Updated December 3, 2022

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The New York Times is an American news media organization.  The Times has been accused of breaching its own professed journalistic ethics, engaging in deceptive practices to push far-left propaganda, and attempting to silence or censor viewpoint diversity.

 

On July 14, 2020, columnist Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times, citing “unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge” arising from “constant bullying” by colleagues with the inaction and complicity of the paper’s administration.(1)  Weiss pointedly observed:

 

“The truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times....Lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else…

“What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets...Standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back.”

 

Following a “fact-check” by the New York Times regarding the Trump impeachment trial that nonpartisan research institute Just Facts noted to contain “flagrant falsehoods propagated by [reporter Linda] Qui and the Times,”(2) Just Facts performed a more detailed evaluation of the New York Times reporting. 

 

Just Facts found that “The New York Times regularly publishes falsehoods that spur violent unrest and civic dysfunction.”(3) The group wrote that “this includes but is not limited to hoaxes, lies and collective delusions that spur violence against police, incite class warfare, stagnate the economy, slander the United States, sow racial animosity, empower criminals by disarming their victims, cover up corruption and fraud, harm the nation’s education system, demonize elected officials...distort science… drive the U.S. deeper into debt” and conceal negative consequences of illegal immigration.  The group demonstrated multiple factual discrepancies with claims by the New York Times on each item.

 

The Times has also been caught up in false reporting scandals.  In December 2020, the paper acknowledged that a twelve-part series it had promoted in 2018 about a Canadian man who had claimed to have been a member of ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), a violent jihadi group designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, was based on fabricated claims and did not meet journalistic standards.(4) The Times, accused of pursuing sensationalism at the expense of journalistic integrity, "returned an award and had another withdrawn" for the reporting. The fraudulent nature of the Times' podcast series had been raised much earlier, yet the paper failed to retract the reporting until after their source was arrested in Canada and charged with a terrorist hoax.(5) 

 

Critics have alleged the episode is symptomatic of "what has happened to the Times since it abandoned its standards of fairness and accuracy to pursue a far-left political and cultural agenda," and that the New York Times has never withdrawn or apologized for a litany of politically-motivated hoaxes and false reports.(ibid)

 

The New York Times has been called out for extreme partisan bias transgressing ethical boundaries, such as its recommendation that the investigation of sexual assault allegations against then-presidential candidate Joe Biden should be led by the Democratic National Committee.  Then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders responded, stating:  "The idea that the DNC should take the lead on an investigation against one of its own candidates is laughable.  I thought it was an Onion headline, not a New York Times headline."(6) Even the DNC stated that the Times' recommendation was "an absurd suggestion."(ibid)

 

New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood ruled in March 2021 that the New York Times may have spread deceptive claims about nonprofit journalism group Project Veritas in injecting opinions in articles represented as news pieces.  Wood wrote that “the dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by defendants’ counsel certainly apply to [New York Times journalist] Astor’s and Hsu’s failure to note that they injected their opinions in news articles, as they now claim.”(7)

 

Judge Wood continued, writing that the lawsuit by Veritas against the Times would proceed: “Here there is a substantial basis in law and fact that Defendants acted with actual malice, that is, with knowledge that the statements in the Articles were false or made with reckless disregard of whether they were false or not.”

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The New York Times has continued to serve as a propaganda organ for the Biden administration,(8) employing the full range of propaganda techniques.  In September 2021, Steven Miller observed on Twitter:

 

“Jen Psaki goes missing the day the Pentagon announces the Biden admin drones 7 kids, France recalls it's ambassador, 12,000 people are being stored under a bridge in Texas and the FDA just rejected Biden booster plan.. but we have another glowing puff profile. Great work everyone.” (9)

 

In July 2020, reporting by the New York Post exposed the New York Times' racist history even as the Times incited race-based riots and violence.(10)  The extended Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has owned the New York Times since 1896, included multiple slave owners, the superintendent of the Charleston workhouse where slaves were subjected to corporal punishment, and a Democratic politician who enforced Jim Crow segregation laws. Employing extreme racist language, a paper owned by Adolph Ochs demanded the death penalty for nine African-American men falsely accused of rape by two white women. The Daughters of the Confederacy sent a “sent a pillow embroidered with the Confederate flag to be placed in [the] coffin” of NYT owner Ochs when he died in 1935.

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Propagandists for Mass Murder and Totalitarianism

Long before Russian propagandists Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan, the New York Times was propagandizing for Soviet totalitarianism.   During Stalin’s genocide against the Ukrainian people through the Holodomor in the early 1930s that killed millions, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty spread Soviet propaganda and acted as an apologist for the Soviet regime. 

 

A British diplomat had recorded in 1933 that Duranty was well aware of the massive human catastrophe caused by the Communist regime, telling him that “as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the past year.”[11]  Duranty never "let the great American public into the secret," although the Times' own editors were aware that "the present food situation is mainly the direct result of the Five-Year Plan and of the methods employed in putting it through."[12] Instead, Duranty used euphemisms such as “malnutrition” instead of “famine” while justifying the genocide, writing: “To put it brutally, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."[13]

 

Duranty told egregious lies and engaged in deception in his vocal defense of Soviet premier and mass murderer Josef Stalin, but received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting which the Times has not returned.  Activist Oksana Piaseckyj stated: "He [Duranty] is the personification of evil in journalism. We think he was like the originator of fake news." 

 

In “How ‘The New York Times’ Helped Hide Stalin’s Mass Murders in Ukraine,” Izabella Tabarovsky wrote: 

 

“Stalin’s crime was only one face of the story. The other face was the extraordinary failure on the part of the world to report and acknowledge the facts. Many were complicit in this failure, but the starring role undoubtedly belonged to the Moscow-based Western journalists, who misreported, underreported, and failed to report about what was plainly happening under their noses. Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow, outright lied about the events, deliberately misleading his readers.”[14]

 

Taborovsky added: “Journalism doesn’t have to stifle the truth in the service of fashionable causes and personal narcissism. It’s a choice.” Sadly, time and again, the New York Times has chosen to push disinformation and propaganda to serve its own political agenda to the detriment of the public.

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References

1. Weiss, Bari. “Resignation Letter.” July 14, 2020. https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter 

2. Agresti, James D. "The New York Times’ Brazenly False 'Fact Check' About Trump’s Impeachment Trial." Just Facts Daily, February 17, 2021. https://www.justfactsdaily.com/the-new-york-times-brazenly-false-fact-check-about-trumps-impeachment-trial 

3. Agresti, James D. "The New York Times Regularly Publishes Falsehoods That Spur Violent Unrest and Civic Dysfunction." Just Facts Daily, February 2021. https://www.justfactsdaily.com/new-york-times-falsehoods-spur-violent-unrest-civic-dysfunction 

4. "Caliphate: NY Times loses awards for Islamic State podcast over false reporting." BBC News, December 19, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55375277 

5. Goodwin, Michael. “New York Times admits to major blunder – but these errors go uncorrected.” Fox News, 21 December 2020.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/new-york-times-caliphate-errors-uncorrected-michael-goodwin 

6. Concha, Joe. "Sanders mocks NY Times urging DNC to investigate Biden allegations: 'I thought it was an Onion headline.'" The Hill, May 4, 2020. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/495989-sanders-mocks-ny-times-urging-dnc-to-investigate-biden-allegations-i-thought 

7. Wood, Charles D.  “Order denying motion to dismiss.” Supreme Court of the State of New York, March 18, 2021. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20518694-order_denying_motion_to_dismiss 

8. Kornick, Lindsay. “New York Times pens Psaki puff piece after bad week for the Biden administration.” Fox News, September 19, 2021. https://www.foxnews.com/media/nyt-pens-psaki-puff-piece-bad-week-for-biden-administration

9. Miller, Stephen L. Twitter [@redsteeze], September 17, 2021. https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1438988891747336193 

10. Goodwin, Michael. “Why New York Times praises ‘cancel culture’ but skips over its own racist history.” New York Post, 11 July 2020. https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/ny-times-praises-cancel-culture-but-skips-its-own-racist-history-goodwin/

11. Carynnyk, Marco, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan, eds. "The Foreign Office and The Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-1933.

Kingston, Ontario: Limestone Press, 1988. xxxii.

https://ia801001.us.archive.org/24/items/Britain-and-Holodomor-Docs/The%20Foreign%20Office%20and%20the%20Famine.%20British%20Documents%20on%20Ukraine%20and%20the%20Great%20Famine%20of%201932%E2%80%931933%20(1988)_text.pdf, 

12. Carynnyk, ibid, xxx.

13. Folkenflik, David. "'The New York Times' can't shake the cloud over a 90-year-old Pulitzer Prize." National Public Radio, Morning Edition, May 8, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/05/08/1097097620/new-york-times-pulitzer-ukraine-walter-duranty

14. Tabarovsky, Izabella.  “How ‘The New York Times’ Helped Hide Stalin’s Mass Murders in Ukraine.” Tablet Mag, October 22, 2020. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/walter-duranty-ukraine-new-york-times-mr-jones-agnieszka-holland