> The review is so awful that it pushed me to watch it. I can't figure
> out
> why my right wing friends think the NY Times is "lib'rul." The Arts
> section seems to me particularly prejudiced. When it sneers at a
> production I use it as a cue to see it.
>
> It seems to me the purpose of these sneering reviews is to dissuade
> people like me, who don't know much about the subject but might be
> interested, not to read the book or watch the show. The NY Times
> reviewers piss me off. I hope they don't get paid much.
I don't understand why the Times book and TV reviewers (perhaps the film and theater ones too, but I don't read them so much) are so overwhelmingly conservative; perhaps it's an attempt to provide "balance" for the more left-leaning news side of the paper. (Though the news side isn't all that left-leaning, either, of course.)
The whole U.S. news media scene is very screwy, of course; there is so much spinning, counter-spinning, and fancy clockwise/counter-clockwise whoopsy-dipsy rotating going on that it's surprising that the whole business has any relationship to the real world at all.
What occurs to me is that the reviewing of books and other cultural products is one field in which news media don't even have to pretend that they are being "objective," and therefore they can give their ideological passions full range. One could say that, in its reviews, the NY Times's id can escape the control of its superego, as in dreams. The reviews are the dark, night, secret side of the "Gray Lady."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile