Clouded by Bias
The New York Times doesn’t want to cover the culture war; it wants to fight it.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
June 5, 2001 9:55 a.m.

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.