Defending a label

 

 Dasu Krishnamoorty 

A public review of its troubled editorial conscience has now become a regular feature of the life and times of the New York Times. Last week, its public editor and readers’ representative Daniel Okrent asked, ‘Is New York Times a liberal newspaper?’ and answered it himself, ‘ Of course it is’ in the very first sentence of his bi-weekly column. The public editor thus grafted NYT into a debate that so far has been between the conservatives and the left; the one asserting that the newspaper’s liberal policy is in reality bias and the other contesting NYT’s eligibility to appropriate the liberal label. But why did Okrent suddenly pose this question without any external stimulus? One may surmise that this may have something to do with last year’s shocking revelations of journalistic fraud and ii. the controversial fallout of Judith Miller’s WMD reports. They dented NYT’s image and its publisher has not been able to restore balance to the newspaper’s editorial focus. Insiders apprehend that if the paper of record does not give up its widespread practice of passing off opinion as news, the main complaint of the conservatives, its reputation as a newspaper that prints all the news that is fit to print might suffer an irreversible setback.   

Since 1896 when Alfred Ochs founded the Times, its tradition has been to strictly adhere to segregation of news from views."  The slide from this motto began in the last days of Och’s son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger. A Times old-timer Herman S. Dinsmore wrote in his book All The News That Fits (1969): "The New York Times today is deliberately pitched to the so-called liberal point of view, both in news and editorial columns."  As people began detecting that the Times had begun using its news space for promoting an ideology, its uncritical following began to shrink. With the erasure of the line between news and the paper’s liberal views, some of its friends saw a new trend of the Times compromising its objectivity legacy. Gradually, a big industry emerged with networks in the campuses, Internet and the world of publishing that does not let NYT claims of unbiased reporting go unchallenged.  

In the recent past, the NYT made so many mistakes (discussed in a series of articles The Hoot carried) in news management that it had to periodically explain fundamental departures from its liberal news philosophy. Since then, self-doubt has become a habit with the NYT. The very act of sporadically washing the Times Square linen in the public manifests a slumping faith in itself and liberalism. But the three sides to the debate on whether NYT is liberal adopted three different premises to conceptualize their case, none of them more than partly tenable.

If we judge liberalism by the tokens Okrent had mentioned we would realize that all of them came decades after liberalism and NYT had arrived on the American scene. They are not liberalism’s original and core ingredients. Okrent defines the concept by explaining the perceptions of the paper on liberalism’s later constituents such as gay rights, abortions, gun control and environmental regulation etc. He harps on the paper`s coverage of gay marriage, which he terms "a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause." Readers who attack The Times from the left, who are a legion, generally confine their complaints to the paper`s coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy. It is strange that Okrent does not refer to the hallmark of NYT journalism: international relations.

I am sure the vast following of the Times will not agree with Okrent’s downsizing of the personality of the paper to a metropolitan level. He says, "Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn`t think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper`s viewpoint "urban."" This interpretation dilutes all claims to liberalism by shifting the NYT’s focus from the political to the geographic, making it as one reader pointed out ‘an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears.’ Okrent’s observation that the "paper’s heart, mind and habits remain embedded here (New York)" is bound to displease millions of its overseas readers who buy the paper because it throws open a window on the world.

The left premise is focused on the loss of liberalism from the NYT pages as evident from its unwitting support to Bush’s search for alibi to go to war with Iraq. The left contrasted this to NYT’s coverage of Vietnam War and the Clinton era. The Iraq war thus seems to have shattered equanimity in the Times newsrooms. Even otherwise, in an environment of eternal media vigil, the NYT’s liberal credentials have not gone uncontested. A Buzzflash.com editorial last month said, "But even the New York Times editorial board supported the war in Iraq, and it has, until just a few weeks ago, been generally devoid of a sense of outrage over the dishonest, lying, treasonous, inept, and corrupt Bush Administration. So, we`re not about to let America`s "paper of record" off the hook." Another Times veteran and author of My Times: A Memoir of Dissent John Hess says:  "I pointed out that the pathological lying by Jayson Blair had harmed nothing but the reputation of the Times, whereas the paper had routinely spread lies by official sources that got us into war." In Extra! Update (April ’03) Jim Naureckas says, "the New York Times played down opposition to war and exaggerated support for George W. Bush`s Iraq policy--in ways that ranged from the questionable to the dishonest."

The conservative case can be gleaned from the pages of Bob Kohn’s latest book Journalistic Fraud: The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted. The book is significant because it is not the work of a journalist but a solicitor. It is an elaborate litany of charges that the conservatives generally make against the NYT. Kohn accents on liberal bias that he says pervades the NYT’s news pages, even while keeping his hands off the political positions inherent in the paper’s editorials and opinion columns. When executive editor Howell Raines had to quit following the Blair episode, the Wall Street Journal, identified with the conservative establishment, said in an editorial (6 June 03): "Our view is that what we have been seeing on the front page (of the Times) in recent years is less straight forward reporting and more advocacy journalism.. In this sense, the scandal over Jayson Blair’s fabrication is symptomatic of a broader credibility problem that won’t vanish because Mr Raines does." A fact Kohn has amply documented is about the NYT camouflaging commentary as news.

According to Times Watch, a project of the Media Research Center, dedicated to documenting and exposing what it calls the liberal political agenda of the New York Times, complaints about its liberal bias have grown stronger since the 2001 promotion of Howell Raines from editorial page editor to executive editor. FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) also has a section that specializes in dissecting the contents of the NYT. But one inadequacy of the liberal bias debate is its participants equating it with opposition to Bush or some issue that has a short shelf life. Neither the liberal Times nor the conservative Wall Street Journal is rigid and doctrinal in the positions taken on important issues. Times are when WSJ criticized Bush policies. The NYT has just emerged bruised from a left fusillade attacking it for lending legitimacy to Bush’s war effort. 

At the individual level, if there is anyone who can compete with the Times in prestige, popularity and controversy it is Noam Chomsky, "arguably the most important intellectual alive." He is as much an inalienable part of New York and America as NYT is. An average American can escape neither. Chomsky steers clear of these familiar labels and describes NYT as the elite media because, according to him, the people who read The New York Times—people who are wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the political class—they are actually involved in the political system in an ongoing fashion.

Chomsky says, "Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well, it’s pretty obvious. Take The New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audience. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses."

Okrent’s article shows that the NYT deserves this elite label Chomsky attaches to it. He refers in his article to culture pages that "often feature forms of art, dance or theater that may pass for normal (or at least tolerable) in New York but might be pretty shocking in other places." He has the same pride for the NYT’s fashion coverage, "particularly in the Sunday magazine, when I’ve encountered models who look like they’re preparing to murder (or be murdered), and others arrayed in a mode you could call dominatrix chic." His list of liberal tokens goes on to include announcements of gay weddings. Revolution, shall we say?

The New York Times is, in terms of Chomsky logic, what its owners determine it should be. From time to time. All this debate about its liberal character is, however, confined to campuses, authors, senior journalists and media vigilantes. Yet at another level, a dispassionate discussion on the NYT is impossible since it is now a religion in America with a large following of believers. In the third millennium, its critics are as many as its believers. NYT ignites unquenchable fires on both sides of the line. The Times is a parallel America, a world of its own inhabited by every nationality that inhabits the Big Apple. To agree with its journalism is as much a fashion statement as it is blasphemy to doubt its liberal claims. All this is fine but since the Times sets the news agenda for much of the print and TV media, it ought to adhere to the unassailable values that its founder Ochs prescribed for it.

 

Dasu Krishnamoorty has worked in the newsrooms of the Indian Express, the Times of India and Patriot and taught at Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Osmania and Hyderabad universities. Contact : dasukrishnamoorty@hotmail.com