Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [81]
“In his work, he seemed like a sickened man; sick of the official lying, sick of safe little men sitting in Washington offices and playing God with the lives of foreign strangers, sick of too much pain, too much bullshit, too much death,” wrote Pete Hamill in a profile of Schanberg in the Village Voice. “He was also laced with guilt; the normal guilt that the living feel after surviving catastrophe, specific guilt because his assistant Dith Pran had been left behind.”5
Schanberg was appointed the assistant metropolitan editor and later the metropolitan editor. He pushed his reporters to cover the homeless, the poor, and the victims of developers. The social movements built around the opposition to the Vietnam War, however, had disbanded, and with them had gone many alternative publications. The commercial press, no longer shamed into good journalism by renegade publications such as Ramparts, had less and less incentive to challenge the power elite. Many in the establishment viewed Schanberg’s concerns as relics of a dead era. He was removed from his position as metropolitan editor and given a column about New York. He used the column, again, to decry the abuse of the powerful, especially developers, against the poor. The editor of the paper, Abe Rosenthal, began to refer acidly to Schanberg as the resident “Commie” and address him curtly as “St. Francis.” Rosenthal, who met William F. Buckley almost weekly for lunch, and the publisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, grew increasingly annoyed with Schanberg’s attacks on their powerful and wealthy friends. Schanberg soon became a pariah. He was not invited to the paper’s table at two consecutive Inner Circle dinners held for New York reporters. The senior editors and the publisher did not attend the previews for the film The Killing Fields. His days at the newspaper were numbered.
The city Schanberg continued to profile in his column did not look like the glossy ads in the Times fashion section or the Sunday magazine. Schanberg’s city was one in which thousands of homeless people were sleeping on the streets. It was one where there were long lines at soup kitchens. It was a city where the mentally ill were tossed onto sidewalks or locked up in jails. He wrote of people who were unable to afford housing and New Yorkers who were being displaced by the greed of overzealous developers. He profiled landlords who charged exorbitant rent that drove out the working and middle class. He soon was denied even his column. He left the paper to work for New York News-day and later the Village Voice. Schanberg knew the rules. But he refused to serve his own career interests or the “practical” concerns of his editors.
“I heard all kinds of reports over the years that the wealthy patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would often get to use the customs clearance provided to the museum to import personal items, including jewelry, which was not going to the museum,” Schanberg said when we met in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I can’t prove this, but I believe it to be true. Would the Times investigate this? Not in a million years. The publisher at the time was the chairman of the board of the museum. These were his friends.”6
“And yet they do more than anyone else, although they leave out a lot of things,” Schanberg said of the paper:There are stories on their blackout list. But it is important the paper is there