By Jeremy Lott on 9.10.04 @ 12:05AM
The New York Times is a biased liberal paper because that's how it makes its money.
Item: Last week, former President George H.W. Bush announced
that he was through with the New York Times -- sort of.
Bush said on CNN that he had "given up" on the paper, though his
comments gave some wiggle room as to the meaning of "given up." He
speculated that his son might fall into the same category as former
first wife Barbara Bush, who refuses to even leaf through it
anymore.
Stop laughing.
Forty-one charged that the news pages of the Times "are
getting to show a certain bias." Through analysis pieces under
headings such as Reporter's Notebook, Bush argued, journalists are
allowed to insinuate their own opinions in pages that were
previously the Platonic ideal of "objective reporting." Thus the
paper's sales pitch, on the front page of every issue: "All the
news that's fit to print."
For its coverage of the incident, USA Today chased down Times editor
Bill Keller. While Keller tried to put a good face on it, you could
tell the grin was forced, like a salesman who found out that a
close relative just died and wanted to wrap this up quick. He said
the former commander-in-chief's critique doesn't "stand up."
Keller conceded that Bush's particular piñata -- the
Reporter's Notebook -- might occasionally serve as a way for
reporters to slip in "unacceptably snarky" lines, but he said he
and his fellow editors "try hard to fight that." The best he could
muster was this: "[N]otebooks are not by any means a vehicle for
people to slip their personal opinions into the newspaper."
YEAH, CAN'T HAVE THAT. Personal opinions are the last
thing you want in a serious newspaper. Well, except for editorials
and op-eds. And book, movie, and theater reviews. And cartoons. And
reader mail. And sports columns. And cutting in-depth profiles.
Wouldn't want someone to make a technology column more readable by,
say, throwing jokes in.
Come to think of it, a lot of the features that people really
care about in newspapers are saturated with personal prejudices.
And yet, critic and publisher alike agree that bias is a four
letter word. Letter writers charge that a reporter's place of
origin, religion, or political affiliation affect the work that he
produces. Ombudsmen answer back that reporters are trained
professionals, capable of overcoming such obstacles.
Well, most ombudsmen.
Readers may have been vacationing at the time, so here's a
refresher: In late July, Times "public editor" Daniel
Okrent wrote a little cherry bomb of a column. Title: "Is the
New York Times a liberal paper?" First sentence: "Of
course it is." Addressing the Times' coverage of a cluster
of social issues, he wrote, "if you think The Times plays it down
the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your
eyes closed."
I won't attempt to summarize the full article (track it down;
read; marvel at its greatness) but Okrent made one point worth
repeating: The New York Times may be a nominally national
paper but half of its readers are in Manhattan, which voted
something like 80 percent for Gore in 2000. Further, many
Times readers in the rest of the country, who pay a lot of
money for the paper, think of themselves as blue staters in
exile.
And so Bill Keller has found himself in an unenviable position.
Coming in the wake of the crusading liberal Harold Raines, Keller
would like to return to the old ideal of the Times as the
paper of record. But it won't happen -- ever. He has a staff and an
audience that liked the old Times just fine, thank you,
and management that wants to make money. This might come as news to
our former president, but that bias that he's finally detected is
great for the bottom line.
Jeremy Lott writes from Lynden,
Washington.
topics:
Sports, Religion, Books
