Irresponsibility

Outrage time again! Even though I’ve stopped reading the New York Times in general, I’d been keeping up my old habit of skimming the Week in Review section (and sometimes the magazine) at my local coffee shop on Sundays. No more, I’ve had enough.

The final straw was the latest column by Byron Calame, the Times’s current “public editor”, the guy hired to try to convince us all that the paper really does, honest, have some shred of journalistic respectability. Here he is trying to justify the May 23rd front-page article on Senator and Bill Clinton’s marriage. First, Calame reinforce the media dynamic recently described by Jamison Foser of Media Matters, the habit of journalists to portray liberals and Democrats as politically calculating, reserving authenticity for the GOP.

Then we learn what Times executive editor Bill Keller thought about the matter:

When it comes to deciding whether to report on political figures’ private lives, “few cases are as clear as the Clinton marriage,” Mr. Keller wrote to me in an e-mail last week. “It would be irresponsible NOT to take a hard look at how these two people relate and operate as a couple.”

Do we all remember former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s famous Wall St Journal editorial about how Elian Gonzalez had been rescued from drowning by magical angelic dolphins? Here she is justifying her suggestion that Castro used recordings of President Clinton’s phone sex with Monica Lewinsky to blackmail Clinton into sending Gonzalez back to Cuba:

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

That’s the journalistic standard the NY Times is now following.