46 Comments

1. 49erDweet:

Maybe he will be able to score a volunteer position as a “story teller” for an elementary school near his home. That way he could continue to satisfy his drive peddle fiction to the masses, only now it would be more accurately labeled.

Apr 3, 2009 - 2:34 pm 2. Doug:

Woman glues eyeball shut

“I would hate people to think I’m just some dumb blonde, because I’m not.”

Apr 3, 2009 - 2:46 pm 3. JMH:

The New York Times, the greatest of them, it would mean the collapse of a dynasty and a national treasure.

I doubt the NYTs was ever any sort of national treasure, except perhaps in the minds of a narrow class of petty guild members aspiring to the lower rungs of some sort of noveau nobility. Walter Duranty was using the pages of the Times to parrot Stalinist propaganda eight decades ago, and the paper hasn’t exactly gone uphill since then.

Even when the bulk of the population accepted what the Times printed as fact, I don’t think most saw it as anything particularly special. Expat and wannabee New Yorkers, convinced that Gotham conferred some sort of status upon it’s once and future denizens bandied the paper around like a membership card, but the rubes in the sticks saw through the arrogance.

The Gray Lady was a myth that I don’t think very many people really believed. The only thing that keeps that from being more clear is that the people who did believe it (mostly for selfish reasons) were the ones with the loudest voices. Pauline Kael probably didn’t know anyone who didn’t read the Times either.

The End that we’re really witnesses is the end of the era where members of the Journalists Guild could insulate themselves from the outside world and ignore any challenges to their pretentions.

Apr 3, 2009 - 3:18 pm 4. PA Cat:

Some will argue that a whole way of life, a Class of people almost, has seen its sun set.

How appropriate that Pinch is rumored to squiring Caroline Kennedy around town. Joe’s heirs are another rapidly fading dynasty.

Apr 3, 2009 - 3:44 pm 5. RWE:

I guess the big question in my mind about the demise of the NYT is what is really causing it.

Was it the clear and obvious bias? I have a book on my shelf, as yet unread, entitled “Journalistic Fraud: How the NYT distorts the news and why it can no longer be trusted.” A shocking allegation, but made by a non-journalist lawyer who just got fed up. This book was not exactly a NYT best seller, so how much impact could it have had? On the other hand, it probably shows just the tip of the iceberg. The author read so much that he considered to be wrong in the Times that he finally got P.Oed enough to write a 300 plus page book.

Was it the incompetence, revealed by such as the Jason Blair case?

Was it really competition from electronic media?

Was it the degradation of general reading skills brought on by various factors?

Or was it the general feeling that the Times no longer presented a viewpoint that most people wanted to read? If so, if Rupert Murdoch bought the Times, told Sulzberger to go fishing with the former President of GM and pointed the paper in his own personally preferred direction, would that turn it around? I don’t know but it sure would be good to find out.

Apr 3, 2009 - 3:45 pm 6. Kevin:

What will replace the NYT? My guess is not one thing but a combination of things, from HuffPo to the Daily Show.

I recall hearing the observation that toward the end of the Roman Empire, its art –particularly its depiction of people– grew increasingly debased, moving from classical forms to what we would now call cartoonish. It’s no surprise that journalism is going the same way now, when political debate and discourse has been looking increasingly like a food fight or a Monty Python skit. And despite all its highbrow posturing, the NYT has itself contributed to that trend.

Apr 3, 2009 - 3:59 pm 7. rrpjr:

I’ll dance on their grave. This ceased to be a newspaper many years ago and in fact has become a net liability to the culture: deliberate liars and demagogues operating under their aegis of prestige, debasing a standard and expectation of journalism absolutely necessary to the health of a democratic society. Simone Weil made the point that crimes of a political and intellectual nature committed by such stewards of the culture are the worst crimes of all, and should by punished accordingly.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:06 pm 8. buddy larsen:

But long live what?

Dirty Harry, as soon as soon as the DNC & Kremlin get done driving American caucasions into a bloc vote.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:07 pm 9. RWE:

JMH: I don’t think it was just a myth at one time. I understand that the NYT was the only newspaper that published Einstein’s entire paper on Relativity. That is damned impressive.

RRPJR: Yes, you are right. It fell down a long time ago. The Fraud book says that a journalist that had worked for the paper for 30 years published a book saying the paper was driven by liberal bias. And that was in 1969. He said it started that at the end of WWII.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:13 pm 10. Josh:

Call it a little creative destruction, institutions get old and die, and a bunch of things can contribute. Dead tree publication is dead. Hierarchical control of information is dead. Last millenial progressivism has no audience of its own, absent distributional monopolies. Sulzberger is an idiot. The entire economy is in a crisis. Uranus is in an ascendant mode. Let’s move on.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:29 pm 11. buddy larsen:

Josh, Futurama tells us that science got tired of the “Uranus” giggles, and changed the name to “Urectum”

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:33 pm 12. Josh:

What giggles?

http://astrology.about.com/od/advancedastrology/p/Uranus.htm

Uranus is known in astrology as the “Awakener,” since its aspects and transits bring sudden changes and shocks. It rules Aquarius, the quirky innovator, and sometimes these upheavals are a necessary break from restrictions in favor of a more liberated path.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:44 pm 13. EdGi:

Journalistic fraud killed the myth and exposed what the Times always was; the internet, ad arrangements and such were changing world problems that competent ownership would have solved, but once the myth died they were dead.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:44 pm 14. Doug:

It still does provide a valuble news source when it is not introducing biased reporting, or omitting or burying important news.

John Burns was still an editor in London last time I checked, Dexter Filkens did some reporting almost equal to Yon’s, and Yon reports that Carla Gill is one of the few reliable sources in the area.
He also reminds that many assignments are too expensive for a majority of alternative media reporters.
Kristof filed informative reports from China SE Asia, and elsewhere, etc…
I’ll miss all that.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:48 pm 15. Doug:

valuble?

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:49 pm 16. RWE:

Back in the 60’s once in while we would go to the news stand down town and buy a copy of the Sunday NYT. What a wealth of material in there!

I could easily imagine the people in NYC lazing away a whole Sunday, leisurely reading that paper. None other I have seen has ever equaled it. Not the LA Times, nor the Wash Post.

Apr 3, 2009 - 4:54 pm 17. rickl:

wretchard, it’s interesting that you mentioned the Titanic. As far as I can tell, the NYT’s accurate front page story about the Titanic disaster is what made that paper’s reputation in 1912.

Dozens of other newspapers throughout the Northeastern U.S. had wildly inaccurate front page stories based on fragmentary and conflicting information. Some papers had the crippled Titanic being taken under tow. A Boston paper even ran a banner headline, “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION”.

A young NYC-based wireless operator named David Sarnoff listened to the ship-to-ship traffic that night and contacted a friend at the Times, which went with a front page story reporting that the Titanic had sunk with “great loss of life”.

Apr 3, 2009 - 5:24 pm 18. buddy larsen:

right –it wasn’t just the New York venue –it was a great paper.

Apr 3, 2009 - 5:28 pm 19. Walt:

I agree with Buddy about the Uranus giggles, especially as it applies to the NYT, and will note, if I may, that there are more important things than what is Pinch Sulzberger going to do with the rest of his life. In the Atlantic Monthly, for instance, Bibi Netanyahu stated that if the US doesn’t stop Iran from getting the bomb, Israel will. The Ohlmert government just recently took out an arms convoy in Sudan, a distance greater than that to Natanz. Was that a message? You bet. Is the clock ticking? Darn right. Will it be soon? Before the summer is out.

Another for instance: the President of the United States traveled to Europe and spent his time spitting in the face of his own country, apologizing for us being arrogant and divisive, blaming the state of the world on the United States in general and George Bush in particular. We have elected a man as president who obviously doesn’t like the country one little bit. But let’s take one thing at a time. Obama we have for the next four years, but it’s the next four months that concern me. The Middle East is about to go up.

Bibi Netanyahu is now Prime Minister of Israel. A much firmer hand than Ohlmert’s is now on the levers of military power, and Israeli military power is to the Middle East as American power is to the world at large. An American president once said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. The only thing the Iranians have to fear is Bibi.

Bibi is a Philly guy and so, my friends, am I
So I know how us Philly guys react to threats and such
When mullahs promise death to Jews will come from out the sky
A guy like Bibi smiles but man can only take so much
We know cannon fire grapeshot but they seldom fire BBs
Bibi fires cannon though, ‘cause that’s what Bibi does
If smoothbore 18 pounders give the mullahs heebie jeebies
Then you just wait till Bibi’s F-15s give them a buzz
Bibi isn’t waiting for the US or the UN
To give him full permission to defend his hearth and home
He’ll hit the mullahs first before they put his land in ruin
He’ll show them Going Roman doesn’t mean a trip to Rome
The calendar is winding down relentlessly toward summer
And while the Phils and Cards and Yanks are playing out the game
The Mossad guys and IAF are planning on a bummer
That after which downtown Teheran will never be the same
The guys in beards and turbans think they’ve got us by the shorties
They don’t see Armageddon though you’d really think they should
The IAF is coming and they’re not in old P-40s
The mullahs better get out while the Arma gettin’s good

Apr 3, 2009 - 5:32 pm 20. blert:

Walt…

Superb!

Apr 3, 2009 - 5:38 pm 21. outa my league:

Move along, Pinch, succumb to progress.

The Outhouse must make way for the Chemical Toilet.

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:20 pm 22. Doug:

You’ll have to meet Tony next time he stops by, Walt.
A fellow Philly boy with interesting stories from his days working with Ray Kurzweil, Afghanistan, Iran, ‘Nam, etc.

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:23 pm 23. Lifeofthemind:

The NY Times has been slowly and more recently more quickly circling the drain ever since Abe Rosenthal was forced out as Managing Editor in 1988. Pinch Sulzberger succeeded his father in 1992 and instituted a regime of aggressive politicization that could be considered a prototype for what Obama is doing to America. Rosenthal was finally and unceremoniously ejected from his column in 1999. Part of the shift between Rosenthal’s Times and Sulzberger’s has to do with issues of sexuality. Rosenthal did not see the homosexual agenda as being an essential component of inclusive Civil Rights reform. Abe Rosenthal was a Liberal in the solid Times tradition of his boss Punch Sulzberger and columnist Scotty Reston. He was high minded, patriotic and rigorous in his devotion to standards. He was devoted to New York City and the working and middle classes and their aspirations. Pinch Sulzberger along with columnist, former theater critic, Frank Rich and Editor Bill Keller has transformed the paper into something far more strident and narrow in its perspective.

The paper was always liberal, when the editorial page endorsed Eisenhower the reporters hug a banner across the newsroom proclaiming their support of Adlai Stevenson. The paper, despite the Duranty episode, was also far more scrupulous until recently.

I miss the NY Sun.

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:30 pm 24. buddy larsen:

walt, your pomes is Revelations!

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:34 pm 25. Habu:

Some credit is due to a once great newspaper. I can attest first hand. Working out of the Office of Special Projects ,Directorate of Science nad Technology for a period of my CIA time we were in the very final stages of what was known as Project Jennifer. The story was going to break for reasons I know but have never seen accurately in print.
My boss went to the major dailies along with the DCI and asked them to sit on this very major project for as long as they could. We even briefed them.

They (NYT) complied for a time but the story broke and the Soviets were all over the ocean X spot we needed, plus they now knew the goal we were after.

It was the end of a beautiful operation that had actually begun when I was a senior in high school, 1965.

Other than that in the past thirty years it’s been a liberal rag with a bias too much to overlook.

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:42 pm 26. Shivermetimbers:

RWE

You wrote: “If so, if Rupert Murdoch bought the Times, told Sulzberger to go fishing with the former President of GM and pointed the paper in his own personally preferred direction, would that turn it around? I don’t know but it sure would be good to find out.”

In many ways, it is what he is doing with the WSJ – a successful paper with broad readership. Slowly but surely he is competing against the NYT. Today, the WSJ has a weekend edition, a personal section, and a sports page.

And a conservative editorial team, to boot.

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:45 pm 27. always right:

The King is Dead. But long live what?…The Rahms and the Baracks?…

The Rahms and the Baracks know ONLY how to tear down. They don’t contribute in building up truly amazing stuff.

The builders and contributors are being villainized as we speak.

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:45 pm 28. RAH:

THE DEMISE OF THE LA TIMES, CHICAGO tIMES AND THE NY TIMES IS “EVOLUTION IN ACTION”

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:49 pm 29. MarkJ:

I keep getting this mental image of Pinch calculating and recalculating the numbers, screaming at his staff, wondering what the f*** happened, and hoping for a miracle that will never come….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxCNCDWaWyE&feature=related

Apr 3, 2009 - 6:52 pm 30. whiskey:

It won’t be the Obamas, the Emmanuels, the Carbon Traders, and the other Yuppie schemes and schemers from the Age of Seinfeld.

This is merely the interregnum, until a new populist spirit ensues. Which will of course have it’s predictably ugly spots. You can’t have populism without a mob, and fury, and targets usually symbolic and of also, importance as a “class enemy” though that’s not the correct or useful word for it.

Whenever there has been a populist movement, with Jackson, or with Lincoln, or with Bryan, or with the Klan, which was in fact genuinely populist in it’s latter incarnation after a long interregnum in the late teens and early twenties, there are “enemies.” Of the White Working class, and the enemies are real economic and social threats. Threats to wages: immigrants and Blacks in the labor force. Threats to social cohesion, safety, and cultural glue that created high trust networks allowing social mobility UPWARD: various “progressive” reformers pushing favored groups such as Gays, Indians, and so on.

These groups bet the farm, often a bet that paid off handsomely, on the progressive Yuppie or elite grouping. But unlike Europe, Working Class Whites in the US would periodically stage populist revolts, sometimes purely political (Bryan’s Prairie Populism) and sometimes as a violent Lynching Goon organization (the Klan). In the latter, ordinary men killed because they found Blacks, Jews, what have you a threat to their economic status and social cohesion. Which being one step from poverty they found a threat.

I would not give much for Yuppie scum long term chances against men who are one step from being poor and used to hard physical work. The demonization and tearing down of sensible populists like Palin means only the coming of a man like Jackson, terrifying in his intensity and that of his followers.

The Emmanuels, the Gores, the Obamas are prepared to make a LOT of working class White people poor and very poor, with no help from anyone (”No White Men Need Apply” says Robert Reich) but without killing them. Machiavelli would be appalled.

This is the King: The Return of Andrew Jackson, the original man on the horse of America.

Apr 3, 2009 - 7:00 pm 31. Lifeofthemind:

Eight and a half months ago Thomas Lifson wrote a piece for Pajamas Media, “The Rapid Decline of the New York Times.” My comments copied from my blog follow.

Stopped reading the Times and now I read The New York Sun. The President should issue an executive order prohibiting the expenditure of any government funds to subscribe to or support the Times. It was a magnificent machine that has sunk into a pool of resentment and sexual confusion.

Oh how the mighty have fallen! Many years ago my mother took her class on the pilgrimage to the Times. While they were there paying homage at the shrine of the newsroom they ran into Anthony Lewis. It must have been his annual trip down to NYC from Cambridge. One of the teachers tried to look smart by asking Mr Lewis what he thought of USA Today. The Great Man drew himself up and pronounced, “Fish would jump out of it!”

Apr 3, 2009 - 7:09 pm 32. Habu:

29. whiskey

You see it coming too I read, and a reasoned and accurate read. The anointed are developing the Sans-culottes and they don’t even realise it.

Apr 3, 2009 - 7:17 pm 33. PA Cat:

Then there’s T. S. Eliot’s 1917 salute to another now-defunct newspaper:

THE READERS of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.

Apr 3, 2009 - 7:25 pm 34. joe buzz:

Egos and attitudes such as these will be the death of you:

CASH-STARVED TIMES COMPARED TO DARFUR

Last updated: 5:00 pm
April 3, 2009
Posted: 1:12 am
April 3, 2009

NEW York Times Execu tive Editor Bill Keller equated the Gray Lady to a PBS pledge drive, claiming readers have offered to donate money to keep the Times alive.

Keller was speaking at Stanford University to dedicate a new building for the campus newspaper — an event he likened to a “ribbon-cutting” for “a new Pontiac dealership.”

The bombastic broadsheet editor went on to equate the keep-the-Times-alive movement to the cause of starving African refugees, saying, “Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.”

Keller said he had little use for Web sites like Google and Drudge Report: “If you’re inclined to trust Google as your source for news — Google yourself.”

Keller’s comments, which were first reported on Web site Politico.com, come as the Times sat down with the Newspaper Guild Wednesday in their first serious bargaining session to figure out how to extract $4.5 million in savings from the newspaper company’s unionized workforce.

by Keith J. Kelly
New York Post partial posting of longer article

Apr 3, 2009 - 8:46 pm 35. buddy larsen:

Keller makes one consider whether all those ass kisses he demands to receive have actually been little by little sucking out his brains.

Apr 3, 2009 - 9:10 pm 36. Doug:

Keller is a very well-respected National Security Leaker, lighten up!

Apr 3, 2009 - 10:46 pm 37. ledger:

The obituary for the NYT just would signal some of the shareholders may actually get a tiny percentage of their investment back. But, “Stake Holders” like Obama and the DNC would have larger loses – they would have to move to CNN.

Apr 3, 2009 - 11:32 pm 38. marymcl:

Thankfully the Sunday puzzles are available in book form and presumably will remain so.

But speaking as an ex-pat New Yorker, (albeit from a Daily News family) watching the decline and fall of the Times in recent years has been a very sad thing. And where, one wonders, will all the other urban dailies get their lead stories once the NYT goes under? Seems to me if the Times goes, many others will follow. And despite the fact they brought this on themselves, the general decline of newspapers is not good for the country. Bloggers don’t gather news, they comment on it. Who has the resources or manpower or prestige of an organization like the Times? (BTW I’m not arguing in favor of bailing out newspapers – in fact I’m quite worried it may happen. This is one of those situations where all choices look bad and the best we can hope for is avoiding the worst)

I too miss the NY Sun. A lot.

Apr 4, 2009 - 7:27 am 39. buckets:

I would add that supporting Adlai Stevenson did not necessarily make one a liberal. The old-Democrats often favored national defense, acted as loyal opposition when the country was in crisis, and helped establish the basic social safety net (SS, welfare) that we have today. Those aren’t all necessarily bad things.

The modern leftist, it is true, may trace his political beliefs back to the traditional Democratic party. But something happened along the way that caused a divergence – the Left incubated more from the Soviet fellow traveler movement than from mainstream Democrats. Dems like Truman and JFK, however myriad their faults, still believed in liberty and were loyal to the United States.

Apr 4, 2009 - 7:53 am 40. Lucy:

“When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a (wo)man I put away childish things.” I Cor. xiii. 11.

When I see a story in the NYS now, I pick it apart as I’m reading. Is this food article slanted too much toward a gay lifestyle? Is this movie or book review too slanted to the left to be trusted? Is the history correct? Everything, absolutely everything, in there is spun. Except their disdain of us–middle America–that’s accurate.

The pictures in the magazine section are often nice, though, and in focus, too!

Apr 4, 2009 - 8:31 am 41. rrpjr:

“Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.”

Funny but also sinkingly familiar. After a lifetime living among these pious narcissistic nimrods I can say with authority that nothing changes, nothing surprises.

Apr 4, 2009 - 8:58 am 42. buddy larsen:

good points, gals –those 400 NYTimes reporters deliver a lot of content –and as Lucy says, one can still figure out the gist of news items from them, just read between their lines.

Apr 4, 2009 - 9:05 am 43. buddy larsen:

pious narcissistic nimrods –damn, that’s the perfect three words i’ve been looking for –

Apr 4, 2009 - 9:09 am 44. Belmont Club » And then the ship seemed to momentarily rise in the water:

[...] parent company, the NYT, may not last long either. The old news model is in serious difficulties. When they go down there [...]

Apr 4, 2009 - 3:52 pm 45. Nine-of-Diamonds:

“Dirty Harry, as soon as soon as the DNC & Kremlin get done driving American caucasions into a bloc vote.”

That’s precisely what I was trying to get Boonton & Benj to realize on an earlier thread. As I said to them, the skinhead forums were jubilant on November 5th for a reason.

Apr 5, 2009 - 2:23 pm 46. buddy larsen:

And that was before the hard left turn.

Apr 5, 2009 - 2:45 pm

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