Defending the former Old Grey Lady

Or a slight defense of the so-called paper of record, The New York Times.

I have read quite a few criticisms, to put it mildly, of the NYT from the right. But we must understand the context for these criticisms and they begin with the old St. Reagan attack on the media for reporting on social inequality and class by shouting: "Class warfare! Class warfare!"

Given the Bush mis-administration dragging the country into social, political, and economic crisis, major newspapers such as The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even the once Grey Lady, The New York Times have begun covering the problems of social inequality and class which divides our tattered One Nation Under Corporate Greed. This is not to say that we were once a perfect country where everyone held hands skipping across the malls both green and commercial, but that life is getting harder and more challenging in the Bush imperialist, religious far (far far) right presidency.

Though the extent of the elitism in the paper is quite clear to anyone who reads the NYT -- and you do not have to live in flyover country to see this -- it is and remains part of our country's ruling elite. Of course, these days the country has moved far more to the ideological and religious far right that the writers, editors, and others at the NYT have to wonder if the elitism that was part of the paper's core identity (even more than the LAT and WSJ) is at odds with the march of the rightists.

After all, this is the newspaper that devotes many of its sections to recounting (and sometimes fall over itself to fawn) the cultural and culinary habits of the rich, the educated, the well-occupied, the sport celebrity, and the uniquely celebrated from New York. This cacphony starts from its Vows and Style sections published on Sunday, to the Home and Dining sections during the regular week editions, to the recently added Thursday Styles section (which has very little of interest for those of us who do not break the 100,000 pay ceiling).

Yet there is another aspect to the paper, one which is routine, and not just its current series on class. The Sunday NYT also includes the City section, which touches on neighborhood in much of New York City, and other regional sections. These tend to reflect the experience of quite varied, and mostly not so well off people.

While the NYT has changed a great deal over the last decade, it has also gotten more accessible to read, (losing, in the process, a sort of pseudo-educated stuffiness in style), and even in the Metropolitan news section the paper tries to cover daily life in a way that is new for it if not novel elsewhere. A small, but significant detail is that reportage of the many New Yorkers with Spanish names nearly always gets the spelling right, with the appropriate diacritical marks. In general, the reportage on people who are not well off has gotten less patronizing, and culturally more informed than ever before in its pages. A step forward to be sure.

Of course the NYT is a ruling class institution, but it's worth noting that it's always been a mouthpiece for some of the more broadminded and farseeing, and hence corporate liberal part of the élites. This is why the ideological and religious right hate the times with exuberance and also explains why so many of us hate the ideological reporting in the Moonie controlled Washington Times.

Thus while the Old Grey Lady may be a bit stuck up, even she is fed up with the destruction of our country under this horrendous ideological and religious assault. Let's cut her a little slack.