So far as I know, this was the first media source in the English-speaking world to take such a turn away from traditional public-health principles to push full lockdown.
All on February 27, 2020.
What are the chances?
I knew that day something had gone very wrong at the newspaper of record. They had essentially enlisted on one side of a war. Their political bias had always been obvious but to deploy the problem of pathogenic spread in service of that mission was next-level. My intuition told me that they were working on behalf of deeper and more sinister interests.
Meanwhile, genuine experts were desperately trying to calm people down even as the NYT was spreading maximum panic, probably for political reasons. In the more than two years since then, the paper’s coronavirus doctrine was set in stone. It still is.
Now, readers see all this and say to me, hey, things have never been right at this paper. I would dispute that. From 1934 to 1946, the great economic journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote not only a daily editorial but also curated the Book Reviews. There were times when the name Ludwig von Mises appeared on the front page of that review section, with glowing reviews of his books.
In particular, Duranty might have covered the millions who died (were slaughtered really) due to deliberate famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. He did not. He did the opposite. In frequent articles for the NYT, Duranty assured readers that all was well, that Stalin was a great leader, that everyone was more or less happy, that there was nothing to see in Ukraine.
It’s extremely difficult to face this terrible history but once you do, you experience a major example of how lies coming from a media machine can perpetuate a killing machine. Duranty ruled the press in Moscow, suppressing truth in every way possible and convincing the world that all was well in the Soviet Union, even though it is quite clear from the documented history that he knew better.
He preferred the lie to the truth, probably because he was being blackmailed but also because he was a communist and had absolutely no moral compass. To what extent his New York editors cooperated in this outrageous fraud remains unclear. At the very least, they wanted him to be correct so much that they didn’t bother with an ounce of incredulity, even though he was exculpating and celebrating a totalitarian dictator.
Rarely has a movie haunted me so much. It’s brilliant, mostly historically accurate, and celebratory of the kind of moral courage it requires to cause truth to prevail over lies in an age of tyranny. How is it possible that millions could die and the world would not know, and so many people would cooperate in the deliberate suppression of truth—people who otherwise had prestige and privilege and reputations for integrity? It happens. It did happen. It could happen again, unless people are willing to stand up and say what is true.
In some ways, it is happening now.
- Attribute terrible economic, educational, and cultural fallout not to the lockdowns but to the virus;
- Attribute virus fallout to the failure not to lock down and mandate enough;
- Deliberately confuse readers about the difference between tests, cases, and deaths, while obscuring any downside to mass mandated vaccinations;
- Never focus on the incredibly obvious demographics of COVID-19 death: average age of expected death with underlying conditions;
- Ignore completely the primary victims of lockdowns: especially small businesses, the poor and minority groups, marginalized communities, artists, immigrant communities, small towns, small theaters, and so on;
- Do not publish anything that speaks of the path that all civilized countries prior dealt with new viruses: the vulnerable protect themselves while everyone else gets exposed with resulting immunity (Sweden did as well as any country because it refused to violate human rights, while lockdowns everywhere else flopped);
- Dismiss any alternative to lockdown as crazy, unscientific, and cruel, while acting as if Fauci speaks for the whole of the scientific community;
- Presume without evidence that all the interventions work in principle, including masks and travel and capacity restrictions;
- Put down and disparage repurposed therapeutics as if the evidence of their effectiveness did not exist.
- Never raise doubts about vaccine effectiveness, much less harms, while ignoring the carnage of the mandates on poor communities and labor markets as hundreds of thousands are fired.
At this point, it’s painful even to read their daily news reports on anything pandemic-related, because they are all so transparently and obviously an extension of this above pattern and the larger agenda, which seems so obviously political. I don’t believe that everyone at the NYT approves of this; it’s just an ethos that becomes self-enforcing in the interest of job retention and career ambition.
I’ve been asked countless times whether this censorship at the NYT of serious commentary is driven by politics, and, namely, Trump hatred. As an early critic of the president and someone who has written probably several hundred articles criticizing many aspects of the past administration’s politics, the idea that an entire nation would be forced to accept unthinkable suffering in the name of a holy war against Trump is basically unconscionable.
Very weak, to be sure, and the statement could have been more precise of course and said governments’ reaction, even if the report suggests that lockdowns were somehow inevitable. Regardless we are at least a slight step beyond claiming that a textbook virus alone somehow magically wrecked the world. Still, I seriously doubt any reckoning on the paper’s role any more than I’ve seen a serious accounting of Walter Duranty’s role in covering Stalin’s crimes.
The news reporting and editorial policies of the NYT today should reminds us of 1932–34 and the way in which journalism has long been used to push dogma over truth, selective facts over full and balanced coverage, ideology over objectivity, propaganda over diversity of opinion, and an aggressive political agenda over humane and accurate reporting. It seems out of control at this point, even unfixable.
The whole sorry episode speaks to a much larger and more entrenched problem: the symbiotic relationship between Big Media and the administrative state. It’s the permanent bureaucracy that serves the journalists’ primary and most credible source material. The higher the journalist or the bureaucrat rises in the profession, the fatter the rolodex grows on both ends. They maintain constant communication, as the FOIA’d emails about the pandemic have repeatedly shown.
Every housing reporter has a dozen sources at HUD, just as medical reporters have friends and sources at CDC/NIH/FDA, while the economic reporters are close with officials at the Fed. The foreign affairs people are tight with the State Department bureaucrats.
And so on it goes. They depend on each other and use each other to push their agendas in a non-stop pattern of information-based quid pro quos.
“The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. The media need a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news. They have daily news demands and imperative news schedules that they must meet. They cannot afford to have reporters and cameras at all places where important stories may break. Economics dictates that they concentrate their resources where significant news often occurs, where important rumors and leaks abound, and where regular press conferences are held. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, in Washington, D.C., are central nodes of such news activity. On a local basis, city hall and the police department are the subject of regular news ‘beats’ for reporters. Business corporations and trade groups are also regular and credible purveyors of stories deemed newsworthy. These bureaucracies turn out a large volume of material that meets the demands of news organizations for reliable, scheduled flows. Mark Fishman calls this ‘the principle of bureaucratic affinity: only other bureaucracies can satisfy the input needs of a news bureaucracy.’”
This is why, while journalists can often hound elected politicians and their appointees, from Watergate to Russiagate and every “gate” in between, they tend towards a hands-off approach to the massive administrative bureaucracies that hold the real power in modern democracies. The press and the deep state live off each other. What that means is ominous to consider: what you read in the papers and hear on TV from the industry-dominant sources is nothing more than an amplification of deep-state priorities and propaganda. The problem has been growing for well over a hundred years and now it is the source of enormous corruption on all sides.
As for any politician who is battling with the administrative apparatus of the state, look out: he or she will make themselves a target of the media. It’s predictable for a reason. These people in both Big Media and the deep state “circle the wagons” as if their careers depend on it because it is true.
What can be done? Reforming this system, much less replacing it, is going to be far more difficult than anyone realizes. In 1932, there weren’t many alternatives to the New York Times. Today there are. It is up to each of us to get smart, get moral, sniff out and reject the distortions, call for a reckoning, and find and tell the truth in other ways.
