It’s interesting, watching people avoiding the obvious about the NY Times, and the McCain smear. Roger Simon, for example:
Excuse me for going psychoanalytic, but there was something weirdly self-destructive in the newspaper’s behavior on this matter.
I cannot believe that an intelligent man like Bill Keller was entirely unaware that most people would be repelled by the thin gruel his paper published – even though he evinced astonishment at the huge number of negative comments, including many from Obama supporters, that appeared on their website. Others may say he and his fellow editors were just unconscious of the way people think, but I am not convinced. As evidence I offer the simple fact that they were for months reluctant to publish. Was the imminence of The New Republic story on the inside deliberations at The Times the trigger? Maybe partly. But again I suspect there was more to it. The New York Times is run by human beings, like everything else, who are subject to the same conflicting cocktail of motivations we all are.
Roger, it’s about time to come up for air. Unless and until one considers the political motivations of the leftist of today, nothing about the actions of the Times is going to make any sense at all. They didn’t publish the story because they wanted McCain to win the nomination, at which point, they started using stuff like they published. They WANTED McCain winning the nomination because they saw him as the easier target in the General election.
The Jayson Blair affair, of course, was damaging to the paper, but I suspect the fallout here will be worse, since we are in the midst of a presidential campaign to determine the leader of the Western World. I don’t think this necessarily means any kind of shakeup in editorial staff. It means something more serious – the continued degradation of the newspaper’s already weakening reputation.
The paper’s reputation was already on the skids before Jayson Blair was out of grade school. This stuff has been goiong on at the Times for generations, now. This is nothing new.
Tags: BO, Campaign, election, General election, Leftist, McCain, Men, new york, New York Times, NFL, nomination, NY, Obama, The New York Times, UN
