Tyranny and the Times

Pajamas Media has just posted a well-written abstract by Bruce Bawer of the pathological condition afflicting the editors of the New York Times these many, many years: the willful ignorance of tyranny. Two paragraphs stand out:

Indeed, it can seem that for the Times, when it comes to the very biggest and most disturbing stories, the “news that’s fit to print” was, and is, often the news that best fits the paper’s pre-existing picture of the world. In this sense, the Times is not a liberal newspaper at all, but deeply conservative, determined above all to provide its largely comfortable and affluent readers with a consistent, predictable picture of the world that doesn’t challenge their own worldview in any significant way or make them feel obliged to deal with things they’d prefer not to deal with.

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Indeed, to read Duranty, Matthews, Schanberg, and the Times’ Holocaust-era European correspondents is to be struck by how much alike they all sound. Whether they were in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, these reporters evinced the selfsame fascination with tyrants and offered the selfsame justifications for tyranny.

The posting is essential reading because the point of Bawer's sordid history of the Times' rationalization of evil is to serve as illustration how it is does so yet again; this time in its coverage of Islam in Europe, with an array of apologist reporters turning a blind eye to Sharia and intolerance among Muslims, disingenuously claiming the underlying problem is not radical Islam but racism among white Europeans.

That sort of pseudo-Marxist drivel would be would be laughable were it only appearing, as it is constantly but largely ignored, in college newspapers, the Nation or the dailykos.com. The Times, however, despite its recent falling fortunes, is still hugely influential among policy makers (you will see little if any difference between positions held by Times editorialists and the leadership and candidates of the Democratic party). Lamentably, more than a few politicians in Washington take their stand on issues based on what they have read in the New York Times so its whitewashing of the gravest threat to Europe in over two generations should be viewed with great concern by the rest of us.

Given its shameful history, e.g. Walter Duranty filing reports (and winning a Pulitzer prize) denying Stalin's intentional starvation of the Kulaks (estimated deaths, seven-to-ten million), the New York Times can be creditably accused of accessory to murder. What a shame if it were to get away with it again.