‘How do you say that about a 2-year-old?’ Amid scandal, parents reckon with the politics of shame
From: Reuters news agency, Friday, January 25, 2013
WELCOME TO NEW YORK TIMES HOME. There are no shortages of newsrooms in New York. But for years, the Times has had one of the best.
And this year, amid a scandal over a book in which some prominent staff members claim to have been sexually harassed and, in one case, fired, the paper was the subject of repeated attempts by media types to find out what, exactly, a “Times” is.
It was only after a Times editor and a journalist friend read a New York Times op-ed piece by Tom Friedman, the former Obama administration official who is now a columnist for the Washington Post, that people started to understand for sure.
Friedman is a good guy, as far as many of us can tell: hard-working, good at his job, smart, even-keeled, a great family man. But Friedman is also a Republican. And when he wrote, “How do you say that about a 2-year-old?” the article was picked up by bloggers and conservative media.
At first, the editors of the Times tried to ignore the controversy, to say the least. So, for example, a piece they wrote about Mitt Romney’s comments about being raised by missionaries, which was published by his Republican opponent, Paul Ryan, was marked by a sub-headline that read: “Romney: No clue about America.”
To be fair, the editors didn’t say that, exactly. But the meaning was clear: That Romney is clueless about the country; that he doesn’t seem to know much about America. Maybe Romney, or maybe the Times, has an agenda: to teach its readership how not to look like Romney.
That was the reaction on the hard right – the Breitbart blog, and others, including Glenn Beck’s show, Fox News
