ProgressOhio

The controversy last week over the disgusting, anti-Obama "chimp" cartoon in the New York Post pained me, but not only for the reason you might think.

As much as I like to see the right-wing media being called out for its wretched excesses, I regret that the Post has fallen so far over the last half-century.

(The Columbia Journalism Review said in 1980, according to Wikipedia, that "the Post is not longer merely a journalistic problem.  It is a social problem - a force for evil.")

The newspaper, founded in 1801, certainly has gone through a number of transitions over the last two centuries -- none more dramatic than after World War II when it ceased being Left Wing and began its long migration over to the Rupert Murdoch rag it is today.

"Under (Dorothy) Schiff's tenure (after 1939), the Post was devoted to liberalism, supporting trade unions and social welfare, and featured some of the most popular columnists of the time, such as Drew Pearson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Max Lerner, Murray Kempton, Pete Hamill and Eric Severeid, in addition to theatre critic Richard Watts Jr. and Broadway columnist Earl Wilson," recalls Wikepedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post

But the reason I care about this history is that both my grandfather and father were columnists at the Post during the 1930s and early 1940s.  My grandfather wrote a foreign affairs column and was one of the first journalists to begin warning in the early 1930s that Adolf Hitler was more than just a strutting buffoon. My father  helped out on grandfather's column and in the late 1930s launched  his own radio column at the newspaper.

In those days, the Post "appealed to people whose politics were Democratic-left, were likely to be Jewish, and were either members of the working class or intellectuals who sympathized with the proletariat and affected its style," writes Marilyn Nissenson in her 2007 history of Schiff, The Lady Upstairs. 

My grandfather, an ardent socialist and anti-fascist, would be horrified to see how the Post has evolved, although the transition began even before his death in 1942.

For sure, change is not always for the best.

-- David Lore