The New York Times: On Bended Knee To The Right Wing

This past week's controversy over an apparent attempt by the New York Times to "normalize" a young white man who has moved from leftist to libertarian to white nationalist without the slightest understanding of how he made these shifts made me think about a book that came out in 1988, toward the end of the Reagan presidency.  "On Bended Knee" described the success Reagan's media handlers had in de-fanging the post-Watergate Washington and national press.  Success, in fact, that was so remarkable that worship of the President replaced coverage of him and his Administration, and nearly allowed a number of major scandals to slip by without notice.

The Times was rightly called out for the profile of the young man (I'm not going to help the normalization by mentioning his name), which seemed long on trivial information about his life and unforgivably short on any attempt to analyze how he made his ideological journey.  Not only was the article decried by Times' readers, but the publicity the young man received for his rancid, uncritical views of Nazism and related subjects has cost him his job and his place of residence.  Frankly, good riddance.  There is no larger First Amendment advocate than me, but it is axiomatic and settled law that the First Amendment protects ideas.  And, as I have said previously and will say again and again until everyone agrees with me, hatred is not an idea.  It is not a philosophy, a policy, or a program.  It's just hatred, and it destroys everything it touches.

But the Times has always been fussy about being pilloried by the right as a leftist rag.  That's why it employs more than one conservative Op-Ed writer, even while its local right-wing counterpart, the New York Post, employs less than one.  (I won't even get into the Wall Street Journal.)  And that's why it publishes embarrassingly bad stories like the one about the white nationalist.

Just so you can be absolutely certain that said story is not an isolated case, consider the following piece not long ago about Ben Shapiro, a young conservative social media personality who enjoys carpet-bombing campuses with incendiary and dishonest rhetoric.  The Times' writer portrays Shapiro as a logician on the order of Plato or Darrow.  The one concrete example he gives of this, on the other hand, reveals him to be little better than a grade school bully, cutting off an audience member rather than giving her a chance to blow up his argument.

Giving the other side its props when it's due to do so is one thing; going out of one's way to praise them in the absence of praiseworthy characteristics is something else.  A paper of the relative importance of the Times would do well to remember that, if journalists focus on telling the truth without fear of doing so, the fair-and balanced thing will take care of itself.  Stop bending, and start reporting!