Gotta Love Okrent, But He Concedes Too Much

Critics of the NYT’s supposed liberal bias have a new ally, the paper’s own bold and independent-minded Public Editor, Daniel Okrent. Signed to a one-year contract in the wake of the Times Blair-Raines-Tiger-Augusta fiasco(s), Okrent has distinguished himself as a keen observer and (mostly) fair-minded evaluator of deceptive and questionable journalistic practices – such as partial quotes, reliance on unnamed sources, and misleading headlines – which, apparently, creep in even to America’s most esteemed newspaper.
 
In his latest piece, Okrent bluntly discusses an issue that conservatives have been hyperventilating about for years.

“Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” asks the headline. “Of course it is,” answers Okrent.

And later: “…if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of [the social issues, like gay rights, gun control, abortion, etc.]…you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.” 

And still more:  "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…and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear."

[Okrent, it should be noted, limited his discussion in this column to social issues; he says he will “get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall.” Looking forward, though I suspect conservatives will be somewhat disappointed with his conclusions.]

All of this is well and good. Excellent, even. And credit is due to Okrent for writing the piece – and even to the Times itself, for allowing such a self-critique to appear in its pages.

However, in his discussion of the Times treatment of gay marriage – the issue that he uses as the paradigmatic example of problematic Times coverage – Okrent unduly concedes a crucial premise to the Times' liberal ideology and, inadvertently, destroys his own case against the paper's coverage of social issues.

Okrent says that he doesn’t mind the laudatory editorials or the magazine article “that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King.” He even admits, seemingly, that he agrees with this comparison. “That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.”

However, cautions Okrent, the Times hasn’t given its audience the complete picture. A credible newspaper must make certain that “all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination,” and the Times – with “a tone that approaches cheerleading” – has not done so in the case of gay marriage. In fact, articles on the “potentially nettlesome effects of gay marriage have been virtually absent from The Times since the issue exploded last winter.” Among the stories the Times has ignored: “Congressional testimony from a Stanford scholar [Stanley Kurtz] making the case that gay marriage in the Netherlands has had a deleterious effect on heterosexual marriage…potential impact of same-sex marriage on tax revenues, and the paucity of reliable research on child-rearing in gay families.”

Okrent’s criticism is exactly on target, but he doesn’t realize that he has already invalidated his own argument – with his admission that the advocates for same-sex marriage are the modern-day equivalent of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. For, if today’s gay marriage movement really is the equivalent of the 1960s civil rights movement, then who cares what the effects of gay marriage might be? It’s a civil right!? Think about it. At the height of the civil rights movement, when the overriding concern was (or should have been) abolishing discrimination against America’s black citizens, was that the time for newspapers to publish studies about the deleterious effects of integrating America’s population? Not unless the newspaper represented the KKK. The point is: when a civil right is truly at stake, when there is a gross societal injustice that demands immediate redress, academic arguments (except for national security-type emergencies) against granting the civil right are irrelevant and inappropriate.

And that, I’m guessing, is exactly what the Times would respond to Okrent’s critique; in the fight against "discrimination," there's simply no time to stop to consider the consequences of ending the discrimination. And Okrent has painted himself into the corner of accepting the Times’ liberal premise. Unfortunately, the apt response to the liberal claim – that the gay marriage issue is in no way meaningfully equivalent to the civil rights movement of the 1960s – will need a champion other than the Times Public Editor.