This morning's New York Times devotes its entire obituary section to a lengthy tribute to "Ring Lardner Jr., Wry Screenwriter and Last of the Hollywood 10." The Times prints, in addition to the obituary, capsule descriptions of the other members of the Hollywood 10, who were jailed and fined in 1950 for contempt of Congress during congressional investigations into Communism in Hollywood. The obituary points out that Lardner was a Communist from 1937 through the 1950s and that he said during a 1987 visit to Moscow, "I've never regretted my association with Communism." The Times obituary casts Lardner as a victim of American abuses and as, in a way, morally superior to those who cooperated with the congressional investigations into Communism in America. The obituary ends with the image of Lardner graciously shaking hands with a writer who cooperated with the committee, and it quotes Lardner saying, "I don't believe in blacklisting." For all the attention from the Times in this obituary to the abuses in America, the newspaper's coverage has a strange blind spot for the crimes that were carried out by the Soviet Communist regime of which the Communist Party, U.S.A. was a wholly owned and operated subsidiary. Those Soviet abuses far exceeded any carried out by American authorities.
Middle of October: A front-page dispatch from Jerusalem in this morning's Times refers to "the American-brokered truce that was agreed to at Sharm el Sheik, Egypt in the middle of October, but never fulfilled." Why get all vague and refer to "the middle of October"? The truce agreement was announced October 17. Can the Times not be bothered to look up the exact date?
Belt-Tightening: A dispatch from Ramallah in the international section of today's Times reports on the toll that the violence in the West Bank has taken on the Palestinian Arab economy. The Times doesn't mention the toll that the violence has taken on the Israeli economy. That toll has been substantial, as tourism and retail sales have taken a significant hit.
Republican Fascists: An article in today's Times on the effort by labor unions in New York to help unionists in Pennsylvania and Michigan assist Al Gore's presidential campaign concludes with the following quote from Dennis Rivera, the president of 1199, a big New York health care union: "This resembles the Second World War, when the United States was sending arms to the British so they can fight the Germans." The Times lets this over-the-top comparison of American Republicans to Nazis go by without even raising an eyebrow, and certainly without making it the lead paragraph of a story that runs under a headline about "negative attacks." It's almost certain that is how such an extreme comparison would be treated by the Times if it had been made by a key political ally of a Republican candidate.