Matti Friedman, a former Associated Press correspondent who covered Israel for a time, explained the modus operandi of most of her former journalist colleagues when reporting about Israel. On November 30, 2014, she wrote an article in the Atlantic titled “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel—The news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news, a former AP reporter says.” Friedman wrote: “Journalistic decisions are made by people who exist in a particular social milieu, one which, like most social groups, involves a certain uniformity of attitude, behavior, and even dress (the fashion these days, for those interested, is less vests with unnecessary pockets than shirts with unnecessary buttons). These people know each other, meet regularly, exchange information, and closely watch one another’s work. This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.”34
Sound familiar? So does this: “In these circles, in my experience,” writes Friedman, “a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the ‘progressive’ Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.”35
Have you ever wondered how the terrorist group Hamas receives so much favorable coverage in the American and international press? Friedman explains: “Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. But Hamas does. Since assuming power in Gaza in 2007, the Islamic Resistance Movement has come to understand that many reporters are committed to a narrative wherein Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians passive victims with reasonable goals, and are uninterested in contradictory information. Recognizing this, certain Hamas spokesmen have taken to confiding to Western journalists, including some I know personally, that the group is in fact a secretly pragmatic outfit with bellicose rhetoric, and journalists—eager to believe the confession, and sometimes unwilling to credit locals with the smarts necessary to deceive them—have taken it as a scoop instead of as spin.”36
Once again, the media are complicit in suppressing news and promoting propaganda, as Koch had complained. “In Gaza, this goes from being a curious detail of press psychology to a major deficiency,” writes Friedman. “Hamas’s strategy is to provoke a response from Israel by attacking from behind the cover of Palestinian civilians, thus drawing Israeli strikes that kill those civilians, and then to have the casualties filmed by one of the world’s largest press contingents, with the understanding that the resulting outrage abroad will blunt Israel’s response. This is a ruthless strategy, and an effective one. It is predicated on the cooperation of journalists. One of the reasons it works is because of the reflex I mentioned. If you report that Hamas has a strategy based on co-opting the media, this raises several difficult questions, like, What exactly is the relationship between the media and Hamas? And has this relationship corrupted the media?”37
As recently as May 2018, the media reporting on Hamas’s aggressions against Israel was so distorted that America’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, felt compelled to publicly author an opinion piece condemning the press. He wrote, in part, that “[f]or weeks, Hamas had been pursuing a direct and unambiguous operation against Israel: On Fridays, after stirring up emotions at weekly prayers, it incited waves of Gaza residents to violently storm the border with Israel, hoping to break through and kill Israeli citizens and kidnap Israeli soldiers. In addition, given the likelihood that these malign efforts would fail, Hamas also created ‘kite bombs’ painted with swastikas that it launched in Israel’s direction when the winds were favorable. Some 60 Gazans, the overwhelming majority of whom were known Hamas terrorists, lost their lives because Hamas turned them into a collective suicide bomb. They were neither heroes nor the peaceful protesters they were advertised to be. At least not before the liberal media entered the scene.”38
Ambassador Friedman was so disgusted with the newsroom antics and dishonesty, he blew the whistle on them. “Desperate for a narrative to discredit the president’s decision to move our embassy to Jerusalem, they broadcast the opening ceremony on a split screen simultaneously displaying the Gaza riots, and condemned the insensitivity of the ceremony’s participants to the carnage that seemed next door on TV but which in actuality was occurring 60 miles away! The next day, the liberal media vilified everyone associated with the embassy move and glorified the poor Hamas terrorists. Failed diplomats who never brought peace or stability to the region were pulled out of mothballs to regurgitate their calcified thinking. And the most deranged even accused the administration of having blood on its hands. Tellingly, not a single pundit offered a less-lethal alternative to protecting Israel from being overrun by killers or its soldiers from being within range of pistols, IEDs or Molotov cocktails.”39
On Christmas Eve in 2018, the Times published as news an event by the Lebanon-based Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, intended to portray the killers in a “Kumbaya” moment. It was a perfect piece of propaganda. The Times “news” story set the stage this way:
The Iranian cultural attaché stepped up to the microphone on a stage flanked by banners bearing the faces of Iran’s two foremost religious authorities: Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, and Ayatollah Khamenei, the current supreme leader.
To the left of Ayatollah Khomeini stood a twinkling Christmas tree, a gold star gilding its tip. Angel ornaments and miniature Santa hats nestled among its branches. Fake snow dusted fake pine needles.
“Today, we’re celebrating the birth of Christ,” the cultural attaché, Mohamed Mehdi Shari’tamdar, announced into the microphone, “and also the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.”
“Hallelujah!” boomed another speaker, Elias Hachem, reciting a poem he had written for the event. “Jesus the savior is born. The king of peace, the son of Mary. He frees the slaves. He heals. The angels protect him. The Bible and the Quran embrace.”
“We’re celebrating a rebel,” proclaimed a third speaker, the new mufti of the Shiite Muslims of Lebanon, the rebel in question being Jesus.
The mufti, Ahmed Kabalan, went on to engage in some novel religious and political thinking: Christians and Muslims, he said, “are one family, against corruption, with social justice, against authority, against Israel, with the Lebanese Army and with the resistance.”40
Thus Hezbollah compares its wanton terrorist bloodlust against the Jews with the life of Jesus and the birth of Christianity. And the mufti’s “novel religious and political thinking” is not novel at all. It is a purposeful act of propaganda aimed at the Times and its ilk, and it works. The Times editorialized favorably within its news column.
Later, the Times took a slap at the U.S. government’s designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, and wrote of Hezbollah’s earlier acts of religious tolerance toward Christians. “Even Hezbollah, the Shiite political movement and militia that the United States has branded a terrorist organization, has helped ring in the season. In previous years, it imported a Santa to Beirut’s southern suburbs to distribute gifts. On Saturday, Hezbollah representatives were on hand for the Iranian Christmas concert, an event that also featured handicrafts by Iranian artists, but the organization skipped Santa this year because of financial constraints.”41 Then, in a preposterous explanation, the Times declared, with the help of “ana
lysts,” that Hezbollah is preaching unity and is a legitimate political entity. “These demonstrations of Christmas spirit seem intended, analysts said, to demonstrate Hezbollah’s inclusivity as a major political and military force in Lebanese society and to highlight its political alliances with Christian parties.”42
But Hezbollah is none of these things. As the Counter Extremism Project has stated: “Like Iran, Hezbollah considers the United States and Israel to be its chief enemies, which has led to a global terrorist campaign against the two nations. Until September 11, 2001, Hezbollah was responsible for killing more Americans than any other terrorist organization. Among other deadly attacks, Hezbollah has been linked to the 1983 attack on U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon; the 1992 suicide bombing at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the 1994 suicide bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association in Buenos Aires; and, the 2012 bombing of an Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria. Hezbollah is also suspected of involvement in the February 2005 Beirut suicide bombing that killed 23 people, including former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.”43
The examples of the Times’ and mass media’s hostility toward the Jewish state is not even a matter of indifference, as it was during the plight of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, which was horrifying. Instead there is frequently open and affirmative hostility toward the Jewish state, despite the fact that the small country, a democracy and ally, faces daily threats of extermination from terrorist groups and surrounding terrorist states, including if not especially nuclear-weapons-obsessed Iran. After examining more than a year’s worth of recent coverage by the Times, Gilead Ini of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) concluded that the Times “consistently flouts the rules of ethical journalism. And it does so as part of a campaign to protect anti-Israel activists and steer public opinion against the Jewish state.”44
However, unbelievably, for the New York Times and other newsrooms the effective cover-up of the Holocaust was not the first time they knowingly censored the horrors of genocide while it was occurring. From approximately 1932 to 1933, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin starved the people of Ukraine, resulting in the mass genocide of millions of Ukrainians. Bruce Bartlett, writing in Human Events, explained that the Holodomor—or Great Famine—“of 1932–33 was the culmination of a long struggle between the Soviet state, non-Russian nationalities like the Ukrainians and historically independent-minded farmers who had been forced onto collective farms. It also resulted from Stalin’s need for foreign exchange to buy Western machinery to aid industrialization.”45
“In late 1932,” wrote Bartlett, “Stalin decreed that all grain should be confiscated and anyone interfering with this action should be considered an enemy of the state. More than 5,000 people received the death penalty as a result. Throughout the countryside in Ukraine and other grain-growing areas, starvation set in. Stalin sent troops to prevent farmers from leaving the land, where increasingly there was nothing to eat. In response to pleas for food aid, Stalin called the famine ‘one of the minor inconveniences of our system.’ ”46
A Manchester Guardian reporter, Malcolm Muggeridge, traveled to Ukraine to see for himself what was taking place there. In her book Stalin’s Apologist, Sally J. Taylor recounts that “[i]n a series of articles published in the Guardian at the end of March 1933, [Muggeridge] confirmed the existence of widespread famine in his eyewitness account. The peasant population, he wrote, was starving: ‘I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished . . . but having for weeks next to nothing to eat. . . .’ ” “ ‘It was true,’ Muggeridge wrote. ‘The famine is an organized occupation; worse, active war. . . .’ ”47
Thus even from other news sources, such as the Manchester Guardian, the New York Times had to know the truth about the famine that was taking place in Ukraine. Even more, as Hoover Institution historian and scholar Robert Conquest wrote in his book The Harvest of Sorrow, “let us . . . insist on the fact that the truth was indeed widely available in the West. In spite of everything, full or adequate reports appeared in the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph; Le Matin and Le Figaro; the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Gazette de Lausanne; La Stampa in Italy, the Reichpost in Austria, and scores of other Western papers. In the United States, wide-circulation newspapers printed very full first-hand accounts by Ukrainian-American and other visitors (though these were mostly discounted as, often, appearing in ‘Right Wing’ journals); and the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Jewish Forwaerts, gave broad coverage. . . .”48
However, the Times’s long-time man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, a propagandist and apologist for the 1917 communist revolution in Russia and later Stalin and his murderous regime, reported otherwise. Indeed, the Times was proud of their man in Moscow. In 1932, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles in the Times that covered up Stalinism’s atrocities. And from 1932 to 1933, Duranty wrote news columns for the Times not only denying the fact of the catastrophic famine taking place in Ukraine, but censoring Stalin’s role in the genocide of multiple millions of Ukrainians.
Another Guardian reporter, Gareth Jones, also filed news stories about the famine in Ukraine. Like Muggeridge, Jones had gone to the areas where widespread starvation was occurring, traveling some forty miles into the midst of it, and was also horrified by what he witnessed and was told—which he reported in detail. But Duranty then took aim at Jones’s credibility and used his powerful perch at the Times to publicly demean him and the accuracy of his reporting in the news pages of the Times.
On March 30, 1932, Duranty wrote a piece in the Times titled “Russians Hungry, but Not Starving,” in which he, among other things, dismissed Jones’s firsthand accounts and countered him with disinformation. “Since I talked to Mr. Jones, I have made exhaustive inquiries about this alleged famine situation. I have inquired in Soviet commissariats and in foreign embassies with their network of consuls, and I have tabulated information from Britons working as specialists and from my personal connections, Russian and foreign. All of this seems to me to be more trustworthy information than I could get by a brief trip through any one area. The Soviet Union is too big to permit a hasty study, and it is the foreign correspondent’s job to present a whole picture, not a part of it.”49
Duranty then exclaimed, “[a]nd here are the facts: There is a serious food shortage throughout the country, with occasional cases of well-managed State or collective farms. The big cities and the army are adequately supplied with food. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition. In short, conditions are definitely bad in certain sections—the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga. The rest of the country is on short rations but nothing worse. These conditions are bad, but there is no famine.”50
Of course, this was a flat-out lie.
The famine peaked in the summer of 1933. Unbelievably, on September 17, 1933, Duranty was at it again. In another report from Russia, Duranty assured the Times’s readers that all was well in Ukraine and that suggestions to the contrary were nonsense. “The writer has just completed a 200-mile auto trip through the heart of the Ukraine and can say positively that the harvest is splendid and all talk of famine now is ridiculous. Everywhere one goes and with everyone with whom one talks—from Communists and officials to local peasants—it is the same story: ‘Now we will be all right, now we are assured for the winter, now we have more grain that can easily be harvested.’ ”51
But Duranty knew the ugly truth. As Professor Lubomyr Luciuk of the Royal Military College of Canada has written: “On September 26, 1933, at the British Embassy in Moscow, Duranty privately confided to William Strang that as many as 10 million people had died directly or indirectly of famine conditions in the USSR during the past year. Meanwhile, publicly, Duranty orchestrated a vicious ostracizing of those journalists who risked much by reporting on the brutalities of forced collectivization and the ensuing
demographic catastrophe, Muggeridge among them. Even as the fertile Ukraine, once the breadbasket of Europe, became a modern-day Golgotha, a place of skulls, Duranty plowed the truth under. Occasionally pressed on the human costs of the Soviet experiment he did, however, evolve a dismissive dodge, canting ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ ”52
Indeed, wrote Conquest, “Duranty had personally told Eugene Lyons [United Press’s Moscow correspondent] and others that he estimated the famine victims at around seven million. . . . What the American public got was not the straight stuff, but the false reporting. Its influence was enormous and long-lasting.”53
But what did the management at the New York Times know about the unreliability of and outright lies involving Duranty’s reporting? Top executives had every reason to be suspicious and, in fact, they were. For one, they could read what the other newspapers had written at the time of the famine. But the Times kept publishing Duranty’s stories anyway. Journalist and scholar Arnold Beichman explained that “the Times’s top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. . . . [In her book] Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty’s Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, ‘the recommendation fell by the wayside.’ ”54
Even so, in furtherance of its deception, in the November–December 2003 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Douglas McCollam critically observed that “[w]hen Walter Duranty left the Times and Russia in 1934, the paper said his twelve-year stint in Moscow had ‘perhaps been the most important assignment ever entrusted by a newspaper to a single correspondent over a considerable period of time.’ ” In other words, Times executives could not have been happier with his “journalistic” record. “By that time,” writes McCollam, “Duranty was a journalistic celebrity—an absentia member of the Algonquin Roundtable, a confidant of Isadora Duncan, George Bernard Shaw, and Sinclair Lewis. He was held in such esteem that the presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt brought him in for consultations on whether the Soviet Union should be officially recognized. When recognition was granted [to the Soviet Union by the United States] in 1934, Duranty traveled with the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, to the signing ceremony and spoke privately with FDR. At a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York held to celebrate the event, Duranty was introduced as ‘one of the great foreign correspondents of modern times,’ and 1,500 dignitaries gave him a standing ovation.”55 Duranty was an admired journalist among his colleagues.
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