Antipathy to Fox News translated into bias in the reporting of Rupert Murdoch’s successful bid to buy the Wall Street Journal in 2007. During the run-up to the sale, the Times did two hostile pieces that were produced to make the Bancroft family, which owned the Journal, think twice about selling to Murdoch. One was centered on his business practices, especially in China, where the Times suggested he regularly caved in to the Communist Party to protect his financial interests. The other story focused on alleged worry among Journal reporters about Murdoch’s journalistic ethics and the possibility that he might inject his conservative political ideology into the news. “If Mr. Murdoch does acquire The Journal,” fretted Paul Krugman on the op-ed page, “it will be a dark day for America’s news media—and American democracy. If there were any justice in the world, Mr. Murdoch, who did more than anyone in the news business to mislead this country into an unjustified, disastrous war, would be a discredited outcast. Instead, he’s expanding his empire.”
While Fox gets hate mail from the Times, liberal media figures and their organizations routinely get valentines. An October 2006 profile of Tavis Smiley, a black former NPR radio host who now has a show on PBS, was headlined “Media Man on a Mission: The Whirl of Tavis Smiley.” The piece by Felicia Lee gushed about how he had just left a meeting with Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, and likened his media saturation to that of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh (about whom the Times rarely has anything nice to say). “Do I cop to trying to motivate people, trying to inspire people, trying to uplift people through my symposiums, my books, my radio, my speeches?” Smiley is quoted as asking. “Yes, I cop to that. But it’s all born of love.” Lee did not mention some of his less uplifting statements, such as comparing George W. Bush to a serial killer in 2000, or insisting that O. J. Simpson was a sympathetic figure.
Coverage of the now-defunct liberal radio network Air America, always a relatively marginal enterprise, showed the same high regard. A puff piece headlined “They Look Nothing Like Rush Limbaugh” profiled two female personalities on the network, Rachel Maddow, who would go on to have her own cable television show on MSNBC, and Randi Rhodes, who made veiled calls for Bush’s assassination on the air, denounced Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro as “whores” in a YouTube video, and made false allegations of being attacked on the Upper West Side—all of which called her mental balance into question but didn’t qualify for mention in the Times. Grasping at straws, the piece said that Air America could become a “station brand,” even though at that point (November 2005) it was heard in only seventy-two cities nationwide and ranked number 24 in New York City, which is considered a liberal stronghold.
When she moved from the bankrupted Air America to her own show in an MSNBC primetime slot, Rachel Maddow was the focus of a string of positive stories in the Times, including a vacuous Q&A with Edward Levine headlined “A Pundit in the Country.” In the interview, conducted at her weekend home in Berkshire, Massachusetts, Maddow revealed that she always carried a handkerchief and that her partner, Susan Mikula, “buys me cute ones.” Not long afterward, the Times declared Maddow a lesbian icon. Daphne Merkin—who once famously wrote in the New Yorker about her fetish for being spanked—applauded Maddow in a magazine story headlined “Butch Fatale: Lesbian Glamour Steps Out of the Closet.” Until recently, Merkin wrote, “lesbians have been the wallflowers at the homosexual dance, waiting to get their share of recognition.” Now, however, “Lesbianism has finally come into a glamour of its own, an appeal that goes beyond butch and femme archetypes into a more universal seduction. Her name is Rachel Maddow, the polished-looking, self-declared gay newscaster who stares out from the MSNBC studio every weekday night and makes love to her audience.”
In its treatment of film, television, theater, music and other arts, the Times’ politicization is more subtle, involving ideological innuendo, radical-chic attitudinizing and liberal “editorial needles,” as Abe Rosenthal called them. But sometimes the subtlety gives way to naked political preaching. According to Peter Bart, a former Timesman and now Variety editor, “The Times has vastly stepped up its coverage of popular culture and in doing so, seems to be bending its normal rules of journalistic fairness.”
Reviewing George Clooney’s Syriana (2005), a sinister look at American foreign policy, A. O. Scott wrote:Someone is sure to complain that the world doesn’t really work the way it does in “Syriana”: that oil companies, law firms and Middle Eastern regimes are not really engaged in semiclandestine collusion, to control the global oil supply and thus influence the destinies of millions of people. O.K., maybe. Call me naïve—or paranoid, or liberal, or whatever the favored epithet is this week—but I’m inclined to give Mr. Gaghan [the screenwriter] the benefit of the doubt.
The Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Ridley Scott’s expensive box office failure, was seen even by some liberal filmgoers as a rabid exercise in anti-Western, anti-Christian, pro-Islamic bias. But it drew a rave from the Times critic Manohla Dargis, who called it “an even-handed account of one of the least fair-minded, evenhanded chapters in human history, during which European Christians descended on the Middle East for more than 200 years.” It spoke to the current world situation, Dargis declared, with parallels to the West “invading Muslim lands.” Dargis was in a minority in this judgment. The eminent Cambridge University historian Jonathan Riley-Smith criticized the film’s false portrayal of Muslims as sophisticated and the Christian Crusaders as barbaric. In an interview with the Telegraph of London, he called it “Osama Bin Laden’s version of the Crusades,” which would “fuel Islamic fundamentalists.” And in the Times of London, he wrote, “At a time of interfaith tension, nonsense like this will only reinforce existing myths.”
Movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the larger War on Terror, may have failed at the box office, but they have succeeded at the Times. Manohla Dargis favorably reviewed Lions for Lambs (2007), a triptych involving two soldiers who die in a remote mountain area of Afghanistan, the college professor who influenced them to join the service, and a newswoman being briefed on a (doomed) forward outpost strategy by an unctuous U.S. senator. From this film, Dargis asserted, viewers will learn that “America is no longer only the land of the free, home of the brave, but also the opportunistic and the compromised.”
A. O. Scott hailed Brian DePalma’s Redacted (2007), about the rape of a teenage girl and the murder of her and her family by U.S. troops in Iraq, because it brought us “face to face with what we have been unable to see or acknowledge with a collage of raw feelings and angry arguments.” In his review of Rendition (2007), which thrust an innocent CIA analyst into the black world of “torture, kidnapping and other abuses,” Scott wrote that the film used “the resources of mainstream movie-making to get viewers thinking about a moral crisis that many of us would prefer to ignore.” He added, however, that it was “inevitable that someone with a loud voice and a small mind will label Rendition anti-American.” In Body of Lies (2008), Scott saw a likeness between a heedless CIA agent portrayed in the film and President George W. Bush. “It’s possible that this resemblance is meant to imply a parallel between the president and Hoffman, who is immune to self-doubt and allergic to second thoughts about the righteousness of his actions.” A feature on the film by Robert Mackay cited its themes of “ruthlessness, political expediency and moral bankruptcy.”
The Matt Damon vehicle Green Zone (2010) has a preposterous plot and flopped at the box office, but that didn’t stop Times critics and feature writers from praising it. The story involves an Army staff sergeant (Damon) who explores what A. O. Scott calls “the hidden history of manipulation and double dealing” in the quest for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Although a noncom, Damon’s character breaks the chain of command to search out the deception behind the WMD issue. He ends up being targeted for assassination by scheming civilian political appointees. Nevertheless, Scott hails Green Zone for its ability “to fictionalize without falsifying,” and says that while the film “may
not be literally accurate in every particular, it has the rough authority of novelistic truth.” An arts feature by Robert Mackay gave the director, Paul Greengrass, a platform to explain that he wanted to tell the story of the invasion of Iraq because “This hugely difficult process by which we ended up going to war there, only then to find that the reason that we went to war was not true, left a huge legacy I think—a legacy of fear, paranoia and mistrust.”
The ideological messages are just as pronounced, maybe even more so, in the criticism, commentary and feature coverage of documentaries. Stephen Holden said of Trumbo (2008), an homage to the blacklisted Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, “If the story of the Hollywood blacklist and the lives it destroyed has been told many times before, it still bears repeating, especially in the post-9/11 climate of fearmongering, of Guantánamo, of flag pins as gauges of patriotism.”
One of the more egregious examples of political naiveté came in a David Halbfinger review of Winter Soldier (2005), an antiwar documentary on Scott Camill, a major figure in the protest movement of the 1960s. In the review, Halbfinger equates American military abuses in Iraq with the alleged throwing of prisoners out of helicopters in Vietnam, which is a bit of a historical stretch. He refers to Camill as “Jesus-like,” neglecting to mention that Camill had fantasized about assassinating political figures on Capitol Hill during congressional hearings.
The Times’ critics have also been effusive in praising Michael Moore, especially his recent look at the American health care system. When Sicko premiered at Cannes in May 2007, Manohla Dargis praised it as Moore’s “most fluid provocation to date.” A. O. Scott was not concerned that Moore had “no use for neutrality, balance or objectivity,” and seemed to revel in the fact that the filmmaker’s “polemical, left-wing manner seems calculated to drive guardians of conventional wisdom bananas.”
Poetry and pop music can also become ideologically charged at the Times. In a review of Poems from Guantanamo, a volume containing twenty-two poems from prisoners at that camp, Dan Chiasson said, “You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.” According to the Pentagon, one of the poets praised by Chiasson was among the scores of former Guantanamo detainees who re-enlisted in terror activities once they were released and returned to their home countries.
With its taste for the transgressive, the Times even celebrates the political and pornographic dimensions of hip-hop and rap, which John McWhorter characterizes as “the most overtly and consistently misogynistic music ever produced in human history.” He puts blame on “an academic establishment and intellectual elite that seems unwilling to judge the dynamics of black life by the standards that it applies to others.” The Times, a paragon of that intellectual elite, has averted its eyes from the harsher aspects of the music and the “gangsta” lifestyle its performers affect as a way of preserving street cred. In a July 2007 website Q&A, the culture editor Sam Sifton stood behind his paper’s coverage of hip-hop, “because it’s an art form. You may find some of it trite and repetitious, crude and juvenile, but it is,” he said to one dubious reader, adding patronizingly, “It may be that you’re just not listening hard enough.”
The in-your-face style of the Times’ rap criticism was apparent in an August 2007 piece by Kelefa Sanneh. Headlined “Still Here by Being Stubborn, Not Mellow,” the story was about a comeback CD by a pair of Texas rappers calling themselves UGK, one of whom had gone to prison in 2001 for aggravated assault. “What do rappers lose when they get older?” Sanneh asked. “In the case of Bun B and Pimp C, two rappers in their 30s from Port Arthur, Texas, who perform together as UGK, the answer is, not much.”
Sanneh reviewed the duo’s history, explaining that in 1992 they had made a major-label debut with Too Hard to Swallow. Their lyrics chronicle a Texan underworld “full of pimps who talk slick, pushers who talk tough, snitches who talk too much.” In a “silky” song called “Gravy,” Bun B waxed physiological, as Sanneh quoted him: “When I put one up in your dome / You’ll be leakin’ out plasma and pus, and your mouth’ll fill up with foam.” Sanneh continued, “There is plenty of old-fashioned trash talking here too. More than once, Bun B reminds listeners that he and his partner have brash new nicknames: Big Dick Cheney and Tony Snow,” the second, apparently, a reference to cocaine. “Throughout these two CDs, kilos are sold, foes are threatened, cars are painted and repainted, and prostitutes are put in their place.”
Most normal people would regard these two as psychopaths, but Sanneh sees them as prophets. “Gangsta rap, broadly speaking—streetwise protagonists, explicit lyrics, hard-boiled stories—turned out to be hip-hop’s future, to the consternation of gripers past and present. Southern gangsta rap, in particular. It’s now clear that Bun B and Pimp C were ahead of their time.” (In some archived versions of Sanneh’s review, some of the dumber and more offensive material noted above has been cut.)
Times critics are always alert to possible victories by the left in the culture war. In 2003, as this war was growing fiercer because of the invasion of Iraq, the Sunday Week in Review section ran a piece about a possible literary upswing for progressives. “For the first time in recent memory,” Emily Eakin noted, “The Times [best-seller] list, the nation’s most influential barometer of book sales, is pitting liberals and conservatives against each other in roughly equal numbers, ending what some publishing executives say is nearly a decade of dominance by right-wing authors.” Alongside such conservative best-selling authors as Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham were liberal-minded books like Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken, Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins, The Great Unraveling by Paul Krugman, Big Lies by Joe Conason, and Thieves in High Places by Jim Hightower.
Eakin may have been right in calling the Times Book Review’s best-seller list “the nation’s most influential barometer of book sales.” But its value as an objective measurement of American literary taste is compromised in view of the fact that all the liberal books Eakin noted had gotten reviews in that same publication, while none of the conservative authors did—as dozens of conservative books have been studiously ignored by the Times despite their commercial success.
Since late 1970, when John Leonard as editor turned an entire issue over to Neil Sheehan as a forum to protest the Vietnam War, the Times Book Review (or TBR as it’s called in the trade) has leaned to the left. The bias was especially pronounced from 1989 to 1994, when the TBR was controlled by Rebecca Sinkler and became “ruthlessly partisan,” as the literary scholar John Ellis famously remarked. “The Times management has decided to donate the Book Review to the cause of political reeducation,” Ellis wrote, turning it into “a lobby for political correctness” as well as “mindless bourgeois bashing and freakish sexual attitudes.”
Ellis described how “p.c. books are protected by assigning them to ideological clones of their author, while books that object to any aspect of p.c. ideology are given to the very people the book criticizes, who respond with predictable animosity.” Among the liberal books that got sweetheart literary deals at the TBR, as Ellis noted, were Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within, reviewed by Mother Jones editor Deirdre English; Susan Faludi’s Backlash, reviewed by Ellen Goodman; and Michael Harrington’s Socialism: Past and Future, reviewed by Paul Berman. “With matchmaking skills like these,” Ellis observed acidly, “Ms. Sinkler is wasted in journalism. She should run a dating service.” Meanwhile, conservative authors such as Dinesh D’Souza, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, all of whom had “established themselves as major contributors to the national debate” on race, were assigned to antagonists and got reviews that were nasty or dismissive, or that purposively ignored their central arguments.
Ellis scored Sinkler for her love of the post
modern jargon of university cultural radicals, and for her obsession with radical feminism and the associated “discourse on gender that sustains it.” Sinkler, he charged, had managed to make the TBR “a place where just as in Women’s Studies Departments no reality check operates to slow the radical feminist slide into ever greater unreality.”
In the Sinkler years, the TBR projected an unremitting hostility to anything resembling normative culture, especially if the book in question came from a high-profile conservative. Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be spent 53 weeks on the Times best-seller list, 24 of them as number one, but was not reviewed until a year after its first appearance on the list. And then it was derided by Walter Goodman, who said that Limbaugh’s writing alternated “between slobberings of sincerity and slaverings of invective.” Goodman was appalled that the book was aimed at “a part of middle America—call it the silent majority or The American People or the booboisie—that feels it has been on the receiving end of the droppings of the bicoastals as they wing first class from abortion-rights rallies to AIDS galas to save-thepornographer parties.”
Rebecca Sinkler was followed as editor of the TBR by Charles (Chip) McGrath, who institutionalized her double standards, praising liberals and penalizing conservatives. He ignored Ann Coulter’s best-selling High Crimes and Misdemeanors, which was scalding in its criticism of President Clinton, while he affirmed such pro-Clinton books as Sidney Blumenthal’s The Clinton Wars and Joe Klein’s The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.
During the McGrath years, Regnery Books, which is based in Washington D.C. and specializes in conservative titles, perfected the marketing art of doing an end run around the TBR. Dereliction of Duty by Robert Patterson, Useful Idiots by Mona Charen, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods, and Bias by Bernard Goldberg all made it to the Times best-seller list, but none got a TBR review. Regnery’s ability to promote the steak without getting the sizzle suggested that the TBR had become obsolete as a cultural arbiter because of its decision to participate in the culture wars rather than merely report on them.
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