[lit-ideas] class and value
- From: Eric Yost <Mr.Eric.Yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2005 12:46:17 -0400
Extract of story at:
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/04731992.asp
All classed up and nowhere to go
The New York Times goes slumming: How the paper’s allegiance to the
ruling elite distorts its look at class in America
BY CHRIS LEHMANN
CLASS REALLY DOES MATTER: by reducing 'class' to behavior and culture,
the Grey Lady ignored cold economic truths and looked down her nose at
how the other half -- and growing -- lives.
AT FIRST GLANCE, "Class Matters" — the New York Times’ epic inquiry into
the widening economic divisions of the new millennium — appears to be
what its editors solemnly claim: a well-intentioned effort to reckon
with a serious social condition, one that notoriously eludes clear
understanding in America, so long hymned as the planet’s pre-eminent
land of opportunity. Alas, however, the New York Times is in no position
to deliver. In contrast to, say, the paper’s conscientious reporting on
the ’60s-era civil-rights movement in the South, its foray into class
consciousness suffers from a fatal flaw. Social class is at the core of
the Times’ institutional identity, which prevents the paper from
offering the sort of dispassionate, critically searching discussion the
subject demands.
Even as the paper takes hits for its alleged liberal bias, it retains a
supremely undeviating affinity for the cultural habits of the rich and
celebrated — most obviously in its Sunday Vows section, which features
short celebratory biographies of newly consummated mateships from the
overclass. The Sunday Styles section — along with the Home and Dining
sections, the T: Style magazine, and the recently added Thursday Styles
— delivers breathless dispatches on the mores, tastes, status worries,
and modes of pecuniary display favored by the coming generation of
anxious downtown arrivistes.
So the many installments of "Class Matters" — a now nearly completed
work in progress — come across less like an authoritative exercise in
social criticism than like an oddly anxious series of Tourette’s-style
asides, desperately sidestepping the core economic inequities that the
Times can never quite afford to mention outright. Getting the New York
Times to explain the real operation of social class in America is, at
the end of the day, a lot like granting your parents exclusive license
to explain sex to you: there are simply far too many conflicts that run
far too deep to result in any reliable account of how the thing works.
YOU CAN SEE the trouble early on, in what serves as the series’s mission
statement: the pledge, in the May 15 first-installment "Overview" piece
by Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, that they will chart the way "class
influences destiny in America."
For most people on the receiving end of class prerogatives in this
country — unskilled service workers who find it all but illegal to form
unions, say, or poor black voters in Ohio and Florida — there’s no
"influences" about it: class is destiny in America, delimiting access to
basic social benefits like health care, education, job training, and
affordable housing. Yet for all sorts of painfully self-evident
institutional reasons, the New York Times can’t afford to approach a
subject this potent in a straightforward fashion.
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