Someday the Kubler-Ross of journalism is going to identify the five stages of the New York Times. I don’t know all five stages, but right now, I’m pretty sure we’re at stage 3 with Occupy Wall Street. We’re past ignoring the protestors, we’ve worked through the breathless encomiums and excuse-making for the police, and now we’re apparently at the analysis phase.
Last night, there was a big march on Wall Street, accompanied by a little police vs protester action. The Guardian was somehow able to report in detail what happened, and include videos of some of the police action. The New York Times instead led with one of their news-analysis pieces, where they tried to explain to us what it all means that the unions are joining the protests. The first mention of what actually happened last night is 8 whole graphs into the story, in a single paragraph. In 21 other paragraphs, the Times solicits quotes and opinions from union leaders and historians who aren’t part of the protest. It’s only at the very end of the story when they finally get around to telling us what actual protesters are saying, in the last three paragraphs.
And lest you think I missed the “real” story, here’s the condescending title of the accompanying piece: “Wall Street Protests Attract Many New to This Sort of Thing”. I couldn’t find a tick-tock of last night’s events, or video, anywhere in the Times. Contrast that with the Daily News, which lived up to their name and led with actual news.
I expect a hell of a lot better from the Times than sloppy think pieces about a big story happening outside their front door. Stop telling me what it all means and start telling me what happened. Five W’s and an H, motherfuckers, and the least important W is “why”.
cleek
why?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Perhaps we should talk about Kubler-Ross for people who expect news organizations to bring us the news, with real reporting and everything.
Personally, I’ve been stuck at anger for a long time.
Southern Beale
One thing I find ironic is that as these anti-corporate Wall Street protests spread from city to city, the Republican Party is stuck with the CEO of a private equity firm for its presidential candidate. I think that kind of says it all.
Lydgate
You expect more from The Times.
The Times employs Tom Friedman and David Brooks.
arguingwithsignposts
NO, NO, NO. The Why is the MOST important part. But the problem is they’re divining the Why from people who aren’t involved.
Also, you can’t have the why without the others.
Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
ETA: to use a practical example, a patient comes into an ER complaining of chest pains. It’s all well and good to know who the person is, what is happening, when it started happening, where it started and how it started, but if you don’t figure out why it’s happening (clogged arteries, anxiety attack, etc.), you might be in a world of hurt.
ETA2: Shorter me: if you don’t know why it’s happening, you can’t apply the right treatment.
c u n d gulag
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yes, “why” is important.
But too often, “why” is just some writer who’s not in a position to determine that, giving his/her ego some excercize.
arguingwithsignposts
@c u n d gulag: Agreed. Why gives the punditry a chance to gaze at their navels, find some random immigrant taxi cab drivers and give us their pearls of wisdom.
MattF
The Times should be embarrassed that the WaPo is actually doing somewhat better on the story, both on the news and on the opinion sides (with Dionne and Myerson). The whole business is apparently invisible even to the all-seeing eyes of the Brooks/Friedman axis.
beltane
There was a time when I would have expected more from the NYT. Those days are long gone. All they are doing now is living up to my bargain basement expectations for them.
greennotGreen
@arguingwithsignposts (sorry, no “reply” function on IPad)
It’s not that “why” isn’t the most important, but perhaps the originators of the 5 W’s and an H realized the “why” might be the least discernable to reporters. Spend all your time on “why” while you are observing the event, and you might fail to note all the other important “W’s” – that you may need to ultimately determine “why.”
arguingwithsignposts
@greennotGreen: I do understand what Mistermix is getting at. I just disagree with the phrasing, I guess. The why is the most important, but it’s lazy and stupid to postulate why’s when, as you say, there are so many other W’s and an H still being resolved.
Also, too: if you click the “link” next to the date stamp, it will bring up the “Reply” button on the iPad.
SiubhanDuinne
@greennotGreen:
I’m replying to you from an iPad. Touch the word “Link” in blue right after the date/time stamp, and the word “Reply” will magically show up in the lower right corner. Touch “Reply” and it will take you to the Leave a Reply box.
And to go back on topic: while I still read the Times regularly, I no longer have a sense that I would feel terribly deprived if it were forcibly removed from my daily routine.
daize
@arguingwithsignposts: Are we still in danger from the “they don’t know what they’re protesting” line of reporting? I’m hoping not, since other sources have been adding their voices to the reporting.
Zifnab25
@cleek:
Say why again, motherfucker!
/Pulp Fiction
Emma
I’m going to go with Cleek and ask “why?” The New York Times had a small part in bringing down a Republican president ye many decades ago and has been apologizing ever since. Of course, not as hard as the Washington Post, which seems to spend all its time on its knees, but bad enough. The only reason a liberal should read either one is to point and giggle.
arguingwithsignposts
@daize:
Does FOX News still exist?
CNNFox Lite?BTW, I mentioned yesterday that there was an Occupy Colleges protest at noon on campuses around the country. Here’s the web page for that.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@arguingwithsignposts: The problem with the NY Times answering why is that they can try to solve that one from the comfort of their desks. I bet every quote they got from people other than the protesters came from a phone call.
JGabriel
mistermix:
Are you a new subscriber?
.
Alex S.
“This sort of thing” sounds like an open air free jazz event.
mistermix
I could have said that last part this way: “The point of the ordering of the 5 W’s, with Why being last, is that you can’t understand Why without understanding Who, What, Where and When (and How, for that matter). The Times’ news-analysis pieces short-circuit the first four W’s and begin with the fifth, and that’s the reason that they’re so useless when a story is still breaking.”
Better?
arguingwithsignposts
@mistermix:
Much better. I have a hard enough time with reporters who don’t even bother with the why (surface reporting) without going too far in the other direction.
nominus
Maybe he was right after all….imgur.com/gallery/8Se3R
RalfW
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I’ve been quoted more than once by reporters based on e-mails I’ve sent. Not press releases, just from an e-mail the reporter then deemed a “conversation.”
cathyx
The protestors are basically protesting the owners of the NYT. Why would they write about them?
PeakVT
I expect a hell of a lot better from the Times than sloppy think pieces about a big story happening outside their front door. Stop telling me what it all means and start telling me what happened.
Haven’t newspapers largely conceded that other forms of media are going to get there first, and so what a newspaper should provide is analysis? Of course, that means they have to get their analysis right, which the NYT doesn’t, in this case.
Bill E Pilgrim
@mistermix: I agree with you. Both versions. The NYT is concerning itself with why before bothering to tell you what, which is not journalism, it’s analysis. “Fair enough” one could say since the article is presented as such, but as you say they’re reporting on what’s pretty much a breaking story, and a lot of people reading the piece aren’t going to know what they’re talking about yet.
I actually sort of hate this kind of writing in newspapers. They’re not very good at, and the format doesn’t lend itself to analysis really anyway, so you end up with “John Johnson got up early, brushed his teeth as he always did, and peered out at the still-dark streets visible outside the window…”
It’s dark-and-stormy-night level writing, in front of which you’re a captive audience at least if you want to find out what the point is that they’ll eventually meander up to. I often don’t last that long, thus never do find out.
I think that’s why I find blogs more interesting these days, among other reasons. There are good and bad writers on blogs as well of course, but the style doesn’t tend to be split between straight old fashioned reporting and then these mini-novels that all read as if they were modeled after the style of one bad writer years ago, and they just keep shoving things into the same literary injection mold.
Or put another way:
Bill E Pilgrim clicked on the link with trepidation that afternoon. He was interested in the subject, but past experiences reading the NYT had made him wary. As the page appeared, he…
Snore.
beltane
Instead of bemoaning the awfulness of the NYT, we should be celebrating the fact that we no longer need to rely on it as a source of anything besides David Brooks columns for DougJ to agonize over. Even my 71 year old mother doesn’t hold the NYT in nearly the same esteem she once did. After all, if they lied to us about a war do you think they are going to tell the truth about a measly protest?
nancydarling
I asked this question on another thread, but seem more likely to get an answer here.
danimal
See, NYT, it took mrmix only 4 paragraphs to explain most of what is wrong with modern-day journalism. It’s not too hard to learn, if that’s actually important.
Someguy
They still got it wrong.
The unions are joining the protests because you can’t have an anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary vanguard, if you don’t have the syndicalists. Duh. I don’t think it will go far but the left anarchist/union commonality of interests was identified 160 years ago, and it remains true today.
Culture of Truth
You’re being unfair. Unlike most newspapers, The Times does sloppy think pieces about big stories happening in places all over the world.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Someguy: Are the cops in a union?
Culture of Truth
It’s NOT outside the front door. It’s all the way downtown.
Kramer from Seinfeld broke up with a woman from downtown because he couldn’t handle a long-distance relationship.
William Hurley
As is so often the case, what the Times’ editorial and reporting staff don’t, can’t or won’t understand, columnist Krugman does – and articulates his view eloquently.
Krugman ends his post with a healthy, plain-spoken helping of common-sense:
handsmile
The more salient “Why?” is why the New York Times has failed so miserably in its reporting of what is indisputably the most newsworthy story in its own city, the “Occupy Wall Street” protest. (While the Yankees baseball playoff series may be the most popular, it is hardly the most consequential or unusual.) It is a shocking act of journalistic dereliction when the newspaper with the highest circulation in its metropolitan area treats so cavalierly a story that has received ongoing and increasing international coverage
Since the arrest of approx 700 protesters on Saturday afternoon during the Brooklyn Bridge march, the highest number of arrests for a single event in NYC since the 2004 GOP convention, here is the complete daily coverage published in its print edition and the news page on which it appeared:
Sunday, 10/2: “More Than 700 Arrested as Protesteres Try to Cross Brooklyn Bridge”, A18 (of 26), below the fold;
Monday, 10/3: “‘White Shirts’ of Police Dept. Take on Enforcer Role”, A17 of 26 (lead ‘New York’ section story; “Police,Too Release Videos of Arrest on Bridge”, A22;
Tuesday, 10/4: “Anti-Wall Street Protest Spreading to Cities Large and Small”, A18 of 30; story focused entirely on emerging protests in other US cities;
Wednesday, 10/5: “Citing Police Trap, Protesters File Suit”, A25 of 28; six paragraph story below the fold.
And that’s it: the sum total of stories published in the hometown New York Times (prior to today’s edition) during the week in which the OWS protest has gained substantial, less dismissive, national and international media coverage. It is by no means the case that the NYT exhaustively covered the protest during the first two weeks of its actions (e.g., culture reporter Ginia Bellafante was the first to be assigned to it).
The Times reporter with the most prominent byline on the above published articles is Al Baker, who is the police headquarters bureau chief. Mr. Baker is the son of the retired citywide supervisor of the NYPD Emergency Services Unit. With accounts of police aggression so prominent in other coverage of OWS, it is worth considering whether Mr. Baker should be the Times’ lead reporter on this story.
One other hint to answering why the Times coverage has been so inexcusably lax is the recent assumption by Jill Abramson as the paper’s executive editor, replacing Bill Keller. Abramson was the Wall Street Journal’s senior Washington reporter from 1988-97, from which she was appointed chief of the Time’s Washington bureau, a post she held until 2003. In that role, she oversaw coverage of the first years of the GWB regime, a period of time for which the Times has received much deserved discredit.
This quote from a recent profile of Abramson in the Harvard Crimson is pertinent and prescient in regards to the OWS protest:
Svensker
@cleek:
Totally and utterly scooped by cleek.
When was the last time the Times did actual news reporting? Did they ever? They’re usually too busy tut-tutting over the loss of life in a natural disaster or paying Li’l Tommy Friedman for oozing out yet another in an endless line of columns to do much reporting. Also important and serious people to talk to, also too also.
PurpleGirl
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Yes, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. Captains (and higher, I believe) are covered by the Captain’s Endowment Association.
Scamp Dog
They’re becoming “Pravda on the Hudson”, aren’t they?
MomSense
“Stop telling me what it all means and start telling me what happened. Five W’s and an H, motherfuckers, and the least important W is “why”.”
Amen!! I could say this about all the news outlets at this point. I can figure out the why for myself and/or seek out the OPINIONS of people who challenge me and whom I respect.
It is mostly just lame, myopic “why” from all the news outlets. The other “W”s and the “H” are missing.
singfoom
I’m waiting for a NYtimes piece entitled, “But what do they really want?”
nancydarling
@singfoom: I realize this is OT, but could you answer my question @ 28?
Origuy
Not surprisingly, Al Jazeera has a comprehensive page on the Occupy movement. There’s a map showing all the protests going on today.
singfoom
@nancydarling: Sure. Adbusters started up OWS. OccupyTogether is the nationally facing organization that’s just a clearinghouse to get individual cities added to the Occupy movement.
I have no information as to whether they are the same people or just a group that sprung up to help. They’re not competing.
No one person speaks for the Occupy groups. The NY one is led by a non-hierarchical general assembly. The NY general Assembly’s page is at http://nycga.cc. They’re the ones actually in charge of OWS.
In a venn diagram, I’m sure there’s an overlap between OWS and OT, but I haven’t done any research towards that…
Answer your question?
JGabriel
@singfoom:
I’m waiting for Maureen Dowd to write an op-ed column telling us that none of the women she knows will date any men at the protests, because they all want to go dutch.
.
nancydarling
@singfoom: Thanks.
jwb
@William Hurley: I liked Krugman’s post, except that last line you quote. It’s gratuitous, and it distracts from his larger point. If he’s going to be a left pundit, that sort of swipe needs to be reserved for taking shots at the real enemy. And if he believes that POTUS is the real enemy, then he had fucking better say that clearly and make me a convincing case that having a GOP president would be better for long-term prospects of country and progressive politics. But otherwise he needs to knock it off.
Xecky Gilchrist
Kubler-Ross may be less relevant than the stages attributed to Gandhi: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Snarki, child of Loki
Why is the NYT not reporting OWS worth a damn?
It’s simple: they’re waiting for Li’l Tommy Friedman to survey all the taxi drivers in NYC, stir in a heapin’ helpin’ of his trademark FlatLand conventional ‘wisdom’, and regurgitate a report that tells us What It All Means.
Some nonsense about Centrists, Free Trade, No Labels, Bomb The 3rd World, Quants Are The Awsum, and Suck On This, no doubt. Same old same old.
OWS just needs to shout one word, over and over: JUSTICE!
William Hurley
@jwb:
Interesting take on the piece.
Allow me to ask, do you believe the OWS phenomenon to be something other that it’s declared?
OWS maintains that its a political and non-partisan movement. The statement its General Assembly issued yesterday embodies and asserts that fact.
Asserting, as you and others have on this thread, that OWS is a vehicle by which support for Obama can be improved, strengthened or otherwise expanded is offensive. So too your “if/then” purity test regarding Krugman’s analysis which are an independent expression of his own views.
Last question. Which of the following observations Krugman makes do not apply to Obama?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@jwb: What Krugman is saying there is that Barack Obama needs to come to *him* personally and beg for forgiveness.
Great economist. Lousy at politics. Asshole. (But then, he’s an economist, so that’s redundant.)
Triassic Sands
Amen. I’d think the “why” was pretty obvious. After all, they are the “1%” and we don’t matter at all.
MattR
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Do you think any of the OWS protesters might be disappointed in Obama’s economic policies? Do you think it is possible that is who Krugman was referencing, especially given the fact that this was an article about OWS?
jron
This comic sums up the Times for me, whenever they report on anything domestic.
William Hurley
I’m curious to know if the Kubler-Ross grief paradigm applies to those who voted for the President as well.
It’s is indisputably true that on his watch more Americans fell into the desperate and dire condition of poverty and fewer Americans are employed than when he took office.
US Labor Force: JAN-09/154.2 million – AUG-11/153.6 million
Citizens Living below Poverty Line: 46.2 million/15% increase since 2008.
Did Obama cause these outcomes. No.
Has he been able to reverse or curtail these horrific trends. No.
Has he had opposition to his proposals. Yes. Has he been able to over come that opposition? No.
I believe Einstein provides an apt description of those who put faith over facts in this matter:
It is the tens of thousands participating in the OWS and affiliated political actions that are breaking the cycle of insanity. OFA is working to the opposite end, more of the same with a double helping of worshipful hope.
One other, crucial difference as well. The former costs you nothing in terms of dollars and cents. The latter, as a campaign, will cost you $1 billion in donations regardless of the outcomes.
William Hurley
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Ahh, not quite.
Besides, Krugman’s smart enough to know that Obama simply doesn’t have the time. He’s busy dancing with Wall St banksters begging them to forgive him and return to the rate of giving they rained on him in 2008.
When he not doing that, he’s meeting with his marketing team (a.k.a. Press Secty & Campaign staff) to conjure the right spin to give him political cover when he genuflects to the Koch Bros. and approves their Keystone XL oil-sands pipeline – among other things (e.g.: his Super Committee’s mission to destroy SocSec, Medicare. Medicaid and the economy at-large).
William Hurley
@William Hurley:
In my haste, I neglected to include the link to this news in my reply to JMN.
Geithner Dodges On Sympathy For Occupy Wall St, Expresses Shock At Wall Street Antipathy To Obama
Now, before anyone tries to suggest that Timmeh! is going “rouge”, let’s put Obama’s umbilical dependence on Wall St into the proper factual context.
In June, the press took note that, Obama Seeks to Win Back Wall St. Cash
But by the fall, they noticed that Obama’s Wall Street Donors Turn to Mitt Romney.
Thus, Timmeh! is acting as emissary, begging bowl in hand, pleading with the 1% of the 1% for money by assuring them that his boss, the President, feels their pain.
Triassic Sands
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
I don’t think that’s true at all, and although Krugman may be disappointed in Obama, I’m also pretty sure that based on Krugman’s) commentary during the campaign his expectations for Obama weren’t all that high — hence his actual disappointment probably isn’t all that great.
I was critical of Krugman for the nature of his support for Clinton — at times it
seemedwas less than objective (not a big surprise for partisan politics). But his commentary since the election has been invaluable, especially because of his platform.When Krugman refers to Obama needing to mend fences, I’m pretty sure he means people like the many who comment on BJ and other blogs, not himself.
I’ve read and watched Krugman for years and from my perspective ego is not one of the defining characteristics of either him or his writing. For a man of his accomplishments, among which are academic stardom and a well-deserved Nobel Prize, he seems quite well-adjusted.
As for whether Krugman is good on the politics, I can only say that Obama’s current approval ratings are not a strong indication that his own political choices have been ideal. And it’s his choices that really matter. Everyone else just has an opinion.
James E. Powell
The Times and the rest of the corporate press/media go directly to the ‘why’ of the story because that is how they bury the who, what, where & when. They work to convince their readers that ‘this is all bullshit, no need to pay attention’ so that the readers never really know what happened. They do this all the time.
Mnemosyne
@MattR:
They may be, but if they’re smart, they won’t let the media get a whiff of it. Otherwise, it’ll be “OWS is the new Tea Party that will rescue us from Obama!” 24/7 and any anti-corporate message will be drowned out in the media triumphalism that Even Leftists Hate Obama.
Mnemosyne
To respond to myself, Crazy Uncle Joe is sayin’ crazy shit again:
Biden: Wall Street protesters have a lot in common with the tea party
Of course, he’s right, as Crazy Uncle Joe usually is, but he’s always the guy who says what no one else is willing to say, isn’t he?
ETA: And when I say that CUJ is right, this is what I mean:
The Thin Black Duke
So many pages, so little news.