Gray Lady Down (23 page)

After ignoring him altogether for years, the
Times
started hitting O’Reilly back. It made fun of his concern about the secularization of Christmas, and allowed Frank Rich to accuse him of having been “deployed” by Mel Gibson to defend Gibson’s film
The Passion
—a charge that led to an official
Times
correction. In the spring of 2007, the
Times
featured a study on “propaganda
techniques” used on
The O’Reilly Factor,
and was happy to report the study’s conclusion that O’Reilly beat Father Charles Coughlin “by a mile” in the use of such techniques.

Another lightning rod for the
Times’
antipathy toward Fox is Glenn Beck, who joined the network in 2009 and instantly started earning through-the-roof ratings. The
Times
most often dismisses Beck with a flick of the wrist, but this contempt has been hard to sustain when Beck has broken important stories that the
Times
ignored.

One of these stories centered on Van Jones, a special advisor to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, whose portfolio was “green energy” and environmental jobs. In July 2009, Beck started banging his drum against Jones, who had been caught on video calling Republicans “assholes” in a February speech. Beck also reported that Jones had signed a “truther” petition claiming that “people within the current [Bush] administration may indeed have allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext to war.” Calling Jones a “communist-anarchist radical,” Beck demanded that he resign, igniting a national firestorm that achieved exactly that end.

When the
Times
finally ran its first Van Jones story, it called him a “charismatic community organizer and ‘green jobs’ advocate from the San Francisco Bay Area” who had become “fodder for conservative critics and Republican officials.” But it did not report, as Beck had done, that Jones had embraced communism in the early 1990s. The managing editor, Jill Abramson, admitted on the
Times
website that the paper was “a beat behind on this story.” To which the
New York Post’
s Kyle Smith responded: “The Times purposely ignored [the Van Jones story] because it was hoping that the story would go away, because it likes people like Comrade Jones and was hoping he wouldn’t be forced out. The Times doesn’t like people like Glenn Beck and didn’t want him to be able to claim Jones’s scalp.”

An even more important story that Beck drove and the
Times
ignored was an undercover video sting of ACORN. Two young filmmakers went to the organization’s offices in cities around the country asking ACORN workers for advice on establishing
brothels, illegally importing underage girls to work in them, and avoiding detection by the police and trouble from the IRS. The 25-year-old male filmmaker was dressed as a caricature of a pimp; his comely 20-year-old female colleague wore skimpy tops with miniskirts and other streetwalker accessories. In Baltimore, an ACORN worker was caught on camera telling the “prostitute” that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an “independent artist” and that the underage illegal-immigrant sex workers could be claimed as “dependants.” In Brooklyn, ACORN workers told the pair how to lie on mortgage documents in order to buy a house of ill repute. In San Diego, an ACORN worker suggested that the two seek their “girls” in Tijuana and said he could help smuggle them into the country.

As the videos were released one by one on the Internet and played on Glenn Beck’s show, various government bodies with links to ACORN severed their ties. The Senate voted to end all funding for ACORN, and the Census Bureau, which uses ACORN as an unpaid resource, cut its connections. The New York City Council froze all its funding for ACORN, and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal probe. In late March, ACORN announced that it was closing all its offices nationwide. Yet the
Times
ran nothing whatsoever until a week after the first video was posted. And then, as with Van Jones, it claimed that Republicans were mobilizing people to dig up dirt.

The paper’s slow reflexes on the ACORN story, following the controversy over Van Jones, “suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs,” wrote the public editor, Clark Hoyt. “Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.” Hoyt said that many readers who wrote him said the
Times
was “protecting the progressive movement.”

But the
Times
was definitely not slow off the mark when the filmmaker who produced the ACORN videos, James O’Keefe, was arrested with three others in January 2010 for allegedly trying to
tamper with the telephones in the office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. “High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateur,” read the front-page headline, with the foursome’s mug shots below it. They had plotted a sting to determine whether Landrieu may have been avoiding constituents’ complaints during the debate over health care reform. (In May, O’Keefe and his cohorts pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor charge.)

Antipathy to Fox News translated into bias in the reporting of Rupert Murdoch’s successful bid to buy the
Wall Street Journal
in 2007. During the run-up to the sale, the
Times
did two hostile pieces that were produced to make the Bancroft family, which owned the
Journal,
think twice about selling to Murdoch. One was centered on his business practices, especially in China, where the
Times
suggested he regularly caved in to the Communist Party to protect his financial interests. The other story focused on alleged worry among
Journal
reporters about Murdoch’s journalistic ethics and the possibility that he might inject his conservative political ideology into the news. “If Mr. Murdoch does acquire The Journal,” fretted Paul Krugman on the op-ed page, “it will be a dark day for America’s news media—and American democracy. If there were any justice in the world, Mr. Murdoch, who did more than anyone in the news business to mislead this country into an unjustified, disastrous war, would be a discredited outcast. Instead, he’s expanding his empire.”

While Fox gets hate mail from the
Times,
liberal media figures and their organizations routinely get valentines. An October 2006 profile of Tavis Smiley, a black former NPR radio host who now has a show on PBS, was headlined “Media Man on a Mission: The Whirl of Tavis Smiley.” The piece by Felicia Lee gushed about how he had just left a meeting with Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, and likened his media saturation to that of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh (about whom the
Times
rarely has anything nice to say). “Do I cop to trying to motivate people, trying to inspire people, trying to uplift people through my symposiums, my books, my radio, my speeches?” Smiley is quoted as asking. “Yes, I cop to that. But it’s all born of love.” Lee did not mention
some of his less uplifting statements, such as comparing George W. Bush to a serial killer in 2000, or insisting that O. J. Simpson was a sympathetic figure.

Coverage of the now-defunct liberal radio network Air America, always a relatively marginal enterprise, showed the same high regard. A puff piece headlined “They Look Nothing Like Rush Limbaugh” profiled two female personalities on the network, Rachel Maddow, who would go on to have her own cable television show on MSNBC, and Randi Rhodes, who made veiled calls for Bush’s assassination on the air, denounced Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro as “whores” in a YouTube video, and made false allegations of being attacked on the Upper West Side—all of which called her mental balance into question but didn’t qualify for mention in the
Times.
Grasping at straws, the piece said that Air America could become a “station brand,” even though at that point (November 2005) it was heard in only seventy-two cities nationwide and ranked number 24 in New York City, which is considered a liberal stronghold.

When she moved from the bankrupted Air America to her own show in an MSNBC primetime slot, Rachel Maddow was the focus of a string of positive stories in the
Times,
including a vacuous Q&A with Edward Levine headlined “A Pundit in the Country.” In the interview, conducted at her weekend home in Berkshire, Massachusetts, Maddow revealed that she always carried a handkerchief and that her partner, Susan Mikula, “buys me cute ones.” Not long afterward, the
Times
declared Maddow a lesbian icon. Daphne Merkin—who once famously wrote in the
New Yorker
about her fetish for being spanked—applauded Maddow in a magazine story headlined “Butch Fatale: Lesbian Glamour Steps Out of the Closet.” Until recently, Merkin wrote, “lesbians have been the wallflowers at the homosexual dance, waiting to get their share of recognition.” Now, however, “Lesbianism has finally come into a glamour of its own, an appeal that goes beyond butch and femme archetypes into a more universal seduction. Her name is Rachel Maddow, the polished-looking, self-declared gay newscaster who stares out from the MSNBC studio every weekday night and makes love to her audience.”

In its treatment of film, television, theater, music and other arts, the
Times’
politicization is more subtle, involving ideological innuendo, radical-chic attitudinizing and liberal “editorial needles,” as Abe Rosenthal called them. But sometimes the subtlety gives way to naked political preaching. According to Peter Bart, a former Timesman and now
Variety
editor, “The Times has vastly stepped up its coverage of popular culture and in doing so, seems to be bending its normal rules of journalistic fairness.”

Reviewing George Clooney’s
Syriana
(2005), a sinister look at American foreign policy, A. O. Scott wrote:

The Kingdom of Heaven
(2005), Ridley Scott’s expensive box office failure, was seen even by some liberal filmgoers as a rabid exercise in anti-Western, anti-Christian, pro-Islamic bias. But it drew a rave from the
Times
critic Manohla Dargis, who called it “an even-handed account of one of the least fair-minded, evenhanded chapters in human history, during which European Christians descended on the Middle East for more than 200 years.” It spoke to the current world situation, Dargis declared, with parallels to the West “invading Muslim lands.” Dargis was in a minority in this judgment. The eminent Cambridge University historian Jonathan Riley-Smith criticized the film’s false portrayal of Muslims as sophisticated and the Christian Crusaders as barbaric. In an interview with the
Telegraph
of London, he called it “Osama Bin Laden’s version of the Crusades,” which would
“fuel Islamic fundamentalists.” And in the
Times
of London, he wrote, “At a time of interfaith tension, nonsense like this will only reinforce existing myths.”

Movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the larger War on Terror, may have failed at the box office, but they have succeeded at the
Times.
Manohla Dargis favorably reviewed
Lions for Lambs
(2007), a triptych involving two soldiers who die in a remote mountain area of Afghanistan, the college professor who influenced them to join the service, and a newswoman being briefed on a (doomed) forward outpost strategy by an unctuous U.S. senator. From this film, Dargis asserted, viewers will learn that “America is no longer only the land of the free, home of the brave, but also the opportunistic and the compromised.”

A. O. Scott hailed Brian DePalma’s
Redacted
(2007), about the rape of a teenage girl and the murder of her and her family by U.S. troops in Iraq, because it brought us “face to face with what we have been unable to see or acknowledge with a collage of raw feelings and angry arguments.” In his review of
Rendition
(2007), which thrust an innocent CIA analyst into the black world of “torture, kidnapping and other abuses,” Scott wrote that the film used “the resources of mainstream movie-making to get viewers thinking about a moral crisis that many of us would prefer to ignore.” He added, however, that it was “inevitable that someone with a loud voice and a small mind will label
Rendition
anti-American.” In
Body of Lies
(2008), Scott saw a likeness between a heedless CIA agent portrayed in the film and President George W. Bush. “It’s possible that this resemblance is meant to imply a parallel between the president and Hoffman, who is immune to self-doubt and allergic to second thoughts about the righteousness of his actions.” A feature on the film by Robert Mackay cited its themes of “ruthlessness, political expediency and moral bankruptcy.”