By Jeremy Lott on 5.21.03 @ 12:10AM
Time for a new newspaper with that double tall.
Who would have thought that the lies and plagiarism of one
reporter would have brought the mighty New York Times to
its knees? People flatter and lie. Reporters plagiarize. These
things happen.
And yet, last Wednesday
hundreds of angry staffers packed the Leow's Theater to express
their anger at editor Howell Raines and his management team. Their
mishandling of the Jayson Blair affair was said, in New York
Times lingo, to be symptomatic of something larger and more
sinister. This wasn't a simple matter of a night editor being
asleep at the monitor; this was a virus that had burrowed its way
into the system. If so, it's a virus that will stay firmly
embedded; Raines won't quit and publisher Pinch Sulzberger told the
staffers he'd refuse to accept the resignation if he did.
Conservative critics of the Times used the scandal to
call for a brand new paper of record to replace the old one which,
for whatever reason (suspects include liberalism, diversity
fetishism, and general arrogance) doesn't seem up to it anymore. At
the Weekly Standard,
Bill Kristol laid out his Platonic ideal for this new paper. It
should be thoughtful, rigorous, un-PC, and not "ignorantly
disdainful of Red America" (amen to the last bit). For National
Review Online Stanley
Kurtz inveighed against reinventing the wheel. The antidote to
the Times would be for the liberal but usually reasonable
Washington Post to go national. For news junkies with a
modem, he argued, the Post already functions as the paper
of record. Why not use this opportunity to prove it?
But newspaper of record for whom? The Times is
not the best selling paper in the U.S, nor is it even close. After
this last year's massive drop in daily circulation (to 1.1
million), it comes in a distant third to the Wall Street
Journal (1.8 million) and USA Today (2.2 million). If
circulation or readership determined pride of place, Al Neuharth's
paper would have it in a walk.
In fact, many of the things that critics hate about the
Times are almost wholly absent from USA Today.
"McPaper," as it is sometimes derisively called, is the opposite of
an arrogant newspaper. While the Times was busy spinning
against Bush's most recent round of tax cuts, USA Today
played it straight, noting a surge in public support for them. It
continues to provide excellent foreign coverage (witness the recent
piece on Col. Matthew Bogdanos, charged with finding looted
Iraqi antiquities) and decent financial coverage (tech columnist
Kevin Maney is one of the best in the business) and its sports
coverage easily laps the Times'.
The thing holding USA Today ("the nation's newspaper")
back is the impression that it's too
much of a lightweight to be a contender. The paper's anemic
op-ed page, its celebration of television, its banker's hours (with
issues only five days a week) and its distribution via McDonald's
are all used to argue that, well, sure, it might sell the pants off
of the competition, but it's… USA Today. A
bellwether newspaper must be more robust.
It would be easy enough for USA Today to mute this
criticism. It could restructure the op-ed page to include (a) more
space and (b) a few hard-hitting columnists, add more arts coverage
and launch a Saturday edition. A few of the renovations (especially
the Saturday edition) would be pricey, but my guess is that it
would goose circulation, and the paper's increased cachet could
lead to higher add rates.
Granted, that's a mighty what if, but such is the nature of
contemplating successors to the New York Times. So many of
us have spent so many years railing against the Gray Lady that it's
hard to know what to do now that she's gone and made herself
irrelevant.
topics:
Television, Business, Sports, Iraq
