Ira Stoll Kicks around the Times, Seven Days a Week

For a guy one pictures sitting there in his pj's with a cup of coffee banging these things out every morning before his real job, Stoll's dispatches are impressively reasoned and researched. In fact, he's doing some of the best close-reading critiques of the Times I've seen in some time. That's a real service in a city where an astonishing number of otherwise intelligent people (e.g., apparently the entire population of the Upper West Side) demonstrate the most extreme naivete regarding the myth of the Times' "objectivity." (It has always amused me that people who agree with the Times' opinions are the first to argue its objectivity.)

Stoll's m.o. is somewhere between Jim Romenesko's original mediagossip.com and the late Lies of Our Times, which also specifically dogged the Times. But where Lies (like its stepchild, FAIR's Extra!) attacked from the left, using a Chomskian "propaganda model" to argue the Times' bias toward business and the establishment elite, Stoll takes a conservative's dim view of the unstated liberal, pro-Democrat biases in the paper's political news.

So, in his dispatch for the morning of Aug. 2, he asked: "When is a black person not really a person, but merely a 'prop'? When the blacks in question are Republicans, and the newspaper is The New York Times." He then desconstructed a "stunning 'editorial observer' column that [went] so far as to liken the Republican convention to a minstrel show" and call people like Colin Powell "props."

Stoll likes to catch the Times issuing partisan hypocrisy as though it were fact, as in this recent critique:

"The New York Times puts its view of the Republican ticket on full display today in a front-page 'man in the News' profile asserting that George W. Bush 'will have, if elected, one of the thinnest resumes in public service of any president in the last century.' In fact, Mr. Bush's experience as the two-term governor of a large state, Texas, is probably more substantial than Bill Clinton's experience as the governor of a small state, Arkansas. And we don't recall much handwringing at the Times back in 1992 over how thin Mr. Clinton's resume was."

Good point. He went on:

"The same profile describes Mr. Cheney as 'a rich, white relic of his father's administration.' These are the Times' news columns, remember, and that is how the article refers to Mr. Cheney on its first reference. The reference to the shade of Mr. Cheney's skin is another indication that the Times won't let the Republicans win no matter what they do on the race issue. If the Republicans appoint blacks like Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice, the Times accuses the Republicans of using them as 'props.' If the Republicans appoint whites, the Times snipes about that, too."

Of course, along with the news reporting, Stoll often spies glaring doublespeak in the paper's editorials. On Aug. 16, regarding the announcement that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. was buying Chris-Craft Industries and its tv stations, "An editorial in this morning's New York Times calls on federal regulators to force Rupert Murdoch to sell either his New York newspaper or a television station in New York. It says 'the proposed purchase would create a troubling concentration of media outlets' and that 'eliminating competition between two independent sources of news and entertainment, would not serve the public interest.'"

Stoll then listed various ways the New York Times company has itself arguably tried to stifle competition, like the "purchase of the Boston Globe, which, one could certainly argue, eliminated competition between two major Northeastern newspapers, and which also created a troubling concentration of 'media outlets.'" The Times company owns WQXR. There's its "ownership of a newspaper distributor, City & Suburban, which has been bouncing smaller newspapers from its distribution network in order to make more room for the Times. Or take the Times' reaction to the attempt in the late 1970s to start a new newspaper in New York City, the Trib. The Times greeted the Trib with a lawsuit trying to shut it down."

Finally, Stoll made the glowing point that if Murdoch were forced to sell the Post it "might then either be weakened editorially, go out of business, or be sold to a more liberal owner who would not provide the Times with the feisty, politically conservative competition that the Post is now providing."

He also has a sharp eye for examples of what he considers even worse coverage: local news. The Times' "limousine liberals," he complains, often describe local affairs "like they don't live here." Living in Brooklyn, he can get especially touchy about the visitors-from-Mars ways the Times can describe the boroughs. One example:

"The metro section of today's New York Times contains a dispatch from Jersey City reporting on a campground there that is scheduled to close. 'The demise of the park will leave outdoorsmen with nowhere to pitch a tent in metropolitan New York,' the article says. 'The closest campground is in Newburgh, N.Y., about 60 miles north of Manhattan.'

"Well, the editors must not have heard of Heckscher State Park in East Islip, N.Y., which has 69 camp sites and is 50 miles from Manhattan. They must not be aware of Clarence Fahnestock State Park in Carmel, N.Y., which is about 55 miles from Manhattan. And, while they know about the privately owned campground in Jersey City, New Jersey, they are apparently ignorant of the opportunities for camping at Floyd Bennett Field in the Jamaica Bay area of Brooklyn..."

Stoll is a Harvard grad (he was president of the Crimson). He was at the Jewish weekly Forward for five years, the last two and a half as managing editor. He left in July, with some other staffers, in solidarity with longtime editor-in-chief Seth Lipsky. Lipsky, who had founded the English edition of the century-old Yiddish paper in 1990 and was a part-owner, was bought out and pushed out last spring by the liberals of the Forward Association, the paper's controlling body, who were convinced Lipsky's conservative editorial slant was ruining the paper. Commenting on this last spring in The Nation, Eric Alterman quipped, "[T]his being capitalism, why don't Lipsky and his conservative backers start their own conservative Jewish newspaper? I've even got a name for it that I'm giving away free of charge: the Backward."

Stoll says that he and Lipsky are looking into doing just that?starting up a new conservative New York daily, more general-market that the Journal, but more up-market than the Post. (If Murdoch did have to sell the Post, they could think about buying it and gutting the editorial. They'd be buying the paper's baggage, but also existing advertisers, distribution, physical plant, etc. Just a thought.)

Meanwhile, Stoll's also writing for The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, The New Republic and elsewhere. And doing the daily maintenance on his smartertimes. com boutique, which he says takes him maybe two hours of work each morning, and basically "costs nothing." Although he treats it as something of a lark, the site is a good marketing tool for a young media critic. It's starting to be read and cited by other media types like Mickey Kaus, the Chicago Tribune's John Kass and Romenesko. The citings brings up another sore point. At the Forward, Stoll would routinely see the Times come waddling along weeks or months later with its version of stories the Forward had broken?and rarely crediting the Forward as the original source. It's a common complaint, but smartertimes.com documents it in a running bit he calls "Late Again." Here's one:

"The Sunday Styles section in this morning's Times carries an article on the increasing popularity of thong underwear, complete with a scene from Kmart and statistics showing that 'Victoria's Secret sold nearly 20 million thongs in 1999. Thongs and their even briefer counterpart, the G-string, now account for 40 percent of the underpants sold by the chain.'

"Sound familiar? The thong boom is old news to readers of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal published a front-page dispatch on the phenomenon back on June 8, 1999?complete with a scene from Wal-Mart and, yep, statistics from Victoria's Secret reporting that the retailer "'sold 14 million thongs last year?a whopping 40% of its total panty sales.' The Times article, of course, doesn't bother to credit the Journal..."

Afterwords This Monday's Post ran the stupidest Cindy Adams column I've read in years. I know that's saying a lot, but this one was incredibly imbecilic even for fossilized Adams' franchise in full summer-filler mode. Under the headline "We're Tawking Noo Yawk," it was that lamest of boilerplate, the supposed lexicon of local pronunciation. "Liberry" for library, "wawda" for water, "youse," "beeyewdeefull" and so on. This one must have slipped under Cindy's desk 50 years ago and just resurfaced. "Noo Yawkers" haven't really spoken this way since The Honeymooners premiered. And the lexicon on "nooyawkese" is an idea that's been published at least 1000 times since. Somebody hire Cindy some new writers.

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To clear my mind after reading that kind of idiocy, I like to turn to my computer and crank up the "Astronomy Picture of the Day" website (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html), which has been running some really spectacular photos lately. A Perseid meteor streaking through a pre-dawn aurora over the extinct volcano Hahn's Peak in Colorado; "doomed star Eta Carinae," fated to explode, burning blue-hot inside a couple of weird, brainlike lobes of gas and dust clouds; giant, translucent galaxy NGC 1316, showing what look like ripples in a cosmic pond.

The site has been around forever, and it runs kind of slowly, but it's worth the wait. It's maintained by two astrophysicists, Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell. "Bob is an associate professor at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, USA, while Jerry is a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA. They are two married, mild, and lazy guys who might otherwise appear normal to an unsuspecting guest. Together, they have found new and unusual ways of annoying their wives such as staging astronomical debates. Most people are surprised to learn that they have developed the perfect random number generator." I like it when science nerds do cute.