By Joel Thurtell
Well, Clarkie’s been at it again.
I was hoping that after a couple of my punitive columns, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt would have seen the light.
After my onslaughts, I can’t understand why he hasn’t backed off on his heavy-handed literary assaults on writers for the Times.
Well, doggone, he doesn’t seem to hear me.
But Clarkie’s most recent sniping misfired, at least for me. I found it funny that he should describe the writing of Times columnist Maureen Dowd as “over the top.”
I’ll bet Dowd, by far the most acerbic of the Times pundits, was laughing, too. Well, then again, maybe not.
I mean, what does Clark Hoyt think Dowd gets paid for — boring her readers?
If they want to fall asleep, Times subscribers can always turn to the National or Business sections, two of the finest soporifics invented by humankind.
For that matter, other than Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and William Kristol, and, of course, Dowd, Times columnists fall definitely under the top, to purloin and pervert Hoyt’s metaphor.
The public editor was responding in his June 22, 2008 Times op-ed column to criticisms by supporters of failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that sexism marred much of the media coverage of Senator Clinton’s campaign.
The National Organization for Women has created a “Media Hall of Shame” for writers whose Hillary coverage NOW considers sexist.
NOW placed Dowd and Kristol in their Hall of Shame. Kristol was honored for comments he made outside the Times. For that reason, presumably, Hoyt ignores Kristol in his column.
Hmmm. The public editor chooses to ignore the transgressions of the male columnist who’s been pilloried for his allegedly sexist remarks? He focuses exclusively on the female columnist? Again, hmmm — because the woman’s rants appeared in the Times and the guy’s ravings showed up somewhere else?
Maybe NOW needs to add Hoyt to its Hall of Shame.
But I digress.
Hoyt indicts Dowd for writing columns “so loaded with language painting her (Clinton) as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed” in a June 13 Times article about sexism in political coverage that did mention Kristol along with other journalists like Chris Mathews, Mike Barnicle and Tucker Carlson.
Apparently the June 13 Times writers managed to let Dowd slip through their fingers. Hoyt was not about to let her skate. He assigned his assistant along with some journalism school types to analyze Times coverage to see if it was sexist. Overall, the academics opined, it was not, other than for a reference to Clinton wearing a “no-nonsense pantsuit” and another that said she “shouted” into a microphone. Or there was the comment in a Times story that Hillary “may not have passed the commander in chief test” in the minds of voters. Oh my.
In other words, nada. But nonetheless, Hoyt requested — and got — justifications from editors.
At the Detroit Free Press, when top editors or the publisher would pretend to critique the paper, staffers’ written responses to the brass’s queries were called “forced confessions.”
And yes, Hoyt presents several forced confessions, including one from Dowd herself.
“From the time I began writing about politics, I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes. You are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves” Dowd told Hoyt, who passed it on to us.
A fair enough response. But I’m sorry she made it. Readers mostly are unaware that Dowd really had no choice: She was compelled to respond to Hoyt. She is – despite being a highly visible Times columnist — still an employee whose paycheck is cut by people who demand obeisance, even from tart-tongued commentators.
What about Dowd’s First Amendment rights? Hah! Glad you asked. Talk about Halls of Shame. Newspapers and media in general have managed to deceive people into thinking their reporters are personifications of First Amendment principles. That they have created that illusion is their true shame.
Yes, the public has been deceived into thinking that newspapers like the Times are pillars of First Amendment righteousness. In fact, while the OWNERS of newspapers enjoy free speech rights, their employees do not. In fact, I have a letter from the management of Gannett, owner of the Detroit Free Press where I worked until a few months ago, stating unequivocally that employees (reporters, editors, photographers, et. al.) of private institutions like the Free Press (and yes, these words apply to the Times, too) do not enjoy First Amendment rights.
So Dowd did not have a right to refuse comment, which would be the inverse of the First Amendment. In other words, if you have First Amendment rights, you have the right to express yourself, or not.
The “or not” — the “no comment” option — is not in the equation for newspaper employees, and woe unto an employee to speaks his/her mind in way that annoys management.
So here we have the outspoken columnist who projects an aura of untrammeled freedom of expression actually being coerced into making a self-defending statement.
Demeaning, but in the newspaper owners’ worldview, necessary to maintain order.
Finally, in Hoyt’s column, after all the phony “analysis” by sanctimonious academics, forced confessions by editors and Dowd herself, Hoyt pronounces his dictum: Dowd, “by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.”
I’m sorry to say, I don’t have an assistant. I don’t have access to a university journalism department for freebie research services. And I certainly can’t mentally bludgeon anyone into responding to my queries.
But still, I’d like to know: What does it mean for a journalist to go “over the top this election season”?
Would “over the top” be something different in another “election season”?
What it boils down to is this: The Times pays Dowd to write a witty. saucy, cantankerous and highly entertaining column.
Why? Because it wakes readers up. They may not agree with her. She may annoy them. But she makes them think.
For chrissake, Clark, isn’t that what it’s about?
Maybe it’s Hoyt who’s over the top.
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Why not just show some guts and tell interest groups like NOW as well as the Christian right — all of whom are pursuing some political agenda — to take their halls of shame or whatever the political gambit du jour might be and stick it where the sun don’t shine?
Contact me at joelthurtell@gmail.com
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