Page One: Gray Lady Down, the Documentary
Over at the Libertas film blog, David Ross reviews the recent documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, which is now available on DVD at Amazon, and in streaming format at both Amazon and Netflix. I haven’t watched the film yet though, for reasons that Ross explains in his bracing and lengthy (at least for a blog post) review. After taking a blowtorch to Thomas Friedman, Gail Collins, Alessandra Stanley, Michiko Kakutani, Paul Krugman, and other high priests of the very secular Times cult, Ross writes:
Whole books have been written about the Times‘ political biases (here), and the Times‘ own public editor has succinctly enough answered the question as to whether the Times is a liberal newspaper: “Of course it is” (here). In recent years, however, the Times’ biases have ever more blatantly trumped its journalistic ethics, a state of affairs unthinkable in the days of Abe Rosenthal.
“We don’t do hit jobs,” one editor assures a source while the cameras of Page One roll. “That’s not the business we’re in.” It is the business you’re in, at least these days. Exhibit A is the assassin’s bullet of a piece the Times published during the 2008 election in which it suggested, without anything you’d call evidence, that John McCain had been romantically involved with a lobbyist (here). The article is a slimy stew of anonymous rumor and innuendo. Even liberal stalwarts like The New Republic and The Washington Post derided its malice and irresponsibility. The article was all the more outrageous given the Times‘ refusal to investigate John Edwards’ very real affair at a time when he was a frontrunner for the Democratic VP slot. The female victim of the Times‘ smear filed a $27 million lawsuit, and the Times eventually issued a groveling apology (here). What was most remarkable about the article was that it appeared in the paper at all.
This story, and a similar recent attack on Rep. Darrell Issa (here), are far more damning than the more notorious Blair or Miller scandals, in my opinion. The latter represent institutional mistakes; the attacks on McCain and Issa represent institutional policy: a deliberate suspension of the usual journalistic ethics to further a partisan objective. As an amateur student of journalism, I can’t guess what motivates the Times‘ self-destructive tilting at windmills that have the capacity to tilt right back. Has the Times become a raving and delusional Quixote or is there some underlying financial logic to its self-repositioning as a rag of the left? The answer is unclear.
Page One has literally nothing to say about any of this. It admits that the Times, like nearly every other newspaper in contemporary America, is teetering on the edge of the abyss. It details plunging stock prices, newsroom layoffs, and stumbling attempts to devise new revenue models in the age of the Internet. These technological and macroeconomic challenges are very real, but Page One ignores the fact that Times has maximized its own vulnerability by systematically alienating more than 50% of its potential market (conservative and Red State types) and by producing a newspaper that’s so hard to enjoy at the sentence level, whatever one’s politics.
At the start of the 20th century, H. L. Mencken discovered Friedrich Nietzsche, assigned himself to the steno pool of Nietzsche’s übermensch army, and promptly went to war against the conservative bourgeoisie of America. As with the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens, it was fun watching a man armed with writing chops the level of Mencken’s fight a one-man battle with the heart of American conventional wisdom. In the first half of the 20th century, Mencken’s prose and its widespread influence helped to revitalize his profession.
But when everyone in his profession decides he’s the second coming of Mencken, the result is a uniformly punitive corporate snark that’s exhausting for the readers. (See also: disastrous results of an entire society drinking Nietzsche’s Kool-Aid. And no, that last sentence isn’t referring to what you think it is, but actually, this.) Today, it’s essentially the entire industry of Old Media that’s at war with half of America — with the Times’ HQ serving as the Bobo equivalent of Dr. Strangelove’s War Room — even as newspapers keep wondering why their readership and stock prices have crumbled.
That’s the Big Story here, and because the filmmakers share the same uber-elitist PC ideology as the journalists who make the inedible sausage at the Gray Lady, they’re either completely unaware of it, or simply look the other way. Ross’s review makes Page One sound like the equivalent of The September Issue, the documentary filmed inside Vogue magazine at the height of its fashion industry influence and gigantic self-importance in mid-2007. Similarly, if it serves any purpose other than to inflate the egos of its subject, Page One may very well survive primarily as a time capsule photograph of the swells parading the deck of the Titanic as the icebergs move that much closer into view.
The old New Yorker cartoon showing a view of the United States from Ninth Avenue pretty much fits the view of the people running the Times, even if their headquarters is one avenue to the east. Outside of the oases of Boston, the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. and the coastal areas of California between Marin and Orange counties, the Times’ staffers neither know much about the rest of the country other than their built-in prejudices, and really don’t care to learn anything new about those areas, because they feel the yahoos living there have nothing to teach anybody.
They’re also perfectly willing to justify double-standards on how they treat candidates because they know how bad the alternative would be. A story against John McCain, even if it results in a six-figure settlement to avoid a libel suit, is still justified even today in their minds, because no matter how chummy with the media Maverick was, he was going to be supported by them in the 2008 election, so he had to be destroyed. As others have noted, the GOP primary voters could turn around over the next 16 weeks and nominate the Boston Globe-endorsed Jon Huntsman and it wouldn’t make a difference — the Times would try to destroy him as well because of who would support him, and irregardless of who he is.
If indeed Romney becomes the nominee, I hope he knows that however chummy the media are with a centrist Republican, come the fall of an election year, as you said, the knives will be out — and extremely well-sharpened.
As McCain experienced, the romance will be over come July. At which point Romney will be treated as the Second Coming of Hitler if he’s the Republican nominee.
However, IMO Romney is not McCain. This game plan might not work so swimmingly for the Dems this time around.
“…even as newspapers keep wondering why their readership and stock prices have crumbled.”
I sometimes ask myself if they really wonder about this or they simply don’t care, it’s just “full speed ahead and damn the torpedos!” But then I see the NYT respond to profit shortfalls by raising the daily price 25%. Can they really be that clueless to not understand if folks ain’t buying your product for $2, they ain’t gonna line up around the block for it because it’s now $2.50? Does it even occur to them that such a price increase might drive even folks who LIKE their stupid rag to foresake it because they are cash-strapped as it is? It may really be that newspaper managements are so out of touch that they don’t have the sense to come out of the rain – or even understand what rain is (the chauffer always holds the umbrella for them, you see.) Well, this is why companies, industries and nations die. Sic transit gloria.
They don’t mind lying, because they think the ends justify the means.
They, like Chris Matthews in the clip below, think that they are allowed to lie.
Saul Alinsky taught them to lie, and of course when anybody internalizes injustice, they merrily apply it to everything else. So, people who have Saul Alinsky as a hero will lie, cheat, and steal.
Chris Matthews says that Saul Alinsky, his hero, taught that if you merely tell the truth, you can’t get anything done. That, of course is itself a lie. What you can’t get done in those circumstances is something that is against the self-interest of people, generally.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvng7TVf-wo
This is the huge, deadly error made by the Communists in Russia, and they cost their people millions of deaths and 70 years of tyranny, followed by still more decades of poverty.
We can do better than this. We don’t have to accept the big lie as a proper foundation for our public life.
I don’t have a problem with the Times or anyone else for that matter, having an agenda. However one assumes there is some moral imperative for such an agenda and if that imperative is believed in as far as being righteous and just, there is no reason to overreach by being disingenuous. I can respect an opponent if I think they are fair minded and don’t intentionally fudge facts or apply massive double standards.
The Times had broached its own credibility; one reads such papers because one wants news but that must be news that one can trust. If one doesn’t know when the Times is right on or simply lying, they simply cannot be trusted by anyone but their choir, which, as you say, they have been reduced to preaching to. If all a newspaper is is a source which reaffirms ones own view of the world, what is that?
The NYTimes is waiting for an Obama bailout, a ” to big to fail ” in the national interest.
Then of course the paper will go from party rag to party riches.
The liberal media, and the NY Times in particular, are engaged in a Hail Mary pass play. They are pulling out all stops to get Obama re-elected. The payoff will be either a bailout as mentioned, or a muzzle on the conservative blog sites, or both. After which, they can continue to deliver the news as they define it. If they fall short, it may be bankruptcy or a buyout.
For ideologues like Rosenthal, business ideas such as appealing to non-customers simply does not exist. He’ll risk the whole venture to maintain intellectual “purity”. If Obama gets a second term, The Times may just hit the jackpot. I feel a little sorry for the rank and file Times worker. It must be like being a sailor on board the Pequod under Captain Ahab.
The Times, in what most of us see as imprudential behavior (contempt for profit, driven by ideology), is symbolic of the actions of the Left writ large — a haughty disdain for accountability in any form. They go about their pernicious business as if they were secure in the knowledge that Nemesis is undone. How to explain?
It’s by belief that the unbounded confidence of the Left lies in their absolute conviction that they have already usurped sufficient political power to suppress and defeat the public will. Have they…?
Very well articulated. And, yes, I believe they have.
It is interesting that NY State has lost one seat, because of (I assume) falling population. This came up during the Wiener episode.
The next question would be: if you are an adventurous, young American, would you head for NYCity because that is where the action is… or would you head somewhere else? I don’t know, but I think the question is a good one.
The aspect of the NYT that defies credibility is not that the journalism is overtly socialistic, but that the management and the board have abandoned the free market principles upon which its past profitabilty and reputation were built. Intelligent ownership, aware that over 50% of the nation’s population (its ostensible target readership) leans toward the conservative. To dismiss your basic demographics is stupid to the point of suicidal. The NYT has become so doctrinaire, top to bottom, in its adoption of socialism that it is, pridefully, destroying itself in the cause of becoming the American Pravda – the official organ of a one-party Democratic Socialist Republic. They WANT to be mouthpieces.
Those who cheer its early demise, however, will be greatly disappointed. It is already entrenching itself in the internet and serving 90% of the nation’s newspapers as a news and columnist service. It will continue as a competitor to AP and Reuters and McClatchy long after its presses no longer roll. Now there’s a grim prospect! Will they all go down together? The really big mystery is.”Why is capitalism so dead in the newspaper and media business that nobody is catering to the majority except Ruper Murdoch?”
As for Alinsky: he took most of his rules from Herr Josef Goebbels, David Axelrod’s role model.
Mr Driscoll,
This exerpt is a gem…..thank you for writing it….
“…..the journalists who make the inedible sausage at the Gray Lady,….”
Several years ago Bernie Goldstiein wrote the book “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News”. In it he stated that liberal editors and publishers as well as reporters do not sit around all day trying to find ways to spin the news to the left. They unfortunately have been raised by the same kind of people, educated in the same institutions, work with the same kind of people, live in the same kind of areas as others of their same stripe.
When they say “no one I know ………..” they are speaking the truth. No one they know believes in gun ownership, deporting illegal aliens, fighting for freedom and democracy, that abortion for convenience is wrong …………. The people they “know” all have the same agenda and belief system. They really have never been exposed to real people who think differently than they and have been taught by liberal professors and administrators and media that it is there job to educate the masses, to in fact save them from themselves.
What needs to be done is to make it important for all educational entities to open their staff to those who think differently than others. If you get federal money, you must expose your students to as many differing opinions or ideas as possible. That is what GOOD education is. It’s has to start from the beginning. It has to begin now.
I suspect you mean Bernard Goldberg. For an updated account of the Times’s collapse as a newspaper, read Goldberg’s “Slobbering Love Affair”, which doesn’t refer to McCain’s mythical affair with Iseman, but the MSM’s 2008 Obama swoon.
The bias at the NYT runs much deeper than politics. Any mention of discipline, personal responsibility, or morality Is forbidden but victimhood is celebrated, even worshiped at every turn.The racism is subtle but vicious.”Minorities” are good and can do no wrong.0thers are “white” and therefore less worthy. Violent criminals are the victim of child abuse. Lazy students are the victims of bad teachers.Spendthrifts are the victim of our consumer society.Drunks and drug addicts are the victim of insufficient clinics.Islamic bombers are the victims of islamphobia.The list is endless.
Funny. Back in the 70s, I wrote a movie called “Gray Lady Down,” starring
Charlton Heston. About a disabled American submarine trapped on the ocean
floor. The guys in my movie got rescued okay. No such help for the NYT…
James Whittaker
Hemet, CA
I keep thinking of that movie every time I hear the Times talked about like that.
I saw that movie at the old Strand Theater in Roscommon, MI.
John Grisham wrote a great story that mentioned the Times. Or I should say, Grisham just punched his ‘Enter’ button, and cranked one out with ALL the typical elements:
– Medium size southern community
– Explosive case develops
– Sexually charged
– Racial lines drawn
– Class distinctions drawn
– Meddling northerners and media types
– Politicians with the most craven motives imaginable, willing to exploit the situation to the utmost.
– Academic politics
And so on and so on….
He called it, ’Until Proven Innocent’, and I read it almost in one sitting…..
Oh wait, my mistake, Grisham didn’t write that at all. It was a cheap Grishim clone… Oh wait, no it wasn’t…. it was one hundred percent true!!!
It was about the shameful Duke rape case, and I remember vividly something about the New York Times. They sent a reporter down there, and this reporter started filing stories that said essentially…. “Wait a minute. Something here doesn’t smell quite right. I’m not sure this case adds up.”
So what did the Times do? As expected…. They pulled that reporter, and sent two different ones down to file a litany of nonsense about class exploitation, sexual misconduct of fraternaties, racial divisions, and all the standard crap. And we all know how it all shook out in the end.
Example number 7,671 of the disgraceful behavior that has driven our journalistic titans into the ditch.
“But when everyone in his profession decides he’s the second coming of Mencken, the result is a uniformly punitive corporate snark that’s exhausting for the readers.” When everyone is posing hipster cool full of ironic detachment, vinegar, bile, and snark, then what’s left? What, exactly, has such actually built that’s worth defending?
I hope the day will come when the NY Times is forced into receivership by a dwindling subscriber base. If that happens, a tiny bit of my faith in coastal urban Americans will be restored.
What is The New York Times?
Just finished viewing Page One. It seems to blame the news media’s problems on everything but cultural/political bias. They have quite a bit of self-righteous stuff about the demise of the Tribune, kind of interesting. At best, it gives some insight into how these people think – and how much they curse.