The Power of the Internet

Have you seen this memo from Los Angeles Times' editor John Carroll, May 22?

I'm concerned about the perception -- and the occasional reality -- that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and elsewhere as requiring "so-called counseling of patients." I don't think people on the anti-abortion side would consider it "so-called," a phrase that is loaded with derision....

And have you seen this article by Seth Mnookin at Newsweek, May 28?

For days, the national correspondents of The New York Times have been burning up, furious that suspended correspondent Rick Bragg has defended himself by publicly describing a work environment in which senior writers send out interns and stringers to do the majority of on-the-ground reporting.

Now, that fury is bubbling over into an open rage. On Wednesday, the Times's Peter Kilborn sent out a blistering e-mail to more than a dozen colleagues and the two top editors on the national desk. "Bragg's comments in defense of his reportorial routines are outrageous," Kilborn wrote. "I hope there is some way that we as correspondents, alone or with the support of the desk, can get the word out there, within The Times and outside, that we do not operate that way. Blair lies, cheats and steals. We don't. Bragg says he works in a poisonous atmosphere. He's the poison." ....

Do you think this kind of intramural newsroom criticism would have happened ten years ago? Or even five years ago? I don't. What do I think has changed? Here is a prime example.

On Sunday, May 25, the New York Times ran an article by some goober named Holland Cotter. The article seems to be, in overall tone, an attempt to generate nostalgia for the good ol' days of... the Black Panthers.

.... And what about that time, that utopian instant? Today it's hard to believe that something so good and so bad ever existed. But it did, in its daft, serious, maddening way, and you can see evidence of it in "The Black Panthers 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones," an unassuming, almost accidentally revisionist show at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, through Sept. 21....

Two days later, City Journal ran a column by Sol Stern, who had written about the Black Panthers for NYT back in the 1960s.

.... Where else but in Sulzberger’s and Raines’s Times could a review (registration required) of an exhibit of photographs of the Black Panthers turn into a political lecture by a white art critic on the justice of black violence? In Sunday’s “Arts and Leisure” section, art commentator Holland Cotter instructs us that the advances promised by the plodding mainstream civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. could only have been regarded as chump change by an intelligent young black like Huey Newton, living in a place like Oakland, California. Integrating public facilities might have been a legitimate goal for Southern blacks, says Cotter, “ but what could it do for a black kid stuck in a ghetto where no whites, except armed-to-the-teeth police, would be caught dead?” Cotter describes Newton and his sidekick, Bobby Seale, as ”smart ambitious urban activists [who] had grown up with the 1950s civil rights movement, and knew it wasn’t enough.” Thus, what could these two frustrated civil rights activists do but create the Panthers, “one of the most potent revolutionary groups of the 60s”?

If Cotter had done a little research on his subject, he might have discovered that Huey Newton’s first prison sentence was not for civil rights or Black Panther activity but for stabbing another black man repeatedly at a party, and that before Newton created the Panthers he was regularly burglarizing homes in the wealthy Oakland hills. Of course Newton, as Cotter avers, was a very bright young man. In mastering texts by Marx, Mao, and Lenin, instead of Martin Luther King, he could find a higher justification for virtually any criminal act. After all, didn’t Comrade Stalin become a bank robber in the name of the revolution?...

What Cotter cannot own up to is that the Panthers self-destructed because of the murderous violence and larceny they imposed on their own community. In my Times Magazine article, I had quoted Newton as saying that he was willing to kill a cop. True to his word, he later shot and killed a 23-year old Oakland police officer named John Frey after he pulled over Newton’s car. Newton pleaded self-defense, got off with a conviction for involuntary manslaughter, and was back on the streets in two years boasting about how he had “offed the pig.” When Panther accountant Betty Van Patter discovered that the leaders were misappropriating money from the breakfast program that Cotter so piously praises, she was murdered. Cotter refers to “alleged attacks on the police, arrests, trials,” as if all this were perhaps in doubt. Of Newton’s confrontation with officer Frey, Cotter lapses evasively into the passive voice: “There was a shoot-out. An officer was killed. Newton was arrested for murder.” The shoot-out had an independent existence, separate from any individual shooter, Cotter wants to suggest. Who knows who killed the cop? Who knows whether the cops rightly arrested Newton?...

I discovered both of these items through a blog at Media Minder this morning.

Ten years ago, a similar, fawning-leftist New York Times article would simply not have come to my attention, and perhaps not to your attention, either, Faithful Reader. I myself have hardly ever read a print edition of NYT. Ten years ago, some other journal might have published a response similar to that in City Journal. But it might have taken weeks, if not months, and I would never have seen it. Maybe you wouldn't have seen it, either. Now, the response comes out in days, and I find out about it within days. And so do you.

The whole dynamic in mainstream media is being changed. And it's being changed very much against their will.

Courtesy of the World Wide Web, big-name publications now have, literally, thousands of potential fact-checkers and bias-detectors who don't have to confine their criticisms to internal memos or corrections on back pages. (See, for instance, how Donald Luskin is all over NYT's Democratic-Shill-Disguised-As-Economics-Columnist Paul Krugman, almost every day.) Courtesy of the Blogosphere, we can connect the fact-checkers and bias-detectors to the offenders with not much more than a glance at a webpage and a couple of mouse clicks. And after that? E-mail sure makes the provision of feedback much more convenient than the typewriter did, no?

It's a brave new world. Apparently, the inhabitants of the smug old world are having paroxysmal growing pains trying to get used to the ideas that (1) they have a bias, like everybody else does, and (2) their bias comes through in their publication, and (3) the reading public isn't going to just sit still and take "what's good for them" anymore because (4) there are a lot of alternatives, especially on the Internet.

Sweet!

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 05/30/03 07:51:35 AM
Categorized as Media & Most Notable.