The New York Times: Should the campus provide a balance?
Through the sponsorship of the Coverdell Institute, GC&SU supplies students and teachers with the New York Times. Those so involved are to be commended for encouraging all of us to improve our political literacy by reading an internationally-ranked periodical like the Times.
This activity has led to some discussion on whether the New York Times is liberal, and whether it ought to be balanced with another more conservative publication.
As for the first question, of course it is liberal. Even the Times itself says that.
On December 2003, Daniel Okrent became the Times’s first “public editor,” a kind of quality control position. It is Okrent’s job, among other things, to reign in the excesses of some of the paper’s liberal-minded columnists. Okrent has admitted the obvious: True objectivity is impossible. On July 25, 2004, he wrote an article entitled “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” His answer: “Of course it is.”
Even more to the point, what are the concrete ways that we can know if a newspaper is liberal or conservative? A quick test is to look at whom the newspaper endorses for political office. In the case of the Times, they are liberal candidates. This is an exercise in the freedom of the press, the same freedom the Wall Street Journal exercises when it invariably endorses conservative candidates.
More generally, periodicals are identified as liberal or conservative by a number of other criteria. These include: what one thinks about human nature, the role of government, free enterprise, the military, America’s role in the world, the environment, individual rights, education, and of course, Ronald Reagan. Conservatives are proud of him, but his mere memory gives liberals indigestion.
Should the university sponsor another publication to balance the New York Times? If meaningful dialogue should take into account opposing points of view, perhaps so. Two choices might be the weekly National Review or the influential Weekly Standard. Both are quite conservative. Or the internationally respected Economist, slightly right of center.
If we are looking for a newspaper, we might consider the London-based Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times is actually a little left of center, but it would still provide a nice balance to the New York Times, offering the advantage of more extensive global coverage, as well as a shrewd perspective on American politics.
Funding for an additional periodical could be tricky, given that the Times comes to us for little to nothing. Fiscal creativity may be needed.
We, the faculty, are obligated not to deny the obvious: Any serious periodical has a point of view. Intelligent reading means we keep that in mind. Secondly, professors fall somewhere on the liberal-conservative spectrum-it can’t be helped. Intelligent teaching means we keep that in mind as well. Students deserve no less. To do less means we lose their respect, if not their tuition dollars, because most of them are smart enough to see the obvious.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Sep 9 2005. Filed under Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
