The
New York Times is a strongly logical paper, whose biases and frequent
propaganda service give its logo phrase "all the news that's fit to print"
an ironical twist.
James Reston acknowledged that "we left [out] a great deal of what we
knew about U.S. intervention in Guatemala and in a variety of other cases"
at government request or for political reasons satisfactory to the editors.
The government lied, but the Times published their claims even though
the "Times knew the statements were not true"(Salisbury). Strategic silences,
the transmitting of false or misleading information, the failure to provide
relevant context, the acceptance and dissemination of myths, the application
of double standards as virtual standard operating procedure, and participation
in ideological bandwagons and campaigns, have been extremely important
in Times coverage of foreign affairs.
Obviously
the Times is not merely a biased instrument of propaganda. It does many
things well and its reporters often produce high quality journalism. This
is especially true where the paper's editorial slant on issues ("policy")
and ideological biases are not at stake and where major advertisers are
not threatened.
In those sensitive areas (some described below), critical and probing
articles are hardly more common than dogs walking on their hind legs.
Furthermore, the paper's reporters are frequently "generalists" moving
from field to field, country to country, who must make up for being out
of their depth by glibness, a reliance on familiar (and English-speaking)
sources, and an ideological conformity that will meet "New York" standards.
This helps explain James LeMoyne's reporting on Central America in the
1980s, and Roger Cohen's on France, Serge Schmemann's on Israel, and David
Sanger's on Asia today.
In his "Without Fear Or Favor", Harrison Salisbury refers to
the pride of Times editors in the 1960s at the paper's tradition of the
"total separation of news and editorial functions," which he implied was
still operative in 1980. There is no doubt an organizational separation
between these departments, even with the greater centralization of the
Rosenthal era and after, and undoubtedly neither department gives instructions
to the other. But there is a line of authority from the top affecting
the hiring, firing, and advance of personnel, and the evidence is overwhelming
that on issue after issue a common policy affects editorials, news, and
book reviews as well.
Alan Wolfe's recent "One Nation, After All", fitting well the
ideological stance of Times leaders, is reviewed favorably in both the
daily paper and Sunday Book Review, and Wolfe immediately gets Op Ed column
space to expound his congenial message.
Anticommunism
and the Cold War.
The Times's commitment to anticommunist ideology, and its acceptance of
the Cold War as a death struggle between the forces of good and evil,
ran deep and severely limited its objectivity as a source of information.
Rosenthal, as noted in Part I, evoked the admiration of William Buckley
for his anticommunist fervor. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was equally
passionate, regularly admonishing his editors to focus on the Soviets
as "colonialists," to use the phrase "iron curtain," and generally exhibiting
the Manichean world view of anticommunist ideologues.
This corrupting influence dates back at least to the Russian Revolution.
In a famous, and devastating, critique of Times reporting on the revolution,
entitled "A Test of the News," published in the New Republic on August
4, 1920, Walter Lippman and Charles Merz found that the paper had reported
the imminent or actual fall of the revolutionary government 91 times,
and had Lenin and Trotsky in flight, imprisoned, or killed on numerous
occasions. Times news about Russia was "a case of seeing, not what was
there, but what men wanted to see."
When the Cold War began in earnest in 1947, the Truman administration
found it difficult to get congressional and public support for massive
aid to a far-right collaborationist government that the British had installed
in Greece. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson therefore resorted
to scare tactics, claiming that this was a case of Soviet expansionism
and that we were in a death struggle with the forces of evil. This was
disinformation, as Stalin honored the postwar settlement with the West,
leaving it free to dominate Greece, and he sought to restrain the Greek
guerrillas. But the lie was taken up by the media with enthusiasm, and
on February 28 and March 1, 1947, James Reston had front-page articles
in the Times that echoed State Department press releases, asserting that
the "issues" were containment of an expanding Soviet Union and our willingness
to aid a government "violently opposed by the Soviet Union" (a lie). Acheson's
formulations -Soviet aggression, and "our safety and world peace" at stake
in Greece [eds., March 3, 11, 12] - along with a virtual suppression of
the facts on Greece and the quality of our Greek client- became standard
Times fare in news and editorials.
An important episode in the history of media coverage of the U.S. effort
to "save" Greece by imposing a minority government of the Right was the
murder of CBS correspondent George Polk in May 1948. Polk had been a harsh
critic of the Greek government, and his murder by the right wing was "understandable,"
but presented a PR problem.
The Greek government, with complete cooperation from the U. S. government
and mainstream U. S. media, pinned the killing on Communists, and got
several to "confess" -after weeks of incarceration-that it had been done
to "discredit" the Greek government. Although the case was extremely implausible,
and the use of torture to extract suitable confessions was obvious at
the time (and conclusively proved in later years), the U. S. media accepted
as legitimate a staged trial that was a Western equivalent of the Moscow
trials of the 1930s. Walter Lippman even organized a "monitoring" group,
which included James Reston, that put its seal of approval on this show
trial. The Times reporter in Greece at that time, A. C. Sedgwick, was
married into the Greek royal family, and had been accurately described
by George Polk as a pawn of the Right. Even within the Times there had
been a steady stream of criticism of Sedgwick as biased and incompetent.
But Cyrus and Arthur Sulzberger supported him -Cyrus had married Sedgwick's
niece and was therefore linked to the royal family- and Sedgwick served
as a Times reporter for 33 years. His coverage of the Polk trial, discussed
in detail in Vlanton and Mettger's "Who Killed George Polk?", was continuously
biased, incompetent, and unreliable on the facts. But his line was compatible
with the Times support of the Cold War and uncritical acceptance of the
party line on the Polk trial, which the editors found to be "honestly
and fairly conducted" (April 22, 1949).
Interestingly, the Times and its reporter James LeMoyne displayed a very
similar patriotic gullibility in treating the murder of Herbert Anaya
in El Salvador in 1984.
Here also a U.S.-supported right-wing government killed one of its enemies,
but produced a tortured student who confessed to having killed Anaya in
order to "make the government look bad." LeMoyne and the Times took this
confession and explanation seriously once again, failed to look at analogous
cases of Salvadoran torture (or the Polk case), and failed to follow the
case up after the tortured student later recanted.
The
Soviet Threat and the Arms Race.
The Times accepted the official view of the Soviet Threat throughout the
Cold War. A huge news, as well as editorial, bias flowed from this, serving
well the propaganda ends of the state. This was notable in 1975-1986,
when U.S. "peddlers of crisis" re-escalated the Cold War and military
outlays that greatly helped corporate capital.
Significant events in this escalation process were the CIA's claims in
1975-1976 that the Soviet Union had doubled its rate of military spending,
supposedly to 45 percent a year, and the CIA's "Team B" report of December
1976, which claimed that the Soviets were achieving military superiority
and getting ready to fight a nuclear war. There had been a Team A report
by CIA professionals, which found the Soviets aiming only toward nuclear
parity, but CIA boss George Bush found this unsatisfactory, appointed
a group of ten noted hardliners (including Richard Pipes and Paul Nitze),
who came up with the desired frightening conclusions. This highly politicized
report displaced that of Team A, and became official doctrine.
A front-page article in the Times of December 26, 1976, by David Binder,
took the Team B report at face value, failed to analyze its political
bias and purpose, and made no attempt by independent investigation or
by tapping experts with different views to get at the truth. With Richard
Burt and Drew Middleton as their regular correspondents on military affairs
in this period, Times news and commentary steadily featured the Soviets
as on the rise and the U.S. in military decline. There was no investigative
effort to check out the CIA's estimates, which the CIA admitted in 1983
to have been fabrications. Times editorials complemented this know-nothing
reporting, supporting "prudent" defense expansion, which involved the
funding of the Trident submarine, Cruise Missile, and MX mobile land missile,
and the creation of rapid deployment force as an ' investment in diplomacy"
(February 24, 1978; February 1, 1980).
During the Reagan years, the Times supported the enormous increase in
the military budget, first, by refusing to investigate outlandish claims
by the administration. Tom Gervasi, exploding many of these lies in his
"Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy" (1986), noted that in one
important case where there was a conflict between the claims of Reagan
officials and available Pentagon data, the Times stated that precise figures
were "difficult to pin down," but its reporters made no effort to pin
them down even though billions of dollars of excess military spending
were at stake.
They could have interviewed those giving the figures, "But the Times did
not do this. It dismissed the issue in six column inches and did not bring
it up again." Gervasi put up a four-page compilation of Times estimates
of U.S. and Soviet warheads, 1979-82, compared them with Pentagon data,
and showed that the Times's figures were inconsistent, distorted, incompetently
assembled, and persistently biased toward overstating Soviet capabilities.
Gervasi was given Op Ed space in the Times in December 1981, after which
he was closed out. His book was never reviewed in the paper, although
of high quality and on a subject to which the Times devoted much space
for official claims. By contrast, passionate supporters of the Reagan
military buildup, Edward Luttwak and Richard Perle, had nine and six Op
Eds, respectively, during the Reagan years.
Reagan
Era Propaganda Campaigns.
Extremely important in maintaining the vision of an acute Soviet Threat
and need for a huge arms buildup were the various propaganda campaigns
of the 1980s, used to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire."
The Times participated in each of these campaigns with a high degree of
gullibility.
-
International terrorism.
One campaign was the attempt to portray the Soviets as the sponsor of
"international terrorism." A landmark was the publication of Claire Sterling's
"The Terror Network" in 1980.
This right-wing fairy tale relied heavily on disinformation sources such
as the intelligence agencies of Argentina, Chile, and South Africa, and
Soviet bloc defectors such as Jan Sejna, which she took at face value.
Sterling also got much of her data from Robert Moss, co-author with Arnaud
de Borchgrave of the Soviet-subversion-of-the-West novel "The Spike",
and of a warm apologia for Pinochet, 10,000 copies of which were purchased
by the Pinochet government. Sterling's fanaticism can be inferred from
her statement (in Human Events, April 21, 1984), at the height of the
Reagan era anti-Soviet frenzy, that the Reagan administration was "covering
up" Soviet guilt in the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1981
because of the Reaganite devotion to détente.
The Times reviewed Sterling's book favorably (compliments of Daniel Schorr),
but more importantly, gave her magazine space to expound her views ("Terrorism:
Tracing the International Network," May 1, 1981).
Previously, and just before the 1980 election, the paper also gave space
to Robert Moss, peddling the same line ("Terrorism: A Soviet Export, "
November 2, 1980). These highly misleading flights of propaganda served
well the plans of the Reagan administration, featuring the Soviet connection
and entirely ignoring the terrorism of "constructively engaged" states
like South Africa and Argentina.
Times "news" performed the same service, continuously identifying "terrorism"
with retail and left-wing violence, and that of states declared outlaws
by the State Department.
Little attention was given to the U.S.-sponsored retail terrorists of
the Cuban refugee network or the wholesale terrorists of Argentina and
Guatemala.
For example, of 22 victims of state terror given intense coverage in the
Times between 1976 and 1981, 21 lived in the Soviet Union, although these
were years of extraordinary violence in Latin America.
-The
plot to murder the Pope.
A second propaganda salvo followed the assassination attempt against the
Pope in May 1981. As the criminal had stayed in Bulgaria for a period,
the western propaganda machine, with Claire Sterling in the lead, soon
pinned this shooting on the Bulgarians and KGB, and a case was brought
in Italy against several Bulgarians (which was eventually lost).
This case rested on what was almost surely an induced and/or coerced confession,
and as in the trial for the murder of George Polk in Greece, the Times
(and most of the mainstream media) handled it with shameful gullibility.
The will to believe overpowered any critical sense, and investigative
responsibility was suspended; official handouts and the speculation of
ideologues like former CIA propaganda specialist Paul Henze and Sterling
dominated the coverage. The Times actually used Sterling as a news reporter
in 1984 and 1985, with a front-page article on June 10, 1984 ("Bulgarians
Hired Agca To Kill Pope"), that was not only biased but suppressed critically
important information. From beginning to end, the Times never departed
from the Sterling-Henze line. This was not altered by the loss of the
case in Rome in 1986.
When CIA officer Melvin Goodman testified during the Gates confirmation
hearing in 1990 that the CIA professionals knew the Bulgarian Connection
was a fraud because they had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services,
the Times failed to reprint this part of Goodman's testimony.
When Allen Weinstein was given permission to examine Bulgarian files on
the case in 1991, the Times repeatedly found this newsworthy, but when
he returned, apparently without "success," the Times failed to seek him
out and report his results.
Following Claire Sterling's death, the obituary notice by Eric Pace (June
18, 1995) stated that while her theory of a Bulgarian Connection was "disputed,"
in 1988 she asserted that Italian courts had "expressed their moral certainty
that Bulgaria's secret service was behind the papal shooting." Sterling's
unverified hearsay was given the last word.
In sum, having participated in a fraudulent propaganda campaign, the Times
not only has never cleared matters up for its readers, it continues to
supply disinformation and refuses to publish facts that would correct
the record.
-Shooting
Down 007.
The Times also got on the propaganda bandwagon when the Soviets shot down
Korean Airliner 007 on September 1, 1983. The paper had 147 articles on
the shootdown in September alone, and for 10 days it had a special section
of the paper on the case.
As usual, the paper took at face value administration claims, in this
case that the Soviets knew they were shooting down a civilian plane. (Five
years later the editors acknowledged this to have been "The Lie That Wasn't
Shot Down," ed, January 18, 1988).
The columnists and editors were frenzied with indignation, using words
like "savage," "brutal," and "uncivilized, and the editors stated that
"There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless
airliner" (September 2, 1983). But when the USS Vincennes shot down an
Iranian airliner in 1988 killing 290, no invidious language was employed,
and the editors found that there was a good excuse for the act -a "tragic
error" and irresponsible behavior by the victims (August 4, 1988). Subsequently,
when David Carlson, commander of a nearby ship, wrote in the September
1989 issue of the U. S. Naval Institute's Proceedings that the actions
of the commander of the Vincennes had been consistently aggressive, and
that Iranian behavior had been entirely proper and unthreatening, the
Times failed to report this information, which contradicted its editorial
position.
The Times also failed to report that in 1990 President Bush had awarded
the commander of the Vincennes a Legion of Merit award for "exceptionally
meritorious conduct" for his deadly efforts. On the other hand, the Times
did find newsworthy an interview in 1996 with the Soviet pilot who shot
down KAL 007, showing his picture on the front page, with a brief lead
entitled "Pilot Describes Downing of KAL 007," the text including the
statement that "he recognized [007] as a civilian plane" (December 9,
1996). But the fuller text on page 12 quotes him saying "It is easy to
turn a civilian plane into one for military use." The Times distorted
his message on page 1, in an almost reflexive effort to portray the Soviet
Union as barbaric, while continuing to suppress evidence putting the shooting
down of the Iranian airliner in a bad light.
Fresh
and Stale History.
The Times regularly selects and ignores history in order to make its favored
political points. Soviet forces killed perhaps 10,000 Polish police and
military personnel in the Katyn Forest in 1940. In the period between
January 1, 1988 and June 1, 1990, the Times had 20 news stories and 2
editorial page entries on this massacre, including 5 front-page feature
articles. Many of these articles were repetitive and referred to disclosures
that were anticipated but had not yet occurred. This was an old story,
but not stale because political points could be scored.
On the other hand, the Times treated differently the story that broke
in Italy in 1990 about Operation Gladio, the code name for a secret army
in Europe sponsored by the CIA immediately after World War II, closely
tied to the far right, which was using weapons secreted under this program
for terrorist activities in the 1980s. In this case, the three back-page
Times articles all featured the story's old age, although the use of Gladio-related
weapons in terrorist activities of the 1980s gave it a currency absent
in the Katyn Forest massacre story. But its political implications made
the Gladio story stale.
A
footnoted version of this article is available from the author for $2:
2300 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
PA 19104.
To
part 3
Published
in Z Magazine
Edward
S. Herman is Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
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