The New York Times Invents a Narrative on Comey

We mastodons who still receive our daily dose of New York Times when the dead-tree version lands on our doorsteps with a dull thud got a special treat Tuesday, a textbook case of the way "the newspaper of record" goes about its business these days. The front page headline read: "Comey Role Recalls Hoover's F.B.I., Fairly or Not."

In one respect, the headline seemed almost banal. Why not compare James Comey with J. Edgar Hoover on the front page of the Times? After all, they've both worked as director of the FBI—Comey currently, of course, and Hoover for nearly half a century, from 1924 to 1972, though it seemed longer.

Yet there the similarities surely end. Comey, just for starters, is more than six and a half feet tall. Hoover would have had to wear lifts to qualify for the Lollipop Guild. Hoover, moreover, was a petty, paranoid bureaucrat who abused his self-bestowed power in shadowy secrecy. Comey is a law enforcement officer who has unintentionally created a commotion by trying to make his actions as transparent as possible.

To fully understand the headline, it helps to know that the Times has a relationship with its readers that is best described as "Pavlovian." After years of careful training, the newspaper has only to ring a bell to raise the appropriate response from its audience: joy, terror, laughter, sorrow, approval, revulsion, running the gamut from lol to smdh.

The name J. Edgar Hoover, a Times reader has learned, is shorthand for all that is dark and sinister in 20th century American history, which, given the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two and the trial of the Scottsboro boys, is a sorry history indeed. Hoover means racism and misuse of power and sexual repression and middle-class hypocrisy. Place the name before a Times reader and instantly he will feel a shudder of horror and push away his morning bowl of Muesli in disgust.