Palestine notes: How the New York Times runs propaganda for the American empire
A quick chat designed to tell you something you need to know about the politics surrounding Palestine.
Palestine notes is inspired by the Pass notes in the British imperialist propaganda rag, also known as the Guardian.
I like the format of the Pass notes and feel that it can be a good medium to inform the uninitiated about the various aspects of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the politics surrounding Palestine, and the Palestinian fight for freedom from the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel.
Search for “Palestine notes” in the search box for previous articles in this series.
Name: The New York Times.
Age: 172 years.
Appearance: A broadsheet that stinks worse than sewage.
It’s the world’s most respected newspaper. Why are you slandering it? Respected by whom? The White House administration for which it does stenography? The Western liberal democracies whose talking point it peddles? The journalists who believe that they are speaking truth to power because they don’t know what that phrase even means?
Come on, don’t be so cynical. It’s the paper of record. Everyone swears by its quality and the way it holds up journalistic standards. Journalistic standards like when they reported about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which became the pretext for the US — and its allies — to bomb Iraq and kill over a million civilians and reduce one of the cradles of human civilisation to ruins? Is that the journalistic standard you are talking about?
We all make mistakes. Even the best of us can get stuff wrong sometimes. Sure. But the keyword here is sometimes. What would you call someone who repeatedly makes the same mistakes? There has to be a point where one has to pause and start to wonder, “Okay, looks like these guys have an agenda,” don’t you think?
Oh, are you saying the venerable New York Times has an agenda? I always had you down as a conspiracy theorist. You are proving me right. It does have an agenda. That agenda serves the interests of the government of the United States, which means your venerable paper of record follows the script handed to it by the US administration. And that script always furthers the geopolitical interests of the US and its allies, the most important of whom is Israel.
Noam Chomsky once said: “The government and the New York Times [are] essentially the same thing.” He wrote in his book Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies: “Readers of the New York Times do not receive a range of perceptions…but only one: the one that accords with the needs of the state.”
It’s high time you showed some proof for your outlandish claims. I have plenty of evidence for you. Let’s dig into a bit of history. How about Operation Mockingbird?
What’s that? It’s a 1977 exposé by Carl Bernstein — of the Watergate scandal fame — that went with a self-explanatory subtitle: “How America’s most powerful news media worked hand in glove with the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] and why the Church Committee covered it up.”
In it, Bernstein indicted the New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger as one of the “executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency.” And added: “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”
Bernstein wrote: “A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.”
Woah! Had never heard of it. We’ve just started scratching the surface of NYT’s stenography for the US government. Let me give you some more examples. Michael Parenti, in his book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, writes how the NYT endorsed Hitler: “In an editorial entitled ‘The Tamed Hitler,’ the New York Times (January 30, 1933) told its readers to expect a ‘transformation’ in Hitler as he begins ‘softening down or abandoning’ ‘the more violent parts of his alleged program.’”
On America’s brutal adventure in Vietnam: “James Reston in the New York Times chided those who thought that ‘somehow the United States was responsible for the carnage in Southeast Asia’…Left out of this view was any thought that our leaders had waged a horrific war in support of a dictatorship and against a largely civilian population.”
On the America-backed Chilean regime change operation following the election of Salvador Allende in 1973: “[I]n an editorial immediately after the coup, the New York Times noted, ‘No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself. Even when the dangers of polarization had become unmistakenly evident, he persisted in pushing a program of pervasive socialism for which he had no popular mandate.”
Parenti adds: “The last to be blamed by the US press for the military takeover was the military itself. Also free of blame was the US government, which financed, equipped, trained, advised, and assisted the Chilean military before, during, and after the takeover. The leading US newspapers took pains to report there was no evidence of US involvement in the destruction of Chilean democracy. To reach this conclusion they also had to ignore the economic war waged by Washington and the CIA’s funding of opposition right-wing political parties and media in Chile.”
That’s damning! Damn it! I take those words about you being a conspiracy theorist back. Well, that was quick. But I will persist with my dissection of this American propaganda rag.
The American empire’s favourite propaganda tool is also extremely racist. Parenti describes the Times’ depiction of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War: “The New York Times ran a David Levin cartoon across the top of its op-ed page entitled ‘The Descent of Man,’ showing in descending order: a man, a gorilla, a monkey, a snake, and a distorted, dwarfed Saddam Hussein.”
Furthermore: “Times journalist Leslie Gelb dehumanized Hussein with an odd science fiction metaphor: “If he were to survive the war as a hero, he would be like a giant starship emitting undeflectable death rays.”
Here’s Parenti with another example of the NYT’s racism during the Gulf War: “Judith Miller in the New York Times claimed that the Gulf Cooperation Council, in ‘typical Arab style,’ made ‘a veiled reference’ to the presence of US forces in the Gulf. Miller would never describe an Israeli leader as making a veiled reference in ‘typical Jewish style.’”
Wait, that name Judith Miller rings a bell. I am glad you noticed. She’s the same “journalist” who spread the Iraq WMD hoax in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Wow! Looks like her entire career was an exercise in dishonesty. That’s the norm for the “journalists” at the New York Times. No one goes there to do actual journalism.
Anyway, do you know how the NYT describes criticisms of American foreign policy by foreign governments?
No, you tell me. By labelling their concerns as “anti-American propaganda.”
Parenti writes: “Fidel Castro’s accusation that the United States was planning to invade Cuba was dismissed by the New York Times as ‘shrill ... anti-American propaganda.’”
And when the Americans invaded Cuba, just like Castro had feared, the NYT had no criticism of the government it serves. Parenti: “Yet, after the Bay of Pigs invasion proved to be something more than a figment of Castro’s anti-Americanism, there was almost a total lack of media criticism regarding its moral and legal impropriety.”
The paper of record was similarly sticking to the script when the Filipinos rose against their America-backed dictatorship in 1984: “[T]he Times again described Filipino protests against US support of the Marcos dictatorship as ‘anti-Americanism.’”
Wow! That’s absurd — textbook cases of journalistic malpractice. And I am giving only some examples from Parenti’s 316-page book. The complete list is beyond the scope of this article.
Tell me about the NYT’s coverage of the Palestine issue. It has always been atrocious.
For example, the Phalanges, the murderous Lebanese Christian militia whom the Israelis propped up, funded, trained, and armed and who would go on to massacre between 2,000 and 3,500 helpless Palestinian refugees in the course of two days in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were never referred to as terrorists that they were in the pages of the New York Times. They were laughably referred to as “the Christians.”
After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and just before the Phalanges’ barbaric assault on the refugee camps, here’s Pakistani-American scholar Eqbal Ahmad speaking about the paper’s coverage of the Phalanges: “This one [i.e. Israel] wants a protectorate under the aegis of the Phalangist movement, whom the New York Times continually describes in violation of historic principles and principles of journalism — basic honest journalism — these bunch of crooks in Beirut, are being described every day as the Christians. It’s an insult to Christianity. For those of you associated with the Church, it’s the greatest single abomination to Christ himself to have the Phalangists described as Christians.”
Ahmad’s friend, Edward Said, wrote about the deceitful ways the New York Times covers Palestine in his book, The Question of Palestine. From omission, selection, and projections of fake symmetry, the paper of record has perfected the art of propaganda.
Said: “During the 1973 war, for example, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran an essay one week by a prominent Israeli lawyer on what it felt like to be at war; the next week there was a supposedly symmetrical feature, although it was written by a former U.S. ambassador to Syria. When an Arab voice is heard it is selected in such a way as to make the least impression or…when a representative Arab view is put forward it is either by a Western expert or it is a quasi-official Arab ‘statement.’”
And here’s Chomsky writing about the NYT’s coverage of Israeli atrocities in Lebanon in his book Necessary Illusions: “The fact that Israel maintains a ‘security zone’ in southern Lebanon controlled by a terrorist mercenary army backed by Israeli might also passes without notice, as does Israel’s regular hijacking of ships in international waters and other actions that are rarely even reported, and might perhaps arouse a whisper of protest in the case of ‘worthy victims.’”
How would the NYT react if similar atrocities were committed by nations not allied with the United States? Chomsky answers: “If Soviet Jews were to suffer the treatment meted out regularly to Arabs, or if some official enemy such as Nicaragua were to impose repressive measures approaching those that are standard in this ‘symbol of human decency,’ the outcry would be deafening.”
That is indeed very deceitful of the New York Times. How has their coverage of Palestine been since October 7? Deceitful, of course.
When Israelis kill Palestinians, the NYT tells the world, “Palestinians died.” Died. Not killed. As if they died because of bronchitis or tuberculosis, not because the Zionists dropped bombs on them.
Here’s a screenshot from a recent headline:
In its description of Palestinians killed by the Israelis, the NYT uses the prefix “Palestinians say,” but no such prefixes are used when peddling Israeli propaganda, for example, in the “40 beheaded babies” fake story.
All Israeli statements are taken as facts, but the other side’s facts are always viewed with scepticism.
When the Israelis attacked the Al-Ahli Arab hospital that killed hundreds of Palestinians, here’s how the NYT gradually changed the headline of its article to absolve the Israeli terrorists of all blame (don’t miss the “Palestinians Say” bit):
Do you know how the paper of record describes the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948?
How? You won’t believe me. But I am not making this up: they recently called it a “migration.” See for yourself:
A migration.
Over 750,000 people forcibly expelled. More than 15,000 people killed. Over 500 villages ethnically cleansed. Countless women raped and tortured.
And it’s “migration” for the venerable New York Times.
Let it sink in.
I am stunned. You are not alone. And now that the Israelis are reviving their mass rape atrocity propaganda to malign the Palestinian resistance fighters and shield themselves from the global condemnation of their genocide in Gaza, the NYT has come to their aid by running evidence-free stories, purporting to prove Palestinian fighters indulged in sexual violence on October 7.
Their story from December 28, titled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7,” had everything but actual evidence of rape. Some of the descriptions of alleged Hamas atrocities are so grotesque that one can only laugh despite the seriousness of the matter.
Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone summed up the absurdities in this New York Times propaganda piece perfectly: “You really have to harbour a lot of anti-Arab racism to believe that all this was true. This narrative is like the Central Park Five for pant-suit feminists and pussyhat liberals who think that Arab men are just like these savages who could actually storm into another country or storm through some border in a military operation and just stop in the middle of an intense confrontation with a powerful military and stand in a circle around a woman and start gang-raping her and cutting her breasts off and playing with them because those are the testimonies contained in this article.”
This article sounds ridiculous. It seems like a David Lynch film if he wrote it drunk. It does. Indeed.
Oh, and by the way, we didn’t speak about anti-black racism in the paper of record. To illustrate this, I will use just one example because it covers the unbridled, filthy racism of the NYT like nothing else does.
It’s from the obituary of the legendary Malcolm X, published on February 22, 1965.
Digest this: “He was a case history, as well as an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose.”
“Twisted man.”
“Evil purpose.”
That’s the obituary of a man with an unparalleled moral compass for a public figure in modern politics who devoted his life to fighting for equality and ultimately paid for it with his life.
That man, according to the NYT, was “twisted” and had an “evil purpose.”
Bravo, NYT! Hold your applause because it gets worse. Much worse.
“[H]is ruthless and fanatical belief in violence not only set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes.”
Demanding equality by any means necessary is a “fanatical belief” for the NYT.
And one of the most galling parts of the obituary follows soon after: “It also marked him for notoriety, and for a violent end.”
Did you notice that? Marked him “for a violent end.”
The New York Times is justifying Malcolm’s killing!
Appalling. There’s still more.
The paper of record again: “[H]e broke away and started his own extremist movement, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.”
“Extremist movement.” Here’s what Malcolm’s “extremist movement” — which existed for barely a year before he was killed — was seeking: human rights for African Americans because Malcolm fervently and rightly believed that African Americans were not just denied their civil rights but also their human rights.
His organisation also worked towards cooperation between Africans and people of African descent in the Americas because he believed, and again, rightly, that their struggles were connected.
Such noble aims were extremist for the NYT.
But you know what’s not extremist for the New York Times? The indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Gaza.
And the obituary continually gets worse.
Is it even possible? You are doubting the NYT’s powers of evil imagination.
“Malcolm X’s life was strangely and pitifully wasted. But this was because he did not seek to fit into society or into the life of his own people.”
Let’s dig into the second sentence first. Yes, he did not seek to fit into a profoundly unjust American society of the time that discriminated violently against his people. Who would? He wanted to be treated with justice, dignity, and equality. And the second half of the second sentence is patently false. He loved his people. He literally died for them.
And now to the first sentence: “Malcolm X’s life was strangely and pitifully wasted.”
That’s what you wish, New York Times, but the truth is furthest from your desire. Malcolm inspired and continues to inspire millions who buy his book, read his ideas, listen to his speeches, and work for positive change in their lives and the societies they inhabit.
The New York Times was relentless in its assault on Malcolm’s legacy. In his obituary, it persisted: “The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still with his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of that darkness that he spawned, and killed him.”
“Distorted and dark” world of Malcolm. The “darkness that he spawned.”
I would imagine if his dedication to justice and equality would earn him such twisted labels from a paper that upholds and makes excuses for American barbarity domestically and abroad, Malcolm would wear such labels as badges of honour.
It was the power of Malcolm’s message, his brutal honesty in highlighting American atrocities and hypocrisies, and his fearless advocacy for his beliefs that so rankled the American establishment and its propagandist mouthpiece.
That’s why it couldn’t hold its bile when he was ultimately killed.
Makes sense. It does. The New York Times has perfected the art of propaganda.
Here’s a final word from Chomsky — who co-authored the classic Manufacturing Consent about the ways mass media manipulates the public — defining an effective propaganda system in the context of the New York Times: “It suppresses some of the facts, it allows others in, but it recreates and reshapes history so as to meet the current needs of the state propaganda system, in part by the simple Orwellian device of redefining peace as meaning American government aims for peace, in part by simply suppressing facts that are unwanted by process of selection, omission, shaping, and distortion, and the result is a system of indoctrination that is quite extraordinarily effective.”
The New York Times has mastered the art of manufacturing consent.
Always remember Malcolm’s advice whenever you read the New York Times — or any other news outlet for that matter: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Do say: “Here’s a joke: All the news that’s fit to print. *guffaws*”
Don’t say: “I start my mornings with the New York Times.”
I need your help to continue writing. If you like my articles, help me write more of them by buying me a coffee. You can also buy me a paid monthly subscription on Ko-fi. Thank you.
U write well !
This reminded me of an article I read recently about the Leahy Law and how they get around it with Israel. It also stated how the DOD trains forces in other countries that go on to do a coup. How Biden and other Presidents make a habit of not labeling it a "coup". Egypt came to mind, and of course Israel. They are doing a genocide instead of a coup, but their human rights abuses over all these decades should mean NO money or weapons are going to them. But, if we don't call it "human rights abuses" or "genocide", it's not happening. Right? Why this reminded me of it is because I saw it, read it, and assumed I could find it again to fill up my "information I need to know" bucket. Some Senators had brought it up, so I expected to see articles about it in all the MSM sources. Imagine my surprise when I could find very few somewhat reliable sources, The Washington Post being the only close to that description, and yet so far away from the truth. After reading this, I now know why. I'm sure the White House and DOD let the media know the old "nothing to see here" mantra applied in this case. It seems very important information and I should be reading/seeing/hearing about this easily. Nope. Without explaining it in this particular instance, you just explained to me why I can't easily find info on it now. It was a 3-minute news story that was immediately squashed, am I right? Ugh! If I could roar I would.