EDITORIALS

We are shocked, shocked

How they write editorials on Eighth Avenue

THE NATIVES are restless. That’s the word from the New York Observer on the newsroom culture of the once good gray New York Times, which in its financially troubled old age has adopted the showy ways of a left-leaning tabloid, regularly exposing national secrets like some junior Edward Snowden. And in the process collecting a raft of Pulitzers as a reward for doing what it can to let al-Qaida’s planners know how to get around the NSA, FBI, CIA, NYPD and such spoilsports. There have been days when a copy of that morning’s Times could have served as a manual on how to exploit American vulnerabilities.

How describe some of the news coverage in the country’s former paper of record? Think of an aged dowager coated in rouge and acting like a flapper out to win a Charleston contest. Appalling, maybe, but times are tough, and the old girl’s got to do what she can to stir up a little interest in her leaden prose.

(N.B. However critical those of us who lost faith in the Times circa 1980 may be, we are honor-bound to note that its obituaries remain matchless-as if its ideological prejudices stopped at the edge of the River Styx.)

When the Times isn’t engaged in doing what it can to undermine national security, it’s doing what it can to support Hillary Clinton’s political security as she readies her next presidential bid. And that includes whitewashing her maculate record as White House heiress apparent. By now, it’s as if she’d been hanging around waiting to be crowned as long as the Prince of Wales, poor titled slob.

The Times did what it could to help not long ago by running a “news” story echoing Our Lady of Benghazi’s account of the massacre at Benghazi being just the result of a popular demonstration that got out of hand. Al-Qaida affiliate? What al-Qaida affiliate?Repeated warnings that the Americans there were in mortal danger? What repeated warnings? Cover stories? What cover stories? Today’s Times (“All the News That’s Not Fit to Print”) explained all that away. At least to the satisfaction of the usual Democratic apparatchiks and upper-class gulls in general. Anything to grease the rails for Miss Hillary’s coronation as the Democrats’ next presidential nominee even as the last one loses his once magic touch.

BUT NOW, according to the Observer’s latest report on the rarefied atmosphere at the Times, the rank-and-file out in its newsroom are said to be unhappy with the paper’s editorials, and especially its editorial page editor, whoever he is these days. (“The Tyranny and Lethargy of the Times Editorial Page”-New York Observer, February 4, 2014)

It always comes as a surprise to learn that Times editorial writers have names, their prose is so personalityless.They don’t so much write in sentences and paragraphs as churn out sodden clots of political conventionalities on order. They write like people who get assignments rather than come up with ideas of their own. However bad their own ideas might be, at least they’d stand a chance of interesting the reader, or just eliciting a sincere groan, rather than boring him beyond death.

The editorialists at the Times might as well be presidential speechwriters, their finished product is so tedious. Reading it all the way through is like having to attend one of those endless testimonial banquets that go from 6:30 to eternity. Scientists who claim that black holes are the only physical feature of the universe not a single ray of light can penetrate must never have tried to read one of the editorials in the New York Times. Are they actually written or just manufactured by the gross? Is anyone expected to actually read them? If so, who? The kind of people who think Gail Collins is funny or John Kerry has something to say?

The editorials in the Times must be meant not to be read but analyzed, like a chemical compound, or the way kremlinologists used to mine Stalin’s speeches for a clue to coming Soviet policy, or just a hint of humanity-in vain.

If, like the vast majority of Americans, you’re unfamiliar with the New York Observer and less than interested in the intramural gossip of American journalism, allow us to explain that the Observer is a journal that exists largely to serve as a check on the New York once Almighty Times, and to retail any scuttlebutt it can pick up about the aging empress of midtown Manhattan.The old dowager queen of American journalism is now ensconced in splashy new quarters on Eighth Avenue designed by some signature architect. Which may be appropriate, the Times having become a kind of hedge fund of American opinion, always balancing risk and gain rather than actually taking a position that might in any way surprise.

The word from the Observer is that the news side of the Times has discovered that the editorials are vapid, researchless, unoriginal, devoid of any real ideas, utterly boring and generally not worth reading. And, oh, yes, without real influence. To think, it took those ace reporters at the Times only 10 years or so to notice. You can’t keep anything from those eagle-eyed newshounds. Now they’ve discovered that the editorials in their publication are boring. We are shocked, shocked.

The only thing surprising about this “discovery” is that the reporters would bother to read the editorials in the first place. They may be the only ones who do, besides a few college professors who are gluttons for bad prose. Plus cosseted denizens of the East Side who don’t know any better, but must keep up appearances when they venture out of their high-rises to Zabar’s for something decent to eat-if they can manage to sneak a good pastrami sandwich past the food police in New York.

When the time comes to fill out the death certificate for the Great American Editorial, once a robust fixture on the American scene, the cause of death will be listed as Terminal Boredom, and the No. 1 suspect in this homicide-suicide will be editorial pages like the one the New York Times has been foisting on a steadily diminishing readership for years.

The only surprising thing about this “discovery” that the editorials in the Times are boring-indeed, boredom codified, indexed and archived in triplicate-is that any of its reporters should have troubled to read them. For the Times’ editorials are a powerful enough soporific that they should require FDA approval.

Congratulations to the news side at the Times for noticing, however late, that there’s something rotten over there on the opinion side, and even daring to murmur about it. It’s always good when the political proclivities of reporters and editorial writers differ. So they can balance each other.

The remarkable thing about this tiff between news and opinion at the NYT is that both share the same conventional liberal prejudices. It’s just that the reporters at the Times believe the editorials should better express them. It’s a shame the reporters don’t have more interesting fare to complain about over on the other side of what ought to be the Great Wall between news and opinion at every proper newspaper. Long may that wall stand. As we hope it will continue to do here at Arkansas’ Newspaper.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 02/08/2014

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