Frank Rich jumps his own fucking shark

In a peculiar mix of unremarkable but real insight and blinkered doltishness in today's New York Times, Frank Rich uses James Carville and Paul Begala's occasional advising role in the Kerry campaign to conclude that CNN is "now as inextricably bound to the Democrats as Fox is to the Republicans." And while making this ludicrous charge, he pens not a word about Wolf Blitzer's all-but-paid position with the Dear Leader crowd (or, for that matter, Joe Scarborough's role in the Bush campaign over at MSNBC).

Rich's purpose seems to be to argue that TV needs to turn to "hard-hitting, trustworthy news" to provide an alternative to Fox's all-Rethuglican-all-the-time approach rather than turn into Fox Lite or a Democratic shill like CNN (!). In making the argument, he by implication lets his own august, hard-hitting, trustworthy publication off the hook by citing the "major newspapers " that "have since worked hard to compensate for their pre-war lapses." With this statement, Rich demonstrates either a gullibility that undermines his credibility or a willful blindness to the garbage dump in which he stands that permits him to hold his nose at the stench from across the way.

Rich does provide a justifiable, though hardly fresh, critique of the disastrous performance of the mainstream press during the Bush hegemony. But he frames it in a headline-producing tribute to the righteousness of Bill O'Reilly (including the jump head, so it appears on two pages) in calling out CNN for its turn to the left and a concluding gratuitous slam at the "self-immolating" Kerry campaign.

With this childish hissy-fit, Rich perhaps permanently stains his credentials as a worthy critic of anything. More important to position himself as loftily above the fray - except, of course for his ingratiating, obsequious nod to his employer's wise path to redemption - than to use the Carville-Begala enlistment in the Kerry army to discuss the serious issues raised by the sordid marriage of scorched-earth politics and corporate-greed media.

•  Same old NYT whores

  Rich tends to come across as some sort of angry granny who will whip out the cane and trip you if she forgets her medication. All the NYT people are also a) extremely elitist and out of touch and b) appear desperate to never, ever be too critical of one party. They have to slander Democrats and make up lies or straw men in order to try to soothe their egos, or save their careers.

  The only one worthwhile at NYT is Krugman. The rest are just relics of a forgotten age. They want to be Dorothy Parker, and wind up having even less journalistic credibility than Peter Parker.

  by JamesB3 on Sun Sep 19, 2004 at 10:57:22 AM PDT

  •  There's the Times. . .

    . . . and then there's the rest of us. I teach media history, and I have been long baffled at why the Times has such a high opinion of itself.  While a lot of folderol gets spouted about the superiority of "fact-based" journalism over Pulitzer's engaged journalism, and while the "newspaper of record" bit seems to have become a part of the culture, however unearned and inaccurate it is, I believe a lot of it has to do with the mere but unrelenting exercise of will, of self assertion.  Sort of like Bush:  Stick with your bluff long enough and eventually the hoi polloi accepts it as God's Truth, and you do, too.

    by Vico on Sun Sep 19, 2004 at 11:29:16 AM PDT

    •  I think NYT used to have some standards,

      and now coasts on those standards, hoping people will not realize what desperate sellouts they have become.

      The national media and the national mindset has become so laudatory towards intimidation, juvenilaity, and propaganda that many people really do see the NYT as being some kind of truthteller, or liberal organ. They have no genuine liberal or honest outlet to compare it with.

      That is why the NYT and CNN must be destroyed.

      by JamesB3 on Sun Sep 19, 2004 at 11:54:25 AM PDT

•  Typical of What's Wrong With American Liberalism

  Rich is actually one of the best assets the NYT has.  This is much less a personal failing than it is a chronic symptom of what's wrong with American liberalism.  The willingness to see the strength of another side's arguments is both admirable, and a significant foundation of the liberal tradition.

  But American liberals repeatedly and routinely fail to distinguish between what actually are strong arguments, and what merely pretend to be. (Remember how many swooned over Powell's UN Speech?) And, of course, once you take a weak argument seriously, all sorts of disasterous consequences follow.  This is also why it's so bogus to argue that liberal reporters will produce liberal bias.  Quite the contrary. They will produce a lot of blather that favors conservatives, simply to demonstrate how fair, liberal and open-minded they are.

  As long as the left can be virtually shut out of the national media, liberals will do this with impunity.  The strength of liberalism in America has always come from its alliance with the left. Its weakness has always come from running away from the left.  (The same is true of the left, as well.)  In the hands of people like Rich, liberalism is in deep trouble. This only serves to emphasize how much we need the sort of fresh perspectives we get from thinkers like Lakoff, as well as the sort of bottom-up influx of ideas that place like this provide.

  by Paul Rosenberg on Sun Sep 19, 2004 at 01:11:50 PM PDT