This Isn’t Satire, Believe It or Not

It was presumably with a straight face that Conservative Party MP John Whittingdale wrote the following paean to the legacy media:

Public service broadcasters are governed by the Broadcasting Code and are required to be impartial and not to give undue offence. The quality press like the Telegraph survive on a reputation for accuracy and properly researched investigative journalism.

Without any kind of moderation, platforms like YouTube provide fertile ground for misinformation and disinformation, allowing conspiracy theorists and hostile states equal space with professional reporting and properly resourced high quality content.

Unlike the public service broadcasters (PSBs) which are bound by strict editorial standards and regulatory oversight, YouTube, TikTok and other platforms rely on algorithms which prioritise engagement over accuracy. Sensationalist, misleading or outright false content often garners more views, likes and shares, amplifying its reach. This distorts the information and facts which voters need to have in order to make informed decisions at election time.

Wait, you’re talking about the same public broadcasters (like the BBC, the ABC, and New Zealand on Air) who told us that, let’s see, Jacinda Ardern was kind and empathic, Donald Trump was a Russian asset, Covid didn’t come from China, the Arctic was going to be ice free by 2013, Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, lockdowns and vaccine mandates would ‘stop the spread’, Joe Biden was a sharp as a tack and the child-rape gangs of Britain aren’t mostly Pakistani Muslims… I could go on forever.

And I will.

Few contenders for the crown of Biggest Legacy Media Liar, though, come even close to the New York Times.

Among the world’s great mastheads – including the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times – the New York Times stands alone as being inconsistently trustworthy. Its editors and staff have a record of manipulating news through omission and commission and the paper sometimes publishes outright lies.

Almost always in the service of the most vile ideologies and regimes.

Last week’s misrepresentation of a photo of an apparently emaciated Gazan boy, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, is the latest chapter in the miserable history of a newspaper that wasn’t even once great. In a nutshell, the photo was presented as evidence of how Israel is cruelly denying Palestinian children nourishment as part of the left-wing fiction that it is denying food supplies to its neighbours.

This is the same newspaper, never forget, that published the grotesque lies of communist apparatchik Walter Duranty, denying that there was famine in the Ukraine or that Stalin was committing atrocities. It took over 70 years for the Times to even admit to ‘lapses’ in its reporting – and it has steadfastly refused to return the Pulitzer Prize it won for its lies.

The masthead of the New York Times still includes [Adolph Ochs]’s famous maxim: “All the news that’s fit to print”. It should more accurately state: “All the news that fits our agenda”.

Like the BBC and the Guardian, which have deplorably downplayed the industrial-scale rape of British children by racist Muslim gangs, the Times did its level best to ignore one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century.

Laurel Leff is a professor of journalism at Boston’s Northeastern University and she set out to examine the record of the New York Times in regards to the Holocaust. Six million Jews may have been murdered on the instruction of Adolf Hitler, but the newspaper couldn’t see it as a big story. Leff’s analysis of its coverage took nine years and was published in her book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper. It makes grim reading as the greatest genocide in history was consciously underplayed by a newspaper unworthy of that title. Reportedly, during the six years of World War II, the New York Times published 23,000 front-page stories, of which half concerned the century’s biggest news story. Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were murdered, but those events made the front page on just 24 occasions. You might call it missing the lead.

Even when its clearly self-loathing owner, Arthur Sulzberger, was taken to a recently closed concentration camp in 1945, all he had to say was that Jews were “but a minor percentage of the total of displaced persons” he believed were receiving too many column inches.

And so it goes. Today, the Times is still rushing to print any old lies and distortions that paint the Jewish state in the worst possible light, while pandering uncritically to the murderous, genocidal terrorists of Hamas.

Tell me again about the legacy media’s “reputation for accuracy and properly researched investigative journalism”. I could use the laugh.