Dana Loesch, the conservative radio talk-show host and spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association (NRA), voiced the anger of many citizens that the mainstream media, specifically the New York Times, has moved from reporting the news to faking the news to promote its own agenda. In the latest video produced by the NRA that hit the wires on Thursday, she expressed that anger:
We’ve had it with your constant protection of your Democrat overlords, your refusal to acknowledge any truth that upsets the fragile construct that you believe is real life.
And we’ve had it with your pretentious, tone-deaf assertion that you are, in any way, truth or fact-based journalism.
She said that she and the NRA would “fisk” — scrutinize carefully for accuracy — everything that the Times writes. During an interview on The Story on Fox News on Tuesday, Loesch explained:
With this particular ad campaign [by the NRA], the whole point is to show the media and announce to the press that [a] free people also have the right to criticize and fact-check the press. That’s why I use the word fisk because apparently the New York Times was completely unaware of a free people’s [right] to fact-check the press, particularly when this is the press that has falsely maligned so many people for so long.
What much of the media missed was the rest of her attack:
We’re going to fisk the New York Times and find out just what “deep rich” means to this old gray hag, this untrustworthy dishonest rag that has subsisted on the welfare of mediocrity for one, two, three decades. We’re going to laser focus on your so-called “honest pursuit” of truth. In short, we’re coming for you.
She could have, and have perhaps should have (except for the limitations placed on a 53-second commercial), used the phrase “promotion of treason against the United States” in place of “welfare of mediocrity” and “generations” in place of “decades.”
For that is what the “old gray hag” — a reference to days long past when the Times was reverently referred to as The Gray Lady — has been promoting since at least the 1930s.
The Times’ bias and history of false reporting is legendary. A simple Google search for “Jayson Blair” will uncover the episode where Times’ reporter Blair was fired for plagiarism and fabrication in 2003. Or Google “Duke University lacrosse” for details on how the Times jumped to the conclusion that the players were guilty long before they were in fact proven innocent. So blatant was the bias of the Times, in fact, that authors of Until Proven Innocent concluded that “at the head of the guilt-presuming pack, the New York Times vied in a race to the journalistic bottom.”
Or one could Google the more recent bias exposed by the Times’ attempt to marginalize Bernie Sanders while touting its favorite candidate, Hillary Clinton. So outrageous was the bias that Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan was forced to admit it:
The Times has not ignored Mr. Sanders’ campaign, but it hasn’t always taken it very seriously. The tone of some of the stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused on the candidate’s age, appearance and style, rather than [on] what he has to say.
But for damning evidence of the Times’ promotion of evil by either calling it good or by ignoring the evil altogether, one need only Google “Walter Duranty.”
Duranty’s deliberate and intentional coverup of the Ukrainian starvation in the 1930s known as Holodomor ordered by Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin took years to come to light. And when it did, along with the massive generational damage it caused, the Times issued a polite disclaimer instead of a full-on apology for keeping this pro-Soviet propagandist on its payroll for years afterward.
Holodomor was a Stalin-ordered starvation of the Ukrainian people for political purposes that resulted in a catastrophe paralleling the Holocaust: Between seven and 10 million citizens were deliberately starved to death by the dictator. Wrote Duranty in March 1933: “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine.” And then added, “But — to put it brutally — you can’t make an omelet [a soviet “paradise”] without breaking eggs.”
Months later, while Ukrainians were dying on the streets and sidewalks (chilling photos are available on the Internet), Duranty wrote, “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
For his efforts he received the Pulitzer Prize, damning that group to infamy as well for its part in promoting the false narrative.
As the truth came to light, pressure was brought to bear on the Times to refute Duranty’s articles as propaganda for the murdering Soviet dictator and to force the Pulitzer Prize board to withdraw its award. Wrote the Times in its limp-wristed, half-hearted “acknowlegement”:
Duranty, one of the most famous correspondents of his day, won the prize for 13 articles written in 1931 analyzing the Soviet Union under Stalin. Times’ correspondents and others have since largely discredited his coverage….
Some of Duranty’s editors criticized his reporting as tendentious, but the Times kept him as a correspondent until 1941.
Since the 1980s, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures. Ukrainian-American and other organizations have repeatedly called on the Pulitzer Prize board and the Times to return it, mainly on the grounds of his later failure to report the famine.
The board refused to acknowledge its error, finding “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” on the part of Duranty, and the Times said it couldn’t return the prize given to him because it “does not have the award in its possession.”
The damage done to Western civilization by Duranty’s efforts to deceive can scarcely be overestimated. In his book Harvest of Sorrow, historian Robert Conquest wrote:
As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty guiled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper’s prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime.
And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.
Stalin was then able to secure financing for his failing dictatorship, thus continuing it and its atrocities for decades into the future.
Dana Loesch no doubt knows all this treacherous history of the New York Times. She was mostly likely unable to cram all of it into a 53-second commercial.
Photo of Dana Loesch: Gage Skidmore
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
