the eXile - Press Review

Issue #07/88, April 13 - 27, 2000

by Matt Taibbi

THIS PAST SUNDAY The New York Times launched a four-part series on one-day rampage killers in which the paper studied 100 American rampage attacks, setting out to "examine as many of these killings as possible in an effort to learn what factors they and the people who carried them out shared."

The Times's research was subpar. It missed one factor a lot of the killers almost certainly had in common: they'd read The New York Times. I should know. After being stuck with little to read but the Times for most of the last three weeks, I'm getting ready to become the 101st on their list. In many ways the Times provides the ultimate proof of why the intelligent and college-educated are more easily fooled than the poor and unsophisticated. People are much more easily distracted when they have conceits and prejudices that can be appealed to, and the readers of papers like the Times-who tend to be wealthy and extremely conscious of their

intellectual and cultural superiority-have conceits in abundance. You can sell a Times reader just about anything, so long as you cloak it in small type, Proustian expansiveness, and an anal and humorless journalistic method.

The rampage killer story is a great example. Written by the humorously-named reporter Ford Fessenden, the series is perfectly faithful to the Times's investigative tradition. The leadoff piece blinds the reader with its ostentatious display of humorless, time-consuming research; it even comes with a neat little chart containing the vital information of each of America's most celebrated one-day killers dating back to Charles Whitman. Below the chart the Times shows off a series of eight bar graphs detailing percentage statistics about the murderers involved-how many were unemployed, how many had military service, how many were ultimately apprehended, what their races were, their ages, and so on. Those bar graphs are then set off against similar graphs which detail the same percentage information about ordinary, i.e. non-rampage murderers. To distinguish them from the space-eating eye-grabber graphics filling the pages of its large-print, mud-person proletarian rivals like the Daily News and the Post, the Times graphs are smaller in size and tinted in yuppie-friendly colors like teal and periwinkle, giving the appearance of serious or at least elite-calibre research.

In addressing the motives of one-day killers, the brainy Fessenden considers a multitude of possibilities: the rampages are variously reported to be the fault of guns ("There are many possible explanations? But the shift coincides, roughly at least, with a trend of increasing availability of guns") television ("the crimes may be feeding on each other, particularly in the era of saturation coverage by cable television") and just plain craziness ("48 of the killers had some kind of formal diagnosis").

But not once anywhere in this massive, four-part, chart-laden study does the Times even consider the most obvious characteristic uniting the one-day killers: THEY WERE PISSED OFF! Not once does the paper consider that the killings might have happened for a reason-that people weren't meant to work in no-dignity cubicle jobs for giant, bloodless bureaucratic corporations, or that jocks shouldn't be given the run of high schools and the lion's share of all school funding, or that the greed-fueled market hysteria that produced day trading was bound to drive people to murder, and so on. None of this is considered so much as once in the Times's study. Instead, the predictably stalwart print defender of the status quo more or less openly theorizes that in our wonderful society, white people who are not starving only commit murder when they're crazy: "That profile-a group that is largely suicidal, and shows few of the demographic patterns of poverty and race associated with regular crime-suggests that mental illness plays a large role?"

The same pattern of willful ignorance of the obvious was on display in a different article on the front page of the same Sunday edition, the April 9 piece, "C.I.A. Fires Officer Blamed in Bombing of China Embassy."

Like the rampage killing piece, this China Embassy article carefully avoids the central issue of the story. Though writer Steven Lee Myers was correct in writing that "the attack badly derailed relations between the United States and China", he is way off base when he writes about why those relations were derailed. Myers mentions words like "human error", "targeting error" and "accident" over and over again, but he never once addresses the real reason the Chinese were pissed at us about the embassy bombing-THEY THOUGHT WE DID IT ON PURPOSE.

It does not necessarily have to be true that we did bomb the embassy on purpose for the Chinese view of events to be a significant part of the story. As long as the Chinese people think so-and the people who rioted in Beijing after the bombing did-their opinion matters and should be reported as a significant result of the event. But all the same, there was evidence that the bombing was intentional, and the Times ignored it out of hand.

Last November, the London Observer, along with the Danish paper Politiken, cited four high-ranking NATO sources who told the journalists that the Americans had bombed the embassy on purpose. A sensation in Europe, the story never made it to the United States; while The New York Times simply refused to write anything about the scoop, the Washington Post ran one dismissive story, and then only on its online version. Regardless of whether the Times's editors believed the story had any merit, it should have acknowledged the lingering suspicions it (and other stories) produced among an enormous number of non-Americans around the world. Instead, Myers wrote the following trite passage:

"The attack? exposed deep doubts in the alliance over the wisdom of its strategy and the susceptibility of even the most advanced American military weaponry to human error."

The passage is not entirely correct; the deep doubts in the alliance prompted by the embassy bombing were not about the wisdom of the alliance's strategy per se, but about the wisdom of America's actions and America's actions alone. And again, the passage about human error implies that there was no controversy about the true reason for the bombing. This is status quo, progovernment, advocacy reporting, plain and simple.

The same tendency was on display in a different Times article published three days earlier, the April 6 piece, "Agencies Urge Use of Inexpensive Drug for H.I.V. in Africa." In it, Times reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. (who in the Daily News would doubtless appear minus the G. and the Jr.) talks about a plan called for by the U.S. government to increase exports of the antibiotic Bactrim to Africa, for use by African AIDS patients. It also loudly draws to the Clinton administration's anti-AIDS efforts overseas:

"The Clinton Administration is spending more than $100 million to fight AIDS abroad and wants to raise that to $325 million in next year's budget." There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this story would not have made the news at all, had there not been an earlier controversy surrounding the

Clinton administration over its opposition (specifically Al Gore's opposition) to measures that would have allowed poor African countries to manufacture generic versions of protease inhibitor drugs. This murderous and inhuman policy did some real damage to Gore politically, and the furor it caused kept the story in the news for a while. The Bactrim story is really interesting only in the context of a counterbalance to the protease inhibitor fiasco, which remains unresolved. After all, the drug has been available in Third World countries, and available for cheap, for decades.

Nonetheless, the Times does not mention so much as once the earlier controversy in its Bactrim story. This looks an awful lot like a conscious effort to apologize for the Clinton administration's African policies, and if you read the Times enough, you know that it looks that way because it is.

But none of these stories comes close to being as loathsome as the April 9 Sunday business story, written by Jonathan Fuerbringer, entitled "A Miffed Moscow Means Headaches for Ikea."

This story, which takes up an entire half page of the Sunday business section, is morally abhorrent on a number of levels. The most startling thing about it is that it is even in the paper at all. If it was suspicious for the "Buy-a-full-page-ad, get-a-front-page-writeup-in-return" Moscow Times to run a lead story about the Ikea bridge controversy, which at least takes place within its editorial jurisdiction, it's downright preposterous for a New York newspaper to devote so much space to the Moscow Ikea story. Loans-for-shares and FIMACO scarcely got this much space in the Times. When tens of millions of ordinary Russians are robbed blind by despots with American help, this is just barely a story in the Times; but when a rich Swedish company encounters mild difficulties in its quest to become still richer, it gets a half page. Amazing.

The article is not only of dubious relevance, but atrociously reported and clearly biased, violating even the Times's own thin standards for objectivity. Fuerbringer's story is based entirely on the testimony of one source - Johannes Steinberg, Ikea's marketing manager for Russia. Though the piece berates the Moscow government for its intractability and unfairness, it does not quote so much as one Moscow city official.

Then there's the language Fuerbringer uses. Take, for instance, the following passage:

"The Moscow roadblock is a reminder of the worst aspects of doing business in Russia, where laws and bureaucrats can be arbitrary, rules can change quickly, and corruption is always a problem."

Fuerbringer should be kneecapped for writing this passage. If the Russians wanted to build a Russkoye Bistro on the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution, you can be damn sure the Times wouldn't describe the city of Boston's refusal as "arbitrary". The passage allows Fuerbringer to make a value judgement about the controversy-his use of the word "arbitrary" makes it clear that he believes the Russians have no valid reason for opposing the ramp construction.

Later, Fuerbringer notes that Russia bent the rules for Ikea when it allowed the company to pay import tariffs based on value, not weight. But for this, Russia wins no points for its special treatment of a foreign company, as the rest of the article continues to harp on the ramp issue as an example of "Russia's failure to come to terms with a major foreign investment in Russia."

But the worst part of the article is its last line. Here it might be useful to point out that, generally speaking, there is almost nothing on earth that comes close to being as unfunny as a New York Times reporter. Hunter Thompson once wrote that he couldn't imagine Richard Nixon laughing at anything but the sight of a paraplegic who couldn't reach high enough to vote democratic. But Nixon was a one-man Monty Python, a human hand buzzer, compared to your average Times reporter. Here's how Fuerbringer ends his piece:

"The monument whose view Moscow says it is protecting is the spot at which the German advance on Moscow was stopped in 1941. In English, it is called the Tank Trap. Perhaps the unfinished overpass could be called the Business Trap."

Four quick points about this joke:

1) Fuerbringer doesn't know how to tell a joke. His method goes something like this: "Now I will tell you a joke. Here it comes. This is what it is." If he really wanted to sell the "Business Trap" line, he would have introduced the "Tank Trap" fact higher up in the piece, then surprised us in the end with his little witticism, minus the mirth-killing telegraph setup.

As it is, he handles the joke attempt like a virgin working a bra strap.

2) Fuerbringer, in discussing Ikea's complaints, never says "Ikea is building the ramp because it says it needs to alleviate traffic." The need to alleviate traffic is assumed to be true and is reported as an unqualified fact in Fuerbringer's piece. But when he writes about the

city's intent to leave the memorial unblocked, he writes about a view "Moscow says it is protecting", not a view "Moscow is protecting".

3) Fuerbringer seems unaware of the real symbolism of the unfinished ramp-the fact that, like the real tank trap, it represents the place at which Russians refused to bend to the will of an obnoxious foreign invader. The inability to see this highlights once again the Times's refusal to see things from the Russian point of view.

And finally:

If I had a name like Fuerbringer - not only silly but German - I'd change it before I went around making jokes in print about 1941. Just a thought.

But one more than the Times had.

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