A news article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on changes at ABC News, including the presence of John Miller as an anchor on "20/20." The Times says of Mr. Miller, "Though he is attractive, he does not have the generic good looks and silky voice of Stone Phillips of NBC's 'Dateline.'" It's nice to know that the New York Times, speaking in a news article with all the authority of the newspaper as an institution, finds Mr. Miller "attractive," and considers Mr. Phillips to have "generic good looks." It's also somewhat amusing. "Attractive" strikes Smartertimes.com as a quality that depends on whether the person being attracted to Mr. Miller is his wife, a man, a woman, a New York Times beat reporter who covers television, or someone who just is attracted to, as Mr. Miller describes himself in the article, "gray hair and crooked teeth." Some people may find him attractive; others may find him grating. Others may not ponder his attractiveness; they may be watching the program for some reason other than the looks of the anchorman. Virginia Postrel is writing a book that is partly about these questions; in her proposal(http://www.dynamist.com/proposal.html ) she writes: "Researchers have found some universal patterns in what humans, from infants to adults, find attractive in other people, in music, and in landscapes. People perceive some things as beautiful without regard to culture or context -- symmetrical faces, smooth surfaces, specific color combinations. Aesthetics is not merely a matter of social manipulation. But hard-wired reactions don't explain everything either. Aesthetics always operates in a personal and cultural context." It's that personal and cultural context that may make more than one Times reader pause for a moment and chuckle when reading the New York Times news article describing Mr. Miller as "attractive."
Right-Wing Ideas: A dispatch from Utah in the sports section of today's New York Times reports on a place where residents oppose gun control and distrust the United Nations. The Times dwells on these sentiments as "extreme," without going into much detail about the views of the genuinely extreme groups like "skinheads" who are mixed into the area. The Times article contains the following quote from "Mark Pitcavage, national fact-finding director for the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist groups": "You can't judge an entire community. But in this country there are a couple of places where time and time again right-wing ideas keep turning up. It's hard to say whether it's a core group of people who keep this alive. But the La Verkin area is one of those places."
Imagine the shoe on the other foot: The Times quoting the Anti-Defamation League, "which tracks extremist groups," to the effect that "In this country there are a couple of places where time and time again left-wing ideas keep turning up. It's hard to say whether it's a core group of people who keep this alive. But the Berkeley, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass., areas are among those places."
If the New York Times or the Anti-Defamation League want to make these folks in Utah sound ominous, then "extremist" is a perfectly good adjective, though mere suspicion of the U.N. and opposition to gun control aren't exactly sufficient to qualify. Merely calling it a place "where time and time again right-wing ideas keep turning up" doesn't really do the trick of backing up the headline calling the denizens of the area "extreme." By that definition, the White House, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Republican Party and even the Anti-Defamation League itself, which has been known to advance what might be called some "right-wing ideas" with respect to Israeli security and American counterterrorism policies, would qualify as extreme.