Is The New York Times A Liberal Newspaper? (Joe Gandelman)
Joe Gandelman
The New York Times' Public Editor Daniel Okrent has a column in the Times today headlined just that:"Is The New York Times A Liberal Newspaper?" And hopefully you won't consider us flip if we say "DUH!"
On a personal note. I've read the Times for all of my life — but can't say I'm a huge fan of the paper — and that has nothing to do with ideology. I never found it as lively as others (say the Los Angeles Times). But through my childhood years and college years it was considered THE liberal newspaper to read. No one disputed that, especially during the Vietnam era and the Clinton era.
In college at Colgate University,a Political Science prof would make a huge production out of opening his Times with a noisy flourish to show he was learned and say: "Hmmm. James Reston has an intersting piece today." This inspired student friend later brought the New York Daily News, opened IT and would say, "Hmmm. Moon Mullins has an interesting strip today..." One student (who later went on to a political career) sat in the front row and slowwwly opened his Times sloooowwly the prof could be sure to see and like him (for a better grade).
Okrent's column was sparked by emails and letters from readers charging his paper has a liberal bias. The paper, he writes, has also been criticized by the left for its election coverage. He writes:
Read the whole thing (you have to register), if you can. But the crux of his point is that if there is a bias it is much less political than geographic: the Times is influenced by city values:
So is he sticking by his paper or is he suggesting changes? He thinks a mental shift needs to occur:
On a personal note. I've read the Times for all of my life — but can't say I'm a huge fan of the paper — and that has nothing to do with ideology. I never found it as lively as others (say the Los Angeles Times). But through my childhood years and college years it was considered THE liberal newspaper to read. No one disputed that, especially during the Vietnam era and the Clinton era.
In college at Colgate University,a Political Science prof would make a huge production out of opening his Times with a noisy flourish to show he was learned and say: "Hmmm. James Reston has an intersting piece today." This inspired student friend later brought the New York Daily News, opened IT and would say, "Hmmm. Moon Mullins has an interesting strip today..." One student (who later went on to a political career) sat in the front row and slowwwly opened his Times sloooowwly the prof could be sure to see and like him (for a better grade).
Okrent's column was sparked by emails and letters from readers charging his paper has a liberal bias. The paper, he writes, has also been criticized by the left for its election coverage. He writes:
I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.
But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.
Read the whole thing (you have to register), if you can. But the crux of his point is that if there is a bias it is much less political than geographic: the Times is influenced by city values:
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." He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means "We're less easily shocked," and that the paper reflects "a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility."
He's right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears, a condition magnified by the been-there-done-that irony afflicting too many journalists.
But it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.
So is he sticking by his paper or is he suggesting changes? He thinks a mental shift needs to occur:
Six years ago, the ownership of this sophisticated New York institution decided to make it a truly national paper. Today, only 50 percent of The Times's readership resides in metropolitan New York, but the paper's heart, mind and habits remain embedded here. You can take the paper out of the city, but without an effort to take the city and all its attendant provocations, experiments and attitudes out of the paper, readers with a different worldview will find The Times an alien beast.
Taking the New York out of The New York Times would be a really bad idea. But a determination by the editors to be mindful of the weight of its hometown's presence would not.
If you're a news reporter and you can't think of anyone you work with who thinks Bush is a good President... or worse, you can think of one or two and you think of them as the oddballs... you have to ask yourself, how can such a view not shape your reporting, whether you intend to or not?
Thankfully some internet blogs actually do point out the bias and dishonesty. See the Ranting Profs or Power Line for NY Times efforts to misinform its readership.
I cringe how this will be disassembled and ripped by the right. And I await the much more searing truth from Fox News.
Also, my publisher last week dropped a W sticker on the back of his bumper (and he's got a very nice, now despoiled, vehicle - a Town Car, I believe).
Along with the rest of the range, I have work colleagues - close - one who I think of as a whacked out liberal and one who I think of as a whacked out conservative.
The liberal is just in pie-in-the-sky land and does not hate. She covers education. The guy on the right - yes, he's quite hateful of many groups. He covers ... politics.
“Top Lowlights of the New York Times in 2003”
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.