By Russ Smith
mug1988@aol.com

One my favorite passages in Joe Hagan’s bizarre New York cover story about the New York Times executive editor Bill Keller last week (“The United States of America vs. Bill Keller,” Sept. 18) was the author’s claim that the Times “aspires to objectivity.” Hagan didn’t even qualify between news articles and opinions, perhaps an unconscious admission that there really is no difference. A front-page article in the daily, say for example a political piece by Adam Nagourney or David Sanger, is barely less partisan than one of the paper’s exponentially shrill anti-Bush editorials or an op-ed column by economist-turned-left-wing hero Paul Krugman or the dashed off musing of Hollywood-obsessed columnists like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. 

Hagan’s sentence is particularly quaint since the mere notion of “objectivity” in the media was dismissed way before the word “bling” was added to the dictionary, so pairing that word with the Times is especially nonsensical. Just last week, two stories (Sept. 12 and 14) and an editorial about Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s veto of a bill that would require Wal-Mart and other “box stores” to pay a minimum wage (sorry, “living wage”) of $10/hr. in that city by 2010 (plus $3/hr. in benefits), were laughable. 

Not once was Daley identified as a Democrat—the party of abortion, appeasement, “deployment” of military troops and tax hikes—but the writers implied that Daley (son of the late mayor who helped JFK win in 1960 but squandered his reputation with the liberal, or progressive, wing of the Democratic party with his thuggish behavior at Hubert Humphrey’s shattered coronation at the ’68 convention in Chicago) ran roughshod over the city’s alderman who several weeks previously had endorsed the pernicious bill. Had this been a Republican mayor—impossible in Chicago, unlike New York, but no matter—his party affiliation would’ve most likely been in the headline.

Given our current political climate, in which Democrats of all ranks are specifically attacking Wal-Mart as the symbol of economic inequality in the country (Joe Biden, John Kerry, Evan Bayh, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, for example) the omission of Daley’s party is notable.

The Times’ Sept. 15 editorial, which ridiculed Wal-Mart’s claim that government-mandated wage hikes would lead to higher prices and the closing of some stores (in fact, the giant retailer said it would pull out of Chicago if the bill was passed) was so fantastic that it’s necessary to remind readers, as a public service, that much of the paper’s staff is out of touch with the rest of the country. The edit concludes: “Wage gains do not automatically lead to higher prices. They could be absorbed by higher productivity or by a narrowing of profit margins. Given Wal-Mart’s profits, the company could improve its wage structure and still beat the competition … Proponents of living wages have the moral high ground and are increasingly finding a political voice. Chicago hasn’t heard the last of them, and Washington hasn’t either.”

My, what thunder from the left! One wonders how publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and cousin Michael Golden would react if Wal-Mart’s CEO issued a self-righteous statement about how the Times could increase productivity and “narrow profit margins” in the interest of soothing uneasy investors regarding the company’s falling stock value. Somehow, I don’t think the paper’s announcement on Sept. 14 that a vice president for “diversity and inclusion” has been hired will make anyone on the Times business side less nervous.

Nagourney’s Sept. 17 article, “In Campaign Ads for Democrats, Bush is the Star,” followed the familiar pattern. First, he wrote that the administration is campaigning in the midterm elections by “moving the debate away from issues like Iraq,” ignoring Bush’s Sept. 11 Oval Office address in which he said, “The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.”

Later in the piece, Nagourney mentions New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez as a Democrat who’s attacking Bush rather than his opponent, Thomas Kean Jr. Nagourney, just like his colleague David Chen did the day before in a profile of Kean, which stated that the incumbent was facing a “tough election battle.” He didn’t see fit to note that Menendez is up to his ears in a corruption probe, one deemed serious enough that a Senate ethics complaint has been levied against him, and that the Democratic machine in Jersey is considering pulling a re-run of 2002 (when the sleazy Sen. Robert Torricelli was forced to walk the plank in favor of Frank Lautenberg) and replacing him on the fall ballot.  

Keller, by all accounts, seems like an affable enough patrician who probably wishes he never accepted Sulzberger’s offer to replace Howell Raines, once the latter, a blustery ballbreaker, imploded during the Jayson Blair institutional meltdown at the Times.

Hagan’s story begins with Keller and Sulzberger at a meeting with Bush late last year in which the President tried to persuade the two that the now-celebrated “scoop” by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about warrantless NSA phone-monitoring wouldn’t be in the nation’s best interests. The two Times men were undaunted, ran the story shortly after, and as Keller tells the New York reporter, “The basic message [from Bush] was ‘You’ll have blood on your hands.’”

Next, Hagan, in perhaps an attempt to scare or embolden the already anti-Bush New York readers, whips off a totally implausible scenario: “Conservative commentators have even urged the Justice Department to charge the paper under the Espionage Act, an unlikely but terrifying prospect that could mean jail time for Sulzberger and Keller and perhaps force the closure of the newspaper.” 

Goodness. You’d think that the Times had printed a story revealing an administration plan to gather all Muslim-Americans into internment camps. Oh, sorry, that was FDR more than half a century ago when he corralled law-abiding citizens of Japanese origin on the West Coast.

It could be that Hagan (as well as the Times executives) really does believe that Bush is an idiot and would wreck his own presidency by trying to “close” the Times, but if that’s so, the Democrats and like-minded media are living in more of a bubble than I previously thought.

Obviously, such blatant disregard for the First Amendment would rally together not only Democrats and Independents but probably most Republicans as well. As odious as the Times may be, any prosecution that would lead to its “closure” would be catastrophic for Bush and rightly so. But perhaps Hagan, Keller and Sulzberger believe that Bush is another Woodrow Wilson.

As sympathetic as Hagan may be to the Times—and it’s not surprising given New York’s symbiotic relationship with the daily—Keller really takes a pasting in the course of the story. He’s characterized as an indecisive edito who’s afraid to act, afraid of conflict and confrontation with his employees, and utterly lost as a leader at a time when the Times’ reputation, and bottom line, has never been quite so precarious. Even Keller’s wife, Emma Gilbey, describes her husband as “socially autistic,” a benign enough comment, especially considering what Hagan coaxes her to say on other Times matters.

Gilbey has quite a mouth, especially on the record. She recounts the time at the height of the Judith Miller disaster regarding the absurd Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson legal circus when Keller went abroad to visit the paper’s Asian bureau. “It was absolutely fucking awful,” Gilbey says. “If he had come back because of Judy—what message are you sending to the foreign desk as opposed to the Washington desk? If it had been, ‘I’ve got this one lunatic at home and I’m not coming …’ The Times has, like, a million children—well, actually only 1,200 fucking children—and they got left at home.”

Em doesn’t say if Keller or Sulzberger are also “fucking children,” but read the Times every day for just a week and my guess is you’ll figure it out almost immediately.