Category: New York Times

New York Times Sends an 11-Year-Old Girl to Interview the Jonas Brothers

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Or the equivalent thereof: Shridar Pappu’s profile feature on “Washington’s New Brat Pack” pulses with so much fanzine breathlessness you might think it was February 1964 and the Beatles had just landed in New York:

In only a few years, these young men and others like them have become part of the journalistic establishment in Washington. Once they lived in groups in squalid homes and stayed out late, reading comic books in between posts as more seasoned reporters slogged their way through traditional publications like “The Hill” and “Roll Call.” Now the members of this “Juicebox Mafia,” as they were first called by Eli Lake of The Washington Times, in a reference to youth, have become destination reading for — and respected by — the city’s power elite. . . .
On Friday evenings it’s not uncommon to spot them at rock places like Black Cat or the 9:30 Club, or . . . in grungy enclaves like the American Ice Company. . . .
But they’ve also rerouted the aspirations of young journalists here, for whom a job in print media was once the holy grail. . . .

Pappu’s wet-your-pants hyperventilating enthusiasm about The Next Big Thing(s) in Journalism is rather difficult to reconcile with the February Meme o’ the Month, The Death of Blogging.

Less than five weeks after we were told that the cool kids are doing that Twitter thing, we are now told that these particular 20-something blogger/journalists are Woodward, Bernstein and Justin Bieber all rolled into one gigantic influential wad of pure awesome.

Amanda Marcotte — whose “godbag christofascists” 15 minutes of fame as The Next Big Thing ended even before anybody ever heard of Rielle Hunter — is appropriately bitter:

Hey, NY Times, 2006 is calling.
They want their narrative back.

Ms. Marcotte notes that “all the members of this curious tribe of bloggers-turned-professional have penises. And they’re remarkably pale of skin tone.” But of course, beyond their white maleness, it is the fetishistic obsession with youth — What All the Cool Kids Are Reading! — which provides the justifying rationale for Pappu’s story.

Frances Martel of Mediaite sees the rise of the Juiceboxers as showing “just how quickly a young consumer of media can become a young producer of media on the web, and how those young producers of media can quickly find themselves shifting roles from proteges to role models.”

Which is to say, the cycle time between being this year’s New Pop Sensation and next year’s Golden Oldies Classic has been accelerated, if only because the MSM editors in charge of assigning these trendspotting pieces are (a) so completely clueless as to what the hell anyone actually wants to read about, and (b) increasingly desperate to attract the younger readers who their consultants tell them are the Key To The Future.

So some editor at the New York Times assigns an article on the Young Kids Who Write What the Young Kids Read and — just like last month’s “Blogs Are So 2003″ idiocy — we get a brief glimpse into the self-obsessive insecurities that rack the minds of the fools presiding over the Decline and Fall of the Sulzberger Empire. (Has Bill Keller resigned yet? Because I’ve got $20 that says he’s gone before May 1.)

What the MSM Emperors With No Clothes can’t grasp is that their obsession with youth — New! Improved! Kid-tastic! — is symptomatic of their fatal disease. Go down the list of the New Media carnivores feasting while the Old Media sinks into the tar pit, and it’s not a bunch of fresh-out-of-college punks:

  • The biggest thing in cable news? Fox, where the No. 1 primetime show is anchored by a 61-year-old guy who used to do Inside Edition.
  • The biggest thing on the Internet? The Drudge Report, run by a 44-year-old guy who got his media training from reading the morning papers while working the third shift at 7-Eleven.
  • The biggest thing on the radio? Rush Limbaugh, 60-year-old former p.r. guy for the Kansas City Royals.

We could run down the list much further than that, of course — e.g., 57-year-old Tina Brown recently hired 57-year-old Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast — but the point is still the same: Whatever is killing the Old Media, it’s not because their New Media competitors are all Pretty Young Things providing readers with New! Improved! Kid-tastic! coverage.

The desperation with which the New York Times has recently flailed around in search of The Next Big Thing — “It’s Facebook!” No? “It’s Twitter!” No? “It’s Bloggers!” — betrays the encroaching sense among courtiers inside the castle that the king has lost control of the situation on the other side of the moat, where the peasants live.

And they are now haunted by an eerie sound: A distinct low rumbling noise, as if in the far distance there were many millions of boots treading steadily toward them, marching like an Army of Davids.

UPDATE: A belated hat-tip to Donald Douglas at American Power. Donald had Tweeted me the link to his post on Saturday, and I clicked through to the NYT article from there. But, by the time I sat down to write Sunday, I was just looking at the NYT article and had forgotten where I’d gotten it from.

Also: The dog ate my homework.

‘My Little Realm …’

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New York Times editor Bill Keller damns his own soul to hell with a column attempting his own justification:

Back in 2004, Daniel Okrent, the first ombudsman at The Times, wrote a column under the headline, “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” The sly first sentence of his essay was: “Of course it is.” Nobody seems to remember what came after. Okrent went on to explain that The Times’s outlook, steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city, tends to be culturally liberal: open-minded, skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan.

But it is none of those things, Mr. Keller. Indeed, it is the opposite of those things. The New York Times is close-minded, a credulous purveyor of the specific dogmas of organized liberalism, devoted to the credos of political correctness with the zeal of a fanatic, and narrowly provincial.

That’s not a mote in your eye, sir, it’s as much timber as might be found in a sequoyah forest. It blinds you to your failures, and if there were yet in your shriveled soul any remaining capacity for shame, you would have long ago resigned, never again to plague the world with pompous proclamations of your bona fides.

You have personally presided over the ruin of a once-great institution. These protestations of your good intentions serve only to remind readers of how the road to hell is proverbially paved. And what an epic folly you distill into a single ten-word sentence:

My little realm, the newsroom, consists of about 1,100 people.

Good Lord! The world’s largest and most highly-paid news-gathering operation in print journalism is your “little realm”!

And what a fine waste you have made of it, Mr. Keller. Your paper is routinely beaten on major stories by other news organizations with the merest fraction of the vast resources you command.

I suspect you will not reign over your “little realm” much longer. Some day historians chronicling the collapse of the New York Times will produce charts demonstrating that the downfall began the day you were hired and that the decline of the paper can be exactly correlated to the rise of Bill Keller within the organization.

Failure heaped upon embarrassing failure cannot be endlessly repeated and sold to the proprietors as success. Sooner or later, all these failures for which you have been personally responsible (try as you might to direct the blame elsewhere by your promiscuous use of “we”) will eventually tip the scales against you, and you’ll be gone.

Not a moment too soon, either. You are a stinking disgrace to the profession of journalism and the world would have been better off had you decided to pursued a career as a pimp, a carnival sideshow hustler or some other occupation for which you might possess an actual aptitude.


Credit Where Due: David Brooks Put It Well On Maher

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by Smitty

While this blog is normally unafraid to deliver the napalm shower for David Brooks, it would be ungracious not to give him a shout for this bit on Maher’s show. Props to NewsBusters for staring into that abdominal wound Maher calls a show:

MAHER: Their confidence is off the chart. If I had a nickel for every kid who come up to me and said, “I’m going to be on your show. Oh, it’s a fact.” I’m like, “Well, actually, it’s not a fact.”
BROOKS: That’s not necessarily a sign of high self-esteem though to want to be on this show.

Stuff the NY Times Doesn’t Mention

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Who promotes racism today? The freaking media, that’s who.

It’s their tiptoe-around-unfortunate-facts attitude — this politically-correct worldview whose peculiar biases are never explicitly admitted, but which we must instead attempt to infer by occasional clues — that creates a distinct species of suspicion, because there’s this cone of silence surrounding things people know but can never say out loud. (The blessed exception being comedians, the best of whom can good-naturedly joke about ethnic stereotypes and make us laugh.) So then something happens, like 17 Mexican illegals getting killed or injured when a minivan wrecks in a high-speed chase on a highway in Texas or Arizona, which pops up as a tiny four-paragraph story out of Phoenix or Waco, and people say, “What the hell? Why isn’t the national media reporting this story in the context of our country being invaded to the tune a million illegals a year, huh?”

It’s like there’s a conspiracy, see? Continue reading Stuff the NY Times Doesn’t Mention →

‘Whose Bright Idea Was It to Send Joe Biden Out to Talk About Egypt?’

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Question of the day, asked by Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy in response to the latest eruption of Bidenism.

“Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden responded: ‘Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with — with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.’ “

Remember how in 2008 we were told that Biden was such a brilliant choice as running mate and that Obama would benefit enormously from this guy’s vast experience in foreign policy?

“I can see Cairo from my house!”

Tobin Harshaw at the New York Times rounds up a number of blog reactions to the Egyptian situation, including Donald Douglas at American Power saying “this administration is the unrivaled champion of reactionary forces in the Middle East.” In regard to Egypt, I’m not entirely sure that “reactionary forces” are the worst to be feared, or whether the protesters in the streets are less “reactionary” than Mubarak’s regime. Thursday night, I voiced a note of Burkean caution toward the incipient Egyptian revolution, which will not help anyone — not the Egyptians, not the cause of Middle East peace, and certainly not the United States — if it ends up empowering Islamist radicals.

Israel reportedly is worried about “regime change” in Egypt, and I think rightly so. Yet what is better for Israel: A corrupt authoritarian regime in Egypt constantly struggling to suppress an outlaw terrorist subculture or that terrorist subculture seizing power in Egypt and declaring itself an open enemy of Israel? I trust if the latter scenario were to play out, the Israeli military would prove itself abundantly capable of meeting any attack that an Islamist Egyptian regime might make. So having the Egyptian radicals seize power might actually make matters simpler for Israel, militarily and diplomatically.

Meanwhile, much of the media commentary is less focused on what the unrest in Cairo means for Egyptians or Israelis than what it means for the prestige of the Obama administration. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” et cetera, and the administration’s sycophants in the press corps — which is to say, just about the entire press corps — seem to be interested primarily in whether the Egyptian crisis will offer them the opportunity to credit the president with a foreign-policy success.

The administration, it appears, is trying to have it both ways so as to be able to claim victory whether Mubarak maintains power or is overthrown. Thus the facing-both-ways caution of Robert Gibbs’s Friday press conference. As I said on Twitter, “If this was 1939, Gibbs would condemn violence on both sides of Germany-Poland conflict.”

UPDATE: Sharif Mansour says Friday’s protests demonstrate that Mubarak is doomed:

If the administration is smart, it will see the writing on the wall and realize that the old order in Egypt, and conceivably the rest of the Middle East, is gone forever. When the smoke clears, Washington will want to be on the right side of history. The United States must now withdraw its support, both financial and symbolic, from the Mubarak regime and avoid any further ties to its oppression.

Arguments based on being “on the right side of history” don’t necessarily persuade a Burkean. Weren’t the Soviets supposed to be “on the right side of history”?

Does the situation in Egypt evoke the distinctions Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously made in “Dictatorships & Double Standards”? If, as we are told, radical Islam is an existential threat comparable to Soviet communism, and if Mubarak has been a valuable U.S. ally in the fight against radicaL Islam, is it not in our interest to support him? But those two “ifs” represent hypotheticals that I don’t have the expertise to address.

What is certain is that the administration cannot vacillate forever. It must either decide to support Mubarak or else decide to support the Egyptian uprising. Eliot Abrams sees the uprising as vindication of Bush’s advocacy of democracy in the Middle East:

Ruling under an endless emergency law, [Mubarak] has crushed the moderate opposition while the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has thrived underground and in the mosques. Mubarak in effect created a two-party system – his ruling National Democratic Party and the Brotherhood – and then defended the lack of democracy by saying a free election would bring the Islamists to power. . . .
[W]e do know for sure that regimes that make moderate politics impossible make extremism far more likely.

Abrams thus argues that it is Mubarak’s repression that has spurred the growth of jihadist radicalism in Egypt, which may well be true, but that doesn’t mean that ending the repression will eliminate the danger. Nevertheless, if Republicans like Abrams are making the argument against Mubarak, that makes Obama’s choice easier: Side with the Cairo protesters and tout this stance as an example of bipartisan consensus.

Of course, the “bipartisan consensus” will only last as long as the policy is successful. If Obama throws Mubarak under the bus and then Egypt descends into anarchy Somalia-style, the president won’t escape blame by saying, “But Eliot Abrams told me it was OK!”

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE III: Thanks to Reaganite Republicanan for calling attention to this interview with John Bolton: “It is not inevitable that street demonstrations lead to Jeffersonian democracy.”

UPDATE IV: The Lonely Conservative notes that Iran’s state-run media are celebrating the Egyptian uprising, a fact that would tend to reinforce Bolton’s concerns. If the mullahs in Tehran think these Cairo riots are a good idea . . .

UPDATE V: Allahpundit on the risk that democracy in Egypt might bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power: “After 9/11 and the Iranian revolution in ’79, how could any American president gamble on backing reforms that might produce a net outcome that’s more Islamist? It’s political suicide.”

Linked by Don Surber, who calls Biden “a dunderhead who cannot tell a dictator from Tater Tot,” and now a Memeorandum thread.

Paul Krugman, Mystifield

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“Something really strange has happened to the debate over economic policy in the face of the Great Recession and its aftermath . . .
“Now, however, we’re seeing a much more widespread attack on demand-side economics. More than that, it’s becoming clear that many people don’t so much disagree with the idea that demand matters as find it abhorrent, incomprehensible, or both. . . .
“I fairly often get comments to the effect that I can’t possibly believe what I’m saying about monetary or fiscal policy, that no sensible person could believe that printing money or engaging in deficit spending will increase output and employment — never mind that all I’m saying is what Econ 101 textbooks have been saying for the last 62 years.”
— Paul Krugman, “The War on Demand,” New York Times

He’s got a Nobel Prize in economics and yet Krugman can’t see that the essential problem of our economy is a capital shortage. Defiict spending can’t remedy that problem, because before the government can spend money it doesn’t have, it must first borrow that money. And where does government borrow money? From the capital markets. Money that might be invested in businesses is instead siphoned away to fund deficits.

The wipeout of the housing bubble destroyed a vast reserve of asset value. Deficit spending cannot restore the loss, but actually aggravates the problem. The private sector is starved by the resulting shortage of capital. The fact that unemployment has remained stubbornly high for 18 months, that the real-estate market is stagnant and that commercial banking perilously shaky — all of these are symptoms of the same disease. Yet Krugman would rather cling to his Keynesian theory like a toddler hugging his teddy bear than to confront the sober reality.

Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession:
‘He Wanted to Watch It All the Time’

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Kudos to the Arizona Republic for this follow-up reporting:

Loughner began fixating on a documentary: “Zeitgeist: The Movie.”
The movie is a bramble of conspiracy theories involving Sept. 11, the international monetary system, and Christianity.
“There are people guiding your life and you don’t even know it,” the trailer for the movie intones.
“He wanted to watch it all the time,” Osler said. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”
Loughner developed a seeming obsession with currency, grammar and literacy rates. They were becoming the objects of his rants and screeds. Those around him didn’t understand.

OK, so on Wednesday, ABC News was first to report on Loughner’s obsession with this conspiracy-theory cult flick:

“I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in.”
– Zach Osler, friend of Tucson gunman

Four days later, the Arizona Republic finally follows up on this angle and we learn how intensely involved with this movie the killer became. Loughner already had serious problems — drugs, alchohol, dropping out of high school — but it seems to have been the “profound impact” of Zeitgeist that signaled his descent into deadly schizophrenic madness.

In their haste to shift blame onto Sarah Palin, Fox News, talk radio and the Tea Party movement, the elite media have overlooked what appears to be a major clue to the motive of the Tucson massacre.

As of noon Sunday, there were 39 search results on Google News for “Loughner+Zeitgeist.” Most of those were passing mentions. Meanwhile, a Google News search for “Loughner+Palin” returned 10,395 results. There were 595 results for “Loughner+Limbaugh.” Continue reading Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession:
‘He Wanted to Watch It All the Time’ →

‘The Most Bald-Faced Lie I Have Ever Read in the New York Times’

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“And that’s saying something,” says Ann Coulter:

[T]hat paper implied Loughner is a pro-life zealot. This is the precise opposite of the truth. . . .
ABC News reported: “One Pima Community College student, who had a poetry class with Loughner later in his college career, said he would often act ‘wildly inappropriate.’
“‘One day (Loughner) started making comments about terrorism and laughing about killing the baby,’ classmate Don Coorough told ABC News, referring to a discussion about abortions. ‘The rest of us were looking at him in shock … I thought this young man was troubled.’
“Another classmate, Lydian Ali, recalled the incident as well.
“‘A girl had written a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,’ Ali said.”
Here’s the Times’ version: “After another student read a poem about getting an abortion, Mr. Loughner compared the young woman to a ‘terrorist for killing the baby.'”

Ace of Spades gave a nice hat-tip to Nice Deb for finding that. Because Ace is good like that.  Continue reading ‘The Most Bald-Faced Lie I Have Ever Read in the New York Times’ →