The New York Times is probably the best newspaper in the United States, if not the entire world, but they have never respected editorial cartoons or cartoonists. While they have reprinted syndicated cartoons (I know this because they’ve reprinted mine), they have never employed a staff cartoonist, and for this, they are quite proud.

However, their international edition has made use of them for years, using syndicated cartoons and hiring cartoonist Patrick Chappatte. Now, after running a cartoon a month and a half ago that drew condemnation for antiSemitism, the Times has decided to stop running political cartoons entirely.

The Times would never ditch opinion columns over one offending columnist, which proves their disrespect for cartoons.

This news gained widespread attention after Chappatte, who did NOT draw the offending cartoon, published a blog post about the Times’ decision. Previously, the Times dropped using syndicated cartoons after the controversy and scolded the editor who approved it. Now, all cartoons have to go from every edition.

Read more:

https://claytoonz.com/2019/06/11/the-times-chickens-out/

 

To say that the NooYaurketymezzz is the best paper in the world shows how poor we are serviced by the print media on this planet... The only thing good about the NYT is that I think it was the only media that apologised for its coverage of the Iraq war... Apart from this, The NYT tows the line of the establishment that feed both the Republican government and its lackeys, the Democrats.

At this level, the New York Post is more accurate, though terribly slanted towards the ultra-rightwing hawks of the Republicans. Also, one has to admire "the images" (front covers) of the NYP (New York Post) designed to illustrate a point that a 20,000 words essay could not.

Trump isn't the flavour of the month at the NYT, even for the usually republican journos such as David Brook (Opinion: David Brooks. Marianne Williamson Knows How to Beat Trump. We need an uprising of decency). Tough titties. The only Democrat that could beat Trump at the 2020 elections is Pete, because he is bland and restrained despite a colourful active life — and he smiles alla Jack Kennedy...

The New York Times was forced to alter its front page headline after it was savaged online by high-profile Democrats who didn't like how the paper framed President Donald Trump's speech about mass shootings.

The US newspaper got into trouble after print editor Tom Jolly shared a preview of Tuesday's front page. The headline on the story about the aftermath of the deadly mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio was 'Trump urges unity vs. racism.' Its sub-headline read as 'Condemns 'slaughters,' but says little of gun control.'

In a tweet, Trump had called for "strong background checks" on gun-owners but did not raise this point in a follow-up speech, focusing on other measures to prevent mass shootings instead.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/465918-nyt-headline-mass-shooting/

 

 

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1. Russi Taylor, the Voice of Minnie Mouse and ‘Simpsons’ Characters, Dies at 75 

   Ms. Taylor had done work for numerous animated series and also voiced Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie.

   By Derrick Bryson Taylor

   July 28, 2019
2. The World According to Mad Magazine 

   Grown-ups who worried it was a subversive influence on America’s youth were 100 percent correct.

   By Tim Kreider

   July 13, 2019
3. Garfield Art Heads to Auction 

   Some of the original artwork for the comic strip, originated by Jim Davis in 1978, is up for grabs starting Tuesday.

   By George Gene Gustines

   July 8, 2019
4. Mad Magazine, Irreverent Baby Boomer Humor Bible, Is All but Dead 

   After two more issues of new stuff, “the usual gang of idiots” will mainly publish old material in future issues.

   By Marc Tracy

   July 5, 2019
5. Of Comic Books and Couture 

   The relationship is no laughing matter. The two art forms have more in common than you might think, as a new exhibition makes clear.

   By Dana Thomas

   July 1, 2019
6. Batman Through the Decades, in Black and White 

   A look at some of the highlights in a Batman exhibition at the Society of Illustrators.

   By George Gene Gustines

   June 26, 2019
7. LETTERSPlease, Gray Lady, Bring Back the Cartoons! 

   Readers urge The Times to rethink its decision to eliminate political cartoons from its global edition.

   June 11, 2019
8. New York Times’s Global Edition Is Ending Daily Political Cartoons 

   The Times stopped running syndicated political cartoons in April, after one with anti-Semitic imagery was printed in the Opinion section of the international edition.

   June 11, 2019
9. Infowars Agrees to Part Ways With Pepe the Frog 

   Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe, sued to stop its use by the far-right website. Infowars agreed on Monday, paying a $15,000 settlement.

   By Liam Stack

   June 10, 2019
10. Mysterious Chinese Political Cartoonist Badiucao Unmasked at Last 

    The authorities in China have moved quickly to censor the cartoonist, Badiucao, whose work uses bold — and critics say sometimes vulgar — imagery.

    By Amy Qin

    June 4, 2019

At this stage, we're not going to forget nor forgive the New York Times for the dismissal of its international cartoonists... Here are cartoons collected around the world by Chapatte about this unfortunate heartless stupid thing to do by the NYT:

 

 

American resilience:

 

Tornadoes: to the cellar!

 

 

Blizzards: stay at home!

 

Hurricanes: a kiss from Eva!

 

Shitstorms: sack all the cartoonists!

 

-----------------------

 

The press in a drawing minefield:

 

 

---------------------

Yellow chicken:

 

jeff parker

 

---------------------

Canary in the graphite mine...

ann telnaes.

 

--------------------------

 

Broken spirit: Falco...

 

--------------------------

Cold comfort:

 

Bénédicte

see also:

cartoonists of the world revolt... or at least draw something like "je suis against le new york times that feeds me"...

 

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These days, when a couple of bullying white guys gang up on two prominent women of color, they are likely to create quite a stir. This is especially the case when the women are darlings of the liberal media, not to mention Democratic members of Congress, and the bullies are the president of the United States and his ostensibly good friend the prime minister of Israel. 

So it has been with the flap pitting President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. The quantity of mud slung on the opposing sides has been most impressive and no doubt a source of joy for the ratings-obsessed executives of our several cable news networks. 

But does this controversy have any real significance? Beyond the question of whether Ms. Tlaib will ever be able to visit her nonagenarian Palestinian grandmother on the West Bank, my guess is probably not.

Still, in those circles where a firm, fierce, unwavering, and unquestioning U.S. commitment to Israel ranks on a par with mom, apple pie, and supporting the troops as core American values, any suggestion of a threat to the longstanding, bipartisan pro-Israel consensus evokes panic. With the exception of AIPAC, few institutions are more sensitive to any hints of backsliding in U.S. support for Israel than The New York Times.

To follow [T]he [New York] Times’s coverage of this tempest in a teapot is to sense the anguish of editors yearning for the “squad” of which Talib and Omar are members to blossom into a full-fledged army of progressives while simultaneously desperate to prevent any such turn in American politics from undermining American support for Israel. 

President Trump, despised by the Times, professes undying love for Israel. Talib and Omar also despise Trump, but don’t even pretend to love Israel. For the nation’s leading newspaper, this poses a serious problem.

The necessary solution to that problem is to prevent the U.S.-Israeli relationship from becoming a partisan issue. For decades now, support for Israel in Washington has transcended politics. Along with raising military pay, it has been one of the few issues on which Republicans and Democrats, with a few brave exceptions, routinely agree. On an annual basis, Congress reaffirms that commitment by mailing another $3 billion check to Jerusalem.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/times-to-think-about-th...

 

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Time to reinstate cartoonists at the NYT.

Last week, Hawaii congresswoman and 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard threatened she was “seriously considering” boycotting the Ohio Democratic presidential debate over claims that both the Democratic National Committee and the “corporate media” were meddling in the election process.

US 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) accused The New York Times and CNN of "smearing" her reputation at the Democrats' 2020 primary debate on 15 October.

"The New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime-change war," she said at the event in Westerville, Ohio, that CNN was co-hosting with The Times.

Gabbard, 38, had been questioned about Syria, where US President Donald Trump recently ordered the withdrawal of US troops from the country's north.

The Hawaii congresswoman continued:

"Just two days ago, The New York Times put out an article saying that I'm a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears. This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I'm an asset of Russia -- completely despicable."
Gabbard was seemingly referring to CNN analyst Bakari Sellers' comments describing the congresswoman as a "puppet for the Russian government".

The congresswoman was also vocal on the situation following Trump’s withdrawal from northern Syria:

"Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand[s], but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011, along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing and cheerleading this regime-change war," she said.

Democratic House Representative for Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard was widely condemned by Democrats and Republicans for holding an unannounced meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad back in 2017 during a “fact-finding” trip to the Middle East country.
Gabbard claimed to have no regrets about meeting with Assad, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” in January this year that she had also witnessed the plight of the Middle East firsthand and “the cost of war”.

Earlier, the congresswoman and Iraq War veteran, who qualified for the fourth showdown with 12 of the remaining 18 Democratic presidential candidates, threatened to boycott the Democratic presidential debate on 15 October, over claims that both the Democratic National Committee and the “corporate media” were interfering with the election process, “rigging” the primary battle against many of the lower tier candidates and political outsiders running for nomination.

In an accompanying video on 10 October, Gabbard pointed what she called “arbitrary” and non-transparent requirements to qualify for the debates, claiming the Democratic Party leaders “are trying to hijack the entire election process”.

However, in the end Gabbard decided the nationally televised prime time event was worth attending.

“I will be attending the debate,” the White House hopeful tweeted Monday morning.

As the Democratic National Committee has been raising the thresholds to qualify for the ensuing rounds of debates, there has been a chorus of criticism by many of the lower tier candidates.

To make the stage for the November debate, candidates have to reach 165,000 campaign contributions from unique donors and hit at least 3 per cent in four polls approved by the DNC.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201910161077058467-tulsi-gabbard-slams-cnn-ny...

 

 

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New York Times columnist accused of eugenics over piece on Jewish intelligence

Bret Stephens faces backlash after suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people

The rightwing New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has sparked furious controversy online for a column praising Ashkenazi Jews for their scientific accomplishments, which critics say amounts to embracing eugenics.

In a column titled The Secrets of Jewish Genius and using a picture of Albert Einstein, Stephens stepped in the eugenics minefield by claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than other people and think differently.

Citing Sarah Bernhardt, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx, Stephens asked: “How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of one per cent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?”

He answered: “The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true … Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.”

That prompted furious accusations that Stephens was using the same genetics arguments that informed Nazism and white supremacist thinking.

“It’s hard to read this column as expressing anything other than a belief in the genetic and cultural inferiority of non-Ashkenazi Jews; it’s hard to tell if that’s intentional or due to appalling sloppiness, but either way it’s not the sort of thing the Times should be running,” tweeted Tim Marchman, editorial director of Vice.

New York Times contributor Jody Rosen offered on Twitter: “Speaking as both an Ashkenazi Jew and a NYT contributor, I don’t think eugenicists should be op-ed columnists.”

“A Jew endorsing the idea that certain races are inherently superior to other, lesser races, what could possibly go wrong?” asked the journalist Ashley Feinberg on Twitter.

The writer Carrie Courogen posted the phone number to cancel a Times subscription, “citing ‘too many awful Bret Stephens pieces, today’s eugenics propaganda being the final straw’ as why you can ‘no longer in good conscience subscribe’. It was easy & painless & I just did it; you can too.”

Stephens’ latest column is far from his first brush with controversy.

In August, he became embroiled in a dispute with a professor who had called him a “bedbug” on Twitter, after it emerged the New York Times had become infested with the insect pest. The spat ended with Stephens cancelling his Twitter account.

“Time to do what I long ago promised to do,” tweeted Stephens before he deactivated his account. “Twitter is a sewer. It brings out the worst in humanity. I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse, and to anyone I’ve ever hurt. Thanks to all of my followers, but I’m deactivating this account.”

Stephens is a regular target of liberals’ ire for other columns attacking climate change science, saying the activist group Black Lives Matter has “some thuggish elements” and for writing a piece about “the disease of the Arab mind”.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/28/bret-stephens-new-york-tim...

 

 

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MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Russian Embassy in the United States reproached the Pulitzer Prize Board for praising anti-Russian articles, which contained allegations that have been repeatedly debunked.

“The Prize Board is taking great responsibility, highlighting in this way anti-Russian materials, with statements that have been repeatedly refuted not only by Russian officials, but already by life itself," the embassy wrote on Facebook.

The Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University earlier announced that the New York Times had emerged as the big winner in this year’s competition with three wins, swelling the newspaper’s total to 130 Pulitzers in more than a century since the award was first established.

In particular, the entire NYT staff won the international reporting prize for articles on Russia and what the Prize Board called the "predations of the Vladimir Putin regime".

The diplomatic mission said it views this series of newspaper articles as "a wonderful collection of undiluted Russophobic fabrications that can be studied as a guide to creating false facts".

In November 2019, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the NYT’s allegations that Russia had prevented the evacuation of a sick US military attaché from Moscow “pure fraud,” and an article on the investigation of "attacks" on Syrian hospitals and Russia's alleged pressure on its results the fake and dishonest work of journalists.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/202005051079198419-russian-embassy-in-us-c...

 

 

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With its editorial staff in open revolt, The New York Times backtracked on its support of a controversial op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that called for troops to be introduced to squash Americans protesting police brutality and the murder of George Floyd.

After first defending its decision to publish the editorial, The Times is now saying that it undertook a “review” following scathing blowback from its own ranks. It has now determined that the op-ed didn’t meet its standards. In fact, the paper concedes the inflammatory article was published without the editorial page editor James Bennet having read it.

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

The Times’ Publisher A.G. Sulzberger has also vowed to change the process as a result, according to a report in The Times.

“Given that this is not the first lapse, the Opinion department will also be taking several initial steps to reduce the likelihood of something like this happening again,” Sulzberger reportedly said in a Slack message to staffers.

Earlier in the day, Bennet himself defended the op-ed’s publication while conceding it might have been a mistake.

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/06/04/new-york-times-editor-james-bennet-defends...

 

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See also: bezos' amazon becomes an arbiter of censorship... in free america now...

The op-ed that raised unrest in the editorial office of the New York Times was written by GOP Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and called for using military force to quell ongoing and widespread protests against police brutality over the death of George Floyd. Earlier, opinion editor James Bennet defended the piece and apologized.

The New York Times announced on Sunday that James Bennet has stepped down as editorial page editor, after far-ranging discontent in the company following the publication of an opinion piece that "called for military force against protesters in American cities".

Following Bennet's resignation, US President Donald Trump tweeted praise for the author of the op-ed that caused the controversy, Senator Tom Cotton, as "excellent", calling for "transparency" and again declaring The NYT "fake news".

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202006071079550363-new-york-times-opinion-edi...

 

 

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Dear A.G.,

It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times. 

I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.

I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor. Among those I helped bring to our pages: the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong. 

I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.

Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.

What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets. 

Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.

It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati. 

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry. 

Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.

All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.

For these young writers and editors, there is one consolation. As places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles, Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere. I hear from these people every day. “An independent press is not a liberal ideal or a progressive ideal or a democratic ideal. It’s an American ideal,” you said a few years ago. I couldn’t agree more. America is a great country that deserves a great newspaper. 

None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper. They do, which is what makes the illiberal environment especially heartbreaking. I will be, as ever, a dedicated reader of their work. But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do—the work that Adolph Ochs described in that famous 1896 statement: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”

Ochs’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. And I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing. Above all, they must be backed by people willing to live by them. 

Sincerely,

 

Bari

 

Read more:

https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

 

 

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...

But, forget high school. Once known as the “Gray Lady,” the Times [The New York Times] now looks more like a middle school run by the "Mean Girls" crowd while the administration cowers in its offices. The proper response to a bunch of junior staffers complaining about articles that a paper publishes is something between “Go, write a piece explaining why that piece is wrong” and “Fetch my latte.” Journalism jobs are hard to come by and, for every troublesome staffer at the New York Times, there are undoubtedly at least a dozen candidates out there who would do at least as good a job and with less overweening self-importance.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/15/bari-weiss-letter-resi...

 

 

Read 

bari weiss resigns from the new york times...

 

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On 14th February 2017, The New York Times published a bombshell exclusive based on the word of a quartet of anonymous intelligence officials - Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence. 

To say the least, the article caused something of a stir, its sensational claims breathlessly and endlessly repeated by journalists and pundits the world over for months afterwards. While former FBI Director James Comey disputed the article’s veracity under oath in June that year, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee “in the main, it was not true”, The Times defended its reporting, and refused to retract the piece.

Now, a previously classified internal Bureau assessment of the article written by Peter Strzok released at the order of Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham has exposed the degree to which the article was a crudely woven patchwork of misrepresentation, exaggeration and outright lies.

Misleading and Inaccurate

The file consists of a facsimile of the article, with accompanying commentary and observations from the now-notorious then-FBI special agent - it seems to have been produced due to internal bewilderment at many key claims made by The Times, certain comments making clear the Bureau was keen to identify how and why the disinformation made it into the paper.

Strzok’s objections begin at the very start of the report, which states “phone records and intercepted calls” showed members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign “and other Trump associates” had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.

“This statement is misleading and inaccurate...we have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with intelligence officials. The FBI has information on the following individuals in contact with Russians (both governmental and non-governmental): [redacted]. There is no known intel affiliation and little if any government affiliation,” Strzok writes.

A few paragraphs on, the article states the anonymous officials alleged the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and “0n the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside the intelligence services”.

“We do not know nor can we figure out what this means or where it might be coming from (ie something we can identify as a source of misunderstanding),” Strzok notes.

In the very next paragraph, it’s claimed one of the Trump advisers who’d been speaking with Russians was Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair March - August 2016.

“We are unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party. If this material is held by the US Intelligence Community, we aren't aware of it. Both CIA and NSA are aware of our subjects, and throughout the summer we provided them names and selectors for queries of their holdings as well as prospective collection,” a flustered Strzok responds.

Fittingly, later on in the article, it’s specifically claimed the NSA captured the phantom calls between Trump’s associates and Russian individuals “as part of routine foreign surveillance” - “if they did, we aren't aware of it”, Strzok bluntly retorts.

The article almost gets things right when noting the FBI had “closely examined” at least three other people close to Trump - Carter Page, former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone.

Page certainly was “closely examined” by the Bureau - he was subject to four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, two of which have since been ruled to have been secured unlawfully. In April 2019, the Mueller Report revealed that investigators found no evidence Page coordinated Trump campaign activities with the Russian government.

Previously declassified files have revealed Flynn was likewise closely examined by the FBI, and their probe quickly closed on the grounds of "no derogatory information" being found, until Strzok himself personally intervened to keep it open.

Stone, however, as Strzok notes in the assessment, wasn’t subject to FBI investigation at all.

The article goes on to note the Bureau was trying to assess the credibility of the information contained in the ‘Trump-Russia’ dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele - “senior FBI officials” are said to believe Steele “has a credible track record”.

Previously released declassified documents have amply underlined there was in fact little faith whatsoever in Steele, much less his dossier, among Bureau staff by February 2017 - in fact, an internal probe into the dossier’s content, and how it was compiled, concluded it contained disinformation fed to Steele’s sub-sources by Russian intelligence operatives. The ex-MI6 operative’s primary source also told investigators Steele had greatly misrepresented many things he’d said.

This is briefly referenced in Strzok’s commentary on the article, the special agent writing that “recent interviews and investigation reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of his subsource network”.

In response to the assessment’s public release, Eileen Murphy, a Times spokesperson, said “we stand by our reporting”.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202007181079924496-declassified-documents-reveal-key-new-york-times-russiagate-piece-was-complete-lies/

 

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Yep, “we stand by our innacurate bullshit reporting”.

 

The NYT must have got its information from Alexander Downer...

See:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34954

 

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In her resignation letter, Weiss found space to castigate the Times for publishing an interview with renowned African-American author Alice Walker, whom she casually defamed as “a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.”

Weiss also flexed her bona fides as a proud neoconservative activist, saying she was “honored” to have given the world’s most prestigious media platform to a slew of regime-change activists from countries targeted by the US national security for overthrow, including Venezuela, Iran, and Hong Kong, along with notorious Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Chloe Valdary – a fellow Israel lobby product who previously worked as an intern for Bret Stephens.

In her three-year career as an editor of the opinion section of the newspaper of record, Weiss devoted a significant chunk of her columns to attacking her left-wing critics, while complaining endlessly of the haters in her Twitter mentions (which is risible given her lamentation in her resignation letter that “Twitter has become [the Times’] ultimate editor”).

In her 2019 book, Weiss condemned the pro-Palestine left as a whole. She insisted the idea that Zionism is a colonialist and racist movement is an anti-Semitic “Soviet conspiracy;” that the UK Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn was a “hub of Jew hatred,” and that “leftist anti-Semites” are “more insidious and perhaps existentially dangerous” than far-right “Hitlerian anti-Semites.”

It is worth reviewing this historical record to show how Cancel Queen Bari Weiss’ apparent change of heart on cancel culture might more appropriately be described as an opportunist career choice.

Bari Weiss’ campaigns to cancel Palestinians Joseph Massad and Linda Sarsour, and Muslim American politician Keith Ellison

In her 2019 book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” Weiss revived her condemnations of Massad, whom she first targeted at Columbia University after interning at the Hertog-funded Shalem Center.

Weiss also argued that New York University (NYU) was rife with anti-Semitism. Her proof? An individual student was told some stupid anti-Semitic comments, and — much more disconcertingly for Weiss – “In December 2018, the student government successfully passed a BDS resolution,” and “NYU gave the President’s Service Award, the school’s highest honor, to Students for Justice in Palestine.”

Massad was hardly the only victim of Bari Weiss’ compulsive cancel culture campaigns. The neoconservative pundit wrote an entire New York Times column in 2017 dedicated to trying to cancel Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour.

Rapping progressives over the knuckles for purportedly “embracing hate,” Weiss characterized Sarsour as an unhinged anti-Semite because of her criticism of the colonialist Zionist movement, and worked to disrupt the Women’s March, which Sarsour helped to found.

Then in a tag-team cancel campaign with feverishly pro-war CNN host Jake Tapper (who has his own questionable history with racial issues), they portrayed Sarsour as an extremist for expressing support for former Black Panther leader Assata Shakur, whom they jointly demonized as a “cop-killer fugitive in Cuba.”

Next, Weiss turned her sights on the Democratic Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison, claiming in a 2017 column that he had a “long history of defending and working with anti-Semites.”

Bari Weiss attempts to cancel Tulsi Gabbard

Bari Weiss’ cancelation rampage continued without a moment of self-reflection.

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan in January 2019, the pundit tried to cancel Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard because of her work advocating against the international proxy war on Syria.

When Rogan mentioned Gabbard’s name, Weiss scoffed that the congresswoman is “monstrous,” smearing her an “Assad toady,” in reference to the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Confused, Rogan asked Weiss what exactly that meant. The bumbling New York Times pundit could not answer, unable to define or even spell the insult.

 

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http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/neocon-watch/2020/july/17/did-neocon-cancel-queen-bari-weiss-stage-her-ny-times-resignation-to-fuel-her-career/

 

 

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‘Too much pot brownie’: Clinton slams NYT's Maureen Dowd over claim it’s been 36 YEARS since a man & woman ran on Dem ticket

Hillary Clinton and thousands of others roasted a now-corrected story and tweet from the New York Times claiming the last time there was a mixed-gender presidential ticket for the Democratic Party was in the ‘80s.

“It’s hard to fathom, but it has been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket,” the New York Times’ Opinion Twitter account wrote, linking to an article by columnist Maureen Dowd, which included the same quote.

Clinton, who was on the Democratic ticket with Tim Kaine as her running mate in 2016, was one of the first to express shock at the bizarre and untrue claim, wondering whether Dowd had “too much pot brownie” before writing her story.

“Either Tim Kaine and I had a very vivid shared hallucination four years ago or Maureen had too much pot brownie before writing her column again,” she tweeted. 

The Times then corrected the tweet to say that in fact it had been 36 years “since a man chose a woman to run as his vice president” – a ‘correction’ which also included a mistake, since the late John McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate on the Republican ticket in 2008.

The Times eventually corrected the mistake properly to clarify that it had been that long since a male Democratic candidate had chosen a female as his vice presidential running mate.

Clinton’s 2016 vice presidential pick Kaine also responded to the Times’ original flub.

Many tweets targeted Dowd herself, who has long been critical of Clinton. Dowd’s column focused on Geraldine Ferraro, who was the first vice presidential candidate for a major political party in 1984. She ran with Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan and lost by a wide margin. A correction was added to the bottom of Dowd’s piece acknowledging her error.

Dowd’s piece examined the pushback Ferraro had received as a female VP pick and wondered whether a woman picked by Joe Biden in 2020 would face similar criticism – but also completely ignored criticism targeted at Clinton herself in 2016.

Others roasted the New York Times itself, wondering how it was possible that such a glaring error had made it past an editor and into publication.

 

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https://www.rt.com/usa/497484-new-york-times-hillary-clinton-maureen-dowd/

 

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I have, for years now, read the New York Times, and for the most part unironically. For all its dowdy Manhattan leftism and paint-by-numbers Blairist opinion writing, the Times has remained a bulwark of old-fashioned newspaper journalism, its pages thick, its interests wide-ranging, its reading level higher than the usual magnetic letters on the fifth-grade fridge. I don’t live in New York and never plan to, but that kind of thing is difficult to find.

For what it’s worth, even Tucker Carlson used to agree. The Times, he said at CPAC 11 years ago, “actually cares about accuracy” and should serve as a model for conservative news startups. (That got him jeered by the audience of right-wing activists.)

So what, then, are we to make of today’s New York Times? Whatever bias once existed there, whatever gentle tug to the left you felt while reading it, has now mushroomed into ridiculous agitprop. This isn’t just about the opinion page, which shoved out editor James Bennet earlier this summer for the crime of publishing an op-ed by a Republican senator. It’s an embedded tendency towards a singular way of thinking that’s seemingly affected all strata of the newspaper.

The Times is now a place that, after months of violent protests in Portland—really years; rioters have been raging there since Trump’s election—sends a tweet that reads: “As right-wing groups increasingly move to confront protesters in U.S. cities, demonstrators are assessing how to keep themselves safe.” (“Keep themselves safe”—a Trump supporter had just been shot and killed!) It’s a place that ran an insanely tendentious piece accusing the mostly upbeat night one of the Republican National Convention of having an “ominous tone” and attempting to “rewrite history.”

It’s a place that, just four days ago, published a “profile” of Andrew Sullivan that was less shoe leather than bell, book, and candle. The piece, slugged “I’m Still Reading Andrew Sullivan. But I Can’t Defend Him,” reached deep into its bag of journalistic prisms and came back with this utterly novel and insightful analysis: Sullivan is a racist. It was a tough thesis to defend, given that, as the article noted, Sullivan had endorsed Barack Obama and was one of the former president’s favorite writers. The profile author, Ben Smith, mustered up three charges. First and foremost, all the way back in 1994, Sullivan had published a symposium at the New Republic about The Bell Curve, a book that alleged differences in IQ between the races. (Smith actually called that Sullivan’s “original sin.”) Second, he’d once sent a puckish and apparently drunken email to an author on the Times‘ 1619 Project. Third, he’d mused that it was interesting that a lot of Jews had won the Nobel Prize.

From here, there could be only one conclusion: “His career, with all its sweep and innovation, can’t ever quite escape that 1994 magazine cover.”

I wasn’t able to read further, as the rest of the piece was in Latin chant.

That Smith’s essay feels more like an excommunication hints at the changes happening at the Times and on the left more generally. Once, the bias over there was incidental, even intellectual, the result of shared assumptions among a largely New York-based staff and perhaps a mild activist impulse to convert. Sam Tanenhaus, for example, has gotten much wrong (sometimes egregiously wrong) about conservatism, but he at least seems curious about his subject matter, even if his biases do refract his findings in a certain direction. Whereas the current coverage is interested primarily in liturgy, in reciting the same lines from the same preconceived assumptions. Of course Sullivan must be reduced to racism: that’s what the post-1619 Times does, just as Portland must become a story about knuckle-dragging violent right-wingers. Question these methods, as Bari Weiss, a former Times columnist, often did, and you get mercilessly bullied by the villagers, given the apostate’s treatment.

The thing about liturgy is that, unless you believe in the religion, it quickly grows boring. You know what’s going to be said; the entire point is that you mouth along. So it goes at the Times today. Some conservatives will reply that it’s been like this for a while, that I’ve been whistling past the graveyard. But I don’t think so. I agree with Carlson: a decade ago, even two years ago, the Times was a better and fairer newspaper. There are still glimmers of that today: in an excellent portrait of post-Freddie Gray Baltimore, in a wonderful profile of kleptocratic Iraq. But generally speaking, the Times now reads like the world’s longest church bulletin. That’s a shame.

 

 

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The New York Times has been stripped of one award and handed back another after the newspaper admitted it could not verify key claims in its 2018 podcast Caliphate.

Key points:

• Shehroze Chaudhry claimed to be an ISIS executioner who used the alias Abu Huzayfah
• He was arrested this year in Canada for perpetrating a terrorist hoax
• Journalist Rukmini Callimachi, who hosted the Caliphate podcast, has been moved off the terrorism beat

The Times said it could not verify the claims of a Canadian man whose account of committing atrocities for the Islamic State in Syria was a central part of the series.

Caliphate had won a prestigious Peabody Award, but within hours administrators said the Times would return the award. The Overseas Press Club of America also said it was rescinding its honour for the series.

The Times assigned an investigative team to look into the story after Canadian police in September arrested Shehroze Chaudhry, who used the alias Abu Huzayfah, for perpetrating a terrorist hoax. 

He told the Times that as an Islamic State soldier, he had shot one man in the head and stabbed another in the heart.

 

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-20/new-york-times-caliphate-podcast-unverified-claims-awards-lost/13001180

 

 

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David Brooks is in trouble, probably more than he realizes and certainly more than he seemed to appreciate last Friday during his regular commentary gig for the “PBS NewsHour.” That’s when he sought to answer questions about the conflicts of interest he entered into when he combined his New York Times column-writing with a more recent stint as a paid top official with a nonprofit venture under the auspices of the well-heeled Aspen Institute. He responded in a rather blithe fashion while also, it seemed, raising further questions on the matter. 

The Times reported Sunday that it was adding disclosures to past articles by Brooks that mention his “community-building” nonprofit venture, called the Weave Project, and the project’s donors. These donors include billionaires, billionaire family members, various foundations, nonprofits, and corporate sponsors such as Facebook, Walmart, M&T Bank, and Nextdoor. For example, the enterprise received $300,000 from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s father and $250,000 from Facebook. 

Here’s an example of how it worked: Brooks’s brainchild, Weave (under the Aspen Institute imprimatur) gets tens of thousands of dollars from, say, Facebook. The Aspen Institute then pays Brooks out of those collected funds. Brooks then leverages his status as a Timescolumnist by writing a blog post for Facebook’s corporate website in praise of a Facebook product. 

Or Weave gets $25,000 from Nextdoor. Brooks then goes on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and urges viewers to get on Nextdoor as an antidote to pandemic isolation. He follows that up by tweeting to his nearly 250,000 Twitter followers, “If you know someone who lives alone, ask them to join NextDoor.” Further, according to BuzzFeed, Brooks appeared on a Walton Family Foundation video without disclosing that the organization, run by the billionaire family that founded Walmart, also helps fund Weave. Finally, it appears that Brooks on numerous occasions touted the work of Weave in his columns without disclosing his association with it. 

Brooks emphasized in his “NewsHour” interview that he never crossed the line by writing about Facebook, except in the most tangential way. But think about that. He’s a New York Times columnist, charged with providing readers with his vaunted thoughts and analyses on the most pressing issues of our time. Why would he cede voluntarily his remit to write about one of the most powerful and controversial companies in the world today? Same with Amazon and so many other companies and individuals who are newsmakers, public figures, and, in some cases, people of folly and transgression—now free from Brooks’s journalistic gaze and critical discernment.

After BuzzFeed broke the story, Brooks resigned his paid position at Weave and will now confine his connection to volunteer work. The Times quoted Aspen officials as saying Brooks had not been involved in day-to-day management at Weave for the past year, since the enterprise “hired a new executive director.” So apparently Brooks had been running Weave until a year ago while also writing his column. The paper, through a spokesman, said that Brooks’s editors had approved his Weave connection, presumably including his executive position and his paid status, prior to his taking the job. But that was before a shakeup in the paper’s Opinion section brought in new editors, who, reports the Times, didn’t know of Brooks’s dual affiliation. 

Here’s an interesting question: What was the Aspen Institute paying Brooks for his services before he resigned under pressure? The Times’s Sunday story doesn’t say, notwithstanding that that simple figure would tell us a lot about just what kind of stakes were involved here. If this were an ordinary conflict-of-interest story involving Joe Schmoe, we’d chalk the omission up to sloppy reporting. It’s more difficult to do that in a situation like this, involving not only Brooks’s professional judgement but also the paper’s regard for journalistic ethics. 

David Brooks is a curious figure in American journalism. He was hired by the Times in 2003 as a conservative commentator, to balance the paper’s many liberal opinion writers. But he never took that role seriously because he isn’t really a conservative. I’ve written about his work a bit over the years and once described him as “a thoughtful and often creative political commentator with some conservative instincts but also an overarching penchant for sidestepping the messy political clashes of our time and pursuing instead ancillary lines of thinking that keep him above the fray.” 

This tendency has contributed to some serious journalistic lapses over the years. An example was his response to the Trump phenomenon. Not surprisingly, he despised Trump and all that he stood for, which was an understandable and defensible point of view if combined with a bit of analytical rigor. But he couldn’t step back and parse in any dispassionate way the underlying pressures and forces that brought the man to the fore. He wrote that the GOP was becoming a party “permanently associated with bigotry,” which put his political sophistication at a level generally associated with Hillary Clinton. He described the typical Trump voter in terms so sarcastic and dismissive as to demonstrate a bigotry of his own. Thus do we see that Brooks’s political commentary is often superficial and tinny, in contrast to the Times’s true conservative writer, Ross Douthat, whose brilliance and absence of dogma frequently penetrate to the essence of what’s actually happening in America. 

But Brooks has distinguished himself as a cultural analyst of rare distinction, beginning with his signature book, Bobos in Paradise (2000), which posited the provocative thesis that bourgeois and bohemian cultures had meshed in intriguing and powerful ways. His subsequent books further explored cultural trends and the inner self, often devolving to his own inner self. His Road to Character (2015), for example, explored what The New Yorker called “how a person might engage in moral self-improvement.” It was about humility, and Brooks once was quoted as saying he wrote it “to save my own soul.” Then came The Second Mountain (2019), about finding deeper meanings to life in one’s later years. The first mountain, as described by Brooks, is the region of life focused on personal status, reputation, material fulfillment. “The second mountain,” writes Brooks, “is about shedding the ego and losing the self”—or, as The New Yorker explained it, “about contribution rather than acquisition, egalitarianism rather than elitism.” This second mountain provides a deeper satisfaction (it is, after all, a “bigger mountain”), and takes people beyond happiness to actual joy. 

Brooks writes that, given his gift of human insight, he can quickly discern whether new acquaintances are first-mountain or second-mountain people. No doubt he would categorize himself as a second-mountain man–particularly, perhaps, in consequence of his exploration of humility in The Road to Character. But the budding saga of David Brooks and his Weave activities and his relationship with The New York Times indicates that his extensive inner-self explorations have inspired him to initiate a second-mountain climbing expedition while remaining in the familiar lucrative territory of the first mountain. That would seem to defy the laws of physics, if not the precepts of journalistic ethics. 

 

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C., journalist and publishing executive, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster).

 

 

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/david-brookss-double-dipping/

 

 

 

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Jounalist Calls Thomas Friedman 'War Criminal Sadist'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg6pnLwUcts

 

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