ABOUT 10 years ago, toiling for a small newspaper in Arkansas, I was fired by my publisher after writing a column criticizing Frank Broyles, the Arkansas athletic director and a longtime member of Augusta National Golf Club.
Turns out the boss played golf with Broyles, who threatened to end the privilege if something wasn’t done about his Yankee sports columnist. To the publisher, it was an easy call.
“We do things differently here at the Northwest Arkansas Times,” my boss explained, “than they do it at The New York Times.”
He never knew how wrong he really was. We know that now.
Say whatever you will about The Times – about its politics, about its policies, about its tweed-jacketed approach to life and to journalism – but you could never question its ethical core.
Question the Old Gray Lady? Even people who revile journalists and journalism could never seem to bring themselves to do that.
Only now, in the past few days, The Times has been exposed for practicing all the terrible catch phrases it always swore to abhor, starting with hypocrisy, quickly devolving into the worst of all communication millstones: censorship.
The Times’ editorial page made a very big splash for itself a few weeks ago, calling upon Tiger Woods to boycott next spring’s Masters, the better to send a message to the golf tournament’s host club, Augusta National, that its policy of forbidding female membership was no longer an acceptable part of our evolving PC world.
Fair enough. If it seemed a bit, well, loud and splashy for The Times – a paper that not so long ago employed a baseball writer who observed to then-Met manager Davey Johnson, “Davey, the tabloids tell me your ballclub is in disarray” – it certainly was a legitimate opinion, worthy of the space The Times gave it.
Dave Anderson and Harvey Araton, who get paid to write their own legitimate opinions for The Times’ sports pages as columnists, had wholly different takes on Woods’ obligations to further this social issue.
I would have liked to read what they had to say about this subject.
I never will. Neither will you. Nor will anyone else who peeks at The Times’ instantly credibility-proof news hole. Their columns were never printed.
The Times, in an internal memo from managing editor Gerald Boyd, said the columnists’ logic “did not meet our standards.” Interesting. Araton’s logic has been featured in New York City newspaper columns for 15 years. Anderson’s grasp of logic hangs on his wall, in the form of a Pulitzer Prize.
Didn’t matter. The Times spiked their columns. Killed them.
Because the columnists dared to differ from the Gray Lady’s editorial take. Because they dared to do their jobs the way they’re supposed to do them. Beautiful. The Times spent 151 years building its reputation as a bastion for all that is supposedly right and honorable in journalism.
And blew a cannon through all of it in 15 minutes.
The trouble with having heroes is that, too often, it’s impossible for them to live up to the standards you set for them. A kid can idolize Tom Seaver, for instance, grow up to carry a notebook for a living, and the first word Seaver ever speaks to him is one that couldn’t be printed in any respectable newspaper in the world.
The same problem applies when you turn institutions into icons. The Times, for years, has fancied itself as journalism’s gold standard. Perhaps it still does. The rest of us won’t make that mistake any more.
