Renata Adler Rips The New York Times a New One

A few years ago Renata Adler wrote a book about the decline of The New Yorker at the departure of its long term editor, William Shawn, and happened to quote a letter she had written Shawn declining to review a book about Judge John Sirica, famous from the Watergate scandal. "Contrary to his reputation as a hero," Adler wrote, "Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime."

This single sentence led to a firestorm, mostly in The New York Times. It published no less than eight pieces critical of Adler and her book and mostly critical of the single sentence quoted above. It also refused to print a letter from Adler defending it. Harpers, however, did publish an essay by Adler. There she discusses the sentence and lays out her substantial support for it and, in the process, demolishes the Times's approach, as well as Sirica. Adler's essay is a masterwork of rhetoric and careful thought.

And I mean careful thought. That does mean that the essay or the words she chooses are sterile; it means that the words, sentences, and structure of the essay are smart. It also means her essay demonstrates, again and again, careful reading of the work of others and how to pick it and its support apart. And it demonstrates, as well, how solid support is built. Adler's analysis applies to her own work as well as the work she critiques.

Adler's essay demonstrates, too, that there are no inherent "good guys" and "bad guys" in the world. I read The New York Times and consider it the "paper of record," but it is written by people and is capable of grave errors. And Adler, despite the careful thought her Harper's essay betrays, is prone to exaggeration. While her book starting all this was entitled The Last Days of the New Yorker, The New Yorker still publishes, and despite a period of lesser quality right after Shawn has recovered to an extent and is still highly regarded. It has not had its last days. Adler once said famous movie critic Pauline Kael's collection When the Lights Go Down was "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." That's sounds witty but it is not literally true. Any moment of worth in Kael's general stream of nonsense -- and there are many -- disproves Adler.

The Times's approach to the controversial Sirica sentence was pitched right into Adler's wheelhouse, for her core concern expressed in The Last Days of the New Yorker and in When the Lights Go Down and in other essays is the decline of rigorous thought and investigation into facts and the reliance instead on second hand accounts and ad hominem reasoning. The Times was guilty of both of these in its articles. it's a general flaw that people have. That, of course, does not make it right.