Sunday 'Two-Timer'

I know I’ve only been doing this blogging thing for a little less than a week, but I have a secret that I’m forced to divulge at this time (I’ve given myself permission to ‘leak’ it so I guess it’s OK to tell you). Here goes...

Every Sunday morning for the past 18 months or so, I have been ‘hooking up’ with another woman—one that sometimes goes by the name of ‘The Gray Lady’. I’ve been carving out an hour or two of my busy (?) home schedule to facilitate these weekly trysts. Although I maintain my loyalty to my local love, this out-of-town temptress has so much more to offer. When I open my door, she’s there like clockwork, waiting patiently and wearing only the sheerest of rainwear—and if the weather is nice, she might arrive sporting nothing at all! On the rare occasions when she has failed to arrive, I would immediately be on the phone pleading to know her whereabouts. If that call from me came too late in the day, I would be forced to venture out and retrieve her from one of a few local business establishments she caters to.

Now before you run to cover the eyes of any impressionable children within eyeshot of your monitor, the ‘lady’ in question is none other than The New York Times—considered by many to be America’s ‘paper of record’ but, more recently, tarred the ‘paper of treason’ by those who become infuriated when it chooses to run stories supposedly embarrassing to the current White House or GOP politicians. As you might have already guessed, I’m in the group that champions the first label. I grew up in a newspaper family back east (my dad worked as a linotype setter for a major Philadelphia daily in the early 1960s) and learned to read by practicing with the copies he brought home with him every morning. We moved to northeastern Pennsylvania when I was in kindergarten (he got a job with a paper closer to my parents’ families—one that eventually fired him when his union local took strike actions against them in 1978). That particular part of the state was nearly equidistant to both New York and Philadelphia so local newsstands offered a wide variety of what both two cities had to offer. We used to get the New York Daily News as our supplemental paper to the locally published Sunday Independent and it wasn’t until I left to join the military that the NYT became my favorite ‘broadsheet’ out of the ‘Big Apple.’

All throughout my adulthood, I’ve had the opportunity to be ‘exposed’ to a variety of papers available at the locations where I served. In San Antonio, we got both of their local newspapers delivered to our apartment (one was morning, one was evening—needless to say, we didn’t do much on Sundays besides read). When we lived in the Baltimore/Washington area, I would hear the ‘thump’ of The Washington Post hitting our front door every day. While overseas, the military-themed Stars & Stripes had to suffice when we were stationed in non-English speaking countries. During our last tour in the UK, I would regularly pick up copies of the London Times (the Brits referred to it simply as ‘the Times’) or The Daily Telegraph at the local shops (OK, I occasionally bought a copy of The Sun but it was for the articles—not for the ‘Page 3 girls’ :-) ). My last tour in Japan had me buying copies of the Japan Times to get their perspective on current affairs and US-related issues (our military presence in that country since the end of World War II, trade policies, Iraq).

While I subconsciously understood that all of these publications had biases associated with their target audiences, I read them primarily to gain a greater understanding of the countries and the populations that were hosting me and my family (S&S officially declares itself ‘neutral’ but it does feature articles from several elements of the DoD’s public affairs apparatus which has demonstrated a pro-administration slant in several controversial events occurring in Iraq and during our current ‘global war’ on terrorism). Politics really didn’t sink in with me in my selections of stateside papers—we generally subscribed to the publication that had the most features we wanted to have (specific Sunday magazines or daily comic strips, feature non-political columnists—Dave Berry, Ann Landers, Dayton’s own Erma Bombeck). Because of nation’s progression towards the 24/7 television news outlets (and most recently to a wide variety of Internet news sources), print papers now find it hard to compete with these readily available outlets. In our now highly politically tinged society, bias can be the sole ‘trump card’ when either accepting or declining your locale’s sole daily publication.

As the ‘paper of record’, the NYT is one of only a handful of papers (Wall Street Journal, USA Today) that are available at almost all major news outlets from coast-to-coast. Originally published only in the New York metropolitan area and transported out to a sprinkling of locations, the Times struck contracts with various printing facilities around the country (including Dayton) to increase its availability to over 200 US markets (its sister publication, the International Herald-Tribune, has a similar arrangement in 33 overseas sites for worldwide distribution to over 180 countries) . When I do purchase a copy during visits back to my old ‘stomping grounds’, that edition displays a pricing scheme based upon one’s distance away from New York City (we were within that radius so it didn't serve as a disincentive for purchase). I do have to scratch my head when I still have to pay $5.00 for my Sunday edition when it was printed just down the road (and get billed even more because of home delivery) but that's probably a topic for a future entry.

What is my attraction to this controversial publication? Well, I like having a big paper to sink my mental ‘teeth’ into on Sunday mornings. While comparable in size to the Sunday NYT, the DDN edition must bow to its commercial masters and make most of its bulk revenue-centric (coupons, circulars, classified ads). Dayton’s paper does have the requisite color comics, Parade magazine, and weekly television listings but it must rely on much of its national and global news from non-DDN sources (wire services and other papers, to include the NYT). The Times, on the other hand, sits within the portfolio of the New York Times Company, a world-class media conglomorate ($3.5 billion in 2005 earnings) that owns 17 other newspapers and several other television, radio and Internet outlets. Its Sunday edition consists of seven different numbered sections (we don’t get sections 6 & 7 here—not sure what they might contain) and includes two pull-outs (their weekly book review and its own magazine). With 16 operating locations in the NY region as well as 11 national and 26 foreign bureaus, many of the stories it publishes are filed by their own reporting staff.

Over its 155-year history, the NYT has earned 94 Pulitzer Prizes—the highest honor in print journalism (I believe the DDN has won just two) and has previously delved into issues that appeal to my sense of democracy and bold reporting (the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 which revealed a more accurate depiction of the Vietnam War than the government was publicly admitting, the unearthing of the Tuskegee Experiment which infected African Americans with syphilis to study its effects and history). One of its latest honors was accorded earlier this year for their coverage of potential Constitutional irregularities with a previously undisclosed NSA wiretapping program.

Reporting on another US surveillance program (the screening of international financial transactions recorded in Belgium’s SWIFT database) in June has drawn the most recent conservative rage over alleged disclosures of classified information. In the right’s current outbursts, the motives of the Times’ staff—specifically of its editor, Bill Keller—have been called into question even though two other papers published similar stories on the same day about the same subject. This latest attack as well as recent internal controversies (journalistic fraud allegations against reporter Jayson Blair, Judith Miller’s jailing on contempt charges in the Valerie Plame outing case, hefty payments to underperforming executives) has caused some concern among stockholders who have seen a 50 percent decrease in its share price since 2002. This trend has been seen by many companies within the print newsmedia due to declining circulations and weak advertising, but enemies of the Times see this downturn to be directly related to their various attempts to discredit them and other ‘mainstream’ media outlets as being tainted by ‘liberal bias’.

In terms of its op/ed pages, the NYT has no rival—at least from my personal political perspective. Boasting a lineup of center-left to center-right columnists, the paper routinely attracts attention due to their particular takes on current issues, whether it is about the Darfur genocide, our government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, or the US’s policies in the Middle East. My favorite of the bunch has to be Frank Rich (only posts a Sunday column but it is well worth the 7-day wait for his next offering). Originally a theater critic for the paper in the 1980s, Mr. Rich has gravitated towards politics and popular culture, especially after the current Bush Administration took office in January 2001. His more recent columns have been aimed squarely at the NYT ‘treason’ issue. He went on sabbatical earlier this year to finish work on his new book (“The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina”—due to be released September 19th on Amazon.com) and I almost went through withdrawals awaiting his return in late April.

Paul Krugman is my next favorite NYT columnist. An economist by trade, he stayed in that field until being hired by the Times in 2000. After January 2001, his writings have focused primarily on the failings of the Bush Administration’s foreign and economic policies. Saddled with many conservative ‘supply side’ detractors, he has the real-world background to find and focus on the truly significant statistics about current US and world economic conditions that allows folks like me to ‘catapult the propaganda’ for a better insight into what is really happening. I occasionally read Tom Friedman’s and Bob Herbert’s columns and peek in on Maureen Dowd if the title sounds ‘snarky’ enough. Nicholas Kristof recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his commentary about Darfur’s on-going genocide campaign (I loved how he taunted Bill O’Reilly by offering to pay for his round-trip tickets to the Sudan to personally witness the horrible realities in that region—the Factor host declined) but I really haven’t been following that issue as closely as I should.

The two I seldom (if ever) read are David Brooks and John Tierney—the ‘token’ right-wingers of their op/ed pages. Originally a self-declared liberal, Mr. Brooks is now one of the conservative movement’s most visible spokesmen. In addition to his two columns per week in the Times, he is a regular on several of the Sunday morning talk shows. Mr. Tierney is a libertarian and has previously taken that political tack on subjects ranging from the ‘war on drugs’ to Amtrak to mandatory recycling. I have no personal animosity towards either of these gentlemen but I don’t feel their particular points of view are in step with how I would approach the issues they write about.

As someone who grew up with newsprint on his hands at a young age, I find it hard to transition to electronic versions of these ‘old friends’. I begrudgingly succumbed to the practice of viewing characters on a glowing CRT screen during my last overseas military tour. At that time, almost all of the major newspapers offered free online access to their print editions; however, today’s market realities have forced some—including the NYT—to post some or all of their content behind subscription-only barriers (coincidently, the conservative Wall Street Journal only makes its editorial materials freely available to viewers while locking out everything else). Since I take delivery of the Sunday Times, I am allowed access to their ‘Times Select’ areas for ‘free’ (non-subscribers wanting to view any of their op/ed columnists must pay an annual fee of around $50). Sadly, this appears to be the future of commercial journalism so I guess I better start learning to live with it now...

BTW, if you were worried about how my wife reacts to my weekly ‘rendezvous’, she actually doesn’t mind it at all—I’ve learned early on that I can secure her indifference by giving her the crossword puzzles…