By Stephanie Ramage
Now that Barack Obama has won the White House, the New York Times has set about painting all those Southerners who voted for John McCain as racists.
In an article today on its front page titled “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” the Times states that it is the South’s racism that has made it irrelevant to politics. The problem is not the South’s waning hold on politics, it’s the Times’ once-growing, now-waning hold on the South.
The Atlanta area is home to 4 million people of diverse backgrounds. Atlanta itself is the hometown of Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. The city and its suburbs are at the very epicenter of the conservative-liberal seismic shift. Yet the Times didn’t think the Atlanta area important enough to explore for its story.
Instead, reporter Adam Nossiter went for the easy, worn-out, stereotypes in Vernon, Ala. It’s Vernon, Ala. What did they expect? But there aren’t many voters—of any kind—in Vernon, Ala. So, how could such demographically feeble places like Vernon have set the tone for a whole region?
If the Times had even a shred of integrity, its editors would have sent a reporter here to the “black Mecca,” in Jimmy Carter’s home state, to find out why there were dozens of McCain-Palin yard signs in my own neighborhood in Decatur, in Ansley Park, in Virginia-Highland, and even in Midtown.
The Times would have us believe that anyone with those signs in their yards must be ignorant, uneducated, impoverished racists. Yet, I know many of the people who planted the signs in their yards and they are professors, doctors, lawyers, writers and scientists. Those signs stand in front of half-million dollar homes and next to driveways where cars bear the faculty and staff tags of Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, Emory, and UGA. Some have Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard alumni insignia. The Times didn’t just miss part of the story. It actually missed the whole story.
That is because the Times cannot come to terms with its own recent past and the shameful truth of its present: its stunning decline, its shrinking circulation, its dwindling revenue. The whole point of a newspaper is to tell the truth—despite the post-modern garbage of subjective-perception-as-truth, the truth is not some flexible reality, not a matter of phrasing in a campaign brochure, the truth is an absolute that journalists, especially, must strive to find.
Rather than admit that it has become the press-release printer for the Democratic Party and fix its skewed, paranoid and partisan coverage, the Times has instead actively sought to belittle those who do not subscribe to it, both figuratively and literally.
In recent years, Times reporters assumed our ignorance and so they continued churning out stories on the “disaster” of Iraq, even as soldiers and aid workers returned to their families, predominantly here in the South thanks to the concentration of military bases in the region, with stories of miraculous improvements, peaceful neighborhoods, and stalwartly pro-American local governments.
Here, as nowhere else in America, with our military installations close by and soldiers walking among us at every airport and shopping mall, we got the news first hand about our growing triumph in Iraq, just as I did from my own brother who is still there, and we are more aware than most Americans of the outright lies perpetrated by the Times.
It’s easy to fool the folks in Manhattan. How many of them have military families? But here in the South, we got the news straight from Iraq, via our own family members.
In September, reporter Dexter Filkins, author of “The Forever War,” wrote a piece lauding progress and a fragile peace in Iraq. Filkins is a marvelous writer and his revelations deserved front page space, but the Times editors stuck his story in an inside section and started it with a thin, un-illustrated strip of gray copy, intending, it seemed, for it to be overshadowed by the wildly illustrated piece next to it.
As if the Times’ Iraq propaganda campaign were not enough, the Times went even further to the left in covering the presidential election, intentionally seeking out the most ignorant, poor and uneducated sources for pro-McCain opinions. No attempt whatsoever was made to find academics or other public intellectuals who supported McCain and they do exist; even here in the South we have some smart people. The reporters went about their business with a preconceived notion handed down to them by lazy editors, threw together stories that told us nothing new, and then handed them over to apparently comatose fact-checkers.
To my knowledge, the Times never canvassed those homes in upper-middle and upper- class Atlanta where McCain-Palin signs shared space with Volvos bearing Ivy League insignia. Every morning on my way to work, I passed those signs, and on one stretch in Ansley Park, the McCain signs outnumbered the Obama signs. The people who live in those houses are not ignorant, poor racists.
But that’s when we get to the Times’ painful past and Obama’s unfortunate economic future.
Those pro-McCain people are economic conservatives, just as I am. Many of them are not even Southerners.
The metro-Atlanta area owes much of its population to a mass exodus from the North in the 1970s and 1980s. It is not insignificant that the era also saw the growth of the Republican Party in the South. Families moved here to escape the crumbling economies of the North. They fled along with their companies who came South to escape the cost of union labor. It is the Southern disdain for unionized labor that produced the South’s economic boom. It is that disdain for union labor that produced the booming black middle class of DeKalb County. It is that disdain for union labor that brought the jobs here that paid for the houses in north Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb.
It was also predominantly northern transplants from Detroit, Chicago, New York, Boston and Philadelphia who led the Fulton County tax rebellion in 1990 and 1991. Having fled high taxes in the suburban north, they didn’t want to find themselves similarly oppressed again here in the South, and in that way they fit right in with native Southerners, both black and white. We Southerners don’t like to pay taxes. We, all of us, of all races, are rugged individualists who like doing things for ourselves, as our history shows. We’re not keen on paying the government. While in college, I worked for a northern tax refugee here in Atlanta who constantly bemoaned how much it had cost to live in Westchester County, New York, and it was I who repeatedly faxed his tax protests to Fulton County Commission Chairman Mitch Skandalakis’ office.
The New York Times’ readership rolls lost those who fled to the South. They kept up their subscriptions for years—the Times was a link to home—but when the Times began, nearly a decade ago, openly lobbying for the Democratic Party and its slate of higher taxes and, more recently, unionized labor, as if it were 1979 all over again, they and their children cancelled their subscriptions by the thousands.
The Times also has a personal beef to pick with the South. Embarrassed by the antics of some members of the so-called “Alabama Mafia,” a group of Southern reporters and editors who dominated its newsroom throughout the 1990s, the Times has created within its walls an anti-Southern sentiment that simply will not allow for fair and balanced coverage of anything between the Mason-Dixon line and Miami. (So you had a blowhard or two who claimed to be covering events when in fact they were half way across the country writing bad Southern gothic novels. Get over it. There are liars, crooks and swindlers in every region and New York, for all of the wonderful things it has, has plenty of those as well.)
As for the South, the fact is that many of those Southerners who voted for McCain rather than Obama were transplanted Northerners.
The fact is that many of them voted for McCain because Obama’s economic policies are frankly scary, particularly for a region that has built its economy on non-union labor. A federal law, such as the Card Check Law presently being promoted by the Democrats, which will pressure even small businesses to unionize, will wreck the economy of the South even more than it has been wrecked by bad federal policies.
The fact is that many of the Southerners who voted for McCain voted against what they perceived to be policies that would necessarily require higher taxes.
The fact is that many of them voted against what sounded a lot like expanded entitlement programs which will only increase the deficit. While McCain’s policies would have increased the deficit, as well, experts overwhelmingly agree that Obama’s policies will increase the deficit even more.
The fact is that many Southerners who voted for McCain are very well educated, wealthy, and cosmopolitan while others are blue-color workers who have a lot of common sense. As most great scholars will tell you, a degree does not confer intellect.
Those are the facts. Where were they in the Times story?
Obviously, the New York Times feels it has a job to do that has nothing whatsoever to do with journalism. It appears more than willing to sacrifice scholarly inquiry, any requirement to accuracy, any responsibility to actually find a new and interesting story, in order to promote the idea that the New York Times is right in its “conservatism equals ignorance” approach —even at the expense of truth.
The Times prides itself on being the antithesis of the “god-and-guns” segment of the American population, but in its shallow story, the Times has indulged in the same old selfish, narrow-minded secular fundamentalism that philosopher David Hume summarized incisively with the phrase, "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
In other words, better to lazily promote dangerous lies and distortions in the name of fighting “god-and-guns” than to do the hard work of reporting and potentially scratch the Times construct of “conservatism equals ignorance.”