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How is the New York Times still even in business? Anyone else who so regularly sold a not faulty but deliberately damaging product repeatedly, over decades, would not just be broke but probably in jail. Yet, here is the Times, still touting itself as the last word in what Barack Obama smugly called “the curated media”. They’ve even won prizes for lying through their teeth in the service of one of history’s monsters.
Michael Crichton coined the term ‘Gell-Mann Amnesia’, after an anecdote from renowned physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann recalled reading a newspaper article on physics that he knew was grotesquely wrong. When he went on to read its coverage on topics he didn’t know as much about as physics, it occurred to him: why should I believe them about this, when I know they were wrong about that? Thus, Gell-Mann Amnesia is defined as:
The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
If we applied the principle of Gell-Mann Amnesia to, well, the entire legacy media, but to the Times in particular, they’d be shut down tomorrow.
If not in jail.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof preempted a painstakingly researched report on the unfathomably cruel barbarism Hamas inflicted on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, by publishing an essay on Israel’s “systematic sexual violence…widely practiced as part of an organized state policy” against Palestinians. If Israel does indeed train dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, then perhaps it’s fair to conclude, as Kristof did, that “The horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct 7 now happens to Palestinians day after day.”
Such a conclusion does exceptional PR for Hamas. Drawing an explicit moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel, it is designed to cause Americans to abandon their support for the Jewish state, a crucial stratagem for the terrorist group in its long war of attrition.
Perhaps that’s not a coincidence. At least two of Kristof’s sources for the essay appear to be Hamas-affiliated. If so, Kristof has likely committed a serious federal crime.
One of Kristof’s sources is Euro-Med, a group whose current and former chairs have been listed as Hamas operatives for over a decade. Its founder, Ramy Abdu, is a regular panelist at Hamas events alongside senior leaders. His brother-in-law and brother have been tied to funneling money to the group. The other named source, Sami al-Sai, was detained for being a member of Hamas, has admitted doing projects for the terror outfit and has been accused by other Palestinian groups of recruiting for it.
How does this cross the line into criminality?
American anti-terrorism laws are designed to be extremely broad […]
Our material-support laws can even criminalize some behavior you might expect to be protected by the First Amendment. In the famous 2010 case, Holder v Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court ruled that even providing legal advice to a designated FTO could be prosecuted – even if the advice only helped the terrorist group engage in legitimate, non-criminal activity. A 6-3 Court reiterated Congress’s finding that terrorist groups “are so tainted by their criminal conduct that any contribution to such an organization facilitates that conduct.”
The Court took pains to emphasize that “independent advocacy” for a cause is protected freedom of speech, but not all speech necessarily counts as independent: “a person of ordinary intelligence would understand the term ‘service’ to cover advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization.” Such advocacy could be criminally prosecuted.
Kristof doesn’t come right out and admit he’s working hand-in-glove with Euro-Med or al-Sai. But meeting with a known Hamas member, then publishing advocacy that explicitly equates Israel with the terrorists who want to annihilate it, looks an awful lot like providing a ‘service’ to a group whose entire strategy relies on maximising Palestinian suffering for Western cameras while making Israelis’ lives hell.
This is the same New York Times that spent years peddling Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop “disinformation” and every other narrative convenient to the regime. They’ve won Pulitzers for fiction before. Why stop now when the prize is helping a gang of rapist baby-killers win the PR war?
The broader point is simpler and more damning. The Times isn’t just occasionally wrong. It is deliberately wrong, repeatedly, on the biggest stories of our time, and in the service of some of the worst monsters, from Stalin to Hamas – and its readers suffer Gell-Mann Amnesia on an industrial scale. They know the paper lied about physics (or economics, or biology, or Covid or any number of topics insiders can fact check), yet they keep swallowing the next front-page sermon on Israel, climate, race or Trump.
Hamas’s two strategies, barbarism on the ground and useful-idiot propaganda in the West, rely on exactly this. The Times delivers the second half with metronomic reliability. And the prestige press wonders why trust in ‘curated media’ has collapsed.
If any other institution had spent decades providing material support, even rhetorical support, to America’s enemies while collecting Pulitzers for it, the FBI would have raided the building years ago. The New York Times keeps chugging along, smug, untouchable and utterly unaccountable.
