Category: San Francisco Journal

Dear New York Times,

It was probably just a matter of time. I started paying for a subscription to the NYT after a friend suggested I start playing Wordle, the clever five letter word game. It was sort of like giving a taste just to draw me into your house of mirrors. I have enjoyed the game and have had a streak of fifty-four continuous wins at one point.

With the paid subscription I began reading the news primarily and some of the essays by the opinion writers. The guest essays are often quite fun. Big names like Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates and various U.S. Senators  have often been interesting reads. I suddenly felt like I was in the “know,” given a view into the rich and powerful.  I tend to open the comments section for articles about Trump. Your readers then go on and on in a sort of cathartic release of how insane our times are and “how in hell that guy is not in jail yet” monologues.  I have joined in on the ruckus at times but little lately.  It really is a waste of time in the end.

And then  in November you began publishing your Presidential race polls, which made it so we should rename out country “The United States of Anxiety,” as somehow the guy who was impeached twice and is in all kinds of legal problems is running neck and neck with the other guy. How is this even possible? One thing is for sure. I do not want to spend 2024 watching this horse race that you started.

In a recent episode of “On The Media” –  “Is The New York Times A Tech Company?”  does a good look at how the The New York Times refactored itself as not a newspaper or even a news publisher, but as a tech company. Publishing is dead. It is about a “platform.” No longer do you make money with good content and intelligent editors and stagnant ads but the with surveillance of your readers. Cull the ads for a demographic. Tease them with sticky content that will make them stay on the site.

I began to notice the formula. News more often than not started to become not events but merely conjecture and what people said.  “Trump has decided to
not show up in court tomorrow.” “McConnel says he if feeling just fine.” “George Santos says he may parley his fame and become a gameshow host.” And even Ross Douthat goes so far as staging a hypothetical situation where Hillary Clinton (not Donald Trump) stages a coup.

The sticky content just kept coming. The rich and famous, the shysters and scandal were given prime real-estate on your paper. People would often should be in jail were treated as celebrities.  Every time Trump would say something outrageous you would put his photo in a suit and a slick red or blue tie on the front page.  Make him and our neurotic political environment seem “normal.” Someone who sent an angry mob on the capital is presented as a slick guy in fancy suits. You give the guy free real-estate on a hourly basis. Enough!

So I’m done. Please cancel my subscription to your echo chamber. I will not follow your polls or read your op-eds by your mostly corporate conservative, neo-liberal columnists. I will not read the witty comments from your dedicated readers. I will no longer have to wade through the 10 Ways to Lose 20 Pounds articles.  I am done with your high-brow tabloid corporate journalism.

I decided to free up that time I was sucked in to your world for better things. I will get my national news from the many available sources out there.  I am giving money to my local paper, Mission Local and 48 Hills. I subscribe to Matt Stollers BIG.   But worry not. I will still play Wordle. That was sold to you with the stipulation that it would always be free.

Below are some of the easy to find examples of the new high-brow tabloid journalism at the New York Times. 

THE MORAL CASE AGAINST EQUITY LANGUAGE
What’s a “justice-involved person”?
By George Packer

In the April 2023 issue of The Atlantic is an article by George Packer that was very insightful that oddly did not seem to stir up any debate. The article brings up something that is under the radar in our current society, but on everyone’s minds. The Moral Case Against Equity Language outlines how language today is being regulated by new equity guideline teams. In marketing lingo these guidelines often are a part of what are called style guides.  Words have power and the object is to make language more “equitable.” The article explains how these new equity guidelines are used by The Sierra Club, non-profits, corporations, academia and other large organizations to craft their writing. It  explains the complicated way that language and words enforce power structures and define identity. How important it is for everyone to “get it right.”  It looks at current efforts to equalize and defang language of some of it historical biases and prejudices. Words matter indeed. One cannot help but think of Orwell’s thought police. The article starts out with:

“The sierra club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled. The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.”

The article goes on with

“Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced.”

That’s the spooky part that is often the elephant in the room these days. Who are these people? The article closes with an argument that the guidelines maybe doing more harm than good. Whether you are “homeless” or “unhoused,” you still do not have a roof over your head. Changing the language does not solve the problem. It really often simply makes people feel less guilty and temporarily more comfortable.

This huge expense of energy to purify language reveals a weakened belief in more material forms of progress. If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. Even by their own lights, they do more ill than good—not because of their absurd bans on ordinary words like congresswoman and expat, or the self-torture they require of conscientious users, but because they make it impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change.

Brilliant thinking and something no one dares touch. I am surprised that the article did not stir up more debate. Indeed, “the guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat” is a fair assessment.

Excellent topic. Choice writing. Subscribe to The Atlantic today!

Epilogue

It is important to not confuse the new equity guidelines with other issues of freedom of speech. That someone who commits multiple felonies and then threatens judges and elected officials receives a “gag-order” has absolutely nothing to do with the topic in this article.

And to that point, the writing and thinking of authors from before the equity guidelines, who use “slave” instead of “enslaved person” are no less valid in their works because of this use of language. Furthermore, if authors today use the old nomenclature, it does not invalidate their theories or ideas. A vigorous intellectual pursuit is not meant to be a journey towards making everyone feel comfortable.

The greatest orator, save one of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversaries case with as great if not still greater intensity than even his own. What Cicero practices as a means of forensic success requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
– From On Liberty – John Stuart Mill

I recently read a guest opinion piece in the New York Times called The Battle for the Soul of the Library by Stanley Kurtz. Doctor Kurtz is a conservative think tank scholar who has written many books, one of which warned us about the terrifying socialist president Barack Obama (guess he sort of missed the mark on that one). In the The Battle for the Soul of the Library, he laments that the current “woke” politics have infiltrated the profession of the librarian and has made it so the library is no longer a place for classical liberal scholarship and neutrality. Librarians are now doing their job with political motivations, recommending books by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky over David Brooks, Stanley Kurtz and Donald Trump. Our current times have revived culture wars over books and libraries but in the end, it is all a bit silly for a variety of reasons.

One, most people and and especially kids do not actually read books that much in the first place. I can safely say that before the internet and smart phones, going to high school and college meant a lot more reading of books. Today, reading takes place primarily on the internet. Rarely do I see the youth actually with their noses in a book – and why would you read an entire book on your phone? Second, librarians have been usurped by Google, Wikipedia and the internets. If someone wants to learn about a topic or find a book, they probably do not go to the library and ask a librarian. More likely they search on the internets and eventual read reviews on Amazon. The battle is really a false battle.  Librarians are not the social movers of our day. Search algorithms and creepy fine-tuned marketing campaigns are far more powerful.

It is the year 2022. What book banning  has to do about is what version of history is sanctioned and approved. Do we teach the same history that was taught in 1950? Do we emphasize and obsess about George Washington surely cutting down a cherry tree or that at the time most wealthy White Americans owned slaves?  Is it about how the Pilgrims and the Indians must have gotten along and shared food or about how the United States government reneged on the treaties with Native Americans? Do we include the Tulsa massacres into history books or airbrush this significant historical event out of the record? Is it about whether presidential records can be flushed down the toilet or are taped back together to get some sort of objectivity.

This sort of dilemma is challenging for both the political right and left.  The mostly White Republican party wants nothing to do with the fact that the country is a complicated place that is built upon racism and slavery.  They want to fly their flags and be proud to be White and American. They want to flush the unsavory parts of our past down the toilet. Perhaps this is one of the reason why they glom onto Donald Trump.

On the left, they want nothing of the writings of Ayn Rand and Adam Smith as they are surely White and racist but prefer the kids read the latest hurried publications or perhaps Marx and Engels. But reading books by dead white guys is just so out of fashion. What could they possibly know?

Libraries are great places and important in society.  A library card is a passport to a whole new world, however because I always forget to return books on time, I more often frequent books stores. The biggest tragedy with the library happened when they digitized everything. No longer do you get to have your book stamped in the back with the return date when you check it out.  You could look at that date and all the other dates stamped and get a sense of time and community. I do sometimes buy books at library sales when they cull and discard books that people are not reading. It is amazing what treasures you can find.