The New York Times can drive you nuts. At least, it does me. It features some of the best journalism and criticism in the world—and also, caveat lector, yours truly, occasionally, in the Book Review—but also some of the most disappointing and biased, in a slouchy, reflexive liberal sort of way. This is particularly true when it covers domestic social and cultural issues, and “progressive” institutions and pols. A couple of recent examples:
The Times Magazine did a cavernous, puzzling cover story about Randi Weingarten, the teachers union boss, on Sunday, April 30. We don’t learn anything of interest about Weingarten personally, except that she’s married to a (woman) Rabbi, whom we never get to meet. We don’t really get to meet Weingarten either—her presence in the profile is spectral, which is bizarre—much less hear her answers to the most substantive issues plaguing her union. Weingarten is surely under attack these days, but the writer is way off the mark about the biggest challenge she is facing:
The pandemic closures and classroom culture wars have fueled the revival of the dormant school-choice movement, with Republican-led states around the country passing an array of far-reaching school-voucher bills. [Emphasis mine.]1
Dormant? This is a fundamental misreading of what the school choice movement is. Vouchers are a small part of it; the passage of largely symbolic voucher bills in lightly-populated red states isn’t going to change the structure of American education. Charter schools—which are public, by the way—are where the action, and much of the friction, is. The writer might have journeyed up to the Harlem Children’s Zone, where they are flourishing (as they are in New Orleans and many other big cities). As it stands, he barely acknowledges that they exist. Weingarten’s position on charters is not explored in this piece, which is a shame because it might have been fascinating: she has lobbied long and hard against them—most aren’t unionized—but she apparently serves on the board of a Harlem charter run by the union (the teachers tried to operate a charter in Brooklyn using union work rules, but it failed—a story The Times, to my knowledge, hasn’t explored).
There is some hokey-doke about the battle between “reformers” and “progressives” in big cities like Chicago and New York—but the writer defines neither group, nor the very real issues that divide them. You might well ask: What is the difference between school “reformers” and “progressives”? Aren’t “progressives” usually “reformers”? Not in this case, and it’s a crucial distinction. School reformers are people who believe that teachers should be treated like professionals—they should be evaluated on performance, not seniority; that incompetent teachers should be fired or retrained; that great teachers—and everyone usually knows who they are—should be paid more, and given more responsibility; the unions should have little say in the length of the school day, duration of the school year, supervision of teachers in the classroom and a zillion other restrictive work rules they have imposed. “Progressives”—i.e. the extremists who run the union’s Chicago branch—believe in none of those things. They are, in fact, reactionaries, wedded to the assembly-line, one-size-fits-all model of education we’ve inherited from the early 20th-century. (Political News Items has an illuminating piece by Mary Williams Walsh on the looming chaos in Chicago.)
One other weird thing about the piece:
A frequent knock on the A.F.T. is that it puts teachers before students, a framing neatly encapsulated by a quote attributed to the union’s former president Al Shanker: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Shanker’s biographer, Richard Kahlenberg, found no record of Shanker’s ever saying this…
Huh? The New York Times gives space to an apocryphal and demeaning quote—Shanker was far too smart to ever say anything like that—but never actually addresses the validity of the “frequent knock,” which is more than merely a “knock.” It is the most substantive argument about the impact of the unions on education. That debate has been going on for at least 40 years. There are plenty of smart people who can discuss it, like former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, or Paul Vallas who just lost the mayoral race in Chicago, or Philip K. Howard, who wrote an excellent book about public employees unions called Not Accountable. Given the currency of the Covid and culture war debates, this might have been a good time to revisit this more basic question: Why do public employees unions exist? Who are they organized against? Why are they opposed to fundamental reforms? (By the way, Shanker liked the idea of charter schools; but he laughed when I asked him if he could sell them to his union.)
Item 2: Here’s a classic journalism dodge. Reporter has theory: Blacks are losing their enthusiasm for Biden. Editor sends reporter, backstopped by national political analyst, off to “investigate” the theory by finding civilians who agree with it. Eureka! Newspaper discovers “trend.” The story becomes irresistible when reporter finds unicorn. In this case, a Biden supporter who… you guessed it:
Ms. [Jennifer] Roberts now says she would support former President Donald J. Trump if he were the Republican nominee next year. What she wants, and has not yet received, is “tangible help” — and she believes Mr. Trump’s economic policies could possibly provide it.
“I understand he’s tried,” she said of Mr. Biden. “When you don’t address the things directly, when they don’t go according to what you said publicly they were going to, you can’t just kind of sweep it under the rug.”
Again, huh? What sort of “tangible help” is she looking for? What “things” isn’t Biden addressing directly? The question was, no doubt, asked (or else the reporter should be sued for malpractice). The answer, I’d guess, didn’t have unicornic entertainment value; indeed, there’s a fair to excellent chance Ms. Roberts’ answer was embarrassingly incomprehensible.
Also, there is this sloppy sentence:
Yet some of Black voters’ biggest policy priorities — stronger federal protections against restrictive voting laws, student loan debt relief and criminal justice and police accountability measures— have failed or stalled.
Wait a minute. Are those really black voters’ biggest priorities? What about crime, plain and simple (as opposed to “criminal justice and police accountability measures”); what about lousy schools and health care? This is the Times imposing an elitist agenda on a moderate-conservative demographic group.
By the way, this is also a classic duh! story. You don’t find much enthusiasm for any politician these days, except for Trump among his zombie-voters. The current lack of enthusiasm for Biden is exhausted turf. It is true that a slight decline in black support can be fatal—as it was to Hillary Clinton in 2016—but there is no way to know if this will be a problem for Biden in 2024. In fact, it’s pretty far down on the list of his worries—declining support among working-class whites and Latinos, the possibility of a recession or banking collapse, concerns about his age, and his fidelity to far-left activists who overstate issues like racism and sexuality.
But the real problem is with reporter-discovers-trend stories in general. They are what journalists do when there isn’t any real, specific news to report. They are fatally anecdotal, spun to meet a theory that may or may not be true. The curious thing is, this piece is almost painfully “objective.” If you read it carefully, you could easily consider it as a “Blacks Continue to Support Biden, Despite Qualms” story…but that wouldn’t be news, would it?
Item 3: Happily, the Times also offers a steady diet of really fine journalism, even—sometimes—in areas where it is biased. I’ve never read a piece by David Leonhardt that wasn’t intelligent and measured, and here he is on a plausible replacement for Affirmative Action, which is likely to be repealed by the Supreme Court:
One example would be an admissions policy that gave extra consideration to a student who grew up in a family with a net worth of less than $30,000. Most Black households fall into that category; only a small share of white households do.
Leonhardt has offered a creative circumvention here: I’d make the “net worth” number much higher, perhaps $100,000, to include the poor whites who are now being discriminated against because of their race. (And I should add that “net worth” is a statistic that is somewhat misleading: black incomes have increased in the past 50 years. Black wealth, or “net worth,” lags because redlining and other restrictive measures limited black home ownership—the most important component of “net worth”—until the past decade or so.)
Leonhardt is certainly barking up the right tree, as opposed to the libs whose only response to the Supreme Court’s likely decision will be to cry “racism” and, heaven forfend, take to the streets. There should be a serious conversation about how to turn the end of affirmative action into an opportunity for all poor people, regardless of race. The Times—and The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal—should provide a forum for that conversation. That is what journalism, at its best, can be.
School choice actually comes in at least four different varieties, with voucher programs the least common. There are also charter schools, which are public and far more common than voucher programs. There are theme-based schools—like high schools of the arts and meritocratic “exam” schools, also public. There are religious schools—including the excellent Roman Catholic parochial schools in the inner city and the often awful, proselytizing evangelical schools in the red states—which are private.
I gave up on the NY Times years ago, even though I know you're correct that they include outstanding journalism. Besides guarding my mood & blood pressure, I hate it when I feel I have to critically assess whether information is grossly distorted to fulfill an agenda, and unfortunately, that's how I now feel about articles in the NYT. Following Fox News's lead, they have obviously found a business model that works, but they lost at least one reader in the process.
"The current lack of enthusiasm for Biden is exhausted turf."
Yep. People are sick of his policies which allow unvetted people to pour over our borders exhausting our resources. People are sick of Dem policies allowing violent criminals to go free, only to kill again. People are sick of Mayorkas and Jean Pierre tellling us our borders are safe as we watch in the background people spilling over the borders, some maybe nice peoplee, some maybe fentanyl traffickers, sex traffickers, MS 13 gang members etc , who go unchecked as the Biden administration lies and says we are safe.
People are sick and exhausted of a corrupt family which has gained millions of dollars from using their influence to make millions of dollars off of our enemies.
Some of us are sick of laws where Oregon landowners must allow squatters to camp out on their property or be fined $1,000 for complaining.
Yes, we're exhausted. Yes we're sick! We have a right to be. Anyone who would vote for this cr*p is sick and twisted.
Do you have any cogent response? Bet not.