By David Ross. Andrew Rossi’s Page One (2011), a sleek, self-important infomercial for The New York Times, largely involves Times partisans whining that the dinosaur carcass of the Gray Lady is being picked clean by the mammalian swarms of the new media. There are cursory nods to the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals, but essentially nothing in the way of real introspection or self-criticism. The Times‘ complaint largely goes like this: “What kind of world fails to recognize the inherent nobility of our enterprise! O fallen mankind, repent your shallowness!”
Do these apologists have a point? To some extent, yes. As numerous interviewees stress, aggregators, bloggers, and citizen journalists cannot cover certain kinds of news. War zone coverage, international political coverage, and intensive daily coverage of the political process require expertise and institutional funding. These are not part-time callings, nor activities that can be undertaken on the cheap. Those who bay for the demise of the mainstream media have to take seriously that news does not coalesce out of the internet ether, as it seems to. It must be dug up, run down, and eye-witnessed as mortar rounds collapse the available ground cover. This ferreting process is crucially enabled by the kind institutional pressure that only billion-dollar media entities can exert. Foreign potentates and corporate barons do not return phone calls placed by self-proclaimed smart guys in their pajamas (e.g., us). Eliciting a response requires the veiled threat intrinsic to newspapers that are in their own way players on the world stage. News depends on credentialed news people in the traditional sense: this is reality, like it or not.
On the other hand, the mainstream media, and the Times in particular, has done everything conceivable to hasten its own demise. The postmodern Times is a cavalcade of inaccuracy, omission, myopia, flagrant political bias, outrageously lousy writing, latent snobbery, and superficial urban sophistication. All the shallowness of the modern elite university has come home to roost at the Times. The worst offenders are surely the editorial sections (prose sinkhole) and the culture sections (lapdog of everything transgressive), but I reserve special ire for fellow Yalie Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer-winning book reviewer who’s done much to instantiate a self-important middle-browism as the default mode of the literary culture. The novelist Jonathan Franzen, for one, calls her “the “stupidest person in New York” and an “international embarrassment.” He continues, “Everyone in Europe says to me, “How can The New York Times let a person who is so patently tone deaf, who is so screechy rhetorically, so clearly unequipped to appreciate interesting books or even to enjoy them — how can that person be the lead reviewer?'” Kakutani had the chance to rise to a historical occasion following the suicide of Franzen’s friend David Foster Wallace in 2008. Her ‘appreciation’ (here) is pat and rote by turns, utterly nerveless, utterly unmoved or inspired by the circumstances. “Laugh-out-loud funny”? “Both brainy and visceral”? An opening quote from Robert Plant! Are these sophomoric clichés what the mighty New York Times has come to? Was ever an era’s chief writer so lazily eulogized by an era’s chief reviewer?
Basic points first. The Times is no longer dependable in terms of fact, grammar, or idiom (“whipping post” for “whipping boy” just this past week, as I happened to notice at the supermarket – and on the front page no less). Ponder the Onionesque aspect of this correction from July 22, 2009:
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30.
Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970.
A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.
How do you misstate the dates of the moon landing and MLK’s assassination in a single article? Don’t Times reporters have access to Wikipedia? Was the reporter in a condition of drunken mania? Were the editors? At The New Haven Register, where I spent four years as a cub reporter, three corrections within memory were enough to get one fired. Five-plus corrections in a single article would have been beyond anybody’s worst nightmare. The night desk’s sleepiest, rummiest old coot would have caught at least some of the above errata (MLK, moon landing, Telstar). I had to acknowledge perhaps three or four factual mistakes in my four-year career. Each was a humiliation, entailing a stern lecture and a day or two of frowns.
Continue reading LFM Review: Page One, The New York Times & Modern Media Bias
