NYT hearts Billy. Completing the thought about Keller's memo (below) and the cultural politics thereof, let's remark on how diligently the Times is implementing the Credibility Group's recommendation that the paper cover religion more extensively. (Keller was, as one expected at the time, blowing smoke up his readers' asses when his Editor's Note on the Times' WMD reporting promised diligence in making up for its Judith Miller-era lapses; but this here is a credibility matter.) "More extensive coverage of religion" of course means, in the language of capitulation the Times has been learning to speak, free marketing copy for megachurch-style evangelical Protestantism.

Billy Graham, superannuated bigot and grandpappy warrior of know-nothing apocalyptic Christianity (who only looks moderate because he's lived long enough to be surpassed by his progeny, both spiritual and in the flesh), concluded a three-day "crusade" in New York City on Sunday—but you could be forgiven, reading the Times, if you thought the Graham NYC crusade had been running longer than Cats. In the past nine days, the Times has devoted a total of thirteen articles (as referenced on the NYT site) to Graham and his religion show, missing only one day (last Monday) in its Grahamapalooza coverage: several thousand words, including an op-ed, a week-in-review piece, and at least two splashy, above-the-fold-with-photo A1 articles that I'm aware of (not all of my print editions got to me last week). Exactly one of those articles (an inner-pager, of course) gestures substantially toward criticism of Graham, and then only for the purpose of smoothing it all over. I'm not sure even the Catholic Pope warranted the kind of wide-eyed, happy-making color commentary that Billy Graham's dotage has evoked in the Times this past week.

Today, beneath a three-column, nearly half-page hero shot of Pope Billy at the lectern before a sea of blue-shirted minions (looking like nothing so much as a similar front-page photo of Dubya before a mass of soldiers from a few months back), we have indefatigable Graham-celebrater Andy Newman holding forth reverently on the crusade's final sermon ("Graham Ends Crusade in City Urging Repentance and Hope"):

The Rev. Billy Graham, global ambassador for Christ and the most prominent American evangelist of the past century, concluded what might be his final American crusade yesterday with a sermon both apocalyptic and hopeful before a joyously polyglot throng in a New York City park.

On a hazy, sun-scorched afternoon, Mr. Graham, 86 years old and long in failing health, rallied his strength to mesmerize what his organization said were 90,000 people at the former World's Fair site at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. He used his own frailty to underscore the urgency of repentance, warning that the end - of a person's life, and of the world - may very well be imminent

After thanking his 96-year-old musical associate, George Beverly Shea, Mr. Graham said: "I know that it won't be long before both of us are going to be in heaven. You know, Jesus said, 'Be ready, for in such an hour that you know not, the son of man comes.' In Amos, the fourth chapter, it says, 'Prepare to meet your God.' Are you prepared? Have you opened your heart to Jesus? Have you repented of your sins?". ...

More than 230,000 people attended the crusade over the three days, Graham officials said, adding to the 83 million who have seen him preach in person in his 417 crusades over the years. Yesterday, the rapt audience spread across 93 acres, filling a vast lawn ringed by London plane and linden trees and overflowing into three more sites where Mr. Graham's visage, rugged and worn but still startlingly handsome, spoke to them from enormous video screens.

Especially ick-making bits of hagiographic enthusiasm highlighted, though it's by no means an exhaustive survey.

I'll give Newman this, he's clearly worked hard at studying the canonical moves in the Times sucking-up-to-power game: you don't come to write this sort of sonorous, manipulative pap just by luck. Looks like Todd Purdum and Elisabeth Bumiller have a competitor. Keep it up, Andy; you're a natural for the Washington bureau.

posted by michael  5:12:38 PM  
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Judases. Just in case there was any question whether I was right last month, when I read the coded language of the report of the Times' so-called Credibility Group as a capitulation to the right-wing PC howler monkeys, Bill Keller kindly dots the remaining "t"s and crosses the "i"s for us.

In a lengthy memo published the newspaper's Web site, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, announced several new policies in response to a recent report by the paper's Credibility Committee. Among them is a fresh attempt to diversify the Times' staff and viewpoints, and not in the usual racial or gender ways, but in political, religious and cultural areas as well. ...

The point, Keller wrote, "is not that we should begin recruiting reporters and editors for their political outlook; it is part of our professional code that we keep our political views out of the paper. The point is that we want a range of experience. ... First and foremost we hire the best reporters, editors, photographers and artists in the business. But we will make an extra effort to focus on diversity of religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class."

Keller said there had already been successes, namely, the coverage of conservatives by David Kirkpatrick and Jason DeParle, and a number of recent Sunday magazine pieces. "I intend to keep pushing us in this direction," Keller declared.

For all the fine talk about keeping political views out of the news columns, Keller couldn't be plainer about where the "diversity" action really is: he has set the Times squarely on the long path of apology for the ideological sins of its former "liberal" incarnation. Expect (what will at least feel like) an endless series of genuflections toward the right and its language police—it'll have to be endless, because Keller's an idiot if he thinks the wingers are ever going to let the Times up off the mat, now that the paper's fallen to its knees. I've written before about the kind of success David Kirkpatrick has been as Keller's ambassador to the conservatives; today, in a happy juxtaposition with Keller's memo, we get a big, off-lead A1 taste of what Jason DeParle is going to bring to the table ("In Battle to Pick Next Justice, Right Says, Avoid a Kennedy").

Chris Geidner is ample on his blog about the intellectual dishonesty in the structure of DeParle's right-wing hatchet job, so I don't feel I have anything much to do on that score. What Chris doesn't mention, though, is the passage—right up there at the top of the article—that made me drop my bagel (as always, cream-cheese side down) this morning:

When Anthony M. Kennedy was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, he took the place of a fallen conservative icon, Robert H. Bork, whose defeat in a Senate conflagration still shapes judicial politics. Sunny while Mr. Bork emanated gloom, clean-shaven while Mr. Bork was bearded, Justice Kennedy was above all philosophically undefined while Mr. Bork's conservatism was chiseled.

But for the next few years, Justice Kennedy sided so reliably with the court's right flank that relieved conservatives proclaimed him an ally: "Bork without the beard."

No one calls him that now. Instead, some notable conservatives are calling for his impeachment. For more than a decade, Justice Kennedy has infuriated the right, writing decisions in cases that struck down prayer at public school graduations, upheld abortion rights, gave constitutional protections to pornography and gay sex and banned the death penalty for juveniles. ...

A genial apostle of tolerance and consensus, Justice Kennedy, 68, is an unlikely lightning rod, one whose traditional Catholic background has little in common with the flag-burners, pornographers or abortion advocates his reading of the Constitution protects. In an interview last week, he responded to a question about what it was like to be cast as a Judas justice.

If self-satisfaction had an odor, I'd have smelled that last graf before the paper was even out of its wrapper. (Not that there aren't other odors wafting about here.) Can't you just see little Jason preening himself, in that alliterative "Judas justice," over his talent (if that's what it ought to be called) for spiteful, leering Cornerite invective? Hard to imagine a catalog like this one, "flag-burners, pornographers or abortion advocates," stated in just this demonizing language, appearing in a discussion of Supreme Court jurisprudence anywhere outside the hard right-wing press: the source, no doubt, of DeParle's inspiration here. It's something of a wonder to me that DeParle left "child molesters" out of the rogue's gallery that he claims Kennedy—obviously in Jason's book a "genial," "tolerant" muddlehead—has come to defend. Did he just not think to add it?

Must have: certainly "Judas justice" suggests that Jason DeParle is singularly unhindered by self-restraint when it comes to the task of fellating wingers. And no editor took it out: no editor with an interest in maintaining rhetorical decorum in the news columns (or with a vestige of self-respect) would have left any of that last graf standing. But it appears that decorum is a thing of that past at the Times: when you're trying to get yourself right with Stalinists, after all, you don't win points for mincing words. Which casts this piece of Bill Keller's memo in perhaps its true light:

We must, as the committee says, be more alert to nuances of language when writing about contentious issues. The committee picked a few examples — the way the word "moderate" conveys a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme, the misuse of "religious fundamentalists" to describe religious conservatives — but there are many pitfalls involved when we try to convey complex ideas as simply as possible, on deadline. I’ve asked Al (the last item on poor Al’s check list) to assure that our training and orientation include sessions with reporters who have proven particularly skillful at avoiding these pitfalls, and also to report periodically to the staff on language issues that have been brought to his attention.

There are nuances, of course, and then there are nuances, and I don't think Keller's suggesting sensitivity training here. Will Jason DeParle be one of the "skillful" rhetoricians Keller taps to do Newspeak orientation for the Times staff?

posted by michael  11:54:13 AM  
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