The Patriot Post® · In Brief: How the NYT Published Lies to Serve the Narrative
“April was the month the narratives died,” says the New York Post’s Mary Kay Linge in a review of The Gray Lady Winked by journalist and media commentator Ashley Rindsberg. Linge summarizes some of Rindsberg’s writing about the leftist lies peddled for a very long time by the New York Times:
On April 15, the Biden administration acknowledged there was no evidence that Russia ever offered bounties on American troops in Afghanistan, walking back a report that wounded former President Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Four days later, the Washington, DC, medical examiner revealed that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick had not been murdered by rampaging Trump supporters during the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, as reports had claimed, but had died of natural causes.
Both stories were based on anonymous, unidentifiable sources, but had become deeply enmeshed in the public consciousness. Both confirmed the assumptions of the nation’s left-leaning media and academic elite, while damaging their political enemies.
And both were driven by The New York Times, where malicious misreporting has been the practice for a century.
The “fabrications and distortions” Rindsberg dug up “were never the product of simple error.” Instead, he says, “they were the byproduct of a particular kind of system, a truth-producing machine” meant to construct a narrative.
With close to $2 billion in annual revenue, the Times has the money, prestige, experience and stature to set the narratives that other news outlets almost invariably follow.
As Rindsberg put it, “When the Times breaks these stories, it’s wall to wall. MSNBC, CNN — everywhere you look, you’ll get that story. And with the Times, it’s never just one false claim. They make a concerted effort over time that they dig into and won’t let go.”
The Times’s overage of Nazi Germany prior to World War II is one particularly bad historical example. Just one American reporter — Guido Enderis — was not arrested by the Nazis in December 1941, and that’s because Rindsberg says he “was a Nazi collaborator.”
Prior to that, Linge writes:
The infamous behavior of the Times’ star Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty — who pooh-poohed reports of the Holodomor, the 1932-33 mass starvation that Josef Stalin either allowed or imposed in the Ukraine — is well known.
But Rindsberg’s book reveals that Duranty had not accidentally overlooked the disaster that killed millions.
“Duranty was instructed by his higher-ups to cover the Ukraine famine in that way,” Rindsberg said. “At the time, The New York Times was actively pushing for American recognition of the Soviet Union,” he explained.
Bringing all of it back around to the Sicknick and bounties stories, Linge and Rindsberg explain how the Times drives the narrative. “They’re protecting the thing that is most valuable to them,” Rindsberg said, “their reputation. And doing it at the expense of the truth.”