The Dead Imagination of the New York Times

Once you understand the Pravadaesque Mindset that marks a New York Times lifer, the paper's capacity to irritate usually subsides into wry amusement. But every so often, the paper describes its own limited mindset so well it is hard to just let it slide. This morning's lead editorial on Russia is a textbook example of denial, incapacity and intellectual insanity: ( Deadly Stalemate in Chechnya ) It leads with:

A staggering series of recent terrorist attacks rooted in the Chechen conflict have been both horrific and remote to most Americans. It's hard to imagine what the public reaction would have been here if terrorists had seized a school full of children, blown up two passenger planes and set off a deadly suicide bomb outside a subway station in Western Europe or Canada.

It would be difficult for most honest reporters to write a more labored lead, but we aren't dealing with honest reporters here, we're dealing with a New York Times editorial.

To begin with I suppose that if by 'most Americans' you mean those who do not read newspapers, fail to watch television or listen to the radio, who never collect information from the web, and live in caves under the rich soil of Amish country, it might be conceivable that those Americans feel a terrorist attack on children in a school to be a "remote" event -- but only the ones with no children. This sort of shrink-wrapping the vast 'unwashed-unreaders' of the New York Times is a hallmark of the Times editorial page. It is a kind of noblesse distress signal in which the self-appointed and unelected media government distinguishes itself from the rabble. It is unfortunate that, to judge by declining circulation and audience figures, the rabble is also distinguishing itself from the major media.

After cleansing the room of the Yahoos, the editorial whips out the show stopper: "It's hard to imagine what the public reaction would have been here if terrorists had seized a school full of children, blown up two passenger planes and set off a deadly suicide bomb outside a subway station in Western Europe or Canada."

Actually it is hard to imagine that there breathes an imagination so dead that it thinks the Chechen atrocity is hard to imagine at all. Imagining it doesn't take more than three brain cells. If, lacking those three brain cells, you still struggle to imagine it, the media is chock full of aids to you imagination in the form of pictures, first hand accounts, and video. Pick up any newspaper or turn on any news station on the radio and television. These aids will be along right after the extensive reports on William Clinton's Big Mac bill coming due. The Russian outrage is many things, but "hard to imagine" doesn't make the list.

What is hard to imagine is that a newspaper which was once an American newspaper could write about such a thing happening and not reflect on what would happen if it the events actually took place in America. But that's what the Times does in the same sentence. Notice how the hypothetical 'happening' takes place "outside a subway station in Western Europe or Canada." A curious bit of localization for a newspaper whose offices are over a subway in New York City and only a few blocks from several schools.

Somehow the terrorist killings at Russian schools cannot be imagined by the Times to happen in America, in New York City, where 3,000 died. No, they have to be moved off, placed at a politically correct distance. With that, I suppose, no avid reader of the New York Times will imagine that what was done to the children of Russians will ever, could ever, happen to their own children in the city of New York.

If the readers could imagine such a thing then they certainly might not support the forthright Times editorial board in the one thing it wants out of the entire episode: "Unless Vladimir Putin opens up negotiations with legitimate Chechen leaders, Russia will not be the only nation to suffer more terrorist attacks."

Ah, the New York Times wants -- after the slaughter of hundreds of children -- appeasement and negotiation. On a certain level, it is comforting to known that in a world awash in fear and fascism, the New York Times remains true to the obsessions of its publisher and his editors. What would it take for this to change? It is hard to imagine, but at some future dark day the sight of dozens of the children of New York's media elite lying shot and burned in body bags on the sidewalk outside their private schools in New York City might do the trick.

I wonder whether, if that terrible day should ever come, the editorial staff of the New York Times will use copies of today's editorial to cover the faces of their own dead.

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Posted by Vanderleun at September 4, 2004 8:27 AM | TrackBack
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