Archives
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Gray Lady Down
To New Yorkers, the U.S. is a foreign nation.
The Scoop
Keep that up, and you won't have any friends left.
The Editors (Try to) Close Ranks
O.K., which one of us is talking now?
The President Responds
Defending the Decision
The Blogosphere Understands
The Editors Are "Puzzled"
O.K., so I screwed up. He didn't have to rub my nose in it.
"The Paper of Record"
Not tonight, dear. You've gained forty pounds and lost most of your hair.
The Silence of the Liberals
The Gray Lady of Tomorrow
UPDATE. Even though Ace of Spades stole my (stolen) title, he's tracking the fall of the NYT quantitatively. And, as always, Michelle Malkin is all over the story too.
To New Yorkers, the U.S. is a foreign nation.
THE
SMART ONES. The editors of the New York Times
seem taken aback by the furious nationwide response to their exposure
of a legal and effective secret anti-terror program of the United
States. They're nonplussed by the outrage. Just as other New York-based
media titans have been nonplussed by events large and small in the new
media environment created by the internet -- from the continuing
shocked denial of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes at the lightning
absoluteness of their humiliation, to the comic befuddlement of Connie
Chung about the instant ubiquity of her embarrassing
farewell to
MSNBC's 2,386 viewers.
There's a reason for this. They live in a very small world. Forget the impressive population figures that tell us how many human souls reside in New York. Most of them are irrelevant dross. Our interest is the New York of the Press. Their city -- the locus of most of the publishing and 80 percent of the news decision making on the continent -- actually consists of just a few thousand of the "right" people, rightly educated, correctly oriented in terms of culture, taste, and politics, and perfectly isolated from what happens outside their small and incestuous social circle. They tread the same few routes along the avenues, congregate at the same handful of acceptable restaurants, and inform themselves from exactly the same list of approved books, magazines, newspapers, and 'films.' (You can forget the L.A. Times in this particular contretemps by the way: like the rest of the community of pseudo-New York journalists, they're just imitating the Big Bitch known as the Gray Lady.) If you ever hope to communicate with them, you have to put things in the extremely parochial terms they understand.
That's what we're up to today. The rest of this entry is an attempt to explain to the New York Times what's been happening in the past few days. Our medium of communication is one they might actually be able to process -- the trenchant sophistication of the one-panel cartoon perfected by the greatest magazine that ever proclaimed itself the greatest magazine in America, The New Yorker.
Non-New Yorkers may find the following summary obscure. But don't worry. That's the way they like it.
The Editorial Decision ProcessThere's a reason for this. They live in a very small world. Forget the impressive population figures that tell us how many human souls reside in New York. Most of them are irrelevant dross. Our interest is the New York of the Press. Their city -- the locus of most of the publishing and 80 percent of the news decision making on the continent -- actually consists of just a few thousand of the "right" people, rightly educated, correctly oriented in terms of culture, taste, and politics, and perfectly isolated from what happens outside their small and incestuous social circle. They tread the same few routes along the avenues, congregate at the same handful of acceptable restaurants, and inform themselves from exactly the same list of approved books, magazines, newspapers, and 'films.' (You can forget the L.A. Times in this particular contretemps by the way: like the rest of the community of pseudo-New York journalists, they're just imitating the Big Bitch known as the Gray Lady.) If you ever hope to communicate with them, you have to put things in the extremely parochial terms they understand.
That's what we're up to today. The rest of this entry is an attempt to explain to the New York Times what's been happening in the past few days. Our medium of communication is one they might actually be able to process -- the trenchant sophistication of the one-panel cartoon perfected by the greatest magazine that ever proclaimed itself the greatest magazine in America, The New Yorker.
Non-New Yorkers may find the following summary obscure. But don't worry. That's the way they like it.
The Scoop
Keep that up, and you won't have any friends left.
The Editors (Try to) Close Ranks
O.K., which one of us is talking now?
The President Responds
Defending the Decision
The Blogosphere Understands
The Editors Are "Puzzled"
O.K., so I screwed up. He didn't have to rub my nose in it.
"The Paper of Record"
Not tonight, dear. You've gained forty pounds and lost most of your hair.
The Silence of the Liberals
The Gray Lady of Tomorrow
Does that clear anything up for you,
boys and girls?
UPDATE. Even though Ace of Spades stole my (stolen) title, he's tracking the fall of the NYT quantitatively. And, as always, Michelle Malkin is all over the story too.
