New York Times Going Soft?
While reading this article by the BBC about Eisner’s plan to finally quit Disney I ran into this interesting item on the Save Disney site.
It’s not the characters that are “tired”…
Elsewhere on these pages is a story from the August 30 edition of The New York Times, all about an old friend, Mickey Mouse.In an article clearly meant to be a “puff piece” for Disney, and especially for the Consumer Products Division, the headline features the Company’s most valuable symbol and personality as “Disney’s Tired Mouse,” and suggests that he (Mickey) needs some “Nike Swoosh.”
I suspect this was not what the executive being interviewed wished to convey about Mickey… But somehow he must have conveyed that impression to the writer. He is, after all, a long-time veteran of the Nike Corporation and thus used to treating nearly everything as a “brand”…
Why I found this interesting was because I’ve noticed that the Times seems to be doing a lot of “puff pieces” lately. These are articles written to promote something and are never good for readers since they are lop-sidedly promotional. I encourage readers to find them and complain about it.
I have to ask, so what else is new? The NYT has been a lot of cage-lining for a while now. I find the only useful articles are the cultural ones (architecture, movie reviews, etc.). Everything else reeks of “puff piece.”
Indeed, the most damaging, IMO, were all the “puff pieces” leading up to the war in Iraq. The articles were all “lop-sidedly promotional[ly]” in favor of the war and failed to take a critical eye to the Administration’s case. For example, since his speech before the U.N., Colin Powell’s evidence has fallen to pieces. You wouldn’t know that it was suspect from the breathless reporting at the time.
This is just one example of many, of the “lop-sidedly promotional” reporting done on its pages. I would merely add that the “promotion” is broader than “for a company” as the term normally implies.
Many news junkies would agree with A’s comment. If an issue raises even a modicum of crankiness or controversy, a sanitizing cloak of cover-your-ass “moderation” descends in an instant. Since we live in a land where Constitutional protections rarely allow big ticket lawsuits against the Press to succeed, that fear can’t be held up as rationale — as the same sort of crude lie is used, somehow, to excuse rising health care costs.
When the same event results in sharp, incisive editorializing and analysis in extra-US newspapers — and blunted platitudes held together with library paste in our own bastions of the 4th Estate — I can only thank the Internet for at least a minimal chance to read about what the hell is going on in the world. Bush’s lies and Blair’s were skewered, daily, in newspapers running the gamut from the MIRROR to the FINANCIAL TIMES. My favorites being the GUARDIAN and the Glasgow SUNDAY HERALD. The runup to US invasion of Iraq was uniformly unquestioned or examined by mealymouthed Talking Heads, print or electronic, in a fashion unmatched since the days of Goebbels!
All of us can doubtless repeat any number of similar tales on a local or regional scale. There are rare tales of independence from corporate mass media. Their scarcity proves the rule.
I am an American; but sadly I must resort to the wonderful BBB television nightly news, and BBC.com to obtain the real news from the US and World.