Media

...Sydney Schanberg's fall from grace may not have been inevitable, but it is also not surprising...

...Raymond Bonner ran afoul of both the U.S...

...Yes and no...

...Is The Times veering rightward...

...But it is also a question of some significance for the rest of us, since The New York Times is the weatherman of American Journalism and, pace Bob Dylan, the rest of the news media do need it to tell which way the wind is blowing...

...Schanberg had been The Times's sole columnist concentrating on New York City affairs—the first ever to do so, in fact...

...For most journalists, The Times sets Robert Karl Manoff is managing editor on leave of Harper's magazine and associate director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at New York University...

...Schanberg has been asked to accept another assignment, which is now under discussion," The Times informed its readers in a two-paragraph announcement buried inside the paper but destined, nevertheless, to raise eyebrows all over town...

...The relationship between Schanberg's politics and his departure from The Times has become a question hotly debated in those journalistic and political circles where such things tend to be hotly debated...

...If Schanberg's departure is a harbinger of a rightward turn at the newspaper, that is something to worry about...

...Before setting off on his vacation this summer, Schanberg even ridiculed The Times itself for devoting space to the personal travails of wealthy suburban homeowners instead of to the billion-dollar problems of New York's decaying infrastructure...

...Christian, author of a recent book promoting her view of the Nicaraguan revolution (see review, Page 42), is a supporter of continued U.S...

...it has been there all along...

...He resigned from the paper in the last week of September, becoming the most recent casualty in the Hundred Years War that is The New York Times...

...He campaigned on behalf of the homeless, fought a massive highway development which the paper's own editorial page supported, and attacked the banks, greedy corporations, and especially the real estate industry...

...Any day's paper will yield up John Corry's neo-conservative critiques of television programming or the less overtly political reporting of Sally Bedell Smith, who won her journalistic spurs at TV Guide when, as part of a right-wing attack on CBS News, she was co-author of the overblown assault on "The Uncounted Enemy" that culminated in General William Westmoreland's suit against the network...

...This spectacle is certainly unappealing, but it must also be said that The New York Times is not turning rightward...

...Its reporting is the standard against which all else is measured...

...Among journalists and policymakers, however, she is better remembered for an article she wrote for The Washington Journalism Review, attacking reporters for their "naivete" in failing to see the Sandinistas as a Marxist-Leninist conspiracy...

...Most revealing, perhaps, are the contrasting careers of two of the reporters who have covered Latin America for The Times in recent years...

...Since the fall of 1980, when his opinions began taking their place alongside those of such colleagues as James Reston, Flora Lewis, and William Safire, his voice had become a singular one in the newspaper...

...For those of us who appreciated his sensibility, shared his concerns, and on occasion found his words inspiring, his departure is an unhappy event...

...The young Walter Lippmann, we tend to forget, took the paper to task for its unrelentingly hostile coverage of the Russian Revolution...

...the agenda...

...Lately she has been gracing The Times with generally friendly reports about the World Anti-Communist League and the work it is doing to overthrow the Nicaraguan government...

...This month's occasion is the recent fall from grace of Sydney Schanberg, the veteran Times reporter whose Cambodian memoirs, published as The Death and Life of Dith Pran, were subsequently dramatized as The Killing Fields and greeted with great acclaim...

...And for most of its more recent history, The Times has reflected the dominant concerns of those who manage the Cold War consensus in the United States...

...Yes, because over the past three years, the comings and goings of the reporting staff have left certain commanding heights in the possession of journalists with a decidedly conservative turn of mind...

...aid to the contras...

...When he came back in mid-August, Schanberg discovered he was out of a job...

...The assignment turned out to be a writing position on The Times Sunday Magazine, which Schanberg declined...

...In terms of its civic function, therefore, The Times is less a private corporation than a public utility...

...As Bonner was leaving The Times, however, Shirley Christian was being recruited to join the staff...

...Government and his editors in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his reporting undercut the official version of events in El Salvador...

...As the newspaper of record, it supplies the information that is the oxygen of democracy...

...Christian is a former Miami Herald reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work in Central America during the Nicaraguan revolution...

...In the context of the paper's political history, the recent developments can be seen as final course corrections following the turbulence of the Vietnam years...

...But we can salvage something of value from the experience if it serves to remind us that the American press, though free, is not yet liberated...

...He was brought back to New York and exiled to an editorial Siberia which he subsequently abandoned for sunnier journalist climes...