A History of Propaganda
Throughout the 1930’s Walter Duranty was The New York Times most celebrated reporter. He was its Moscow correspondent, for whom it submitted a request and received a Pulitzer Prize. Among the many of Duranty’s malevolent falsehoods published in The Times were his denials that Stalin’s forced collectivization of farms caused millions of Russians to starve.
Today the dismal facts disprove Duranty’s reports. The Times has never apologized for its culpability in this, a wicked propaganda offensive, nor offered to see to it that the prize be returned. Instead, years later, it merely released a statement in which it confessed that Duranty’s reports were “Some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.”
A Timeline of Deceit
— July 21, 2017 —
Late last week General Tony Thomas, who leads the US Special Operations Command, spoke to Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge at the Aspen Security Forum about the war against ISIS and of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He told her that nearly every terrorist who has worked for him initially is dead or gone. And among his network, a conservative estimate is that 60,000 to 70,000 of his followers have been killed. This is good news.
Yet he went on to say that al-Baghdadi is still at large, probably due to a leak that was published in The New York Times. The General said his team was “particularly close” to al-Baghdadi after the 2015 raid that killed the ISIS oil minister Abu Sayyaf. That raid also netted his wife, who provided a wealth of actionable information. But according to General Thomas, the lead went dead after The Times story appeared in June of 2015 (a year and a half before Obama left office).
— July 22, 2017 —
The next day, President Trump issued this scathing tweet:
The Failing New York Times foiled U.S. attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist,Al-Baghdadi.Their sick agenda over National Security
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017
Later that day, the Fox television show, Fox & Friends, amplified the report for its viewers. It castigated the main stream media and The Times for their continued failing to hold back information which could put our soldiers in war zones and the American homeland at risk. After all, the hosts contended, this is what the media are obligated to do regarding criminal investigations.
— July 23, 2017 —
The next Sunday The New York Times issued the following press release to Fox News: “The story you cite in your report was published on June 8, more than three weeks after the raid. The Times described the piece to the Pentagon before publication and they had no objections. No senior American official complained publicly about the story until now, more than two years later.”
Then Newsweek.com entered the fray to support the “Destroy-Trump” Times, but slipped up by writing, “The claim on the part of Trump, Fox News, and General Thomas appears to be that The New York Times’ disclosure of al-Baghdadi’s modus operandi in evading capture or death led him to changing how he works, and therefore gave him a greater chance of avoiding capture.”
Later that day a New York Times spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, demanded an on-air apology and tweet from Fox & Friends for its report on Saturday.
Fox shot back — “Fox will provide an updated story to viewers tomorrow morning based on the FoxNews.com report,” the broadcaster said in a response to The Times.
Before Fox filed its rebuttal on Monday, The Times ran a lengthy article entitled How the President Wrongly Blamed the Times for a Terrorists Survival written by a Michael Gordon. In it he blames Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, and the Pentagon for the controversy, stating The Times ran the story by the military brass who had no objection to its publication.
Furthering the Leftist Agenda
Count me as one who doesn’t believe that The Times spent any time vetting their story with the Pentagon brass before it appeared.
Count me as one who believes General Thomas’s depiction of events over that of that of Mike Gordon of The Times.
Moreover, I doubt that Ash Carter and the bulk of Obama inner circle cared at all about protecting those special forces men and women who put their lives on the line in conducting this, or any other, dangerous mission aimed at protecting our soldiers and the US mainland.
Stop to consider the fact that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and virtually every other Democrat in Congress voted in 2002 for a resolution of force against Iraq. Yet they and their allies, The New York Times and the left-wing media, then spent years denigrating and undermining our military and its mission there. This used to be called aiding and abetting the enemy.
To the great shame of The New York Times, the expression “Potemkin village” has now become a permanent fixture resident in the English language nomenclature. According to Webster it means – an impressive façade designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition.
History has recorded that Duranty, in the 1930’s, was escorted by his Soviet hosts out to a village called Potemkin which was nothing but facades of buildings something like a movie set. They did this to hide the fact that the Russian people all lived in crushing poverty and were enslaved by the Soviet socialist machine. Based on what he saw, Duranty wrote glowing articles for The Times about the wonders of Soviet socialist communism.
