MAGAZINE REVIEWS

New York Times goes to the mat against Renata Adler; students against tests; George Bush destroys the planet

WILLIAMSTOWN – This week’s grab-bag of magazine articles includes the inner workings of the New York Times, defiant anti-test students, the commercialization of sports and George W. Bush’s dismal record on the environment

Harper’s Magazine

Renata Adler’s “A Court of No Appeal” in the August Harper’s offers a fascinating backstage glimpse of the New York publishing world. The main players are the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Adler herself, who has written for both journals and who is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including “Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker.” Adler’s piece deconstructs the flurry of negative attention she received in the New York Times in the wake of the publication of her memoir of life at the New Yorker. Her book contained a disparaging sentence about the late Judge John J. Sirica, provoking a veritable torrent of response from the Times – no less than eight separate articles or column items attacking her veracity and ethics. Adler denotes the disturbing conflicts of interest among the various writers involved in the Times pieces, as well as the unusually ardent and tenacious interest that her sentence on Sirica provoked. Follow-up articles appeared in the Times’s business section, on the editorial and op-ed pages, and in the Week in Review section, where a piece focused on the question of her ethics, as opposed to the relative truth or falsity of her charge. In the second half of her essay, Adler attempts to justify her portrayal of Sirica as having been linked to organized crime. She does so primarily by parsing passages from Sirica’s own autobiography. She shows herself to be a creative reader in this endeavor, although her interpretation of the facts as Sirica presents them are certainly justifiable. In the end, Adler puts her skirmish with the Times into the larger context of her decades-long role as a press critic. She paints a chilling portrait of the Times as a totalitarian outfit, using its power to spread disinformation, coerce a retraction and stain a critic’s credibility.

Atlantic Monthly

In the “High Stakes Are for Tomatoes” in the August issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Peter Schrag looks at the growing backlash against statewide testing of students. No sooner did the move to apply more stringent standards to students and teachers alike take hold than did a reaction against it erupt. Schrag numbers among those in the advance guard opposing statewide testing the Great Barrington-based group of students who just said no to the MCAS tests. Similar grassroots movements have sprung up in Wisconsin, Virginia and Ohio. Schrag calls Great Barrington’s Will Greene, a student leader in the anti-MCAS movement, one of the “most articulate critics” of testing. Greene points out that students have stopped enrolling in one of the most exciting courses at Monument Mountain Regional High School, a science-and-technology class whose hands-on methodology is now widely perceived by students as irrelevant to passing the MCAS. Schrag also suggests that the anti-testing backlash crosses political lines, so that opponents of statewide testing include back-to-basics conservatives who see state-imposed standards as excessive governmental intrusion and interference in local schools, and educational progressives who believe that testing itself is anathema.

Index on Censorship

The Olympic ideal is one in which representatives of different nations meet on an level playing field, literally, and compete non-violently. Of course, we all know that these days sports is big business, and, as Mike Marqusee writes in “This Sporting Lie” in the August issue of Index on Censorship -- devoted in large part to issues of commercialism, racism and colonialism in sports -- the international media oligarch Rupert Murdoch is actually “the single most powerful individual” in sports. The intrusion of big business into sports, says Marqusee, the author of a book about Muhammad Ali, has resulted in lopsided competition and the bland, generification of sports. The Olympics, writes Marqusee, “have become a peculiarly noxious cocktail of national chauvinism and global capitalism,” and professional wrestling, for all its artifice, is at least less hypocritical about its “legitimacy” than other equally staged and predetermined professional games.

Rolling Stone

If you’re a major source of environmental pollution in Texas – an oil refinery belching out noxious gases into the air, say, or a strip-mining company dirtying the air and polluting wells – and if you run into trouble with state or federal regulations regarding the environment, you can do one of two things. You can change your practices to meet the state or federal standards. Or you can contribute gobs of money to Gov. George W. Bush’s re-election campaign.
At least that’s the prevailing state of business in Bush’s state, according to “George W. Bush and the Environment,” by Tom Horton in the Aug. 31 issue of Rolling Stone. According to Horton, Bush’s basic belief is that “market-based solutions” are the best way to insure clean air and water, even though history proves otherwise -- that governmental regulation is needed to eradicate the use of dangerous chemicals and pesticides and improve air quality.
One conservationist familiar with Bush’s record in Texas fears that a Bush presidency could undo in four years what it’s taken the environmental movement to achieve in the last 30.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 12, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]