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Times Watch for June 9, 2003

Times Promotes Laughable Lefty Authors

Sunday’s Times promotes a left-wing publisher’s laughable lineup of authors. In the Styles section, Warren St. John profiles “scrappy” left-wing publisher Beau Friedlander, who runs Context Books in Lower Manhattan. St. John’s story, “Enlisting the Stars to Tilt at the Right,” notes without judgment that Friedlander is publishing a book written with Scott Ritter and once acquired a manuscript from convicted murderer Ted Kaczynski -- the Unabomber. (Given Kaczynski’s history with the mail, that bit of author-editor correspondence must have been rather tense.)

St. John describes two “quickie paperbacks” published by Context Books: “Sean Penn wrote the afterword to ‘Target Iraq.’ ‘War on Iraq’ was based on a lengthy interview with Scott Ritter, a former United Nations arms inspector.” Scott Ritter has had his own run-ins with the law, while Sean Penn has mostly confined himself to printed atrocities (see for yourself, if you’re brave).

Any publishing roster sporting Khmer Rouge-defending Noam Chomsky (“9-11”) as its most respectable author is rather suspect, but that doesn’t stop St. John from sympathizing with left-wing publisher Friedlander: “Perhaps even the most die-hard Bill O'Reilly enthusiast might muster a twinge of empathy for a scrappy political partisan trying to sell his ideas to the mainstream.”

For the rest of Warren St. John’s profile of Friedlander, click here.

Well-Intended Terrorists?

Will the Times ever learn? Elvis Mitchell’s June 4 review of “The Weather Underground,” a sympathetic documentary of the early 1970’s American terrorist group, claims it “captures a movement in motion, with its contradictions of good intentions and narcissism -- a revolt so accelerated and noisy, there was no time for reflection during its heyday.”

Profiling leading Underground members Mark Rudd and Naomi Jaffe, Mitchell notes: “The men now see as much wrong as right in their previous lives. The women are still full of hope. By the end Ms. Jaffe admits that she'd do it again if she could be smarter about it. That mixture of optimism and toughness was what started the Weathermen, and it still has a place in Ms. Jaffe's heart. It's also the spirit of ‘The Weather Underground.’”

Good intentions? Optimism and toughness? This upbeat tone is remindful of another fond look at unapologetic terrorists that appeared in the Times Arts section the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 (though hardly anyone in Manhattan got to the Arts page that day).

In “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives,” reporter Dinitia Smith talks to some of the same people Mitchell refers to, including Bill Ayers, promoting his then memoir “Fugitive Days.” He tells Smith: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Smith writes: “He still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement….As Mr. Ayers mellows into middle age, he finds himself thinking about truth and reconciliation.”

In the closet thing to a criticism, Smith notes: “But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.” One of those “daring acts” was bombing the Pentagon in 1972 (the group placed a two-pound bomb in a Pentagon restroom that fortunately killed no one). Smith quotes this line from Ayers’ memoir: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.” Such callousness would be seen as obscene later that Sept. 11 morning, when 189 people died in an attack on the Pentagon.

For the rest of Elvis Mitchell’s review of “The Weather Underground,” click here.

Chris Hedges Channels Noam Chomsky

Times reporter Chris Hedges, recently booed off a Rockford College commencement stage for his tone-deaf anti-war rant, recently discussed his anti-war book, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" in a Reader’s Forum on the New York Times web site.

When asked: “How are you in your courses at Columbia trying to teach journalist to think independently and responsibly?” Hedges shows why he fits right in at the Times: “I ask them to listen to and write about the poor, the marginalized and the weak, to distrust the powerful, to beware of careerists, especially those at their own news organizations….”

When asked about war coverage, Hedges answered with a paranoid rant worthy of Noam Chomsky (notorious for suggesting Cambodia's Khmer Rouge atrocities were fiction): “The embedded journalists were a broader, more pernicious version of the military-controlled press pools in the Gulf War. The coverage, especially by television, was terrible. The press, which should have been questioning the reasons given for the war, was largely spineless. It served as stenographers to those in power. It often engaged in unabashed and shameful cheerleading. The Internet, while useful for those who have the energy and desire to find alternative news sources, is no match for the reach and power of the cable news shows, most of whom served as a propaganda arm of the state.”

For the rest of the forum with Chris Hedges, click here.

The Times’ Raw Journalism

Monday’s “Barcelona Journal” from Sarah Lyall is a unique example of hands-on (or rather, clothes-off) journalism, as Lyall apparently joined in a photographer’s “unclad art project” in Barcelona.

In “He Called, and Naked Came 7,000 Strangers,” Lyall writes: “Aside from being worried about losing my clothes altogether and being forced to wander the back streets of Barcelona with nothing on, I discovered that a notebook does not work as a makeshift skirt. It was embarrassing while naked to happen upon people I had already interviewed while dressed. One of Mr. Tunick's earlier projects, involving nude older women in Australia, began to seem like a better bet in terms of participatory journalism.”

Still, we at Times Watch are counting our blessings -- it could have been noted Times gourmand R.W. Apple.

For the rest of Sarah Lyall’s story on the naked art project, click here.

Whose Credibility Problem?

David Sanger’s Monday story, “Bush Aides Deny Effort to Slant Data on Iraq Arms,” focuses on Sunday talk show appearances by Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice: “They both said it would take more time to uncover the evidence of Iraq's weapons efforts -- the time they were unwilling to extend to United Nations inspectors in March. Interviews with scientists and others are proceeding, they said, and another 1,300 American experts are now joining the search. But it is unclear how much time Ms. Rice and Mr. Bush have before a number of Congressional inquiries begin, and other nations begin to question American credibility.”

But as columnist Robert Kagan notes in Sunday’s Washington Post, it’s not just “American credibility” on the line -- before the Iraq war, even those opposed to war admitted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Kagan notes: “Maybe the German intelligence service was lying when it reported in 2001 that Hussein might be three years away from being able to build three nuclear weapons and that by 2005 Iraq would have a missile with sufficient range to reach Europe. Maybe French President Jacques Chirac was lying when he declared in February that there were probably weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that ‘we have to find and destroy them.’”

That’s probably why you won’t hear much from Sanger’s “other nations” like France or Germany on the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction -- since they agree with the U.S. on the issue.

For the rest of David Sanger’s piece on “American credibility,” click here.

The Times’ Pursuit of John Ashcroft

Sunday’s Week in Review story by Adam Liptak, “The Pursuit of Immigrants in America

After Sept. 11.” Adding the word “illegal” in front of immigrants would have made the headline both more accurate and less hostile toward Attorney General John Ashcroft -- two things which haven’t topped the Times “to-do” list of late.

“Terrorism, for America, may be a new threat, but according to a Justice Department report last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft has employed some old, discredited, means to fight it,” Liptak writes, before likening the roundup of illegal immigrants to the Palmer raids and the internment of the Nisei in World War II: “In the Palmer raids of 1920, for instance, thousands of people, mostly immigrants, were rounded up in cities across America on suspicion of holding radical views. Many were beaten, held in intolerable conditions and forced to sign confessions. During World War II, about 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, many of them American citizens, were held in internment camps.” Yet in the case of the most recent Justice Department round-up, none of the detainees were American citizens, making Liptak’s point meaningless.

Liptak finally adds a measure of context in the 14th paragraph: “…nearly all were guilty of overstaying visas, entering the country illegally or other immigration violations.”

For more of Adam Liptak’s story, click here.