Great news! Our troubles are over! The New York Times
is at last to appoint an ombudsman. A report prepared by a special
task force formed by the New York Times under its
assistant managing editor, Allan Siegal, to look into the Jayson
Blair affair has recommended not only an ombudsman but an ethics
czar as well. So that’s all right then.
But Siegal, according to Howard Kurtz’s
report of the matter in the Washington Post, doesn’t
want his ombudsman to have a job description exactly like that of
Michael Getler, who does the job at the Post. “There are
features of Getler’s job we did not incorporate,” Siegal told
Kurtz, “such as a weekly column in the paper and a weekly memo to
the staff.” The new executive editor at the Times, Bill
Keller, had added a cover note to the report which worried that
quite such sweeping powers as Getler had “would foster nit-picking
and navel-gazing.”
You’ve got to laugh. As if the whole idea of the task force and
its report were not itself an exercise in nit-picking and
navel-gazing. As if all the internal attacks on the
Times’s culture of insularity were not the best evidence
that the culture of insularity shows no slightest traces of
dissipating. As if anyone, anywhere might imagine that the report’s
call for greater “openness to dissent” at the Times were
anything but a joke.
Times employees, that is, might win the right to
disagree with Howell Raines, or Bill Keller, on matters of
editorial policy, but to how many of them would it occur seriously
to disagree with them on matters of substance?
It is in the nature of the Manhattan media culture to be blind
to its own political uniformity, and its bland assumption that
anyone with a right to be taken seriously thinks pretty much as it
does on any subjects that matter. An amusing instance of this
ideological predisposition had appeared in the Times the
day before the report was released when its readers were no doubt
heartened to learn that, “After more than a year of nonstop visits
to Iowa and New Hampshire on a threadbare budget, supported mainly
by volunteers who had connected over the Internet, [Howard] Dean,
who began as an antiwar gadfly, has in the past month burst from
his obscurity to rank among the top contenders in a crowded field
of Democrats for the party’s presidential nomination.”
The article,
by Jodi Wilgoren and David Rosenbaum, pays tribute to Dr. Dean’s
“stunning surge as the top fund-raiser among the potential
Democratic candidates in the second quarter” and his rivalry with
those hitherto thought to be stronger candidates like John Kerry
and Dick Gephardt. But the gravamen of the article is that, despite
“his early and intense opposition to the American-led attack on
Iraq, his call for universal health insurance and his signing a
bill that created civil unions for gay couples in Vermont,” he’s
not really the liberal that people think he is. In fact, part of
the putative excitement of his campaign is owing to the fact that,
in the words of the headline, Dean is “Defying Labels Left or
Right.”
Who knew? You or I might suppose that supporting gay marriage in
all but name and universal (i.e. government paid) health-care and
opposing — intensely, forsooth — the war in Iraq were
pretty infallible indicators of a leftward tilt, to put it no
stronger. But in Vermont — where, as the Times helpfully
informs us, the “political center of gravity lands left of the
nation’s” — Dr. Dean is apparently regarded as being practically a
conservative for supporting business and the N.R.A. and ticking off
some environmentalists.
In short, he is “a pragmatic politician” or “more pragmatic than
ideological. He is less George McGovern than John McCain, less
Eugene McCarthy than Jimmy Carter.” There is just a mention, set
apart in brackets to indicate its dubiousness, of the Democratic
Leadership Council’s stigmatizing of Dean as an advocate for a “far
left” agenda, but the New York Times clearly knows better.
Its calm, dispassionate, objective account of his candidacy cites
approvingly the good doctor’s own view of what he learned from the
legislative battle over “civil union” for gays in Vermont: “I
realized you could win by standing up for what you believe in.”
Just imagine what would be the attitude of your typical New
York Times reporter to that same statement in the mouth of a
Republican candidate. If it were reported at all and not merely
dismissed as boilerplate, you would be able to hear the sarcasm as
you read it. But neither Miss Wilgoren nor Mr. Rosenbaum is likely
to be aware of any disparity in their treatment of this candidate
or of their own credulity in happily branding him “pragmatic” and
label-defying.
In the same way they go on casually and with sublime
unconsciousness of self-parody to mention that, in addition to the
millions Dean has reportedly raised from little people and
first-time contributors, “he also has had conventional fundraisers
in Provincetown, Mass., and on Cape Cod. On the West Coast, his
supporters include Rob Reiner, Martin Sheen, Mel Brooks, Norman
Lear, Nora Ephron and Larry David.” What, no Ed Asner or Barbra
Streisand? I guess he must be just too right-wing for them.
