Ignatz
06-24-2010, 02:34 PM
From the The Spectator, 19 November 1994
OCCASIONALLY I receive plaintive letters from our small but loyal expatriate readership in Saudi Arabia. Usually, they complain that their enjoyment of an issue of The Spectator has been diminished by the actions of the Wahabbi religious censors of Riyadh, who had taken their scissors to an article in the magazine, and removed some offending passages before they could be read by the intended recipients.
I am beginning to wonder how long it will be before The Spectator will receive similarly subtle vetting at the hands of the arbiters of political correctness in the United States of America.
At the beginning of the year we published an article (`Black mischief, 1 January) by Amity Shlaes, then a leader writer at the Wall Street Journal which described the fear of blacks pervading the middle-class New York suburbs in the wake of the murder by Colin Ferguson of six whites on the Long Island commuter line. She said that the white commuters were frightened because Colin Ferguson's `manic hostility to whites is shared by many of the city's non madmen. It is hostility shared by the black teenagers who push white teenagers out of [subway] cars when they are trying to board a crowded train. It is shared by the (black) city employee behind the bullet-proof glass at the token booth, who looks at two simultaneous arrivals - one white, one black - and says to the black one with a pointed and gratified smile, "You go first."'
In Britain the article did not cause much of a stir, although a number of journalists, including Anthony Sampson, a director of the far from right-wing Observer, took the trouble to tell me that they thought it a fine piece of work. In New York, a leading firm of stockbrokers reproduced it in its monthly newsletter. The senior partner commented that it was a brilliantly perceptive piece about life in the western world's financial centre, but added, `This article could never have been published in our country.'
The stockbroker's circular finally turned up on the desk of one of Amity Shlaes' colleagues at the Wall Street Journal. It was speedily photocopied and distributed among the editorial staff. Over the next few days, Amity found herself being treated like Peter Sellers's strike-breaker in I'm All Right, Jack. A number of her colleagues would get out of the office lift if they saw her getting in. Others who had eaten with Miss Shlaes for ten years in the staff canteen would refuse to sit at the same table with her. By way of further intimidation a delegation of her colleagues marched on the office of the chairman of Dow Jones Inc., the company which owns the Wall Street Journal.
It did not matter that the offending piece had stated, with characteristic clarity, `The real issue, though, is not race. The statistics bear out the truism that minorities are the greatest victims of minority crimes in cities like New York.' It did not even matter for Amity Shlaes' accusers that they could not demonstrate a single element in her article which was either untrue or even inaccurate. Her crime was far greater than being merely wrong. She had written the truth, regardless of the offence it might cause. And in modern America, or at least in its mainstream media, that is simply not done.
More recently one of Amity's compatriots, Richard Stengel, wrote at my suggestion a piece for The Spectator about the forthcoming trial of O.J. Simpson, the black athlete-turned-film star accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Part of Stengel's article attempted to describe the way in which being charged with the murder of two whites had actually made Simpson more rather than less popular among a number of blacks. Some days later Stengel received a note from Kurt Andersen, the editor of New York magazine, which said that the article was far and away the best he had yet read about the Simpson affair but that, of course, `it could not have been published here'.
We should ponder here the state of modern American journalism: endowed with intelligent and able people who are quite willing to suppress what they know to be valid opinions in order not to endure hostility from their stupider and less able colleagues. And as for their mutual readers, presumably they are considered to be so very stupid that they will neither notice nor mind the wide discrepancy between what they are told and what they experience in their own lives.
As a matter of fact, the readers increasingly do notice the discrepancy, and they increasingly do mind. In recent years the right-wing `ghetto press' - as it is sneeringly called by the mainstream media - has been growing at a remarkable rate. Over the past few years, the American Spectator (no relation), one of the few long-established publications to take a consistent stand against political correctness, has produced an eightfold increase in circulation. Not far behind is the National Review, edited by an ex-Daily Telegraph man and former speech writer for Margaret Thatcher, John O'Sullivan.
It is clear that the American public, as befits a great democratic nation, knows when it is being fed what Damon Runyon called `the old phonus balonus'. Were such papers as the New York Times and the Washington Post not companies with gerrymandered share structures there is little doubt that the ordinary shareholders would be clamouring for some relief from the dead hand of liberal self-censorship.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in American current affairs radio. One programme above all, hosted by Rush Limbaugh, has had an extraordinary popular success. From a standing start five years ago, Mr Limbaugh's show now has an audience of 20 million. Mr Limbaugh, you see, delights in poking fun at the politically correct. He does so with vulgarity and cmdeness. For example, Mr Limbaugh consistently refers to feminists as `feminazis'.
The point is that if the mainstream media jointly and severally decide to censor themselves, then the only people who question that orthodoxy will tend to be those at the extremes. In many ways this is undesirable, and destabilising for American society. It would be far better if part of the mainstream media were to take up the task of challenging the Washington Post/New York Times/Boston Globe consensus. The debate would at least then be civilised, and possibly even interesting.
But, in the meantime, another article written out of America for The Spectator has caused consternation among the grand folk of the media in that country, while passing almost unnoticed here, where the overwhelming majority of our readership live. The article (`Kings of the deal', 29 October) was written by William Cash as a response to a `Special Report' in the October issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair called 'Redefining Power in America: The New Establishment'. The Vanity Fair piece took as its starting point the classic definition of Establishment in The Spectator by the American journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955, then purported to prove that the most powerful men in America were now centred on the West Coast and particularly around Hollywood (this is Vanity Fair, remember), and tried to find common factors among the men (and Barbra Streisand) it termed `The New Establishment'. Prominent among this new elite were Hollywood big-shots such as Michael Ovitz, the town's top agent, Gerald Levin, the president of Time Warner, David Geffen, chairman of the eponymous company, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, and, of course, Barbra. Of course Barbra.
Vanity Fair, with a certain panache and preening, made the point (and made it, and made it) that these people were anything but the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (hereinafter known as Wasp) establishment. `It's their world now. Welcome to it,' concluded Vanity Fair's sortable editor in chief, Graydon Carter.
What struck William Cash, was that, while strenuously pointing out that the New Establishment was not Wasp, Vanity Fair had at no point in a survey the size of a small book mentioned that most of the members of the soi-disant `New Establishment', particularly in Hollywood, are Jewish. In his article, Cash went on to point out that there was in fact nothing new in this, that Hollywood had for well over 50 years been the scene of triumphs on the part of the most talented Jewish businessmen. He concluded that the main difference was that whereas the old moguls such as Warner and Mayer craved acceptance by the old Wasp establishment, and mimicked the staid clubs and horsey pastimes of the Anglophile East Coast elite, the new Hollywood moguls were more secure in their own identity, and needed no such reassurances.
As I say, the article caused little comment in Britain when it was published. However, Mr Michael Williams-Jones, the chief executive of United International Pictures in London, which distributes films abroad for MGM, Paramount and Universal, took the trouble to send faxes of the article to his contacts in Hollywood. Mr Williams-Jones wrote in an accompanying note, `The article is odious in its innuendo and inaccurate in its facts.' At the other end the moguls got in touch with Mr Bernard Weinraub, the highly experienced Los Angeles correspondent of the New York Times. While none of them wished to be quoted personally, Mr Weinraub reported that they were collectively of the view that the Cash article was `disgusting', `despicable', `bigoted' and `odious'.
The most upsetting words which Mr Weinraub was able to quote from Cash's article were that he described Jews as `fiercely competitive', `compulsive storytellers' and `talented negotiators'. Mr Weinraub appended to these exact extracts from Cash's article his own comment: `Few in Hollywood could recall such an antiSemitic article in a mainstream publication.' Following Mr Weinraub's article, the Anti-Defamation League swung into action from its New York office - as a result of this one of our valued advertisers cancelled its contract with us - and the Los Angeles Times ran a leader page article to denounce young William Cash.
The New York Times article appeared on Monday 7 November, and was given the honour of the front page in the paper's Arts section. It quoted me, absolutely accurately, as saying to Mr Weinraub that The Spectator seeks to be `highly polemical and highly controversial. There is a difference between what is deemed acceptable in an American paper and what is deemed acceptable in a British paper. American papers have a code of political correctness. It's simply impossible to run views counter to that product.' Mr Weinraub added, `Mr Lawson, who said he was Jewish, remarked that he did not necessarily agree with the views of authors in his magazine. He said he was "well aware of the sensitivities of Jews" but had had no second thoughts about publishing the article.'
Mr Weinraub had called me on Sunday evening (the 6th). He seemed a little agitated. I suspect he was most offended by William Cash's remark that the New York Times was the `official mouthpiece' of the new Jewish establishment. I now accept without reservation that this allegation is totally without foundation. Aside from anything else, a newspaper which argues in an editorial, as the NY Times did last April, that it would be wrong to elect white males to the US Supreme Court, can hardly be called a Jewish mouthpiece. The NY Times clearly believes that most of the Jewish members of the American legal profession should be barred from the highest office.
Mr Weinraub's own article was very wellwritten - I would have been happy to have published such a piece in The Spectator, although I didn't agree with it. But it did not quite do justice to the spice of our telephone conversation, part of which went as follows:
[INDENT]Self (after being told, at length, how offended le tout Hollywood was by Mr Cash's article): I am quite sensitive to the attitudes of Jews to this sort of thing.
Weinraub : Why do you say that?
Self: Because I am Jewish.
Weinraub: What does that mean?
Self: It means I am a Jew
Weinraub: Jews put Jews in gas ovens!
Self: What a very pleasant analogy.[/INDENT]
OCCASIONALLY I receive plaintive letters from our small but loyal expatriate readership in Saudi Arabia. Usually, they complain that their enjoyment of an issue of The Spectator has been diminished by the actions of the Wahabbi religious censors of Riyadh, who had taken their scissors to an article in the magazine, and removed some offending passages before they could be read by the intended recipients.
I am beginning to wonder how long it will be before The Spectator will receive similarly subtle vetting at the hands of the arbiters of political correctness in the United States of America.
At the beginning of the year we published an article (`Black mischief, 1 January) by Amity Shlaes, then a leader writer at the Wall Street Journal which described the fear of blacks pervading the middle-class New York suburbs in the wake of the murder by Colin Ferguson of six whites on the Long Island commuter line. She said that the white commuters were frightened because Colin Ferguson's `manic hostility to whites is shared by many of the city's non madmen. It is hostility shared by the black teenagers who push white teenagers out of [subway] cars when they are trying to board a crowded train. It is shared by the (black) city employee behind the bullet-proof glass at the token booth, who looks at two simultaneous arrivals - one white, one black - and says to the black one with a pointed and gratified smile, "You go first."'
In Britain the article did not cause much of a stir, although a number of journalists, including Anthony Sampson, a director of the far from right-wing Observer, took the trouble to tell me that they thought it a fine piece of work. In New York, a leading firm of stockbrokers reproduced it in its monthly newsletter. The senior partner commented that it was a brilliantly perceptive piece about life in the western world's financial centre, but added, `This article could never have been published in our country.'
The stockbroker's circular finally turned up on the desk of one of Amity Shlaes' colleagues at the Wall Street Journal. It was speedily photocopied and distributed among the editorial staff. Over the next few days, Amity found herself being treated like Peter Sellers's strike-breaker in I'm All Right, Jack. A number of her colleagues would get out of the office lift if they saw her getting in. Others who had eaten with Miss Shlaes for ten years in the staff canteen would refuse to sit at the same table with her. By way of further intimidation a delegation of her colleagues marched on the office of the chairman of Dow Jones Inc., the company which owns the Wall Street Journal.
It did not matter that the offending piece had stated, with characteristic clarity, `The real issue, though, is not race. The statistics bear out the truism that minorities are the greatest victims of minority crimes in cities like New York.' It did not even matter for Amity Shlaes' accusers that they could not demonstrate a single element in her article which was either untrue or even inaccurate. Her crime was far greater than being merely wrong. She had written the truth, regardless of the offence it might cause. And in modern America, or at least in its mainstream media, that is simply not done.
More recently one of Amity's compatriots, Richard Stengel, wrote at my suggestion a piece for The Spectator about the forthcoming trial of O.J. Simpson, the black athlete-turned-film star accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Part of Stengel's article attempted to describe the way in which being charged with the murder of two whites had actually made Simpson more rather than less popular among a number of blacks. Some days later Stengel received a note from Kurt Andersen, the editor of New York magazine, which said that the article was far and away the best he had yet read about the Simpson affair but that, of course, `it could not have been published here'.
We should ponder here the state of modern American journalism: endowed with intelligent and able people who are quite willing to suppress what they know to be valid opinions in order not to endure hostility from their stupider and less able colleagues. And as for their mutual readers, presumably they are considered to be so very stupid that they will neither notice nor mind the wide discrepancy between what they are told and what they experience in their own lives.
As a matter of fact, the readers increasingly do notice the discrepancy, and they increasingly do mind. In recent years the right-wing `ghetto press' - as it is sneeringly called by the mainstream media - has been growing at a remarkable rate. Over the past few years, the American Spectator (no relation), one of the few long-established publications to take a consistent stand against political correctness, has produced an eightfold increase in circulation. Not far behind is the National Review, edited by an ex-Daily Telegraph man and former speech writer for Margaret Thatcher, John O'Sullivan.
It is clear that the American public, as befits a great democratic nation, knows when it is being fed what Damon Runyon called `the old phonus balonus'. Were such papers as the New York Times and the Washington Post not companies with gerrymandered share structures there is little doubt that the ordinary shareholders would be clamouring for some relief from the dead hand of liberal self-censorship.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in American current affairs radio. One programme above all, hosted by Rush Limbaugh, has had an extraordinary popular success. From a standing start five years ago, Mr Limbaugh's show now has an audience of 20 million. Mr Limbaugh, you see, delights in poking fun at the politically correct. He does so with vulgarity and cmdeness. For example, Mr Limbaugh consistently refers to feminists as `feminazis'.
The point is that if the mainstream media jointly and severally decide to censor themselves, then the only people who question that orthodoxy will tend to be those at the extremes. In many ways this is undesirable, and destabilising for American society. It would be far better if part of the mainstream media were to take up the task of challenging the Washington Post/New York Times/Boston Globe consensus. The debate would at least then be civilised, and possibly even interesting.
But, in the meantime, another article written out of America for The Spectator has caused consternation among the grand folk of the media in that country, while passing almost unnoticed here, where the overwhelming majority of our readership live. The article (`Kings of the deal', 29 October) was written by William Cash as a response to a `Special Report' in the October issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair called 'Redefining Power in America: The New Establishment'. The Vanity Fair piece took as its starting point the classic definition of Establishment in The Spectator by the American journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955, then purported to prove that the most powerful men in America were now centred on the West Coast and particularly around Hollywood (this is Vanity Fair, remember), and tried to find common factors among the men (and Barbra Streisand) it termed `The New Establishment'. Prominent among this new elite were Hollywood big-shots such as Michael Ovitz, the town's top agent, Gerald Levin, the president of Time Warner, David Geffen, chairman of the eponymous company, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, and, of course, Barbra. Of course Barbra.
Vanity Fair, with a certain panache and preening, made the point (and made it, and made it) that these people were anything but the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (hereinafter known as Wasp) establishment. `It's their world now. Welcome to it,' concluded Vanity Fair's sortable editor in chief, Graydon Carter.
What struck William Cash, was that, while strenuously pointing out that the New Establishment was not Wasp, Vanity Fair had at no point in a survey the size of a small book mentioned that most of the members of the soi-disant `New Establishment', particularly in Hollywood, are Jewish. In his article, Cash went on to point out that there was in fact nothing new in this, that Hollywood had for well over 50 years been the scene of triumphs on the part of the most talented Jewish businessmen. He concluded that the main difference was that whereas the old moguls such as Warner and Mayer craved acceptance by the old Wasp establishment, and mimicked the staid clubs and horsey pastimes of the Anglophile East Coast elite, the new Hollywood moguls were more secure in their own identity, and needed no such reassurances.
As I say, the article caused little comment in Britain when it was published. However, Mr Michael Williams-Jones, the chief executive of United International Pictures in London, which distributes films abroad for MGM, Paramount and Universal, took the trouble to send faxes of the article to his contacts in Hollywood. Mr Williams-Jones wrote in an accompanying note, `The article is odious in its innuendo and inaccurate in its facts.' At the other end the moguls got in touch with Mr Bernard Weinraub, the highly experienced Los Angeles correspondent of the New York Times. While none of them wished to be quoted personally, Mr Weinraub reported that they were collectively of the view that the Cash article was `disgusting', `despicable', `bigoted' and `odious'.
The most upsetting words which Mr Weinraub was able to quote from Cash's article were that he described Jews as `fiercely competitive', `compulsive storytellers' and `talented negotiators'. Mr Weinraub appended to these exact extracts from Cash's article his own comment: `Few in Hollywood could recall such an antiSemitic article in a mainstream publication.' Following Mr Weinraub's article, the Anti-Defamation League swung into action from its New York office - as a result of this one of our valued advertisers cancelled its contract with us - and the Los Angeles Times ran a leader page article to denounce young William Cash.
The New York Times article appeared on Monday 7 November, and was given the honour of the front page in the paper's Arts section. It quoted me, absolutely accurately, as saying to Mr Weinraub that The Spectator seeks to be `highly polemical and highly controversial. There is a difference between what is deemed acceptable in an American paper and what is deemed acceptable in a British paper. American papers have a code of political correctness. It's simply impossible to run views counter to that product.' Mr Weinraub added, `Mr Lawson, who said he was Jewish, remarked that he did not necessarily agree with the views of authors in his magazine. He said he was "well aware of the sensitivities of Jews" but had had no second thoughts about publishing the article.'
Mr Weinraub had called me on Sunday evening (the 6th). He seemed a little agitated. I suspect he was most offended by William Cash's remark that the New York Times was the `official mouthpiece' of the new Jewish establishment. I now accept without reservation that this allegation is totally without foundation. Aside from anything else, a newspaper which argues in an editorial, as the NY Times did last April, that it would be wrong to elect white males to the US Supreme Court, can hardly be called a Jewish mouthpiece. The NY Times clearly believes that most of the Jewish members of the American legal profession should be barred from the highest office.
Mr Weinraub's own article was very wellwritten - I would have been happy to have published such a piece in The Spectator, although I didn't agree with it. But it did not quite do justice to the spice of our telephone conversation, part of which went as follows:
[INDENT]Self (after being told, at length, how offended le tout Hollywood was by Mr Cash's article): I am quite sensitive to the attitudes of Jews to this sort of thing.
Weinraub : Why do you say that?
Self: Because I am Jewish.
Weinraub: What does that mean?
Self: It means I am a Jew
Weinraub: Jews put Jews in gas ovens!
Self: What a very pleasant analogy.[/INDENT]