I have a conservative friend who is becoming increasingly exercised by what he regards as the antiTrump bias of the Times. I’ve told him to calm down as the Times was turning into a parody of its former self. Today the NYT obliged by doing just that.
Here’s what so exercised my friend in today’s Times (19 Feb ’17). “For $200,000, a Chance to Whisper in Trump’s Ear”, Membership at Mar-a-Lago Gives Titans Easier Access to Political Power.” This appeared on the front page taking up the twomost right columns above the fold. All of page 13 inside is devoted to the article.
Here’s how the Times parodied itself “Around the World by Private Jet: Cultures in Transformation ” This took up the entire back page of the Style Section (New England Edition at Least) “Privately chartered Boeing 757 26 day/9 countries/50 travelers/$135,000” You will ride with 5 members of the Times staff (lilywhite) — Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Alan Riding, Nicholas Kristof, Elaine Sciolino and Elizabeth Bumiller. You will not have to share the air with the Times’ minority editorial contributors, Charles Blow (Black) and Ross Douhat (Conservative). They don’t appear to have a Latino.
Imagine the joy of access for the cut rate price of 135K (who said the Times didn’t care about the little man), while cruising at 35,000 feet exuding both virtue and carbon dioxide.
Here’s part of what my friend had to say about the article (unfortunately he doesn’t blog (he should ) so I can’t supply a link).
Back in the early 18th Century William Congreve wrote:
” Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned”
You would think he was talking about the venerable “Gray LADY”, aka New York Times. Indeed the paper has jettisoned any pretense of professional journalistic ethics – any pretense of journalism purpose. A week after the election, after flagrantly shilling for Clinton and smearing Trump in previous months, the editor of the Times issued in writing to the papers readers an apology of sorts by admitting the paper had lost its way and promised to return to reporting news. Evidently atonement to its readers is in the words not the performance. The Gray Lady is profoundly stunned by the rejection by most of the country of the paper’s vision of how the world should be.
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Since the election the scorned and enraged Gray Lady has fill page after page , day after day , with disgrace as represented by the article below. The paper has flooded us with conjecture about things that have not happened and gossip of any sort that could denigrate and damage Trump.
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The relentless attacks on Trump and his playing golf with dangerous cohorts etc is in marked contrast to how it suppressed any conjecture about Obama’s rise through the notoriously crooked Chicago political machine. Not a whisper of how he was dependent on other graduates of the Chicago cesspool, such as Axelrod and Jarrett. There was dismissal of Obama’s friendship with Ayers, a principal in a murderous urban terrorist group.
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The august “paper of record” never conjectured how Obama could spent 20 years listening to Rev. Wright vicious racist rants and kept listening to them, but later said he hardly knew the man.
One final thought — could this be fake news, an ad bought by the Koch brothers to embarrass the Times. Possible, but unlikely.
Chemiotics II 