Readers with long memories are asked to indulge the Monitor’s use, for the second time in three years, of a quote about The New York Times from the noted essayist and author Renata Adler. In the introduction to her book Canaries in the Mineshaft (St. Martin’s Press, 2001), Adler, herself a Timeswoman many years ago, dismisses the “paper of record” in typically acerbic fashion, encapsulating in a handful of words everything that’s gone wrong on West 43rd Street.
“For years,” she writes, “readers have looked in the Times for what was once its unsurpassed strength: the uninflected coverage of the news. You can look and look, now, and you will not find it there. Some politically correct series and group therapy reflections on race relations perhaps…. But nothing a reader can trust any longer, either. Certainly no reliable, uninflected coverage of anything, least of all the news. The enterprise, whatever else it is, has almost ceased altogether to be a newspaper.”
Readers who still look exclusively to the Times for comprehensive news reporting devoid of inflection are liable to miss any number of interesting stories – particularly stories that cast a favorable (or at least not unfavorable) light on individuals the Times doesn’t particularly care for or a negative light on those for whom the Times has developed a noticeable soft spot.
In the past few weeks alone the paper ignored President Bush’s pledge that the U.S. would militarily defend Israel from an Iranian attack (the Times briefly carried a Reuters report on its website, but the print edition – repository of all the Times deems worthy of historical note – had nothing); was silent about Massachusetts Senator and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s eye-poppingly ignorant claim on the “Today” show that 53 percent of American children do not graduate high school (according to the Census Bureau, 85.9 percent of Americans aged 20-24 are high school grads); and chose not to report on former vice president and 2000 Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore’s visit to Saudi Arabia where Gore accused the U.S. government of having committed “terrible abuses” against Arabs after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (As with the Bush-Israel story there was a wire service account – the Associated Press this time – posted for a few hours on the Times website, but the story was nowhere to be found in the paper itself.)
The Gore incident is especially instructive because here was a prominent American politician bad-mouthing the United States before a predominantly Saudi audience in the country that was home and nurturing ground to nearly all the 9/11 terrorists. And the forum at which he made his remarks was funded in part by the Saudi Binladin Group – the kingdom’s largest construction company, headed by a slew of brothers and cousins of Osama bin Laden.
In addition to alleging that Arabs had been “indiscriminately rounded up” and held in “unforgivable” conditions, Gore labeled the Bush administration’s strict guidelines on granting visa applications to Saudis “thoughtless” and “a mistake” (though one can be certain that if the administration were pursuing a more relaxed policy the opportunistic Gore would be among the first to attack it for “cozying up to the Saudis”).
Gore also let slide several comments from the audience that were critical of U.S. support for Israel – “We can’t solve that long conflict in exchanges here” was the strongest response he could muster.
“With this speech,” wrote the columnist Mark Steyn, “Sheikh al-Gore sets an impressive new standard of insanity that even star performers like Kerry, Dean, Kennedy, Leahy and Biden will find very hard to match.”