international level Ambassador to Great Britain Louis B. Susman.
Sen. Sweeney is disenchanted and upset with Jersey’s conservative Republican Governor Chris Christie over Christie’s perceived slights and state budget cuts, additions, and line item vetoes. Sweeney expressed his disenchantment and upsetment in no uncertain terms, including calling the governor a “bully and a punk,” adding, ”I wanted to punch him in his head.”
Not content with that nastiness and threat of violence, Sweeney drew upon his enviable grasp of popular culture and filmdom by comparing Christie to a well-known villain: “You know who he reminds me of? Mr. Potter from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ the mean old bastard who screws everybody.” He later reiterated his vulgarity by calling the governor “a rotten bastard” and “a prick.”
Classy, Stephen, classy!
See videos and the slanted report on NJ.com which fails to mention the New Jersey fiscal abyss caused by Sweeney and his Democrats and with something less than objectivity observes, “The Republican Bobbleheads will side with the governor again, and the vetoes will stand,” here: http://bit.ly/md8qVu
The good news is that neither Sweeney nor NJ.com have yet proposed murdering Gov. Christie in his bathtub ala Jean-Paul Marat or trotting out the guillotine.
They never employed the guillotine in Great Britain although Brits did favor the oubliette but some people there might like to see one or both used, figuratively, of course, in the case of Ambassador Louis B. Susman. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4964)