Oh, No — the Times, It Ain’t a Changin’
Wouldn’t it have been refreshing if the New York Times had admitted it had a big problem and brought in some “new blood” to solve it? Someone who doesn’t represent yet another iteration of the brain-dead New York leftyism of its current boss Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, who’s been running it into the ground for almost two decades now?
Maybe I’m being unfair to Jill Abramson, and I actually hope I am. Maybe she only looks and sounds like the “same old, same old” and will bring a breath of fresh — and even politically incorrect — air to the Grey Lady. But what hope is there when she goes out of her way to tell us that, at her home on the Upper West Side when she was growing up, receiving their daily Times was like a religious experience, because her family believed that “if the Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” That was never true — witness the Stalin-coddling of Walter Duranty in the ‘30s and the Castro-sanitizing of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, to name only a few flagrant examples — but it’s probably even less true now.
There was a time — I’m thinking of the A.M. Rosenthal era — when the Times wasn’t always totally in the bag for what I call “leftyism.” Rosenthal and his assistants probably rarely, if ever, voted for a Republican (except maybe John Lindsay, Jacob Javits, and Nelson Rockefeller, who epitomized “progressive” Northeast Republicanism), but they still retained some intellectual honesty. They could separate themselves enough from their beliefs to recognize — albeit perhaps grudgingly, at times — facts. The “Pinch” edition of the Times is almost totally at one with its pathetically parochial belief system and has been steadily changing itself from a news medium to a thought filter that enables liberals to avoid any contact with what they dread most — reality.
I remember so clearly the moment when my growing doubts about the reliability of the Times crystallized: It was the morning of the big “exposé” about the 2000 election. As everyone at the Times knew beyond question, and which it had appointed itself to prove, George W. Bush had “stolen” Florida and thus the presidency. The Times had been first among not-quite equals in a huge journalistic safari (perhaps the last gasp of the post-Watergate glory days of the American daily press) that went into deepest darkest Florida in the days after Gore conceded in order to bring back the pelt of the great infamy. Yet on that morning, in the form of a relatively smallish headline on page 1, it … didn’t. The head was a mealy-mouthed excuse for the huge, bold “J’accuse!” that Times readers had been so eagerly awaiting.
I read down the oddly oblique, sheepish paragraphs impatiently, until, at about the sixth or seventh one, I encountered the big news: The big expedition had found that Bush had actually won Florida by 537 votes. Not exactly a landslide, but according to the Times’ own parameters perhaps one of the biggest examples of “man bites dog” ever. Something they had known in their DNA to be true — something as obvious as the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow — had been shown to be false by their own hand! Not only that, but all the partisan caterwauling, all the nasty, deliberate poisoning of the W presidency by the Democrats and their allies on the left — all the threats of waving the bloody shirt of fraud forever and ever — had been utterly trashed. Like a crazed Samson, the Times had pulled down its temple of lies on its own head.
Mr. Durstewitz,
My wife receives the NYT ‘Travel’ section every week from an Illiberal colleague for that person knows we enjoying traveling for holiday. Even the ‘Travel’ section is so out-of-touch with its readers, suggesting ~$200-$400 a night hotels and as pricey excursions to boot.
Yes, we still accept the ‘Travel’ section but peruse it just as quick as gamblers looking at their day track bets from the day prior.
NYT Travel Section:
See the Pyramids, or perhaps you would prefer the Hagia Sophia. >:)
Nah.. we try to avoid areas the Muslims deface and destroy.
In Rabat, Malta next to Saint Paul’s catacombs is St. Agatha’s catacombs. There you’ll see paintings of Agatha and other Christian’s face paintings scratched beyond recognition by then ‘peaceful Islamic conquerors’.
They could put Joseph Pulitzer as editor-in-chief and it still wouldn’t save the Times. They just don’t get it. The Internet has killed print media for good and the Times just hasn’t caught up to that fact yet. You will always have local papers (because of their specialized advertisements), but the huge daily newspapers like the Times are a thing of the past. I’m just surprised they’re still open and have not totally become an Internet paper. Within the next three years, I’m sure they will.
Sad as it is – and for me it is very VERY sad to contemplate – the reality of this world is that when a business or industry – views as a while – loses status and value – it is marked by a transition to female control and management. In colder words – they couldn’t find a qualified man to take the crappy job at a price (be it in money, status, or control) that the ownership was willing to pay. Ms. Abramson is willing to take less of at least one – maybe of all three ( and of the three my bet would be that she is under-demanding the ‘control’ aspect, viewing her comments on the current perfection of the paper) – so she gets the job.
If all the people who know the NYT is baloney would simply stop buying and reading it–as I did about forty years ago–the sorry old rag would fold up.
No article has asked (so far) why Keller received such a large demotion. That is the first thing every reader asks himself, even before reaching the end of the paragraph.
Perhaps he told Pinch that he is refusing to continue the shameless daily lying, and ordering his subordinates to do the same. Or perhaps Pinch told him of some even more extremely sleazy, dishonest, corrupt things that he was going to require the NYT staff to do in the near future.
I think we will eventually hear the reason, or see it via upcoming activities at the NYT.
Things reach equilibrium. The circulation of the NY Times will continue to fall until it matches the value of the content.
Abramson will, judging by her comments, speed the process.
Pinchy will eventually have to sell Kruggles, Tom Terrific, MoDo and the rest of the rollicking crew to Soros, who will pledge to keep them all in good style forever out of his pocket change from betting against the dollar. Kruggles, in particular, will savor that irony.
heard her whiny feminazi voice on PBS news last night – she is definitely on something.
If Marvel Comics re-invented themselves like the NYT, Iron Man would still be stomping around like a gold Golem kicking Kruschev in the rear and Peter Parker would still be getting “beaten up” by Flash on the way to science class.
The Washington Post was also once a great paper. While in France, I used to get the International Herald Tribune when it was a combined effort of the Post and the NYT. Sadly, once the NYT ended the Post’s participation the leftist slant increased so much I just stopped buying it.
I also stopped buying the Post except for the Sunday edition. (Still like the Samarai Sudoku and my daughter likes the comics.)
There are apparently still enough leftists who enjoy being spoon fed the party line, to keep the carcasses from immediate decay, but it is hard to see a future for either of them. I also read the NYT many years ago, but quit the paper and now seldom bother to read their web articles because there is just too much filtering, slant, and the occasional case of just making it up.
The Post is part of the Democrat Ministry of Information — no question about that — but it retains some intellectual honesty. It’s not a total thought-conditioning machine like the Times, an honest motto for which would be: “All the slant that fits.”
Jeff – I feel exactly as you do, down to realizing that the NYT was pretty good under A.M. Rosenthal and that it deteriorated quickly after he was no longer editor. The real problem is at the top. (The fish stinks from the head.) While Pinch Sulzberger is publisher, the paper will continue to slide downhill. My motto for the times is: All the news that fits our views, we print.
As for the Washington Post, I thought that when Lalley Weymouth took over, the paper would improve. No such luck. I think the masthead on the editorial page says it all: An Indpendent Newspaper. When you have declare that you are an independent newspaper, that means you’re not.
Salmonella? Why not just ay it: e. coli.
From the pig sty to the trough, hello Jill Abramson. I kind of liked Bill Keller, an invisible man who like a cigar store Indian would be routinely trotted out after some Times atrocity to mumble,”we stand by our story”. No mater what the degree of distortion or exposure of dishonesty, old Bill and the Filth he worked for always were standing by their story.
I do believe the pig Jill Abamson was one one of the smear artists who defamed Clarence Thomas, so she has a pedigree and the appropriate credentials. Everything these savages have stood for is collapsing around them, every policy, the very basis of their beliefs. If they ever had beliefs.
Re: The Times’ 2000 election recount coverage — as biased as it might have been they finally did suck it up and admit their hopes and dreams were dashed by reality. But you have to wonder if something similar were to happen in the 2012 election (especially if the GOP nominee facing Obama were someone like Palin) if the Times in it’s current form would have even that amount of intellectual honesty to to the same, given how much their new editrix was involved in pushing the Anita Hill story during the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Promoting Jill Abramson is really a very clever preemptive move. As the anti-American media goes into jihadi mode over the possibility of a Palin campaign, it must try to defend against claims that opposition to Palin is, on it’s face, anti-female sexism. What better way to try to talk that point away that to have a commie propaganda outfit run by a nominal female?
Remember when any criticism of the Kenyan was claimed, by these same people, to be racist? They do. And, as there is no person on earth who the anti-American, commie propagandists fear or hate more than Palin, they preemptively appoint a female so as to be able to say, “No, we’re not sexist in our opposition; our cell is run by a female.”