All Episodes
Previous Next
May 3, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:49
The History of the New York Times' Fake News Propaganda
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Among those of us in public life, you can divide the world into these two groups, those who care about what the New York Times says about them and those who do not.
The only way to moral clarity in this country is not to care about what the New York Times says about you.
That's by way of introduction of an extremely important work that has just been published, titled The Gray Lady Winked.
Known as the New York Times.
The New York Times Misreporting Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History is the subtitle.
The author is Ashley Rinsberg, who when I read his biography, I would say qualifies as a Renaissance man, novelist, essayist, freelance journalist, etc., etc.
Born in South Africa, and then the rest is fascinating history.
So...
Ashley Rinsberg, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
Thank you, Dennis.
I'm really excited to be here.
Thank you so much.
What prompted you to write this book?
Well, the book grew out of a chance occurrence when I was kind of coming through a copy of William Shire's great book of history on World War II, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
In a footnote, Sarah just kind of noted almost casually that on the eve of World War II, the New York Times had run a story claiming that Poland had invaded Germany, which was, I was sitting in my chair and it just kind of almost, you know, knocked me out of the chair.
It was such a crazy idea that the New York Times could print something that was so wrong, so opposite to what we know is the truth about World War II. It's fundamental.
And that launched me on a mission to understand how that happened, why that happened, what else happened like that, and that eventually evolved into a full book.
That is mind-blowing.
I didn't want to interrupt you.
I want to review this.
It really is.
Well, I remember reading that in college, by the way.
It is one of the most riveting works of history I have ever read.
And I think it stands up in time, don't you?
I absolutely do.
And not only does his book or his books stand up, but his journalism does too.
And that was really important, something that I went back and looked at how other journalists, how other news outlets were recovering events like World War II. And, you know, because it's easy to say, well, looking back, it's 2020, very nice of you, you did your research great.
But the reality was that people like Shire or Edward Murrow, they were reporting very much correctly.
They were reporting on things like World War II or the Holocaust or many other events in history that the Times completely botched.
These guys got it right and the Times got it completely wrong.
So it wasn't just about hindsight.
Who did Shire report for?
I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that Shire was one of Murrow's boys.
So was that NBC? What network?
That's a good question.
Okay, fine.
It's not important.
But Shira was not a New York Times reporter.
No, no.
Right, okay.
I want to get back to your revelation.
So you saw, was it a footnote, did you say?
A footnote in Shira's book, The Rise of the Fall of Third Reich.
So the New York Times actually reported This is what I said was mind-blowing, that Poland invaded Germany and not the other way around?
Yeah, so the lead story on that day, 1939, was basically a reprint of Nazi propaganda.
Yes, that's what the Nazis claimed.
That's right.
They were responding to a Polish invasion.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it wasn't by chance, of course.
These were very well-seasoned propagandists, the Nazis, and they decided they would launch the war by deceiving the world as to the fact.
That would give them enough time, enough credibility.
It would confuse the story enough to create a pause.
And that's all they needed.
As we know, one of their biggest strategies was using the blitz.
Move fast.
storm.
And just having the space of a few days where people said, oh, okay, well, if the Polish insurrectionists actually did invade this German border town, then maybe the Germans are right to invade Poland.
It kind of makes sense.
And that's exactly what the Nazis wanted.
But it all depended on getting this out into the world.
And having it printed on the front page of the New York Times was, I would say, qualified as out in the world.
So that Remember, this was all in answer to my question, what prompted you to write this book about the New York Times and its lies?
So that footnote sort of triggered this whole thing in you?
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people like myself at the time and still today have a sense that something is up when you read certain stories or coverage.
In the mainstream media, you get a sense that you're not getting the full picture, and sometimes you even get a glimpse where you absolutely know you're not getting the full picture.
In my case, I had been living in Israel, I still live in Israel, and I saw The Times reporting here, and I saw the reality on the ground here, and I said, there's just no way to reconcile these two things.
The reality is so divergent.
From what I'm reading in this illustrious newspaper, how can it be?
And when I saw this little footnote in William Shire's book, I said, okay, there's something more here.
There's something going on.
And when I discovered what happened throughout the Times' coverage of World War II over the course of a decade, that's when I started to understand that feeling that I had that something was amiss.
was actually real.
It was what we called, you know, almost like being gaslighted when you discover, aha, it's not me, it's them.
Well, of course it began even before the 1939 German invasion because they got the Pulitzer Prize for denying that the Ukrainians were having a famine.
Yes, definitely, definitely.
And that was at least on the same level, the same proportion as their coverage or their botched coverage of World War II, which is that famously a reporter named Walter Durante covered up Ukraine famine.
He denied it in his reporting.
He was, I would say, the most famous English-language reporter in the world at the time.
He was a brilliant person, spoke five languages, Oxford educated, and the Times' narrative...
Still today is that he was kind of a rogue reporter.
He was slovenly.
They really pinned it on him.
But that isn't the story.
Durante knew very well what was going on in Russia and Ukraine.
He was there.
He was on the ground.
He was very well connected.
He covered it up, it turns out, because he was instructed to.
And this is the story the New York Times has never really let out, and I've never really seen it pieced together or told in this way.
You know, the question is, why would Durante do this?
Why would he risk his whole career, his journalistic reputation to peddle such a big lie?
The Ukraine famine was big news.
It was a big story.
And if you're a journalist, you want that story.
You don't want to cover up the story.
You don't want to make it seem as if there's no story.
So that's the question.
Why did he do it?
It's a question no one really asks.
And the answer to it is because the New York Times' ownership wanted it.
To be told in this way, because they were pushing for American official recognition of the USSR. It's the early days of the Soviet regime.
And you could not convince the American public that the government should recognize this regime if it had just killed two to three million of its own people.
Turns out the number was actually much greater than that.
That's what was known at the time.
And they buried it for that reason.
And it worked.
The FDR recognized the USSR.
It was with Walter Durante's help, who really shepherded the process.
And everybody kind of got what they wanted aside from the American public.
Why did he get a Pulitzer Prize?
Were they as corrupt as the New York Times?
You know, it's one of these things that's very hard to digest.
And it's that the reporter who, during World War II, on the eve of World War II, printed the Nazi lies on the front page of the New York Times, received a Pulitzer.
The New York Times reporter who called the Berlin Nazi Olympics the greatest sporting event of all time.
Who said that?
Who said that?
This is a man named Frederick Right.
I was just curious.
I'm impressed that you even remembered the name.
But that's what he wrote from Berlin in the New York Times?
That's what he reported from Berlin.
And that was a lot of the times his coverage was very much tearing that water.
And again, the Berlin Olympics were very clearly a propaganda.
Yes, totally.
I'll be back in a moment.
▲
Export Selection