 onday
morning, during my ritual reading of the New York Times, I
jumped to attention when I spotted the headline, "Calls for Slavery
Restitution Getting Louder." Wow, I thought, the Times
is going to have to talk about the Horowitz ad. Oh, I knew the Times
had already run a front-page story on the controversy over David Horowitz's
anti-reparations ad, but that was more than two weeks after the original
story broke — well after venues like the Wall Street Journal,
the Washington Post, The New Republic, USA Today,
the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the New York Daily News,
and a host of other local papers and opinion outlets had printed Op-Ed's
and/or covered the story. It was clear that the Times had put
off coverage and discussion of the Horowitz controversy for as long
as it conceivably could. And besides, the story that had finally made
it into the Times had focused on the campus free-speech issue.
Now, with this new article, I was just itching to see how the Times
would finally assess the role of the Horowitz ad in the reparations
debate itself.
As I nervously
made my way through the article, my eyes kept skipping ahead to
find the inevitable Horowitz reference.... the reference that never
came. I rolled my eyes and turned the page. Just another New
York Times moment.
Somewhere inside,
although it embarrasses me to say so, I still believe in the New
York Times — a reflex from years of reverence past. And although
it may no longer be a fair paper, the Times is still, in
important ways, a great paper. That is why I keep wanting to believe.
And that is why I keep on getting fooled.
What I'm looking
for is a newspaper that will actually cover the biggest story in
this country today: our ongoing debates over race, feminism, the
family, and homosexuality — our "culture war." But the
New York Times doesn't want to cover the culture war; it
wants to fight it.
The Times
story on reparations, written by Tamar Lewin, claims that the movement
for reparations has been "gaining steam" in the past year.
Now how can anyone assess the momentum gained by the reparations
movement in the past year without calculating the effect of the
earthquake set off by the Horowitz ad? Somehow Ms. Lewin saw fit
to record that last month, the Philadelphia Inquirer published
two full-page editorials urging the creation of a national reparations
commission. Those editorials wouldn't fill up a thimble beside the
oceans of ink spilled over the Horowitz ad. Even excluding discussions
of the free-speech implications of the Horowitz controversy, nowhere
has there been more — or more important — public discussion of the
reparations debate during this past year than in connection with
the Horowitz ad. Yes, Lewin does briefly quote black conservative
Walter Williams in opposition to reparations. But isn't it obvious
that David Horowitz is the most important opponent of slave reparations
in the United States today?
Not that Lewin
didn't get a quote from a white opponent of slave reparations. She
questioned Clinton domestic-policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat on the
issue. But as both Eizenstat and Lewin frame the debate, the choice
is not between individual responsibility, and the affirmative action
mentality embodied by the call for slave reparations. No, the "choice"
is between two ways of making up for slavery — either reparations
or "affirmative government action in general." This is
what passes for debate over racial issues in the pages of today's
New York Times. Shall we have reparations, or a combination
of affirmative action and increased government spending?
I for one have
always felt that the Horowitz ad, while on the whole well reasoned
and correct, has its weaknesses. Nor have I hesitated to
say so. For example, it troubles me, as many others, that in
his ad, Horowitz treats welfare payments as a form of reparations
for slavery. Welfare payments are and should be race-blind, even
if they go disproportionately to African Americans. For this reason,
to speak of welfare as a form of reparations for slavery seems to
me both ill conceived and uncalled for. But here is President Clinton's
domestic-policy adviser treating "affirmative government action
in general" as a form of reparations for slavery. Don't hold
your breath waiting for the people who jumped on Horowitz for his
welfare remarks to come after Eizenstat.
Lewin's article
makes a stab at looking like fair coverage of the reparations controversy,
when in fact it's a puff piece for the reparations movement itself.
The thrust of the article is to tout the movement's recent successes.
This requires that discussion of the massive setback represented
by the Horowitz controversy be entirely suppressed. Lewin's piece
ends with unchallenged quotes by reparations advocates equating
their efforts with the original quest of the civil rights movement
for integration. Yet this is the central point of principle challenged
by Horowitz, who equates reparations, not with the struggle for
integration, but with the insistence on preferential treatment by
race. So by removing any reference to Horowitz, not only has any
realistic assessment of the movement's prospects been rendered impossible,
the fundamental point of principled contention in the debate been
entirely removed.
At one level,
it's easy enough to explain the liberal bias on controversial social
issues now dominant at the Times. It's all part of a deliberate
decision to make the Times a vehicle for (rather than a record
of) social change, a policy instituted by the Times's new
publisher, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. Pinch was a sixties
anti-war activist who famously declared that in a confrontation
between an American and a North Vietnamese soldier he'd want to
see the American get shot. After all, "It's the other guy's
country."
In a little
noted appearance last year at his alma mater, Tufts University,
Sulzberger Jr. harked back to his activist days at college and emphasized
how important it was to apply those values in the "real world"
today. Questioned about liberal bias at his paper, Sulzberger denied
all, claiming that "skepticism," rather than liberalism,
reigns at the Times. Besides, said Pinch, good copy editors
are careful to take out any biased statements that liberal reporters
might let creep into their stories.
So skepticism
and good copyediting keep the New York Times bias free. I
do hope those young folks at Tufts take Mr. Sulzberger's advice
about questioning the powerful to heart, because that answer answers
nothing. Of course when it comes to studies that raise questions
about, say, day
care, New York Times reporters are skeptical to a fault.
But when it comes to any study offered up by, say, feminists, the
skepticism of New York Times reporters swiftly evaporates.
For two examples, consider the famously mistaken study by the American
Association of University Women claiming that our schools "shortchange
girls," or that infamous bit of junk science that claimed to
establish bias against female faculty members called the "MIT
Study on the Status of Women." Each study was touted by front-page
headlines in the New York Times, yet each was exposed as
groundless and deeply biased in brilliant articles by University
of Alaska professor Judith Kleinfeld. Yet the Times never
bothered to consult skeptics like Kleinfeld before going to press,
any more than Tamar Lewin went to David Horowitz for her piece on
reparations. And how can copy editors edit out bias in stories where
the real bias is in the sources never consulted, the questions never
asked, the issues never raised?
But problem
isn't just some executive decision made by Pinch Sulzberger. Sulzberger
stands for a generation of reporters who understand their work in
a fundamentally different way than reporters before them. For these
reporters, the meaningful aspect of their work is the chance that
it gives them to "make a difference" in the world. These
reporters — and I mean reporters at daily papers and television
news outlets, not simply reporters in magazines of opinion — do
not hold as their ideal the relatively modest goal of facilitating
public debate. No, for these reporters, the goal is nothing less
than bringing about "progressive" social change.
Overtly, and
particularly when it comes to party politics, these reporters maintain
at least the pretense of fairness. They will even sometimes believe
themselves to be fair. But when it comes to cultural issues, these
reporters consciously understand themselves to be warriors for "racial
justice," feminism, and gay rights, even when — indeed, precisely
because — the nation has in no way reached a consensus on such questions.
As I said last
week, this is fundamentally a question of religion. In the absence
of traditional religion, the secular elite cannot be satisfied with
the classically liberal task of facilitating open, honest, and informed
public debate. That goal, however noble, cannot supply the ground
and meaning of a reporter's life. Only transforming the world to
make it "socially just" can do that. And if achieving
"social justice" means allowing the public to see only
half of a two-sided argument, so be it. This is not your father's
justice.
Of course,
you can fool all of the people only some of the time. The new generation
of leftist reporters at the Times has indeed done much to
bring about social change, but at significant cost to the paper's
credibility — so significant that the new generation has facilitated
a bit of social change not bargained for. The very existence of
outlets such as National Review Online owes much to the perception
by the public that the mainstream press is no longer telling them
the truth. Increasingly, liberals lament the rise of the conservative
counter-media and the cultural fragmentation it reflects. Yet they
have brought it on themselves. Having excluded half of the argument,
the argument has reformed itself in other venues. And however much
a part of me still loves, admires, and wants to believe in the New
York Times, my ritual daily reading now yields little besides
the leeching away of the last good measure of my trust in that once
great paper.
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