MORAL SUPERIORITY FILLS THE AIR on opening night

The opening night film of the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival was screened to a crowd of 1100 at the Sarasota Opera House. The venue was beautiful, the screen and sound were excellent and the name of the film was PAGE ONE, a Year Inside the New York Times. It was, not surprisingly, about the inner workings of the newspaper and mostly followed the journalistic life of David Carr who writes about media as it intersects with business culture and government. Though the question of whether the N Y Times would survive in an era where the internet and social media have become such powerful forces, one gets the impression that the Times feels that it is above the fray and though "They are no longer hurling lightning bolts down from the mountain top" they are going to, as the marines say, "Improvise, adapt, and overcome," and somehow outlast us all.

Though apparent in the Documentary movie, their Hubris and Holier-than-thou-ness really came out during the Q and A after the film. The stereotypical chain smoking former drug addict liberal hero, David Carr, is a funny guy and a good writer. The movie about him was well done. The movie could have been equally good had it been about an impending train wreck where the audience was aware it was going to happen but everyone on the train was oblivious. The usual "cheap shots" were taken at Glen Beck, a conservative hero, who has just lost his FOX News TV show. This was greeted with a round of cheering from the sycophants in the audience who"can't start their day without the New York Times" as the woman seated behind me opined loudly.

At the end of the evening, I was left with the feeling that The Columbia School of Journalism, The New York Times, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan were really all that mattered, and if you did not agree, you were a Barbarian and probably would not understand the articles in the Times anyway. I do understand them, and the Advocacy and Agenda-driven nature of their paper. Their Moral Superiority and insistence that they are pure, and factual, and true journalists while everyone else was NOT is an extension of the entirety of liberal thought. We are right, and if you don't agree, you are stupid, or racist, or Islamophobic, or a hick from a small town. At the risk of getting into a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, The movie may make it, but the paper is living on borrowed Times.