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NOTABLE EXCEPTIONS
Not Everything in The Times Sucks
The New York Times is rarely surprising or witty, a cardinal newspaper transgression that’s accelerated in the “TimesSelect” era, but I’ve discovered a few nuggets of liveliness in its pages over the past week. David Carr, for example, is a reporter/blogger who hasn’t completely lost his sense of humor, probably because he’s spent the bulk of his career at other publications, and isn’t one of those caged Times animals, force-fed ideology and do-as-I-say morality from the time he or she graduates from a prestigious university or has completed the required apprenticeship at a suitable farm team.
Carr spends part of the year writing about movie awards and Hollywood—a cushy assignment that no one can begrudge him—but unlike most of his peers he doesn’t roll over for the entertainment industry. I particularly enjoyed parts of his Feb. 25 “Red Carpet Confidential,” appearing on the morning of the Oscars celebration, an essay that offered little in the way of speculation (thankfully) but instead gave a whiff of his utter embarrassment about the entire proceedings.
He writes: “The ‘reporters’ on the margins [of the red carpet] are not really reporting in any conventional sense of the word. They don’t investigate, explain or even filter very much, which is part of why the movies stars are willing to play ball. Instead they inspect frocks, repeat sound bites and shout into the cameras about what the stars are ‘really like.’ In truth carpet reporters like me serve as grubby floor traders whose cumulative hunger … determines the market value of the glittering commodities on display.”
It’s difficult, actually impossible, to imagine pop culture critic/Walter Duranty clone Frank Rich admitting as much. I wonder if Carr got into trouble with Times higher-ups (assuming they read his story) when he stated plainly that at one point during the Screen Actors Guild Awards show he went “outside for a smoke.” Carr, as it happens, is more than 50 years old, and surely there must be a policy, written or assumed, that Times employees are not allowed to use tobacco products, much less confess to the habit in print.
My tolerance for op-ed columnist Bob Herbert is on the same level as attempting to shovel a driveway of ice-covered snow, but on Feb. 26 the Savior of New Orleans deviated from his shop-worn menu of invective against Bush, Cheney, tax cuts, conservative Christians, neocons, Wall Street bonuses and Republican “chicken-hawks” in favor of a very nasty take-down of the Clintons. Granted, Maureen Dowd had paved the way for Herbert by recording the self-interested remarks of David Geffen, but her colleague was exquisitely direct. “If Bill and Hillary Clinton were the stars of a reality TV show,” he wrote, “it would be a weekly series called ‘The Connivers.’ The Clintons, the most powerful of power couples, are always scheming at something, and they’re good at it … Right behind [the snowballing perception that the Clintons are creeps] that as a factor is the distinct possibility that Mr. Obama will ride off with the black vote, without which the Clintons are doomed. Those who joked that Bill Clinton was the first black president are now confronted with someone who might be the real deal.”
As I recall, lots of people in the media, and Los Angeles, really did believe the potential First Gentleman was the first black (as well as gay, female, Puerto Rican, Mexican and trans-gender) president, but no matter, at least Herbert is staking his ground as a Hillary turncoat, which I’m betting Paul Krugman will also make clear very soon.
It’s snippets like these that brings fleeting relief from the standard Times tedium. A Feb. 28 editorial once again referred to “ordinary Americans,” a maddening and repetitive tic that simply reinforces the paper’s worldview that its readers are somehow less important than the editorial superiors who issue grand proclamations (or Democratic press releases, depending on your point of view) for the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with Camus, proper nutrition or tax-avoidance loopholes.
In fairness, one editorialist had the temerity, on Feb. 21, to use the word scrotum in a sensible defense of children’s book author Susan Patron.
In truth, it was the Boston Globe (the Times Co.’s flagging New England property) that irritated me more than even another David Brooks simplistic exercise in sociology or Murray Chass article pining for the glories of baseball in the 1930s. Barbara F. Meltz, on Feb. 13, in a very dumb piece headlined “Hooking up is the rage, but is it healthy?”
ventured far afield—to Boston University—to find two young women who aren’t comfortable with the apparent absence of romance in today’s young adult sexual relationships. As if the concept of “hooking up” hasn’t been explained, and derided, ad nauseum in the past decade, Meltz felt compelled to examine the “trend” once again, and offered the insights of her two sources, young women who have steady boyfriends.
Isn’t it time to leave kids alone and stop the lascivious reporting on their mating habits? While it’s true that a generation ago, “lipstick parties” weren’t in vogue (too bad for Boomers) and teenagers probably have sex at an earlier age, isn’t “hooking up” just a new way of saying “one-night stand”? What distresses some of today’s parents and reporters is that young women (or girls, as the case may be) give an object of affection a blowjob, or roll in the hay, and then never hear from him again. This is a new phenomenon? Back in my own college days, at about 2 a.m. when the campus bar closed (the drinking age was then 18), you saw flocks of couples arm and arm off to destinations unknown, and it’s safe to say that a minute percentage of those assignations resulted in more than a fling, much less than a steady relationship.
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