The Times at Work
23rd August 2015
When I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book Between the World and Me, I noted that he was this year’s officially certified angry black. He is officially certified by the New York Times through Jennifer Schuessler, the Times culture critic and gatekeeper. Schuessler’s July 17 profile of Coates attests that Coates’s book “has had an almost frictionless glide straight to the heart of the national conversation.” (The official publication date of the book was July 14; Schuessler was on top of the story.) I wrote about Coates’s book in the City Journal essay “An updated racial hustle.”
Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow, a book decrying the “mass incarceration” of blacks in the United States. Alexander was 2012’s officially certified angry black. She was certified by Schuessler an adoring profile when her book took off in paperback that year. I wrote about Alexander’s book in the Power Line post “Deep secrets of racial profiling (4).”
When the Times got around to assigning Coates’s dreadful book for review, whom did they turn to? Michelle Alexander, of course. It’s almost funny.
Imagine an immensely large circle of people in New York, each breathing the other’s exhaust.
The Times’s treatment of Coates’s new book represents a variation on an old story. Earlier this year Bryan Burrough’s book Days of Rage on the terrorist left prompted me to reflect on the role played by the New York Times as an instrument of celebrity propping up the revolutionary left. As a corollary, the Times is invested in protecting the reputation of the left. It is, shall we say, not given much to introspection regarding the impact of its judgments.