Tag Archives: NY Times

Unchastened by Russiagate, the NY Times Doubles Down in Its Special Counsel Coverage, by Aaron Maté

Posted on February 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Being one of the government’s main propaganda organs means you never have to admit to a lie, you just go on to new ones. From Aaron Maté at realclearwire.com:

Special Counsel John Durham, leading a multi-year probe of how U.S. intelligence officials conducted the Russia investigation, has yet to issue his final report. But according to the New York Times, Durham has already come up empty.  

Durham’s team, the Times declared in a widely circulated Jan. 26 article, has gone “unsuccessfully down one path after another” and ultimately “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry.”  The three bylined reporters, Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner, base their conclusion on a “monthslong review,” including interviews “with more than a dozen current and former officials.”  

Yet a review of the trio’s reporting shows that the Times is still engaging in the same journalistic behavior that has made the paper a reliable disseminator of discredited innuendo about a conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia. By omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts, the Times article does not set the record straight. Instead, it attempts to write off the Durham probe before its findings have been released, and whitewashes Russiagate’s key actors in the FBI and Clinton campaign long after they have been exposed.  

The article fits into a larger pattern of malfeasance in the Times’ Russiagate coverage, which RCI has documented and the Columbia Journalism Review recently highlighted at length. RCI found, among other shortcomings, a failure to correct clear errors, the use of misleading language to minimize and sanitize the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and the refusal to acknowledge broader missteps, especially those involving anonymous sources who turned out to be deceitful. The Times’ failures are especially consequential because of the newspaper’s unique role in framing broader news narratives. That its Russiagate reporting shared journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, underscores a media dysfunction that extends beyond this single influential organization. 

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NYT On Ukraine – Real Reporting, Propaganda For Balance, Ominous Warning, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on February 8, 2023 | 1 comment

By the time the NY Times gets around to publishing anything important, it’s usually days or weeks old in the alternative media. Apparently the rag of record has discovered that Ukraine is not winning its war with Russia. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

The New York Times is putting itself in a twist with its current reporting on the war in Ukraine.

Last months Ukraine was winning the war – at least in ‘western’ media. But this week the NYT‘s man on the ground reports the opposite:

Outnumbered and Worn Out, Ukrainians in East Brace for Russian Assault

Exhausted Ukrainian troops complain they are already outnumbered and outgunned, even before Russia has committed the bulk of its roughly 200,000 newly mobilized soldiers. And doctors at hospitals speak of mounting losses as they struggle to care for fighters with gruesome injuries.
…
The first stages of the Russian offensive have already begun. Ukrainian troops say that Bakhmut, an eastern Ukrainian city that Russian forces have been trying to seize since the summer, is likely to fall soon. Elsewhere, Russian forces are advancing in small groups and probing the front lines looking for Ukrainian weaknesses.The efforts are already straining Ukraine’s military, which is worn out by nearly 12 months of heavy fighting.
…
Losses among Ukrainian forces have been severe. Troops in a volunteer contingent called the Carpathian Sich, positioned near Nevske, said that some 30 fighters from their group had died in recent weeks, and soldiers said, only partly in jest, that just about everyone has a concussion.

“It’s winter and the positions are open; there’s nowhere to hide,” said a soldier from the unit with the call sign Rusin.

At one frontline hospital in the Donbas, the morgue was packed with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers in white plastic bags. In another hospital, stretchers with wounded troops covered in gold foil thermal blankets crowded the corridors, and a steady stream of ambulances arrived from the front nearly all day long.

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New York Times Decides Lockdowns are Actually Draconian and Economically Destructive when China Does Them, by eugyppius

Posted on November 29, 2022 | 1 comment

The New York Times can’t get its editorial slant straight on whether lockdowns are a good or a bad thing. From eugyppius at eugyppius.com:

“Many were fed up with Mr. Xi … and his ‘Zero-Covid’ policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country,” writes the Times in pacific unselfawareness.

“Right-wing conspiracy theorists with ties to anti-Xi opposition elements spread baseless rumours, deny science, and endanger lives” – strangely not how the New York Times chose to caption this image.

Three years ago, Zero Covid was the aspiration of public health bureaucrats and politicians across the West. Charlatan techbros like Tomas Pueyo appeared on national television to demand nationwide house arrest; leaders like Angela Merkel surrounded themselves with virus-eradicationist modellers and imposed unprecedented months-long closures upon their countries. When protests inevitably broke out, they were violently suppressed; the protesters were slandered as conspiracy theorists and fascists.

The New York Times played a leading role in this long and excruciating charade. In April 2020, they reported that “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the [Trump] White House” was responsible for “quietly working to nurture protests and apply … pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus.” In March 2021, they ran an obnoxious opinion piece about What Happened When Germany’s Far-Right Party Railed Against Lockdowns, which called German protesters “an amorphous mix of conspiracy theorists, shady organizations and outraged citizens” and appeared to accuse the right-populist party Alternativ für Deutschland of opportunism for joining their ranks.

What a difference a few years have made.

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NY Times Takes Rare Look At Apparent Ukrainian War Crimes, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

This will be as far as things will go at the NY Times, because any honest appraisal of Ukraine would lead to the question: why are supporting these clowns and crooks? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The New York Times has in an extremely rare moment (or perhaps more like unprecedented) conducted an in-depth visual investigation of a likely war crime against surrendered Russian troops conducted by Ukrainian forces. Multiple videos from different angles, including drone footage, emerged last week showing the incredibly disturbing scenes as Ukrainian forces were recapturing the village of Makiivka in the Luhansk region.

The videos show ten apparently unarmed Russian soldiers lying facedown on the ground, who early on are seen moving and in a position of surrender as at least four Ukrainian troops stand nearby outside of a house in a farmyard.

By the end of the footage, eleven Russians had been shot dead at close range, in what Russia says was a summary execution of people who at that point (based on their surrender) effectively become non-combatants based on accepted international laws of war.

Via AP: Investigators in Makiivka, where the shooting in the video allegedly took place. 

The Russian Defense Ministry has said the videos confirm “deliberate and methodical murder” of its soldiers by the Ukrainian side, also with the Russian Foreign Ministry calling the act “merciless” and “shocking”.

Surprisingly, the videos were initially made public by Ukrainian news sources and soldiers themselves, and were shared widely on social media, as they purportedly showed the ‘heroism’ of Ukrainian soldiers as they clawed back territory in eastern Ukraine.

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No, New York Times, You Don’t “Deserve Better” Than Donald Trump. By Matt Taibbi

Posted on November 20, 2022 | 1 comment

Donald Trump is a hand grenade thrown by people who are sick and tired of the what they see and hear from the establishment, of which the New York Times is an exemplar. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

Trump should spare us all and retire. But his antagonists’ lack of self-awareness keeps giving him oxygen

Among the predictably enormous quantity of horrified responses to Donald Trump’s campaign announcement this week, the New York Times editorial board handed down a beauty: “America Deserves Better Than Donald Trump.”

Is that true? If the question is if Donald Trump should be president, even I’ve been clear from the start the answer is no. But deserve? When the Times reaches for a word like that, they complicate what should be a simple question. Does the Times editorial board deserve President Trump? As William Munny put it with a bullet in Unforgiven, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.

Trump was elected in 2016. That’s a fact. The American political establishment has since refused any honest reckoning about how or why it happened. The closest the Times came to an explanation in this week’s editorial:

Mr. Trump has many loyal supporters, who regard him as a flawed but effective champion. His rise to power was built on the idea that he is a winner and, for many Republicans, his victory in 2016 was sufficient justification for having supported him. It allowed the party to cut taxes and take firm control of the Supreme Court, opening an era of conservative jurisprudence, including the reversal of Roe v. Wade this year.

In this fantasy world, Republicans merely put up with Trump, as a means to securing traditional conservative ends like cutting taxes and reversing Roe, because of “the idea that he is a winner.”

You’d have to be high as a Georgia Pine to believe this. There may be some Republican politicians who made the Machiavellian calculation the Times describes, but his voters weren’t thinking that. They just saw a way to send a giant Fuck You to people they hated and distrusted more than Trump.

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New York Times to Biden — Time to Go! By Pat Buchanan

Posted on July 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

When the liberals’ bible says it’s time for Biden to go, he might as well book his retirement flight on Air Force One and start soliciting donations for the Joe Biden Presidential Library. From Pat Buchanan at buchanan.org:

When President Joe Biden retired in Rehoboth Beach on Saturday night, he likely did not expect to find a severed horse’s head under his bed covers.

But there it was, courtesy of The New York Times.

“At 79, Biden is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency” ran the headline over Sunday’s devastating front-page story.

Message: Time’s up, Joe. Time to go. Second term is out.

Biden officials and White House aides acknowledge, the story ran, that, “Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago … His energy level … is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.”

On and on it went, the Times tale of Biden’s cognitive decline:

“Mr. Biden’s … speeches can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused. More than once, he has promoted Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her ‘President Harris.’ Mr. Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, stumbles over words like ‘kleptocracy.’ He has said Iranian when he meant Ukrainian and several times called Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, ‘John,’ confusing him with the late Republican senator of that name from Virginia …

“The White House has had to walk back some of his ad-libbed comments, such as when he vowed a military response if China attacks Taiwan or declared that President Vladimir V. Putin ‘cannot remain in power’ in Russia.”

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NY Times Shifts Pro-War Narrative, Documents Failure of US in Ukraine, by John Walsh

Posted on May 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Perhaps the NY Times has been chastened by its failure to admit the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal for two years, and it’s trying to improve its record on the time it takes to recognize the obvious. From John V. Walsh at antiwar.com:

Suggests the US End Its the Proxy War on Russia

The New York Times has a job to do – and it has done that job spectacularly well over the past few months. The Times is a leader, in the opinion of this writer, the leader in spelling out the US narrative on the war in Ukraine, a tale designed to keep up morale, give the war a high moral purpose and justify the untold billions pouring from the taxpayers’ pockets into Joe Biden’s proxy war on Russia. Day in and day out in page after page of word and picture it has been instructing one and all, including politicians and lower level opinion shapers, exactly what to think about the war in Ukraine.

So, when the Times says that things are not going well for the US and its man in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelensky, it is a man bites dog kind of story. It tells us that some truths have gone from uncomfortable to undeniable. Such was nature of the page one story on May 11, headlined “Russians Hold Much of the East, Setbacks Aside.”

Even that anti-narrative headline softens the bitter truth. The first paragraph of the story fesses up more completely, stating, “Obscured in the daily fighting is the geographic reality that Russia has made gains on the ground.” Not “holding” ground but “gaining” ground. Not exactly a morale booster.

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Anonymous Officials Claim There’s An Evil Russian Plot Again But The Evidence Is Secret Again, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 23, 2022 | 1 comment

Recycling propaganda from the government is not journalism. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Major western news publications are running a story about a sinister plot by the Russian government, and — you may want to sit down for this — the sources of the report are anonymous, and the evidence for it is secret.

The New York Times reports that according to anonymous individuals within the US and British governments, Russia is currently plotting to topple the existing government of Ukraine in some way using some method and then somehow install a puppet regime that is sympathetic to Moscow using some sort of means. What specifically those means and methods might be are not revealed to us in this very serious news report.

“The communiqué provided few details about how Russia might go about imposing a new government on Ukraine, and did not say whether such plans were contingent on an invasion by Russian troops,” the Paper of Record informs us. “British officials familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intent was both to head off the activation of such plans as well as to put Mr. Putin on notice that this plot had been exposed.”

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NYT: Why Are All These Racist Losers So Angry? by Ann Coulter

Posted on July 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

We’re angry because we don’t like them and their presumption that they are entitled to rule the world. From Ann Coulter at townhall.com:

NYT: Why Are All These Racist Losers So Angry?

Source: AP Photo/Richard Drew

Today we’ll talk about how to write the classic New York Times column, using Thomas Edsall’s recent “Trumpism Without Borders” as our example. It must have taken him about 40 minutes to write it.

Edsall blames the populist movements sweeping the globe on the same ills that “led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump.” To wit: “anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism and inequality.” Fascism awaits us unless we keep importing low-skilled immigrants and shipping jobs abroad!

For someone worried about the erosion of “democratic norms,” maybe Edsall shouldn’t be referring to the outcome of a free and fair U.S. presidential election as a “right-wing takeover of the federal government.” We had an election, pal.

But ever since the 2016 election, there’s been a frisson of viciousness to the elites’ usual contempt for ordinary Americans. Never mind that Trump ended up betraying his voters. The establishment is appalled that the issues he ran on were popular. Five years later, they still sputter in rage, unable to comprehend why Jeb or Hillary didn’t end up in the White House.

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The CIA Used To Infiltrate The Media. Now The CIA Is The Media. by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on April 16, 2021 | 1 comment

Just look at all the ex-spooks (Or is it once a spook always a spook?) on the various network payrolls. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called  “Bountygate” story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.

“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,” Greenwald tweeted. “So media outlets – again – repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.”

Indeed, NYT’s original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only “officials,” yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the lying, torturing, drug-running, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New York Times first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s assessment,” with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.

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