How The New York Times is like the Roman Catholic Church: Using comparisons & contrasts for better writing

It takes a long time for some lessons to sink in. Take the standard genre of English composition class, writing an essay in which you compare and contrast two things, conditions or issues.  My wife and daughters fulfilled this assignment during their early college years by discussing the relative merits of breast feeding vs. bottle feeding. (Breast feeding always won.)

While useful, such assignments put the cart before the horse — and then demand that the horse push the cart up the hill with its nose. You can’t write a good sonnet until you are brimming over with love. You can’t write a good comparison/contrast essay until you are confronted with a real problem with two competing elements as possible solutions.

One of my first mentors was a fellow student named Jim Slevin, who was a senior at Providence College when I was a freshman. Before his untimely death, Jim had become one of the most influential writing scholars in America, and was just as good, if not better, in the classroom.

One evening, we were sitting in the basement of his parents’ house on Long Island, drinking beers and talking about teaching. He picked up a yellow pad and drew a simple cross, filling up the page, with the cross bar near the top.

He said something to the effect of: “We ask students to perform all these tasks, without demonstrating for them the tools we all need to complete them. Anytime I’m trying to compare and contrast some competing ideas, the first thing I do is to create this diagram.”

At the top of each column he would write the two elements that are being compared and contrasted. It could be young adult with health insurance vs. one without, or literary memoir vs. journalistic memoir.

Since Jim shared that simple tool with me, I’ve spent more than three decades using it to make distinctions.

What is the difference, for example, between a report and a story? The purpose of a report, I argued at the time, is to deliver information so that readers can act upon it if they chose. A story, on the other hand, is a form of vicarious experience. A report might point you there, but a story can put you there.

To illustrate the difference, I listed, side by side, the reporting and writing strategies inherent in each of them. A report, for example, requires us to find out who was involved. In a story there is a special name for the Who; we call it a Character. The result of such thinking was this chart:

A provocative article in Commonweal, the Catholic magazine on public affairs, argued that The New York Times, in its coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, had time and again revealed a bias against the church.

The author of “Church of the ‘Times’ ” was Kenneth L. Woodward, who served as religion editor of Newsweek for 38 years. The author built his case for bias on a surprising correlation — that The New York Times is to journalism what the Catholic Church is to religion.

Culling the comparative evidence, I’ve come up with this chart:

In such cases, the full architecture of an essay — even a book — can be erected according to these parallel themes. But the invitation to compare and contrast can come in granular form.

Take, for example, a literary allusion made by Thomas French in his book “Zoo Story,” a narrative of life and death in an American zoo.

One of the main characters is Herman, a chimp who lived in a zoo for 35 years and was killed by another chimp in a struggle for dominance.  Herman, we learned, was captured in Africa as a baby, torn from the care of his mother, then rescued by a nurturing family who raised him up to adolescence.  His story, wrote French, was something out of Dickens and Darwin.

Over time I have studied that allusion, and with the help of other readers, parsed it into its comparative parts. Here’s the chart:

That’s a lot of juice squeezed out of two English surnames.

To test this strategy, I decided to identify a topic that I had not written about before. It came to me in an argument over the way the talents of black performing artists were exploited by white producers and performers, especially in the 1950s, when race in America was a powder keg and rock music was emerging from the South.

The classic case pits two successful but wildly different artists: Little Richard, who helped invent rock music with songs like “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally”; and Pat Boone, who sang cover versions of those songs in an effort to neutralize the effects of what was dubbed “race music” for white audiences. Consider these two:

Armed with these persuasive elements of contrast, I am ready to write.

UPDATE (Dec. 28, 2010): After receiving thoughtful complaints about this essay on comparison and contrast, we have decided to delete a description of The New York Times as “Jewish.”

The chart above that includes the adjective was derived from a lengthy and nuanced discussion of ways in which the culture and hierarchy of the Times invites comparisons to the Roman Catholic Church. The Commonweal article refers to a book on the Times by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, who conclude that the “self-image as Jews” of the Ochs-Sulzberger family has “profoundly shaped the paper.”

As my editor Julie Moos noted, the Commonweal piece elaborates that what shaped the Times was the family’s “social assimilation and ambivalence about religion.” To get at all the implications and contexts in which the adjective “Jewish” could be illuminated would require a social history of American religions in the 20th century. Absent such critical analysis, the designation of the Times as “Jewish” comes off as superficial at best, and offensive at worst, feeding into tired and often vicious stereotypes about media ownership and control.

I should not let this case pass without noting that it has been a lesson for me on the limitations of comparison/contrast as a strategy for both writing and critical thinking. As a cautionary tale for writers, it suggests that a comparison chart can do little more than suggest possible lines of inquiry, relationships that must be explored seriously — and with the best intentions. Even poets, as Shakespeare warned us in Sonnet 130, can be guilty of “false compare.”