DMW: Digital Music W...

I want to walk over to the offices of The New York Times and ask them one question, "Are you guys being paid by Cartoon Network to write articles that glorify their anime programming?" Don't get me wrong. Cartoon Network has been the stalwart in anime programming since they struck gold in the late 1990s with the airing of Dragonball Z. That show basically put the network on the map and help build a programming block called Toonami into the power that it is today. But the article from this past Sunday's New York Times Arts & Leisure section really got my ire up.
It starts out ok, mentioning the success of feature length anime courtesy of Miyazaki and Kon. But as the article goes on, I figured out that the true nature of the article was not to gauge the state of anime on US TV, but to publicize anime currently being offered by this one network, Cartoon Network. In other words, it was stealth pr, a pr piece for Cartoon Network. I hated the fact that the piece made it sound like you can only find anime on this one network and that is simply not true. You can find anime on other nets such as G4 under their Anime Unleashed sub-block of Barbed Wire Biscuit block, Starz, Showtime Extreme and soon on IFC. On VOD, you can find anime programming on The Anime Network and Anime Selects.
What I hated most about the article were the very bad descriptions of some of the shows. He had the gall to equate Samurai Champloo to Crazy/Beautiful. WHAT??? He described Samurai Champloo's characters as "three misfits straight out of a high-class teen movie." Was that the best description you can come up with Mr. Hale? You couldn't just say 'a mixture of contemporary pop culture set in Feudal Japan where three disparate travellers are forced to share a journey'? Instead, you opted for the - "Hey, NYT readers are pretty dense, so I'll just use the contemporary movie title and hope for the best". Mr. Hale compromises integrity for ignorance.
And must you relegate Naruto as 'just another one of those tween shows'? You probably thought you were watching an anime version of "7th Heaven" or "Summerland." I am completely dismayed by the article since it showed that the writer was trying to grab the attention of the readers at large by using simplistic analogies at the expense of the true anime viewer.
If this article was written with the intention of only spotlighting Cartoon Network's anime programming, then it did it's job. If the article was written with the intention of discussing where to find anime on US TV, then the article failed on all accounts.