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Times Watch for 04/30/03
Up Mt. Everest, With A Left Turn At Mars
Alan Cowell’s “Letter from Europe” on the 50th anniversary of the scaling of Mt. Everest starts out innocuously enough: “In a few weeks Britons will mark the day 50 years ago when a team of climbers representing their small island with its modest altitudes and imperial history reached the summit of the world's highest mountain half a world away, on the borders of Tibet and Nepal.”
Perhaps it’s the thin air up there. But on the way to the top of Mt. Everest, Cowell appears to lose his footing on reality. Comparing recent Everest climbers to the first crowning mission in 1953, he sniffs: “These days, the most acerbic critics of the modern Everest culture complain that, in their hunger for the summit, some climbers display a callous disregard for others on the mountain. But was that not a value conjured forth in the Thatcher years, when Britons finally shook off their shame about self-enrichment in the scramble for wealth?”
Come Back, Paul Krugman--All Is Forgiven
If you think New York Times columnists Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd are biased, you haven’t read William Pfaff. Though the (fittingly) Paris-based columnist Pfaff doesn’t write for the Times, he’s been a columnist for the International Herald Tribune for over 20 years. The Times became full owner of the IHT (having pushed out the Washington Post) Jan. 1, and Slate media critic Jack Shafer predicts executive editor Howell Raines will aggressively remake the IHT in the Times image, transforming it into a sort of “New York Times International.”
Times Watch thinks Raines will let Pfaff retain his anti-American soapbox, since it plays so well abroad. Pfaff has always leaned left, but the revulsion he feels toward the Bush administration is coloring Pfaff’s judgment, as he proves twice a week. His December 28 column on terrorism concludes with this revolting moral equivalence: “Two radicalisms - Al Qaeda's and Washington's - are at work, and in 2003 they will continue to feed on one another.” Not even Paul Krugman could get away with Pfaff’s vitriol.
Pfaff also despises the war on Iraq. On April 17 he wrote: “The war now is past tense, the dead are gone, the wounded are paying the price for all the cheers and relief.…The oil ministry was secured early in the battle of Baghdad, even if the hospitals and museums were not; that told us about one Bush administration priority.”
From Feb. 27: “The American Phony War is damaging the international economy, the principal international security and political institutions, and what is left of the American reputation for seriousness.”
But Pfaff tops himself in his April 10 column, getting downright conspiratorial in “The Neoconservative Agenda.” After a laundry list of insults and hints of neo-con collusion, he writes: “Finally, the neoconservatives are fanatics. They believe it is worth killing people for unproved ideas. Traditional morality says that war is justified in legitimate defense. Totalitarian morality justifies war to make people or societies better.”
The Bush administration’s “totalitarian morality?” Geez. A few doses of this could almost makes one pine for the measured tone of, oh, Paul Krugman.
I did say almost.
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org