The real test of whether anyone has been reading the New York Times' interminable series on "How Race Is Lived In America" will be whether anything happens to Lieutenant James Byrne of the New York Police Department. Lieutenant Byrne, who supervises a Harlem narcotics unit, is a minor character in today's installment of the series. And somewhere, after several thousands words exploring the subtleties of race relations among police officers, the Times article today reports that "Lieutenant Byrne, who oversees Sergeant Brogli's team, says the only answer is legalizing drugs. 'In my humble opinion, we're doing nothing up here,' he said after another long day of buy-and-busts."
Hello? You have a New York police lieutenant who is supposed to be keeping drugs off the streets of Harlem publicly saying that drugs should be legal and that the police aren't accomplishing anything? Probably not the best career move for Lieutenant Byrne. But, again, the Times is so obsessed with race relations that the story of a maverick police supervisor in Harlem is dealt with as an aside.
Also dealt with merely as an aside, buried in the bottom half of the story, is the article's statement: "It's supposedly common knowledge: black New Yorkers distrust the police. But on the streets where Sergeant Brogli works, the biggest supporters of the police are African-American. . . . At council meetings it is mainly black residents who attend to ask for more police enforcement, more drug arrests, who want more people jailed for loitering and trespassing." Aha. A Times reporter has finally stumbled onto one of the great truths of urban life. But one reason that the opposite of this truth is "common knowledge" is the acres of space the Times has devoted to editorials assailing the police for their tactics and to news articles about the Rev. Al Sharpton and other anti-police agitators and to polls purporting to show bad relations between blacks and police.
It's 11 a.m. on Sunday, July 9: One of the dullest and most cliched ways of beginning a news story is the old time-and-date trick. Today's installment of the race series begins with this ploy: "Friday, Feb. 25, at 5 p.m., there wasn't. . . " That usage at least spares us the usual "It's" introduction, as seen in the lead story in the Sunday business section, which begins "It was the evening of Monday, May 1. . ."
This Just In: There's a small news story on the front of the Metro section of New York editions that reports on a court hearing about desegregation in the Englewood, N.J. schools. The article discloses in its final sentence that the court hearing happened on May 9. Which raises the question: If the news of the hearing is so important that it is worthy of being displayed on the front of Sunday's metro section, why didn't the Times report it on May 10 rather than waiting nearly a month?
Screen Hype: The week in review section contains an article on "Screen Hype" that contains this gem: "Studios usually spend one and a half times the production budget of a movie on publicity, and with the average summer picture costing close $70,000,000, that's real money." Ignore the missing word "to" after the word "close." Ignore the style violation on the use of all numerals for what should be rendered as "$70 million." Think about this, and it's clear the numbers are way out of whack. This would mean that studios spend $105 million on newspaper, TV and billboard advertising and other "publicity" to market a movie it costs $70 million to make and that, if it's a big hit, does $150 million in gross domestic box office sales. A movie industry analyst tells smartertimes.com that the real costs for publicity are closer to 50 percent of production costs, and he says even that is an upper-end estimate.