BEg2 ch 30 aftermath paragraph 1

[Mark Kohut]

Good history and comment, thanks, Michael. Like any great paper I want to
add, great for
its reporting, it also breaks many anti-Establishment stories, under the
usual meanings of Establishment. Reporting has one basic truth: the report
must be true, justified facts about the real world.

It makes mistakes too, as does any. As my international law professor used
to say, that any institution can get things wrong shows the reality of
standards and truth.

On Wed, May 18, 2022 at 12:00 AM Michael Bailey <
michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

> Six paragraphs start the chapter with some reportage.
>
> Paragraph 1:
>
> “If you read nothing but the Newspaper of Record, you might believe that
> New York City, like the nation, united in sorrow and shock, has risen to
> the challenge of global jihadism, joining a righteous crusade Bush’s people
> are now calling the War on Terror. If you go to other sources—the Internet,
> for example—you might get a different picture. Out in the vast undefined
> anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of self-resonant fantasies,
> dark possibilities are beginning to emerge.”
>
>           So the first focus is on coverage, reportage if you will…and the
> first mention is the “Newspaper of Record” which via some interesting
> tradition is the New York Times, although the Wall Street Journal and The
> Washington Post also are recognized in the category.
>
>  - librarians began referring to The NY Times as such in the early 1900s, &
> the Times held an essay contest for people to buttress that nomenclature
>
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/1927/01/25/archives/wins-times-essay-prize-california-librarian-first-in-contest-on.html
>  - not digitized so only the title is legible -
>
> As a newspaper of record, its editorial policy is firmly Establishment
> oriented. So it looks to official spokespersons in many cases. The logic of
> government policy informs its choice of coverage and its take - and in same
> cases, vice versa, although that’s more in the form of suggestions and
> opinions in editorials.
>
> The Internet, still a fairly new thing, has no such orientation. Many
> people who have never looked to the Newspaper of Record to shape their
> worldview now had a forum. However lacking or flawed The NY Times’s
> fact-checking and policies w/r/t choices of stories to run with, at least
> they had some.
>
> Absent from this first paragraph is TV and radio. No worries, he gets to
> that, but perhaps it’s natural for a writer to first look to verbiage. No
> matter how in depth pictures and voices can get, there is for some of us an
> impact almost always stronger in reading about things.
>
> The nature of the Establishment narrative seems reasonable enough, invoking
> familiar themes such as threat - now more immediate - and pulling together
> under existing leadership.
>
> The independent viewpoints may outnumber the adherents of the Viewpoint of
> Record, but lack organization and official clout. At this point, “dark
> possibilities” is the only description given.
> --
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>