Looking at the reactions of the right-wingers to l’affaire Novak-Rove-Wilson-Plame, you’d have to conclude that, for them, national security is a sometime thing — a talking point or a symbolic flourish, but not a real-world imperative involving actual lives, dangers, and government workings. The smears and (to be generous) fat, sloppy errors directed against former […]
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin wrote about the Chicago events for the Ramparts Wallposter during the Democratic Convention; and later in his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; and then again, exercising his own fiction-making license, in the novel The Opposition, to be published in 2021 by Guernica Editions. In Chicago, when Tom Hayden, bailed out of jail, went undercover, it was Todd Gitlin who purchased his fake goatee.
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Hello, Henhouse? Fox Calling
“Should we have affirmative action for conservatives?” This question, arresting enough by itself, becomes all the more so when the “we” in that question is The New York Times. It cropped up during a January 17 meeting in a nicely paneled Times conference room, billed as an “informal forum” at which various Times editors and […]
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Swifter Than Truth
Historians of the mad pageant in which Americans chose their president in 2004 will someday note with astonishment that the quote-unquote Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, many of its members inveterate liars more swift than truthful, succeeded in hijacking the presidential campaign for the better part of the month of August, nearly one-third of the […]
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Unmistaken
Conventional wisdom says that George W. Bush flip-flopped (you might say) in the debates from petulance in Miami to belligerence in St. Louis to grins in Tempe. True enough, but the consensus story line of Bush’s inconsistency masks the more significant invariant pattern: The president’s idea of resolve is to repeat slogans. This is, as […]
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Channel Surfing
Quacking like a canard On Wednesday evening, Karl Rove was ushered to the roundtable of PBS, where he wiped all but angelic fingerprints off the Swift boat liars. Along the way, he repeated the canard that in his April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ho Chi (sorry, John) Kerry called all American […]
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New York Minutes
Nobody here but us good cops On most channels, the Republican funfest shines forth as a genial display of red-white-and-blue, on-message sincerity. Everyone is so earnest, everyone exudes optimism, all virtues are on parade. Only good cops pass through these pearly gates. When Senator Lindsey Graham introduced John McCain, saying that McCain had always respected […]
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Dumbing Him Down
Is it a huge surprise that American multitudes say they don’t know what John Kerry and the Democrats stand for? How would they know? And who bears responsibility? First point about the attention that’s being paid: An ABC representative took to The New York Times (July 28) to brag that the network had made the […]
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An Exercise in Futility
Sunday morning’s guardians of American virtue helpfully prepared a presumably pre-jaded people for the Democratic national convention by asking the questions that burn in the hearts of ordinary Americans. Wasn’t it a thrill to hear Cokie Roberts ask John Edwards how he was going to explain his positions on repealing tax cuts for billionaires to […]
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Media: It Was a Very Bad Year
There was a time when readers of The New York Times never knew what they were missing. You had to run down to Hotaling’s, the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square, to check The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or wait a few days for the Manchester Guardian. Or you subscribed to I.F. Stone’s […]
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Soft News, Hard Cash
Backstory: Inside the Business of News By Ken Auletta, Penguin, 296 pages, $24.95 All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News By James T. Hamilton, Princeton University Press, 342 pages, $35.00 There’s a lot of muttering nowadays about the future of a minor, almost wholly owned subsidiary […]