To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
--- George Orwell
Thursday, December 1, 2016
‘Gray Lady Down:’ Why The New York Times Got Election 2016 So Staggeringly Wrong --- And Why Its ‘Epic Fail’ Matters To America
From Gray Lady Down: What The Decline And Fall Of The New York Times Means For America. (Encounter Books, 2010.)
p. 252: The real problem is, for lack
of a better term, the armaments of political correctness--- the subtle and
not-so subtle anti-Americanism, anti
bourgeois hauteur, hypersensitivity toward “victimized minority groups, double
standards, historical shallowness,
intellectual dishonesty, guilt, moral righteousness and cultural
relativism---that saturates its newsroom and its news pages. Journalists are
supposed to have an adversarial to the institutions and issues they cover. But
when that adversarial attitude becomes reflexive and blanket oppositionalism,
at odds with the middle register of American society and its values, there’s a
problem.
*****
pp 256-258: If the damage to the Times’ journalistic
reputation and financial footing affected only the Sulzberger clan, it would
not be a matter of broad public concern. But the paper has always played a
central role in our country’s civic life and the public debates that shape our
democracy and forge consensus. Even if the Times were not suffering from
self-in icted wounds, the proliferation of news sources—cable, the Web, talk
radio, Twitter—may have meant that it could no longer be the “principle point
of contact with reality” for our educated classes, as Dwight Macdonald once
described it. And conservatives now would hardly say, as William F. Buckley
once did, that going without the Times would be “like going without arms
and legs.” (In late 2004, the idea of “going “Timesless” was endorsed by
Jay Nordlinger in Buckley’s National Review.)
Yet even in its fallen state, this newspaper is
important, and any loosening of “contact with reality,” particularly at this
critical moment in our country’s history, has signi cant implications. And so
its decline is something that anyone with a gene for public affairs should care
about. Even those who are now going Times- less as a matter of protest
and conviction admit that the paper affects “all of America’s media, whether
individual readers know it or not,” as Nordlinger put it. Everyone who supplies
the news, “whether in print or over the air, does read the Times. And is
profoundly influenced by it. The paper is in the bloodstream of this nation’s
media.”
That being so, the Times will continue to
wield enormous over what the average American reads, hears and sees, even if
the network newscasts no longer the front page of the paper in its entirety on
a nightly basis. The Times still sets the news agenda. Whether it
appears on paper or on a digital screen, it will continue to be the polestar
for American journalism.
In this time of increasing social and cultural
fragmentation, our civic culture needs a common narrative and a national forum
that is free of cant and agnostic toward fact—an honest broker of hard news and
detached analysis, where the editorial pages are not spread like invisible ink
between the lines of its news reports and cultural reviews. As our political
system grows more polarized, and political parties play harder toward their
base, it is even more important that we have news organizations whose honest
reporting can form a DMZ between opposing forces trapped in their own
information cocoons. Some liberals may feel a need to rally around and declare,
le Times, c’est nous, but this protective impulse is not only
intellectually dishonest, it hands a rallying cry to the right-wing forces they
castigate.
Although he himself writes for an unapologetically
ideological page, the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger was right when
he wrote awhile back, “We really could use some neutral ground, a space one
could enter without having to suspect that ‘what we know’ about X or Y is being
manipulated.” While the emergent blogging culture is dynamic, it mostly serves
as a check on mainstream news, not a substitute for it. There’s energy and loud
argument, but hard information and neutral reporting are not this medium’s
strong suit. An inherent fragmentation and multiplicity, not to mention
problems with factual accuracy, make it difficult for the blogosphere to
provide the common ground that helps cement a shared sense of civic mission,
especially on a national level, or the critical institutional counterweight to
the power of corporations, government, vested political interests and self-involved
politicians.
The Times will not be so easily replaced,
which makes its decline—and perhaps even its fall—more worrisome. But if the
era we are passing through still demands the Times, it demands a much
better version of the Times than is being produced by the current
regime.
The new Times headquarters, since 2008, is a
far cry from the now somewhat seedy Victorian digs of the past. The 52-story
tower is made of steel and glass, with a scrim of horizontal ceramic rods
encasing it. Designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Renzo Piano,
it shimmers and hovers, achieving Piano’s goals of “lightness, transparency and
immateriality.” But if it embodies a certain promise, it also symbolizes what
has been left behind in Times Square. As the Times veteran David Dunlap
wrote in a nostalgic tribute before the move, the old building echoed with “the
staccato rapping of manual typewriters” and “the insistent chatter of
news-agency teleprinters,” with bells and loudspeakers, and the cry of “Copy!”
and the printing presses roaring in the basement, setting the whole 15-story
building atremble. This was the sound of news being manufactured during the
American Century.
Dunlap noted that he and his colleagues were
wrestling with the implications of a greater shift than the geographic one: the
transition into an unknown future. “Certainly The Times has reinvented itself
before,” he noted, yet there was nevertheless “some uncertainty as to whether
the Times traditions can survive a move from the home in which they were
shaped.” The new building was therefore less a “factory for news” than a
laboratory. “We don’t know yet whether the transition will liberate us or leave
us unmoored,” Dunlap fretted.
And for all of us, whether we read the Times or
boycott it, something large rides on how this question is ultimately
answered.
*****
A thoughtful vividly supported expose.
*****
A thoughtful vividly supported expose.
---Juan Williams, FOX News
McGowan
shows us that things at the Times aren’t as bad as we thought. They’re worse!
---Mickey Kaus, Newsweek
Read
Willliam McGowan’s book to better understand how and why the ‘Gray Lady’ has
fallen on such hard times.
---Clifford May, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
---Clifford May, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
A tough-minded
but judicious critique of how the Times has declined under the Baby Boom
leadership of publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. --- Miami Herald
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