Atheism and The New York Times

Following on the coattails of True Freethinker's post The New York Times - Latest Victims of Atheist Propaganda it seemed relevant to note a recent discussion about atheism and atheist propaganda. At the end of this essay we will provide, for those who are interested, in an admission by The New York Times that they are purposefully biased towards the left; although somewhat subconsciously as a result of having their heads in the sands of New York liberal group think.

The following is gleaned from a "rush transcript from 'Hannity,' May 14, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated."1
Bill Maher (posted about here, here, here) noted the following that with regards to the reported rise of atheism in America,

Now, what do you think of the fact that it seems to be a movement that's gaining credibility as of late?
Well, it was on the front page of The New York Times this week in a number of places around the country that you might not think it would be happening, when they put up a billboard that says, "Atheists, please call," you know, there was no complaints. It was just people saying, "Hey, I want to join."

I do not know if the movement is gaining credibility; it is gaining numbers but I would not say credibility. By the way: what movement? I thought that atheism was merely a lack of belief in god(s).

The rush transcript continues with a discussion between Sean Hannity and Bernard (Bernie) Goldberg, author of "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True, Pathetic Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media" (video of the interview here).

SEAN HANNITY: All right.
There is - and I have said this for years - a hostility in the media towards Christian conservatives. Do I overstate that case?

BERNIE GOLDBERG: No, no.
Let's take this - this New York Times story as one example. It's a perfectly legitimate journalism story to talk about the rise of atheism in America, if, indeed, the facts are correct.
Now, The Times put it on page one. Now they're sending a message. The message is: We think this is important.
Well, here is what they didn't think was important. When a book came out by a Syracuse University professor saying that conservatives are more generous than liberals when it comes to giving money to charity, and the reason that they're more generous is because of their Christian faith, or their religious faith, that story didn't wind up on page one of The New York Times or page two or page five page 10. In fact, there was no news story about that.
There was no book review of the guy's book. There was an op-ed. But that was all.

True Freethinker made note of the book by Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks in the post: Charity - Secular Liberals vs. Religious Conservatives.

As further examples of the New York Times' liberal bias Sean Hannity notes,

Now, in fairness, my book was number one for five weeks in a row, my last book, on The New York Times list. Mark Levin's book is now seven weeks in a row. He has not been invited on any of the mainstream media shows. You went through this same type of treatment as a conservative...

Next Bernard Goldberg makes a point about the heads in the sands of New York liberal group think to which I alluded above and the New York Times will admit below:

...a lot of liberal elites, including liberal elites inside news rooms, think that people who believe in an invisible man who lives in the sky and, you know, can send fire down with his fingertips, people who believe that, the elites think, aren't too smart, because that's irrational, they think.
Well, what is the opposite of that? Atheism. Atheism is rational to them. It's smart to them. It's hip in places like Manhattan. So, that's why atheism is given this kind of prominence on page one, and a lot of things having to do with religion in a good sense just aren't.

He then retells an event from when he was at CBS News and had occasion to hear a conference call with producers from all around the country. The producer in Washington referred to Gary Bauer, head of a family values organization "Family Research" by stating, "you know, that little nut from the Christian group":

GOLDBERG: "...And not one person on the conference call said anything, like, "You can't say that."

SEAN HANNITY: Yes.

BERNIE GOLDBERG: Could you imagine if a CBS News producer said, "Jesse Jackson, the nut from the black group," or "some nut from the Hispanic group" or "some nut from the gay group"?

SEAN HANNITY: Good point.

BERNIE GOLDBERG: That would never be tolerated, but - but saying somebody is a nut from a Christian group, no problem.

I am afraid that this is so commonplace and expected that the reaction of many will be "So what?"

The New York Times appears to be placing the rise of atheism in America in its front page during a time of worldwide recession and America fighting two wars because they are excited by the prospect of a new world atheist order.

For whoever may be interested: following is the entire text of Daniel Okrent who at the time of the writing was The New York Times' Public Editor. The New York Times is quick to note that "The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own."

Daniel Okrent, "THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?," The New York Times, July 25, 2004

OF course it is.

The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left -- and there are plenty -- generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy.

I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.
Across the gutter, the Op-Ed page editors do an evenhanded job of representing a range of views in the essays from outsiders they publish -- but you need an awfully heavy counterweight to balance a page that also bears the work of seven opinionated columnists, only two of whom could be classified as conservative (and, even then, of the conservative subspecies that supports legalization of gay unions and, in the case of William Safire, opposes some central provisions of the Patriot Act).

But opinion pages are opinion pages, and ''balanced opinion page'' is an oxymoron. So let's move elsewhere. In the Sunday magazine, the culture-wars applause-o-meter chronically points left. On the Arts & Leisure front page every week, columnist Frank Rich slices up President Bush, Mel Gibson, John Ashcroft and other paladins of the right in prose as uncompromising as Paul Krugman's or Maureen Dowd's. The culture pages often feature forms of art, dance or theater that may pass for normal (or at least tolerable) in New York but might be pretty shocking in other places.

Same goes for fashion coverage, particularly in the Sunday magazine, where I've encountered models who look like they're preparing to murder (or be murdered), and others arrayed in a mode you could call dominatrix chic. If you're like Jim Chapman, one of my correspondents who has given up on The Times, you're lost in space. Wrote Chapman, ''Whatever happened to poetry that required rhyme and meter, to songs that required lyrics and tunes, to clothing ads that stressed the costume rather than the barely clothed females and slovenly dressed, slack-jawed, unshaven men?''

In the Sunday Styles section, there are gay wedding announcements, of course, but also downtown sex clubs and T-shirts bearing the slogan, ''I'm afraid of Americans.'' The findings of racial-equity reformer Richard Lapchick have been appearing in the sports pages for decades (''Since when is diversity a sport?'' one e-mail complainant grumbled). The front page of the Metro section has featured a long piece best described by its subhead, ''Cross-Dressers Gladly Pay to Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side.'' And a creationist will find no comfort in Science Times.

Not that creationists should expect to find comfort in Science Times. Newspapers have the right to decide what's important and what's not. But their editors must also expect that some readers will think: ''This does not represent me or my interests. In fact, it represents my enemy.'' So is it any wonder that the offended or befuddled reader might consider everything else in the paper -- including, say, campaign coverage -- suspicious as well?

TIMES publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn't think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper's viewpoint ''urban.'' He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means ''We're less easily shocked,'' and that the paper reflects ''a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility.''

He's right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears, a condition magnified by the been-there-done-that irony afflicting too many journalists. Articles containing the word ''postmodern'' have appeared in The Times an average of four times a week this year -- true fact! -- and if that doesn't reflect a Manhattan sensibility, I'm Noam Chomsky.

But it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.

The gay marriage issue provides a perfect example. Set aside the editorial page, the columnists or the lengthy article in the magazine (''Toward a More Perfect Union,'' by David J. Garrow, May 9) that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.

But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it's disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that ''For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy'' (March 19); that the family of ''Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home'' (Jan. 12) is a new archetype; and that ''Gay Couples Seek Unions in God's Eyes'' (Jan. 30). I've learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I've met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I've been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.

Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn't even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you'd have the makings of a life insurance commercial.

This implicit advocacy is underscored by what hasn't appeared. Apart from one excursion into the legal ramifications of custody battles (''Split Gay Couples Face Custody Hurdles,'' by Adam Liptak and Pam Belluck, March 24), potentially nettlesome effects of gay marriage have been virtually absent from The Times since the issue exploded last winter.

The San Francisco Chronicle runs an uninflected article about Congressional testimony from a Stanford scholar making the case that gay marriage in the Netherlands has had a deleterious effect on heterosexual marriage. The Boston Globe explores the potential impact of same-sex marriage on tax revenues, and the paucity of reliable research on child-rearing in gay families. But in The Times, I have learned next to nothing about these issues, nor about partner abuse in the gay community, about any social difficulties that might be encountered by children of gay couples or about divorce rates (or causes, or consequences) among the 7,000 couples legally joined in Vermont since civil union was established there four years ago.

On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires. This has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one's own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning. Six years ago, the ownership of this sophisticated New York institution decided to make it a truly national paper. Today, only 50 percent of The Times's readership resides in metropolitan New York, but the paper's heart, mind and habits remain embedded here. You can take the paper out of the city, but without an effort to take the city and all its attendant provocations, experiments and attitudes out of the paper, readers with a different worldview will find The Times an alien beast.

Taking the New York out of The New York Times would be a really bad idea. But a determination by the editors to be mindful of the weight of its hometown's presence would not.

With that, I'm leaving town. Next week, letters from readers; after that, this space will be occupied by my polymathic pal Jack Rosenthal, a former Times writer and editor whose name appeared on the masthead for 25 years. I'm going to spend August in a deck chair and see if I can once again read The Times like a civilian. See you after Labor Day.

1. 1. "New York Times Fueling War on Religion?," Fox News, May 15, 2009