Author: George Salamon

How many Muslim readers hath the New York Times?

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By GEORGE SALAMON / The decision of The New York Times not to depict the cover of Charlie Hebdo after ten of the French magazine’s journalists had been murdered by Islamic terrorists has drawn much deserved criticism in the United States and abroad, in comments from the editorial page editor of the Denver Post to a reporter’s charge of “cowardice” in the German newsweekly DER SPIEGEL. Within the ranks of Times editors the decision not to depict the cover, which showed a tearful Prophet Muhammad holding up a “Je Suis Charlie” sign, was defended by Executive Editor Dean Baquet: “My first most important job is to serve the readers of The New York Times, and a big chunk of the readers of The New York Times are people who would be offended by showing satire of the Prophet Muhammad…That reader is a guy who lives in Brooklyn and is Islamic and has a family and is devout and just happens to find that insulting.” Some might be surprised that among Brooklyn’s Muslim population (3.73% or 95,000 out of 2.5 million) there can be found a “big chunk” of the Times’ readership.

Journalist imitates Sergeant Schultz: “I know Nozzink” about the Paris attacks

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Right after the January 7 murderous attacks on the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” and a kosher supermarket in Paris, TV and internet commentators regaled or outraged us with immediate analyses of what these attacks might mean. Predictably enough, conservative pundits saw in them another attack on Western values by radical Islam while liberal and left ones emphasized the “blowback” element of Islamic rage against the West’s often violent interference in the politics and culture of Muslim countries. Comments, lacking information about the attackers’ inspiration and motivation, were therefore mostly recycled hot air. But one internet journalist outdid many others in intellectual laziness and shallowness the Journalism Iconoclast decries. And that was the onetime Washington Post and MSNBC wunderkind Ezra Klein, now Editor in Chief of the VOX media website.

“We’ll always have Paris…” or not. The “blah, blah, blah” response to the attack

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“We’ll always have Paris,” Humphrey Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman in the 1942 movie classic. After the response, so far, to the murder of ten Charlie Hebdo journalists and two policemen by Islamic gunmen on January 7, maybe not. There’s plenty of sadness and rage in France, but the response by world leaders and in establishment media recalled the “blah, blah, blah” made famous by Charlie Brown’s teacher in “Peanuts” cartoons.

If I were a rich man, Ya ha deedle deedle, I’d read The New York Times

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BY GEORGE SALAMON// “I think of The Times reader as very-well educated, worldly and likely affluent.” Dean Baquet, Executive Editor, The New York Times
The “affluent” part of Baquet’s quote seems to trouble some of the paper’s readers and was the subject of its public editor’s column on November 9: “Pricey Doughnuts, Pricier Homes, Priced-Out Readers,” (Sunday Review, p.12). Has our national “paper of record” become a voice primarily to the rich? Has it always been so, or has the ravaging rise of income inequality priced The Times out of middle-and-working class readership? And has The Times made attempts to keep readers from those segments of our population? (Did it ever have much of a readership in them is a question that should have been but was not asked.)

2016 Is approaching and it’ll be time for a change. Again. And again. And…

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By GEORGE SALAMON// If watching or reading about the November 4 midterm elections already gave you acid reflux, the next morning’s New York Times could have been stroke inducing: “Did Someone Say ‘2016’? Presidential Contenders Circle” was the headline above an analysis by Jonathan Martin, national political correspondent for the paper.

Unwilling to leave bad enough alone, Martin produced sketches of the dozen leading candidates: two Democrats, one Independent and nine Republicans, reminding us that recycling has replaced what used to pass for each party’s political philosophy. Running Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) against Jeb Bush (R) ought to cause mass renunciations of citizenship and a substantial exodus to Canada and Australia. But it won’t. Instead Americans will accept the parties’ official and advertising slogans that have become par since Dwight Eisenhower (R) convinced the country in 1952 that it was “time for a change” and that he would “clean up the mess in Washington.”