The Times will never, ever miss a chance to compare the United States unfavorably to Western Europe. The U.S., you see, is filled with yokels who place freedom over other political goals, and think justice is a clear and simple concept everyone ought to understand without a multi-contextual meta-analysis. Quite obviously a benighted and retrograde place in need of a thorough enlightenment by the vanguard elite of left-liberalism.

Try this one on from a Times book review of Rush Limbaugh's bestseller The Way Things Ought To Be:

"[Limbaugh's] appeal is to a part of middle America -- call it the silent majority or the American People or the booboisie."

Walter Goodman wrote that, and the New York Times, that fountainhead of nonjudgmental egalitarianism, published it on February 21, 1993.

Is there any wonder that a paper so filled with contempt for book readers has been found employing reporters who fabricate entire stories from the comfort of their living rooms -- for several years? Is it really incomprehensible that a paper with such a supercilious disdain for the truth that it shields Walter Duranty from his monstrous pro-Communist lies to avoid embarrassment, and contradicts its own printed accounts of Pius XII's heroic opposition to Hitler during the Nazi years because to say a good word about the Catholic Church today is not politically correct, would fail to take the context of two constitutions written 216 years apart into account?

Perhaps it's niche marketing at work. But why the Times would want to limit itself to a market populated by reality-averse, America-hating Manhattan socialists defeats my understanding of the economics of print journalism.

posted by Francis W. Porretto on June 15, 2003 04:01 AM