Tag: New York Times

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ideological culture media and media people

Discussion versus Intimidation

newspaper, New York Times, dogma, propaganda

“My boss got fired for running an op-​ed by a sitting U.S. senator,” says Bari Weiss, former opinion editor for The New York Times, in a recent TV interview.

Cotton argued for sending troops to quell rioters who “have plunged many American cities into anarchy.” Unnerved by furious criticism not only of the op-​ed but of the paper’s temerity in publishing it, The Times now prefaces Cotton’s piece with an abject and silly apology.

In her public letter of resignation, Weiss reports being hired in 2016 “with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-​time writers, centrists, conservatives.…”

By the time she quit, “intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-​taking” had become “a liability at The Times.… If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it.… Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril.”

Weiss says the country is becoming “retribalized,” with politics amounting to undebatable religious dogma, revelation rather than ratiocination. The sort of government that becomes possible when politics is a religion is total government. Totalitarianism.

Old-​timers like me can recall a Times editorial page that featured plenty of horrific opinions (not very diligently vetted, one suspects) but that also had room for the William Safires of the day.

Does the current dread of reasoned debate at The New York Times represents a mere temporary spasm of appeasement?

The signs (of the Times) aren’t good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Wrong Field for You

New York Times, toilet paper, editorial, censorship, 1st Amendment,

“If you’re an emotionally unstable baby who regards disagreement as ‘violence,’” tweeted “roving journalist” Michael Tracey, “journalism is probably the wrong field for you.”

Only half-​right. Given their goals, filling jobs that would otherwise be filled by journalists is indeed the right thing for hysterico-​new-​new-​Left activists — just as bank-​tellering is right for inside men helping bank robbers rob banks.

Tracey is commenting on how New York Times “journalists” — and others — apoplexed over the Times’ sin of permitting unqualified disapproval of mass rioting to grace its editorial pages. In his June Third op-​ed, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton argued that the rioters, “if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-​abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives.” He recommended invoking the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the military.

One can argue about whether invoking the Act would be a good idea. 

Or one could, even in the Times … if one weren’t thereby invading the “safe space” of pseudo-​journalists who had supposed that they need never face the hazards of fundamental debate within its pages.

An abject but vague apology now prefaces the op-ed. 

The Times has also fired the editor who let it be published. 

After all, by the time it reached print, Cotton’s piece did continue to contain evaluations with which someone might disagree.

This is a new low for the Times, which continues its downward spiral. The rest of us, I trust, will escape that vortex, resisting the great flush down to the sewer at civilization’s end.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people Popular

The Fifth Century Begins

slavery, 1619, freedom, chains,

When socialists and woke scolds talk about slavery, you can almost hear the chains and smell the leather of the slaver’s whip — and not always in a good way.

Project 1619 is the New York Times effort to acknowledge 400 years of Africans in America. Thankfully, the project’s page is more coherent and forthright than Matthew Desmond’s New York Times Magazine farrago of August 14, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”

Indeed, that piece (like others in the series) is such a tangle that there is no hope to unravel it in this limited space. Just note that Desmond does his darnedest to help the enemies of liberty tie slavery into the idea of free markets, private property, and free association.*

Project 1619, on the other hand, accepts the complexity of slavery in America without being idiotically tendentious. It recognizes that the captured Africans brought to Virginia shores in August 1619 were treated as indentured servants. Unfortunately, unlike the Englishmen arriving under indentured servitude, the first Africans in Virginia lacked explicit contracts. So negotiating their way out was … problematic. Still, one African, arriving two years later, was soon freed and became a landowner. And it was he who was awarded another African as a slave for life, in civil court in 1655, marking the real start of chattel slavery in America.

Which is to say, slavery in America was not exclusively a matter of race.**

Why is this important? Because slavery is wrong not because racism is wrong (as wrong as that is), but because people have a right to freedom.

Could it be that socialists emphasize racism regarding slavery because they fear that focusing on freedom might scuttle their socialism?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* See my discussion of slavery yesterday.

** This becomes clear once you read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, or learn how Thomas Jefferson’s wife was related to Sally Hemings

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Guess Which is Real.

communism, New York Times, Nazism,

NOTE: 100 million human beings were killed by communist ideologues in the 20th century.

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ideological culture media and media people Popular

Gray Lady Commies

New York Times, communism, socialism, journalism, pandering, newspaper,

The New York Times has long leaned left. But is it really a stable Pisa-​tower lean, at this point? It sure seems that, in recent years, the Gray Lady has gone extreme, abandoning its “respectable” center-left perch. 

The change, economist Alex Tabarrok writes for FEE, appears to have happened “around 2010 – 2014,” when we can see “an inflection point” where phrases and buzzwords like “social justice” and “diversity and inclusion” increased in number in Times editorials and news stories.

Forget, for a moment, the why — is it demand side, with the paper trying to court Millennial readers; or supply side, a result of new hires out of journalism programs and other indoctrination factories; or a mixture of both? — and concern ourselves with how far will the Gray Lady go?

Communism, apparently.

Or, at least, “Automated Luxury Communism,” as identified in what may be the stupidest article to appear in any newspaper in years.

“The plummeting cost of information and advances in technology are providing the ground for a collective future of freedom and luxury for all,” the author asserts, upon the evidence of innovations he has identified as arising … in our capitalist mixed economy, chiefly in the market sector: lab-​grown burgers and “molecular whiskey.”

It all smacks of a loafer’s Marxism, with robots and AI as the proles. I could explain this better had the author bothered to do any real work on his vision, but, unfortunately (?), he offers nothing but a “wouldn’t it be neat if” blog post. 

That the Times’ placed on its front page.

I guess since Democratic pols are now calling themselves socialists, their lead thought organ must seize the advance guard position by going full commie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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New York Times, communism, socialism, journalism, pandering, newspaper,

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people

Transcendent Gray Lady

New York Times, The Terror, doxing, firing, racism, double standard

How far are we away from a completely vindictive, murderous madness like The Terror of revolutionary France?

I know, almost no one is talking of guillotines. 

But a lot of people seem determined to destroy others’ lives publicly. We are all too familiar with Twitterstorms where worked-​up outrage forces someone out of a job or a deal  — usually for making jokes.

But it’s not just jokes. Not long ago an actor got in trouble for Tweeting that commentator and Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro seems a nice, honest person on the right that a leftist might listen to. The actor was forced to recant, and then Shapiro himself publicly recanted from some past putatively “dumb” things he “did” or “said.” Or something.

Since we’re talking about Mr. Shapiro, his commentary on the Sarah Jeong case is not irrelevant. The New York Times hired Ms. Jeong despite her past racist tweets. 

Well, racist-​against-​whites. 

“By the rules of the left,” says Shapiro, “this person should now be excised from polite society.”

But the Times is keeping her.

Shapiro finds this “indicative” of more than just the Times. The left at large seems OK with anti-​white racism but not anti-any-other-race.

It’s indicative of a lot more, though, not just racism and anti-​racism and anti-​anti-​racism. 

Outrage and the Twittermob may be fun. But it’s time to stop.

Is the Times leading the way?

Only when the decrepit old rag defends someone not on its own ideological side. Transcending partisan mob mania means first transcending partisanship. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

The Cuban Slavery-​and-​Freedom Sandwich

Cuba, New York Times, communism, socialism, freedom, slavery

How easy is it to mix freedom with just the right amount of slavery?

New York Times reporter Azam Ahmed regards the attempt to mingle political opposites as noble or at least understandable. He doesn’t call Cuban Communism and its destructive effects “bad” — it’s a “unique tapestry.” 

He wonders, instead, to what extent the Cuban government can fine-​tune the contradiction.

According to the article, Cuba’s newest Dear Leader “will have to foster the growing private sector … while guarding against the income inequality it often brings.… Move too slowly and it risks economic collapse and widespread discontent.… Move too fast, and it risks unstitching the unique tapestry of Cuba’s social project.”

“Unique”? With or without cigars and salsa, the “social project” of repressing a hapless populace is as old as civilization. And as a “tapestry,” we’ve seen this warp and weft before.

Under freedom, inequalities are unavoidable.* On the other hand, nothing is wrong with inequality per se. Nature, human beings and economic outcomes are inherently unequal. Equality arrives only with the grave.

A government working to phase out slavery and phase in freedom may have legitimate problems in transition. But it is wrongheaded to seek just the right “balance” of both. How can any degree of freedom and markets fail to threaten a revolution, the purpose of which is a thoroughgoing assault on freedom and markets?

My advice to Cuban social engineers? Abandon Communism altogether and embrace prosperity and freedom instead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Speaking of inequality, Cuba’s head commies certainly have not lived like the masses they’ve kept down.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies responsibility too much government

The Times Must Change

USSR, Soviet Union, communism, socialism, apologist, New York Times

“Political leaders prefer to project a noble history, sometimes by turning complicity in atrocities into claims of victimhood,” the New York Times informed us last Sunday. “In Russia, Mr. Putin and many of his lieutenants came from the K.G.B. and resisted fully confronting its repressive history. And they, like many of their countrymen, prefer to portray Stalin not only as the architect of the Gulag but also as the leader who built Russia’s industrial might and led it to victory in the Great Patriotic War.” 

The Gray Lady here marks the passing of Arseny Roginsky, an organizer and activist who kept alive the memory of state mass murder in his homeland. The Times quotes the late hero as insisting that common talk of “victims of repression” is nowhere near enough. The repression did not merely descend upon the people as “a plague.” 

The victims were targets of “state terror.”

But there was something missing in this too-​brief notice. Though the Nazis were mentioned, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn’t.

Communism was not.*

State terror did not infect its perpetrators biologically, like the world’s worst case of x-oplasmosis. It neither descended from the heavens nor ascended from the swamps. The infection was ideological — the result of Marxian socialism, of unworkable communism. 

By not mentioning socialism or communism or even the USSR, the New York Times carries on its sad history of leftist apologetics. The case of the lying propagandist Walter Duranty — the Times’ award-​winning foreign correspondent and author of Mission to Moscow — should have been the last of that.

It isn’t, apparently. The Times still protects its safe-​space socialist readers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The omissions were also present in the Times’ initial obituary.

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First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies Regulating Protest too much government

Crossing the Twitter Rubicon

Liberty, Trump, censorship, NBC, New York Times, First Amendment

No sooner had I upbraided media folks for overreacting to various presidential peccadillos regarding Puerto Rico, when Donald J. Trump, in his running media battle, crossed a line with this week’s most notorious tweet.

He first complained, perhaps correctly, that, “Fake @NBCNews made up a story that I wanted a ‘tenfold’ increase in our U.S. nuclear arsenal. Pure fiction, made up to demean.” But then the chief executive officer of the United States of America tweeted this: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?”

The answer to his question is: never.

The Federal Communications Commission licenses the network affiliates of ABC, NBC and CBS across the country — not the networks themselves — to broadcast their television signals using public airwaves. Still, through those affiliates a tyrannical FCC could no doubt damage the networks. 

Government licensing of media outlets is anathema to the First Amendment. And the thought of the POTUS actively threatening the ability of NBC or other networks to report the news as they freely decide is … well, unthinkable.

I don’t buy the accusations that Trump is undermining freedom of the press by criticizing the press — even arguing by tweet, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) … is the enemy of the American People!” The president is as free to criticize the media as the media is free to criticize the president.

It might be his duty.

But considering the use of official government power to potentially “shut down NBC and other American networks,” as UK’s Independent reported, or just to temper their coverage?

Despotism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Not So Bad, Communism?

New York Times, apologist, China, Soviet Union, communism, Walter Duranty

First the good news. The New York Times has repudiated Walter Duranty’s 1930s-​era “journalism” for whitewashing — “underestimating” — the murderousness of Soviet Communism.

So that’s done, right? 

Whatever its failings today, the paper will certainly no longer allow writers to use its august pages to discount blatant systematic evil. 

Right?

But Helen Raleigh, a writer for The Federalist who is an immigrant from China, finds that the Times does indeed persist in glossing over the sins of Communism. In commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the paper is “once again proving itself Communism’s greatest apologist” through articles variously arguing that “women had better sex under socialism to now claiming China’s Communist revolution taught Chinese women to ‘dream big’…”

As if, suggests Raleigh, Duranty’s ghost were still calling the shots.

In rebuttal, she recounts what so many people suffered under Communism, as exemplified by the fate of her Aunt San. 

At age 15, her aunt was forced by Mao’s government to leave the city and work in the countryside, separately from her siblings, who were forced to do the same but in different villages. Cutting family ties was important “so people could devote themselves 100 percent to the Communist Party’s causes.” 

Primitive farming, mandatory singing of gruesomely cheerful revolutionary songs, food rations, malnutrition, ritual humiliation, derailed education, derailed or extinguished lives. 

Just a few of the standard ingredients of the totalitarianism that, according to the Times of 2017, taught women to “dream big.”

Which should remind us: despite only a few countries’ close ties to the doctrine — Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — Communism’s threat to world peace, prosperity, and freedom remains big.

The Times must change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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