Saturday, October 17, 2020

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.