ASYLUM FREAKS

Is anybody capable of standing up to The New York Times?

Whatever the faults of that paper, they at least made the intelligent business decision not to champion the reactionary line in this relatively sophisticated city. Given the other papers’ refusal to recognize the existence of reality, that more or less leaves The Times a clear field among reader who retch at the thought of Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh narrating on themes of public policy.

Nevertheless, The Times is mortally flawed by an overarching delusion of its own social importance. This is a newspaper that considers itself an institution rather than a manufacturer of fancy fish wrapping, which is closer to the reality of the situation than its overblown editorial staff might wish to contemplate. No point in regurgitating the gaffes of that paper’s dysfunctional recent history, with a star correspondent being exposed as a panting, star struck administration puppet, a cokehead reporter plagiarizing and inventing front-page exposes, a journalistic ombudsman dismissed for telling the truth about the paper’s all-to-obvious defects, public self-flagellation and wholesale purges of its editors even as the public looks on in mute incomprehension like a pack of grazing kangaroos watching a hierarchical battle between a couple of its dominant males…

The Times is a shapeless, amorphous blob of spoiled, overfed baby boomers with such delusions of grandeur that they even have their own foreign policy, God Help Us. Recently it refused to review a play at The Jewish Theater about anti-semitism in contemporary Poland because the powers in charge determined that it would not be helpful to world diplomacy.

News management, self-censorship, ignoring inconvenient facts that don’t fit in with it’s half-baked concepts of reality – The Times is guilty of all this and more, ladies and gentlemen.

The voting shares of The New York Times Corporation are controlled by the Sulzberger family, who insist on filling the top corporate positions with members of their own family manifestly unqualified for that line of work. The Chairman, “Pinch” Sulzberger is so overwhelmed by his own incompetent management abilities (and believe me, with the self-entitled gang of pricks he has to control, you would need a Saddam Hussein or an Idi Amin to manage them. That’s where Rupert Murdoch gets my respect – nobody at The Post or Fox would dare to pull the kind of primadonna antics that have come to characterize The Times) that in an unguarded moment he even allowed as how The Times might not even continue to publish – and he wouldn’t care. This is not the statement of a manager who is in control of the situation.

Recently The Post’s Page Six reported a screaming match at a dinner party between Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson and a playwright who felt his play had been shafted by The Times,and given the convoluted internal politics of that company it’s easy to believe. The play in question, “Magical Thinking,” went on to be a hit, with $4 million in advance sales despite the hatchet job, which shows how much authority The Times, or indeed any newspaper, really possesses. Abramson grandly announced, “We are the central arbiter of taste and culture in The City of New York.”

Whoa! When I hear that I know I have got a problem. The Post, for all its obvious limitations will declare “We are a great newspaper,” and leave it at that. But when you have got a building full of self-inflated nut cases like The Times endowing themselves with magical, god-like status, it’s like the old Cheech and Chong movie where the boys are frantic to escape the crazy inmates in the mental hospital until they finally run into a guy who appears to be the Voice of Authority – and soon reveals himself to be the most insane, most dangerous lunatic in the asylum.

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Posted on 3/25/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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