THE GAYING OF THE GRAY LADY :

What is the New York Times promoting? (Brent Bozell, May 29, 2002, Town Hall)

[R]ichard Berke, the [NY Times's] national political correspondent since 1993, is being promoted to Washington editor, the No. 2 job in a bureau of more than 50 people.

[T]here's [an] event from 2000 that underscores why Berke's promotion is different than the usual liberals-promote-liberals plan. At that spring's annual conference of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, the openly gay Berke rejoiced at the strides homosexuals have made in the nation's newsrooms. He told the crowd "there are times when you look at the front-page meeting [of the Times] and ... literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals."

If affirmative action and multiculturalism are about making workplaces more accurately reflect the racial, sexual, religious makeup of the nation, then how can you justify this?

In Ambling Into History. his fine book about George W. Bush and the 2000 campaign, Frank Bruni says the following about what he observed in the President after 9-11 :

Bush's spirituality was perhaps crucial to his ability to handle himself so well in public--and by all accounts, in private--after the attacks. Reporters in general tended not to look for or consider this kind of influence, because so few of them put all that much stock in religion, which they associated with extreme political views based on moral disapproval and condemnation. I confess to membership in this group. And perhaps because of this prejudice, which is probably the right thing to call it, administration officials seldom dwelled on Bush's faith when they described the way he was coping at difficult junctures.

Doesn't this raise the question of whether the Times compromised its coverage of candidate Bush by putting a gay reporter on the beat who acknowledges not being able to comprehend the core of Mr. Bush's being? And is it possible to imagine this situation being reversed : would the Times have a born-again Christian reporter cover an openly gay Presidential candidate? Yeah, right.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 30, 2002 1:08 PM