Charles Jacobs, “The Times Still Suffers From Crown Heights Syndrome”:
Two weeks ago [Ari] Goldman, formerly a religion writer for The New York Times, publicly confessed to having remained silent for 20 years about his paper’s distorted coverage of the Crown Heights riots. For Goldman, it was up close and personal. He was on the phone, right there in Brooklyn, calling in reports from the streets where black mobs were attacking Jews, yelling “Heil Hitler” and “Kill the Jews!” But, he now tells us, his Times editor found this news not fit to print. There was to be no black anti-Semitism, and no anti-Jewish pogrom in the nation’s “paper of record.”
Instead, Goldman explained, the Times doctored the news by forcing inconvenient facts into story lines it preferred. In Crown Heights, a Hasidic Jewish driver mistakenly killed a black boy, Galvin Cato, in a car accident, and then blacks rampaged and murdered a Jew, Yankel Rosenbaum. The paper, unhappy with these clear and simple facts, instead told a tall tale: “Blacks and Jews clashed,” it reported, implying there was blame on both sides, though neither Goldman — nor anyone else — saw any Jew attacking a black. “Clashed” was simply a lie that enabled the Times to treat the accident that killed Cato and the murder of Rosenbaum as morally equivalent tragedies. That’s the “news” they wanted to publish.
Commentators explain that Times editors are disciples of post-modernist theory, now spoon fed to every one of our $25,000-a-semester children in their spa-like centers of “higher education.” There is no “truth,” you see. That’s old-fashioned. There are only “narratives,” and each side’s version of reality must be given equal treatment (unless that side is the Judeo-Christian); otherwise, we’d all remain stuck for life as morally sick, white-skin-privileged xenophobes.
[…]
Take its coverage of the latest round of Gaza-Israel clashes. On Thursday, Arab/Muslim terrorists from Gaza (merely “militants” in Times speak) crossed into southern Israel from Egypt and carried out a carefully laid plot that murdered Israeli men, women and children. The Israelis retaliated and, while killing some terrorist leaders, unfortunately hit and killed Palestinian civilians.
Channeling Crown Heights, the Times worked hard to shift blame to the Jews for the now widening violence. In a story August 21, the Times reported that the Israeli airstrike “ignited cross-border exchanges after months of relative quiet under an informal cease-fire with Hamas.” As the media watchdog HonestReporting.com aptly put it, it was as though the clock only started when the Jews responded to attacks. Does there exist a Times editor who would publish the view that the non-Jewish side might be engaging in inexcusably criminal acts that logically should be deterred? Would a Times editor have the capacity to think such a thought?
On the other hand, Timesmen are linguistic magicians: “Cross-border exchanges” implies, as HonestReporting writes, “moral equivalence between Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets and Israeli responses.” Evenhandedness uber alles. The SS might have fared pretty well: “Deaths on both sides as Jews and Nazis clash in Warsaw.”
Rubbing in the salt, the paper chose to headline its Sunday coverage, “Casualties on Both Sides as Israelis and Gazans trade fire.” It’s Galvin Cato/Yankel Rosenbaum all over again. Tragedies everywhere, oh my!
Earlier this month, the Times, channeling the old USSR, actually began airbrushing facts it no longer has use for. Last year, the whole world saw dramatic footage of Israeli soldiers, set upon and beaten with staves and pipes, as they slid down on ropes from helicopters onto a flotilla “peace” boat dispatched from Turkey. Even the Times reported it as it happened. But now as it covers Turkey’s efforts to extract an apology from Israel, the Times transforms the thuggish attack from a clearly established matter of fact to that of one side’s allegation.
CAMERA caught the Times in flagrante delicto: “Isabel Kershner recounted the incident as if it is unknown what happened. ‘By Israel’s account, the Israeli soldiers met with violent resistance as they landed on the deck,’ she wrote.” The New York Times,” CAMERA explains, “is now “telling readers that maybe the soldiers were met with violence, or maybe they were not.” CAMERA notes that even Kershner herself previously reported that “video images… showed Israeli commandos being set upon as they rappelled onto the ship’s deck.” Stalin, after he killed a former comrade, would have the man’s image airbrushed out of published news photos. Et tu, comrade Kershner?
I’m reminded of the old joke: a man’s wife catches him in bed with another woman. Without missing a beat, the adulterer screams: “I didn’t do it! Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?!” The Times adulterates the truth. Jews should get a divorce.
Wanna know why The Times is the paper of choice for the faux-intellectual set? Because by pretending toward a moral equivalency that the paper itself creates, it appeals to those wishing to believe they are delving deeper into stories than the provincial masses subsisting on spoonfed facts: life, for the smart set, must be cast into delicious shades of gray, eschewing the kinds of stark blacks and whites that are properly the province of religious sermons and preachy mainstream cinema.
And if this comes at the expense of reality — which oftentimes hamfistedly unfolds in black and white, with actual heroes and actual villains (the racist!) — such is the sacrifice one makes to live the kind of nuance-drenched life the smart set likes to belief itself steeped in, a marker, to them, of their own intellectual rigor and willingness to really and truly understand.
When what is really happening is that they are self-satisfied dupes being shaped and then played by the very leftism they believe they’ve come to themselves, independent of the indoctrination they not only accept, but frankly crave.
Allowing that the blinded and dumb are the smartest and most rigorous among us — and that they come to be seen as our “intellectual” class based on nothing so much as superficial trappings — was and is the great trick of the left: and by taking over certain institutions (be it the media, the entertainment industry, or the universities), then self-selecting as a way to create a manufactured consensus boasting the cachet of those once respectable institutions, the left builds themselves a stable of deluded, self-important useful idiots who have been taught to believe themselves critical, nuanced thinkers.
Intellectual discernment and the ability to separate fact from propaganda is written off as dogmatic thinking; while lazy, full-throated relativism is the mark of a truly beautiful mind.
Up is down. Black is white. Crimson is clover.
People interested in politics really should pay closer attention to the marshaling of certain ideas of language in support of particular ideology entrenchments. Because the left certainly does — even if their useful idiots on the ground are too self-satisfied to see it.
(thanks to Lazarus Long)
Tommy James and the Shondells? Really?
Funny how, too, there is no “otherside” when it comes to AGW. To Al Gore, “deniers” are racists – case closed … no debate allowed
This is an argument that I have not seen played out much in the chattering classes. For the amount of time that the militantly secular left spends obsessing on the right’s religiosity, they are terribly blind to the needs of their own moral vanity. Shelby Steele’s piece from yesterday ties directly into this, I think.
Missing a blockquote tag in there, Jeff.
Btw, these people [insert some clever vulgarity that I can’t think of at the moment]. This is what bothers me when bias is written off as being 99% unintentional and actually just a function of confirmation bias and all that.
No, oftentimes they are making conscious decisions.
That’s quite a trick, making refusal to think deeply and seriously the sine qua non of intellectualism.
Brings these words of wisdom to mind.
THEY ARE WHO WE THOUGHT THEY WERE!!!
Someone should link that video in every thread. Always makes me smile. Every single time.
[…] Manufacturing equivalence Two weeks ago [Ari] Goldman, formerly a religion writer for The New York Times, publicly confessed to having remained silent for 20 years about his paper’s distorted coverage of the Crown Heights riots. For Goldman, it was up close and personal. He was on the phone, right there in Brooklyn, calling in reports from the streets where black mobs were attacking Jews, yelling “Heil Hitler” and “Kill the Jews!” But, he now tells us, his Times editor found this news not fit to print. There was to be no black anti-Semitism, and no anti-Jewish pogrom in the nation’s “paper of record.” […]
Better yet somebody ought to edit it to the end of the Dane’s speech when he takes Tom back to Miller’s Crossing.
“You think you’re so smart [….] Well, we’ll go out to Miller’s Crossing and see who’s smart.”
THEY ARE WHO WE THOUGHT THE WERE!!!
The problem with living in an alternate reality is that actual reality always returns.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
But they are certain it will never happen to them because they are much smarter than those who preceded them and will be able to nuance this to their benefit.
Mikey NTH:
I’ve had that poem running through my head pretty constantly for the last several weeks. I’m starting to think that Kipling somehow got on the wavelength the government uses to broadcast to my metal fillings.
Hadlowe: This is Kipling’s World; we’re just passing through.
This is Kipling’s World
Good excuse to relink this.
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There are only “narratives,” and each side’s version of reality must be given equal treatment
Hardly. Narratives compete for dominance, and you do what you must to make sure your preferred narrative becomes the accepted narrative. The idea that all narratives have equal footing is presented at the beginning of class because it sounds so high-minded and even-handed. But from there on out, you learn that all right-thinking people prefer the Leftist narratives.
otherwise, we’d all remain stuck for life as morally sick, white-skin-privileged xenophobes.
Because there’s no way to revise one’s narrative by incorporating new facts, or engaging in introspection, especially not when *gasp* required by one’s religion.
All narratives are equal. Some narratives are more equal.
tomorrow’s narrative today
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