Instead of issuing a correction, the Times simply updated its “Screams Without Words” with the bracketed revelation that an entire section of its article was incorrect.
Source: New York Times Brass Moves to Staunch Leaks Over Gaza Coverage
Tag: NYT
Journalistic Rhetoric in the waging of war
Source: The NYT’s Palestinian-Israeli Lexicon: Special Edition of the Ghoul’s Glossary
Amid the internal battle over the New York Times’s coverage of Israel’s war, top editors handed down a set of directives.
The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.
Source: New York Times to Journalists: What You Can’t Say on Gaza War
This doesn’t typically happen as a result of any grand monolithic conspiracy; it’s mostly just the natural consequence of having all the major news platforms controlled by wealthy and powerful people who each have a vested interest in manufacturing consent for the status quo upon which their wealth and power are premised.
The oligarchs control the media, and they hire the executives who run the media, and the executives hire the editors who write the headlines and guide the reporters to report a certain way, and this gives rise to a system where everyone working for the outlet conducts themselves in a way that just so happens to suit the powerful people on top.
Then before you know it you’ve got editors at The New York Times — a paper that’s been published by the same family for over a century — packaging a story about starvation caused by an Israeli siege to look like it’s a story about an innocent crop failure.
Odds are nobody told them to do that; they just learned over the years that that’s how you rise to the top in an outlet like The New York Times.
We speak with Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim of The Intercept about their exposé of a major New York Times piece into alleged mass rapes committed by Hamas militants on October 7 that raises serious questions about the accuracy of the story. The Times article was headlined “’Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” and its release in late December helped the Israeli government to justify the ongoing war on Gaza and to paint pro-Palestine supporters abroad as not caring about sexual violence. One of the reporters of the Times piece, Israeli freelancer Anat Schwartz, is being investigated by the Times for her social media activity, which included dehumanizing language and endorsements of violence against Palestinians in Gaza. ”The New York Times has grave, grave mischaracterizations, sins of omission, reliance on people who have no forensic or criminology credentials to be asserting that there was a systematic rape campaign put in place here,” says Scahill, who criticizes the newspaper for not issuing any corrections for their flawed reporting. We also hear from Ryan Grim about how the flawed Times article touched off “extremely intense debate” inside the newsroom. “They’re used to external criticism, but the amount of internal criticism they’re getting has them on the back foot,” he says.
The fact that the New York Times assigned its investigation of October 7 sexual assault claims to Anat Schwartz, a non-journalist with anti-Palestinian beliefs and ties to the Israeli military, is an extreme reflection of the paper’s unflagging pro-Israel bias.
Beneath these surface layers of anti-Palestinian bias, though, there may be a deeper and simpler issue. As Noam Chomsky and his late coauthor Edward Herman argued in Manufacturing Consent, one of the defining biases of mainstream media in general — of which the New York Times was emblematic long before the beginning of these dramatic recent conflicts of interest — has been a deep deference to and ideological affinity with the US national security state.
That was true of how they covered the Vietnam War when Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon were carpet-bombing that country to crush a peasant revolution. That was true of the Iraq War when the Times uncritically published the George W. Bush administration’s lies about “weapons of mass destruction.” We should not be surprised to discover that it’s true about Gaza, where the mass slaughter and displacement of civilians is being carried out with American funds and American weapons.
Source: The New York Times Has an Ugly Anti-Palestinian Bias
Many people are unhappy about some recent pensées from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal KingdomOpens in a new tab.” Friedman explains that “Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature.” He informs us that Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are like caterpillars in which this wasp lays its eggs, and those eggs are the “Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah.”
This is imperialistic blather straight out of the 19th century, except horribly written — imagine Rudyard Kipling after an anvil fell on his head. But the column is useful because it reconnects us to a 1982 incident that illustrates how, when it comes to the Middle East and Israel, the management of the Times has sometimes been to the right of Friedman.
The same thing is true for the Times itself. Somehow it is simultaneously the worst and best newspaper on earth. On the one hand, it runs crimes against human cognition about the insects living in the Middle East. On the other hand, it also regularly produces brilliant investigative reporting, sometimes even about IsraelOpens in a new tab.
This complexity is extremely cold comfort for the people who are brutalized by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, it’s important to comprehend if we’re trying to understand reality — something we should want to do, no matter how difficult and frustrating it can be.
Source: Thomas Friedman and Journalism’s Red Lines on Israel–Palestine
Let TF ask what is it that has enabled Gazans and the Houthis to make the world turn on a time; what is it that is exposing Israel’s narrative of victimhood for the farce that it is; and why have peoples across the world been mounting daily protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians.
Let him also ask why the United States is so openly, brazenly funding and arming the perpetrator of a genocidal war when it should be working very hard to play down its history of war-mongering against the Global South. Can an America that bombs compete with a China that builds?
What is this ‘dangerous moment?’
Is it the discovery by CIA of a Chinese plan to lay siege to Taiwan, Russian forces advancing on the capital of Ukraine, or thousands of Iranian attack boats blockading the Straits of Hormuz? It’s none of these.
Instead, this ‘dangerous moment’ is the result of actions emanating from a tiny sliver of land no larger than the smaller cities in the United States, whose impoverished population of 2.3 million Palestinians has lived in an open-air prison since 2007, and regularly subjected to carpet bombing by Israel, America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East. It is Gaza that has Thomas Friedman (TF) running scared.
What is it about the human spirit (note to self: Palestinians are human, not ‘human animals’) that compels a weak, ethnically cleansed, terrorized people to resist the might and power of the world’s most ‘civilized’ and powerful nation?
Yes, TF admits obliquely that it is an act of resistance by Gazans that now disturbs the USA, Israel and their Western accomplices.
Until the morning of October 7, 2023, the USA, Israel, and their Arab protectorates were blithely convinced that the ‘juggernaut’ of the so-called Abraham Accords would bury the Palestinians forever.
Yet, after nearly four months of the most destructive bombing in recent history, the esteemed NYT columnist is forced to acknowledge that Gaza “is forcing a fundamental rethinking about the Middle East within the Biden administration.” Is the human spirit still capable of such miracles?
Source: The Confessions of Thomas Friedman – CounterPunch.org
Murdoch owns the WSJ and The Lobby and is a heavy influence MSM. Are Shock Jocks stealing their audience?
The nation’s leading newspapers were under fire this weekend after publishing opinion pieces seen as “Bigoted,” “Islamophobic,” “Racist,” and “Reckless.”
Source: Outrage over Bigotry, Islamophobia in Wall Street Journal & New York Times
A New York Times story claiming a pattern of gender-based violence on October 7 hinged on the story of Gal Abdush. But the Abdush family says there is no proof she was raped, and that Times reporters interviewed them under false pretenses.
In the end, it appears that the New York Times manipulated a working-class Mizrahi family in the service of Israeli hasbara in order to score a journalistic achievement, which in reality is nothing more than a repetition of fake news and government propaganda.
The source of Trump’s fortune was his father, who bailed out the son’s failing businesses many times, a bombshell New York Times investigation found.
Donald Trump has, for decades, attempted to portray himself as a self-made, up-by-your-bootstraps entrepreneur who benefited little from his father’s fortune, relying on his own gumption and wiles to overcome financial challenges.
But a bombshell investigation by The New York Times published Tuesday annihilated this claim
Key points:
NYT claims Mr Downer had a night of heavy drinking with former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in May 2016
Mr Papadopoulos reportedly revealed Russia was shopping dirt on Hillary Clinton
It is alleged Australian officials passed that information to US counterparts when those emails began appearing in public
Whitewashing history
This is a gross whitewashing of history, clearly aimed at erasing from the record Israel’s well-documented and systematic ethnic cleansing of the majority Palestinian population whose presence on the land stood in the way of the Zionist goal of creating a “Jewish state.”
In fact, in the months before Israel’s “independence” was declared on 15 May, and before any Arab armies had intervened, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was already well under way.
The Zionist leadership finalized its “Plan Dalet” to expel Palestinians in March 1948. Palestinians from the cities of Haifa and Jaffa, and dozens of villages, had already been expelled before 15 May. The notorious massacre by Zionist forces in the village of Deir Yassin took place on 9 April, and by early May it is estimated that up to 250,000 Palestinians had already fled or been forced from their homes.
By the end of Israel’s so-called “War of Independence,” some 750,000 Palestinians out of 1.2 million had been displaced and more than 500 cities, towns and villages had been destroyed or depopulated.
Accurately reporting this chronology would make it impossible to sustain Israeli myths about 1948, or to obscure events, as The New York Times does, as mere violence by “both sides.In article on Jerusalem, New York Times falsifies history of 1948, 1967 | The Electronic Intifada
Hours after President Donald Trump denounced critical journalists as “the enemy of the people” before a cheering crowd of supporters, major news outlets were blacklisted from a White House press gaggle while the administration’s sycophants were ushered in.“CNN was not permitted to attend, along with the New York Times, Politico, Buz
Source: Trump Just Blacklisted Media Outlets. We Warned You This Would Happen.
TeleSur | – – Researchers say they were shocked to learn that Islam receives more negative coverage than cancer. The New York …
Source: The New York Times Presents Islam More Negatively than Cancer and Cocaine | Informed Comment
The government’s policy would be a terrible model for other prosperous countries facing huge numbers of people fleeing wars and persecution.
Source: Australia’s Brutal Treatment of Migrants – The New York Times
SYDNEY, Australia — Tony Abbott will remain Australia’s prime minister, fighting off a challenge to his position on Monday by lawmakers from his conservative Liberal Party.
Lawmakers in the party voted 61 to 39 against a “spill motion,” which would have declared the party’s leader and deputy leadership positions vacant. Had the motion succeeded, party members would then have voted to fill the positions held by Mr. Abbott and his deputy, Julie Bishop, Australia’s foreign minister.
Emerging from the vote in Canberra, Mr. Abbott said, “The Liberal Party has dealt with the spill motion, and now this matter is behind us.”
“We are absolutely determined to work for you, the people who elected us,” he added. “We want to end the disunity and the uncertainty which destroyed two Labor governments, and give you the good government that you deserve.”
The previous Labor government lost an election in September 2013 after twice dumping its leaders.
The ballot was held in secret at a specially convened meeting of lawmakers from the Liberal Party.
A junior lawmaker, Luke Simpkins from Western Australia, had called Friday for the move, amid growing dissatisfaction with Mr. Abbott’s leadership.
Mr. Abbott has been forced in the past week to promise to run a more collegial team and has acknowledged that some of his own major policy platforms were politically unpalatable. He said the government would now focus on jobs and families and on strengthening the economy. He has described the challenge just 16 months into his leadership as a “chastening experience.”
Last week Australia’s central bank cut its benchmark interest rate in response to a drop in resources prices, dampened forecasts for economic growth and expectations that unemployment will rise.
Before the leadership vote, Kate Carnell, head of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said business confidence had fallen, and industry leaders were not confident about the country’s direction.
“The future of Australia right now is pretty flat,” Ms. Carnell said Monday. “It is a real issue. The government doesn’t seem to be able to prosecute the direction that it said it wanted to go down. What business wants? It wants a vision.”
Ms. Carnell said that industry leaders wanted the government to cut expenditures but that stronger economic growth was more important.
Mr. Abbott and his governing conservatives have been unable to get many of their major measures from last year’s May budget passed through the Senate. But after retaining office on Monday, he said, “At heart, we are a highly successful country, justifiably proud of what we have achieved.”
He continued: “In essence, we are a strong economy with so much creativity and dynamism, and the challenge for government is to work with you, not against you. I love this country, and I will do my best to help our country to succeed.”
Mr. Abbott was due in Parliament, which was to resume Monday after a long summer recess.
Andrew Laming, a Liberal Party member from the state of Queensland, had been strongly critical of the prime minister before the vote, and especially Mr. Abbott’s decision on Jan. 26, the holiday known as Australia Day, to knight the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip.
“I believe strongly we can move ahead from here,” Mr. Laming said Monday. “Many of us were sending a signal to the prime minister for change, and he has promised that.”
He reiterated that Mr. Abbott’s job was now safe even though 40 percent of those party members voting had wanted a change, stating that many of them would be “satisfied with sending the signal.”
But John Wanna, a professor of politics at the Australian National University, warned that discontent remained high, even though the prime minister won a majority of the votes. “The numbers show widespread dissatisfaction,” he said.
“It is a strong warning shot,” he said. “He is going to have to remake himself quickly with this sort of dissent.”
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