Brace yourselves
NYT ombudsman Dan Okrent finally admits something those of us who aren’t out-and-out red-toothed Commies have known all along:
Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
Of course it is.
The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left – and there are plenty – generally confine their complaints to the paper’s coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy.
I’ll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.
But if you’re examining the paper’s coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.
And an incredibly stupid, arrogant, and insufferably self-righteous one too; one where success is failure, failure is success, arthritic liberal orthodoxy is daring and “alternative,” partisanship is bipartisan, fiction is truth, and truth something to be horrified by and shunned. Eric Alterman, please call your publisher’s office.
- Entries
I don't mind that the Times leans as hard to the left as a motorcycle dirtrack racer. What I hate is (1) the presumption that it's biased news ought to set the news agenda for the country; (2) the insistence that it doesn't veer left consistently in its news coverage; and (3) the liberal outrage that the Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Trib, LA Times and a hundred lesser papers, along with the network news, CNN, MSNBC, and all the rest, are offset by Fox News, the NY Post and the Wash Times, along with a relative handful of blogs. It's as if Goliath was bitching that the tiny rock in David's hand was far, far too large; and that David ought to be restricted to using grains of sand.
Sadly for me, I kind of hope the NY Times regains its former stature. A great country should have a world class newspaper with fine writing and a prominent position in the establishment. Sadly, the NY Times isn't suitable for that position right now, since it only speaks to a chunk of people on the left. Okrent's frank admission may shock a few people awake. I doubt it, but you should never give up hope, y'know?
And Al, I love your descriptive writing. In a few weeks, I'll watch some motorcycle dirtrack racers lean hard to the left when some friends and I wear short skirts and high heels to Fox Night at the local speedway (c: I love the smell of that fuel.
For instance, it completely destroyed our reputation in the Arab world. For which Mr. Alterman deserves credit - I hadn't realized that there was any topic I cared less about than what he thinks and says. But there is, and it's how our reputation in the Arab world is doing.