{"id":78648,"date":"2016-08-29T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=78648"},"modified":"2016-08-29T11:32:19","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T10:32:19","slug":"the-dumbed-down-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/the-dumbed-down-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dumbed-Down New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A New York Times columnist writes Americans are so \u201cdumbed-down\u201d that they don\u2019t know that Russia \u201cinvaded\u201d Ukraine two years ago, but that \u201cinvasion\u201d was mostly in the minds of Times editors and other propagandist.<\/em><\/p>\n

27 Aug 2016 – <\/em>In a column<\/a> mocking the political ignorance of the \u201cdumbed-down\u201d American people and lamenting the death of \u201cobjective fact,\u201d New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows why so many Americans have lost faith in the supposedly just-the-facts-ma\u2019am mainstream media.<\/p>\n

Egan states as flat fact, \u201cIf more than 16 percent of Americans<\/a> could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it \u2014 two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>

New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

But it is not a \u201cfact\u201d that Russia \u201cinvaded\u201d Ukraine \u2013 and it\u2019s especially not the case if you also don\u2019t state as flat fact that the United States has invaded Syria, Libya and many other countries where the U.S. government has launched bombing raids or dispatched \u201cspecial forces.\u201d \u00a0Yet, the Times doesn\u2019t describe those military operations as \u201cinvasions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor does the newspaper of record condemn the U.S. government for violating international law, although in every instance in which U.S. forces cross into another country\u2019s sovereign territory without permission from that government or the United Nations Security Council, that is technically \u00a0an act of illegal aggression.<\/p>\n

In other words, the Times applies a conscious double standard when reporting on the actions of the United States or one of its allies (note how Turkey\u2019s recent invasion of Syria was just an \u201cintervention\u201d) as compared to how the Times deals with actions by U.S. adversaries, such as Russia.<\/p>\n

Biased on Ukraine<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Times\u2019 reporting on Ukraine has been particularly dishonest and hypocritical. The Times ignores the substantial evidence that the U.S. government encouraged and supported a violent coup that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014, including a pre-coup intercepted phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should lead the new government and how to \u201cmidwife this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"U.S.<\/a>

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, flanked by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria \u201cToria\u201d Nuland, addresses Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, at the outset of a bilateral meeting on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo]<\/p><\/div>The Times also played down the key role of neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists in killing police before the coup, seizing government building during the coup, and then spearheading the slaughter of ethnic Russian Ukrainians after the coup. If you wanted to detect the role of these SS-wannabes from the Times\u2019 coverage, you\u2019d have to scour the last few paragraphs of a few stories that dealt with other aspects of the Ukraine crisis.<\/p>\n

While leaving out the context, the Times has repeatedly claimed that Russia \u201cinvaded\u201d Crimea, although curiously without showing any photographs of an amphibious landing on Crimea\u2019s coast or Russian tanks crashing across Ukraine\u2019s border en route to Crimea or troops parachuting from the sky to seize strategic Crimean targets.<\/p>\n

The reason such evidence of an \u201cinvasion\u201d was lacking is that Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea as part of a basing agreement for the port of Sevastopol. So, it was a very curious \u201cinvasion\u201d indeed, since the Russian troops were on scene before the \u201cinvasion\u201d and their involvement after the coup was peaceful in protecting the Crimean population from the depredations of the new regime\u2019s neo-Nazis. The presence of a small number of Russian troops also allowed the Crimeans to vote on whether to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which they did with a 96 percent majority.<\/p>\n

In the eastern provinces, which represented Yanukovych\u2019s political base and where many Ukrainians opposed the coup, you can fault, if you wish, the Russian decision to provide some military equipment and possibly some special forces so ethnic Russian and other anti-coup Ukrainians could defend themselves from the assaults by the neo-Nazi Azov brigade and from the tanks and artillery of the coup-controlled Ukrainian army.<\/p>\n

But an honest newspaper and honest columnists would insist on including this context. They also would resist pejorative phrases such as \u201cinvasion\u201d and \u201caggression\u201d \u2013 unless, of course, they applied the same terminology objectively to actions by the U.S. government and its \u201callies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Nazi<\/a>

Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine\u2019s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)<\/p><\/div>\n

That sort of nuance and balance is not what you get from The New York Times and its \u201cgroup thinking\u201d writers, people like Timothy Egan. When it comes to reporting on Russia, it\u2019s Cold War-style propaganda, day in and day out.<\/p>\n

And this has not been a one-off problem. The unrelenting bias of the Times and, indeed, the rest of the mainstream U.S. news media on the Ukraine crisis represents a lack of professionalism that was also apparent in the pro-war coverage of the Iraq crisis in 2002-03 and other catastrophic U.S. foreign policy decisions.<\/p>\n

A growing public recognition of that mainstream bias explains why so much of the American population has tuned out supposedly \u201cobjective\u201d news (because it is anything but objective).<\/p>\n

Indeed, those Americans who are more sophisticated about Russia and Ukraine than Timothy Egan know that they\u2019re not getting the straight story from the Times and other MSM outlets. Those not-dumbed-down Americans can spot U.S. government propaganda when they see it.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com\u2019s<\/em> \u201cNYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine<\/a>\u201d; \u201cNYT Is Lost in its Ukraine Propaganda<\/a>\u201d; \u201cNYT Whites Out Ukraine\u2019s Brown Shirts<\/a>\u201d; and<\/em> \u201cNYT Enforces Ukraine \u2018Group Think\u2019<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the <\/em>Associated Press and<\/em> Newsweek. His latest book, <\/em>Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush<\/a>, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are <\/em>Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq<\/a> and<\/em> Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Aug 2016 – The Times applies a conscious double standard when reporting on the actions of the United States or one of its allies (note how Turkey’s recent invasion of Syria was just an ‘intervention’) as compared to how the Times deals with actions by U.S. adversaries, such as Russia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}