GOP Attacks, NYT Parrots
New York Times
“Democratic Candidate Who Criticized Israel Faces Charges of Antisemitism” was the New York Times headline on a piece on Virginia Democratic congressional candidate Leslie Cockburn. Faces charges from where? Why, from the Virginia Republican Party, which had no evidence for the charge that the Times quoted. The paper did quote a voter from her district, part of a group that met with her to talk about Israel: “None of us think she’s antisemitic,” she said. “That’s not even an issue.” So why is the article framed around this non-issue?
The paper did quote a Times review (8/18/91) of Dangerous Liaison, a 27-year-old book Cockburn co-wrote, that accused it of “Israel-bashing.” It didn’t quote the part of the review that said that “unlike other Israel-bashing volumes, this one at least acknowledges the long shadow of the Holocaust, as well as Stalinist antisemitism.” For what it’s worth, the book-review reference Kirkus (6/1/91) called it “an unflinching, fact-packed, closely reasoned exploration of our relations with our strongest ally in the Middle East.”
With Neutrality Like This, Who Needs Allies?
“Mr. Trump’s announcement that he was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and moving the embassy from Tel Aviv, swept aside 70 years of American neutrality,” wrote the editors of the New York Times (5/14/18). During those 70 years, the US has given Israel $80 billion in military aid and another $50 billion in economic and other aid, and has used its UN Security Council veto on Israel’s behalf 43 times—a curious form of “neutrality.”
Facebook’s Foreign-Funded Watchdog on Foreign Influence
Facebook (Medium, 5/17/18) announced it was partnering with DC think tank the Atlantic Council to “monitor for misinformation and foreign interference.” Which is odd, because the Atlantic Council is bankrolled by a number of foreign governments—including the United Arab Emirates, Britain, Norway, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea—along with NATO and various branches of the US government, which, after all, is a foreign entity to most of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users.
The think tank was caught advocating on behalf of one of its funders, Turkey, after its government was criticized for brutalizing protesters at its DC embassy (Splinter, 5/17/18). Despite this, the foreign ties of Facebook’s watchdog for “foreign interference” were mostly ignored in media write-ups (FAIR.org, 5/21/18).
Frank of Dodd/Frank Now Frank of the Bank
CNBC (5/22/18) was one of several outlets that quoted former Rep. Barney Frank on a congressional rollback of his Dodd/Frank Act, reassuring viewers that the move “does not in any way weaken the regulations we put in there for the largest banks or that were there to prevent the kind of crisis we had ten years ago.” CNBC, like most of these outlets, failed to mention the fact that Frank is now a director at a bank that benefits directly from the new bill’s scaling back of “stress-testing,” having been paid more than $1 million by Signature Bank since 2015 (Washington Post, 5/24/18).
NYT Accepts That Charging Feminists With Treason ‘Undermines Reformist Credentials’
New York Times
Saudi Arabian ruler “Prince Mohammed bin Salman…is just what his country needs” in some ways, the New York Times (6/23/17) editorialized last year, notably because he “would consider reforming laws tightly controlling the lives of women.” This May, bin Salman’s dictatorship rounded up seven prominent women’s rights advocates, accusing them with treason and conspiracy against the state (Middle East Eye, 5/22/18), charges that could get the activists the death penalty.
FAIR’s Adam Johnson (5/23/18) wrote about the failure of outlets that had praised bin Salman as an emancipator of women, including the Times’ “typically scoldy editorial board,” to condemn his crackdown on actual Saudi feminists. Two days later, the Times (5/25/18) ran an editorial critical of bin Salman’s “crackdown on the very activists who had promoted the right of women to drive,” saying it “raises doubts about the prince’s commitment to women’s equality” and “undermined [his] reformist credentials.”
Staff Cartoonist Rob Rogers Fired
Cartoon by Rob Rogers.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff cartoonist Rob Rogers, had 19 cartoons or cartoon ideas mostly criticizing Donald Trump or racism, rejected by editorial director Keith Burris since March 2018. Burris is notorious for writing an editorial (Post-Gazette, 1/15/18) defending Trump’s reported complaint about immigrants who come from “shithole countries.” On June 14, Rogers was told he had been fired.
