With your recent contract for news services from the New York Times, it was inevitable that your readers would soon bear the advantage or affliction of Anthony Lewis' writings.
He is a skilled writer, persuasive in his approach to whatever subject he undertakes. An example came quickly in his article on your editorial page of Feb. 10. There he hit hard in attempting to assign blame for the new administration's difficulties in choosing an acceptable attorney general.Did he blame the nominees for their scofflaw attitude in hiring undocumented aliens for household help or ignoring Social Security laws? Did he mention that the duties of the attorney general would include enforcement of the very laws that those appointees admitted breaking? He did not. Instead, he chose to heap his wrath upon a portion of society that he terms "male-dominated."
Typically, Lewis' tactic is to skirt the real issue and attempt to muddy the problem. For example, during the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s, Anthony Lewis and other writers for the New York Times were sympathetic and supportive to Pol Pot's communist government.
Their journalistic efforts in support of that dictator did not waver until Soviet Russia publicly conceded the existence of the Pol Pot extermination of over a million Cambodians. Then, and only then, did Lewis relent in his fervent journalistic support. And then, in a strange twist, he blamed it all on the United States.
Lewis is a darling of the ultra-liberal left (long employed by the Northeastern liberal press); now that we are to be treated to his opinions, we need to be familiar with his historic agenda to understand where he's coming from. Otherwise, he's apt to disinform us right out of our socks.
Earl M. Altizer
West Jordan