Reading the (Funny) Papers or My NY Times Problem

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.
This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.

Reading the (Funny) Papers or My NY Times Problem

Once upon a time, I only read and wrote for the most radical, left, and feminist media on the face of the earth. Reluctantly, suspiciously, I read just one establishment, “grown up” paper: The New York Times. After all, it was my home town paper and being as provincial as most Manhattanites, I somehow still believed (you learn this from the drinking water) that the Times covered issues in an objective, sophisticated, and leading-edge way.

I still subscribe to and read the Times but never first and sometimes not at all. (I love how they cover weddings and usually check their obituaries). But duty calls and, as a culture warrior on the front lines, so to speak, I have to read the Times.

But now, I first read The New York Sun, Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Commentary, Middle East Quarterly, the American Jewish media, the online Israeli and Middle Eastern papers and then check about twenty five other internet websites beginning with FrontPage and Pajamas Media in order to steel myself for the ordeal of reading The Paper of Record-yes, the same paper which buried news of the Holocaust on its back pages; the one which today, chooses, positions, and captions photos in such a way that over time, its readers have come to believe that Israel is really an “apartheid” nation state and that every single Palestinian, including the suicide killers, their handlers, and their billionaire funders are barefoot, unarmed, and innocent victims of Israeli and Jewish aggression.

Just the other day-on precisely August 11, 2007, what fresh outrage blinded me and caused me to reach for my blood pressure medication? There, right on the front page of the Saturday Times was a photo four columns wide and five inches high. It was not about the American miners who were, at the time, heartstoppingly, tragically trapped in Utah…Continue Reading on Chesler Chronicles