“You Guys Are Like a Walking Colonial Williamsburg”
Posted on June 11th, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
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This “Daily Show” report by Jason Jones on the New York Times is so brutal I would feel sorry for the Old Gray Lady — if only any of her employees showed a hint of humor or self-awareness. Consider this exchange between Jones and Assistant Managing Editor Rick Burke:
Jones: Why is aged news better than real news?
Burke: I’ve never heard the term “aged news.”
Jones: Well, the newspaper is aged. It’s yesterday’s news.
Burke: Not necessarily.
Jones: Give me one thing in there that happened today.
Burke: [Awkward silence.] But, um … Nothing here happened today. But I can give you several things that didn’t happen yesterday.
Jones: So it’s even older?
Burke: It depends on your perspective.
Neither Burke nor executive editor Bill Keller makes much effort to argue that the Times adds value to the news. And none of the Timesmen interviewed seems to get the paper’s basic problem: that its content, which indeed is still valuable, is not best served by its format. “News” and “paper” has become a contradiction in terms. That’s not to say that paper is dead (TAC certainly isn’t), but you can’t defend the paper as news. By the time it’s in print, it isn’t news any more.
The sharpest remark in Jones’s report, though, is one that punctures the Times’s happy talk about factual accuracy: “Whether it’s uncovering what happened during a war, leading us into that war in the first place, or just making s**t up,” says Jones, “the Times covers the news like no one else.” Doesn’t Keller realize that if readers want fresh propaganda and up-to-the-minute fabrications they can just turn to the Internet?
Filed under: media
Hey, hey, hey… I’m from Williamsburg and we aren’t *nearly* as lame, outdated, and useless as The New York Times.
The NYT was a paper I found boring but respected because it set out to be scrupulous about facts. Even if it was embarrassingly caught out on occasion, it was the intention that engendered the respect.
However, its reluctance to use the word ‘torture’ with respect to waterboarding, etc. has put it way beyond the pale. By siding with Cheney’s mob and effectively changing its working definition of torture it’s shown itself to be a believer in the contingency of truth; it has shirked the necessary task of telling truth to power. That’s simply something a serious newspaper can’t be caught doing; and what’s worse it’s doing it as a matter of deliberate editorial policy.
My favorite is the last question of the interview…”What’s black and white and red all over?”
Answer “A newspaper”
“Wrong…The NY Times Balance Sheet”
LOL