The Times Calls Jets’ West Side Stadium ‘ Dreadful’?

The New York Times sounded more like a screeching fishwife than the dignified Gray Lady of 43rd Street in the latest of its series of frenzied attacks on our eagerly awaited stadium last Sunday.

In an editorial in its Jan. 16 section called The City, the newspaper referred to the Jets’ proposed stunning new home as “dreadful.”

Excuse me, New York Times – “dreadful?” A supermodern sports complex, designed by a top 21st-Century architect, is, you already know, going to be dreadful? Is this your paper I am reading, or some sleazy supermarket tabloid?

A respectable newspaper does not make such a comically insupportable charge in a formal editorial.

Before the first steam shovel-full of earth is lifted on the future site The Times calls a structure that does not exist dreadful – by the way, did a lady come over from the Sunday Styles section to write that for you? It’s a word more often heard along the runway at a fashion show than at a football game.

Is it that your sly agents have obtained inside information that the restroom facilities will be craftily designed to be inadequate, so that the toilets are going to be overflowing? Or, even better, that they are planning to forget to put in restrooms altogether? Such conditions would surely be dreadful, and are you telling us that in your ivory tower clairvoyance you actually know that?

Of course not. But what I do read in your use of so nasty a pejorative is something equally ugly: genuine loathing. The Company, as I called it in a previous article, really hates this proposal, and you give yourselves away as anything but unbiased editorialists by playing it the Company way (“Whatever the Company says is by me OK!”)

Let me suggest what else may be motivating these increasingly shrill attacks by a presumably respectable newspaper.

• Does the Times find the stadium “dreadful” because the Gray Lady has some undisclosed relationship with real estate interests who don’t want this gorgeous money-making sports facility to be built there? I received a letter from a reader months ago, when the Times began its long campaign to destroy Woody Johnson’s dream (for which, let’s remember, although the newspaper never mentions it, he is putting up 800 million dollars!), telling me of some Times-related real estate deal, and I apologize for not having kept that letter – would that gentleman write to me again, please? I would like to call the Gray Lady on the carpet about this.
• Could it be the opposition of the Shubert Organization, which pumps a lot of money into the Times with those high-priced Sunday Arts & Leisure ads? (What did I hear, it’s $30,000 a page? Of course that was years ago; it’s probably more now.)
• Can the paper possibly have a cozy relationship with the Giants and/or their landlords at that stadium in the Jersey swamplands, not to mention Cablevision and Madison Square Garden? Hey, only asking, because in all my years I have never witnessed such a manic campaign by a presumably honorable newspaper.

– Tom McMorrow