Friday, July 18, 2008
Why People Hate the NYT
This Vanity Fair article asks why people hate the New York Times.
The responses go from self-righteous disdain for any who would dare to criticize to claims of envy. One of the commentators said what seems to me true — it is a familial thing. If you read a paper everyday, or watch a broadcast, or pay attention to one person or thing a lot, you can be sorely disappointed. More deeply disappointed than you would be with a figure or institution outside of your day to day experience.
The news so often has strong moral forces expressing themselves in people's lives, where attitudes can often lead to catastrophic action. So you want to feel that they, the NYT, does get it right on a moral plane if they are going to play a subtextual ideological game. You don't want ideology, of course — a form of patronizing arrogance — you want them to tell the truth with all its messy ambiguities. If the Times stuck to that sole task, of trying to tell the truth and being open to mistakes in the narrative they would insulate themselves.
Because the NYT has often chosen to express itself subtextually as an ideological player, they open themselves to the critical grief they have received. Often the NYT has failed on the moral plane — in the days of Howell Raines it was a self-parody. But it is a huge newspaper with tremendous scope and impossible to categorize, certainly impossible to excoriate without many exceptions, of the journalists, and of decisions made by the editors.
The NYT can often be disappointing but it is not a suitable target of hate. You can hate an intentional lie but it is foolish to hate the clueless.