Gray Lady Down (22 page)

The Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist was trying to speak at Columbia University in October 2006 when campus radicals stormed the stage. A melee ensued, as security had to whisk Gilchrist off-stage, ending the event. The
Times
reported some of what happened but omitted some incriminating details, such as students shaking their fists and chanting
“Si se pudo, si se pudo,”
Spanish for “Yes we could!” Others unrolled a banner that read “No one is ever illegal,” in Arabic as well as English. But these bits of color were left to other news organizations to report.

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.”

O
n 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-Dressers 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.