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| Peggy Noonan: the fall of the New York Times |
| 2006-06-29 |
| Once the New York Times was extremely important, and often destructive. Now it is less important, and often destructive. This is not a change for the worse. The Times is important still because of its influence on other parts of the media: . . . But it's not what it was. Once it was such a force that it controlled the intellectual climate. Now it's just part of it. Seventy years ago its depiction of Stalin's benignity left a generation confused, or confounded. Fifty years ago, when the Times became enamored of a romantic young revolutionary named Fidel, the American decision-making establishment believed what it read and observed in comfort as an angry communist dictatorship was established 90 miles off our shore. The Times' wrongheadedness had huge implications for American statecraft. . . . It was hurt by its own limits--a paper of and from an island off the continent, awkward in its relationship with and understanding of the continent. It was and is hurt by its longtime and predictable liberalism. Predictable isn't fun. It doesn't make you want to get up in the morning, tear the paper off the mat and open it with a hungry snap. It was hurt by technology--it lost its share of what was, essentially, a monopoly. And it's been hurt by its own scandals and misjudgments. The Times rarely seems driven by an agenda to get the news first, fast and clear; to get the story and let the chips fall. It often seems driven by a search for information that might support its suppositions. Which, again, gets boring. The Times never knows what's becoming a huge national issue. It's always surprised by what Americans are thinking. In a way the modern Times is playing to a base, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the redoubts of the Upper West Side throughout America: affluent urban neighborhoods and suburbs. The paper plays not to a region but a class. But one senses the people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power. Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it's 1968 and he's an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out. This is the imagery that comes to you when you ponder the Times. It's the imagery that comes unbidden when you ponder the national security stories they've been doing. They're all re-enacting. They're acting out their own private drama in which they bravely stand up to a secretive and all-powerful American government. I think it's personal drama in part because there's no common sense in it. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 The news media in general are providing less news than they ever used to, month by month. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2006-06-29 18:35 |
| #2 and this from a woman who saw fit to ridicule and deride President Bush's inaguration speech that championed promoting democracy to reduce terroism. oh sure... I agree with what she's saying here, but I think she's really missing a main point and that is that the papers are preaching instead of providing the product that they profess to sell - news. You can sell fake cures for weight reduction and small breasts until someone else provides one that really works and then you are screwed. The NYT hasn't provided news in quite a long time. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-06-29 10:22 |
| #1 Very good article. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-06-29 08:31 |