It Didn't Start With Jayson Blair

Fredom News ^ | 5/19/2003 | Tim Phares

[TBP]

So the New York Times lied. Why is that news? Do we report that millions of people commuted home without incident, or that hundreds of airplanes didn’t crash? No, because those are routine incidents. Well, when the New York Times prints out-and-out fabrications, it is just part of a longstanding pattern.

Recent reports have indicated that two other Times reporters are currently under investigation for "improprieties."

Back in the 1930s, the Times won Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of Stalin’s Soviet Union, written by reporter Walter Duranty. Duranty assured his readers that there was no famine in Russia and that everyone was well fed, even though he admitted privately that Stalin was the "workers’ paradise" was systematically starving 20 to 30 million people. Yet Duranty reported that the Soviet system was providing food for everyone and the New York Times blindly printed it.

On November 14, 2001, the Times admitted that publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.’s grandfather, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, directed his reporters to suppress news of Hitler’s Holocaust. Even though the Times editors knew what was going on in the Third Reich, Sulzberger directed them to downplay it.

The current publisher, "Pinch" Sulzberger, is a worthy heir to this tradition of suppression and distortion. He handpicked Executive Editor Howell Raines, who has denied knowing anything about reporter Jayson Blair’s fictions even though Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landsman wrote a memo to all the editors discussing Blair’s falsehoods and saying, "We must stop Jayson from writing for the New York Times. Now." Raines said that the memo never got beyond Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, clearly setting up Boyd, who is African American, to be the designated fall guy.

As media analyst Cliff Kincaid has pointed out, a reader of the New York Times could not be faulted for concluding that the paper’s editors and reporters thought that the all-male membership of the Augusta National Golf Club is more important than America’s recent war against Iraq. The Times hammered the Augusta story and spiked articles that supported the country club’s position. Yet it constantly second-guessed the Iraq war, not just on the editorial pages, but in its news coverage, declaring the situation a "quagmire" when American troops were just days away from victory. Well, who is in a quagmire now?

The Times has even admitted that it sought out former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to ask him to write an article opposing the effort to liberate Iraq, an offer Mr. Eagleburger declined.

In addition, Times writer Nicholas Kristof claimed that former University of South Florida Professor Sami Al-Arian was being singled out for criticism because his views on the Middle East "are out of the mainstream." Al-Arian, according to reports in many other media outlets and an indictment against him, was a major leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in this country and actively raised funds for organizations that acted as fronts for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, the Times has been leading the campaign to blame Dr. Steven Hatfill for the Anthrax letters that killed five people, suggesting that Dr. Hatfill was a suspect because of his anti-Communist background.

Now NewsMax.com is reporting that the Boston Globe, which the Times owns, spiked a column criticizing Times management’s handling of the Blair matter while making reference to the relatively light punishment of Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, who was suspended from the paper for his plagiarism.

Blair, in addition to his fraudulent reporting, submitted detailed expense accounts for trips he never took. Why didn’t anyone ask him for proof of these expenses? And why was Blair promoted to the D.C. sniper story after the Times editors, including Raines, knew of his habit of making up information and stealing quotes? Blair was the author of the story claiming that the questioning of sniper suspect John Muhammad had been stopped just before Muhammad was about to confess.

The Times’s motto, which is printed on its masthead, is "All the News That’s Fit to Print." Perhaps it should be "All the news that fits our views" because its preference for ideology over accuracy is now as clear as it is longstanding.

[TBP]

Ideology over accuracy.

[OldFriend]

The NYT reporter snuck up to the house where William Kennedy Smith's rape victim lived and printed a picture of the inside of her baby's room. They also printed her name altho the trial protected her identity.

Nothing they have done in decades has earned them the respect they think they deserve.