Triumphalist hurrahs infused the Times’ coverage of the large-scale protests by illegal immigrants demanding amnesty in the spring of 2006. Few photographs showed the seas of Mexican flags, and the demonstrators’claims that borders are unnecessary because we’re all “one big American landmass” didn’t find their way into print.
Meanwhile, the Times condemned almost any effort at border enforcement or interior immigration control. Raids on overcrowded immigrant housing on Long Island—such as the modest-sized residence where sixty-four men lived—were denounced, and the targets were quoted as declaring that they were being treated worse than dogs. These raids were painted in totally racial terms and likened to the segregation formerly practiced against blacks. “It’s like we’re going backwards,” one activist told the Times.
Unsurprisingly, the paper was apoplectic over Arizona’s plans to arrest and deport illegal immigrants in April 2010. The new law was passed in response to drug violence spreading across the border from Mexico, compounding the criminality already associated with rampant immigrant smuggling. The most contested provision entailed permitting local police to arrest and hold people for federal immigration authorities if there was “a reasonable suspicion” they were illegal, after encountering them in the course of traffic stops, domestic violence calls and other routine law enforcement actions.
When the Arizona law was signed, Randal Archibold gave plenty of room in his report for opponents to condemn it as “a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling,” and as “an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.” Archibold quoted Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles saying that demanding residency documents was equivalent to “Nazism.” He said the bill’s author, state senator Russell Pearce, was regarded as a “politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party.”
It was in editorial and op-ed commentary that the Times really foamed at the mouth, however. An editorial headlined “Arizona Goes Over the Edge” called the bill “harsh and mean-spirited,” and predicted, “If you are brown-skinned and leave home without your wallet, you are in trouble.” Timothy Egan referred to Arizona as “a lunatic magnet” and said the “crackpot” law was the work of “crackpots who dominate Republican politics, who in turn cannot get elected without the backing of crackpot media.” The former Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, now a Web columnist and a resident scholar at Yale, went over the edge in a post headlined “Breathing While Undocumented.” Greenhouse said she was glad she had already seen the Grand Canyon because “I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state,” and added: “Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?”
The very idea of border enforcement and requiring a legal process for immigration has been met by journalistic contempt. Many reports in a myopic and maudlin vein have been the work of Nina Bernstein, whom one former Times employee called “nothing more than an advocate” for illegal immigrants. A search of her stories on the Times website over the last few years reveals an anthology of charges that immigrants are being abused or victimized in some way.
Bernstein’s specialty is stories where immigrant families are split apart because one of the parents got caught up in a raid or a fraud, or where immigrants had spent a substantial length of time in the United States and become integrated into their communities, but were deported for various unfair technicalities. One piece tells of a woman separated from her child, whom she can only visit through the border fence. The teary money quote: “It’s like visiting in prison. It’s heartbreaking. It’s sad because there’s a fence when we know we are all supposed to be together.” A story in February 2010, “A Fatal Ending for a Family Forced Apart by Immigration Law,” told of a 32-year-old father of three and husband of an American citizen who was sent back to his native Ecuador, which he had left when he was seventeen. The man was picked up in an immigration raid and took “voluntary departure” instead of being deported, which boosted his chances of getting back in. But the couple’s application for a marriage visa was rejected, and the man committed suicide in Ecuador.
Bernstein also filed a story decrying a perfectly legal program that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had set up at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York to identify undocumented foreign criminals. In a city with a “don’t ask, don’t tell approach to immigration,” the program “may come as a surprise to many,” she wrote. Using immigration advocates as her predominant sources, Bernstein allowed them to depict the program as a “warning” of what the rest of the country could expect. The process of deporting criminal aliens once their sentences were up, according to immigrant rights groups, was “leaving the deportees’ families abandoned in New York and dependent on our city’s strained social service system.” True, the process of dealing with twelve million people who broke the law to get here is going to involve some pain. But constantly harping on that does not encourage compassion.
One reason why the Times’ immigration reporting sounds so off is the success of lobbying groups such as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. There’s also anxiety about “feeding a backlash” against poor Third Worlders. But scorn for patriotism—not nationalism or jingoism, but patriotism—is certainly a factor too, along with an agenda to deconstruct the idea of citizenship. At the Times, cosmopolitan postnationalism trumps the traditional notion of American community, and “the cult of ethnicity” that Arthur Schlesinger warned about in The Disuniting of America has overshadowed the commonweal. The diversity to which the Times is so committed has had mixed blessings for the United States, which the paper has not bothered to investigate. As the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam found, places with the most ethnic and racial diversity are also places with low civic engagement and social trust. Community life withers and people tend to “hunker down” in order to escape the friction that develops in excessively diverse places. Yet the Times promotes “diversity” as an aggressive creed, one whose spirit was captured by the columnist Charles Blow in a taunt at the Tea Partiers: “You may want your country back, but you can’t have it.... Welcome to America: The Remix.”
six
Culture Wars
On his NBC News blog in April 2008, Brian Williams, a fairly mainstream newsman, noted with bemusement that the lead story in that week’s Sunday Style section was “Through Sickness, Health, Sex Change.” In the same section, Williams also found “Was I on a Date or Baby-Sitting?” and “Let’s Say You Want to Date a Hog Farmer.” The cover story of the Sunday magazine was about “The Newlywed Gays,” while the lead story in the Travel section reported on the rise of vacation resorts catering to nudists. Williams wondered “exactly what readers the paper is speaking to, or seeking.”
The public editor Daniel Okrent had wondered the same thing in 2004 when he wrote a column asking “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” His answer: “Of course it is.” Okrent said the word “postmodern” had been used “an average of four times a week” that year, and if this didn’t reflect a Manhattan as opposed to a mainstream sensibility, he remarked, “then I’m Noam Chomsky.” (In August 2010, the standards editor, Philip Corbett, urged the Times newsroom to limit the use of the word “hipster,” which he said had appeared 250 times in the last year alone.) Okrent also noted that the culture pages of the Times “often feature forms of art, dance or theater that may pass for normal (or at least tolerable) in New York but might be pretty shocking in other places.” The Times Magazine, he said, featured photo essays of “models who look like they’re preparing to murder (or be murdered), and others arrayed in a mode you could call dominatrix chic.” In the Sunday Style section, he found “gay wedding announcements, of course, but also downtown sex clubs and T-shirts bearing the slogan, ‘I’m afraid of Americans.’ . . . The front page of the Metro section has featured a long piece best described by its subheadline, ‘Cross-Dresse
rs Gladly Pay to Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side.’”
Okrent acknowledged that a newspaper has the right to decide what’s important and what’s not, but stipulated that some readers will think, “This does not represent me or my interests. In fact, it represents my enemy.” He finished his controversial meditation: “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.” For those with a different worldview from the one that dominates the Times, the paper must necessarily seem “like an alien beast.”
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, responded to a query from Okrent by saying that he preferred to call the paper’s viewpoint “urban.” The tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment that the Times occupies meant that “We’re less easily shocked,” Sulzberger said. He maintained that the paper reflected “a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility.”
But the cat was out of the bag. An authoritative voice at the Times had said, in effect, that the paper’s views—especially in matters of culture—were characterized by moral relativism and a celebration of the transgressive over traditional American norms and values.
Indeed, the New York Times has been waging its own war against the traditional culture. In its coverage and criticism of media, film, television, books, poetry and music, the Times looks through a radical-chic lens, affirming marginal causes and communities at the expense of normative values, and deriding what members of the academic community ridicule as “heteronormativity.” The Times has embraced postmodernism with a vengeance, along with a deconstructionist cultural agenda that has spread through the paper like a computer virus.
The Times’ biases have come sharply into view in its media criticism, especially regarding “conservative media,” and above all, Fox News. Grudging admiration might have been a legitimate approach for the Times to use in covering Fox. As Jack Shafer put it in Slate, “you might not like what you see on the Fox News Channel, but you’ve got to admit the variety of voices heard on cable news increased after [Rupert] Murdoch started the channel in 1996.” In his Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer explained that “Fox broke the liberal media’s monopoly on the news, altered the intellectual and ideological landscape of America, and gave not only voice but also legitimacy to a worldview that had been utterly excluded from the mainstream media.” In the process, Fox News shattered “the scriptural authority” of the New York Times.
The Times of Abe Rosenthal’s day might have criticized Fox but also acknowledged that the more points of view, the better in a robust democracy. The Times of Sulzberger Jr., however, saw Fox only as a dangerous development—a medium that “shills for Republicans and panders to the latest American religious manias,” as Howell Raines declared on Charlie Rose in 2008. Raines called Rupert Murdoch “a flagrant pirate,” and he described Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder and president, as “an unprincipled thug who has assumed a journalistic disguise.” In 2005, the Times’ executive editor Bill Keller told the New Yorker that Fox’s slogan of being “fair and balanced” was “the most ingeniously cynical slogan in the history of media marketing.” And in April 2010, the television writer Brian Stelter gave the comedian Jon Stewart a wide berth to call Fox a “truly terrible, cynical news organization.”
The biggest lightning rod for the Times has been Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. The self-declared “Culture Warrior,” O’Reilly can be feisty and over-the-top, as when he threatened to make a citizen’s arrest on San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom for performing gay marriages under dubious legality. But The O’Reilly Factor has used its star’s old-fashioned moral fervor to break stories that other news organizations have ignored, and to set a news agenda that other organizations have followed. It led on the United Way’s post-9/11 misuse of funds, put a spotlight on child molestation and a legal system that goes too easy on it, insisted on the distinction between legal and illegal aliens, and explored the misappropriation of taxpayer dollars to the left-wing organization ACORN. O’Reilly spares no opportunity to go after the New York Times, which he has labeled “a brochure for the far left in America.” He aggressively questioned the paper for the number of stories on Abu Ghraib that ran on the front page (more than four dozen), declaring it a sign of the Times’ antimilitary bias and lack of patriotism. He has done segments insinuating that the Times may have known about possible illegal ACORN campaign contributions to Barack Obama but spiked the story.
After ignoring him altogether for years, the Times started hitting O’Reilly back. It made fun of his concern about the secularization of Christmas, and allowed Frank Rich to accuse him of having been “deployed” by Mel Gibson to defend Gibson’s film The Passion—a charge that led to an official Times correction. In the spring of 2007, the Times featured a study on “propaganda techniques” used on The O’Reilly Factor, and was happy to report the study’s conclusion that O’Reilly beat Father Charles Coughlin “by a mile” in the use of such techniques.
Another lightning rod for the Times’ antipathy toward Fox is Glenn Beck, who joined the network in 2009 and instantly started earning through-the-roof ratings. The Times most often dismisses Beck with a flick of the wrist, but this contempt has been hard to sustain when Beck has broken important stories that the Times ignored.
One of these stories centered on Van Jones, a special advisor to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, whose portfolio was “green energy” and environmental jobs. In July 2009, Beck started banging his drum against Jones, who had been caught on video calling Republicans “assholes” in a February speech. Beck also reported that Jones had signed a “truther” petition claiming that “people within the current [Bush] administration may indeed have allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext to war.” Calling Jones a “communist-anarchist radical,” Beck demanded that he resign, igniting a national firestorm that achieved exactly that end.
When the Times finally ran its first Van Jones story, it called him a “charismatic community organizer and ‘green jobs’ advocate from the San Francisco Bay Area” who had become “fodder for conservative critics and Republican officials.” But it did not report, as Beck had done, that Jones had embraced communism in the early 1990s. The managing editor, Jill Abramson, admitted on the Times website that the paper was “a beat behind on this story.” To which the New York Post’s Kyle Smith responded: “The Times purposely ignored [the Van Jones story] because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn’t be forced out. The Times doesn’t like people like Glenn Beck and didn’t want him to be able to claim Jones’s scalp.”
An even more important story that Beck drove and the Times ignored was an undercover video sting of ACORN. Two young filmmakers went to the organization’s offices in cities around the country asking ACORN workers for advice on establishing brothels, illegally importing underage girls to work in them, and avoiding detection by the police and trouble from the IRS. The 25-year-old male filmmaker was dressed as a caricature of a pimp; his comely 20-year-old female colleague wore skimpy tops with miniskirts and other streetwalker accessories. In Baltimore, an ACORN worker was caught on camera telling the “prostitute” that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an “independent artist” and that the underage illegal-immigrant sex workers could be claimed as “dependants.” In Brooklyn, ACORN workers told the pair how to lie on mortgage documents in order to buy a house of ill repute. In San Diego, an ACORN worker suggested that the two seek their “girls” in Tijuana and said he could help smuggle them into the country.
As the videos were released one by one on the Internet and played on Glenn Beck’s show, various government bodies with links to ACORN severed their ties. The Senate voted to end all funding for ACORN, and the Census Bureau, whi
ch uses ACORN as an unpaid resource, cut its connections. The New York City Council froze all its funding for ACORN, and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal probe. In late March, ACORN announced that it was closing all its offices nationwide. Yet the Times ran nothing whatsoever until a week after the first video was posted. And then, as with Van Jones, it claimed that Republicans were mobilizing people to dig up dirt.
The paper’s slow reflexes on the ACORN story, following the controversy over Van Jones, “suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs,” wrote the public editor, Clark Hoyt. “Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.” Hoyt said that many readers who wrote him said the Times was “protecting the progressive movement.”
But the Times was definitely not slow off the mark when the filmmaker who produced the ACORN videos, James O’Keefe, was arrested with three others in January 2010 for allegedly trying to tamper with the telephones in the office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. “High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateur,” read the front-page headline, with the foursome’s mug shots below it. They had plotted a sting to determine whether Landrieu may have been avoiding constituents’ complaints during the debate over health care reform. (In May, O’Keefe and his cohorts pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor charge.)
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