When only lies are fit to print
When only lies are fit to print

Of this you can be sure, that you will never get it straight on Israel or President Trump from The New York Times, which is bad enough, but worse when you consider that the rest of the media follow the leader, namely, the Times. This is so serious, that top columnist Michael Goodwin brings it up again, as to the tragedy of no news we can trust.

My only complaint, so far as the New York Post’s Goodwin, is that I wish I’d written it first, how dangerous it is when people are consistently deceived.

Well, first or second, I’d written plenty about it in these pages, and in this book.

The thing is – how brazenly they go about their falsehoods. Times’ Executive Editor Dean Baquet has termed Trump the enemy, and has mandated his staffers to write accordingly.

If it’s objective reporting you want with your coffee, forget about it; only one side of the story will you get, and never Trump’s good side.

Then, as we know, as it goes for Trump, so it goes for Israel, and thereafter Jews everywhere – and have you been to Brooklyn lately?

Nearly every day there, another attack against Jews. Here, the important stats.

Which is not to say that the Times is guilty, but neither is it innocent, either. The poison gets in the air and spreads to people who can’t even read.

Like those “teenagers,” or “youths” as they are called, who roam the streets to find Jewish pedestrians convenient for sport.

Antisemitism becomes part of the culture, and for this, the Times is very much to blame – and have you been to Europe lately?

Antisemitism is back to what it was, epidemic, which is saying Europe is back to what it was. 

But in America, we are supposed to be different; journalism is supposed to be different. Telling both sides to every story used to be the rule.

Back at the start, at the Burlington County Times, I would not dare, or even think to hand in a story that included my “opinion.”

Later, it was the same too at The Philadelphia Inquirer, until that too fell into the hands of dogmatic leftists, and became corrupted.

No wait. Opine away…but at the opinion pages. 

News reporting was a sacred trust and you handled it with care, and if you didn’t, you’d get the editor’s scowl; twice, you are in the wrong line of work.

I do not remember the great Bill Holland ever telling us to write how we “feel” about the president or anybody else.

You didn’t get to toot your own horn, left or right, in the front pages.

But Bill Holland is gone, and at the Times, Abe Rosenthal is gone, and what’s left is Dean Baquet. 

It is now his newspaper…his world.

I share Goodwin’s alarm. 

I still say, it all began with Woodward and Bernstein, who were, and still are, about making the world a better place, through advocacy journalism.

What world is that?

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” and the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah,” for which contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com