I grew up on The New York Times. Delivered, every morning, even before they had a national edition. Read it every morning, through high school and college. An essential part of breakfast.
She is dead now. From City Journal's The Worst of Times - William McGowan chronicles the long decline of the paper of record:
The second factor in the Times’s decline was the ascension of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. to the perch of publisher in 1992. Having come of age in the sixties counterculture, Sulzberger moved to shift the paper’s focus from its historical commitment of reporting the news “without fear or favor” to the more activist promise to “enhance society.” In particular, Sulzberger wanted the paper to promote “diversity” and to move beyond what he disparaged as the “predominantly white, straight, male version of events.” As the author of Coloring the News, a critical look at the politically correct mania for “diversity” and its damaging effect on the news media, McGowan writes as an authority on the Times’s transformation. The change was most obvious in the paper’s increasingly strident editorial pages, but the news content, which began taking its cues from editorial, suffered as well. Times veterans groused that the paper risked compromising its news coverage with a newly ideological agenda, but Sulzberger dismissed such concerns, declaring that he was “setting a moral standard.”
A newspaper's job to set a moral standard? Grandiose? How about just giving us the real facts with tough, skeptical, half-drunk cranky journalists instead of metrosexual twits, and we'll take care of the morality part ourselves. We're Americans, not illiterate ignoramuses who need to be taught how to think correctly by our superiors who filter and slant our information "for our own good." Propagandists, exploiting their historic franchise.
I quit The Times years ago because it would make me begin my day in an irritable mood. Irritated with them for quitting their job. Now, I catch up with Maggie's for breakfast, and so does She Who Must Be Obeyed. Imagine that!
