The American Spectator

Of course we know that the New York Times is, in the immortal words used to describe himself by Keith Olbermann of MSNBC to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, “currently aligned, not in the sense of having membership, but being in the same part of the ballpark as a lot of liberals.” Good one, Keith! In that case, how I look forward to the time when that alignment will no longer be current! The Times’s presence in the same part of the same ballpark made itself obvious again last week with a headline which, perhaps as recently as a decade ago, would have been inconceivable in our newspaper of record. “On His New Album, Neil Young Calls for Bush’s Impeachment.” Of course, there’s not much news-value in that addition to the ever-growing ranks of anti-war pop stars in spite of Mr. Young’s once having found it convenient to associate himself politically with Ronald Reagan. Easy come, easy go ought to be the motto for the political allegiances of the beautiful but largely brainless people of the entertainment community. But what I find much, much sadder is the Times’s ever-growing attachment to the values of the celebrity culture, in whose world alone it could possibly imagine anyone cares what Neil Young thinks about George Bush.

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One more straw in the wind indicating the Times’s outlook on the world came earlier this month. On the same day, the paper published the obituaries of Fred Christensen, one of the top American fighter aces of World War II and a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Silver Star and the Air Medal, and the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, famed anti-war protester and agitator of the Vietnam era. Which of these distinguished gentlemen do you imagine the Times regarded as having lived a life more deserving of notice and recognition by the American people? Judging by the relative length of their obituaries — 534 words for Captain Christensen and 2,939 words for the Reverend Mr. Coffin — the latter ought to be seen as having been, in the Times’s eyes, nearly six times more important than the former. No surprises there, then.