What is the matter with the NY Times Editors? Where in Hell has their journalistic judgment gone?

Or did they never have any, and we just thought they were competent because those who questioned their competence had no platform for making their questions public before the Internet and bloggers?

Wait; do I read this correctly? All these years after Judy Wossname and WMDs, the NYT is only now being added to the list of "newspapers acting badly"?

By that logic, we're hardly "victims" of bad journalism. After all, nobody is holding a gun to our heads and forcing us to buy into all the nonsense being packaged as journalism.

A few weeks ago, Kurtz over at WaPo admitted that George Will's facts about climate change were wrong but found it so innocuous a lie, he pointedly refused to issue a correction. And now here is another just perfect example of how clueless and insulated they are from the rest of us.

And they hold conventions and wring their hands and whine the question over and over, "Why, o why do they not read us anymore"? When we, the customers tell them that though, the response is always, "You don't know what you're talking about so shut up and leave the adults in peace to figure this out". I won't even go into their refusal to accept responsibility for their skewed and biased "journalism" that has helped start two wars and ruin our economy.

They deserve to fail. Disasterously.

Honestly, though. Isn´t she right?

Wow, I had no idea these two Merkins were related. I've been reading Daphne for years. Her book "Dreaming of Hitler" contains essays about "the subversive thrill of shoplifting" [hmmmm] and "the sexual pleasures of spanking."

"As the saying has it, "There's a little larceny in everyone," writes Daphne in the essay "The Shoplifter's High."

Especially among your relatives and acquaintances, Daphne!

Those of you who argue that the "victims" helped create the crime likely agree that the crime of rape is largely prompted by the kind of clothing women wear. If you wore a chador and were always accompanied outside by your brother, husband or father, and your home had great security, the likelyhood of bein raped would be reduced. Same thing if you stuff money in your mattress, you would deter being ripped off by securities firms and advisers.

And seriously, given the attitude newspapers have toward their own product, there is wonder why people don't want to buy them? Yeah, they need a bailout too, because like rotten investments banks they too need to be subsidized. All these susbisidies are going to make Soviet centralized planning the new "it" in economic theory and development.

And then there is the NYT's arguments that nepotism and hereditary elites are not a problem in the US. Not only do they exist but they are running our country, and its instituions like the NYT, into the ground.

When I was an EM in the navy long ago, there were endless jokes with newbies about "why didn't you go for a merkin fitter rating when you had the chance". I still go there every time I see the word. I even heard it used as a pickup line in a bar in Jacksonville.

Strange world.

And they wonder why the amount of readers keeps going down.

Perhaps Rosenthal believes that because the NYT is the establishment's paper of record, no one will know they made such an obvious mistake if they don't admit it themselves.

What makes it particularly egregious is that Merkin's only hook for writing the piece and getting it published was her brother's involvement. I wonder if Rosenthal and Merkin will have to answer questions about prospective jury-tampering.

Rosenthal needs to get some better "better judgement".

No One was holding a gun to Merkin's head, forcing him to funnel funds to Madoff.

Boy, that 'holding a gun to someone's head' is so overused, so improperly.

Isn't Daphne Merkin famous for a New Yorker essay about how she likes to be spanked? Ah, yes, here it is.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/02/26/1996_02_26_098_TNY_CARDS_000373793

I too have been reading Daphne Merkin for years, as a consequence of which I pretty much assume, a priori, that it's pointless to read her work as if it had the same implications it would if it were, you know, a rational appercu of her subject.

I mean, it could just be me. But fwiw, I've always thought of the near-total absence of sense and/or substance on a basic narrative level as her chief rhetorical attribute, in strictly literary terms. And while I guess I have to admit that I have sometimes found it diverting to try to spot whatever the real self-serving sub-textual emotional drama lay behind the screen of the (typically, if sometimes rather cryptically) disclosed self-serving emotional drama that Daphne Merkin was failing to distinguish from her ostensible subject, it's a pretty fucking tedious exercise most of the time. And a depressing one, too, actually, because: Poor her, to have such an excess of the repressed that its return, in the form of published writing, would probably translate into enough money for her to live on, should she ever find herself tragically bereft of independent income.

Anyway. I had a point. And this was it:

She's condemning not defending her brother in that piece, imo. Because she traditionally depicts herself as the boldly convention-bucking break-away Merkin, who saved herself by refusing to endorse the family myth, thus becoming Glorious and Artistic.

From which it follows that the only Madoff "victim" who didn't have a gun to his head she'd even be sufficiently interested in to bother noticing is the one to whom she's saying, "Ha, ha! Told you so!" -- ie, Ezra Merkin.

That's why there's all that hackneyed shit about family and daddy-substitutes.

And of course, you can sort of see how that'd just be business-as-usual as far as Andrew Rosenthal was concerned, too. Poor little freaks. More to be pitied than censured, I say.

"Rosenthal's and the Times' siege mentality strategy is doubly puzzling"

Does the name Judy Miller ring any bells?

The NY Times is arguably the worst newspaper in the US, given the huge gap between its reputation and its performance. Nothing outside of its sports results and the TV listings can be believed. It's an ethical sinkhole.

I can't wait to see them go out of business. The last published issue of the Times will be a golden moment for journalism.

Nobody's holding a gun to my head making me resubscribe to the New York Times. Andrew Rosenthal hates his readers, viz. his response to criticism when he gate Kristol a column on the op-ed page.

Merkin was quite the philanthropist as well. From the WSJ:

As chairman of the investment committee at Yeshiva University, Mr. Merkin put about $15 million of the school's endowment into Ascot. He thus captured a 1.5% annual fee for himself, even though Yeshiva could have given its money directly to Bernie Madoff -- who was later treasurer of the university's board -- for nothing.

Maybe if newspapers were able to suss out Bush's ineptness, debunk WMD, cease promoting global warmining deniers, etc. people would be more likely to be willing to pay to buy them.

Where is I.F. Stone when you need him? TPM is a start but they rolled over for Obama.

Remember, Rosenthal is the one who thought that signing on William Kristol for the op-ed page was a brilliant idea!