The elite media, then and now
The late reporter and author David Halberstam graduated from Harvard in 1955, joined the New York Times’ Washington bureau in 1960, and was sent to Saigon in 1962. With that background, we now join Hilton Kramer’s review of Halberstam’s The Fifties:
on one of my periodic assignments in Europe for The New York Times, I had a conversation over lunch one day [in the 1970's] with one of the paper’s older foreign correspondents that made a great impression on me…the vehement, free-wheeling tirade to which I was treated that day touched on many particular people, editors as well as reporters, and many specific episodes, but its essential points were the following:
The Vietnam War was proving to be a disaster for the Times’s foreign coverage. The paper had to send in all those reporters in relays to cover the war. Many of them were young men who had little or no experience of the world. They knew nothing about politics and even less about war. There were exceptions, of course, but very few. Some had never before had a serious foreign assignment or seen any military combat. At one point the Times had even sent in a fashion reporter from its Paris bureau.
Communism was an abstraction to them. They thought the real enemy in Vietnam was the USA. They weren’t Communists themselves, but they proved to be complete suckers for the anti-anti-Communist line that was now ascendant in the Western press. History for a lot of these guys began with the election of John F. Kennedy, and most of them thought Bobby Kennedy was a saint.
In Vietnam, they had three ambitions: to get out alive, to win a Pulitzer, and to see America defeated. Their whole view of the world was shaped by Vietnam. They saw the world divided into good guys and bad guys, and we were the bad guys.
Then, when they had finished their stint in Vietnam, they had to be rewarded with assignments to more glamorous foreign capitals, where they were likely to understand even less than they had in Saigon, and where they seldom knew the language, the history, or the culture of the countries they were writing about. This was the kind of comic-strip coverage of foreign affairs the Times was now getting. All in all, it was probably a good thing that newspaper readers were now less interested in foreign affairs than they used to be. It was keeping the circulation of misinformation at a lower level than it would otherwise be.
I can’t say that this conversation changed my view of the world, but it certainly changed the way I read the foreign news columns of the Times, and not only the Times. It wasn’t until a little later, as I watched some of these Vietnam-era correspondents ascend to positions of power on the paper, that I realized they were bringing the same good guy-bad guy scenario, with America as the bad guy, to their coverage of the domestic scene as well.
We noted the other day Theodore Dalrymple’s thesis that Islam has taken the place of Marxism as the current locus of totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the quality and tenor of reporting seem not to have changed at all since the dark days of Vietnam the New York Times’ senior foreign correspondent described to Hilton Kramer. The main difference between then and now is that the Viet Cong had no intention of coming to America to kill or subjugate us. (HT: Powerline)