Tag Archives: The New York Times

The Fire This Time

Posted on by under activism, anarchism, cancel culture, migrant defense

Scenes from Delaney Hall (5)
It’s a serious mistake to rely exclusively on the mainstream media for news of what’s happening at Delaney Hall. If you’re doing this, you’re being misled by omission: you’re systematically depriving yourself of information that’s relevant to getting a balanced picture of what’s happening there, or for passing a verdict on it.

To illustrate this, I want to work through a representative example of mainstream journalism, a June 4 article on Delaney Hall in The New York Times. My aim here is not to find fault with the author, or to condemn the article, but simply to point out as a matter of objective fact that whether fault is involved or not, the article systematically misleads the reader to the detriment of the protesters. It fails to supply necessary background context, fails to ask the right questions, fails to answer them, and misses salient points of detail. Again, my point is not primarily that the author should have included this or that, but simply that given what he excludes, he misleads, full stop. Why this is the case is a separate question. How it’s to be remedied, or whether it can be remedied within mainstream media at all, is also a separate question.

Continue reading →

Roger Cohen: “Au Revoir, but Not Adieu”

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Whatever my disagreements with him, on Israel and Zionism for instance, I’ve always admired both the style and substance of Roger Cohen’s writing. This farewell column of his for The New York Times is moving testimony to the value of the literate, civilized brand of journalism he wrote.

He was, to my mind, one of the Times’s best columnists, a consistent and eloquent defender of commonsense realism married to liberal values. He drew intelligently and without grandstanding on an enormous reservoir of hard experiences, and there was something fresh and authentic about his prose, a relief from the tedious nostrums, whether left or right, that one so often encounters on the Op-Ed page.

The highest compliment I can pay him is the sense of writerly jealousy I often felt on reading him. He’ll be hard to replace. He’s a hard act to follow.