Oh, ya gotta love this! I wonder if they are going to set him up, like "Indiana Jones," with a whip and gun as he moves off into the unexplored wilderness of Conservative Land? Too funny!
January 28, 2004|6:16 AM
Off the Record
by Sridhar Pappu
The New York Observer
The conservative movement, which at various points has felt slighted, ignored, abused, dismissed and otherwise thoroughly adrift in coverage by New York’s "media elites," has finally found a place in The New York Times. Sort of.
For the next year, David Kirkpatrick—formerly the man charged with covering the book publishing industry—will cover conservatives. Not the Republican Party or the Bush administration. No, it’s real conservatives.
In an announcement earlier this month Times national editor Jim Roberts said that Mr. Kirkpatrick "will examine conservative forces in religion, politics, law, business and the media—a job that will take him across the country and make him a frequent presence in Washington.
"His coverage will cut across the political campaigns this season," Mr. Roberts continued, "but we expect that much of what he does will transcend the race itself and delve into the issues and personalities that drive—and sometimes divide—conservatives."
"I winced a little when I read that job announcement," said Times executive editor Bill Keller, "because it was a little like ‘The New York Times discovers this strange, alien species called conservatives,’ and that’s not what this is about."
If it seems a little wacky, well, it is. Intellectual movements seldom draw the attention of beat reporters. There is, after all, no correspondent covering think tanks for The Washington Post. What The Times’ new beat means to do, Mr. Keller said, is this: Give a great big bear hug to the disparate but at times interconnected conservative organizations—evangelical Christians and anti-abortionists, for example—all as a way of gaining a peek into who the Bush administration listens to, and why.
"Maybe they figured out that’s where the intellectual energy in this country is coming from," said Paul Gigot, editor of the neoconservative’s sports section, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. "Maybe they could save time and read us. Cut out the middleman."
Mr. Gigot’s assessment is not so far off. Since the Bush administration took command in January 2001, the administration has drawn its collective strength and power not so much from individual power-brokers in Congress as from a vast network of conservative groups that have fed it, nourished it and sent it forth with policies into the world.
"You sort of use the shorthand you use for any interest group without always trying to get down in the thinking—without trying to figure out why people believe what they do, how big their constituency is, where it comes from," Mr. Keller said. "We haven’t always had a real three-dimensional understanding of where conservative activists are coming from.
"Everyone knows this is not the most accessible administration in the history of the Beltway," Mr. Keller continued. "And it seems to me their reasoning and their strategies are often clouded in secrecy and spin. And in an election year, that’s likely to be more true than ever."
While perhaps a reasoned, well-thought basis for a beat, The Times assigning a reporter to cover conservatives still feels strange, if not off-putting—a little like Judd Nelson peering through the bathroom window at Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. This is not The New York Sun or even the New York Post, but The Times (or to conservatives, the equivalent of the local-coffeehouse beatnik magazine). Under Mr. Keller’s predecessor, Howell Raines, critics howled that The Times misstated former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s position on the war. When it was revealed in December 2002 that the Raines administration had spiked sports columns disagreeing with the paper’s editorial-page policy, the paper was accused of advancing social policy through its news coverage. In the first days of the war, the New York Post labeled a front page of The Times "News by Saddam," saying the paper was trying to put "the darkest possible spin on Operation Iraqi Freedom."
Asked if he was concerned about any further attention his new beat might draw from conservatives, Mr. Keller said: "That’s really not the point. It’s to understand an important force in American political life, and I think that’s a subject that matters to readers on the left, on the right and somewhere in between."
"I don’t think it’s going to suddenly make Gary Bauer a champion of The New York Times," Mr. Keller said. "The point of it is not to change minds and persuade conservatives that we’re with them. I don’t want anyone to think that we’re aligned with them ideologically."
So far, the early attempts have felt stilted, forced: a little like trying to write the story of Brooklyn’s feelings about their would-be basketball team and arena by talking to people walking down Flatbush Avenue. There’s been a story on how "Bush’s Push for Marriage Falls Short for Conservatives." Mr. Kirkpatrick followed with a piece reporting that "Conservative Groups Differ on Bush Words on Marriage." On Jan. 25, Mr. Kirkpatrick wrote a story titled "A Concerned Bloc of Republicans Wonders Whether Bush Is Conservative Enough."
Susan E. Tifft, co-author of The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, said The Times’ new area of study is a throwback to a long-standing Timesman mantra.
"Scotty Reston once said the biggest story of our time or any time is change itself," Ms. Tifft said. "That’s one of the hardest things to cover. It’s not really a trend. What they’re trying to do here is get at this idea—change itself."
When asked why The Times hadn’t dispatched a correspondent to cover the far left, Mr. Keller said: "If the country was governed by a liberal executive branch and a liberal Congress, and the best access to their thinking would be assigning a reporter to cover liberal thinkers and lobbyists, I’d be happy to do that.
"It just happens to be conservatives in this case," Mr. Keller said...........
This column ran on page 6 in the 2/2/2004 edition of The New York Observer. |
