New York Times Admits It Is “Cheerleading” for Gay Marriage
By MassNews Staff
The New York Times, owner of the Boston Globe, has not provided an impartial view of gay marriage that is required in “balanced journalism,” according to the paper’s new ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, who wrote last Sunday.
Agreeing with the opinion of J. Edward Pawlick in his book, “Libel by New York Times,” Okrent said that the “news” in the paper on homosexuality amounts to “cheerleading.”
Although the Publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. was mentioned in the story, along with the fact that the paper changed its course when he became Chairman and took control in the late 1990s, the ombudsman tread lightly when talking about him.
Nevertheless, the appearance of the story caused many to wonder if the 12 cousins in the Sulzberger family are finally ready to jettison Arthur Jr. and put another family member in charge of the huge, rich, powerful conglomerate.
Arthur, also known as Pinch, was almost removed last year during the Jayson Blair scandal and the appointment of the ombudsman resulted therefrom. It is well known that the cousins believe Pinch is a little strange and obsessed with homosexuality. He has publicly stated numerous times since he first appeared at the New York offices in 1984 that he believes all his ancestors, including his father, were homophobes.
It was not reported last Sunday, however, that three-quarters of the people who decide what appears on the front page of the New York Times are homosexuals, according to Richard Berke, the paper's National Political Correspondent, a longtime member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.
Berke spoke at the 10th anniversary reception for the group in Washington, D.C. on April 12, 2000 at the National Press Club, saying: "This is at a newspaper where not so long ago -- when I started there 15 years ago -- the department heads were asking for lists of the gay reporters on different sections so they could be punished in different ways. So things have really changed at the newspaper. Since I've been there, there's been a dramatic shift. I remember coming and wondering if there were any gay reporters there or whatever. Now it's like, there are times when you look at the front-page meeting and … literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals. … [It is] a real far cry from what it was like not so long ago."
According to those words, the decision to start cheerleading for homosexuality began soon after 1984 when Pinch Sulzberger first arrived at the New York offices. Since then he alone has effected a remarkable transition --- in the paper and in the nation --- as a result of his interference in Massachusetts politics, beginning in 1999. He took full charge of the conglomerate in 1997 when he became Chairman.
Remarkable Text of New York Times Mea Culpa
If you want a full understanding of this remarkable document which substantiates what Attorney Pawlick wrote in “Libel by New York Times,” you must read the concluding paragraphs.
Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
By Daniel Okrent
Of course it is.
The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left --- and there are plenty --- generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy.
I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.
But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.
Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.
Across the gutter, the Op-Ed page editors do an evenhanded job of representing a range of views in the essays from outsiders they publish - but you need an awfully heavy counterweight to balance a page that also bears the work of seven opinionated columnists, only two of whom could be classified as conservative (and, even then, of the conservative subspecies that supports legalization of gay unions and, in the case of William Safire, opposes some central provisions of the Patriot Act).
But opinion pages are opinion pages, and "balanced opinion page" is an oxymoron. So let's move elsewhere. In the Sunday magazine, the culture-wars applause-o-meter chronically points left. On the Arts & Leisure front page every week, columnist Frank Rich slices up President Bush, Mel Gibson, John Ashcroft and other paladins of the right in prose as uncompromising as Paul Krugman's or Maureen Dowd's. The culture pages often feature forms of art, dance or theater that may pass for normal (or at least tolerable) in New York but might be pretty shocking in other places.
Same goes for fashion coverage, particularly in the Sunday magazine, where I've encountered models who look like they're preparing to murder (or be murdered), and others arrayed in a mode you could call dominatrix chic. If you're like Jim Chapman, one of my correspondents who has given up on The Times, you're lost in space. Wrote Chapman, "Whatever happened to poetry that required rhyme and meter, to songs that required lyrics and tunes, to clothing ads that stressed the costume rather than the barely clothed females and slovenly dressed, slack-jawed, unshaven men?
In the Sunday Styles section, there are gay wedding announcements, of course, but also downtown sex clubs and T-shirts bearing the slogan, "I'm afraid of Americans." The findings of racial-equity reformer Richard Lapchick have been appearing in the sports pages for decades ("Since when is diversity a sport?" one e-mail complainant grumbled). The front page of the Metro section has featured a long piece best described by its subhead, "Cross-Dressers Gladly Pay to Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side." And a creationist will find no comfort in Science Times
Not that creationists should expect to find comfort in Science Times. Newspapers have the right to decide what's important and what's not. But their editors must also expect that some readers will think: "This does not represent me or my interests. In fact, it represents my enemy." So is it any wonder that the offended or befuddled reader might consider everything else in the paper - including, say, campaign coverage - suspicious as well?
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MassNews comment: This is where the most important words begin. The next paragraph reveals that the Sulzbergers are involved in every detail of the paper, including its content, as Atty. Pawlick recounts in “Libel.” This is their family business, just like a shoe store and they continue to control everything in this public corporation even though the stock arrangements could easily be challenged by any shareholder who has the money and the courage to mount a suit.
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Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn't think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper's viewpoint "urban." He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means "We're less easily shocked," and that the paper reflects "a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility."
He's right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears, a condition magnified by the been-there-done-that irony afflicting too many journalists. Articles containing the word "postmodern" have appeared in The Times an average of four times a week this year - true fact! - and if that doesn't reflect a Manhattan sensibility, I'm Noam Chomsky.
But it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.
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MassNews comment: Next we told that the Times has compared Atty. Mary Bonauto, who conspired with Judge Margaret Marshall to win her suit in Massachusetts, with Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. The black folk in Boston will not be happy to hear that.
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The gay marriage issue provides a perfect example. Set aside the editorial page, the columnists or the lengthy article in the magazine ("Toward a More Perfect Union," by David J. Garrow, May 9) that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.
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MassNews comment: Here we are told that the news coverage of gay marriage in the Times is like cheerleading.
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But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it's disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that
"For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy," (March 19, 2004); that the family of
"Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home," (Jan. 12, 2004) is a new archetype; and that
"Gay Couples Seek Unions in God's Eyes," (Jan. 30, 2004). I've learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I've met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I've been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom
