The New York Times and 'The Other'

            When conservatives claim that there is a liberal media bias in the United States, they are probably correct. On social issues, daily print media in this country, especially the four major national dailies, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, are by-and-large socially liberal. By socially liberal, I mean pro-choice, racially sensitive, feminist-friendly, gay-friendly, and secular. Of course, TV media and weekly print media are an entirely different thing; for reasons that others know better, TV (the networks, CNN, Fox) and weekly print media (Time, Newsweek) are predominantly socially conservative. And, of course, Fox is more fascist than conservative.

            The academic community largely adheres to these liberal beliefs. Having passed through many humanities departments in many institutions of higher education, I can attest to the fact that only rarely have I ever met anyone who is not pro-choice, racially sensitive, feminist-friendly, gay-friendly, and secular. Academics spend a lot of time being understanding of the "other." You would think that this would be a good thing, and yes, of course it is. I strongly support all of these values.

            But there is also something cloying and annoying about this behavior. This is because all of these media, including National Public Radio, while being socially liberal are all generally politically conservative. This is what denudes liberalism in America of all of its power, defangs it, and makes it worthless and whiny. And nowhere is this more starkly on display than in the New York Times. Liberals all over the country read the Times as a signifier of intellectual status, on Sunday mornings over their coffees or on-line at their computers, feeling good about its socially liberal stance.

            It satisfies every basic requirement of the modern liberal position: on social issues, the paper serves as a mirror for your own biases and preferences, confirming those things that have a moral standing in your world view, censuring those that are uncivilized. And on foreign issues, you learn about the world through a prism of benevolent condescension. A few years ago, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins wrote a book, Reading National Geographic about the ways that magazine has represented "the other" through the decades to an inquisitive and predominantly liberal American audience. The writers:

            assess how the cultural narratives of the magazine are received

            and interpreted, and identify a tension between the desire to know about other
            peoples and their ways and the wish to validate middle-class American
            values. . . . in promoting a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges
            universal values and celebrates diversity while it allows readers to relegate
            non-Western peoples to an earlier stage of progress. We see the magazine
            and the Society as a key middlebrow arbiter of taste, wealth, and power in
            America, and we get a telling glimpse into middle-class American culture
            and all the wishes, assumptions, and fears it brings to bear on our armchair
            explorations of the world.

            You could easily substitute the New York Times for National Geographic. Normally, I wouldn't expect a newspaper to be sensitive about notions of language and power but liberals expect and see the Times as much more than simply a newspaper. It is a window into the world for many educated people in this country. It is considered an informed forum, not one prone to shy away from complexities. And I guess that that's the supreme achievement of the New York Times -- wrapping dumbed down observations about the rest of the world in the false sheen of erudite sophistication.

            You can pick up the paper on any given day and there will be some nice piece on some country "far away," an evaluation of that culture through the prism of modern socially conscious liberalism. We can feel good about expanding our knowledge base about "the other" (where else would you read about Gabon?). We neatly divide "the other" into two camps, the "reformers" (a synonym for those who engage in the rhetoric of modern Western liberalism) and the "radicals" or "orthodox" who cling to "regressive" (i.e., non-Western) notions of governance and civil society. We feel a pang of sympathy for the former ("these women want to be drive too!"), and refrain from criticizing the latter (because good liberals don't criticize, they merely explain things), generally feeling good once again (we learned but we didn't criticize!), and thus affirmed our universal values of celebrating diversity.

             One ubiquitous rhetorical device is the oft-repeated story about the "Muslim woman." In the New York Times, there's never any question that Islam explains everything that happens to women in Muslim countries. (A point actually made much earlier by Sarah Graham-Brown in a book in the late 1980s). For them, there's no other way to understand or locate these women. And so, wherever you live, whatever you do, if you have been defined as being a Muslim woman (often defined for you by others, of course), your entire existence is defined as one for or against some abstract notion of "Islam." Thus, occasionally, the New York Times will print some fiery interview with some woman in California or somewhere who is (gasp) critical of Islam. Islam sucks! Screw that crap! On the other hand, it will print a story about women in some generic Arab country who are (gasp) proud of wearing the veil. Proud of wearing the veil? Goldarn it. There are basically two positions to take and both are circumscribed by Islam on the one end and (liberal) modernity on the other. It would be incomprehensible to think that women from Muslim countries (in both their own countries or in the U.S.) might have identities not dominated by religion. Good liberal publications (such as the Times) propagate this dichotomy day in and day out by publishing pictures of women in veils walking infront of "modern" things. How clever they must think they are, by having their photographers track down that veiled woman infront of the McDonald's!! Or imagine the genius it took to chase after that perfect shot of the veiled woman infront of the billboard advertising the iPod!!

            Publishing articles and cliched photographs with these themes may not seem particularly political, but they are about politics—they are about the politics of culture, a particularly potent form of politics that provide fodder for those who are out there yammering on about a clash of civilizations. When the New York Times represents the foreign "other" in its newspaper, by taking an implicit political position of modern vs. anti-modern, it dumbs down its socially liberal and tolerant stance to the barest of its ineffectual essentials. Its insidious power is that you read the newspaper as an act of liberal faith -- to get upset about the disturbing behavior of crooked Republicans or the hypocricy of right-wing pro-life activists, but then you move to, say, the Civil War in Congo, and you are left with an article that has embedded within it the deeply Orientalist assumptions about a world in which everybody wants to have liberal ideas or everybody hates them. The subtle affirmation of your life here.

            You read, and then you go about your business in life with nothing changed either way. There was nothing political in that interaction because there was no commitment made to anything. The newspaper reaffirmed everything you know, and you were never faced with any cognitive dissonance about any value that you might hold. For all the news that we received via the paper about the world beyond America, at the end, we remain unchanged, unaltered, and ultimately uninformed.

            Many people (mostly conservatives) criticize the New York Times . . . so my critique is merely the incremental drop in the bucket. Some say that, "yes, the Times is flawed" but it's the best daily resource we have on the world. This is partly true. On issues of Western culture (film, music, literature, and cultural ephemera, both high and low), it is unrivalled. They also do great reporting on domestic issues within the U.S. Good writers, they have. There are others who say we must read the Times because, even if we disagree with its contents, it's an important indicator of the current world as seen by the American elite. True, also. Read it and learn about the powers that be. But I still think that on international politics, it is a terrible terrible resource. Of course, I don't expect my little diatribe to change anyone's behavior, especially those who are addicted to reading the Times because it gives their lives an imprimatur of informed status......but give it a try. Stop reading it. Read other stuff. There are many other places to go to, especially if you have access to the web: the L.A. Times, TomDispatch, Democracy Now, etc., etc.

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