THE NEW YORK TIMES, TODAY

THE NEW YORK TIMES, TODAY

TO UNDERSTAND WHY JOURNALISM IS DEAD-11-12-08 Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006
From The New Criterion: V. 24, Number 2, Notes & Comments, October, 2005:

“Martin Heidegger once said that the fundamental metaphysical question is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” While waiting for an answer to that query, we would like to offer for the consideration of our readers a less fundamental, but perhaps no less pressing, metaphysical question: “How is it that cultural coverage in The New York Times, which yesterday seemed as awful as it was possible to be, is today even worse?” This ever-fresh question deserves serious thought. How do they do it: each week a little more tawdry and demotic, more politically correct, less intellectually nimble and journalistically serious?

“Some of you may immediately object, pointing out that this prodigy of deterioration is by no means confined to the Times’s coverage of culture. We concede the point. After all, we are talking about a newspaper that actually employs Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, not as comic relief but as some of its star pundits. These are moveon.org folks, infatuated by a combination of narcissism, ideology, and moral hysteria. And let’s not forget that cynosure of fatuousness,

Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, the perpetually adolescent publisher of the Times, who sets the tone…. Remember the recent flap over demands that the Pulitzer Prize for Walter “Friend of Joe Stalin” Duranty be rescinded? The Times couldn’t give it back, Pinch said, because it didn’t actually have the award. …

“The truth is: deterioration at the Times is a rich subject, full of cautionary tales about how a great liberal institution can go rancid by making a caricature of its principles and adulterating its work. When a great newspaper’s front page is indistinguishable from its editorial page, and its editorial page is indistinguishable from a transcript of a Democratic Party rally, journalistic decay is a certainty. But if what’s happened to the Times’s news reporting and opinion page is an outrage – think only of the repulsive way in which the paper attempted to generate anti-Bush capital from the Katrina disaster – its coverage of culture is somehow more depressing than infuriating. Here, too, one finds the triumph of ideology over principle and an unseemly race to the lowest common denominator….An entire dissertation might be written about what has happened ….

“Times Book Review: In many respects, it is Exhibit “A” in the metaphysical sweepstakes under discussion. It was already as bad as it could get when a new editor came along – treating readers to, inter alia, full length reviews of tell-all books by famous porn stars, garish redesign, and a steady diet of politically correct sermons about the world of ideas – somehow made it worse. Our favorite recent example was the preposterous essay by Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, which attempted to rehabilitate Allan Bloom and The Closing of the American Mind for the Left. The basic argument was that Bloom’s book was not the simple-minded prescriptive book it has often been taken to be (taken to be by the Left, that is, though Mr. Sleeper left out that bit). Ergo (note the logic), it cannot be something that could give aid and comfort to conservatives who, as everyone knows, are simple-minded, prescriptive ideologues. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been in earnest. But of course it was in earnest….”

In today’s Orange County Register, I saw two news items from the Times.
Appendix # l to Report Card on Bill Press’s Book, How the Republicans Stole Christmas
G.H.K. (Report Cards on Bill will be posted to understand mind and heart of a CINOP.)