What fool would take a motto at face value. One for cornflakes – possibly. The motto of a paper for elites educated on bedrocks of progressive dogma is as likely to speak truth as their debacle-plagued campaigner for the White House.
The New York Times, commonly known as 'The Grey Lady', coined a motto in 1897, and there it is today, on the masthead. The gullible are free to believe in “All the news that’s fit to print,” though let them beware: the media is in the business of bias. On top of which “fit to print” means ...What? Fit for subscribers? Fit for shareholders? The answer requires journeying to the deceiving heart of the Grey Lady gargoyle.
“On the run.” “Hurt.” “Alone.” “Defiant.” Such adjectives could suitably apply to the titanic last stand of Boer War General Christiaan de Wet, saddled on his noble horse as he surrenders to Lord Kitchener’s juggernaut, the pride of King and countrymen. But guess what. The Times used those words when it was reporting the demise of Islam’s Hitler trapped like a rat in ruins of his own devise.
That was just the headline. Beneath its flights of fancy, embedded phraseology soars into outer space. The special talents of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda guru, were not superior by much. It does not stop there.
A confirmation trial: what is amiss about making Yahya Sinwar a “militant leader”? Nothing, if you kept consistent. Consistency would require the Democrat’s bible to posthumously bestow the honorific, “Militant” on the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, so no one can nitpick the Times engraving “Militant” on Sinwar the baddy’s gravestone.
How equivalent were the pair? Time Magazine has treated them pretty much as club buddies. It bid Sinwar goodbye with the iconic ‘Red X’ it used to mark the demise of affiliated monsters, Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Of Sinwar we might say that he more than earned his club colours. Höss probably also had toddlers roasted alive, heaping their grey ash onto that from their moms and dads. Though perhaps on two metrics Yahya the “militant” out-performed Rudolf. Decapitation and necrophilia seemed to have been a bridge too far, in Auschwitz even.
At what language trickery would the Grey Lady go so far and no further?
By selecting “attack” to describe the barbarity of Oct 7, editors hadn’t breached the borderline of bias. They had not done with sick equivalents. A time warp alert: the Russian Civil war produced untold pogroms in Ukraine. A most gruesome one was committed in the town of Tetiiv where the Jews were burnt alive inside a locked synagogue. The estimated toll of 1,127 is eerily reminiscent of Oct 7. Had the Times reported this pogrom it would have used the word “attack” it chose for its Sinwar tribute.
From where comes such ballistic propaganda? Look for no altitude higher than a business model of the media. The modeller, none other than the most cited author living, is Professor Noam Chomsky. In one of his 150 tomes, Chomsky nails media bias to the mast of – to believe a linguistic giant – the profit motive. As for the owners, their investment in the business is paramount. Not subscribers, not audiences? Those are the business products sold to customers. Who’d be? Advertisers, naturally. They buy the subscribers and audiences produced.
Hence the media business model is about keeping investors happy. News fit to print is news that is expected to do this. So long as (1) profit is on target and (2) news content conforms to their personal narrative of news events, that’s how much media owners care for news accuracy. Truth is an after-thought. If it takes bias to grow the bottom line, editorial staff are at liberty to lie through their teeth.
Meet A.G. Sulzberger, contemporary owner and publisher of the Times. Parodied to perfection by the novelist, Howard Jacobson, A.G could be the Jewish type he envisaged.
“Every other Wednesday, except for festivals and High Holy-days, an anti-Zionist group called ASHamed Jews meets in an upstairs room in the Groucho Club in Soho to dissociate itself from Israel.”
Sulzberger once commissioned a cynically honest in-house report headed, ‘Innovation’.
“A journalist’s job,” it said, “no longer ended with choosing, reporting and publishing the news. To compensate for a steady decline in advertising revenue post digitization, the wall dividing newsroom and business side’ had to come down.”
Counterintuitive though it may seem, the Times’ business model is a duplication of every news channel. Return on investment is king. News is mere bait to hook the audience to sell to advertisers. But here the Times must tread carefully. As part of a group of companies, it must avoid ‘unwelcome news,’ which is news unfit to print thinking of bottom line profit. So news unbefitting the Times is tampered with or blocked.
To meet target profit something must give, and that something is objectivity. Unless reports are biased, the owners of a newspaper, and the advertisers that keep them in business, won’t be happy chaps.
Where does it all leave media mottos, even the Washington Post’s, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”? Not too far off the mark, actually. One word out, another in would change the Times motto. “ALL the news that’s fit to print” would become “ONLY the news that’s fit to print.”
The Washington Post motto needs a little more work to make it true. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” becomes, “Democrats die in the light”. That motto will convey a real but unpalatable truth: we are not consuming news per se. As a subscriber you are getting the news as owner Jeff Beezos likes it to be.
If bias is good business, fake news has no honest excuse. Normalising an atrocity sinks a media business to the murky depths. Doing this with Sinwar’s Oct 7 signature atrocity was nowhere near the deep level to which the ‘gold standard’ for newspapers sunk in reporting on the Holocaust.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger & family, loath to alienate the powers that be, downplayed what was happening in Nazi-occupied Europe. God forbid that business and political moguls should get the idea that the Times was a Jewish paper. In her book, Laurel Leff cites examples of how the Times played a game of language. It emasculated Jews in the Warsaw ghetto revolt by making them “Poles” or still sillier, “Warsaw patriots.” Stories on massacres of Italian and Austrian Jewry were buried in back pages. Four columns were good enough for an account of the murder of half a million Hungarian Jews.
As if downplaying this Holocaust wasn’t bad enough, the Times had denied an earlier one. News of it was not buried but faked, cooked up, revamped, given a gloss of snow white paint. As a run up to downplaying Hitler’s final solution for the Jews, the paper denied Stalin’s final solution for Ukrainians. The years 1932 and 1933 saw a man-made famine when Ukrainians by the millions were methodically starved to death. Stalin’s plan was to settle Russians in Ukraine. Cannibalism reached the point where authorities had to plaster signs on walls, “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.”
Walter Duranty meanwhile was playing his own revolutionary role. The Times man in Moscow filed dispatches denying everything. Americans read that the Holodomor, as Ukrainians name their Holocaust, was a stunt. Tales of ‘hardship’ won Duranty the Pulitzer Prize for “dispassionate reporting.” Fifty years on the artist of fake would be known as “Stalin’s apologist.” The Bolshevik vociferously denied famine. People, he wrote, were “hungry but not starving,” Reporters on the spot disagreed. George Bernard Shaw was duped by his KGB handlers
None of this deterred the Times going to print with reports debunking the atrocity, and greasily quipping, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”Jokes and a big fraudulent Prize! Executive Editor Max Frankel was cool with it. “The revelation,” he said, doesn’t seem to qualify as news. It’s really history and belongs in history books.”
Neither did it lose Howell Raines, executive editor at a later time, any sleep.
“Though the paper’s slogan is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it is patently flawed. Important news slips by because our coverage reflects blind spots that we recognize only in retrospect…We know we make mistakes, but as long as they are … intellectually honest and promptly corrected…”
Blind spots? The Times was not intellectually honest then, nor did it become – unless declining to return the Prize was the moral thing to do.
The fact is, the owning family disliked Zionism. They liked the idea of a Jewish state, as they liked the idea of a Jewish newspaper, no better than a chronic carbuncle. Hence the Times’ Middle East correspondents. They were as they remain: duty bound to be anti-Israel. Opinion is planted into news until we give up distinguishing one from the other. ‘News Analysis’ on the front page brings a new subtlety to the art of befuddling the reader. It’s an opinion column by another name.
News headlines are more opinion in disguise. “Hard-Line Jews Support Recognition of Jerusalem as Capital.” The reporter describes “a landmark shift in American policy that was extremely popular with…a segment of hard-line pro-Israel American Jews.”
The White House correspondent papered over bipartisan support in Congress for Trump’s move. She omitted that mainstream Jewish groups supported the move.
Especially when covering Israel, keeping opinion and news apart is a foreign concept. Jodi Rudoren packed her despatches with opinion. Why not? Bias was in her brief. It was practically in her terms of employment. She felt dutibound to tear down Israel in the eyes of the world; to deprecate, denounce, condemn and revile Israel as the villain. From the outset she had the back of Hamas covered, as Walter Duranty had Stalin’s back. The Gray Lady appointed her to be a cut out replica of that rogue.
The day has come for the media industry to open up. Tell readers what tailored news they are consuming.
And for readers to doubt every word they read.
One more ground-breaking depiction of anti-Zionism at work by Steve Apfel, a long established authority on the how and why and wherefore of Israel-hatred.