“The incredibly shrinking” New York Times is how George Will describes the one-time paper of record, a formerly respectable journalistic enterprise that, in Will’s words, is “reinventing itself along the lines of a factional broadsheet…”
Charles Krauthammer had similar visions dancing in his head last week when he charged that “Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, ?You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,’ has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines’s New York Times.”
Will and Krauthammer – and a couple dozen other pundits, columnists and editorial writers – were fulminating about an issue dear to the Monitor’s heart: the blatant editorializing on its news pages that has come to characterize the Times under the stewardship of publisher Arthur (“Don’t call me Pinch”) Sulzberger Jr., a state of affairs that has grown even more acute in the year since Sulzberger appointed former editorial page editor Howell Raines as the paper’s executive editor.
Under Raines, the Times has abandoned any pretense that it is anything other than the house organ of the Democratic National Committee. Ostensibly “straight” news stories are shot through with a shamelessly anti-Bush bias; articles purporting to analyze the Times’s own polls are massaged in such a way as to de-emphasize numbers favorable to Bush; and the Times’s White House correspondent, Elisabeth Bumiller, writes as if she’s auditioning for a speechwriting gig with the Gore 2004 presidential campaign.
What has lately raised the ire of Will and others is the Times’s relentless editorializing, clumsily disguised as news reporting – against an American attack on Iraq. The Times has been at it for several months now, never more egregiously than in its Aug. 16 edition, when it ran what the Washington Times called “a willfully misleading front-page story which mischaracterized [former secretary of state] Henry Kissinger’s critical endorsement of President Bush’s Iraq strategy.”
As Washington Times editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden put it, Sulzberger’s New York Times, “casting about for something, anything, to use against the case for war, reported…that Mr. Kissinger had said precisely the opposite of what he actually had said. It was nothing short of disinformation.”
Ah, but the Times still has its standards of truth, as witness a remarkable item that ran on Aug. 14 in the paper’s daily “Corrections” box, excerpts of which follow:
A front-page article on Monday about the house in North Caldwell, N.J., used to represent the residence of the mobster Tony Soprano in the HBO television series “The Sopranos” misstated the given name of…a character killed by Tony. He was Salvatore Bonpensiero, not Vincent.
The article also misstated the circumstances in which Tony decided to kill him. The decision was made after he awoke from a dream and later found incriminating evidence in his comrade’s home, not during a meeting in Tony’s basement.
The place where A.J., Tony’s son, was caught smoking marijuana was misidentified. It was the garage, not the powder room.
Remember now, Salvatore Bonpensiero is, or was, a fictional character. Ditto for his “killer.” Ditto for his killer’s “son.”
As a bemused Gregg Easterbrook pointed out in his weekly column on ESPN.com, “Tony can’t kill anyone, he does not exist. Tony never had any dream or found incriminating evidence or met anyone in the basement or caught his son smoking grass. Tony is fictional. Here the straight-laced, precision-obsessed, oh-so-conscientious New York Times runs a detailed ?correction’ regarding events that are totally made up.”
In case anyone still misses the sheer ludicrousness of it all, Easterbrook likened it to the Times “running a correction that says, ‘James Bond drinks vodka martinis, not gin as was stated in yesterday’s editions. The New York Times apologizes to Mr. Bond.’ ”
Jason Maoz can be reached at [email protected]