For her final post on the blog “Public Editor’s Journal,” outgoing New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan described “Five Things I Won’t Miss About the Times – and Seven Things I Will.” The most memorable Won’t-Miss was “2. New York Times Exceptionalism: The idea that whatever The Times does is, by definition, the right thing. In editorial matters, this manifests itself as, ‘It’s news when we say it’s news.’”
Sullivan then listed the Times being slow off the mark on a series of leftist obsessions: the new fuss over the proof of tax evasion in the “Panama Papers,” the espionage trial of Bradley (“Chelsea”) Manning, and the Flint water crisis. “Excellent as it is, The Times is too often self-satisfied. If there’s a fatal flaw – as in Greek tragedy – this may be it.”
As a progressive, Sullivan also loathed catering to the rich in the Times pages:
4. Articles that celebrate the excesses of the 1 percent – like the recent real estate piece explaining that members of a certain class of homeowners feel they need something called a “four-pack”: a pied-à-terre in New York, a beach house in the Hamptons, a ski villa in Aspen and a winter condo in Miami. These were especially disturbing on days when, after getting off the subway, I once again had seen a particular diminutive woman who seemed for a time to be living in a crate in the Times Square station – or any one of the New Yorkers who lack even one humble home.
The blog FishbowlNY described the article in question, “If It’s March, It Must Be Miami: When Homes Change With the Seasons,” by CNBC wealth editor Robert Frank and published in print March 6. “An accompanying graph...showed that in terms of Peak Millionaire concentration, the winner is London during the month of July.”
Brent Bozell and I made this point in our book Collusion, that the Times would slam Mitt Romney as the worst kind of conspicuous consumer and then fail to note their own upper-class origins and newspaper celebrations of wealth:
So this Thurston Howell III routine not only came from the family newspaper handed down to Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., but from a reporter with the first name of “Trip.” As a reader might suspect, Gabriel was actually born with the name Bertram Gabriel III, who was born in 1955 and then attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and Middlebury College in Vermont, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. His father, Bertram Gabriel Jr., was a real estate developer in Santa Fe, and before that was president of Gabriel Brothers Inc., a New York toy company. Before covering politics for the Times, Gabriel was an editor for what The New Republic dismissed as the paper’s “luxury porn” sections, the ones dedicated to the tastes of conspicuous consumers whose idea of a cheap timepiece is an $890 watch from Prada.
