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NY Times, Tell it to the Marines

Posted By Jack Kemp On February 18, 2008 @ 5:00 am

Years ago the New York Times had a much better understanding of — and respect for — the US military.


It seems like an appropriate time for "Pinch" Sulzberger to listen to some fatherly advice on how the US Military builds character.

From Behind the Times by New York Magazine writer and NYU Journalism professor Edwin Diamond, viewed within the [1] Amazon Online Reader,pages 34-35, from the chapter entitled "Punch and his Times," a quote about Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger, the father of the current head of the NY Times:

. . . in 1943, at age seventeen, he left the Loomis School in Connecticut to join the Marines, with his father's written permission. He did well enough, serving in the South Pacific toward the end of the war as a radio man and driver in rear echelons. "Before I entered the Marines, I was a lazy good-for-nothing. The Marines woke me up," Punch would later say. After his discharge he attended Columbia University, enrolling in a general studies program (his father was a trustee, and that helped with the admissions office). In 1951, a year after the start of the Korean war, Sulzberger was recalled to active duty, to be a public information officer in Japan and Korea.

This is what happens when some wealthy Boomer liberal spends their whole life isolated from the realities of life. Years ago, the Times used to have a military analyst/columnist who was quite good, even though he wasn't a veteran. He learned much by spending time with people in the military, so he could write realistic articles about military matters and the behavior of veterans as a whole. Today, the New York Times has no such columnist with that type of experience. I'd venture to guess that a majority of the Times staff were against the 1990s US Navy Home Port plan to station warships on Staten Island, the New York City borough south of Manhattan. "Sophisticated" New Yorkers got their wish – and thus had no warships in port on September 11th capable of using an onboard missile to shoot down an airliner approaching the World Trade Center.

Ralph Peters and others have [2] pointed out the New York Times also flunked Journalism 101 by not doing basic research to compare the veteran population's murder rate to the general population of young adult men. A scientific comparison would have led the Times to the conclusion that the murder rate among veterans was much lower than that of the comparable civilian population. Once again, the Times disgraces itself – and seems totally unable to do their journalistic job professionally.

The late Anne Richards once said of President George H.W. Bush's privileged family that he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Well, "Pinch" Sulzberger believes that the New York Times, every time it steps up to the plate, has already hit a home run and can merely circle the bases as an afterthought. Just because "post-modernist educators" give gold stars to everyone, doesn't mean they earned them.

The New York Times, in its' one-dimensional and unfair attack on American Armed Forces veterans, could arguably be said to take an elitist position, myopically believing "their crowd" is the only group of people who deserve fair treatment, while rationalizing a self-delusional excuse.

In 1990, a white, Wellesley and Yale-educated female investment banker was raped and beaten unconscious in New York's Central Park. The suspects were poor black and Hispanic youths. This became a national story and the Times chose not to publish the victim's name. A year later, a college dropout woman accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her at his family's Florida mansion. In this case, the Times chose to print her name, details of her personal sexual history, and details of her mother's social and sexual history. The Times used the excuse that NBC had broadcast her name the night before. To quote page 14 of Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond,

"When have we ever given a **** about what NBC said before," I was told by a reporter who attended the [Times] staff meeting.

In fact, a famous NY Times female columnist accused her employer of prejudice. On pages 14-15 of Behind the Times, it states:

Times columnist Anna Quindlen made just such a charge in her Sunday Op-Ed page space two days after the staff meeting: as far as the editors of the Times were concerned, Quindlen wrote, women who have prestigious jobs will be treated more fairly than "women who have 'below average' high school grades [and] are well known at bars and dance clubs." Others who wanted to know why the Times hadn't produced a similar investigative profile of the well-connected man in the case, William Kennedy Smith. They were told, "one is in the works." (When it eventually appeared, there were new outcries. A Washington Post profile of Kennedy Smith quoted several women, most of them anonymously, who described his loutish and sometimes violent sexual behavior; the Time's Kennedy Smith article, produced by the Washington bureau, didn't include these alleged episodes. Bureau people later said they were unable to confirm the accounts to the editors' "satisfaction."

Does this story remind you of a later prominent politically connected family's scandals involving attacks on less prominent women and statements such as, "drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find?" But I digress – into that which the Times, for all its' "high-minded liberalness," has enabled and de facto encouraged.

So it appears the Times has a history of writing hit pieces on the non-rich, particularly when the well-heeled are involved in some way. In contrast, the tabloids also write about the failures of the poor – but they also highlight the successes of the sons and daughters of the non-privileged, often as a result of their serving in the military. Frankly, I don't believe the Times understands that it has a problem with covering the news fairly and perceptively. It will take some even greater criticisms and financial upheavals before The Gray Lady "gets it."

Ellie