NY Times Arrogance – Downing Street No. 2
From the people's voice.orgTed Lang
There may have been some secretive, vital, diplomatic or international security reasons, or even possibly some other critical military considerations that shaped their editorial reasoning, but somehow, I doubt that any such considerations came into play regarding The New York Times’ decision to censor and spike the story first broken by the Sunday London Times on May 1, 2005. Of course, the red two-inch bold headline lettering that should have emblazoned the front pages of The New York Times on May 2, 2005, along with its follow-on account, could easily have deferred to the London Times and acknowledged its scoop, even if the story could, back then, have been considered a real stretch. But these certainly cannot be the reasons that the NY Times failed to further amplify that monumental piece of true journalism, ignoring it instead and relegating it to less than a mere and meaningless supermarket checkout counter tabloid exposé.
The Downing Street Memo revealed that both the Cheney-Bush regime and the government of then-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, were in agreement and understood the need to concoct and create phony, fraudulent intelligence to fool citizens of both America and Great Britain into accepting the resultant “policy” to attack and invade Iraq simply because Bush wanted to. And that this Bush fraud was specifically perpetrated to launch the attack on Iraq and Saddam Hussein had been even further verified by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s shocking public disclosures in his efforts to promote his book, as well as subsequent secret memos that came to light as well. Political enemies of Tony Blair arranged for these security breaches that brought the Memo and other evidence into the light of day. O’Neill revealed that Bush’s first order of business immediately upon taking office was to start a war with Iraq and to go after Saddam.
Bush’s reasons for going after Saddam and Iraq were personal – that’s what Downing and the O’Neill account proved. So how were these journalistic bombshells handled by “The Gray Lady?” How was the Downing Street Memo handled by America’s “newspaper of record?” And why is it that The New York Times is so often referred to by these lofty terms of endearment?
I have read both of Bernard Goldberg’s books: Bias [2002] and Arrogance [2003]. For those not familiar with the former CBS TV journalist, he can best be described as a veteran broadcast reporter, and therefore a well-positioned and knowledgeable “insider” who spent 28 years at CBS and achieved six Emmy Awards while there. He also earned a seventh Emmy doing a sports assignment on HBO.
Goldberg was somewhat of a maverick yet a very idealistic and accomplished true journalist. He literally railed against the “once size news fits all” control of the broadcast news media. His real revulsion for big mass media news was the broadcast media’s obeisance to that “journalistic” entity that boastfully offers in its trademark motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.” Of course, Goldberg’s major hang-up and resultant contempt was for none other than the editorial gatekeepers at The New York Times.
So why, considering the earth-shattering impact of the Downing Street Memo, was this huge event deserving of massive coverage and emblazoned front page treatment so unfit to print in the judgment of the Times’ editors and publisher? Goldberg provides the answer in just two words: “bias” and “arrogance!” The full title of Goldberg’s second book is: Arrogance – Rescuing America from the Media Elite [© Warner Books, Inc, New York – 2003].
Here are Goldberg’s comments in Arrogance, page 61: “If the Times decrees a story important, by definition it is important. And when the Times ignores a story – or a book or a social trend or an idea – then it is invisible. As the syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock puts it, ‘The cult of the New York Times...holds journalists, politicians, and other opinion makers in a Svengali-like trance. If the Times says the sun will rise in the west, then by golly it will!’”
Goldberg continues: “On a typical morning, this is how assignment editors and producers at network news divisions begin their day. Step one: They open up the New York Times. Step two: They scan the paper for stories to put on their nightly newscasts. Step three: They get one of their high-priced reporters (who is in his or her own office also reading the New York Times) on the phone – a reporter who may not have come up with even one original story idea in his entire network career (I mean that literally) – and then tell him or her to go out and do the New York Times story. Step four: He or she does, and that evening a video version of the Times story is on the air.”
Goldberg laments, “The sad fact is that the networks that shamelessly crib from the Times aren’t even embarrassed about doing it. After all, a lot of other media are doing the same thing; such is the reach and influence of the mighty New York Times. And if you steal from the Times – and this is no small point – no one can ever give you grief about getting something wrong. It was, after all, in the New York Times.” [p.62]
Goldberg reverts back to his observations concerning the newspaper of record’s earlier days of journalistic excellence so deserving of its role as news media gatekeeper. He also points out its bias: “Now, let’s be fair – until very late in the twentieth century very few people had any problem with the Times [sic] role as arbiter of what mattered, because it was understood that the paper’s reputation for excellence was merited. Of course it was liberal, but mostly it was sober and responsible, if sometimes a bit stodgy and boring. It didn’t get that nickname ‘the Old Gray Lady’ for nothing.
Back then the Times tried to cover the news straight, in a just-the-facts sort of way. Though even then it made some whopping mistakes – its chief correspondent to Moscow in the 1930s, Walter Duranty, turned out to be the media’s number one apologist for Stalin, if not a Soviet agent – as a matter of policy it at least sought to be fair. This was the Times of journalistic giants like Walter Lippmann and James Reston, and the rest of the media had good reason to look to it as an inspiration and an example. That was then; this is now.”
Professional broadcast journalist Bernard Goldberg then explains how the “mighty” Times abandoned its journalistic moorings and began to manufacture news to support its “liberal” agenda. Some may call it liberal, some others may call it progressive, and others may call it leftist. But Goldberg relates on page 64 of his book how Arthur Sulzberger confronted his son, “Pinch,” with a poignant question because he was infuriated over his son’s arrests for demonstrating against America’s military blunder in Vietnam, and asked him this question: “‘If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?’ Pinch replied. ‘I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country.’” [p.64]
And there you have it! Sulzberger, among the top five multi-millionaire families that control over 90 percent of the American media, would prefer the communist to kill the American. Says it all, now don’t it? Doesn’t this response perfectly characterize the liberal, progressive and socialist mindset? The INDIVIDUAL American soldier went there of his own volition; and great, beautiful powerful government had absolutely nothing to do with putting him there! Individuals are basically all bad, but a large group of individuals, a group we call “government,” is inherently good! Only government can bring out the good in each and every individual; and only government can ensure maximum individual freedom. That explains the left’s unceasing efforts to expand government and then to centralize it as tightly as possible. Does one now understand why “liberal” Democrats in Congress refuse to impeach Cheney-Bush?
Professor Kevin MacDonald once wrote a piece for V-Dare.com that earned him the scarlet, red-commie “A” [anti-Semite]. He correctly pointed out that Karl Marx was Jewish and that “communism was a product of Jewish intellectualism.” Who were we supposedly fighting in Vietnam if not an outcropping of the more militant version of Marxism; namely, Bolshevism? And The New York Times still proudly displays the 1932 Pulitzer Prize in journalism “earned” by Walter Duranty, who covered up the starvation mass murders of 8,000,000 Ukrainians by Comrade Josef Stalin.
Why is this so relevant? Consider the remarks of Adolf Hitler in 1926 in Mein Kampf: “And so the Jew today is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany. Wherever in the world we read of attacks against Germany, Jews are the fabricators, just as in peacetime and during the War the press of the Jewish stock exchange and Marxists systematically stirred up hatred against Germany until state after state abandoned neutrality and, renouncing the true interests of the peoples, entered the service of the World War coalition.” These remarks go a tad bit further in explaining Hitler’s hatred for the Jews than the mere one-size-fits all smear of “anti-Semitism.” And the Israel lobby, AIPAC, is firmly on record as having agitated for the unjust, unconstitutional and unnecessary invasion and war in Iraq, and now they’re agitating for our invasion of Iran. Think of The New York Times’ Judith Miller!
Here are observations from William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich [MJF Books, New York, renewed copyrights in 1987 and 1989 – in collaboration with Simon & Shuster, Inc.] from pages 244-245: “Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. [Joseph] Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day.” Almost sounds like Goldberg’s observations!
Shirer makes it clear that Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry were not only deployed by Hitler to control all news and information to be made available to the public, but to also remove any and all possible propaganda outlets supportive of the nation-destroying influence of “Jewish” communism. “Newspapers deemed as a threat by the Nazis, virtually all owned by Jewish entrepreneurs were all to be eliminated as well, whether or not they posed a communist threat.”
Shirer continues: “It now led to the ousting of those journals and journalists who were not Nazi or who declined to become so. One of the first to be forced out of business was the Vossische Zeitung. Founded in 1704 and numbering among its contributors in the past such names as Frederick the Great, Lessing and Rathenau, it had become the leading newspaper of Germany, comparable to the Times of London and The New York Times. But it was liberal and it was owned by the House of Ullstein, a Jewish firm. It went out of business on April 1, 1934, after 230 years of continuous publication. The Berliner Tageblatt, another world-renowned liberal newspaper, lingered on a little longer, until 1937, though its owner, Hans Lackmann-Mosse, a Jew, was forced to surrender his interest in the newspaper in the spring of 1933.
Germany’s third great liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, also continued to publish after divesting itself of its Jewish proprietor and editors. Rudolf Kircher, its London correspondent, an Anglophile and a liberal, became the editor and, like Karl Silex, editor of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of Berlin, who had also been a London correspondent, a Rhodes scholar, a passionate admirer of the British and a liberal, served the Nazis well, often becoming, as Otto Dietrich, the Reich press chief, once said of the former ‘opposition papers,’ ‘more papal than the Pope.’ That the last three newspapers survived was due partly to the influence of the German Foreign Office, which wanted these internationally known journals as a kind of showpiece to impress the outside world. They gave a respectability to Nazi Germany and at the same time peddled its propaganda.”
Digressing a moment, please note the now-tired overuse of the term “liberal” by Shirer. In the United States today, politically if not legitimately a police state, made so by the Constitution-nullifying USA PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and unlimited NSA spying on law-abiding citizens, the only two valid opposing political factions in America are now comprised of constitutionalists and anti-constitutionalists.
Yet Shirer, although unknowingly at the time, is journalistically prescient, properly assessing the eventual dumbing-down intended by propaganda to its eventual total demise when it serves to mentally numb each individual in a society where only manufactured news is offered: “With all newspapers in Germany being told what to publish and how to write the news and editorials, it was inevitable that a deadly conformity would come over the nation’s press. Even a people so regimented and so given to accepting authority became bored by the daily newspapers.”
What Shirer describes as the status of newspaper conformity and journalistic control in Nazi Germany before and during World War II is precisely the same state of journalism that exists here and now in the formerly free United States of America. It is what has created the Internet, and a new dimension to true journalism. How does the Goebbels-controlled German press compare with The New York Times-controlled press of America today? Isn’t it obvious? We have no free and independent press as regards the traditional reporting profession, and have transitioned to dictatorship as a result and been taken over by an evil, vile, totalitarian government enforcing a police state!
On December 27, 2007, a Thursday and therefore not as vital a prime time window as would be a Sunday, The New York Times published an editorial entitled: “Protection for Endangered Whistle-Blowers.” The piece opens, “Congress is finally ready to stand up to the Bush administration and for those courageous federal workers who dare to reveal waste and abuse in government. The Senate has passed strong reforms to the 1989 whistle-blower protection law, counteracting the gag orders, retaliatory investigations and other harassments that have become shamefully standard practice during the last seven years.”
“Waste and abuse?” “Counteracting gag orders?” “Shamefully standard practice?” Sounds serious! It would seem that the American newspaper of record is finally getting down to the real meaning of a free and independent press.
The editorial continues: “The reforms would provide stronger outside review protection for whistle-blowers and would make it more difficult for their security clearances to be revoked, a common shunning device. Workers would also be freer to share classified information with Congress – when necessary to reveal the details of abuse and fraud – and would have a strengthened court review process for appealing disputed cases.”
“Abuse and fraud?”
It goes on: “More than 400 workers a year make first hand allegations of on the job waste and fraud, risking their careers in the process. In response, too many administration political appointees have flouted the law, demoting and demeaning workers who speak up, even subverting the inspector general system in the process.”
The Times editorial continues: “The House has passed an even stronger version, and negotiators will begin meeting soon after Congress returns. The White House, predictably, is threatening a veto. Both chambers of Congress have registered a veto-proof commitment, and the next priority should be to steer the strongest possible final measure into law. In particular, conferees must include House provisions extending whistle-blower protection to workers at the F.B.I. and national intelligence agencies.”
Given this encouraging editorial support from America’s newspaper of record, it would seem that the Times is not only solidly behind whistle-blower protection, but also strongly opposes government waste, fraud and abuse. But where does The New York Times stand on acts of treason? And since the editorial mentions the FBI, what about the Sibel Edmonds whistle-blower case?
On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2007, The New York Times offered yet another “timely” [Sorry!] editorial: “Looking at America.” It opens, “There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.”
This hard-hitting opening summarization of the Cheney-Bush administration horror show has long been known by web surfers and has been the subject of volumes of Internet commentary. Clearly, the obvious purpose of this extremely late-in-coming opinion is to get the Times on board even if by a last minute “me too.”
The editorial continues: “It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.”
Then the real purpose of the Times opinion piece is revealed: “The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.”
Their conclusion is that Bush destroyed our national moral posture due to “panic,” which was offered up twice in their preceding two paragraphs. The New York Times is apologizing for Bush, seeking to protect him from fact-based criticism and substituting instead “ideology and panic” for a reckless agenda of deliberate warmongering for reasons known only to him, his inner circle of friends and his Establishment handlers. Employing the “newspaper mentality” and relying upon a very short and dim collective public memory, the opinion writer deliberately fails to recall the revelations of former Bush Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill. This is a deliberate attempt by the Times to manipulate public opinion by a convenient omission thereby hoping for total public forgetfulness.
Yet, the Times finally catches up to the Internet: “The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.” See? 9/11 was an unfortunate tragedy, a kind of natural event, like hurricane Katrina! It was an accident!
Hoping to have gotten this second false tag attempt past the gullible Times readers, they resurrect the “American press’” biggest lie: “These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.”
Beautifully said, no?
It is worth considering at this point, whether we, the Internet-informed news practitioners and consumers, should apprise America’s newspaper of record, “The Gray Lady,” of the numerous and burgeoning accounts of vote fraud already being uncovered in primary elections across the nation. We could also inform them of the August 2007 HDTV Dan Rather report concerning the iVotronic electronic voting machines manufactured by Election Systems & Software that have been proven to cast the wrong balloting data and which have been in use in 22 states. And perhaps even the Times knows about the Diebold machines! We could elaborate on the increasing incidents of voter identity registration fraud and manipulation, and the failure of electronic op scan voting machines. Shouldn’t we inform the Times of these voting anomalies?
Nah! Let’s just let them think they’re one of us: the real journalists in America!
On Sunday, January 6th, the Sunday London Times did it again! A report, in all likelihood even more significant than the Downing Street Memo story spiked by our pond side Times, was scooped again by the London Times. Entitled, “For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets,” written for the paper’s “Insight” section and carried also on Times Online, reporters Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, and Joe Lauria launch a disturbing account of high level government treason involving the sale of nuclear secrets and a possible connection in the attempted theft of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles pointed out by David Lindorff. This has to develop into yet another major exposé of Cheney-Bush conspiracy and treason.
The article begins, “A whistle-blower has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets. Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office. She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.”
The article continues: “Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions. Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan. The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims. However, Edmonds said: ‘He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.’”
Have you read anything about this in America’s newspaper of record? Have you seen any editorials on this in The Gray Lady? Neither have I!!!
Journalist David Lindorff, a former New York Times reporter, did a follow-on piece for the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel on its website, and of course, quickly comes up with a strong connection to other crimes perpetrated by the Cheney-Bush regime against this nation and its people: “If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London based upon information provided by US government whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, we have not only solid evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America’s enemies, even including Al Qaeda.”
Lindorff goes on: “The story also casts a chilling light on the so-called ‘accidental’ flight of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52 that flew last Aug. 30 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The Sunday Times reports that Edmonds, whose whistle-blowing efforts have been studiously ignored by what passes for the news media in American … approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British paper a month ago after reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda leader had been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey, a US NATO alley, under the noses of the Turkish military.”
Then Lindorff asks the obvious question: “There is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media?”
Of course, we know the answer. The New York Times doesn’t want it to be news – they don’t want the American people to know about the Cheney-Bush regime’s deadly treason, for it might lead to other conclusions about 9/11 as noted by Lindorff. They are understandably pro-Israel, and the Cheney-Bush regime represents the best thing that ever happened for Israel. And The New York Times is the official propaganda mouthpiece for The Establishment, the real government and shadow authority in America! The New York Times’ total control of American broadcast TV, radio, cable TV, and entire chains of newspapers all across America simulates and almost totally duplicates the control Hitler and Goebbels exercised in pre-World War II Nazi Germany.
My apologies for this sober and upsetting rant! But if you need to lighten up and enjoy a laugh, go back and read the quotes cited from those two New York Times editorials. How the Times has been made to crash and burn; from its days supporting Dr. Daniel Ellsberg and its courageous journalism in exposing the “Pentagon Papers,” to now becoming a Joseph Goebbels bootlicking propaganda factory helping to cover up nuclear treason by Cheney-Bush. This is an American journalistic tragedy! How sad it is for “The Red Lady.”
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February 5, 2008 © Theodore E. Lang 1/28/08 All rights reserved. Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer.
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