Keller Must Stay

Conservatives don’t want The New York Times to be “fairer.” They want it to cease to exist.
By Michael Tomasky

Last December, I wrote a column on this site called “Keller Must Go,” arguing that New York Times executive editor Bill Keller had demonstrated a singular lack of courage in holding the famous James Risen-Eric Lichtblau NSA spying story for nearly a year before running it.

I acknowledged at the time that there may have been valid reasons of which I was unaware for Keller to hold the story. But, I argued, the presumptive condition of journalism has to be to publish -- especially when you’re running the country’s most important (and still best) newspaper, especially when you’re following in the footsteps of the men who risked jail time by publishing the Pentagon Papers, and especially when you’re at the helm of the paper that employed Judy Miller and published her garbage about aluminum tubes on page one (in fairness to Keller, that happened under Howell Raines’ tenure).

Well. I’m not eating my words, but I do have to say that since I wrote that piece, the Times’s performance has been reasonably impressive. Excellent, aggressive younger reporters have energized the Washington bureau, and of course Lichtblau and Risen continue to push forward, most recently with the “controversial” bank-records story.

And now, a Google search for the words “New York Times treason” yields about seven million hits. Undoubtedly, not all of these concern themselves with the matter at hand. Many of these hits represent the random ravings of the wingnut constituency over the years; some even surely take us back to the simultaneously toxic and banal days -- of which only a handful of us today carry the gruesome burden of remembering -- of Hilton Kramer’s old “Times Watch” column in the New York Post (to those of you who are too young, be grateful; to those of you who had wiped those dispatches from your memory banks, my sincere apologies).

But try out for yourself just the first two or three pages. Here you will find an “indictment” drawn up by someone named -- no, he’ll only be happy if I quote him by name; let’s just say some third-rank thrower of bombs that don’t detonate. More “respectably,” we have the New York Post’s Deborah Orin pumping up Pete King’s demagogic call for the criminal prosecution of the Times, and, of course, the President himself, stopping short of using the T-word, but calling the paper’s reporting “disgraceful,” signal enough to the far right that he’s happy to see this drumbeat kept up.

I needn’t retail all the ways in which the charge against the Times is phony. That’s been done elsewhere. Keith Olbermann demolished the argument on his June 28 program, showing a series of clips of Bush saying several times after 9-11 in public forums that we were tracking terrorists’ banking activities. The terrorist who didn’t assume this was happening after September 11 is a terrorist with an IQ of roughly 65, and thus more likely to blow himself up than us.

Instead, what’s important here is modern conservatism’s jihad against the very existence of disinterested (not the same as un-interested) arbiters of public discourse and civil society, of which the Times, for all its faults, continues to be among the most important.

I’m as much in favor as the next guy of building the liberal echo chamber to counter the one the right has built (and believe me, when the subject is the funding of a liberal magazine in the nation’s capital, I’m exponentially more in favor of it than the next guy). However, this doesn’t mean I want a world in which everything, every institution that is involved in shaping public policy, is intensely partisan or ideological. For one thing, there are actual human beings out there, even in this town, who are not deeply partisan (!), and they have a role to play in all this, too. For another, and more importantly, any civil society needs institutions in every realm of life -- in business, the law, the arts, what have you -- that take as their presumptive raison d’etre not ideology but its opposite, impartiality.

Yes -- nothing in this world is purely impartial. Liberals recognize this, but still recognize at the same time the need for the existence of imperfectly impartial institutions. We have our beefs with these institutions too, God knows, from the Times to the network news divisions to the Supreme Court to a hundred other institutions. So we see bias, too, but we believe, in general terms, that it is indeed possible for individual, biased humans to take seriously the need to set their biases aside for the sake of professional and ethical responsibilities and living up to their institutions’ missions.

The far left and the far right don’t think that setting aside is possible. On the left, where people rely on the traditional Marxian base-superstructure analysis, disinterest is considered impossible because it always, ineluctably, serves power. On the right, it is considered impossible because today’s conservatives don’t want there to be impartial institutions and don’t believe they can exist.

I know people in the mainstream media. Sure, they tend to be more liberal than not in their personal beliefs. But that’s completely irrelevant, because they also work very hard to lock those beliefs away. I laugh sometimes when I read on a liberal blog that so-and-so reporter is a tool of the Bush administration when I know that so-and-so’s personal views aren’t that far away from mine. But such criticism means, from so-and-so’s perspective, that he or she is doing his or her job.

I’m not sure a conservative of today’s stripe could do that. Conservatives gripe all the time that reporters get hired from liberal magazines into the mainstream, while they don’t get the same deal. Well, maybe the Times should hire Byron York, who strikes me as one of the more industrious actual reporters at a right-wing publication, one who has even been known to seek out comment from the other side (!). Let’s see if York can be a Times reporter -- can put his biases away, schmooze Nancy Pelosi just like he schmoozes Denny Hastert, give a Center for American Progress expert equal time to a Heritage Foundation wonk, write “President Bush suffered a damaging blow to his credibility today as…” when the facts say that this is what happened.

I don’t even know if he wants to. But without making any possibly unfair judgments about York, I feel very comfortable saying that I think most right-wing journalists don’t want to, and they don’t want to because the impartiality that doing such a job would require is to them an essentially illegitimate idea (plus, they’d rather have the problem around to complain about than do anything to address it). Whereas, to the journalists who’ve gone from liberal magazines into the mainstream, both ideological and impartial journalism are legitimate ideas, and most of them know how to play by the rules that govern each milieu.

Conservatives don’t want The New York Times to be “fairer.” They want it to cease to exist, or at least, to cease to be influential, because they believe it is engaged in a task that, because it isn’t expressly conservative, is de facto liberal. (They also forget, or pretend to: The man running the Times, Keller, came out in favor of the Iraq War when he was a columnist!)

So the crusade against Risen and Lichtblau, and Keller, is a crusade against the idea that our discourse needs institutions like the Times in the first place. Well, we do need them, we need them to be able to do their work, and we need to defend them against quasi-Stalinist witch hunts that are aimed at delegitimizing them. Keller must stay.