[What follows is the text for the second of my Talking Through My Hat videos. The actual video can be viewed here.]
Back when I was a kid the New York Times was somewhere between the works of Shakespeare and the Lord’s Prayer. It was, well, everything… It told us what books to read, what movies and plays to see, what opinions to have, what politicians to like, who got married, where to eat, where to sleep and whether the Yankees would win the pennant – they usually did.
It even told us whether we had lived a decent life, because if you didn’t have an obit it in the Times, you really hadn’t been here, had you? Or certainly hadn’t done anything of significance.
And this wasn’t just true for New York, where I grew up. The Times’ power spread across the country and, indeed, the world, because so many media folks – either too lazy or too credulous or just too conformist – looked to the paper for validation of what they were saying or, more importantly, what they should say…
If the Gray Lady wrote it, it had to be. Not even Pravda had such an influence over its culture because, at least with Pravda, everyone knew it was the state organ of the Soviet Union and not to be trusted.
In fact, the paper reached deeply into my own life when it gave a relatively good review to my barely-read first novel, causing my father finally to shut up about how writing was too iffy an occupation and that I should go to medical school… In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t such a good thing.
Anyway, it took me many years … until about the time I started blogging… to realize what a pernicious influence The Times had had and how no single media outlet ought to have that much power in a democracy… something, by the way, that its editor Bill Keller admitted to me, when we were still friends, back before I fully put on my pajamas… Even now, with its business model failing to the extent that it is selling off its own landmark building while borrowing millions at a usurious rate from a Mexican billionaire, the Times still has an excessive influence, still moves the agenda more than any other media outlet, defining itself with a slogan so cloaked in bogus objectivity – “All the News That’s Fit to Print” – that it might make a Pravda editor blush.
Because, as we know, no one is objective. I’m not, you’re not and certainly not the New York Times. We’re all biased. I could say bias is as American as apple pie, but this is far from just an American trait. It’s a global one. Bias is as human as bread.
But this is nothing new.
What surprised me when I finally woke up to the extreme bias of the New York Times was that it had had a long history – which is what I am going to deal with in the next episodes of this show in my own, and undoubtedly biased, way. But I will try to be fair – not just for fairness’s sake – but because the Times has some fine writers and sometimes does excellent work. It’s just that too often these days you find it in the Travel section.
In fact, that may be where you always found it. But let’s go back to how the Times came to be THE TIMES. The paper was founded in 1851, but — because “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one,” as AJ Liebling famously said — the important year to remember in the history of The Times was 1896. That was the year that the then New York Daily Times was bought by Alfred Ochs, the German Jewish publisher of the Chattanooga Times.
Ochs ditched the “daily” and the Ochs family and their Sulzberger descendants have owned the New York Times ever since, dominating the news for over a hundred years as no single family ever has. Although the New York Times is a publicly traded company, its actual operation – the paper’s editorial policy – is completely governed by the Ochs-Sulzbergers through a complicated system of A and B stocks. In this case freedom of the press belongs to the family who owns one – and we all know the perils of tight family control.
Overstated? Well, maybe not that bad, but pretty destructive in another, perhaps more lethal way… destructive to our minds… But I am getting ahead of myself.
What did Adolph Ochs do to turn that New York Daily Times into the Gray Lady we may or may not love? Well, he invented that slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” and made it clear his paper would no longer be like those other sensational yellow journalistic rags of those days – The New York World and the New York Journal American. The Times would be something different. It would be a serious enterprise with professional reporters and foreign correspondents. It would have authority. It would have the facts.
It was supposed to anyway, but did it? Were those subverted by other agendas? Was this authority deserved then or now?
You probably recall the Times was embarrassed a few years back for publishing articles fabricated and plagiarized by their reporter Jayson Blair. An independent investigation concluded that 36 of Blair’s 73 national news stories were suspect. These included serious Iraq War-related pieces like “In Military Wards, Questions and Fears from the Wounded” and “Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse News” – both of which were virtually made up. The Times, evidently had no real fact-checking. Or perhaps – if you said certain things, if you had certain views – they just assumed you were telling the truth.
The ensuing scandal instigated not only the 2003 “resignation” of Blair, but also a change of top editors at the paper, with Blair enabler Howell Raines exiting and my friend Keller replacing him in the job he had previously coveted. The atmosphere at the Gray Lady at that time was apparently morbidly depressing. What could be worse for their reputation than a New York Times reporter caught lying all over the front page? How could such a thing happen?
Well, hello, Planet Earth… It happened plenty of times before, in some instances in a far worse manner than the low-grade fiction writing of Jayson Blair and with far greater impact on the world. The question is why it happened so many times at The Times. They’re not just some low-grade blog run by amateurs in their pajamas. What’s the explanation for this?
Maybe we can try to figure that out…. Perhaps a journey into the past will shine some light on the present… For our next episode, I will examine one of the most egregious examples of prevarication in the history of journalism – the story of Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, the man known as “Stalin’s apologist” who lied about the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants on the front page of the New York Times.
This is Roger L. Simon and I’ve been talking through my hat.
Thanks so much for the text version (I’m on slow dial-up – what I can afford). Enjoyed this article very much and look forward to the next. A recollection from the past: In my high school civics class, we were required by the teacher to read, as a minimum, the front page of the NYT everyday – included pop quizzes! Intent was to make students keep abreast of current events. I lived in Rhode Island then, and why he didn’t recommend the Providence Journal or Evening Bulletin (both great papers) eludes my. I think now that the teacher wanted to impress us (himself?)with his astute “worldliness”.
where are the other 3 acts? if you burn it,they will provide the matches.then again if you burn it,no more paper,no more paper,no more bird cage lining! if the times did catch fire,would the n.y.f.d.even bother to participate?
now that i’ve thought about it,yes the n.y.d. would have to respond. we must do everything to eliminate global warming!
Thanks Roger. That was a very honest perspective, from my biased point of view. To me, the biggest question at this point has less to do with the Times and its lack of credibility and much more to do with the “dead enders” who just won’t admit what you have. The Times is a pile of unadulterated propagandistic tripe. To read and believe it, you have to be in, what we clingers to religion call, a state of grace. Seriously, for a person to continue subscribing to the Times, he/she must suspend all rational thought, refuse to evenly consider alternative points of view, and be in intellectual self-denial.
Roger, you wrote: “Because, as we know, no one is objective. I’m not, you’re not and certainly not the New York Times. We’re all biased. I could say bias is as American as apple pie, but this is far from just an American trait. It’s a global one. Bias is as human as bread.”
Roger, why do you concede to your opponents that there is no such thing as non-bias or objectivity? We all struggle with subjectivity and our unique shaping experiences, but there is a marketplace of ideas, and it is only when we submit our productions to others who want clarity in our political talk that we can come closer to accurate renditions of the issues we care about. That is the method of science, and it stands opposed to all formulations of human weakness.
For instance, it is not impossible to get underneath current controversies and outline to readers what principles are at stake: I am thinking now of the Sonia Sotomayor nomination. As I wrote on another thread here, the political theories are clashing: one defines the proper role of the state as guaranteeing equal treatment under the law, and equal opportunity. The other (activist) one wants reparations for past mistreatment and hence redistributive justice, not commutative justice.
Similarly, as we debate affirmative action, we might think of scarcity of jobs and what is the better route to job creation: statist intervention or incentives to the private sector (or some mix of the two).
Finally (for now), it is possible to identify and denounce the racialist discourse that now prevails in bureaucratic circles. “Liberals” today are not part of the eighteenth-century legacy that has made possible the most advanced democracy in the world. The Old and New Left has done its best to undermine it, and irrationalism has been one of its weapons of choice. It is always an error to allow the enemy to define the terms.
Roger, you wrote: “Because, as we know, no one is objective. I’m not, you’re not and certainly not the New York Times. We’re all biased. I could say bias is as American as apple pie, but this is far from just an American trait. It’s a global one. Bias is as human as bread.”
This is self-refuting and false. If the statement “All statements are biased” is true, then it itself is biased, and therefore false. Your account of the bias and untruthfulness of the New York Times is not, so far as I can tell, biased but supported by evidence. That it committed treason by making public practices of intelligence is fact. I will not read it for that very reason.
Roger’s “talking through my hat” segments will improve over time. It’s merely a matter of needing more experience. Thumbs up on this one. Hope to see more in the future.
Shakespeare and the Lord’s prayer? Was your editor dozing? As an Irish Catholic, let me be the first to raise one to your future.
The NYT was always a rite for a flock which wished to be affirmed, not informed. They called cadence for those who wanted to be in step. I expect it will be merged into the NEA/PBS/NPR group; not because anyone cares about Ochs-Sulz, but because the flock wants & must be led and affirmed in its superiority to avoid the chaos of critical thinking.
Obama said:
“I have a very tough schedule and I would love nothing more than to have a leisurely week in Paris, stroll down the Seine, take my wife out to a nice meal, have a picnic in Luxembourg Garden.”
The rest of us walk ALONG the Seine. Obama really does walk on water?
“Obama really does walk on water?”
That question mark implies an unpatriotic measure of doubt.
At last he was free of the damnable books of romance.
–Cervantes
What Cervantes said about the damnable books of romance applies in equal measure to all of us who grew up in a time and a world which gave absolute and unthinking allegiance to the modern liberal creed and its tribune, the New York Times. It was the work of a lifetime to dig oneself out from under the liberal myths that the Times spoonfed the children of the mid-century urban American middle and upper-middle classes. Was it worth it? To finally THINK? A thousand times, YES!
Sybil, your apostacy is troubleing; if you persist in the anti-leader and anti-party stuff of questioning Obi Iwon walking on water, Jackboot Janet will be looking for you for the new Inquisition.
Actually, I don’t criticise Barack for NY or Paris; my guess is it really works with Michelle, and he scores good with it. I think we males need to stick together on this.
What follows is the text for the second of my Talking Through My Hat videos. The actual video can be viewed here.
Minor nit – this was the text to the first part, not the second.
Saludos to Roger, for taking Pajamas Media face to face with the New York Times. Not since we used to see the “Smarter Times” blog (a predecessor to the New York Sun) has it been so fun to see this revealing light shined on our country’s poisonous ‘paper of record’.
The confrontation may bring unwelcome attention from the current Government of the USA, in a case where it decides that its pet newspapers such as the NYT are ‘too important to fail’, and then uses Chicago politics to spike the spokes of its competition.
But, it’s better to use a little provocation now and force the issue sooner rather than later. Obama & Co. are leading us off a financial cliff, as well as signalling the whole world that the US will not oppose Muslim countries no matter what they might get up to, and making wreckage of the laws of contracts with their seizures of banks, Chrysler and GM. So far, the MSM is running full cover for them, as if American governmental duties include such authoritarian travesties.
Time for some forthright media reporting, because the MSM aint gonna do it – they’ve gone from serving as the Opposition, to serving as an advertising agency for the Government.
For me, the tipping point were the 1960′s teacher union wars. In 1967, New York’s Mayor Lindsay, a Times favorite, said that “Jewish teachers were going out on black kids” as a reason for a strike. Ignoring the fact that this was a fight over money.
Lindsay put the Ford Foundation in charge of change. The big idea was letting parents run the schools. Three districts fired all their teachers…ignored due process, etc.
The Times (as reported by their own editor Michael Meyers) ignored in their coverage that five of the thirteen board members were either employed by the foundation or had close family members employed and their worked with a couple of ideological fellow travelers to help create a long term strike.
Also not mentioned at all were that every high school and junior high school in the city was closed. A handful of elementary schools were opened and the Times simply covered them with glowing words. Bella Abzug, a partisan pol who went to Congress later led some of the parents and the teachers and other union people never let her forget it.
But the Times lied all the way through.
And Roger don’t forget the paper’s glorious history with the Stalinist Era and the Holocaust.
“…Back when I was a kid the New York Times was somewhere between the works of Shakespeare and the Lord’s Prayer…”
You must have attended one of those disadvantaged schools, Roger. Those of us in the better schools had the Times rammed down our throats.
On field trips when we might have enjoyed some time in the sun we were shepherded through the smelly NYT news factory. We visited the editorial offices and art studios where news is created and were awed the monster presses which enshrined the news on cheap paper.
For our “social studies” classes we were required to read NYT student supplements which the NYT foisted on students through lazy teachers. I and many others too young to defend ourselves, wereforced to do homework assignents based on drivel in the Times.
In debates on on national water flouridation and the admission of Communist China into the UN pro or con, we were graded on our facility for quoting drek from the Times.
The NYT Company habituated innocent children to its unhealthy products as shamelessly as the British once habituated Chinese to opium. We were Times junkies in the making. I was among those cruelly victimized.
In future installments on this subject, please don’t be so PC as to Neglect Arthur Ochs Sulzberger’s murderous rejection of sponsorship pleas for American asylum from his personal relatives in Nazi Germany. Likewise the steadfast refusal by this Nazi co-conspirator to cover the slaughter of Jews in Europe in the Times while it was happening.
17-David, greatanalogy, “..habituated..children..as shamelessly as the British habituated the Chinese to opium.” Or, to paraphase the communists – the NYT was the opiate of the ruling class, a fundamendalist religious sect which hates all other religions.