Waving Goodbye
Daniel Okrent's 18 month tenure as the NYT's public advocate is at it's end. Okrent waves goodbye and leaves a list of things left dangling, including:
Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults. Maureen Dowd was still writing that Alberto R. Gonzales "called the Geneva Conventions 'quaint' " nearly two months after a correction in the news pages noted that Gonzales had specifically applied the term to Geneva provisions about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.Ouch. That's gotta hurt. Okrent also regrets being a bit too pithy:
No one deserves the personal vituperation that regularly comes Dowd's way, and some of Krugman's enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn't mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn't hold his columnists to higher standards.
I didn't give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.
Last July, when I slapped the headline "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" atop my column and opened the piece with the catchy one-liner "Of course it is," I wasn't doing anyone - the paper, its serious critics, myself - any favors. I'd reduced a complex issue to a sound bite. The column itself, I'll stand by; I still believe the paper is the inevitable product of its staff's experience and worldview, and that its news coverage reflects a generalized acceptance of liberal positions on most social issues.Although I don't think of myself as an ideologically fueled righty (your mileage may vary), I got to play with the machine gun and found it very easy to fire.
For The Times's ideologically fueled detractors on the right, though, there was no reason to invoke this somewhat more complex analysis when they could paint my more incendiary words on a billboard: "According to The Times's own Daniel Okrent. ..." I may wish they'd live by one of the same standards they ask The Times to adhere to - the fair representation of controversial opinions. But I handed them a machine gun when a pistol would have sufficed.
Okrent's successor is Barney Calame.
Comments
I can't even muster up the energy to respond to this tripe. I guess your crusade to join the other righty bloggers in attacking the media as "too liberal" continues. But I think we know its all bullshit. Or is this like what's happening to public broadcasting. The purge continues. Makes me want to vomit.
The sad thing is that all this is a waste of time. There are real issues left undiscussed. But I guess that's the task you have right? Keep the misdirection going? When do you start writing about the Michael Jackson case?
Posted by: Glenn | May 22, 2005 6:51 PM
Didn't you guys have this same go-round back in 1977? Things were a lot simpler then, too. We were still listening to the Jackson Five.
Posted by: dan | May 22, 2005 10:47 PM
Exactly which tripe is that? Are you suggesting that Krugman hasn't been well called on in the past for selective use of his numbers? Or that Maureen Dowd doesn't repeat factual errors long after they've been publicly corrected? Or that Safire didn't insist without anything real to back it up that Saddam and Al Quaeda were directly playing footsie? Or do you think the Times' publisher holds his columnists up to a high enough standard, thank you very much?
Aside from that, I reject your bi-polar view of the world. If you want a "righty blogger" I can show them to you. If I showed them this site and asked them if they thought I was a "righty blogger" I think they'd disagree. But even if I'm not a righty blogger, if they happen to agree with me then I prefer to think of them as a "WCRS blogger".
And what's happening to public broadcasting? Help me out here.
And last -- shit grax, but get a grip! What I'm writing here is keeping "the misdirection going"? Have you considered the - uh - you know, actual number of visitors that come here? Did you know that one of the most frequent reasons why this blog gets hits is because almost a year ago I used the phrase "g*lden showers", and a thousand or more hits later it's STILL the most popular search term used to reach this site.
I think the world is safe, even if I don't blog about Michael Jackson.
Posted by: Peter | May 23, 2005 9:07 PM
Now, thanks to your last post, I am seriously thinking the Apocalypse is nearing. Just for a chuckle, I just did a Google search of "golden showers" to see your site link show up. After 25 screens worth of deviant sex listings (with no end in sight), I finally gave up. If you want your site to be read (by the right, the left, by moderates and independents) either update your meta tags to attract a proper audience or pay for a Google adword or two like the PeePeeGirls do!
Posted by: dan | May 24, 2005 9:25 PM