Yet another muddle-headed story in the NYTimes...greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread |
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/02/biztech/articles/14john.html
February 14, 1999
For Y2K Utopians, a Chance to Remake the System
By GEORGE JOHNSON
If the more sober prognosticators are right, the millennial odometer will turn over in 10 1/2 months with scattered disruptions, some medium-sized glitches, but hardly a disaster anywhere. About the only thing that will count as a Y2K casualty will be the vague sense of disappointment settling in on those who were hoping, deep down, for a major change. After all the excitement and anticipation, the empire of the technocrats won't have collapsed after all. Lost will be the longed-for opportunity to start over from scratch and finally bring on the Age of Aquarius.
For years sociologists and historians have predicted that millennial anxiety would bring out a record number of religious fundamentalists and right-wing survivalists joyfully preaching doomsday scenarios and hoarding food and ammunition. Far more surprising has been the manner in which a loose coalition of New Agers, veterans of the 1960's counterculture and grass-roots populists have enthusiastically embraced Y2K as a chance to cut free from their stifling addiction to The System and remake society...
(It then talks about Utne's Y2K Citizen's Action Guide. I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of these next two paragraphs)
...All over the country, people will drift away from their soon-to-be-darkened computer screens and meet at the community garden for a homemade cappuccino and some organic greens. Or as Utne put it in an introduction to the guide, "Y2K is the excuse we've been waiting for to stop making so many compromises in how we know we should, and want to, live our lives." Finally, a chance to do the right thing.
While there are sensible arguments for encouraging people to prepare for the worst, some officials are worrying that the most disruptive thing about Y2K will be runs on dehydrated food, bottled water, fuel and other survival supplies. "As it becomes clear our national infrastructure will hold, overreaction becomes one of the biggest remaining problems," John Koskinen, chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, said last week...
...Y2K offers the hope of returning to the real thing, Esalen-style rhetoric and all. "Using well-developed dialoguing and visioning processes involving the entire community, people could develop new ways to organize themselves with community-supported agriculture, barter and alternative currencies, solar and wind energy, wholistic and complementary medicine, and co-ops of all kinds," write two contributors to the Utne guide, Gordon Davidson and Corinne McLaughlin, cofounders of the Center for Visionary Leadership in Washington, D.C. "As people realize they can mobilize their personal resources and contribute to community-preparedness efforts, they feel more confident and empowered that they can get through this..."
...The hardest thing to survive may be the anticlimax. A litany of horror stories in an article in last month's Vanity Fair about "the Y2K nightmare" is oddly more reassuring than alarming: A batch of chemicals at Amway was rejected because a computer figured it had expired in 1900 instead of 2000; a medical information network froze when asked to schedule a doctor's appointment in 2000. But these incidents happened years ago, demonstrating that companies have been confronting and overcoming Y2K problems all along, as has every consumer who now carries a working credit card expiring in 00 or 01. The fixes can be expensive but they are being made.
It is the nature of complex, intertwined systems that their behavior cannot be precisely predicted, so the world may still be in for a shock. Some experts warned that the first would come on Jan. 1, 1999, when many systems started dealing with dates 12 months in the future. With that occasion safely behind, the next milestone is in April for companies starting a new fiscal year, and then in September, when 9/9/99 rolls around, possibly confusing some computers.
If these dates too pass uneventfully, along with the big one on Dec. 31, then the new millenarians will be in much the same position as the old religious fundamentalists who painstakingly add up biblical generations to calculate, and then recalculate, the day of the second coming. One by one, the milestones come and go, judgment day postponed for another time.
(The story, on the web, anyway, includes a picture of the same couple stocking up on supplies that were featured in another NYTimes piece earlier in the week. However, this photo is a little gentler - they're smiling and a nice looking jar of strawberry jam is prominent.
The propaganda angle here is SO obvious that it's sickening. Make the new age types appear to be even goofier than the fire and brimstone types, so that anyone who would identify with the new agers would be turned off by it. This would include a lot of Upper West Side and Park Slope liberals, a major demographic for the NYTimes. )
(Oh, by the way - as an amusing aside - Saturday's New York Daily News front page was a screaming headline "Close, But No Cigar" with a picture of Clinton doing that cute scrunching up of his chin thing that he does when he's acting like he's sorry. My sister said he makes Reagan look like the bad "B" movie actor that he was...)
-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), February 14, 1999
pshannon,The propaganda angle in it is VERY obvious. Who is George Johnson? Does he write often for the New York Times?
-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), February 14, 1999.
"...disruptions in dehydrated food, bottled water, fuel..." notice the telling absence of BANK RUNS. THAT is what the info managers are worried about. Dehydrated food? C'mon--absolutely nothing, nada, zip to do with our quotidien life. Bottle water? What, the springs are gonna dry up? Fuel? They think people storing some extra kerosene is gonna exhaust world supplies of oil? No, the thing they most want to protect is bank liquidity. There are 44billion in current cash reserves, plus the extra 50billion the feds gonna print; that equals about 100billion. If twenty million Americans take $5,000 bucks out and stick it in a shoe, there goes the cash reserve of the U.S. Or 40 million taking out the princely sum of $2,500. These are not improbable scenarios. What is most interesting is the sudden interest of the New York Times in pooh-poohing Y2K preparation. They've gotten their marching orders, clearly.
-- Spidey (in@jam.com), February 14, 1999.
Excellent question Kevin! I was wondering that myself, having not recognized the author's name. A search through the NYTimes archive shows that most of the Y2K articles were written by Barnaby Feder, Jeri Clausing, Robert Pear (who along with R.W.Apple, the Times' Clinton propagandist, I call one of the "Fruit Guys." My father who was an editor at the NYTimes for 30 years thought that was hilarious), Michael Wald, and Peter Lewis (a regular P.C. columnist). There are three of four other writers who have done Y2K pieces, but the vast majority of them were written by these folks.A search through the NYTimes site for "George Johnson" comes up with this:
"George Johnson is a writer of essays and articles about science and philosophy for The New York Times, a former editor of The Week in Review, and the author of Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order. His next book, "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics," will be published in fall 1999 by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and Jonathan Cape in England. "
A quote from one of his previous books - ``Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order'' (Knopf, 1995) - "Do the patterns found by science hold some claim to universal truth, or would a visitor from another galaxy find them as quaint and culturally determined, as built on faith, as religious explanations of the universe?"
(I actually found that quote to be rather revealing. A search through the Times' archive found 84 references to George Johnson, following are a few samples. The point of this exercise is that the guy is a thinker, and a player. He was the editor of the Week in Review, knows and writes about computers, and has access to Sandia National Labs, for instance. It's not a stretch to think that he would be asked to craft propaganda. In fact, looking at his previous work and areas of interest, this latest piece is VERY interesting...)
March 30, 1997
From Porn to Cults, The Net Looks Nasty
By GEORGE JOHNSON
For the techno-libertarians intent on keeping the abstract duchy called cyberspace the freest of all lands, the last few months have been a nightmare of bad vibrations rippling through what the electronic elite derisively calls the "old media."
Every few days, it seems, television newscasts and newspapers carry reports of unspeakable acts conducted over the Internet. Pedophiles and maybe even prisoners trade pornography and tips on kidnapping, while trying to seduce children in electronic chat-rooms.
Right-wing lunatics post recipes for explosives and rouse their members with paranoid visions of immense conspiracies that only they can overthrow.
Earlier this year, the United States Parole Commission, alarmed at the flotsam sifted from the data gurgling through the fiber optical pipes, added a new item to the list of things federal parolees can be kept from doing: owning firearms, drinking to excess, consorting with criminals, and now, using a computer to access the Internet.
The horror stories about the crimes made possible by this powerfully anarchic technology pale against the news last week that a cult of Southern California computer enthusiasts, who supported themselves making Web pages for businesses, committed mass suicide in preparation for a science-fiction version of the Rapture, in which they would be beamed aboard a UFO hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet.
Taking phenobarbital like Communion wafers, and following the drug with vodka chasers, they rested, shrouded in purple, and quietly awaited the ultimate trip...
September 2, 1997
Giant Computer Virtually Conquers Space and Time
By GEORGE JOHNSON
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Janus, recently christened the world's fastest supercomputer, is not much to look at: 84 tall gray cabinets resembling plastic gym lockers lined up inside a claustrophobic, fluorescent-lighted room.
Inside the drab enclosures, 9,072 Pentium Pro processors silently trade information, giving the computer, built by the Intel Corporation and installed this summer at Sandia National Laboratories here, the power to perform a once-inconceivable trillion mathematical operations per second...
May 9, 1997
Conventional Wisdom Says Machines Cannot Think
By GEORGE JOHNSON
NEW YORK -- Whether the machine or the man ultimately wins the rematch between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov, it is probably just a matter of time before a computer prevails. What is far less certain is just what to make of such a victory.
How to define intelligence and decide who or what has it remains among science's unsolved, and possibly unsolvable, problems. Whether a machine like Deep Blue, combining lightning-fast search power with a growing database of chess knowledge, can be said to think depends on one's philosophical prejudices. And it can be surprising to learn who holds which view...
(He's also done a number of book reviews, including this one...)
March 16, 1997
The Brain Eater
By GEORGE JOHNSON
Richard Rhodes explores the family of strange, deadly illnesses that includes mad cow disease
In Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel, ''Cat's Cradle,'' the world comes to a chilling end when every drop of water on the planet suddenly freezes solid. This crystalline death is caused not by nuclear winter or the burning out of the sun. A tiny shard of an insidiously engineered substance called ice-nine sets off a chemical chain reaction that causes all the earth's water to coagulate into a new, unthawable form.
In 1995, two medical researchers borrowed Mr. Vonnegut's scientific fantasy for the title of a paper about a deadly degenerative disease that turns the brains of sheep into something that looks like Swiss cheese. In ''The Chemistry of Scrapie Infection: Implications of the 'Ice 9' Metaphor,'' Dr. Byron Caughey and Dr. Peter Lansbury wrote about what many scientists had come to believe is a new kind of illness -- one spread not by viruses or bacteria but by a protein crystal rather like Mr. Vonnegut's ice-nine. The culprit, according to the theory, is a protein similar to one normally made by brain cells but folded into a different shape. These prions, as they are called, act as seed crystals, the trigger for the disease. Once the interlopers find their way into a brain, normal proteins copy them, folding themselves into this new pattern. Just as water frozen into ice-nine will not thaw, brain proteins knotted up like prions cannot be broken down. They accumulate in the brain, killing cells, leaving it with the airy structure of a sponge.
Scrapie is believed to be related to mad cow disease, which has swept through Britain in the last 10 years. Mad cow disease has been tentatively linked to a rare illness in humans called Creutzfeldt- Jakob, which eats human brains. In their paper, the two scientists added to the evidence that these ailments -- called spongiform encephalopathies -- are caused by a previously unknown pathogen...
-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), February 14, 1999.
pshannon,Thanks. It is fascinating to "see" the different agendas floated in the media.
Whatever happened to objective, investigative journalism? Lousy pay?
Diane
-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), February 14, 1999.
Addendum -The propaganda value of this piece is even worse that I originally imagined. I first saw it on the Web this morning, knowing it would be in today's paper. Well, I bought the paper, and it is. In the "Week in Review" section (which George Johnson used to edit). It's on page 4, and the teaser on page 1 says "Hooray for the Y2K bug - Some people are hoping for the worst." Next to it is a photo of "Y2K Bug Spray."
The NYTimes does NOT have a Comics section. Except, in the Sunday "Week in Review" section where they always print a half page called "Views - A Portfolio From Around the Nation" where they print a few political cartoons from other papers. Naturally, today they mostly have to do with Clinton's aquittal. (sample - George Washington - "I cannot tell a lie!" Richard Nixon - "I am not a crook!" Bill Clinton - "Who cares?")
The Y2K piece is directly above today's political cartoons. The message here is that this is something to laugh about...
-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), February 14, 1999.
pshannon: thank thank thank you a thousand times for your diligent searching and posting. (Now I can save the $2.50!) From the samples you provided, it is clear to this jaundiced observer that Mr. Johnson is chosen for these 'debunking' pieces because of his arch, ironic writing style--"hey, look what the rubes are up to NOW!" Scanning the propaganda in the Times is easily as useful as reading a hard-hitting assessment would be: it telegraphs the mindset of the 'players' most instructively. As a certain linguist at MIT once said, "I don't see how the editors at the New York Times don't drown in their own hypocrisy." Still, as a bellwether of mendacity and barometer of elite paranoia, you can't beat it.
-- Spidey (in@jam.com), February 14, 1999.
After careful reading and rereading of this material, I fail utterly to find any propaganda at all. George Johnson appears to be an intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed individual, whose viewpoint appears entirely reasonable. He even admits that we may indeed face unpredictable problems, and preparing for them is sensible.Propaganda is NOT defined as "anything I disagree with". Propaganda is defined as "the systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those people advocating such a doctrine or cause".
Think about it: you're unhappy that the New York Times is not espousing your doctrine and cause, nor are they "propagating information reflecting the views and interests" of your cause. By definition, you're unhappy because the New York Times is NOT spouting propaganda, and you wish they would.
I suggest you read the Remnant Review instead.
-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), February 14, 1999.
Aw, c'mon, flint. Wake up and smell the coffee!Of course this writer is intelligent and reasonable. He wouldn't be a heavy-weight at the NYTimes if he wasn't. Of course the NYTimes says things that I agree with that are balanced and encouraging. It's as much the placement in the paper and juxtapositions of statements and other articles that I'm responding to. It's very subtle. You and I are aware of everything that's being said out there about Y2K. Most people aren't. They see something like this placed next to the comics, with a picture of Y2K bug spray, and a comparison of the granola liberals (very "sensitive" people, who typify a large proportion of their readership) to the religious fundamentalists and right-wing survivalists, and the SUBCONSCIOUS message becomes as or more important than what's actually being said.
"...All over the country, people will drift away from their soon-to- be-darkened computer screens and meet at the community garden for a homemade cappuccino and some organic greens..."
followed by:
" "As it becomes clear our national infrastructue will hold, overreaction becomes one of the biggest remaining problems," John Koskinen chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, said last week..."
Gimme a break, flint! This has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing. Of course I believe that "...overreaction becomes one of the biggest remaining problems..."
However, are you somehow going to say that the NYTimes is NOT engaged in "the systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those people advocating such a doctrine or cause"?
Are you going to somehow say that the SUBTEXT of juxtaposition is NOT a clever editorial trick to get across a SUBCONSCIOUS message?
PUH-LEASE!
And flint, that line about Propaganda is NOT defined as "anything I disagree with" is getting boring. Another muddle-headed statement...
-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), February 14, 1999.
pshannon, I think most of your questions should be directed at Declan or someone in print media.My brief newspaper experience leads me to believe that one person wrote the column, a second person picked a headline, a third person selected the section to put it, a fourth person did the page layout, etc. I do know that editorial content is placed second, and advertisements are placed first. The various juxtapositions that offend you may result from the conscious design of a single editor, but I tend to doubt it.
Media people in general get a feel for which people should be taken seriously, and which issues deserve what kind of emphasis. Mike McCormack (a journalist) points out that, as time goes by, no credible people are joining the doomists, and that the level of concern by credible people is diminishing. Once the paper has 'covered' the fanatics, and nobody knowledgeable is joining their ranks, the story is necessarily placed on hold until the trend changes or something really newsworthy goes wrong.
So long as predicted spike dates go by and public impact remains at zero, there's no real news. This situation is neither propaganda nor is it muddle-headed. Pejorative terms like those describe not the New York Times, but rather your own bias. The column you quote is clear, reasonable and balanced.
I can assure you that journalists are well aware of y2k, always on the alert for related stories, and calling it as they see it. If conditions take a turn for the worse, they'll write it up.
-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), February 14, 1999.
flint - what's pejorative about the word propaganda? As you said - "the systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those people advocating such a doctrine or cause" So, let's call a spade a spade.As for the muddle-headed bit, I have no problem making my OPINION known, and admitting that it's my opinion. However, after examining the article and juxtapositions more, and knowing a bit more about its author, I don't think it's the LEAST BIT muddle-headed. In fact it's brilliantly insidious. Rather, it's meant to appeal to the muddle- headed READERS who will be taken in by the subtext...
-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), February 14, 1999.
pshannon,First, I think you are far more sensitive to your perceived subtext than the average muddle-headed reader.
Second, If the NY Times is systematically advocating a doctrine or cause, it's pretty nebulous. Expressed opinions in that paper tend on the whole to be slightly left of dead center, but not much and not always. This is a 'cause'? Come on.
Third, insidious means "working or spreading harmfully, intended to entrap, treacherous." I see nothing harmful here, no entrapment, no treachery. That's your opinion, not a description of what you saw, but rather a description of your failure to see what you'd prefer.
All in all, you seem very concerned about very little. If y2k brings bad news, or even new and credible warnings of bad news, they'll report it.
-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), February 14, 1999.
And I repeat here, in response to another thread ...Spidey ... I think we as a people are headed into the steep part of the learning curve, and that's why elite news media like the NY Times are doing their damndest to make it seem like something laughable. They're worried, and it shows.
Agreed.
And it is how they write those stories than convinces me theyre worried. Big time.
Instead of finding the companies publicly stating they are Y2K ready, willing and able, the press keeps attacking people preparing.
Do we have tons of showcase examples of top executives opening wide the corporate doors to the inquiring press and TV cameras, saying ... Come inside and see what weve finished! No. Its still silence and shuffling as usual. Not to mention that cute little S 96 senate bill trying to reduce Y2K legal liability for corporations.
Connect the dots, and fasten your community seat belts.
And Flint, do please study what is NOT written about.
Diane
-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), February 14, 1999.
flint, of course I'm "far more sensitive to your perceived subtext than the average muddle-headed reader." THAT'S THE POINT!"Second, If the NY Times is systematically advocating a doctrine or cause, it's pretty nebulous."
It's not nebulous if you look at the subtext - "Consume/Don't worry/ "As it becomes clear our national infrastructure will hold, overreaction becomes one of the biggest remaining problems..."/It's a laughable problem...etc.
"Third, insidious means "working or spreading harmfully, intended to entrap, treacherous." I see nothing harmful here..."
It'll be harmful if people do nothing to protect themselves and Y2K turns out to cause more than just "minor" problems.
"All in all, you seem very concerned about very little."
I admit that this article is just one little speck of dust in the Y2K universe (thanks Lisa!). However, the NYTimes is my hometown newspaper, and New Yorkers in general have very little awareness of or concern for the possiblities. Articles like this do almost nothing to increase the awareness of those possibilities. There's been next to nothing as far as REPORTING in the New York newspapers. And by REPORTING, I mean the kinds of facts and figures, public documents, etc, that are referred to on this forum. (true, a hell of a lot of opinionating here also...)
Look, New York is the center of the corporate world. I can not recall a single instance of the NYTimes printing something about a company claiming compliance. (Social Security excepted) All I recall ever seeing is stuff like this piece. Why is that? Whose interests are they protecting?
-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), February 14, 1999.
Ooooh! I hate the New York Times!Flint, I won't deal with whether this piece fits the strict definitions of propaganda, or not. But one thing it does do, is a more subtle and underhanded way of discrediting something. Generalize, generalize, categorize, categorize, keep calling something names and putting different sorts of pseudo-erudite sociological spins on it until there is no substance left; it becomes just a "phenomenon" to be commented on and sighed about at the breakfast table. ("Nothing to do with my life")
My objection is NOT that they take a stand I don't agree with, as you suggest. I really do appreciate and respect a strong stand and supporting data, as in investigative journalism, but this is not that. It's that they try to affect taking an oh-so-moderate, so-very-reasonable stand. They position themselves chronically in the safe middle ground, where there is only "consensus reality". Then they pretend to identify some other "consensus reality" and debunk it. The article is NOT "clear, reasonable, and balanced". It is insidious and plays on people's fears of not being normal (if they are outside of the consensus reality), while pretending to objectively discuss "news".
Let's get to the tone of the article, which is after all, what the reader retains after reading it. It is insulting and debunking towards people trying to prepare, i.e., make informed life choices. Personal life choices are always risky, and even without Y2k, choices are made the best we can facing an always uncertain future. (And I am further insulted - the article pretends to describe me and many others who take Y2k seriously, and fails miserably. Personally, Y2k is tearing me apart, it is NOT easy. There are hard personal decisions here and I've reluctantly put my future on hold, or at best am living a double future. This is HARD! If we have a bump in the road I will celebrate! I have NEVER had apocalyptic leanings and yes I am a child of the 60s and there is much that was wonderful about the 60s, but there is much I didn't like and never identified with, either.)
The NYT does this also with alternative medicine. I hate this kind of self-satisfied posturing. It makes a virtue out of the "cautious middle ground", but this very posture of cautious reasonableness is really pig-headedness in disguise. To state that not much will happen is really arrogant. The true, reasoned starting position is "nobody knows what will happen" followed up by conclusions based on facts and logic about what MAY or MAY NOT happen. Even better would be to just lay off of this "What's going to happen?" stuff and who's crazy and who's reasonable, and get into, what's really being done, or not. There's plenty good/bad/uncertain to report about there, and it is much more compelling. But instead, the writer just postures that not much will happen, gazing smugly down from his lofty summit upon people putting themselves on the line preparing, and then tries to make them look like fools. How noble! (Got that, reader? Whatever you do, don't look like a fool! In fact, we'll carve you a headstone, "He didn't offend.")
Anyway, if the reporters are waiting for information from some "credible people" then I must ask - credible to who? Maybe the reporters ARE in an impossible dilemma. Since they believe their only job is to report on "consensus reality," then until we begin getting closure next year, the journalists are doomed to remain irrelevant on this issue, and in limbo. There really is nothing they can say (except more oh so witty quips and epithets about people preparing - and therein lies the spin IMO). (Yeah Diane what ever happened to good old investigative reporting??)
Into the birdcage with this one.
Now that that is said, I'll tell you how I really feel
-- Debbie Spence (dbspence@usa.net), February 14, 1999.
The propaganda is obvious by the use of the word "sober" to describe the pollyanish/bump-in-the-road view of Y2K. It is also found in the use of the words "right-wing" and "fundamentalist". These are meant to equate preparation with joining a militia group.
-- Joe O (ozarkjoe@yahoo.com), February 14, 1999.
(Where is my copy of Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language?!) Flint: I still find something jarring about the abscence of mention of bank runs. Surely you would agree that the Times is establishmentarian in outlook, and at least takes into consideration other elite outlooks. If the upper 20% of income earners starts to get vaguely spooked by Y2K fears, not only banks would be at risk. How about that other game going on downtown, the equities markets? Few people deny there's a bit of a speculative bubble on Wall St. (a bunch of 26 year old fund managers building a financial hydrogen bomb). The Times has changed its tone a bit from the Aug (?18) 98 editorial, "Millenium Looms," the last line of which was "Still, it makes sense to prepare for the worst." I have little doubt that at a few fabled soirees on 5th Ave., the editors have had explained to them the 'importance of moderation in tone when discussing potential Y2K failures.' And if it takes a bit of pooh-poohing the preparation crowd, then so be it. And hey, maybe it's simple pragmatism: a stock meltdown early in 1999 would destroy capital needed for remediation. But I still read the Times as astute Soviets used to read Pravda and Izvestia: between the lines. (Is the Remnant Review the trad. Catholic magazine?)
-- Spidey (in@jam.com), February 15, 1999.
The Remnant Review is Gary North's rag...
-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), February 15, 1999.
Flint: Look at your own words: They *define* the meaning of propaganda (as used by big government and the national media -<< Media people in general get a feel for which people should be taken seriously, and which issues deserve what kind of emphasis. Mike McCormack (a journalist) points out that, as time goes by, no credible people are joining the doomists, and that the level of concern by credible people is diminishing. Once the paper has 'covered' the fanatics, and nobody knowledgeable is joining their ranks, the story is necessarily placed on hold until the trend changes or something really newsworthy goes wrong.
So long as predicted spike dates go by and public impact remains at zero, there's no real news. This situation is neither propaganda nor is it muddle-headed. Pejorative terms like those describe not the New York Times, but rather your own bias. The column you quote is clear, reasonable and balanced.
I can assure you that journalists are well aware of y2k, always on the alert for related stories, and calling it as they see it. If conditions take a turn for the worse, they'll write it up. >>
There is absolutely no investigative or independent reporting going on there - its strictly "follow the herd" - follow what everybody else is reporting" "don't make waves."
Also - just who do "they" consider credible - the pattern they are following deliberately makes anyone not following their predefined administration-kissing path a kook and a criminal for being a terrorist - there is no credibility given - nor is there honest reporting of potential problems at *any* level at the national media once past the Vanity Fair article last November.
They - the national media, and only the national media and Clinton administration - have decided Y2K is a non-event whose greatest threat is those right-wing Christain fundamentalist racist kooks who are hoarding food, gathering weapons, and causing panic. They are propagandizing this and you bought their lies about honest reporting hook, line, and sinker.
You might consider that a fish being reeled in and landed in a boat does not generally fare very well. He becomes good fare for the fisherman.
If it not so damaging - I'd be laughing at the thought of these same NY liberals crying in fear as the riots and fires kill them next year - potentially - we don't know yet what will happen.
But the opinions of these editors won't matter - its a technical problem not driven by any polls asked of unknowing, politically-sensitive news propagandists.
-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), February 15, 1999.