NYT sucks

[David Dorkin]

I agree, though El Pais generally is not my favorite, it and all of the
center left papers in Europe and Latin America tower above the Times,
and not necessarily because they publish more radical material (El Pais
has been deteriorating for some time now) but they are just more likely
to cover places and events that the NYT etc cover about once a year and
publish essays that would only appear in journals or the Nation here.
Coverage on, say Italy or France is always awful in the Times when it
appears, but it's such an occasion when it actually does appear that I
almost dont notice. It's pretty significant that even Mexico has La
Jornada, Argentina has Pagina 12 and the US can't even put out one
liberlish much less left of center daily and self-styled liberals pass
off the Times as a quality paper.

For me, reading dailies was a very important part of my education-I'm
glad I started in Italy with Il Manifesto and France with Liberation, Le
Monde and L'Humanite (for all their faults), etc. Perhaps even a
liberalish daily is out of the question in the US for the moment, but it
would be something if one could pull it off (yes, I know about the
internet...).

Dave

Doug Henwood wrote:


> From: Enrique Diaz-Alvarez <enrique at ee.cornell.edu>
> David Dorkin wrote:
> >  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.
> 
> It is always fun to shock American lefties at parties trashing their beloved
> NYT, especially given that, unlike most Europeans, I normally  try to avoid
> gratuitous yank-bashing. It may or may not be, like Doug says, the voice of
> the American ruling class, but the really remarkable thing about it is just
> how mediocre it is. The problem is lack of reference points. Compared to the
> swap sheets that pass for newspapers in most American cities, it may appear
> as an excellent paper, but compared to leading foreign newspapers, it just
> doesn't stack up. First, most of its space is ads. Consequently, it barely
> has room for 30-35 stories outside of sports and local news in its daily
> edition, compared to the 100+ you find in El Pais or any of the six or seven
> decent Spanish newspapers. Its opinion pages are a sad joke, restricted to
> an embarrassingly narrow range of acceptable opinions (moronic right-wingery
> to mushy centrism, for the most part). El Pais regularly publishes excellent
> op ed pieces from people ranging from Communism to Thatcherism; you may find
> in the same issue articles from Chomsky and Vargas Llosa. And though El Pais
> has its own biases, an act of self-censorship remotely comparable to the
> supression of the Chinese Embassy bombing report from the Observer would be
> unthinkable.
> 
> And they have the balls to charge you $1.00 for it.
> 
> Enrique