New York Times Redux

As my one reader knows, I’ve been critical of the crimes of the New York Times, though theirs have paled in comparison to those of ABC. So I’ll give them an at-a-boy when they do something to indicate a spine behind all that extraneous flesh. Thank you NYT for today’s editorial, The Low Road to Victory. Nothing new, but something good and right and true.

Euphemisms

In The Big Sink, Perry Bathaus wrote:

So all the polls are in and apparently to everyone’s surprise white rural, gun-toting, cheap-beer-drinking, high-school-educated unemployed bowlers prefer Clinton to Obama.

I’m sorry, but why can’t we just say white “racists” prefer Clinton to Obama?

I’m with you Perry!

ABC = American Bulls**t Corporation

Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous deserve to have been boo-ed off the stage, as they were at the end of last night’s debate in Philadelphia, by the audience which represented an American public hungry for real debate about real issues but sat through two hours of nothing but tabloid attacks. I had never seen a major national news network anchor booed off the stage on a televised event, but found this to be one of the only hopeful moments of the evening. Hosting a presidential debate is a test of character not only for the candidates, but also for the host network, and it demands a certain amount of seriousness, respect, and integrity on the part of the interviewers even when asking aggressive questions. Clinton fully participated in the antics, but repeatedly found herself evading eye-contact with the audience, her daughter, or her moderators, choosing instead when she went into mudslinging mode to be speaking to the rafters.

Shame on you ABC! If this debate represents your idea of the proper or even profit-worthy relationship between journalism and politics at a time of an unfathomably destructive war and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, not to mention all the other domestic and global issues for which the presidential candidates should be articulating a vision for the future, I would go so far as to say that ABC is an enemy of the American public.

After witnessing the embarrassing capitulation to lowest common denominator gutter politics, and the so called “objective commentary” at the end that basically served as an 30-second campaign ad for Clinton who months ago under Mark being-human-is-overrated Penn set the tone for this kind of mudslinging and tabloid tactics, I hereby boycott ABC as a source of any news in the future and declare that ABC is harboring weapons of mass distraction that pose a vital threat to the American people.

Whatever fate is in store for those moderating this goosing of America should also meet the producers of the show and David Brooks, who for the New York Times (surprise surprise) gives ABC an ‘A’ for its hardhitting questions on lapel pins, pastors, Bosnian gunfire, and 60’s radicals, and whose op-ed title “No Whining about the Media” expresses a particularly disturbing stance toward the outcries of thousands of Americans who are up in arms about the so-called shapers of public opinion and their increasing distance from the matters shaping the public sphere and those affecting the public good.

Only this now gives me hope! http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/DemocraticDebate/comments?type=story&id=4666956

When first I checked, this official ABC comment roll of 14,951 comments included hundreds of posts, about 90% of which decried the shameful behavior by ABC cohosts Gibson and Stephanopolous, the producers and the network, and many of which share my resolve to boycott ABC. When last I checked, it seems that dozens of these comments had been scrubbed or were inaccessible, including my own albeit brusquely worded version of the above. I hope someone archives these comments for posterity (and for the ABC board), because I think if we’re lucky we may look back on last night’s debacle of a debate as some kind of pivotal moment in the history of the relationship between American media and American politics, when the American public decides to take back both politics and the media from the hands of propagandistic corporate distractionists and disinforming swine. If we’re unlucky, last night’s debate is yet one more nail in the coffin of American journalism and we may well mark it as the day the music died.

Bye, Bye Miss American Pie — In Memoriam for the New York Times Book Review

After years of being trained to suspect underlying interests behind any genre or institution that claims a position of disinterest or service to the pure public good, and watching the corporatization and partisan-ization of the press, including that of the so-called public media, at least here in the U.S., of which I think Bill Moyers is the best and most hardhitting analyst (hence my soft spot for movies like Network and The Insider), I think I still harbored the naive belief that, if not the New York Times at least the New York Times Book Review could be a safe harbor, an a-topia immune to the obvious and crass antics of media manipulation – because after all the New York Times Book Review readership is if nothing else hyper-literate. Despite the inevitable and increasingly common topical capitulations to the topical, I never felt that any book review actually had a secret agenda other than to review a book and maybe to advance the reviewer’s standing in the eyes of the public as someone with better adjectives or better restraint in the use of adjectives, or someone better versed in the art of rhetorical inversions, or someone with an unfathomably richer vocabulary than that of any other reviewer who ever wrote for the US intelligentsia’s Good Book. There are countless Sundays when I have read the NYTBR like a kind of scripture, pen in hand, marking my agreements and disagreements with the reviewers, and notes to self and marginalia of resonances with my own obsessions.

But last Sunday’s April 13, 2008 book review featured a review, Niall Ferguson’s review of Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt that made me feel that not only had politics encroached upon my sacred space but the same political antics that were driving campaign pundits to smear and camoflauge strategy as opinion and disinform the gullible glue-eyed American “public” 25 hours a day, 8 days a week were intruding into the very structure and message of the review. There are better critiques than mine of the troubling substance of the review. (e.g. Kalkaina’s on the Daily Kos, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/13/133931/051). But my surprise — surprise is the wrong word, as if Scarlet O’Hara was “surprised” to find Tara demolished in the midst of a civil war that turned the world into an upside down hell, or dot dot dot name your literary figure here for sacred domestic spaces being turned into vivid scenes of destruction and lost innocence) — was that the entire editorial apparatus was being brought in to camouflage a campaign ad for John McCain as if it were a very positive review of a very scholarly book.

First, never before in the New York Times Book Review have I noticed so much focus on the credentials of the author of the book in a review. The authors whose works have been reviewed in the review include the world’s greatest writers, the most prize winning prize winners, some of the most honored degree holders, and a slew of really smart people whose lack of an ivy league degree in no way compromises their achievements as scholars, writers, or achievers on the world stage. New York Times Book Review readers, I imagine, are a smart group who collectively represent higher education around the world, and are likely not to be wowed by emphases on the educational credentials of the authors reviewed. But the editors of this issue — rather than commenting on the substance of the review — state that Phillip Bobbitt “is a busy man” as Senior Fellow of the University of Texas research institute, teaches law at Columbia and runs the Columbia Center for National Security. But, we are told that “his reviewer goes one better” holding four positions, including Lawrence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard, the William Ziegler professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

Doth the lady protest too much?

We only get a hint at an idea in the last line of the editor’s “Up Front” Preface to this week’s review.

What are all these credentials for? We now read the review not as one review among others but as a reviewer’s review – where the conspicuous display of unsurpassed credentials should suspend any disbelief we have toward the content of the review. I skip now over the review’s assertions rather than display of the brilliance of this text and the superlatives that Niall Ferguson lays upon the Bobbitt book (it is “quite simply the most prfound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 - indeed since the end of the cold war,” my emphasis), I skip over these measured and objective remarks to the review’s conclusion, “Yet it is striking that despite being a democrat, Philip Bobbitt so often echoes the arguments made by McCain on foreign policy.

Are we meant to go away from the lead book review in the New York Times with the impression that even the most well educated democrats will be forced to concede after reading this book, or even without reading this book?, that John McCain is the candidate for anyone who cares about foreign policy? perhaps that McCain is the most profound candidate for advancing US foreign policy since the cold war? Or are we supposed to go away thinking that either of these eggheads would make a mighty fine Secretary of State under President McCain? Or are we supposed to come away thinking, hmmm… I’m a democrat and if I (like the New York Times) really want to endorse Hillary Clinton, I better vote for McCain (and find really convoluted ways of defending my choice to my fellow democrats) so Hillary has a chance in 2012?