Unlike the old soldier Douglas MacArthur, the Old Media will not fade away gracefully. Instead they’ve chosen the Sunset Blvd route of Nora Desmond, minus the eccentric charm. In Sunset Boulevard you couldn't help but sympathize with Norma Desmond. She made nostalgia, senility and decrepitude slightly pitiable, but also charming.
The New York Times, plagued by plagiarism scandals, stock value and circulation heading for the sewer while it squirms under the thumb of a foreign robber baron, makes the same things shabby and pathetic. In last week’s Washington Post, former New York Times' senior editor, Howell Raines, while wheezing spitefully against his former competition Fox News, dramatized this shabbiness and pathos.
“Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post,” writes Raines in his Washington Post piece.
Raines implies that boosterism for a New York mayoral candidate is hideously tacky. A truly world–class paper’s boosterism should be employed (apparently) to help Stalinists set up their killing fields and gulags. To wit:
“A foreign reporter — preferably American (meaning the New York Times’ Herbert Matthews) — was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda.” (Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries.)
“In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions (by Fox News) would have been given their proper label: DIS-information.”
Not to be confused with the impeccable IN-formation printed (not as commentary, but as a gold-backed news scoop) on the very front pages of the New York Times by Scotty Reston’s colleague in July 1959: “This is not a communist revolution in any sense of the word,” wrote Reston’s colleague and the New York Times' senior man in Cuba, Herbert Matthews from Havana itself. “Fidel Castro is not only NOT a Communist, he is decidedly ANTI-Communist. In Cuba there are NO COMMUNISTS in positions of control.”