MADNESS: The New York Times scans NPR!

FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2024

But also, the flight of birds: Is this a form of madness? A possible second cousin to same?

Does it represent a possible dance of the fairies in the forest near Athens, Midsummer Night's Dream-wise? It's a front-page report in the New York Times on this very day!

Is this a lower-grade bout of madness? Print edition headline included, Vanesa Friedman's "CRITIC'S ESSAY" essay starts exactly like this:

A Battle for the White House, Fought With Beading and Silk

There were cherry blossoms. There were silk and glass butterflies. There were toasts. There was an entree inspired by a California roll and a performance by Paul Simon. But before that, there was the photo op, and the fashion.

On Wednesday evening, as the Bidens hosted Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and his wife, Yuko Kishida, at the fifth state dinner of the Biden administration,  Jill Biden, wearing an evening dress from Oscar de la Renta, stood with her husband to greet their guests of honor at the North Portico.

[...]

On a night meant to underscore another powerful relationship—that of the United States and Japan — and reaffirm the strength of that mutual commitment through political stagecraft, the [de la Renta] label was an apt choice.

And it suggested that Dr. Biden, who has not always seemed interested in the game of fashion diplomacy, is gearing up with every means at her disposal to help amplify her husband’s message, not just as president but as the Democratic presidential nominee as he faces off against an opponent who revels in the reality TV nature of politics—complete with costumes.

The election will be fought partly in pictures, and already the pictures are starting to tell a story, at least when it comes to the women involved...

There are five front-page reports in today's New York Times. One deals with the death O.J. Simpson. Another deals with Shohei Ohtani's translator.

This third report treats the way the fashion choices of the prospective first ladies might swing this year's White House campaign. Might that editorial judgment represent a form of madness? 

We're prepared to let you decide.

Full disclosure! According to the report's identity line, Vanessa Friedman "has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014." It isn't her fault that someone decided to put this manifest drivel on the newspaper's front page.

That said, is it a cousin to sobbing, floor-pounding, undisguised madness when major newspapers function this way? Are we secretly back on the plains before Troy, where we meet Thestor's gifted son right at the start of Book One?

So he proposed
and down he sat again as Calchas rose among them,
Thestor's son, the clearest by far of all the seers
who scan the flight of birds.

Calchas was "the clearest by far" at the task of "scanning the flight of birds!" Today, within our continuing human madness, so is the fashion director and chief fashion critic of the well-known New York Times.

On the front page of today's Business section, the Times starts scanning NPR. Beyond the bare bones of the matter, the report doesn't say a whole lot. It's a report about this week's allegations concerning the way NPR now rolls:

NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias

NPR is facing both internal tumult and a fusillade of attacks by prominent conservatives this week after a senior editor publicly claimed the broadcaster had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage, risking its trust with audiences.

Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published Tuesday by The Free Press, a popular Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

Mr. Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, castigated NPR for what he said was a litany of journalistic missteps around coverage of several major news events, including the origins of Covid-19 and the war in Gaza. He also said the internal culture at NPR had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

Beyond the bare bones, this Times report doesn't say much. Its authors even skip past the most striking specific claim to emerge from Berliner's essay—his claim that a census of staffers at NPR's headquarters in D.C. yielded a count of 87 registered Democrats versus zero Republicans—none.

(As we noted yesterday: We can't swear that those numbers are accurate. But that's what Berliner reported, and such numbers do leap off a page.)

Is something wrong with the way NPR is currently sifting the news? More specifically, is it true that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview?"

Is it true that the internal culture at NPR has placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace?" Also, would it necessarily be wrong if some such assertions were accurate?

There's no way to answer those questions from reading Berliner's lengthy but sprawling essay—an essay which makes no attempt to nail down the accuracy of any particular claim. (Given the complexities of the world, it would be very hard to do so.)

Also, there's no way to know such things from reading Kevin Drum's post about Berliner's essay, accurate though it may (or may not) be in the three basic points Kevin covers. 

There's no way to know such things from reading the report in today's New York Times. Meanwhile, the pseudo-discussion of Berliner's essay performed on the Gutfeld! program last night was among the stupidest imitations of journalism ever broadcast by a "cable news" provider. But that's pretty much the way it rolls in our pair of large nations now.

One other point:

There's no way to assess the merits of Berliner's claims from reading the comments to Kevin Drum's post. 

Tomorrow, we'll walk you through a recent report on the PBS NewsHour which did traffic in the kinds of flawed "progressive" journalism Berliner attributes to NPR, or so it will say around here. 

We thought the work was astoundingly bad. To our surprise, it was done by one of our favorite rising journalists, joined by one of the program's wholly respectable and experienced co-hosts.

That said, there's no way to tell, from reading the comments to Kevin's post, whether Berliner was making decent points about NPR's work in the age of Trump. By way of contrast:

From the instantly nasty tenor of quite a few of the comments, you can something about us the humans —about our possible attractions to various forms of madness, especially to the basic human impulses which tend to lead on to war.

In Book One of Europe's earliest extant poem of war, the madness is quickly apparent. 

Agamemnon, lord of men, instantly says he's been gripped by a madness. (Tears stream down as he does.) At the time of the lord of men's breakdown, he says this madness has held him in thrall for at least the prior nine years.

As usual, the men were fighting over which of two warring civilizations would maintain rights to Helen, radiance of women—the most beautiful woman in the world. Next week, we vastly more enlightened moderns start our own clown-car courtroom fight over access to our own failing nation's number-one, best-known "porn star!"

Can we learn to see ourselves more clearly in the twenty-four books of the Iliad? In the comments to Kevin's post, the eternal human drive toward war is quickly rather apparent.

Quite often, there's no such thing as good-faith disagreement within those poisonous comments. Like the silly Southern boys cavorting for Miss Scarlett before venturing off to meet their deaths at the hands of the Yankees, successors to the rage of Agamemnon insult and attack, with fighting words, those others who fail to create the most perfect speech and analysis.

Some of these poisonous attacks are "race and identity" all the way down. These are the impulses to war from within our own Blue America, not from the ugly, misogynistic clown-car which pulls up to the Fox News Channel at 10 o'clock each weekday night.

We're wired to march ourselves off to war! The practice is general over "cable news" now, though nowhere quite as much as on the truly astounding and primetime / primitive Gutfeld! imitation of human life.

We're wired to subdivide into nations, then to provoke a hot war. Can we see this tendency a bit more clearly if we return to the cultural setting surrounding that poem of war?

We take you now to the 1990 Robert Fagles translation—more specifically, to the Introduction to that translation penned by the late Bernard Knox.

At the time, Professor Knox was Director Emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. According to the leading authority, he possessed subject matter awareness.

At one point in his lengthy essay, Professor Knox described the cultural norms—and the human impulses—of those Euro forefathers. As we start, he's speaking about "the Greeks of historic times who knew and loved Homer's [war] poem:"

The Trojan War

[...]

For them history began with a splendid Panhellenic expedition against an Eastern foe, led by kings and including contingents from all the more than one hundred and fifty places listed in the catalogue in Book 2 [of the Iliad]. History began with a war. That was an appropriate beginning, for the Greek city-states, from their first appearance as organized communities until the loss of their political independence, were almost uninterruptedly at war with one another. The Greek polis, the city-state, was a community surrounded by potential enemies, who could turn into actual belligerents at the first sign of aggression or weakness. The permanence of war is a theme echoed in Greek literature from Homer to Plato. We Achaeans, says Odysseus in the Iliad, are

"the men whom Zeus decrees, from youth to old age,
must wind down our brutal wars to the bitter end
until we drop and die, down to the last man. "

And in Plato's Laws the Cretan participant in the discussion says: "Peace is just a name. The truth is that every city-state is, by natural law, engaged in a perpetual undeclared war with every other city-state." 

There was no lack of declared wars, either. The citizens of Athens in the great century of Greek civilization, the fifth B.C., were at war, on land and sea, for more years than they were at peace. In the Louvre in Paris there is an inscription, dating from the early 450s [B.C.], that lists the names of 171 men of one of the ten Athenian tribes, who died "in war, on Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia. at Haliels. Aegina. Megara in the same year." Athens at this time was fighting not only the Persian Empire but also her former ally against Persia, Sparta and its Peloponnesian League. She had been fighting the Persians continually since 480 and Sparta since 460. In 448 she made peace with Persia and in 446 with Sparta and the League. But the peace lasted only fifteen years. In 431 the Peloponnesian War began, to end in 404 with the surrender of Athens and the loss of her naval empire.

Even in Athens' greatest century, its citizens found themselves embroiled in constant wars. Further establishing the cultural record, the madness found throughout the Iliad had apparently come into being, as a work of literature, three or four centuries earlier.

That earlier madness inspired the Achaeans to spend ten years (brutally) dying in the dust before the walls of Troy as they tried to get Helen back. Judging from the Fagles translation, she had engaged in her move to Troy voluntarily, as with the one (alleged) act of congress engaged in by our modern-day "porn star."

With respect to the surrender of Athens in 404 B.C., we turn now to the leading authority on the subject. Here's what happened next:

The Athenian Defeat

The overall effect of the war in Greece proper was to replace the Athenian Empire with a Spartan empire. After the battle of Aegospotami, Sparta took over the Athenian empire and kept all its tribute revenues for itself; Sparta's allies, who had made greater sacrifices in the war than had Sparta, got nothing.

For a short time, Athens was ruled by the Thirty Tyrants, a reactionary regime set up by Sparta. In 403 BC, the oligarchs were overthrown and a democracy was restored by Thrasybulus.

The Thirty ruled for less than a year. In the meantime, here's some of what happened in Athens, as Plato and Socrates watched:

The rule of the Thirty

With Spartan support, the Thirty established an interim government in Athens. They reestablished the Boule, a council composed of 500 members. They appointed other officials, including 10 men who would rule the port town of Piraeus on behalf of the Thirty, and hired 300 mastigophoroi, whip bearers who would act as a police force. The Thirty oversaw trials in the Boule against Athenian leaders who had opposed the peace with Sparta and sentenced them to death. They then tried and executed a number of "undesirables" within Athens...

Instead of drafting a new constitution, the Thirty instead ruled Athens themselves, similar to the Spartan Gerouisa. They limited citizenship and the right "to share in the government" to only 3,000 selected Athenians. These hand-selected individuals had the right to carry weapons, to have a jury trial, and to reside within city limits. The list of the selected 3,000 was constantly revised. Although little is known about these 3,000 men ‒ for a complete record was never documented ‒ it is hypothesized that the Thirty appointed these select few as the only men the Thirty could find who were devotedly loyal to their regime.

Led by Critias, the Thirty Tyrants presided over a reign of terror in which they executed, murdered, and exiled hundreds of Athenians, seizing their possessions afterward. Both Isocrates and Aristotle (the latter in the Athenian Constitution) have reported that the Thirty executed 1,500 people without trial. Critias, a former pupil of Socrates, has been described as "the first Robespierre" because of his cruelty and inhumanity; he evidently aimed to end democracy, regardless of the human cost. The Thirty removed criminals as well as many ordinary citizens whom they considered "unfriendly" to the new regime for expressing support for democracy. One of their targets was one of their own, Theramenes, whom Xenophon depicts as revolted by Critias' excessive violence and injustice and trying to oppose him. Critias accused Theramenes of conspiracy and treason, and then forced him to drink hemlock. 

Many wealthy citizens were executed simply so the oligarchs could confiscate their assets, which were then distributed among the Thirty and their supporters. They also hired 300 "lash-bearers" or whip-bearing men to intimidate Athenian citizens.

They hired 300 whip-bearing men! Welcome to downtown Teheran!

The silly Southern boys got off fairly easy. Within the four corners of Gone With The Wind, some of them, as they lay there dying or dead, were nursed by Miss Scarlett herself.

Has something gone wrong at NPR? Because we rarely follow its work, we have no way of knowing. That said:

To this very day, our deeply-rooted human impulses are often very "wrong." Nor are Blue America's highest-ranking journalists always masters of technical brilliance.

Even here in Blue America, we regular citizens may be inclined to use fighting words, urging all others to war. And when we respond to sudden changes in human events, our basic judgments and our basic analytical skills may not be especially strong.

We blues sometimes tend to go wrong! For that reason, as dumbfounding at the nightly Gutfeld! program is, it's almost impossible to be wholly wrong if you're a corporate hireling in Red America today. 

Such people are now scrambling to explain Red America's position regarding abortion rights. Meanwhile, Blue America's pundit guild is scrambling to explain President Biden's astonishing silence and lack of action concerning the southern border. 

Even for someone like Gutfeld, along with his heavyweight wrestler and his gaggle of low-grade comedians, it's very hard for Red America's "analysts" to be totally wrong about President Biden's silence and inaction. After all the ugly, amazingly stupid insults, the termagant can always fall back on the president's peculiar lack of action, as can his colleagues around the 24-hour dial.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at a recent report where we'd say that the PBS NewsHour went way off the journalistic rails, very much in the manner Berliner attributes to NPR.

(Good people can get things wrong. We'll suggest that example.)

This morning, the New York Times scanned Uri Berliner's report about NPR. That said, can we sometimes see ourselves more clearly when we visit an ancient war poem?

On page B1, the New York Times scanned Berliner's critique. But out on page one, is Blue America's greatest newspaper still scanning the flight of birds?

Tomorrow: Kindergarten press corps?