Our faith is strong that long after Senator Eastland and his present subcommittee are gone, long after segregation has lost its final battle in the South, long after all that was known as McCarthyism is a dim, unwelcome memory, long after the last Congressional committee has learned that it cannot tamper successfully with a free press, The New York Times will be speaking for (those) who make it, and only for (those) who make it, and speaking, without fear or favor, the truth as it sees it.
The best literature in this country now is being written by minorities, black women first, Chinese Americans, Chicanos, Japanese-Americans. These people are writing wonderful literature that totally defies the standards of WASP literature that is always in the New York Times, and I love it.
1990 interview included in Conversations with Isabel Allende (1999)
The ritual obeisance to the benign government and its laudatory goals.
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 201-202
The New York Times released sequel six in the best-selling Putin-the-Poisoner series on September 22. The incredibly gifted junior G-men and women in the Times Tower have sleuthed yet another episode of boundless evildoing by the arch-villain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. “The editorial board,” we are informed, “is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.... In this blue state special, they spin the tale of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny poisoned with “a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union.” Jacobin calls Navalny, who is a right-wing anti-immigrant blogger and YouTube celebrity, “Russia’s Trump.” From the “established fact” that a poisoning occurred, the rest of the Times editorial is pure conjecture. After the poisoning and spending two days in a Russian hospital, the victim flew off to Germany.... In a chain of custody not revealed, the “colleagues” sent the “evidence” out of Russia to Germany then also to France and Sweden, where it was subsequently “confirmed by laboratories.” “The powerful poison,” we are told is used “against foes of the Russian regime.” Only in the cartoonish mindset of the NYT do the perpetually bungling villains leave such blatant clues to their crimes. The editorial board declares, “many questions remain unanswered and are likely to remain so. Chief among them is whether President Vladimir Putin ordered or approved the attempted assassination.” Later in the editorial, this chief question is answered: “Mr. Putin knows what happened...” but “…he continues to hide behind glaringly phony denials.”
Outside the comic book world that the editorial paints, there are questions not addressed by the Times. Why, after five previous incidents, has the Russian security state not learned to administer fatal doses of poison and cover up their tracks? Why would Putin repeatedly order hits on dissidents that every time boomerang on him by publicizing their grievances and inviting punishing sanctions? An alternative explanation for this poisoning story is that this is a setup to discredit and weaken an official enemy of the US imperial state. The nation’s newspaper of record has a long history as a faithful mouthpiece of empire. On spinning the Putin-the-Poisoner tale, the Times has been but one voice in the Russo-phobic chorus of western media. The truth of the Navalny case is hard to ascertain. What is clear is that the “evidence” that the Times touts has not been made public but has been used to bludgeon Russia. Putin is not up for election. But there is something else at stake and that is, as the Times editorial mentions, the possible “cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a gas conduit from Russia to Germany,” which is of vital economic interest to Russia. The US, now the world’s leading producer of fossil fuels, opposes the project. In a bipartisan effort, the US even threatens “crushing legal and economic [secondary] sanctions” on the German seaport of Sassnitz for supplying the project.
Our bureaucracy doesn’t always speak with one voice, and … those who don’t speak with one voice usually speak to the New York Times.
Henry Kissinger, quoted from Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.
I really love the New York Times, I really do. You guys are the best. You do some of the most accurate, precise reporting in news. You never fail to write down exactly... whatever the police have given you to say, really powerful.
Burn down the New York Times And make it pay for crimes Made worse by its pretension To have no ill intention, Made worse by its façade That seems as clean as God.
In the broadest strokes, the Times’ coverage of India is almost Orientalist—it’s almost as if it’s a backward place characterised by nationalism, violence, sexual assault. I read in an article somewhere, where they just flatly stated that there’s a rampant rape culture in India. And I was like, what? So, I actually started to look at the statistics to see what they meant. And you look at the statistics, and they’re a fraction of cases from what the US or Western Europe experiences. How can you make an assertion like that when the statistics are not even close to being there? So that was what I wanted to understand. I think on the broad level India (is portrayed as) being this nationalist kind of bully. And I think on a more specific level, it’s an anti Hindu approach. I have a list of headlines here from the New York Times. One is “why India’s farmers fight to save a broken system”. Another is “under Modi, a Hindu nationalist surge has further divided India”. “What the rape and murder of a child reveals about Modi’s India”. “Death is the only truth (that’s a quote) watching India’s funeral pyres burn”. “India’s battered free press”—on and on and on and on and on. And you go back to China and you look at the China reporting for example, on the pandemic. In August of 2020, there the New York Times is celebrating China’s victory over Covid and taking the CCP’s statistics of Covid deaths at face value. The statistics the CCP provides are absurd, but the New York Times prints them, gives them that credibility. So you think to yourself why is there this division in how they cover China and how they cover India? Why is one being shown as this sort of progressive place that has managed to conquer a pandemic and the other this backward place characterised by funeral pyres and rape—and that’s what I’m trying to understand.
Carlos Tejada, a New York Times Deputy Asia Editor, has died at the age of 49. He suffered a heart attack less than a day after posting to social media that he had received a Modernabooster vaccination.
