The NYT vs. The Civil Society

The biases of the New York Times surface in one or another fashion on a daily basis, but while sometimes awfully crude, these manifestations of bias are often sufficiently subtle and self-assured, with facts galore thrown in, that it is easy to get fooled by them. Analyzing them is still a useful enterprise to keep us alert to the paper’s ideological premises and numerous crimes of omission, selectivity, gullible acceptance of convenient disinformation, and pursuit of a discernible political agenda in many spheres that it covers.

The veteran Times reporter John Hess has said that in all 24 years of his service at the paper he “never saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don’t let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?” The paper is an establishment institution and serves establishment ends. As Times historian Harrison Salisbury said about former executive editor Max Frankel, “The last thing that would have entered his mind would be to hassle the American Establishment, of which he was so proud to be a part.”

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Jumping to the present, the Times placed its small news report on the large September 24, 2005, Washington, DC antiwar protest on page A26 (Michael Janofsky, “Antiwar Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities,” September 25, 2005) and gave that protest no editorial support. By contrast, on October 22, the paper had a large front page picture of “Hundreds of protesters gathered at the grave of Lebanon’s former prime minister in Beirut yesterday to demand the ouster of Syria’s president.” This front page picture—and there was one on A8 as well, showing the crater that a bomb left that had killed Rafik Hariri—geared well into the Bush administration’s campaign to destabilize Syria. On the same day there was a front page article on “Bush pushes U.N. to Move Swiftly on Syria Report,” and day after day there has been a steady tattoo of similar articles featured in the paper as it serves Bush once again in the same capacity as it had served in the pre-invasion Iraq propaganda campaign.