The New York Times Has Been Lying to us for 100 Years

 Back in July of 2017 I published an article, "Is the Press Our Enemy? "  There I researched what left wing said about the American press.  Dr. Noam Chomsky gave detailed examples of how the press misleads us.  Walter Lippmann wrote a book in 1920, Liberty and the News, where he expressed his worries about a dishonest press threatening the foundations of our democracy.

What you should know today, in 2020, a hundred years after he published Liberty and the News, is that Walter Lippmann did a detailed study of the reporting done by the New York Times (NYT) about the Russian Revolution.  There is a good description in Wikipedia of  how and why he did this study.  Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, an editor at the New York Times, studied thousands of articles written by the NYT about the Russian Revolution and they concluded that the NYT was biased and inaccurate.  Lippmann believed the poor quality reporting was due to an attitude of wishful thinking by reporters about the Russian Revolution.  You can see for yourself, and journalism students really ought to see for themselves, the detailed evidence presented by Lippmann and Merz in "A Test of the News," published on August 4, 1920 as a 42-page supplement to The New Republic.

You can read this online here:  https://archive.org/details/LippmannMerzATestoftheNews

You can download a PDF here: https://ia801902.us.archive.org/14/items/LippmannMerzATestoftheNews/Lippmann_Merz_ATestoftheNews.pdf

 During the Presidential campaign of 2020, the New York Times has continued its 100 year old tradition of lying to the American people.  I have been reading the NYT now for 47 years.  I can testify that the quality of writing style and technique made a noticeable downturn 30 years ago.  And I have seen in the last 5 years the editors and reporters at the NYT simply lose their minds when Donald Trump started running for President.  The NYT reporters might get right some simple facts about when a hurricane hits some city, but the NYT reporters seem incapable of providing honest coverage on our President and on the lies spread by his political opponents.  The NYT is not an institution that provides truth to our citizens, it is a biased and hostile opponent to a President who loves America and serves the American people.

The Sunday NYT has a section called "Sunday Review."  The entire Sunday Review section on October 18, 2020, "The Case Against Donald Trump," is anti-Trump propaganda intending to influence the 2020 Presidential election.  The idea of the Russians meddling with our elections is laughable when compared to the lies and manipulation of the New York Times editorial board.

It follows logically that if the NYT cannot be trusted to report honestly on American politics, then the TV reporters are even worse.

I encourage everyone to turn off cable and TV "news" coverage.  It cannot be trusted and it is abusive towards us by bombarding us constantly with relentless negativity.  At the end of the Vice Presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, a child expressed despair over the relentless negativity she saw on the TV "news" coverage.  It is unhealthy to our spirit and mind to be subjected to so much negativity. For your sake and for your children, turn off TV news.

Remember There Are Traitors

I was reading a book review of "Atomic Spy" by Nancy Greenspan.  The review is "‘Atomic Spy’ Review: The Soviets’ Secret Weapon" by Henry Hemming (May 1, 2020 online NYT).  It is in the Sunday NYT print edition on page C12.  Here is a quote from it:

Google “atomic spy” and the first name to come up is most likely Klaus Fuchs. As a result of the information he shared both before and during his work on the Manhattan Project, the Soviet Union created an atomic bomb at least two years earlier than it might have done otherwise. Fuchs’s name has become shorthand for a certain type of high-minded, mid-20th-century espionage, one in which well-educated and often well-off individuals in the West were inspired to spy by a quasi-religious faith in Marxism and the potential of the Soviet Union. Either they blinded themselves to the brutal reality of life in Russia at that time, or they saw it as a necessary stage on the path to political enlightenment.

While we here in Texas work to make America the best it can be, we need to remember that there are traitors in our society.  They exist.  They are real.  They are dangerous.  I bring this article about Klaus Fuchs to your attention because some of his traits are wide-spread in America.  Here is one of the key quotes from this book review:

"...well-educated and often well-off individuals in the West were inspired to spy by a quasi-religious faith in Marxism."  And there is this quote: "Either they blinded themselves to the brutal reality of life in Russia at that time, or they saw it as a necessary stage on the path to political enlightenment."

Russia has fallen as the Pole Star for Communism, but Communists and Socialists now call themselves "Progressives" and "Democrats" and still seek to overthrow our way of life.  How can well educated people still want Socialism?  There are many reasons, but key elements are a scoffing nature and an arrogance that makes them think they are better than everyone else, certainly better than the middle-class Americans Hillary Clinton called "deplorables."  Many Progressives, like Hillary, are staggeringly arrogant.

This is why the Bible is so important, so people can see that scoffers are unrighteous.  This is from Psalm 1 (ESV):
1 Blessed is the man
    who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
    nor stands in the way of sinners,
    nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and on his law he meditates day and night.
Americans must understand the difference between arrogance and righteousness.

Robert Canright

Trotsky in Mexico

If you are familiar with Communism, you have probably heard the name "Trotsky."  Leon Trotsky was the founder and commander of the Red Army during the Bolshevik Revolution.  You might have learned that he had to run for his life after Stalin took over and that Stalin's assassin finally found him in Mexico and murdered Trotsky there.

Here is a vignette, a depiction of Trotsky in Mexico.  This is from an article in the Sunday March 22, 2020 New York Times, Sunday Review section, page 6.  The online edition is dated March 21, 2020.

Lessons From My Grandma on Art, Sex and Life By Bret Stephens

 My father once asked his mother, the artist Annette Nancarrow, what she thought of Leon Trotsky. It wasn’t a political question. He just wanted her impression of the exiled Bolshevik, whom she had first met in Mexico City in the late 1930s, in the studio of her close friend (and, my father suspected, future lover) Diego Rivera.

“Well, I was surprised to see the leader of the proletariat so elegantly dressed,” she recalled, many decades after Trotsky’s murder by a Soviet agent in 1940. “His attire was impeccable, and I was particularly struck by the Parisian calf-skin gloves he took off of his beautifully manicured hands.”

The answer was vintage Annette. As a painter, she saw the part of the surface that revealed the inner man — the bourgeois fop within the fiery revolutionary. As a judge of character, she sensed why he had lost his power struggle with Joseph Stalin for control of the Soviet Union — people who take care of their fingernails don’t usually enjoy getting them bloody. And as a connoisseur of style, she appreciated good leather.

Here is a link to the article
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opinion/sunday/annette-nancarrow-art-mexico.html

I have not said much about Communism, but I should.  The last time I wrote about Communism it was because the news media was pushing "resistance" and that made no sense until you study and discover that resistance is part of Communist ideology.  I wrote about it in this previous post:

What is this Talk About Resistance?  December 28, 2017
https://texasascendant.blogspot.com/2017/12/what-is-this-talk-about-resistance.html

Robert

Always Have Had Fake News

We have always had a problem with fake news.  Read what Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to John Norvell, 1807:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.  Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.  I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.

These means we have always had fake news in this country.

I found this on page 210 of Lapham's Quarterly, Volume XIII, Number 2, Spring 2020.  The issue is labeled "Scandal."

Robert

You might read my earlier post:
Is the Press Our Enemy?   July 4, 2017
https://texasascendant.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-press-our-enemy.html