The Boston Phoenix
October 2 - 9, 1997

[Don't Quote Me]

Hue world order

Somewhere over the rainbow with the New York Times. Plus, black columnists and Dianne Wilkerson, and some goose-stepping rhetoric.

by Dan Kennedy

A camera crew filming elephants here. A football player being tackled there. The splashes of color in the New York Times are so restrained and unremarkable -- and so consistent with what other newspapers have been doing for years -- that you wonder, nearly three weeks into the Fujichrome Era, whether anyone other than a few elitists still feels blue over the demise of gray.

In fact, the furor that erupted in some circles over the Times' decision to print color photos and offer more sections is almost entirely beside the point.

Like all newspapers, the Times faces serious long-term questions about how to publish and distribute its product in an era when information technology can zap it around the world instantly and at minimal cost. Thus, last month's changes are just a small step into the future, and a sideways step at that. The Times hasn't changed its mission; it's merely upgraded its equipment by opening a brand-new, $350 million printing plant in Queens. But you'd never know it by reading the howls of the critics.

In the New York Post, Jurassic-era conservative intellectual (and former Times cultural editor) Hilton Kramer denounced the move toward "an even more fiercely consumer-friendly Times, with enough color and a sufficient expansion of soft service features to meet the needs of its spendthrift yuppie readers and the advertisers who target their debt-ridden credit cards."

In the conspicuously colorful Web publication Salon, novelist Jim Lewis complained: "The last thing I want from my newspaper is flash and in-my-face friendliness. I don't want my paper in color any more than I want my mother in a miniskirt or my president on MTV." (Responded a participant in Salon's interactive forum, "Table Talk": "Those people, like Mr. Lewis . . . need to get a life.")

In Slate, humorist Mark Katz wrote a parody of the colorful new Times ("All the Hues that're Fit to Print") that, though uneven, does contain one gem of a "correction": "In a 1991 editorial titled `Color Me Stupid,' this space wrongly scolded cable magnate Ted Turner for colorizing classic movies filmed originally in black and white. The Times regrets the error."

What's odd about these observations is the suggestion that color, in some way, is phony, superficial, glitzy. After all, life is in color. Black-and-white photography, striking though it can be, is what's unreal. In an interview on NPR's All Things Considered on September 15, the day that color made its debut, Times picture editor Nancy Lee explained that her photographers have been shooting color film for several years, and then converting the images to black and white. Thus has reality given way to artifice. Until now.

Of course, black and white is superior to bad color, and the Times' color quality so far has been inconsistent. But presumably that problem will have been fixed by the time color creeps onto the front page -- perhaps, Lee told NPR, in time for the World Series.

In a sense, the introduction of color is a metaphor for how the Times has maintained its status as the nation's premier cultural gatekeeper, with the power to influence public opinion concerning what's important and what's not.

To remain the voice of that diminished but still important institution once known as the Eastern Liberal Establishment, the Times sometimes has to lead, and sometimes has to follow. The front page of the Times is a cultural document of incalculable importance, and when the editors give over that space to vital but eyeglazing stories on topics such as immigration reform and the latest nuance-within-a-nuance from the Middle East, they're exercising real leadership. On the other hand, when they put Marv Albert's kinky-sex woes on the front page, as they did the day after his guilty plea, they're following tabloid trends they can't ignore unless they wish to risk being labeled irrelevant. The same goes for color.

Yet if the Times isn't quite as influential as it was in, say, 1961, when the editors changed the course of history by withholding key details from an article about the forthcoming Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, its position as the nation's preeminent newspaper remains unchallenged. Time magazine, in its September 29 edition, called the Times "the Last Great Newspaper," and hailed it for getting bigger and better even while much of the industry has downsized and dumbsized. The Time article, by Richard Zoglin, even went so far as to argue that such formidable competitors as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times have deteriorated to the point where they no longer seriously challenge the Times.

Not everyone agrees. Media critic Mark Lasswell recently argued in Salon that the Journal is the best paper in the country, and he tepidly praised the Times as "a decent big-city paper in an era and a nation littered with atrocious metropolitan dailies." As evidence, Lasswell cites internal Journal memos showing that the paper regularly beats the Times, with an average of four exclusives a day. Yet the Journal's specialized business audience and just-plain-weird ultraconservative editorial page argue against that paper's hegemony. Even readers of the Clinton-bashing Drudge Report, which chose the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's scandal-obsessed Washington Times as the second-best paper in the country, nevertheless stuck with the New York Times for the number-one slot in a recent survey.

Look at the recent changes at the Times as the other shoe dropping, the first being the debut of the New England and Washington editions last spring. Those editions were only slightly different from Metro. But now, with the Times freed from having to truck papers from New York to the hinterlands (the New England edition is printed by the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times Company), it can put together a product that appeals to advertisers in the New York market, where it competes fiercely with Long Island's Newsday and the Newark Star Ledger. It should appeal to readers more, too, since its new, later deadlines will accommodate West Coast sports scores.

"We admit we're taking a risk," publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. recently told the Columbia Journalism Review. "But we feel that not changing would be even riskier with our readers and advertisers."

It's a sign of how deeply ingrained the Times mystique is that Sulzberger would even consider it risky to offer a bigger, more up-to-date, more colorful paper.

In 2017, when you'll get the morning paper by plugging your portable electronic tablet into a slot on the cable-TV box, you'll probably still be able to choose something called the New York Times. (For an early look at the Times of the future, see the paper's Web site at http://www.nytimes.com.) You can be sure it will be in full color, and will be packed with all kinds of interactive features and doodads that will have Hilton Kramer, if he is still among us, howling in righteous agony.

But will it still be the Times? Ultimately, that has nothing to do with what it looks like or how it's delivered.


Boston Globe columnist Robert Jordan, buried deep in the Sunday Focus section, rarely gets the attention accorded his fellow African-American columnists, the Globe's Patricia Smith and Derrick Jackson, and the Boston Herald's Leonard Greene.

Yet Jordan, on September 28, wrote what struck me as the most knowledgeable analysis of State Senator Dianne Wilkerson's quest to save her career following her guilty plea on federal charges of failing to file taxes.

Whereas Smith and Greene wrestled with the notion of whether the Roxbury Democrat's race should make a difference, Jordan made a compelling case for why it should: the black community's religious orientation, and its concomitant emphasis on forgiveness and redemption. (Wilkerson took a big step toward reconciliation on Monday evening when she apologized at an emotional prayer service.)

Wilkerson, once touted as a future congresswoman or even mayor, may have to content herself with remaining in the State Senate, Jordan wrote, adding: "But at least she will know that in a fall from grace, she will fall into the arms of a strong religious force that will embrace her and uplift her with amazing grace."

Greene wrote a nicely balanced piece September 24, calling on Wilkerson to consider resigning rather than go through with the humiliation of serving "with an electronic bracelet around her arm" -- and then seek office again, "when she gets this mess behind her."

Smith, on the other hand, weighed in September 26 with a screed that seemed to suggest that Wilkerson was a victim of racism even while insisting that she was arguing the opposite. "It's not a black thang, it's a tax thang," Smith declared. Yet she denounced as "hypocritical" the support given to former House Speaker Charlie Flaherty, who, after all, was hounded out of office for tax violations less serious than Wilkerson's.

Smith also displayed her characteristic ignorance of the political landscape when she praised Wilkerson for "backing former governor William F. Weld's veto of a `punitive' welfare reform package." What Smith left out was that Weld then turned around and rammed an even more punitive welfare package through the legislature, making Wilkerson and her Democratic ally, State Senator Lois Pines, of Newton, looking naive and ineffective.


Bob Kraft = Adolf Hitler? Anyone who tried to make such an analogy explicitly would be denounced not just for outrageous rhetorical overkill, but for gross offensiveness as well, given the Kraft family's prominent role in the Greater Boston Jewish community.

Yet, twice recently, people who should know better have made sly digs comparing the New England Patriots' owner to der führer.

On September 20, Massachusetts House Speaker Tom Finneran told the Boston Herald how frustrated he was with Acting Governor Paul Cellucci's willingness to use tax money to help Kraft build a new stadium. "I'm glad he wasn't leading Great Britain back in the late '30s," Finneran said of Cellucci. Finneran was, of course, comparing Cellucci to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister reviled by historians for his futile attempts to appease Hitler.

Then, September 25, WLVI-TV political reporter Jon Keller wrote a column for the Boston Globe defending Finneran's tough stand against a publicly funded stadium. Keller explained the Kraft-Finneran feud in terms of "Kraft's smug lebensraum and Finneran's hostile boomer skepticism." Lebensraum (German for "living room" or "living space") was a term Hitler often used to describe his mission of overrunning Europe and populating it with pure Aryans. Keller says he meant to invoke a pre-Hitler notion of insatiable expansionism, but his use of the term created an unfortunate, if inadvertent, connotation.

Granted, Kraft's entitlement mentality has gotten pretty damn tiresome. Look at how fast Rhode Island officials' can-do optimism changed to won't-do irritation once they took Kraft's full measure. But does that really invite comparison to a man behind the slaughter of millions?


Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/


Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com


Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here


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