Ashley Rinsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked exposes the New York Times’ 1939 false claim that Poland invaded Germany, parroting Nazi propaganda, while ignoring the Holocaust, Stalin’s Ukraine famine (via Duranty), and fabricating Vietnam massacres to sway U.S. policy. Owned by German Jews, the paper avoided Jewish identity coverage to dodge anti-Semitism, later adopting "woke" conformity—silencing critics like Barry Weiss—to push racial equity narratives. From Ochs’ idealism to today’s centralized, politically driven reporting, the Times has weaponized influence, reshaping history through selective distortions. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, let's talk to Ashley Rinsburgh about the New York Times.
He is an American writer living in Israel.
He's a novelist, a journalist.
He has written for Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffbo, The Daily Beast, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel.
He's got this new book out, The Gray Lady Winked.
And it's an examination of how the New York Times newspaper has misreported and misshaped history over the years.
It is quite an amazing book.
Here is Ashley Rinsberg.
So, Ashley Rinsburg, I often joke that the New York Times is a former newspaper.
I've been calling it that for years because I remember the paper in the 1970s when it was actually good.
Its coverage of the financial crisis in New York was excellent.
But now you have made me doubt that it was ever, ever a newspaper.
Let me start by just reading a quote from your book that is a quote from the New York Times.
It says it is describing an international figure in his time, and it says he is credibly credited with being actuated by lofty, unselfish patriotism.
That was the New York Times description at the time of Adolf Hitler.
So let me begin with this.
You were a philosophy student, right?
What moved you to write a book about the New York Times?
Well, the real impetus was reading a footnote in William Shire's book about World War II, the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
And he kind of casually mentions there that on the eve of World War II, the New York Times reported that Poland invaded Germany.
And that stopped me in my tracks.
I just couldn't believe it.
And that he was making really kind of not a big deal out of this fact.
So I went and did a little bit of my own digging and found those articles from that day, that day's edition.
And that was exactly the case.
The lead story in the New York Times, I think it was August, end of August 1939, basically ran a piece that was Nazi propaganda to all intents and purposes.
In fact, it actually was because the sources of all the reporting were Nazi state media organs.
And that's how the New York Times reported it.
That's what Hitler wanted people to believe, that Poland is available.
That's what he wanted.
Exactly.
It was a propaganda blitz called Operation Canned Goods, or sometimes they called it Operation Himmler.
And it was designed to fool the West into thinking that Germany had a right to invade Poland to set off basically World War II.
And the New York Times just ran it.
They ran it without any other quotes.
They ran it without any other sources.
They used the only sourcing was the Nazi media organ, their propaganda outlet.
And they reprinted Hitler's speech to the Reichstag in full.
Again, no context, no other sourcing, no other couching of what this might be or what might be really going on here.
And you got to remember by 1939, this is 10 years of Nazi propaganda, hardcore and the world knew it, and the Times just took the bait.
So that set me off on this journey to understand what happened and why it happened.
And it goes on.
I mean, I want to go through the whole story before we get to the New York Times today.
I mean, it goes, they went on not only running Nazi propaganda about the Berlin Olympics, but also playing down the Holocaust.
They, yes, that to me is one of the most tragic stories out of all of this is how they blacked out the Holocaust.
I mean, there was almost no coverage in six years, no prominent coverage.
Maybe it was something tucked into page A-12 or, you know, deep within the newspaper, a very small item.
But these are small items about a million people being massacred in a concerted effort of genocide in civilized or so-called civilized Europe.
And why did this happen?
Again, that was the question I kept coming up against is how could this happen and why did it happen?
And in that case, just like in many of these other cases, it's a very toxic blend of interest, meaning wealth and power and prestige, which the New York Times has and probably wants to maintain, and ideology.
And when those two things collide, it's really calamity for the public.
What was the ideology that would make them, the New York Times, which is run by Jewish people, that would make them play down the Holocaust and basically ignore the clear wickedness of this leader that most people could actually see?
What was the ideology?
Well, you know, the ideology and the interest were very connected in this case.
At the time, they're no longer predominantly Jewish family, but at the time they were.
They were German Jewish immigrants.
They had this very valuable asset on their hands.
And they feared that in America at that time, with anti-Semitism was running fairly strong in the 1930s and 40s, that if they were seen as a Jewish newspaper, they would lose their prestige.
They would lose business.
They would not be read.
And this is in a very competitive media environment.
So that's the interest.
The ideology is connected to it, which is they didn't believe that Jews are a nation, a people.
They believed that Jews are people who just worship in a particular way.
So for them, any kind of coverage that spotlighted this national idea of Jewish people was something that they shied away from or avoided in total, which we saw with the Holocaust.
They just shut it down.
So those two things together are probably what caused really the biggest omission and maybe the biggest journalistic sin of the 20th century.
So it's one thing, I mean, you know, so they missed Hitler and anybody could overlook one of the most evil men in history slaughtering more people than anyone ever had before.
But they did it again with Stalin.
Now that that incident has become more famous, but they missed Stalin as well.
Yeah, well, no, I think they saw Stalin.
They understood Stalin, who he was and what he was doing.
And, you know, that was the common misconception about Walter Duranty.
He's the infamous New York Times reporter accused of sort of taking it in his own hands to cover up the Ukraine famine.
But when you stop and think about that claim and say, wait a second, why would a reporter want to downplay a story?
A reporter's job, his mission, what gives him joy in life is getting great scoops.
And the Ukraine famine was a great scoop.
Why would anyone want to throw that away?
Of course you wouldn't, especially someone who was as famous as Walter Duranti, as successful and skilled as him on the world stage.
What really happened there was he was instructed by his higher-ups at the New York Times, the owners and the publishers, to downplay that story, to obscure what was really going on.
And again, it's a toxic blend, this stew of ideology and interest.
The New York Times owners wanted the United States to formally recognize the Soviet regime, which at that point was still fairly young.
And you couldn't convince the American public to be okay with that if that regime just killed two, three million of its own people for almost no reason.
So in order for them to achieve that political aim, they had to downplay that story, which otherwise nobody would because it's too good.
It's great material.
It's a great scoop.
It's a great thing to report on from a journalistic standpoint of view.
So they had a superseding interest.
They pursued it.
And in so doing, they basically gave Stalin a major propaganda win, just as they did for Hitler in the 1930s and 40s.
So it's good to remember that this is a newspaper that today, if they can find a mean tweet you sent when you were 12 years old that maybe says something wrong about gay people, they will actually destroy your career.
So these are, we're going back in time a little bit.
And obviously the people who covered these stories aren't there anymore, but this is still the reputation of the paper.
And it goes on.
That's two strikes.
Hitler stalin two big strikes.
But they do it again with Castro.
Yes, they did it again with Castro.
I mean, it's, let's say, a smaller pond, but a much bigger fish in the sense that they really made Castro.
I mean, Castro at that time, when they found him, they literally dug him up.
The New York Times reporter named Herbert Matthews had to search for this guy in the mountains of Cuba because he was all but defeated at that time.
He had a few stragglers still with him, no money, very little weaponry.
The New York Times basically overnight made him into an international celebrity.
They had that power, they had that reach, and they had a reporter on the ground there who just, for whatever reason, and I think it was some kind of strange romantic notions about this kind of guerrilla fighter, but they made him into the democratic savior of Cuba.
That's how the Messiah, Democratic Messiah of Cuba, is how the New York Times positioned Castro.
And it worked, as we saw.
And it worked so well that Castro came back to the New York Times visiting New York on three separate occasions, went to the publisher to say, personally, thank you for what you did for me.
So just one more to bring this up to date, and then we'll talk about the New York Times today.
Vietnam.
And now this is a reporter, Halberstam, I believe.
If I've got his name right.
This guy, when I was a younger, a much younger guy, this guy was a huge, huge journalistic star.
I mean, he was one of the biggest stars, and he was really playing politics in Vietnam and had a lot to do with the way people thought about Vietnam.
Talk a little bit about what Halberstam was doing over there.
Yeah, like you said, he was this young, brash, often described as brainy, maybe a little too brainy for his own good.
But this young guy in Vietnam, again, you're a New York Times correspondent, a reporter.
You have a significant amount of power to influence how people understand what's unfolding on the ground, in that case, in Vietnam.
And he knew that.
He was a smart guy.
And by all accounts, this is not me saying this, but even his friends called him arrogant.
So you've got this young, arrogant guy with power in his hands.
And he decides that he doesn't like the way the war is being prosecuted in Vietnam.
He doesn't think the U.S. should be allied to the South Vietnamese government.
And he believes that he and his successor at the New York Times, Neil Sheehan, can actually change the course of events.
And it turns out that they did.
Through their reporting, for example, through reporting that the South Vietnamese government was run by a madman, that's what he was trying to convince the American public of.
And they tried to do it by showing massacring of Buddhist monks.
That was a really big storyline.
So in one case, they reported 30 Buddhist monks massacred by the Diem government, the South Vietnamese government, to show that these people were unhinged and unreliable and not worthy of being Americans' allies.
It turns out that not only were 30 monks not massacred in that event, zero monks were massacred.
And when you think of what kind of resonance a story like that has, 30 monks, Buddhist monks, peaceful religious worshipers being massacred by these crazy South Vietnamese government backed by the U.S., it's hard to get that stain out of people's minds.
And that's exactly what happened.
They built the case, Sheehan and Halperstam together.
And at the end of the day, when that coup happened against the South Vietnamese government at the time, what Kennedy realized was that the planned pullout he'd been working on with at the time Defense Secretary McNamara was no longer feasible.
They couldn't get out of Vietnam without a partner and they no longer had a partner.
And that meant that the U.S. had to stay in the war for a number of years, many years after that.
Amazing story.
And then he wrote, Halberston wrote his famous book on how the best and the brightest had failed by getting us deeper and deeper into Vietnam without mentioning that he had had a real hand in that.
Talking to Ashley Rinsberg, the book is called The Gray Lady Winked, How the New York Times Misreporting Fabrications and Distortions Radically Alter History.
Barry's Independent Publishing Journey00:03:40
And I read it over a couple of days.
I have to say that again and again as I would turn the pages, my jaw was dropping stuff that I really didn't know.
What happened when you tried, and it's a well-researched, it's not spectacularly written.
What I mean by that is it's not trying to be spectacular.
It's very well written, but it's not trying to be overly dramatic.
It's just presenting the facts.
What happened when you took this book out to try to get a publisher?
Yeah, no, that's definitely a big part of the story.
And we talk a lot about cancel culture today, and we think about cancel culture as people who are on whatever platform or stage they're on and then get yanked off.
But a very big and pervasive part of cancel culture are all the people who are not able to speak.
Either they're shut out of institutions or they're too afraid to say what's on their mind.
And in this case, that's exactly what happened.
I went out to very well-connected, very influential people in the publishing business time and again.
And none of them said that this book is not worth a reading.
None of them said that it's inaccurate or speculative or anything along those lines.
They all said we can't risk angering the New York Times.
And I understood because they are so powerful.
There are a close to $10 billion company, which even downplays the true significance of their power.
And nobody wants to make them angry, except for me, it turns out, but nobody else wants to make them angry.
And, you know, I accepted defeat for sort of a moment in time, actually quite a long one, 10 years.
And then I saw that, you know, things have changed.
The definition of media is no longer what it was.
The power is in our hands to go out and to speak out about what we're seeing going on, to carry these messages and to bring them to platforms like yours where we can actually have a fair hearing.
And so I decided this is the best time if there ever was one.
Did you bring the book out yourself or did you actually find a publisher?
I brought it out by myself and it was for this reason.
I kept looking around and I kept seeing the Barry Weisses of the world, the Ben Shapiros of the world, Andrew Sullivan, people who could go to pretty much any publication they would like to work from or report at or edit or whatever they chose.
But they're choosing now to be independent because independence is now, I think, a higher value to a lot of us than prestige, than legacy, than even those massive resources.
Because if you're independent, you have an ability to actually speak to people about what matters and not what matters to somebody else or some other interest.
And this is a book, I really want to emphasize this is a book that is researched and written at the highest professional level.
This is not some guy bringing out like a self-published book who doesn't know what he's doing.
This is a really well-done book.
Any publisher with nerve would have published it, I think, back in the day.
So at some point, you're talking about ideology in the New York Times.
At some point, the ideology of the New York Times becomes very openly woke, doesn't it?
I mean, there is a point where the publisher calls people in and says, we are here to make white men's lives difficult.
Yeah, it's, you know, that is fair.
I think if you were to look at the sort of the woke graph of the New York Times, it would be a hockey stick.
I mean, it happened so fast and it happened so thoroughly.
And that's where Barry Weiss, who was an editor, and she, you know, I don't think she's a right-wing person.
She's centrist or maybe left of center.
That's, I think, how she describes herself.
She felt driven out of the newsroom.
Truth's Concentration Of Power00:03:35
She's claiming that she was subject to harassment and intimidation because she didn't carry the torch of woke ideology.
And that's precisely the problem.
I think very few of us would have a problem if, you know, in a newsroom or in a workplace or in a society in general, someone has this kind of idea about race or equity or whatever they want to believe.
It's fine.
And, you know, in other parts of the spectrum, the problem is that when it becomes a monolith, when it becomes this kind of homogeneous thing like it has at the New York Times, where someone like Barry Weiss feels she can't even work there any longer, that's when we're facing a very grave danger, especially in journalism.
Journalism is about multiple viewpoints.
It's about diversity of perspectives.
And that's what wokeness is crowding out completely, even though it does so in the banner of diversity of ideas.
But I think we realize now that it's much more of a dogma than anything else.
No, it's antithetical to both journalism and university education.
Wokeness is actually the opposite of those things.
Now, the newspaper that thought Hitler was kind of a loyal, patriotic guy and thought Stalin was a charmer and thought Castro really needed to be built up, that newspaper has now embraced this woke philosophy.
Is there a through line there or am I just making that up?
Is there some connection between those things?
Yeah, no, that's, I think, one of the most important questions you can ask about any institution in this one in particular.
And yes, there's a through line.
And the through line is the family that owns it and the kind of control they own it by, which means for 120 years, you've had this enormous amount of power.
And we're not just talking about a financial power, like you could have a family owning a business.
We're talking about the power of truth in the hands of a very small number of people who are all related to one another and whose interests are all tied together and tied to this truth mechanism.
So when you have that kind of concentration of power to determine truth, to shape our reality, to shape our lives, I think you have, by nature, a problem.
And that's exactly what has happened there.
You've had the original founder of the current dynasty was a man with high ideals.
And he's the guy that made the paper, quote unquote, gray.
His name was Adolf Ox.
He loved America.
He was an immigrant to America.
He believed fully in the American project.
And he wanted to make a newspaper worthy of serving it.
And he did.
But then you've got this dynasty that comes after him, 100 years plus of people trying to maintain that power and that wealth and that prestige and trying to keep this thing not just afloat, but at its number one position.
And all sorts of other considerations get mixed into that pot.
And I think this is where we really need to be careful when we're thinking about corporate news.
We're thinking about this kind of ownership of a news institution.
I think that's an indication of where we might want to go in the future, which is to decentralize things to move to a much more flat landscape than something that is so hierarchical as the New York Times.
It's a literal patriarchy.
And the thing that people don't understand is that every day in newsrooms and news outlets across the country, their budget, their list of stories comes over the wire.
And that sets the budget.
That sets the schedule for outlets, cable, TV, small outlets, online outlets across the country.
Newsroom Hierarchies Altering History00:00:38
They still have tremendous reach and tremendous power.
Again, the authors, Ashley Rinsberg, The Gray Lady Winked, How the New York Times, Misreporting, Fabrications, and Distortions Radically Alter History and are still altering history.
I don't want your subtitle to get too long, but they're still altering history.
It's a really good book, Ashley.
And how is it selling, Andrew?
It's selling really well, which is very heartening after the story I told you about this being kind of shut out for 10 years to see that people are interested, that they want to understand this topic.
And that's really what this is about.
It's great.
Ashley, thanks for coming on a really interesting.