Today's New York Times offers a front-page obituary, a "Metro Matters" column and an editorial, all devoted to eulogizing Mayor Lindsay. The obituary went up on the Times Web site yesterday afternoon, and it referred to the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills as "affluent" and "well-to-do." By the time the obit appeared in today's newspaper, the descriptions of Forest Hills had both been changed to "middle class." That's also the description used in the Metro Matters column.
The Metro Matters column also includes a reference to "the racist, anti-Semitic teachers' strike of 1968." That's an odd reference; the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike itself wasn't racist or anti-Semitic; it was a protest against racism and anti-Semitism. The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, would have bridled at the notion that the strike he led was racist and anti-Semitic.
The Times obituary further terms the rejection by city voters of a Civilian Complaint Review Board that had been proposed to hear charges against the police "a major blow" to "the cause of civil rights." How it advances civil rights to haul police officers before some extrajudicial complaint mechanism is left unexplained by the Times. What about the civil rights of police officers? What about the civil rights of all New Yorkers to live in a city made safe by the ability of police to do their jobs without the interference of an institution created to undermine their authority?
Acknowledgements: An article in the Circuits section of today's New York Times describes computer consultants who make house calls. One consultant works for authors who collaborated on a recent book. The article reports that in the book's acknowledgements, the computer consultant "is mentioned ahead of the authors' families." The truth is, many acknowledgement sections in books follow the convention of saving the final acknowledgement for family. It's like saving the best for last. It's just bizarre to use that order of acknowledgement, as the Times does, to suggest that the authors are somehow more appreciative of their computer consultant than they are of their families.
Negotiating With North Korea: In an editorial today on "Negotiating With North Korea," the New York Times urges President Clinton to make certain "that a visit to North Korea would not interfere with a possible final effort to produce a peace agreement in the Middle East." What a perfect quandary for Mr. Clinton and the Times editorialists to find themselves in at the end of the Clinton presidency. Mr. Clinton is hopping from appeasement effort to appeasement effort, and the Times' big worry is that one appeasement effort might interfere with another.
Actually, wait -- the Times editorial acknowledges that "dealing with Pyongyang has its perils, including the fact that a Clinton visit would lend prestige to the North Korean leader, one of the world's last Stalinist dictators and a brazen violator of his people's human rights." It's funny how the Times all of a sudden discovers this concern when it comes to the North Korean leader but ignores it when it comes to the leaders of Cuba, Communist China, the Palestine Liberation Organization and Syria.
Late Again: The New York Times waddles in this morning with a front-page photo of a woman rabbinical student in Israel, Haviva Ner-David. The photo accompanies a front-page article about "a small but steady revolution that is redefining the role of women in Orthodox Judaism." This is old news to readers of the Forward newspaper, which ran Ms. Ner-David's photograph on its front page on February 18, 2000, alongside an article by the newspaper's religion editor, E.J. Kessler, that was more nuanced and balanced than is the Times dispatch today.
Note: Technical difficulties prevented updates to the Smartertimes Web site for the past few days. The Saturday, Sunday and Monday issues are available for those who missed them.