Mike Booth: The Gringo Chronicles

For most of my adult lifetime the New York Times, the American newspaper of record, was practically an object of reverence for me. “All the news that’s fit to print…” proclaimed the masthead, and still does. I still read it online even though, over the years, it has lost some of its luster. To begin with, it’s take on the Iraq war seemed to me driven by the mass hysteria which gripped the less critical elements in the U.S.A. from the beginning. I really didn’t expect my beloved Times to go along with the baying crowd.

Recently I began to receive regular email publicity blurbs from the Times, plumping their most viewed feature stories over the previous week. Here’s the one which arrived a couple of days ago:

Top 5 Viewed Features on NTTimes.com
(Between Wednesday, Feb. 6-Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2008

1. Fitness & Nutrition: Metabolic Syndrome Tied to Soda
2. Dowd: Darkness & Light
3. Health: Diabetes Study Partially Halted After Deaths
4. Politics: Support Divided, Democrats Trade Victories
5. Fashion Shows: The Vanishing Point

This is the previous one:

Top 5 Viewed Features on NTTimes.com
(Between Wednesday, Jan. 30 – Tuesday, Feb. 5)

1. Krugman: Clinton, Obama, Insurance
2. Rich: Ask Not What J.F.K. Can Do for Obama
3. Krugman: The Edwards Effect
4. Dowd: There Will Be Blood
5. Health: Mystery Unfolds in Minnesota

And the one before that:

Top 5 Viewed Features on NTTimes.com
(Between Wednesday, Jan. 23 – Tuesday, Jan. 29)

1. Magazine: Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
2. Travel: Hawaii on a Dime
3. Business: Prep School Endowments
4. Bob Herbert: Questions for the Clintons
5. Primary Choices: Hillary Clinton

What all these lists of most-viewed articles have in common–distressingly so for me–is that none of them deal with the two capital issues of our times: the Iraq war and global warming. Instead they dwell endlessly on the familiar endogamic American issues, subjects which are increasingly looking like smokescreens designed to cloud important matters which, as I see it, are:

• When will the United States decide to cut everyone’s losses and go home from Iraq?
• How can the United States assume effective leadership in saving the planet, and when? (Am I overdramatizing? I think not.)

Instead, what do we get from America’s most serious, most influential newspaper?

• health and fashion
• travel and the Good Life
• business, of course
• and the the ineffable Barack and Hillary Punch and Judy show

This latter issue arouses passion in the United States, even though in reality it matters little whether the country is governed for the next four years by Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee, neither of whom will likely be capable of pulling it out of the doldrums of the George W. Bush legacy.

So, instead of providing urgent moral leadership on the issues, the great American newspaper does nothing but offer frivolous distractions, contributing to the generalized American amnesia. It’s a shame. I had hoped for something better from them.