For the record.
Over at Gawker, Alex Pareene’s got a post expressing amazement at the fact that the Times has pretty much owned the Governor Hobagger story. Now, I love Pareene; I think he’s one of the best writers in the Gawker Media stable and a couple of friends and I are trying to figure out some sort of Underground Railroad to help ferry him to freedom, but this is clearly one of those posts that Nick suggested via that obnoxious delicious slavemaster thing he’s got going: there is nothing special or sacrosanct about the New York Times anymore, and there hasn’t been for years. They’re just another news organization out there looking for the biggest story. Sometimes it’s John McCain possibly fucking a lobbyist, but mostly it’s manufactured bullshit about how people coming from crazy meth-intensive neighborhoods who briefly served in Iraq tend to go crazy and shoot folks when they return to those crazy meth-intensive neighborhoods, much like their fellow crazy meth-intensive neighbors who have not been to Iraq. The only difference between the Times (or any “respectable” news organization) and your TMZs are that the Times still has enough vestigial prestige that enough otherwise intelligent people who haven’t yet realized that there’s no longer anything particularly respectable about working for the paper have somehow convinced themselves that their take on the latest Obama viral video is somehow different or better than any other outfit’s simply because they write for the same peridoical in which Scotty Reston used to cover for JFK’s whoring (and by whoring, I mean “fucking whores”). In fact, the only people who still think that the Times is somehow above the fray in any newsgathering/reporting matter are those poor, deluded kids* and Nick Denton, for whom the pretense is a convenient battering ram against the paper. This is not to take anything away from the Times: as stated above, they totally destroyed on the Spitzer story, and they do terrific work. But are they the standard against which all other newspapers should be judged? As TV critic Alessandra Stanley might say, “Water is three parts hydrogen and six parts oxygen.”
*Except for Nick Confessore, who is a total dreamboat.
