The Media and Our Country's Agenda
John Patrick Diggins:
Welcome to the fourth session of "Our Country,
Our Culture." I will introduce the speakers successively. We're going to
start with Hilton Kramer, the editor of
The New Criterion,
and the
author of a number of books, including
The Twilight of the Intellectu–
als.
Our second speaker is Michael Meyers, who has a program on tele–
vision. He's a civil rights officer who has written on race and rites of
passage. And finally, Edward Rothstein, who writes for the
New York
Times
Arts and Ideas section. He's written on subjects such as music,
mathematics, and science. We'll start with Mr. Kramer.
Hilton Kramer:
I inevitably feel at a certain disadvantage coming after
the last group of speakers, because their subjects were full of questions
about unintended consequences, serious questions. But the subject Edith
Kurzweil invited me to speak on here, the media and its role in our
country's agenda, is generally in the realm of deliberate ly intended con–
sequences. Many of them are stupid and destructive to both our coun–
try and our culture. I will speak mostly about my alma mater, the
New
York Times,
where I spent seventeen years pulling on the oars . But I'll
have something to say about other parts of the media as well.
I want to particularly focus on the question of liberal bias in the
American mainstream media .
It
is much discussed, but it's rarely, except
among a few conservative diehards, analyzed in great detail.
It
may,
sometimes even among libera ls, be considered a folly. But that it might
constitute a deliberate misrepresentation of reality is something that I
think is rarely considered. And so I want to tell some particular stories.
As you will readily see, I don't have any theory about the American
media and still less about the
New York Times.
But I have a large accu–
mulation of experience, and today I want to share with you some of the
stories coming out of that experience.
Back in the
I990S,
as some of you who live in New York know, I was
writing a weekly column called "Times Watch" in the
New York Post.
I did that from
I993
to
I997.
During that period, I was invited to a
panel discussion that had been organized by, I think, a group of people
at Columbia University. But it didn't take place at Columbia, probably
for good reason. It was about the media generally, but it was focused on
