- 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
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece>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
<http://baltimorechronicle.com/2008/010708Lindorf.shtml>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 <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece>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."
-
-
- © THEODORE E. LANG 1/28/08 All rights reserved
-
- Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer.
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