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The New York Times: What Passes for Journalism in the Newspaper of Record - by Stephen Lendman
Overall, America's major media fails the test. It's biased, shameless, and irresponsible with "everything to sell and nothing to tell" as a noted US media critic once said. It delivers a daily diet of "managed news" (propaganda), infotainment, and "junk food news," a worthless mix, treating people like mushrooms - well-watered, in the dark, and uninformed about what matters most. No wonder greater numbers opt out, consuming less broadcast "news" and print media, the kind no one should waste time or money on.
No paper has more clout than The New York Times. Media critic Norman Solomon once called its front page "the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA" - in fact, anywhere because its reports circulate globally.
In his April 1998 article titled, "All the News Fit to Print (Part I): Structure and Background of the New York Times," Edward Herman called The Times "an establishment newspaper," serving wealth and power interests, a record dating from 1896 when the Ochs-Sulzberger family took control. Its agenda "persist(s) to this day" as two earlier articles explained, accessed through the following links:
For many decades The Times has had the lead role distorting, censoring, and suppressing truth, a shameful record:
-- supporting the powerful;
-- backing corporate interests;
-- endorsing imperial wars;
-- ducking major issues like government and corporate lawlessness and corruption, sham elections, democracy for the select few alone, an unprecedented wealth gap, and eroding civil liberties and social benefits; and
-- supporting Pentagon and CIA efforts to topple elected governments, assassinate independent leaders, prop up friendly dictators, secretly fund and train paramilitary death squads, practice sophisticated forms of torture, and menace democratic freedoms at home and abroad.
Journalism, New York Times Style
Predictably, The Times endorsed Obamacare, a March 21 editorial praising it, titled "Health Care Reform, at Last," saying:
"The process was wrenching....Barack Obama put his presidency on the line for an accomplishment of historic proportions." The editorial called the law "a triumph for countless Americans who have been victimized or neglected by their dysfunctional health care system."
In fact, Obamacare is a shameless rationing scheme to enrich insurers, drug giants, and large hospital chains. It imposes marketplace solutions, not vitally needed equitable reform assuring universal coverage, free from predatory insurers that overcharge and profit by denying care. No matter. The Times cynically called it "another stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American Dream....reforms (that) could ultimately rival Social Security and Medicare in historic importance." So much for truth.
