Life During Wartime
As we fight against the forces of evil, one of our allies presumably ought to be the press who are ostensibly dedicated to reporting the truth. Unfortunately the Murrow Myth is just that, and all too often the scribes are simply transcribers more interested in keeping their heads down than their eyes open. And this goes centuple for their corporate bosses and the organs they command.
Eric Boehlert posts some of the best work on this issue in his Press Run newsletter, where he is routinely writing about the failure of the media to report honestly and courageously on the madness afflicting our nation. If you haven't seen it, please stop over there and take a look.
As for me, I was particularly appalled with a story in Thursday's (Nov.2) New York Times titled "Schools in Bind As Bitter Feuds Cripple Board," (Now "While Politics Consume School Board Meetings, a Very Different Crisis Festers" online - subscription required) and written by Times national correspondent Campbell Robertson. I don't know Robertson but I know the Times as a fearful, hedging, have-it-both-ways publication that offers just enough honesty on the op-ed page to satisfy the progressives who stop by mainly for the Arts Section, while covering up the truth with disingenuous "Both Sides" reporting. That's what I expect from the Times, and it never disappoints. Every once in a while I get mad enough to write them a letter which, unsurprisingly, is not published. It's been a week, so I offer it here.
Re: Schools in Bind as Bitter Feuds Cripple Board
To the Editor,
For god’s sake, please call it what it is.
The New York Times continues to politely look the other way to avoid describing our present circumstances. When parents and agents of chaos attack schools and the people who work in them, when they confront school boards with, according to the Times' reporting, cries of "supposed Jewish ties to organized crime," this is not a disagreement among good-faith actors over policy. This is crazy.
We are being swallowed up in a mass delusion, and for the Times to report the story but pretend this is a “feud” or these are “debates about schools” is an attempt to say you’ve done your job without actually doing the job. The "disconnect" you describe isn't between competing priorities, it's between the sane and the insane. Your timidity and your reluctance to call it by its name puts the entire nation at risk.
On behalf of those of us receiving death threats and being harassed, I beg you to do better. The cancer is here, and it is all around us. Not talking about it will not make it go away.
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