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The Gray Lady Shows Her Colors
 Unlike
many conservatives, I like the New
York Times, the “Good Gray Lady” of American
journalism. On big political stories, it usually offers the most thorough
reporting and is scrupulously
accurate.  But,
aware of its stodgy image,
the Times has recently lightened up to a fault.
For example, one of its regular
columnists now is Maureen Dowd, spunky and hip. She often alludes to topics
of pop culture the Times has sniffily ignored and hardly
covered. You can’t follow her meaning unless you’re also
reading New York’s tabloids, the Post and Daily
News, not to mention keeping up with the Michael Jackson trial.
The paper’s famous motto,
“All the news that’s fit to print,” leaves it in an awkward
relation to the celebrity culture. Unless I’m badly mistaken, it has
reported nothing about Russell Crowe’s latest arrest and subsequent
contrition.
Obviously the Times
has heard about the New Journalism and too often tries to apply the
techniques of fiction to news stories. Instead of the old-fashioned lead
paragraph, packed with who-what-when-where facts, you are now apt to find
an article beginning with atmospherics like this: “Even the black cat
that lived beneath Wrigley Field, fed and nurtured by stadium workers who
apparently are not as superstitious as the patrons, seemed to sense that
the Red Sox were coming.” Nice writing, but if you’re in a hurry
to read the morning paper you may not want to settle in as for a Joseph
Conrad novel.
What about the famous liberal bias
of the Times? It’s certainly there, not so much in overt
ways as in the tacit assumptions the paper habitually makes about the
reader. It seems to go without saying that the Times reader
believes there’s a government solution to every problem, and that he
doesn’t believe in the supernatural. The paper’s coverage of
religion is minimal, and the activities of Christians — papal elections,
say — are of interest — “fit to print” — only
insofar as they are potential threats to liberal causes. When Cardinal
Ratzinger was elected Pope, the Times reported the fact with
an undertone of alarm. It had hoped for someone less — well, Catholic.
Even the huge Sunday edition has no religion section.
![[Breaker quote for The Gray Lady Shows Her Colors: Reading the TIMES]](2005breakers/050609.gif) Catholics
may write in the Times, so long
as they are Garry Wills. That is to say, they are allowed space to attack the
Church for being insufficiently liberal. Defenders of the Church hardly ever
appear in the paper, and the orthodox Catholic reader feels a bit like a man
attending a party he hasn’t been invited to, with uncongenial people.
The Times fairly cries out to him, “Your kind
aren’t welcome here!”
The Times tries to
make a show of ideological balance on the op-ed page (a Times
innovation of the Spiro Agnew era), but even its
“conservatives” are liberals — that is, neoconservatives.
For many years this niche was filled by William Safire, a chum of Ariel
Sharon; today it’s occupied by David Brooks, who takes the position
that there’s no such thing as a neoconservative, thereby proving that
he is one. Only neoconservatives deny the existence of neoconservatives, on
the principle, I suppose, that Satan’s cleverest wile is to make us
think he doesn’t exist.
But whereas Safire blamed
Christianity for the Holocaust, Brooks can write sympathetically about
Christians. Still, Brooks is as statist as any liberal, and he’s scornful
of old-fashioned conservatives who favor limited government; he wants what
he calls “national greatness conservatism,” with America
dominating the globe (while maintaining a welfare state at home). Brooks
once championed the war on Iraq, but since it has gone bad he has been
rather subdued about it.
In general the
Times has been ambivalent, but mostly skeptical, about this
war — never opposing it directly, but supplying plenty of ammunition,
as it were, for those who do. This is the way it also handled the Vietnam war
for a long time, avoiding explicit commitment until liberal opinion had
solidified against that war.
The New York
Times is of course the Establishment paper par excellence, a
bellwether for all the major media, which imitate not only its news judgment
but its cagey liberalism. But it contains plenty of good writing, and it’s
an indispensable guide to what the most influential folk in America are
thinking.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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