Dean's World

Jay Rosen has a long and thoughtful look at the Judith Miller fiasco, and has a revelation: he no longer views the New York Times as the Paper of Record. He now instinctively trusts the Washington Post instead.

Welcome to the club, Jay. I've found the reporting routinely better and more reliable from the Washington Post for some time now, and always link them preferentially on any story.

I was made a little wistful reading this conclusion from Jay though:

Whether the Times can free itself and tell a larger story that incorporates and corrects hers is totally unclear. The organization may not be up to it. But this doesn’t matter to what I said at the start. There’s a new flagship paper, and just as the Times needed the Post to steam alongside and challenge it, the Post will need a strong New York Times to remain true.

So I hope they go back to being the New York Times one day soon.

Jay, please hear this in the gentlest possible voice when I say these words: they've been a ridiculously unreliable voice for a long time now. To "get back to being the New York Times," they've got to go way, way, waay back before they can be considered a real news organization again.

Harry Stein, a post-liberal who in a better world would still be considered very much a moderate centrist, in his 2000 book, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), said in one sentence what an awful lot of people have known for a very long time:

Quite simply, when it comes to any subject touching even remotely on politics, the New York Times just cannot be trusted.

Their opinion columnists, with one or two brave exceptions, are shallow idiots. Their science reporting is steeped in political correctness. The old-school PC spin on every story involving weighty public matters is laughable. The way they treat red state America as a sort of bizarre alien specimen is painful. Their war reporting is hopelessly stuck in the Vietnam era. Indeed, what does it say about them that to get a positive story published on our troops' postive efforts and accomplishments in Iraq, someone at the Times had to sneak it into the sports section?

It all to me points to something rotton to the core of what we've come to call liberalism today. I'm not ashamed of the world liberal, it's not a dirty word and I'm proud to apply it to myself in many, many contexts. But the broad political movement known as "liberalism," epitomized by the worldview common to the New York Times, has become paint-by-numbers, predictable, kneejerk, pompous, and shallow. The great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill once said of the conservatives of his day that they were people who didn't have ideas so much as irritable mental gestures that vaguely sought to resemble ideas. I can think of no better description than the worldview epitomized by the folks running the ship at the New York Times. It's why I rarely link them, and rarely talk or write about them except in terms of contempt. I still skim them, still find an occasional brilliant story there.

But if I find out about an important story, even if the New York Times has it first (which ain't that often anymore), I automatically check the Washington Post or Reuters or UPI because I know there's a good chance the New York Times' report won't be trustworthy.

They haven't been the paper of record for a long time Jay. As a continuing modern liberal you may find that painful, but there it is: they don't deserve to be considered #2 or #3. They aren't even #10. They cannot be trusted on any of the most important matters of the day. It's time we all admit that.

Modern liberalism needs to resurrect itself as an intellectual movement. Recognizing what a ridiculous self-parody the average issue of The New York Times represents is a very good starting step. Indeed, perhaps an even deeper question could be asked: For the New York Times to get back to being the New York Times, we would have to ask if it was ever the New York Times in the first place.