The Truth Vs. The New York Times

The New York Times spent an estimated $2 million on an advertisement during the Oscars broadcast in February. Glamorous singer and actress Janelle Monae stood on the seashore selling The Times' "1619 Project," which dramatically insists that America began 400 years ago when a ship carrying slaves from Africa landed at Hampton, Virginia. The commercial closed with the on-screen messages "The truth can change how we see the world" and "The truth is worth it," followed by The New York Times logo.

But on March 11, The Times felt pressed to publish an "update," a "clarification" on this grand, brand-building project. The 1619 Project was based on the idea that slavery was "one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution." It seems that point is not true. To imply that all of the American colonists were passionate advocates of slavery would be a jarring smear.

"If the scholarship of the past several decades has taught us anything, it is that we should be careful not to assume unanimity on the part of the colonists, as many previous interpretive histories of the patriot cause did," The Times wrote. "We recognize that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists."

This "project" tried to attach everything "wrong" with America to the legacy of slavery, from our lack of "universal health care" to our love of sugar, which has "a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery."

Imagine if someone 100 years from now were to write a history of The New York Times claiming that everything the newspaper had ever done could be framed by the notion that everyone who worked there was a passionate atheist. Would it help to months later add a "clarification" saying that not every Times employee was this way?

The nation's most overrated newspaper was embarrassed on March 6 by a Politico article provocatively titled "I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me." Writer Leslie M. Harris, a Northwestern University historian specializing in slavery and African Americans, began by talking about an interview on Georgia Public Broadcasting: "On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America."

She told The Times "fact-checker" that "slavery was certainly an issue" in the Revolution, but "the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 colonies went to war. ... Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones' introductory essay."

This is not the only such opinion. Jonathan Butcher at The Daily Signal adds to the story. The Wall Street Journal cited criticism from Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Gordon Wood and James McPherson, with Wood saying, "It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support."

But this colonist-smearing 1619 Project has been energetically adopted as a curriculum in public schools. The Pulitzer Center, which distributes the project, claims in its annual report that 3,500 schools are using it. Entire school systems in Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Buffalo, New York, and other big cities are touting this ersatz history as "invaluable" for their students.

This is who the New York Times is. And it goes back a long way.

Walter Duranty, their man in the Soviet Union through the Twenties and Thirties, actively discounted Stalin's famine (even though he knew it was really happening)

Here are some quotes from a Washington Examiner article Pulitzer-Winning Lies (Quotes the New York Times has NEVER repudiated):

"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1

"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933

"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6

"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
--New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18

"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."
--New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13

Here is another excerpt from that same article

"...I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. ("An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934," University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP's Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:

"Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated."

And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day..."

And this is only from their star reporter on the famine. His coverage of the show trials was even more nauseating and sycophantic to the Soviets. Pretty much says it all about the New York Times.

Add to this their active non-coverage or open denial of the Holocaust as it occurred, and the picture is complete.

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