Pasted below is the letter I wrote today to Daniel Okrent, Public Editor for New Pravda.
Atrios finally motivated me to write the prick.
Dear Mr. Okrent:
I just read your latest and have finally realized that you and the New York Times are the perfect match. Like the Times and many (though not all) of its reporters, you are smug, arrogant and ever so conscious of your power.
The Times has much to answer for in the lead up to the Iraq war. The Times got into this mess by being silly in the credulity it gave to the pronouncements of Bush Administration officials and its paid handmaidens like Ahmed Chalabi. Though the administration has been caught in one lie after another, the Times usually suspends its memory of these lies and reports what the Bush administration says as if the administration had never been caught in lies. If a Holocaust denier made assertions in a different context, the Times would certainly (and rightly), always, remind its readers that the person is a Holocaust denier. The person's credibility would always be an issue -- made explicit -- whatever other issue the person was making news about. This is the treatment commoners get from the Times -- and that is how they should be treated. But the Times never gives (and never would give) the Bush Administration similar treatment. The Times won't (and can't) treat the reigning administration as the Times would treat any common liar. To do so would be to negate the Times's self-conscious status as a pillar of an establishment that is the modern equivalent of a royal court.
At court, it was usually only the jester who could speak unpleasant truths. No way the Times will ever allow itself to become the jester. But in reporting uncritically about President Bush's new clothes, the Times has nothing to be smug or arrogant about, at least in a professional sense. And the Times certainly has nothing on many of the political blogs out there, at least in terms of being fair, accurate and in telling an interesting and salient story.
The times and the media are changing and given how much anyone with an internet connection can now learn and share about the Times's failings, your employer is losing the respect of tens of thousands of well educated, serious, well informed and reasonably well-off people. These are precisely those to whom the Times has traditionally appealed. Check out some of the blogs that cover the media -- Digby's "Hullabaloo" and Bob Somerby's "Daily Howler," for example. They represent readers by taking a critical look at the Times (and other news sources) and they do it much better than you do. Reading their work, and contrasting it to yours, helps us see what you are.
In a sense you're a depressing symptom of how the Times has responded to the dilemma it faces: Is the Times a journalist or a courtier? Your job is to allow the Times to pretend it's a journalist, or to help the Times plausibly deny (including to itself) what it is to be a courtier. You help the Times lie to itself and to believe its lies. Jean Paul Sartre would call this process "bad faith."
When the powerful cannot be honest their defense is a sneer. Arrogant dismissal replaces engagement. You write with a smirk and a sneer. The smug assurance and the arrogance you bring to your job makes you the perfect public face for the Times. At this critical point in our nation's history that is what the Paper of Record has been reduced to in dealing with its own readers.
Cordially,
Kaleidescope