Cancelling the New York Times

I read the Times since a kid (yeah, one of those uncool kids), and I have gotten my own daily NYT since a callow youth in prep school. It arrived on a huge library table, labeled by name, each morning as you entered the main building on the way from morning Chapel to the dining hall. (Back then, about half of us got the NY Herald Tribune and half the NYT, and each half viewed the other half as benighted.) It has been part of my daily morning life ever since, wherever I have lived.

 But I have had enough of their propaganda, their selective choice of facts, their tilting of front page stories, their condescension, the smugly virtuous attitude, their preference for sentiment over economic facts, the predictably party-line editorials, their writers' total ignorance of even introductory statistics (they seem to hire people who can write, but who don't know anything about history, math, economics, science, warfare, or anything else), and, finally, their embarassing op-ed team which is as deficient in common sense and in respect for the USA as it is in testosterone. The NYT is no longer the "newspaper of record," but a loyal agent (or "useful idiot"?) of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, stuck in a combination of moldy rhetoric of the 1960s, the moldy statist politics of the 1930s, the cocktail party anti-American "radical chic" of the goofy, cocaine-addled NYC of the 1970s, and adolescent-style reflexive anti-traditionalism. Test it for yourself: How long has it been since you have been surprised by a NYT editorial? How long since a NYT editorial has provoked you to thought? Q.E.D.

For this post, I had saved about ten recent examples of the above, but decided that would be beating a dead horse, and their editorial on John Roberts pushed me over the edge: it was indistinguishable from a Scrapple Face satire of the NYT. They have a socio-political agenda, and do not let confusing facts or intellectual integrity get in their way...I guess they imagine that they are in the noble vanguard of something wonderful (!), but sometimes I think they aren't even aware of what they are doing, because their prejudice is second nature. They have become a joke, but they don't know it yet. I hope they are beginning to get the joke, because newspapers are fine things. "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

I kept putting the deed off, like delaying putting down a sick old dog, but I finally I cut the cord this week. But I cheat a little: I can read the Tuesday Science Times online, and I kept the delivery of the Sunday for the Book Review, etc. Plus folks email me pieces I should see. For those who need a New York newspaper to survive, try The New York Sun. They are equally good at letting you know what music, dance, gallery shows, restaurants, etc. you are missing, and they do not throw curve balls.

Well, I am not alone. I had an elegant dinner at the home of long-time NYC Democrats last night, prominent in NYC business and politics and charity, supporters of the arts, but old-style Dems - Moynihan Dems, JFK Dems. Smart, lovely, gracious, refined people who would not consider the Clintons to be socially appropriate, but might vote for them. The hostess confessed to me that she had cancelled their NYT too, and replaced it with the Sun. I was amazed. The same week, this story comes out. Other newspapers may blame their circulation declines on a number of causes, but everyone I know who has quit it has done so for the same reasons I have, and with a similar reluctance and a similar feeling of abandoning an old companion - but why begin one's day agitated by a newspaper's transparently biased and manipulative decisions?

To paraphrase Reagan, I did not leave the NYT; the NYT left me. I do not miss it, yet, anyway. Give me the whole truth, people of the NYT, with knowledge and fact rather than partisan opinion and propaganda behind it, and I will come back home to you, old gal.

Here's the hard part - Stop the ACLU's Trackback Party.