Wow. It doesn’t get any more thorough than this.
Over here at Real Clear Investigations is a long piece by former New York Times editor Tom Kuntz, a 28-year veteran of the paper who departed on good terms in 2016.
In the wake of the demand for an apology/retraction from The Times by Sean Hannity for its egregiously – make that deliberately – untrue story that grossly misrepresented Hannity’s coverage of the pandemic, the Kuntz column is an eyeopening look (if any more are needed) of just how ideological the paper has become, totally polluting its once solid reputation as “the paper of record.”
Among other things, Kuntz says the following. He heads his piece:
The NY Times Used to Correct Its Whoppers. But Not These Two. Here’s Why.
Then he says:
“The New York Times is widely admired for owning up to its errors. In addition to the corrections it runs each day, it has a tradition of publishing extensive Editor’s Notes and even full-length investigations when it has determined that flawed reporting misled readers and botched the rough first draft of history. Since 2000, these have included lengthy reassessments of its reporting on whether a Chinese American scientist, Wen Ho Lee, had collaborated with the Chinese; the false stories filed by a troubled black reporter, Jayson Blair, and articles regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
During the last few years, the Times has published two other sets of deeply flawed articles that also demand such extended corrections: “The 1619 Project” and its Trump-Russia coverage. It is a sign of how much the Times, and mainstream journalism in general, have changed that it appears highly unlikely the “paper of record” will correct the record.”
Got that? Kuntz zeroes in exactly two pieces of Times journalistic, well, trash.
The first, the much-debunked-by-notable-historians “1619 Project” that tries to re-write the founding of the United States to say it was all about slavery, was particularly awful. Kuntz writes that:
“….the 1619 Project itself did not appear out of thin air. It is the result of the long diversity push within the newspaper and of the left’s wider recent embrace of progressively byzantine identity politics, including among “woke” upper-middle-class whites who are the foundation of the paper’s business model.
As British writer Douglas Murray writes in his recent book “The Madness of Crowds,” this trend showed up in the Times with a studied emphasis on stories concerning race, gender, and sexual identity, ‘perhaps making up for lost time, or perhaps just rubbing things in the faces of those not yet up to speed with the changing mores of the age. Either way, something strange and vaguely retributive is in the air.’”
As I have written repeatedly over the years, it is the very culture of slavery and later segregation that formed the cultural and political mold that is now called “identity politics.” This is to say, the 1619 project, in a stunning example of a lack-of-self awareness, is exactly what it is criticizing. Identity politics is nothing if not the son of segregation and the grandson of slavery. In writing this entire “project” The Times quite effectively illustrates just how race-conscious it now is. It is as if the paper had been turned over to be edited by David Duke, the infamous ex-Klan leader who, like the Times editors, of today, judges everything through the lens of race.
Writes Kuntz:
“Once one concludes that it is right and good to shape the news to advance the ideological ends of diversity, it is a small step to do the same in coverage of a president whom most of your readers loathe.”
Exactly.
Kuntz’ zeroes in on another recent episode in The Times “coverage” of the Trump presidency – the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. Writes Kuntz:
“Similarly, in the face of the Mueller Report’s finding last year of no Trump-Russia collusion, the Times is not giving back the 2018 Pulitzer Prize it won with the Washington Post for coverage that uncritically pushed the conspiracy theories of anti-Trump intelligence sources. (Nor is the Post.) As it withholds from its readers any detailed explanation of its relationship with a vital source of its misleading coverage – Fusion GPS, producer of the discredited Steele dossier at the heart of the affair – the Times continues to publish the spin of intelligence sources trying to discredit or at least blunt continuing federal inquiries into what happened.”
None of this is, shall we say, journalistically attractive. These two episodes reveal, as Kuntz details, a newspaper that is no longer about being “the paper of record” or publishing the objective facts of a story.
As Kuntz illustrates in detail, and as the paper’s handling of the Hannity story illustrates, this is a paper that is now all about spreading a far-left ideology and hating a president – and that president’s supporters.
The Kuntz article is worth a long, thoughtful read – not least because it comes from a onetime Times editor who recalls a day when The New York Times really was a serious newspaper and not the American version of the old Soviet Union’s Communist Party propaganda outlet – Pravda.
