March 31, 2008: The New York Times Doesn't Read The New York Times
I am up on Bainbridge Island, some of you may have guessed from the less frequent blogging. (I shall return to LaLa on Wednesday night.) But flying up here early Sunday morning I had a few moments to indulge in a ritual that in days of yore was as much a part of my Sunday mornings as brushing my teeth - reading the New York Times. Yes, for some reason (ancestor worship? maybe I'm a secret Shintoist?) I still subscribe to the Sunday edition. So I did what I used to do, stripping the paper down to the sections I like (book review, magazine, news of the week, travel) and stuffing them in my overnight bag for the plane. Actually I was looking for an excuse to procrastinate from writing my book during the two and half hours from LAX to SeaTac.
Well,the procrastination didn't work. After about fifteen minutes of skimming (mostly in the travel section) I chucked the whole thing out and got to my writing. Much better in the long run, of course, and definitely a sign that I should save the twenty-two bucks a month or whatever it is I am being billed for this drivel. That's enough a year to buy an iPod. [You already have an iPod-ed. Okay, something, else. One half a Laker seat.]
Anyway, apparently I missed something "brilliant" from that day's NYT in my rush to get to more serious work - some party line (Zabar's zeitgeist) bloviation about Basra from James Ganz- their Baghdad bureau chief- who evidently thinks there's something amazing about Iraqis drinking Scotch. He apparently didn't read his own paper on April 2, 2003:
NAJAF, Iraq, April 2 - In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today.
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"
Around him, the crowd roared its approval.
But not the NYT. As the years wear on, their voice becomes increasingly reactionary, their profound wish for our failure greater, almost as if as the paper goes down, it wants to take us with it.
Newsweek, however, appears to be just going down by itself.
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The New York Times has always hinged its fortunes on trading accuracy for access, being all to willing to suspend pursuit of the truth in favor of that agenda. The real question may be "who benefits from this short-term memory loss?"
Then again, there's a cost to be paid for these kinds of games....
sorry for the OT,Roger,but this line was funny enough,I thought your fellow readers would get a chuckle.
"Who is Obama? Well, he is first of all someone who expects to get away with it. In that respect, if Bill Clinton was the first black president, Obama is the first black Bill Clinton."
- quoting a poster from Belmont Club
When I saw the cover headline in Sunday's NYT Mag, "THE END OF REPUBLICAN AMERICA" I actually thought of RLS.com and wondered if you'd blog about how pathetic, self-absorbed (Zabar's Zeitgeist, indeed) and dolefully inaccurate the Gray Lady has become. Some genius in the Art Department did the cover illustration for this story (BTW,"story" for the NYT can be loosely translated as "WISH" as in "We WISH this would happen. We WISH this were actually the news, so let's go with it.") The mag cover showed a PhotoShopped red toy elephant ("Get it?" the Art Dept genius must have crowed, "Red! As in the flyover"), lying on its side, the air seeping out of it. Yeah, right. In their dreams.
That entire newspaper, Art Department, News Department and Opinion Department---as if the entire paper isn't just one big Opinion Dept---reminds me of Pravda, propped up with Prada ads. I'm glad you chose to work on your book.
(Why did I see the Sunday Times, given my view of it? Because my view is not shared by my entire household, and while I was throwing it out, I noticed the mag's headline & "art" work and thought, "What a revoltin' waste of $648 dollars a year THIS is." More than half a Lakers seat, unless it came with Jack Nicholson sitting in it.)
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March 31, 2008: The New York Times Doesn't Read The New York Times
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