An article in the national section of today's New York Times reports on the results of the mayoral election in Los Angeles. "Mr. Hahn, like Mr. Villaraigosa a Democrat, will succeed Mayor Richard J. Riordan, the millionaire Republican businessman who has led the city since 1993 but was barred from seeking a third term." Why identify Mayor Riordan as a millionaire? Hillary Clinton owns two million-dollar houses and has an $8 million book contract, but the Times never refers to her as "the millionaire Democratic senator." Reuters reported on March 6 that the chairman of the New York Times Company, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who is also the publisher of the New York Times, "received a pay compensation package valued at about $4.7 million in 2000, up from $3.7 million in the previous year." But the Times never refers to Mr. Sulzberger as a "millionaire businessman." What is it about the phrase "millionaire Republican businessman" that the Times finds so enchanting?
Fatherhood Spokesman: An article in the national section of today's New York Times reports on a fatherhood advocate, Wade Horn, who has been nominated for a job in the Bush administration. "'Wade Horn is an honest broker who works effectively across party lines in the best interests of our nation's children,' said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, the chief Democratic spokesman on the issue," the Times reports. The chief Democratic spokesman on what issue? The issue of Wade Horn's nomination? The issue of fatherhood? The issue of "our nation's children"? If the Democratic Party is organized enough to appoint a chief spokesman on any issue, particularly a controversial one like fatherhood, and if that spokesman is Senator Bayh, it seems like that might be a more newsworthy story than the one about Mr. Horn.
War Memorial: The New York Times displays on its front page today an architecture review by the paper's architecture critic, who has pretensions as a political scientist and historian. The critic declares that "real estate development" is the "modern version" of "primordial ooze." (So much for affordable housing.) He criticizes the proposed World War II memorial as "a monument to the military-entertainment industry complex." He asserts that "Before Vietnam, before Watergate, before the cultural distortions of the cold war, there was an age of moral certainty, a time innocent of complexity, irony or ambiguity. This time can be bracketed between the years 1939 and 1945." Anyone who ever saw a Bill Mauldin cartoon knows that the years 1939 to 1945 were not innocent of irony or complexity. And as for moral certainty, the fact that it was absent at the Times during the Cold War doesn't mean that it was absent among the masses of Americans, who knew their cause was just. The critic further says, "Our political system is great because it enables authority to be challenged. Washington is relatively insubstantial architecturally because it does not." This is silliness. Washington is a great city architecturally because, unlike other less democratic cities, the governing buildings are accessible to the public and built on a relatively human scale. The humble scale of the White House compared to European palaces and even compared to the Capitol conveys exactly the message of the American executive as a servant of the people rather than an authority over them.
Said Valentine: The "Public Lives" column in the metro section of today's New York Times is a valentine to Edward Said. The Times says Mr. Said wields "moral clout" and has a voice that defies "religious and ideological extremism." It's not so much the glorification of Mr. Said that is so troubling here, though that is troubling. It's just that this is about the third fawning profile of Mr. Said that the Times has run in the past few years. They usually go in the Saturday Arts and Ideas section.
Missing Bar: The bar graph that goes with the AIDS article on the front of the business section of today's New York Times is missing a year between 1985 and 1990.