I was wondering if anyone else had read and responded to this awful article in Dissent. Though I am not a resident of NY and read its 3 papers only for contrast to the European and Latin-American dailies (or for a bit of local info), I dashed off the following letter to them. What do New Yorkers on the list think? Maybe Seth Ackerman at FAIR should send them a few emails...
Dear Dissent
How much longer will Dissent publish pieces such as "It's a Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab World" by Michael Tomasky and continue to call itself a magazine of the left? For a magazine of the left to publish the claim that NY's dailies still offer "a sufficient diet of variety and spice" is remarkable. While he states that the two tabloids take information and then package "it in such a way that it both confirms and augments the reader's prejudice," the Times all too frequently does the same, albeit in a more upscale format. The "variety" of New York's daily press is in his mind.
The author allows that the Times might blame "the Salvadoran rebels for blowing up a bridge when the right-wing forces really did it, although I suppose that sort of thing probably still happens now and again." In reality, the Times' record is full of misstatements and not just where the apparently "passe'" third world is concerned. Economist Dean Baker has long been documenting the errors of the Times on the side of unexamined "elite" opinion, often contradictory on its face, and has done so with the very orthodox tools of neo-classical economics (see below).
Perhaps uncritical and incestuous reliance on governement officials and PR mavens along with editorialists who pride themselves on thinking like hedge-fund managers (Tom "Lexus" Friedman), is what it takes to be "probably the world's best newspaper". Outside of NY and the US, however, even the mainstream press allows more "dissent" than this. As an American raised in 5 countries, I can assure you that Le Monde, La Jornada, Liberation, La Repubblica, El Pais, Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Zeit, the Guardian and the Independant all provide top-level international coverage (not just of disasters or one-time events as the Times tends to do, not to mention the others) and they publish critical pieces and analysis that the Times wouldn't touch. Dissent, as a journal which considers itself to offer "the most sophisticated coverage of European politics you'll find anywhere outside of Europe," should take note.
Finally, if as Tomasky maintains, even liberal dissent at the tabloids is now taboo, one is a right-wing house organ, and many imagine that one of the two tabloids will fold in the coming years, just why is it that New Yorkers or anyone else should be so cheery about all that "variety" in the NY daily press?
http://www.fair.org/err/991213.html-Dean Baker's Economic Reporting Review http://www.fair.org/activism/embassy-follow-up.html-the London Observer and the Times on NATO's attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
Regards, Dave Dorkin