To marry a couple of recent topics (or give em a same-sex union)... after reading Wm1865's latest proof of the NY Times as a lefty rag -- they endorsed the very Pres Clinton who repealed welfare, how Trotskyite can you get? -- I commend this Michelangelo Signorile column on how the Grey Lady kept the closet door of New York's notorious Cardinal Spellman securely shut, 20 years after his death:


Cardinal Spellman's Dark Legacy


Not even "socially" liberal, eh?

My favorite paragraph:

"Yet, among the several skeletons in gay-basher Clark’s closet is that he in fact dutifully worked as secretary for one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in th American Catholic Church’s history: the politically connected Francis Cardinal Spellman, known as "Franny" to assorted Broadway chorus boys and others, who was New York’s cardinal from 1939 until his death in 1967."

"'Franny'" to assorted "chorus boys and others" no less! I guess the late homophobic Cardinal Spellman was a MESSY GIRL!

As I understand it this all happened twenty-some years ago and MS himself agrees that the Times today is on the warpath against the Catholic church. At least my examples of bias are somewhat current.

Is covering up for closeted homosexual priests supposed to serve as some sort of evidence of conservatism? Not sure I understand the connection.

[quote]Originally posted by William1865:
[QB
Is covering up for closeted homosexual priests supposed to serve as some sort of evidence of conservatism? [/QB]

---

Yes.

The Times prints precious little to offend corporate America, the Church, and other enclaves of autocratic power, until elephants like Enron and Priestgate stomp into the public consciousness. And they published many long articles about Whitewater that have proven to be total right-wing loon bullshit. Recent enough?

Never mind!

[ May 02, 2002: Message edited by: Jim ]

[quote]Originally posted by Bill W:


Recent enough?

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No.

Also, Bill, what you're talking about is not political conservatism but more or less a bureaucratic or or financial - not fiscal, but profit-motivated - conservatism, in as much as the Times doesn't (in your view) want to offend organizations that could harm its effectiveness and thus its bottom line, and is therefore (as you see it) conservative in its coverage of these groups. Really, "conservative" is completely the wrong word. The Times, if we accept your view, isn't conservative but timid. They express timidity, or caution, maybe, in the face of the Church, corporations, etc. (again, if we accept your analysis). This whole issue has nothing to do with tax cuts or gun rights, which are at the heart of political or ideological conservatism (as I see it).

Or, for an even more recent example, though somewhat off-topic:
On April 13, in the immediate aftermath of the right-wing coup in Venezuela but before the popular uprising and counter-coup restored Hugo Chavez to power, the "liberal" New York Times published an editorial endorsing the putsch and expressing general contempt for leftist populism in Latin America. Except that the writers didn't characterize it as a coup: the president, it was stated, "stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader." This basically echoed the line of the Bush administration.

I agree that the NYTimes has become much more conservative than it used to be (and timid, as well), but to be fair about the Chávez story, Billy, newspapers throughout the world, including some liberal leaning ones in Spain and France, pretty much bought the party line about people being tired of Chávez and the uprising being more popular than it really was. Even Cuba's own Granma could only blame a generalized notion of "right wing forces"; they couldn't be specific. It was an easy mistake to make, as Chávez is a stupid clown with a very poor sense of how to run a country beyond wearing a silly hat, feigning passion, and throwing around a few populist slogans.
It was impressive how courageous the leaders of other Latin American coutries were, despite the fact that they mostly hate Chávez. Is Latin America finally coming of age politically?

One factor in this mix of interesting viewpoints is that the NYT (and the Washington Post, among others) give their editorial page editors a great deal of leeway, and they sometimes clash. A reading of "The Trust" and "Personal History" shows how much grief the Sulzburgers and Grahams went through when the ed page went in a different direction. Great papers will always struggle with the intrusion of the business/advertising side of the house into matters that *should* be purely journalistic. They win some, they lose some hopefully the W's outweigh the L's (for example, the LA Times Staples Center scandal, which cost the publisher and executive editor their jobs).

In the specific Spellman case, the decision even in the '80s to kowtow to the Spellman hagiographers tells me that Punch Sulzburger probably intervened - this is a man with an almost obsessive penchant to avoid the serious discussion of religious controversey in the pages of his paper, and it reflects in the very ambivilent attitude towards his own Judiasm (hence the attacks by Israel hard-liners who complain the Times is not sufficiently supportive of whichever party currently holds the Knesset).

A paper, whether owned by Sulzburgers, McClatchys, Hearsts, Bignhams, Ritters, or the Rev. Moon, has the right by its ownership to have its editors decide the content, just as prospective readers are free to judge how much weight to give the paper's coverage. It's an entirely different matter when the journalistic entity that actually distorts the truth or prints outright fabricatons - yellow journalism. As stated in another post, if I were doing an analysis of Canadian paper mill pollution, I don't think the NYT would be my first point of reference, just like I wouldn't expect to see hard-hitting China analysis in any Murdoch paper or both-sides-fair Cuba reporting in the shameful Miami Hearld, or for that matter, flattering coverage of outsports in "Christianity Today."


Edited to include missing words

[ May 02, 2002: Message edited by: Wurm ]

Comrades:

I read the piece on Cardinal Spellman on the New York Press, and I spotted one problem area. The article stated that one time Cardinal Spellman ordered the department stores of New York to withdraw ads from one newspaper, and that forced its editor to back down.

Now wait a minute! Are most of the large department stores in New York owned by Jews - such as Macy's, Lord and Taylor, Fifth Avenue, B.Altman's? How could Cardinal Spellman have so much influence over these department stores if most of their owners were Jewish?

Something to think about.

Mikestead

mikestead - in the example of Macy*s, one of the founders was Isodor Strauss who perished on the Titanic in 1912 (a legend is that Isodor's wife, offered a place on a lifeboat, refused, instead giving her space to her maid - handing the maid her fur coat, she said "I won't be needing this anymore").

R.H. Macy was a Nantucket whaler who opened a fishing supply store, and Isodor and his family rented space selling household goods. RH's drunkard son ran the store into the ground, whereupon the Strauss's bought the remnants, and the rest was hstory (they kept the RHM name).

I honestly can't say how much control if any, the Strauss descendents had by the 1980s. I do know that Robert Campeau, the Canadian real estate magnate (and donor to Catholic charities) , fought Macy*s for control of Federated Department Stores, but that may have been at the end of the 80's.

Bottom line, I think a lot of the founding families were out of the picture by the time of the wild Wall Street corporate-raiding '80s.

Hey Wurm: did the Straus family also own "Abraham & Straus," better known as "A&S"? Was that also under the Macy's corporate umbrella?

Spellman probably had considerable power even over major Jewish commercial families; he was a confidant of several presidents, generals, J. Edgar Hoover (another hateful closet case), and so on, and used his pulpit as a key venue for denouncing Communism.

I saw that Fr. Paul Shanley was arrested today for raping several boys in Boston over a series of years. This is the same character who attended one of the founding meetings for the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), who claimed before an audience of parents that "children seduce adults," and who even after his exploits were known received praise from Cardinal Law(less)! He also apparently co-established and ran two gay resorts in Palm Springs back in the 1980s, and made a little over half a $ million by selling them.

His lawyer today pointed the finger at the Boston Archdiocese, while victims' lawyers MacLeish suggested that Shanley may have had "something" on the Boston officials. Who knows? It is all quite sordid, strange and disturbing, though, that even with all the information about Shanley, he was still receiving hosannas and valentines from Law...and he STILL HAD ACCESS TO KIDS in San Diego as recently as the past few years!

[ May 03, 2002: Message edited by: fantomas ]