From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
My Patience Challenged
Good riddance to the New York Times' special section.
"A Nation Challenged" is no more. That is not, I suspect, because we as a nation are no longer challenged. After all, we are, and in more ways than I'd care to enumerate.
"A Nation Challenged" is no more--and I refer, here, to the special section in the New York Times, brought out shortly after Sept. 11 as the home for all emanations from that violent day--because the date for the publication of work to be submitted in Pulitzer entries has passed, and the Times need no longer persist with the section. Dec. 31 was the cutoff date for the 2002 Pulitzers, and Dec. 31 was the section's last day.
Is that cynical? Perhaps. But if so, it's healthy, robust cynicism. I hated the section from the beginning, in part because of what it revealed about the Times' approach to news management, or news husbandry, and in part because of the acres of unreadable copy one encountered in it.
Let me start with my first reproach: Why did we need the new section in the first place?
It is standard newspaper practice--and not bad practice merely because it is standard--that the first section of any multisection newspaper be devoted to mainstream news. Of course, everything in a newspaper might broadly be called "news," and what is mainstream to me may not be so to you; but it is safe to say that areas such as business and sport, and the arts, are best filleted from the news body and served to readers separately. It's much less messy that way. This is what the Times does, in discrete sections, and what most other newspapers do.
Within mainstream news, there is a division between home and abroad, with most papers progressing sequentially, after page one, from domestic news to foreign. The Times is unusual in its inversion of this apparent hierarchy, with the pages from A3 onward being given over to foreign news, followed by news with its origins in the U.S. Of course, the other great newspaper practice--that pages move sequentially from important news to less important news--is more or less nonexistent at the Times, except for page one. And this weird approach to news display was at the heart of the paper's problem after Sept. 11--and of its need to bring out a separate section in which "a nation" was "challenged."
I have no access to Times editors, and still less to their innermost thoughts. So I do not know whether there was an almighty row after Sept. 11, with "progressives" calling for the adoption of normal newspaper practice--i.e. important news served up front, immediately--vs. "Times troglodytes" who fought for the retention of the present system, whereby pages A3 through A8 are given over to stories about the rise of synthetic Mongolian yurts, crises in the Brazilian aquarium industry, or micro-credit movements in Melanesia. (I call it the Upper West Side We Are the World Syndrome). All I know is that the first section of the Times remained unchanged.
If there was a war for the soul of Section A, then bravo to the gallant losers; if there was no war, and if the paper moved blithely to the institution of a separate section wherein to put the only news readers truly wanted, then one has to shudder. One can, it seems, plumb depths while being lofty.
So, nomenclature aside--and everyone admits that "A Nation Challenged" is a very silly name--the setting up of a separate section revealed clearly the weirdness, the tedious other-worldliness, of the Times' approach to news. It has been argued that in regard to Sept. 11 the blurring of lines between domestic and foreign news--and in New York's case even local news--might have made it difficult to decide which story went in the foreign news section and which in the domestic or Metro, and that the cleanest solution, therefore, was a whole new section in which the editors' taxonomic abilities would not be stretched to breaking point. But this is a bogus argument, for--apart from being condescending to editors--it is self-fulfilling. We can't do it because we really couldn't.
As for the name, it grated because it was more than "a nation" being "challenged" (oh ghastly verb, with its theatrical promise of conflict, and of a great national rising to the occasion!). It's as if the Times' editors were railroaded into this tabloidish label by the networks: "America at War," they all cried, so the Times, abandoning for once--and, alas, unfortunately here--its daunting reserve, plunged headlong into the world of gaudy sign-posting.
What was inside the section was, often, not all bad. In fact, far from it on certain days, and even Rupert Murdoch, with not a New York Times gene in his body, was unable to suppress a compliment on "The Charlie Rose Show," to wit, that the Times' staff "have just pulled on all their huge resources and done a fantastically good job."
The section had no designated editor, however, and it showed. Repetition was commonplace, as was a relentless impression of unfiltered sprawl. Times writers are, on the whole, accustomed to writing stories without a stop sign in sight, but here the excess was often suffocating.
Worst of all, however--and I steel myself against sentimentality here--were the "Portraits of Grief," miniprofiles of the victims of Sept. 11, which usually took up the last page or two of the section. These portraits--no doubt well-intentioned--were quite, quite indigestible.
I don't wish to belittle the lives that were snuffed out, and only a charlatan would suggest that in complaining about these portraits I am showing contempt for the people profiled. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. I think less gush, more gray, more solemnity, less minihagiography would have conferred infinitely more dignity on the dead than the saccharine-and-molasses thumbnail sketches that were inflicted on us every morning.
It is reported that the families of hundreds of victims were unwilling to cooperate with the Times in its profiling enterprise. I am not surprised. The profiles, most of all, suggested that the Times was not, for once, the paper of record; instead, it was the paper of mawkish sentiment. The memory of the dead was done a ghastly, cloying disservice.
But let's not get too overheated by the section's flaws, or overwhelmed by its memory. Let's rejoice, instead, and say "Hurrah!" "A Nation Challenged" is gone. Ergo, a nation's load is lightened. Phew!
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays.
