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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 2/28/2008 8:17:20 PM
Title: An answer for Jay Rosen
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From LARRY KART, Subject -- An answer for Jay Rosen. The common thread here, and the main reason for the bizarreness, is that the real subject of all these stories is the Times itself --and/or the image the Times thinks it's creating or would like to create for itself when it runs an ostensibly major story about a subject that is or will become of common interest. The same is true of many other broken-backed stories in the Times and a host of other papers since, probably, the mid 1970s or early 1980s. At least that's the time when I began to see that sort of stuff in action at the paper where I used to work. A particularly revealing early warning sign was when that paper, with a long tradition of rock-ribbed Republicanism, began to seach for some attractive, young, fairly liberal candidates for local offices that it could endorse, while it never dreamed of endorsing (and hasn't dome so to this date, I believe) a non-Republican for president, governor, or senator. It slowly occurred to me that these seemingly against-the-grain local endorsements were in effect advertisements for the paper, a way of signaling to a body of potential readers that the paper very much wanted and needed to attract that the paper was an attractively against-the-grain enterprise, a place of supple independent thought rather than a stern grandfatherly GOP bastion. Similarly (but along different lines, given its own history) the Times is dancing in front of a mirror here, trying to move in ways that telegraph to a somewhat imaginary audience that it is a truly supple paper -- iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image (if the "facts" of a story require that it be so) and certainly capable of seeing all sides of all issues. Thus these Times stories were mis-conceived and mis-edited so as to incorporate and express the paper's own image-shaping needs; and the "facts," such as they were, were pushed about one way and another toward the end. The paper is not so much a paper anymore; it is itself a candidate. [Permalink]

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