Dartblog

Reader Paul Goodman rises to defend the publisher of the Old Grey Lady against his having received the ignominious award of “Quote of the Year” from the conservative Media Research Center:

Joe,

As a one-time media professional and self-diagnosed news junkie, I read with interest your posting on Arthur Sulzberger’s speech at New Paltz and subsequent coverage by the somewhat dubious and misleadingly-named “Media Research Center.” While I believe in the spirit of the MRC – and any group wishing to utilize concrete, fact-based media tracking to advance their cause – I have to say that this “Quote of the Year” is such a stretch that I no longer associate any credibility with this association. While I do not have the ammunition – I have not researched these topics individually – to offer a complete argument, I think you have to strip for a moment your conservative bent and listen to the words that the man says. Following Vietnam there was an *overwhelming,* *bipartisan *belief that the youth of that generation had the ability –having lived through that mess – to offer their children a better world. Is this a liberal philosophy, a liberal agenda? Of course not – look only to Reagan to understand the power in communicating this idea.

More importantly, Sulzberger’s points aren’t as ridiculous as you make them out to be. Our country’s energy needs do in fact drive our foreign policy. And while I do not buy into the “No Blood for Oil” argument made by anti-war protestors, I know – and you do- that we would not be in Iraq if it weren’t for the natural resources in the region. Period. On women: women should have the right to choose. Would you support your sister if she chose to have a child? Great. Would you if she decided to have an abortion? Whatever your response, it doesn’t matter – freedom, a word that our current political leadership bandies about like the flags you see adorning their press conferences (and your blog) is a principle that believes in the virtue of choice. Choosing our own future is what America stands for; it is who we are. To suggest otherwise, I would contend, is un-American. And on the topic of lesbians and gays – while I am not a bonafide cultural anthropologist, I believe that equality of rights for all those that choose to marry will be a baseline right that Americans endorse in the next two decades. Sulzberger expresses with wit and confidence that which politicians cannot for fear of character assassination by a tiny minority within the American political spectrum.

I apologize if these thoughts are incomplete; I wish only to stimulate some debate on a site that seems devoid of it. Even if you decide not to post this letter, you should know that having reader feedback (as evidence by the recent Duke graduate’s e-mail) lends considerable credibility to your site.

Take care,

Paul Goodman

A few thoughts. The first is that Dartblog is hardly devoid of debate. Like most single-author political commentary sites, postings on this humble page are split into two types: serious and not serious. When a post chides the publisher of The New York Times it very likely falls into the latter category. if I were soberly to undertake that the Times were a biased newspaper, I would most likely need to deconstruct at some length a particular article in that newspaper. The post about Sulzberger did not represent such an undertaking. It was a piece of entertainment provided for the more than fifty percent of the readership which is already conservative and already quite straight on the question of the Times’ partiality. On the other hand, one may read special topics like the Dartmouth Indian Wars (or browse through featured posts) and find lengthier, more serious scrawls. I prefer to write those, in fact. But this would be a dry corner of the Internet if I offered only those.

I agree with Mr. Goodman in full as regards his first paragraph. There must indeed have been that feeling, and Reagan does prove that point, and the conviction that, in America, one’s son must as a matter of course surpass his father, or that the world we pass on must always be brighter than the one in which we lived, is nothing less than crucial. But view the video again. Sulzberger, in apologizing to the college students for the world his generation has handed them, is being dishonest. He isn’t really apologizing. His face betrays his mirth. The kids’ partisan applause betrays their pleasure at the show of deft polemic. Sulzberger wasn’t making an apology; if he was, his audience wouldn’t have wildly celebrated the failed earth they’ve inherited. Sulzberger was just slamming Republicans, that’s all. He was being cheap and thoughtless. He, dressed in his expensive suit, was talking to them, college students ready to enter a booming job market, about the pocked shell of a planet they all live in. But nothing in the reality of the event gives credence to that claim that the world is so terrible. Only Sulzberger’s empty words do that.

And empty words are what the kids were applauding.

None of this is to address the handful of policy points Mr. Goodman brings up, which are probably better served in subsequent postings. It should suffice for now to say that Sulzberger offered absolutely nothing new. He simply rattled of the Democrats’ list of complaints. I happen to think he’s right about some and wrong about others, but he was hardly appealing to high ideals. He showed himself to be an awfully small man — a partisan — by co-opting the happy graduation day of several hundred students to list the grievances of one of this country’s two major political parties. I suppose that was my point in reproducing his rant in video form: to showcase Sulzberger’s knack for injecting his own personal political slate at inappropriate times. Such as at graduations. Or on the front page.