As all sentient readers (and innumerable ex-readers) of The New York Times know, but executive editor Bill Keller seemingly does not, among the things that make the paper so relentlessly irritating is that its left/liberal assumptions are pervasive and inescapable. As my first Diary entry noted, even turning to the food or fashion section one can never be sure of finding refuge from a gratuitous, nasty aside about Sarah Palin, or a bit of offhand rah-rahing for Obamacare, or the conviction that those twin monsters, diversity and multiculturalism, are unquestioned goods.
The sports section is, of course, especially egregious in pushing the paper’s social agenda, enthusiastically embracing the victim mentality in its every twisted guise on the court or diamond or gridiron. Most memorably, there was former Executive Editor Howell Raines’s feminist-inspired jihad against Augusta National and, even more notoriously, the paper’s shameless crusade against the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of rape.
But the paper just as fully reveals itself in it treatment of less sensational, day-to-day controversies. Take columnist William C. Rhoden’s piece on the suspension of Washington Wizards’ star Gilbert Arenas for responding to a dispute with a teammate over an unpaid gambling debt by producing four guns in the locker room and suggesting the teammate choose one. (No problem – the teammate, also black, had one of his own). Now as Times readers know, Rhoden, author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete, makes an absolute fetish of race. He never hesitates to raise the subject even when there seems no reason to, as when, typically, he used the World Series as an excuse to reflect on the Phillies’ racist past.
So one would think, as the concerned black man he so relentlessly portrays himself to be, not to mention as a competent journalist ostensibly interested in the full truth, that he might use the Arenas/guns story as an opportunity to look at the nihilism that is so destructive an aspect of inner-city black culture, with particular attention to the epidemic fatherlessness that fosters it.
Au contraire. Rhoden’s stock-in-trade, like that of the Times generally, is racism – white racism – and since there was none of that here, he writes not a syllable about race, indeed, magesterially dismisses those who “will offer treatises deploring the N.B.A. and hip-hop culture.” The piece’s real (exculpatory) point is made when he quotes former NBA star John Lucas, who “cautioned against using the Arenas affair to make generalizations about the N.B.A. Gun violence and easy access to firearms are national scourges that often come into focus when high-profile athletes are involved. ‘It’s in the suburbs, it’s in the inner city, it’s all over,’ Lucas said. ‘It’s not just the basketball culture, it’s in all cultures.'”
Right, sure it is. Poke around the locker room at Scarsdale High and you’re sure to find a bunch of Glocks in there, too. Nothing to see here, move along.
Just another day on The New York Times sports page.
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