NYTimes v. Blair Rebuttal: Stories Neglected & Lies told by NYT

Due to the glaringly racist nature of the condemnation by the New York Times editor of the lack of journalist ethics on the part of junior reporter, African American Jayson Blair, age 27, Blair now has a legal case against the NYT. Certainly in the amicus brief, if not the actual brief on behalf of Blair, one can include the lies by omission, suppression and commission on the part of the NYT editors.

From the World Socialist Website, 5/12/03, at
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/nyt-m12.shtml,
we have the following pertinent paragraphs condemning the capitalist rag, the New York Times:

"This was the newspaper, after all, that employed Walter Duranty in the 1930s, the correspondent who deliberately covered up the crimes of Stalin and defended the integrity of the Moscow frame-up trials that led to the physical liquidation of the leading figures of the October 1917 revolution and inaugurated a wholesale reign of terror by the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The Times still proudly lists Duranty as one of its Pulitzer Prize winners."

"During World War II, the newspaper made an editorial decision to suppress coverage of the Holocaust in which six million Jews were exterminated."

"There are certainly more recent incidents beside which Blair’s alleged behavior pales to insignificance. In 1999-2000, the newspaper led a full-throated witch hunt against Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee, described by the White House as “explosive and near hysterical investigative reporting,” that led to Lee’s imprisonment for nine months and could have helped bring about his trial and execution."

"The newspaper offered only a grudging apology for its reprehensible victimization of Lee and did not discipline any of the reporters involved. "

"Thus, lying—by both the government and the Times—to promote a war in which tens of thousands of people die is not a problem, but copying a quote from another newspaper is a capital offense. Such are the paper’s journalistic standards."

"One only has to compare Blair’s conduct to that of one of the newspaper’s more senior correspondents, Judith Miller, who has served as a willing conduit for misinformation from neo-conservative circles promoting war. She has specialized in stories built on not a single verifiable fact, repeatedly proclaiming evidence substantiating the existence of “weapons of mass destruction”. The Times recently insisted that the fact that Ms. Miller is associated with the right-wing, pro-Zionist Middle East Forum of Daniel Pipes, which has advocated war not only against Iraq but Syria and Lebanon as well, was no violation of the paper’s standards of objectivity."