Gray Lady Down (24 page)

The Matt Damon vehicle
Green Zone
(2010) has a preposterous plot and flopped at the box office, but that didn’t stop
Times
critics and feature writers from praising it. The story involves an Army staff sergeant (Damon) who explores what A. O. Scott calls “the hidden history of manipulation and double dealing” in the quest for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Although a noncom,
Damon’s character breaks the chain of command to search out the deception behind the WMD issue. He ends up being targeted for assassination by scheming civilian political appointees. Nevertheless, Scott hails
Green Zone
for its ability “to fictionalize without falsifying,” and says that while the film “may not be literally accurate in every particular, it has the rough authority of novelistic truth.” An arts feature by Robert Mackay gave the director, Paul Greengrass, a platform to explain that he wanted to tell the story of the invasion of Iraq because “This hugely difficult process by which we ended up going to war there, only then to find that the reason that we went to war was not true, left a huge legacy I think—a legacy of fear, paranoia and mistrust.”

The ideological messages are just as pronounced, maybe even more so, in the criticism, commentary and feature coverage of documentaries. Stephen Holden said of
Trumbo
(2008), an homage to the blacklisted Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, “If the story of the Hollywood blacklist and the lives it destroyed has been told many times before, it still bears repeating, especially in the post-9/11 climate of fearmongering, of Guantánamo, of flag pins as gauges of patriotism.”

One of the more egregious examples of political naiveté came in a David Halbfinger review of
Winter Soldier
(2005), an antiwar documentary on Scott Camill, a major figure in the protest movement of the 1960s. In the review, Halbfinger equates American military abuses in Iraq with the alleged throwing of prisoners out of helicopters in Vietnam, which is a bit of a historical stretch. He refers to Camill as “Jesus-like,” neglecting to mention that Camill had fantasized about assassinating political figures on Capitol Hill during congressional hearings.

The
Times’
critics have also been effusive in praising Michael Moore, especially his recent look at the American health care system. When
Sicko
premiered at Cannes in May 2007, Manohla Dargis praised it as Moore’s “most fluid provocation to date.” A. O. Scott was not concerned that Moore had “no use for neutrality, balance or objectivity,” and seemed to revel in the fact that the filmmaker’s “polemical, left-wing manner seems calculated to drive guardians of conventional wisdom bananas.”

Poetry and pop music can also become ideologically charged at the
Times.
In a review of
Poems from Guantanamo,
a volume containing twenty-two poems from prisoners at that camp, Dan Chiasson said, “You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.” According to the Pentagon, one of the poets praised by Chiasson was among the scores of former Guantanamo detainees who re-enlisted in terror activities once they were released and returned to their home countries.

With its taste for the transgressive, the
Times
even celebrates the political and pornographic dimensions of hip-hop and rap, which John McWhorter characterizes as “the most overtly and consistently misogynistic music ever produced in human history.” He puts blame on “an academic establishment and intellectual elite that seems unwilling to judge the dynamics of black life by the standards that it applies to others.” The
Times,
a paragon of that intellectual elite, has averted its eyes from the harsher aspects of the music and the “gangsta” lifestyle its performers affect as a way of preserving street cred. In a July 2007 website Q&A, the culture editor Sam Sifton stood behind his paper’s coverage of hip-hop, “because it’s an art form. You may find some of it trite and repetitious, crude and juvenile, but it is,” he said to one dubious reader, adding patronizingly, “It may be that you’re just not listening hard enough.”

The in-your-face style of the
Times’
rap criticism was apparent in an August 2007 piece by Kelefa Sanneh. Headlined “Still Here by Being Stubborn, Not Mellow,” the story was about a comeback CD by a pair of Texas rappers calling themselves UGK, one of whom had gone to prison in 2001 for aggravated assault. “What do rappers lose when they get older?” Sanneh asked. “In the case of Bun B and Pimp C, two rappers in their 30s from Port Arthur, Texas, who perform together as UGK, the answer is, not much.”

Sanneh reviewed the duo’s history, explaining that in 1992 they had made a major-label debut with
Too Hard to Swallow.
Their lyrics chronicle a Texan underworld “full of pimps who talk slick, pushers who talk tough, snitches who talk too much.” In a “silky” song called “Gravy,” Bun B waxed physiological, as Sanneh quoted him: “When I put one up in your dome / You’ll be leakin’ out plasma and pus, and your mouth’ll fill up with foam.” Sanneh continued, “There is plenty of old-fashioned trash talking here too. More than once, Bun B reminds listeners that he and his partner have brash new nicknames: Big Dick Cheney and Tony Snow,” the second, apparently, a reference to cocaine. “Throughout these two CDs, kilos are sold, foes are threatened, cars are painted and repainted, and prostitutes are put in their place.”

Most normal people would regard these two as psychopaths, but Sanneh sees them as prophets. “Gangsta rap, broadly speaking—streetwise protagonists, explicit lyrics, hard-boiled stories—turned out to be hip-hop’s future, to the consternation of gripers past and present. Southern gangsta rap, in particular. It’s now clear that Bun B and Pimp C were ahead of their time.” (In some archived versions of Sanneh’s review, some of the dumber and more offensive material noted above has been cut.)

Times
critics are always alert to possible victories by the left in the culture war. In 2003, as this war was growing fiercer because of the invasion of Iraq, the Sunday Week in Review section ran a piece about a possible literary upswing for progressives. “For the first time in recent memory,” Emily Eakin noted, “The Times [best-seller] list, the nation’s most influential barometer of book sales, is pitting liberals and conservatives against each other in roughly equal numbers, ending what some publishing executives say is nearly a decade of dominance by right-wing authors.” Alongside such conservative best-selling authors as Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham were liberal-minded books like
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
by Al Franken,
Bushwhacked
by Molly Ivins,
The Great Unraveling
by Paul Krugman,
Big Lies
by Joe Conason, and
Thieves in High Places
by Jim Hightower.

Eakin may have been right in calling the
Times Book Review’
s best-seller list “the nation’s most influential barometer of book sales.” But its value as an objective measurement of American literary taste is compromised in view of the fact that all the liberal books Eakin noted had gotten reviews in that same publication, while none of the conservative authors did—as dozens of conservative books have been studiously ignored by the
Times
despite their commercial success.

Since late 1970, when John Leonard as editor turned an entire issue over to Neil Sheehan as a forum to protest the Vietnam War, the
Times Book Review
(or TBR as it’s called in the trade) has leaned to the left. The bias was especially pronounced from 1989 to 1994, when the TBR was controlled by Rebecca Sinkler and became “ruthlessly partisan,” as the literary scholar John Ellis famously remarked. “The Times management has decided to donate the Book Review to the cause of political reeducation,” Ellis wrote, turning it into “a lobby for political correctness” as well as “mindless bourgeois bashing and freakish sexual attitudes.”

Ellis described how “p.c. books are protected by assigning them to ideological clones of their author, while books that object to any aspect of p.c. ideology are given to the very people the book criticizes, who respond with predictable animosity.” Among the liberal books that got sweetheart literary deals at the TBR, as Ellis noted, were Gloria Steinem’s
Revolution from Within,
reviewed by
Mother Jones
editor Deirdre English; Susan Faludi’s
Backlash,
reviewed by Ellen Goodman; and Michael Harrington’s
Socialism: Past and Future,
reviewed by Paul Berman. “With matchmaking skills like these,” Ellis observed acidly, “Ms. Sinkler is wasted in journalism. She should run a dating service.” Meanwhile, conservative authors such as Dinesh D’Souza, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, all of whom had “established themselves as major contributors to the national debate” on race, were assigned to antagonists and got reviews that were nasty or dismissive, or that purposively ignored their central arguments.

Ellis scored Sinkler for her love of the postmodern jargon of university cultural radicals, and for her obsession with radical feminism and the associated “discourse on gender that sustains it.” Sinkler, he charged, had managed to make the TBR “a place where just as in Women’s Studies Departments no reality check operates to slow the radical feminist slide into ever greater unreality.”

In the Sinkler years, the TBR projected an unremitting hostility to anything resembling normative culture, especially if the book in question came from a high-profile conservative. Rush Limbaugh’s
The Way Things Ought to Be
spent 53 weeks on the
Times
best-seller list, 24 of them as number one, but was not reviewed until a year after its first appearance on the list. And then it was derided by Walter Goodman, who said that Limbaugh’s writing alternated “between slobberings of sincerity and slaverings of invective.” Goodman was appalled that the book was aimed at “a part of middle America—call it the silent majority or The American People or the booboisie—that feels it has been on the receiving end of the droppings of the bicoastals as they wing first class from abortion-rights rallies to AIDS galas to save-thepornographer parties.”

Rebecca Sinkler was followed as editor of the TBR by Charles (Chip) McGrath, who institutionalized her double standards, praising liberals and penalizing conservatives. He ignored Ann Coulter’s best-selling
High Crimes and Misdemeanors,
which was scalding in its criticism of President Clinton, while he affirmed such pro-Clinton books as Sidney Blumenthal’s
The Clinton Wars
and Joe Klein’s
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.

During the McGrath years, Regnery Books, which is based in Washington D.C. and specializes in conservative titles, perfected the marketing art of doing an end run around the TBR.
Dereliction of Duty
by Robert Patterson,
Useful Idiots
by Mona Charen,
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History
by Thomas E. Woods, and
Bias
by Bernard Goldberg all made it to the
Times
best-seller list, but none got a TBR review. Regnery’s ability to promote the steak without getting the sizzle suggested that the TBR had
become obsolete as a cultural arbiter because of its decision to participate in the culture wars rather than merely report on them.

McGrath’s principle of exclusion went so far as to ignore a series of extremely important books on Soviet espionage in America. Two of these were part of Yale University Press’s Annals of Communism series by Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, which used materials from the recently opened Soviet archives.
The Secret World of Soviet Espionage
(1995) and
The Soviet World of American Communism
(1998) were not reviewed, although (or perhaps because) they revealed extensive, hitherto undocumented evidence of broad Soviet manipulation of members of the Communist Party of the USA, and they named names of Americans who were on the KGB payroll.

In the immediate post-9/11 period, McGrath drew the lines on correctness ever more tightly. The TBR refused to review Oriana Fallaci’s European blockbuster, published in the United States as
The Rage and the Pride,
which attacked radical Islamic terrorism and much of Islam itself for being antidemocratic, misogynistic and violent. (According to Fallaci, “to believe that a good Islam and a bad Islam exist goes against all reason.”) Instead, the TBR reviewed Noam Chomsky’s anti-American screed
Hegemony and Survival,
published about the same time as Fallaci’s work. Samantha Power, a left-wing human rights scholar from Harvard, complained about Chomsky’s “glib and caustic tone,” but added respectfully that “his critiques have come to influence and reflect mainstream opinion elsewhere in the world,” and closed her review by insisting that Chomsky was “right to demand that officials in Washington devote themselves more zealously to strengthening international institutions, curbing arms flows and advancing human rights.”