It doesn’t take the great Tenno Kurosawa to tell us that we all see our own special version of the truth. I used to be one of those who trusted The New York Times to adjudicate it for me. O les beaux jours – those halcyon days will probably never return. Thinking for myself can be wearisome sometimes, I have to admit.
But over in Iraq now, Greyhawk is doing some thinking for himself. He gives us a compare and contrast between the NYT’s and the Washington Times’ vision of Marine attitudes there toward the election. As you recall, we’re not supposed to trust the Washington Times because “they are owned by the Moonies.” I’ll keep that in mind. Who owns Greyhwawk, btw, has anybody asked him? Oh, he owns himself.
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20 Comments
1. WichitaBoy:The NYT would probably do itself a world of good by moving its headquarters out of New York. It is an increasingly parochial newspaper masquerading as a national newspaper. New Yorkers are living in a many-million person bubble, as this article shows.
New Yorkers fail to realize that they are parochial because they are the center of the broadcasting and national newspaper industries in this country. That means that information constantly flows out of New York and not the other way round. Thus, nearly every town of any size in America has the NYT and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post readily available for sale, and read by many. Not to mention Time and Newsweek, the book publishing industry, etc. Every single city and town and village and rural area in America gets nightly broadcasts from New York and we have all seen infinitely many movies and television shows centered in New York and about New York. Thus, we out here in Flyover know all about New York, many of us have even lived there at one time, and most of us are required to travel to New York on a regular basis for business reasons. However, how many New Yorkers have ever been to Wichita or Columbus, even once? We know all about them and they know nothing of us. Yet they presume to continue to tell us how things are in their infinite conceit.
One of the many hallmarks of genius in our Constitution is the realization that people do tend to share the views of the people immediately around them and thus democracy has an inherently regional nature. If you think about it, simple geographic location is probably a far better predictor of how people will vote than race, religion, education, or any number of other things people insist upon measuring. This is why we have the Electoral College. The New Yorkers naturally have pretty much the same view of the world as all the other New Yorkers around them, not any absolute truth unavailable to the rest of humanity. They’re all stuck in the same scene of Roshomon; the rest of us have moved on to consider the rest of the movie.
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:19 pm 2. Jamie Irons:Roger
What a fine piece!
With his laconic, trenchant sense of humor, the writer reminds me of own Terrye.
I especially enjoyed, in reference to the NYT reporter:
You see, registration began for the Iraqi elections this week – a story I haven’t seen in too many places yet. I’m going to bet that the NY Times reporter has been instructed by his commanders not to tell that story.
Some day soon he might have freedom to tell the truth. Or some day soon people just won’t listen.
Jamie Irons
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:23 pm 3. Hylas:Best line in the piece:
LOL
It’s amazing how quickly the “W won because Americans are bigoted hicks” meme has become the official narrative of the NYT crowd. I doubt they even realize when they’re being mocked.
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:25 pm 4. Bostonian:That was brilliant.
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:27 pm 5. gb_in_ga:WichitaBoy:
I just glanced at that article, and right up there at the top was this little quote that I find profound:
“New York is an island off the coast of Europe.”
How true.
But the idea of New York being a multi-million person bubble isn’t at all new, it has been like that for longer than I’ve been here. They’ve always considered themselves to be a microcosmos.
I think you are correct in your observation on information flow there — they don’t really know nor care what is going on out here in the rest of the States. Especially here in the South, and in “Fly Over Country”. We have always been alien to them, and increasingly they to us.
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:28 pm 6. Jamie Irons:Sorry, should be:
With his laconic, trenchant sense of humor, the writer reminds me of our own Terrye.
Jamie Irons
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:31 pm 7. Salt Lick:Wasn’t part of this in “Alice’s Restaurant?” — Eat burnt, dead bodies, and stop that homo marridge?
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:41 pm 8. Samuel:I get the best liberal and conservative newspapers delivered to my doorstep every day, the Washiungton Times and the Washington Post. The Washington Times is the best newspaper at covering politics by a mile. It is the favorite of conservatives for a reason, not because it is a hack newspaper, but because it is fair and conservative friendly on the Oped’s. By the way the Washington Times carries twice the amount of editorials the Washington Post does, but the Washington Post has a great Oped section as well, the best and most fair of all the liberal papers. But these are the two best at representing the opposing political slants and by a mile. (my opinion)
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:52 pm 9. Skookumchuk:WichitaBoy:
Very true. We know all about them. They know nothing about us.
Excellent post.
Nov 4, 2004 - 1:55 pm 10. BigFire:Re: Samuel
I used to read WaPo’s Metro section for entertainment value. Now that Barry is back in town, I may just pick that habit again.
Nov 4, 2004 - 2:10 pm 11. ex-democrat:Worse: We know all about them. They just think they know all about us.
Nov 4, 2004 - 2:10 pm 12. Old Dad:Roger,
I stopped reading the Times’ “news” pages years ago. Until “Bombgate” I still forced myself to scan the editorial pages on line. I guess I just needed to confirm that Paul Krugman still saw the President as Hitler. But after the latest fiasco, I quit cold turkey. I didn’t want to give Pinch the satisfaction of a single web hit.
And it’s been great. I see their most egregiously inane stuff as it gets shreaded by the blogosphere, and I don’t have to suffer the psychic shock of reading it first hand.
Abstinence works!
Nov 4, 2004 - 2:18 pm 13. Charlie (Colorado):We should do a thread sometime on Kurosawa movies. One of my favorites is Dodes’ka den, although everyone else (including Kurosawa) seems to think it’s a depressing movie, but I think it’s uplifting.
Anyway…
I loved the piece; as Jamie says (if I suck up a little he may forgive me for the psychiatrist crack below) it has a compressed dry and trenchant wit that, sadly, probably won’t be understood by the people who most need to.
But, there’s another interesting aspect to it: one thing I’ve noticed quite a bit in this political campaign is that, while the MSM continues to think they can determine what the information is, what the narrative is, blogs from Iraq, like Ala’a, like Greyhawk, like SMASH and Chief Wiggles before them, are telling their own stories, can react to what the MSM is saying and refute it, and the story gets out
There was a book I loved as a kid, Don’t Go Near the Water, by William Brinkley. It reminded me a lot of the stories my father told about the Pacific Theater in WWII; what it was about, though, is public relations in WWII by a man who had done PR. One of the major antagonists is a reporter who insists on telling the worst possible story all the time.
Nov 4, 2004 - 2:23 pm 14. Jamie Irons:Charlie
Where’s the psychiatrist crack? I missed it somehow.
We psychiatrists, nous sommes tres sensibles…
My favorite definition of a psychiatrist, BTW (and it fits me) is “A Jewish doctor who is afraid of blood.”
Jamie Irons
Nov 4, 2004 - 2:35 pm 15. Old Grouch:Jack Risko has posted about the decline at the NYT:
(which includes a wonderful Guardian quote in which Howell Raines tells John Kerry to sell his positon on social security to the rubes by using disinformation(!))He also has an analysis of the decline of the Democratic party that I believe a lot of people here would appreciate.(By the way, his candidate for “Closest to being able to become the ‘Paper of Record’” is The Washington Post.)
Nov 4, 2004 - 4:00 pm 16. Terrye:I have never been to NYC.
I know… I know. I had intended to go for vacation but always ended up somewhere that had trees and mountains and streams and stuff like that.
I hate cities.
But Indianapolis is a big city, being in the midwest however it is an outpost in the wilderness to the smart, chic people in NYC. My niece likes it there however, in fact she was in Manhattan the day the WTC was attacked as was her father. Bad day.
But the folks of NYC and the coasts have got to get over themselves. Midwesterners are not heathens.
One of the reasons the Dems got beat so bad is that they have managed to convince a lot of people out here that the National Democratic Party wants nothing to do with them.
They need to stop treating the NYT as if it were the Gospel according to the God of secular liberalism and nominate somebody like Evan Bahy from someplace like Indiana.
Nov 4, 2004 - 4:48 pm 17. Charlie (Colorado):Jamie –
Here.
Proving I enjoy a good crack more than I’ve got good sense.
Nov 4, 2004 - 5:21 pm 18. Frederick:Hylas:
“If I get me a innernet I’ll stop that homo marridge.”
Superb. As the MSM produces boring drivel, America produces talent in astonishing abundance.
They used to say in the 19th c. that God made men but it took Samuel Colt to make them equal. I guess the 21st c. equivalent will be that the Constitution gave men freedom of the press but it took the internet to give them presses.
Nov 4, 2004 - 5:46 pm 19. Roberts:If Drudge is to be believed, Krugman has another completely nutty column slotted for Friday’s NYT.
Just as it is obvious that the mainstream media was discredited in this election, it is even more obvious that the NYT hasn’t gotten it yet.
Nov 4, 2004 - 7:27 pm 20. hm:not surprisingly, at least one german print journalist covering the election from new york was so distraught at the result that he forgot to write his story… and had to plagiarize by stealing parts of it from the new york times.
Nov 5, 2004 - 8:29 am