It’s Christmas in June! Along with the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down essay I gifted you folks yesterday about the media’s latest Crime In The Streets fad, I hereby release today’s edition to gen pop. It’s New York Times deputy executive editor Ned Bins’ defense of his paper’s phlegmatic coverage of longtime New York Republican politician Carl Paladino's paen to the political gifts of Adolf Hitler -- and believe me, if you haven’t seen Paladino’s rap, whatever you’re imagining that was, it’s even worse.
I’m actually in sympathy with the Times, in a way, because they imagine themselves to be the Paper of Record and I’m sure its bigwigs -- most of whom, I notice, came of age when the Fourth Estate was still coasting on Watergate-era prestige and few noticed how poorly it was performing its traditional societal functions -- envision future readers scanning its back pages for a fair, fact-based, balls-and-strikes record of then-current events. They probably also feel their even-handed approach makes a historically accurate portrayal of any controversy (including whether or not what Paladino said was a big deal) easier to craft.
But it also reminds me of this 2019 Tablet story about the Times’ Berlin correspondent in the run-up to WWII:
At the outbreak of the Second World War, The New York Times bureau chief in Berlin, Guido Enderis, was known to sit in the bar of the city’s famous Adlon Hotel spouting “a loudmouthed defense of Nazism,” eventually provoking another reporter to complain to the Times’ publisher: “Isn’t it about time that The New York Times did something about its Nazi correspondent?”
But the Times had no intention of doing anything about Enderis. In fact, it valued his close connections to the Nazi government, as it had throughout the 1930s.
If the name “Maggie Haberman” flashed in your mind, have a cigar.
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