The major takeaway is that one can't count on the NYT to challenge powerful interests. This makes the NYT a powerful conservative force in US culture.
It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force.
It's no accident that the paper ran the Judith Miller work selling the Iraq war, or that it was an early participant in the smear campaign against Assange, or that it is a thought leader on the threat posed by China. Sure there are stories about CSAs and the homeless, but ultimately it's a big budget right wing PR operation, intent on preserving the status quo.
For even more obvious evidence, just look at the people whose weddings are covered in the paper's nuptials section -- predominantly children of powerful elites who the paper wishes to flatter with its coverage.
If one were to ask "what kind of coverage might we expect from a paper controlled by a billionaire industrialist?", we might actually predict a right-wing perspective. But due to the Times' history as a progressive paper (most notably the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted which fueled the abolitionist movement), the paper is uncritically viewed by many in the present day as a voice that opposes the right wing, authoritarian social goals held by powerful elites.
I think the big papers (New York Times, Washington Post) have always been the voice of the establishment. I remember reading their editorials broadly condemning the labor movement while it was fighting for basic rights (and being slaughtered by public and privatized law enforcement) in the middle of the 19th century. Perhaps at times more humanist than others, but nevertheless.
I also think it is really obvious that it would be this way. There is hardly any money in selling newspapers, even well before the internet completely obliterated that business. But shaping public opinion? That is valuable beyond measure, for the right (moneyed) interest groups.
I don't think that's the takeaway the author means to convey. The picture he paints of the Times is that they've become much more resilient to political pressure as a result of his ordeal.
In fact the article closes:
Since then, the Times has been much more willing to stand up to the government and refuse to go along with White House demands to hold or kill stories.
I think the major takeaway is really the erosion of journalistic protections which has occurred over the last decade+.
> It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force.
It could also be taking on a rival powerful establishment interests, like in Democrats vs Republican type bickering.
Chomsky in his famous Andrew Marr interview addressed Marr's example of Watergate scandal as one part of the establishment defending itself against another part of the establishment, thus allowing the story to be broken. He compared Watergate, which everybody knows about, to a much bigger scandal of the same time, COINTELPRO, which relatively few people have even heard about.
Not only the NYT, other mainstream sources will not shake the boat if ad revenue is at stake. The Internet was the wild west early on, but it did provide a medium to discuss issues and foster many different points of view. It seems the walled gardens have taken over and the de-platforming is beginning to curtail some points of view whether you agree with them or not.
Conservative in the sense of conserving, which doesn't always fit the right/left modality.
It's as Chesterton said, "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."
The NYT is not useful as a source of important news. It is useful as a barometer of what a portion of the US establishment thinks. It's pro-Iraq war cheerleading predicted there would be no significant pushback against it, for instance.
> but ultimately [the NYT is] a big budget right wing PR operation, intent on preserving the status quo.
I think that's misleading, bordering on libel. Even this article cited cases (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy...) where the NYT ran stories that challenged powerful interests and the status quo, directly against the personally stated wishes of a conservative president.
The truth is that things are more complicated than black and white. Some might be disappointed that the NYT doesn't always gleefully poke at the eyes of a particular power whenever it can, but like every human and human organization, it doesn't always live up to its own ideals or the ideals that have been applied to it.
>If one were to ask "what kind of coverage might we expect from a paper controlled by a billionaire industrialist?", we might actually predict a right-wing perspective.
That depends on what he's selling, and also on what his allies in government or elsewhere want him to publish.
> Obama was determined to extend and even expand many of Bush’s national security policies, including a crackdown on whistleblowers and the press. Ignoring the possible consequences to American democracy, the Obama administration began aggressively conducting surveillance of the digital communications of journalists and potential sources, leading to more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.
I am still thinking periodically about what happened there. Like the saying goes "I don't know what I expected..." but I certainly expected more from Obama. For some reason I thought privacy, freedom of speech and transparency would be priorities but they weren't. Granted, looking back I don't think he explicitly said those would be his top policies, it was just beliefs people, including me, imbued into his presidency. It was a very successful "Hope and Change" marketing campaign. He even fooled the Nobel Committee into getting a Nobel Peace Prize, so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad.
Other good things happened of course like ACA, a push to regulate pollution but overall it was a disappointment vis-a-vis the expectations.
During the Obama administration it became legal to assassinate US citizens without trial as long as they are presumed "terrorists" and aren't currently on US soil. It was a deeply flawed presidency that deserves much more critique than it has ever received.
This kind of thing is why people say the dems and repubs are the same party with two coats of paint.
Before 2008 there were a lot of issues the mainstream left were vocal about. 8 years of Obama and only a select few even got lip service. Now neither the democrats nor any vocal factions of the left seem to care about them.
> Granted, looking back I don't think he explicitly said those would be his top policies, it was just beliefs people, including me, imbued into his presidency. It was a very successful "Hope and Change" marketing campaign.
Exactly. He was a chimera: the ambiguity in his slogans let each person see in him what they wanted to see, and his brief political record gave few specifics to challenge those desires. The real work of politics is to decide on the details of policy in the midst of real disagreement, and ideally politicians would be very clear about their thoughts on those details to help the public to properly have its say.
>For some reason I thought privacy, freedom of speech and transparency would be priorities but they weren't.
He's a constitutional law professor! He loves his blackberry! Those girls that campaigned and danced around for Obama were hot. Yay his skin color doesn't matter - except it totally matters! He'll stop the wars! He's so cool he tweets out things!
Because you were sold on an extremely effective misinformation campaign specifically targeted at you. It's not that you should feel bad - but I'd hope you'd be able to see it if it happened again (and it is happening again, it's just opposite now).
... I'm sorry, perhaps I'm bitter because I saw exactly what this was in 2007, then had to put up with 8 years of watching the media entirely cover for him. It was annoying. What's worse is that even now people still fall for the "I had a scandal free presidency" absolute lie.
It's disappointing coming from the man who campaigned on the promise "I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution."
Obama was also the "tech" president. I wonder to what extent this increased surveillance is a result of the scalability advantages software brings. More than all previous presidents combined is pretty significant. Did he spend that much more?
I discovered that there was, in effect, a marketplace of secrets in Washington, in which White House officials and other current and former bureaucrats, contractors, members of Congress, their staffers, and journalists all traded information.
This is why I left that world.
The US Government and policy makers decide that it is sometimes necessary to do things that put US Govt employees at mortal risk. It is important that there are employees like this that are willing to take those risks and they do so knowingly.
Where this goes off the rails is when those same Policymakers put their ego over the safety of the people they are risking in order to repugnantly gain status or money.
This "marketplace" is a dark pool of real risk that is opaque to those who are trying to execute the orders given. An operator can reasonably evaluate what the risks are going into any intelligence activity, but there has traditionally been an underlying assumption that the people giving the orders aren't going to comprimise the activity. I'm not sure that's an assumption worth holding anymore.
I should note that is a separate point from accountability and transparency with respect to the "should" of these activities. There is an equal need for democratic accountability for these activities, and OPSEC is often in conflict with democratic discoverability. There should be more discussion on the "how" of that, because as it stands such information sharing is not magnanimous or virtuous - it's exploited for personal gain.
Guy I went to school with in the late 80's had an internship at Lockheed working on the video recorders used in fighters to record bombing runs. They were designing a new system because the old system had some defects that the Soviets found out about. The reason they found out about them was the Reagan Administration released the full bombing run tapes to the press after Operation El Dorado Canyon. Which then made it onto national TV and was copied as well.
Air force was livid but wasn't going to publicly go after the Reagan Administration officials responsible. If you did that you'd get 25-life.
I think it's fair to say the majority of the US "Mainstream Media" is overwhelmingly pro-interventalist and by extension pro-military. MSNBC had a clear conflict of interest in the run-up to the Iraq war, with its parent company being a defense contractor, yet ran overwhelmingly pro-invasion stories. A more modern example was the run-up to our involvement with Syria, where you had major network personalities like Jake Tapper deliver almost nightly pearl-clutching lectures about how we must do something. The efforts to appear balanced and to "both sides" an issue end when it involves interventionist campaigns. All of a sudden those who suggest caution and restraint become problematic and need iron-clad arguments.
One one think committing American "blood and treasure" to these engagements would demand careful reasoning but often it's those pushing for restraint that are tasked with the intellectual heavy-lifting.
> MSNBC had a clear conflict of interest in the run-up to the Iraq war, with its parent company being a defense contractor
I'd be grateful if you could elaborate - I'm having trouble following the ownership chain, since there was a merger with Comcast I think after the Iraq War.
This aspect of the Yugoslav civil war is usually missing from the mainstream narratives.
During one interview, a source was droning on about a minor bureaucratic battle inside the CIA when he briefly referred to how then-President Bill Clinton had secretly given the green light to Iran to covertly ship arms to Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan wars. The man had already resumed talking about his bureaucratic turf war when I realized what he had just said and interrupted him, demanding that he go back to Iran. That led me to write a series of stories that prompted the House of Representatives to create a special select committee to investigate the covert Iran-Bosnia arms pipeline.
Given what I remember what we knew at the time, having Iran arm the Muslims in a civil war to defend themselves against ethnic cleansing was the best option short of what continuing what had been done before - intercede with NATO to broker a ceasefire. This was pretty well documented in the daily news versus the manufactured testimony to justify Gulf War 1/2.
In another recent incident that gave me chilling insight into the power of government surveillance, I met with a sensitive and well-placed source through an intermediary. After the meeting, which occurred a few years ago in Europe, I began to do research on the source. About an hour later, I got a call from the intermediary, who said, “Stop Googling his name.”
I think the implication is clearly that there existed a government survalence dragnet and that the source was well placed enough to have unfettered access to it.
However, it strikes me that there are a number of other possibilities: perhaps his own computer had been specifically compromised; maybe they targeted his hotel room or WiFi network; or, one which I find really compelling, it was simply a well timed ruse intended to bolster the legitimacy of whatever information the source was sharing.
Hypothesizing how this could be done... The simplest method may be to plant a web page that has high ranking for the sources name that phones home details about all requests the the site.
If the site normally only receives standard webcrawler traffic any human traffic after such a meeting would serve as a canary of sorts.
I mean, presuming that they don't have an inside line with google.
The author, James Risen, has had a long trajectory as a reporter. The OP (which I admit I have not read all of yet) touches on Risen's reporting on the Wen Ho Lee case while at the NYT. Risen and Gerth's story, and their later follow-up story, was based on "leaks" from "senior intelligence officials" that were either false or slanted.
It was a disgrace. The case was eventually thrown out of court, and a mealy-mouthed NYT recantation was issued (linked in OP - it's a typical NYT non-retraction retraction).
There was other reporting at the time, from Robert Scheer of the LA Times, that contradicted the Risen/Gerth story. But the combination of the endorsement of the NYT, and the mesmeric hold of "national security" on peoples' minds, led to an establishment take that Lee had committed serious crimes. Scheer tells the story here: https://www.thenation.com/article/no-defense/
The whole affair serves as a warning about the dangers of taking selected "senior intelligence officials" at their word. We seem to need these warnings.
James Risen has a checkered reporting background, to be sure. [1] There are all kinds of attacks on the press these days, and we are told to be afraid of attacks on the press. But the devaluation of the press is owed more to its own behavior than to that of its enemies. (In the U.S. Less so in Saudi, China, Russia)
I like that the thing people make fun of Alex Jones for the most is that "chemicals were turning the frogs gay!" ... and then that turned out to be effectively true.
EDIT: Sorry if you don't like this, but it's true. This isn't a defense of Jones's tactics or character, just that people make fun of him for an outlandish claim he was more or less right about.
[+] [-] resters|7 years ago|reply
It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force.
It's no accident that the paper ran the Judith Miller work selling the Iraq war, or that it was an early participant in the smear campaign against Assange, or that it is a thought leader on the threat posed by China. Sure there are stories about CSAs and the homeless, but ultimately it's a big budget right wing PR operation, intent on preserving the status quo.
For even more obvious evidence, just look at the people whose weddings are covered in the paper's nuptials section -- predominantly children of powerful elites who the paper wishes to flatter with its coverage.
If one were to ask "what kind of coverage might we expect from a paper controlled by a billionaire industrialist?", we might actually predict a right-wing perspective. But due to the Times' history as a progressive paper (most notably the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted which fueled the abolitionist movement), the paper is uncritically viewed by many in the present day as a voice that opposes the right wing, authoritarian social goals held by powerful elites.
[+] [-] the_rosentotter|7 years ago|reply
I also think it is really obvious that it would be this way. There is hardly any money in selling newspapers, even well before the internet completely obliterated that business. But shaping public opinion? That is valuable beyond measure, for the right (moneyed) interest groups.
[+] [-] rkagerer|7 years ago|reply
In fact the article closes:
Since then, the Times has been much more willing to stand up to the government and refuse to go along with White House demands to hold or kill stories.
I think the major takeaway is really the erosion of journalistic protections which has occurred over the last decade+.
[+] [-] baursak|7 years ago|reply
It could also be taking on a rival powerful establishment interests, like in Democrats vs Republican type bickering.
Chomsky in his famous Andrew Marr interview addressed Marr's example of Watergate scandal as one part of the establishment defending itself against another part of the establishment, thus allowing the story to be broken. He compared Watergate, which everybody knows about, to a much bigger scandal of the same time, COINTELPRO, which relatively few people have even heard about.
The entire interview is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow
[+] [-] tmaly|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teilo|7 years ago|reply
It's as Chesterton said, "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."
[+] [-] fmajid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tivert|7 years ago|reply
I think that's misleading, bordering on libel. Even this article cited cases (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy...) where the NYT ran stories that challenged powerful interests and the status quo, directly against the personally stated wishes of a conservative president.
The truth is that things are more complicated than black and white. Some might be disappointed that the NYT doesn't always gleefully poke at the eyes of a particular power whenever it can, but like every human and human organization, it doesn't always live up to its own ideals or the ideals that have been applied to it.
[+] [-] sDlEzAtyoNAz|7 years ago|reply
That depends on what he's selling, and also on what his allies in government or elsewhere want him to publish.
[+] [-] qrbLPHiKpiux|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] justaman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|7 years ago|reply
I am still thinking periodically about what happened there. Like the saying goes "I don't know what I expected..." but I certainly expected more from Obama. For some reason I thought privacy, freedom of speech and transparency would be priorities but they weren't. Granted, looking back I don't think he explicitly said those would be his top policies, it was just beliefs people, including me, imbued into his presidency. It was a very successful "Hope and Change" marketing campaign. He even fooled the Nobel Committee into getting a Nobel Peace Prize, so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad.
Other good things happened of course like ACA, a push to regulate pollution but overall it was a disappointment vis-a-vis the expectations.
[+] [-] ngngngng|7 years ago|reply
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...
[+] [-] finnthehuman|7 years ago|reply
Before 2008 there were a lot of issues the mainstream left were vocal about. 8 years of Obama and only a select few even got lip service. Now neither the democrats nor any vocal factions of the left seem to care about them.
[+] [-] tivert|7 years ago|reply
Exactly. He was a chimera: the ambiguity in his slogans let each person see in him what they wanted to see, and his brief political record gave few specifics to challenge those desires. The real work of politics is to decide on the details of policy in the midst of real disagreement, and ideally politicians would be very clear about their thoughts on those details to help the public to properly have its say.
[+] [-] SlowRobotAhead|7 years ago|reply
He's a constitutional law professor! He loves his blackberry! Those girls that campaigned and danced around for Obama were hot. Yay his skin color doesn't matter - except it totally matters! He'll stop the wars! He's so cool he tweets out things!
Because you were sold on an extremely effective misinformation campaign specifically targeted at you. It's not that you should feel bad - but I'd hope you'd be able to see it if it happened again (and it is happening again, it's just opposite now).
... I'm sorry, perhaps I'm bitter because I saw exactly what this was in 2007, then had to put up with 8 years of watching the media entirely cover for him. It was annoying. What's worse is that even now people still fall for the "I had a scandal free presidency" absolute lie.
[+] [-] kop316|7 years ago|reply
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-aclu-demolish-its-jus...
[+] [-] quasse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebbecai|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lord_basics|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|7 years ago|reply
This is why I left that world.
The US Government and policy makers decide that it is sometimes necessary to do things that put US Govt employees at mortal risk. It is important that there are employees like this that are willing to take those risks and they do so knowingly.
Where this goes off the rails is when those same Policymakers put their ego over the safety of the people they are risking in order to repugnantly gain status or money.
This "marketplace" is a dark pool of real risk that is opaque to those who are trying to execute the orders given. An operator can reasonably evaluate what the risks are going into any intelligence activity, but there has traditionally been an underlying assumption that the people giving the orders aren't going to comprimise the activity. I'm not sure that's an assumption worth holding anymore.
I should note that is a separate point from accountability and transparency with respect to the "should" of these activities. There is an equal need for democratic accountability for these activities, and OPSEC is often in conflict with democratic discoverability. There should be more discussion on the "how" of that, because as it stands such information sharing is not magnanimous or virtuous - it's exploited for personal gain.
[+] [-] Gibbon1|7 years ago|reply
Air force was livid but wasn't going to publicly go after the Reagan Administration officials responsible. If you did that you'd get 25-life.
Lockheed probably wasn't unhappy though.
[+] [-] spamizbad|7 years ago|reply
One one think committing American "blood and treasure" to these engagements would demand careful reasoning but often it's those pushing for restraint that are tasked with the intellectual heavy-lifting.
[+] [-] deogeo|7 years ago|reply
I'd be grateful if you could elaborate - I'm having trouble following the ownership chain, since there was a merger with Comcast I think after the Iraq War.
[+] [-] georgecmu|7 years ago|reply
During one interview, a source was droning on about a minor bureaucratic battle inside the CIA when he briefly referred to how then-President Bill Clinton had secretly given the green light to Iran to covertly ship arms to Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan wars. The man had already resumed talking about his bureaucratic turf war when I realized what he had just said and interrupted him, demanding that he go back to Iran. That led me to write a series of stories that prompted the House of Representatives to create a special select committee to investigate the covert Iran-Bosnia arms pipeline.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/15/world/us-looks-away-as-ir...
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/19/opinion/l-iran-to-bosnia-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/05/12/u...
[+] [-] stevenwoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackpirate|7 years ago|reply
In another recent incident that gave me chilling insight into the power of government surveillance, I met with a sensitive and well-placed source through an intermediary. After the meeting, which occurred a few years ago in Europe, I began to do research on the source. About an hour later, I got a call from the intermediary, who said, “Stop Googling his name.”
[+] [-] VBprogrammer|7 years ago|reply
However, it strikes me that there are a number of other possibilities: perhaps his own computer had been specifically compromised; maybe they targeted his hotel room or WiFi network; or, one which I find really compelling, it was simply a well timed ruse intended to bolster the legitimacy of whatever information the source was sharing.
[+] [-] iaw|7 years ago|reply
If the site normally only receives standard webcrawler traffic any human traffic after such a meeting would serve as a canary of sorts.
I mean, presuming that they don't have an inside line with google.
[+] [-] turingcompeteme|7 years ago|reply
Does someone like Bezos now have access to similar information that the Times was hiding from the public shown here?
That information would appear to be worth a lot more than the 250 million he paid for the Post.
[+] [-] mturmon|7 years ago|reply
It was a disgrace. The case was eventually thrown out of court, and a mealy-mouthed NYT recantation was issued (linked in OP - it's a typical NYT non-retraction retraction).
There was other reporting at the time, from Robert Scheer of the LA Times, that contradicted the Risen/Gerth story. But the combination of the endorsement of the NYT, and the mesmeric hold of "national security" on peoples' minds, led to an establishment take that Lee had committed serious crimes. Scheer tells the story here: https://www.thenation.com/article/no-defense/
The whole affair serves as a warning about the dangers of taking selected "senior intelligence officials" at their word. We seem to need these warnings.
[+] [-] microdrum|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/is-james-rise...
[+] [-] herbstein|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
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[+] [-] SlowRobotAhead|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Sorry if you don't like this, but it's true. This isn't a defense of Jones's tactics or character, just that people make fun of him for an outlandish claim he was more or less right about.