DAVID HARE AGREES WITH ME. I have previously posted here and here on the New York Time critics who suffer because they don’t like the theater. The New York Post (the newspaper of record in our household for forty years) has on Page Six today this account of an encounter at a dinner between the distinguished British playwright David Hare and the Jill Abramson, the managing editor of the New York Times. “Abramson was seated next to Hare and immediately launched into a speech about the supposed superiority of the Times’ theater coverage.” Hare replied, “‘You must be kidding. The Times has contempt for the theater, especially Broadway, and especially plays.’” Abramson’s reply implied that it is not important that a New York Times theater critic like the theater: “Listen, it is not our obligation to like or care about the theater. It’s our obligation to arbitrate it. We are the central arbiter of taste and culture in the city of New York.”
For all that people fall over themselves to praise the Times, I have yet to hear anything good about it, or read anything in it that impressed me.
Even Curt Schilling called out the Times for the willful, stubborn, and (shocker!) arrogant ignorance with which Murray Chass covered baseball and its new statistics.
Wow, the Times is arrogant even when dealing with sports? I hear you get a free lifetime subscription if you can tell the front page from the editorial section.
[...] NEW YORK? John Gapper has an article in the Financial Times today which discusses a quote which I linked to last week. Gapper says, “…the New York Times rules. As Jill Abramson, its managing [...]