In the introduction to one of his books, Noam Chomsky tells a story about himself. It seems that he went to the dentist because of some pain, and the dentist told him he was grinding his teeth, and to cut it out. After some investigation, he figured out that it was when he was reading the New York Times.
Me too.
Two Sundays ago, they had this article in the Sunday Magazine comparing action against the insurgents to death squads in El Salvador.
Now mind you, you could make a lot of interesting comparisons between Iraq and El Salvador. Did the NYT do that? NO! Instead, they made all these strained comparisons to El Salvador of the early 80’s, completely ignoring their history since then, like the elections in ‘89. A piece that could have been very interesting was made completely unreadable by their struggle to fit their flawed (and intentionally limited) metaphor.
Then Sunday, in the AZ Republic, I see an opinion piece by Paul Krugman reprinted from the NYT, somehow managing to argue that Bush’s proposal to cut benefits for the richest people still receiving Social Security was somehow designed to secretly benefit the wealthy because they don’t actually depend on Social Security. It was a pretty strained argument.
Jeesh. The New York Times wants to improve? How about adopting a “no strained metaphors” rule? Or perhaps adopt a rule that you don’t try to make Bush to be evil in every single opinion piece?
Everytime I read the NYT, I have to spend 75% of the time disentangling the reporters strained metaphors and obvious bias from the true facts of the piece. That’s why I grit my teeth.
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