The opposite of love, sayeth the wise man, is not hate but apathy. In the five long years during which I was a Manhattanite, I developed a yawning apathy about the local newspaper of record, the New York Times.
The main problem for me as a local resident was that its reportage on the local scene was spotty at best. What good is a newspaper if it fails to cover its putative beat? To find out what was going on in New York, you had to read the tabloids, the Daily News, the Post and (for a while) Newsday.
The reason was obvious: The New York Times considered itself to be the nation’s newspaper of record — a sort of USA Today for grownups — and therefore did not deign to report on which New York man was bitten by what New York dog — or, better, which New York man was found headless in what New York topless bar.
In an exposé on the troubles facing the New York Times, Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff offers some statistics on the disastrous results of the paper’s decades of trying to be everything to everyone, which apparently, and predictably, have resulted in it’s becoming nothing to no one:
Unlike The Washington Post, which has put much of its editorial and business energies into dominating its local market, the Times’s strategy — a doomsday scenario, foreseeing a one-newspaper nation, a last-man-standing paper — has been to make the paper national. Hence, the New York Times is no longer principally a metropolitan paper. With a daily circulation of 260,000 in the five boroughs, it’s no longer even creditably a New York paper. (Its two tabloid competitors, the Daily News and the New York Post, have far more readers in New York City.)
Wolff’s article tracks what appears to be the New York Times’ downward spiral. Business is not good and the paper has been rocked by two journalism scandals — Jayson Blair’s plaigarism and Judith Miller’s stenography for the Bush/neocon war machine — all of which is symbolized by the paper’s current project: a huge new office tower under construction on West 40th Street.
NYT: “All the News Republicans Tell Us to Print” has so debased itself to Bushco and his Republican Guard that it is now nothing more than the Armstrong Williams of newspapers.
They arguably changed the outcome of the ’04 elections, as there is no doubt in my mind that Bush, who won small, would not have been reelected had the public known of the NSA domestic spying.
NYT deserves to die a slow, ugly, death and relegation to the ashcan of history.