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May 3, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:24
The New York Times' Journalistic Cover-Up
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So we've discussed, I mean, these are amazing, the Ukraine issue and the Nazi Olympics issue and the invasion of Poland issue.
Give us some more examples.
Well, the book takes us right through the 20th century.
You know, a big one for me personally is the Holocaust, which obviously the reporting was, or the non-reporting, I should say, was concurrent with their World War II. Debacle.
But the Times from New York chose effectively to, quote-unquote, bury the Holocaust.
They did not cover it.
They acted as if it wasn't happening.
And if you were reading their newspaper day by day when reports were coming out of the decks of 700,000 Jews, a million Jews, I mean, we're talking about an epic story, a story once in a generation or even bigger than that.
And they just were silent.
And again, it kind of boggles the mind.
This is a newsgathering organization.
Their mission in life is to bring people the fact.
And this is a fact of all fact.
People were being slaughtered en masse in Europe by a so-called civilized nation.
And that to me was really the height of it because that's more than failure, more than even malfeasance.
That's something on a tragic level.
And diving into it, again, the question I kept bumping up against was how could such a thing happen?
How?
And the answer there was a very disturbing answer, and it touches on everything that I think we learned about false media narratives and why they happen, why they go wrong.
And in this case, it was because There's a dynasty, a dynastic family in control of the New York Times.
No checks and balances on them.
They own the company.
They are the publisher.
They appoint the editors.
They can do whatever they want, and they did.
And in this case, they were afraid of being seen as a Jewish newspaper.
That was part of it.
They were afraid it would hurt their newspaper, hurt their business.
And on the other hand, they had some very esoteric theories.
about what it meant to be a Jewish person or Jew and what it didn't mean.
And for them, it didn't mean that you were part of our nation.
It just meant you worshipped in a particular way.
So the fact that, quote-unquote, Jewish people were being slaughtered in Europe didn't mean anything to them.
It was just other people, part of the war, wasn't anything particular.
But we know for a fact that the Holocaust was a war within the war.
It was fought.
You know, Hitler had been on record saying if nothing else happens, So long as he destroys the Jewish people, he will have succeeded.
And the Times completely just chose to ignore that for both ideological reasons and for interest-related reasons, reasons of power, money, and prestige.
The New York Times, given its record of lying, how did it become known as the paper of record?
Up until that point, the paper had been very well respected and quote-unquote gray.
I mean, that's where the name The Gray Lady comes from, is that the reporting was pretty down the line.
The founder of the dynasty I was just talking about was a German-Jewish immigrant to America.
He loved America and appreciated all that it had done for him.
His name was Adolf Al Fox, and he decided that he would...
Report the news without fear or favor.
That's his famous proclamation.
He wrote it in the New York Times as a business announcement.
And he kept to his word.
For as long as he was there at the helm, they reported things in a very gray manner.
They brought the facts.
They tried to keep things pretty sedate.
But, you know, this is the nature of a dynasty, that the founder might have great intentions and good ideals and good values.
But what happens with the dynasty, and this is something we see over and over in politics and media and business, is that the rest of the dynasty down the line are more interested in maintaining or growing their wealth and their power and their prestige than they are in fulfilling the original ideals of the founder.
And that's exactly what's happened at the Times.
And, you know, these are individuals.
They're people.
They are not imbued with special powers, but they've been given this huge amount of power.
We lose sight of it.
We think of this as just a newspaper, but it's not.
It is an institution, a business, and a company that controls how we perceive the world.
It controls how we understand what's going on around us.
And that is a lot of power for a very small number of people.
So, President Trump's claim, fake media.
Well, well predates his presidency.
Yes.
Yes, it does.
And, you know, that term, fake media and fake news, that became a political football in and of itself.
And it sort of distorted the deeper issue, was that the real issue here is that there are false media narratives.
They happen.
And they don't just happen.
They don't just fall out of the sky.
Somebody is making a decision.
Somebody is deciding that we are going to do this in a coordinated and deliberate and concerted way because, you know, you can publish a story about something that's false and most people won't notice it and those that do, half of them won't believe it anyway.
In order to build what I've called a false media narrative, you need a lot of energy, a lot of people, a lot of resources.
Pounding away at this same message.
You really are trying to do this.
And this is where we have to be very careful, because this is something that's precious in a democracy, which is trust in information, trust in our media.
Well, democracy dies in darkness.
The motto of the Washington Post.
I want to ask you about Vietnam and the coverage there when we come back.
Ashley Rinsberg, the gray lady, winked.
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