All the News That’s Fit for Whom?

After the digital age begat Twitter and Facebook mobs, the paper of record bid a fatal farewell to objectivity. On the Iran war “all the news that’s fit to print” roots for the regime. Commercial catchphrases are not meant to be taken at face value.

McDonald’s, “I’m lovin it” is ultra catchy but hyped.

“Red Bull gives you wings” is designed to be zany. But here’s the thing. The legacy media can’t plug a promise they don’t keep without repercussions.

Taunts of fake news made CNN rebrand with the taglines “Facts first” or “Go there.” Not so the “Old Grey Lady.” Steadfastly she treats her tagline as tamper proof.

The Times coined a celebrated motto in 1897, and there it is today on the masthead. People are free to believe in, “All the news that’s fit to print,” but let the buyer beware.

“Fit to print” for whom? For subscribers, or the Sulzberger family, or investors, or advertisers, or how about all of the above? Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky, more cited than any living author, once nailed the media’s business model to the masthead.

In Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media he makes the owners paramount. Audiences (subscribers, site visitors, clicks, etc) are treated as products and sold to advertisers.

In the Times’s case it comes down to keeping the owners in clover by the production of news and views “fit to print.” The Sulzbergers would scan results for two metrics:

1. Bottom line profit and
2. news content and opinion conforming to their own progressive bias. That’s how little the accuracy of news matters.

Provided audience stats keep climbing the newsroom is free — indeed duty-bound — to filter progressive narratives into news reports. Hence the paper of record and language hoopla are soul mates. Describing the barbarity of Oct. 7 as an “attack” — not even that breached the borderline of bias.

Looking back one can usually pinpoint the birth of a new era. In the early 1930’s a prodigy and a portent made landfall. Until then “fit to print” was a commitment to accurate and even-handed content.

Then holocaust denial broke the symbiosis. During 1932 and 1933 Stalin, wanting to resettle Russians in Ukraine, methodically starved the population to death. During what became known as the “Holodomor,” cannibalism reached the point where authorities deigned to plaster signs on walls, “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.”

Moscow correspondent for the Times, Walter Duranty, filed dispatches denying everything. Americans read that the Holodomor, Ukraine’s holocaust, was a stunt. People, he wrote, were “hungry but not starving.”

His reports on “hardship” won Duranty a Pulitzer prize for “dispassionate reporting.” A half century too late the rogue journo, the artist of fake, got the name he’d earned: “Stalin’s apologist.” The Times had endorsed his reports and dismissed the famine as “bunk,” even with Duranty’s greasy quip, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

Jokes and a big fraudulent Prize! Max Frankel, Executive Editor until 1994, was cool about winning it.

“The revelation doesn’t seem to qualify as news. It’s really history and belongs in history books.” Nor did it bother Howell Raines, Executive Editor until June 2003 when he resigned over — what else — an outbreak of journalistic fraud.

He conceded that, Though the paper’s slogan is All the News That’s Fit to Print it is patently flawed. Important news slips by because our coverage reflects blind spots that we recognize only in retrospect … We know we make mistakes, but as long as they are intellectually honest and promptly corrected … Blind spots! The paper was not honest then, nor has it been since — unless declining to return the Pulitzer Prize was the moral thing to do.

Fake news has no excuse. Bias on the other hand may have legit business motives, despicable though they be. During WWII the Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, did not deny the Holocaust, but downplayed it.

Loath to alienate the powers that be, in government and business, AH desired to avoid the impression that the paper was Jewish owned. Hence the plight of European Jewry was buried on inside pages. Laurel Leff cites many cases.

The Times emasculated the Warsaw ghetto revolt by making Jews into “Poles” or, even sillier, “Warsaw patriots.” The massacre of Italian and Austrian Jews failed to make the front page. Four columns buried on page 12 reported that half a million Hungarian Jews had been exterminated.

The truth is that the Sulzbergers fit the mold that Howard Jacobson would later label “ASHamed Jews” in his 2010 novel The Finkler Question. The family were not keen Zionists either. They liked Israel no more than a chronic carbuncle.

Hence Middle East correspondents and opinion writers have to be hostile to Israel. Opinion lapses into news until readers give up distinguishing one from the other.

“News Analysis” on the front page turns out to be Democrat talking points — and bashing Trump, it goes without saying. On the Iran war, “all the news that’s fit to print” is relentlessly bad, and it got the President’s back up.

“We are totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise, yet, if you read the Failing New York Times, you would incorrectly think that we are not winning,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Telling the truth “without fear or favor” has long ceased to be the job description for the newsroom. Telling the truth could well cost your job.

“Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor,” Bari Weiss wrote in her resignation letter. Israel’s wars with Iran and its proxies are reported with the staple narrative that Israelis can’t be victims of terrorism.

No more can American Jews. Witness the way the Times reported the latest attack on a synagogue.

“The attacker who drove into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Michigan, a 41-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, is dead. The man who rammed his truck into a synagogue on Thursday had recently lost family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, officials say. Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun said that the suspect, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, recently suffered “devastating and personal losses overseas” but that it was “not an excuse” for the attack.

No staff or children at the synagogue and attached school were hurt. Although a motive remains unclear, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said earlier in the day that the attack was antisemitism and “hate, plain and simple.” The Times conveyed the news with the staple narrative contortions.

The headline angled in on the grievance of the terrorist, portraying him as a tragic figure. Israel had killed his family, hadn’t it. A Community Struggles to Understand Why Their Neighbor Attacked Synagogue “Days before the antisemitic violence, an imam recalled seeing Ayman Mohamad Ghazali at a service for his relatives who had been killed in the war in Lebanon.”

Which is half true — they were targeted while fighting alongside Hezbollah forces. Where does it leave the celebrated Times motto? Not so far off the mark, as it happens.