New York Times: Ideology -- Not The Internet -- Is Destroying New York Times, According to New Book by William McGowan
Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America
By William McGowan
"As American journalism is roiled by technology and financial pressures, McGowan succeeds in reminding us that arrogance and a limited worldview are also to blame for the troubles of even our most celebrated newspapers."- Juan Williams, Fox News and former NPR contributor
"If you think the Times plays it straight down the middle on [divisive social issues], you have been reading the paper with your eyes closed." -Dan Okrent, former NYT Public Editor
NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Gray Lady Down examines how the New York Times, once the gold standard in journalism and America's most trusted news organization, has become a vehicle for politically correct ideologies and tattered liberal pieties, and a repeated victim of journalistic scandal and institutional embarrassment.
The book levels blame on publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., showing how his obsessions with diversity, "soft" pop cultural news and his countercultural Vietnam-era attitudinizing has squandered the Times legacy and corroded its institutional commitment to give the news "impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sects or interests involved," as Sulzberger's great-grandfather Adolph S. Ochs once declared.
Although the book explores Sulzberger's twenty-year tenure at the helm, it focuses most closely on the years following 9/11, inarguably some of the most dynamic — and contentious — in American politics. McGowan swifts through the Times coverage and miscoverage of such volatile social, political and cultural issues as race, immigration, the "Culture Wars," gay rights, the War on Terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Gray Lady Down examines high-profile journalistic scandals and blunders that are collectively damning: Jayson Blair's plagiarism; Duke Lacrosse Rape Case; Hurricane Katrina; Weapons of Mass Destruction; Plamegate; 2009 Ft. Hood attack; celebratory reporting on such figures as former Weatherman William Ayers.
According to McGowan, "If 'These Times Demand the Times,' as the paper's advertising slogan goes, they also demand a better Times than the one we are getting, especially at this fraught point in our political, social and cultural history."
William McGowan is the author of Coloring the News: How Political Correctness has Corrupted American Journalism, for which he won a National Press Club Award.
McGowan Available for Interviews Starting November 16th
For More information, please visit: grayladydown-nyt.com/
SOURCE William McGowan
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