The Grey Lady is a syphilitic old whore. Soon may she expire. Bury her deep and place a stone over her sufficient to keep the evil old baggage from ever crawling out again.
The NYT is a brilliantly run business. Amazing in its design production and manufacture. But the content is, and has always been, much overrated. And I am not remarking here on political slant. If the Times was worth cutting down trees for, it would not have to be sold so aggressively and unscrupulously.
I speak as a recovering victim of the Sulzbergers and the Ochsen and their ruthless flogging of their mediocre rag.
At the tender age of nine, I was torn from my studies and hauled off with some twenty or twenty-five of my schoolmates for a tour of the NYT. Where the rule was written, I don’t know, but a tour of the Times was required for all grade-schoolers in my day.
The only thing that I and millions of other kids like me remember from that tour were the presses. We were branded by those huge machines and the brand was New York Times. The scale, the noise, the giant whirl of steel and paper were indelibly imprinted. We were every one of us future customers.
Let me amend that. We were already customers but we didn’t pay directly for the privilege. Our school, like many others, subscribed to the Times weekly student supplement. And we nine, ten, eleven and twelve year olds read the Times student supplement faithfully whether we liked it or not because we got homework and tests based on it.
By the time I finished grade school, I’d had so much of Sulxy and Oxy’s fish wrap shoved down my throat that ‘newspaper’ was synonymous with ‘Times.’ In high school, citing the Times in class discussion put you in good with the teach. Citing an editorial scored big. The smartest kids in school demonstrated it by how far they could get in the Times crossword. The NYT was a mainstay source in writing papers.
I was thoroughly brainwashed. For years I labored under the conviction that someone who didn’t read the Times every day was uninformed. Ashamed though I am to admit it today, I reached a point of such intellectual depravity that I forced myself to read articles in the Times in which I had no interest whatever. Reading the NYT editorial page was a near religious obligation. Lord help me, I even read Anthony Lewis. The most boring man in America. Faithfully. Several times a week. I cringe to think of it.
At some point in my life I found out that the NYT had for years suppressed news of what was being done to European Jewry under Hitler. I read that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger refused to acknowledge kinship to European family members he could have rescued and who were subsequently murdered. It is brooded about the kosher circles I travel that Sulzberger Sr’s progeny who run the Times today take umbrage when strangers mistake them for lowly Jews when even a blind man can see they’re High Episcopal.
Anyway, I’m happy to say I’m off the Times and recovering nicely. If any fellow victims of the NYT want to join in a class action suit for damages from the NYT I’d like to hear from them. Also from all those diagnosed with cancer who feels it may be attributable to years of carcinogen newsprint on their fingers.
