The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Time’s Misreporting, Distortions, and Fabrications Radically Alter History

This week’s book…I am not even sure how it ended up on my radar. I suspect it was a random Amazon suggestion, based on other books I had purchased, and I knew I had a vague idea of what it contained but had no idea of just how bad “fake news” can get. Until I read The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Time’s misreporting, distortions, and fabrications radically alter history by Ashley Rindsberg.

When I said “fake news” above, I was half kidding. I don’t mean it in the way Trump means it, to demean and decry all news I disagree with, as being fake. I mean for real, absolutely garbage, fakest of fake news, being reported as the real deal, on the pages of the New York Times…All the News That’s Fit to Print.

And I know what made me pick THIS book this month was specifically reading about the Holodomor last month, and in that book, Red Famine, author Anne Applebaum mentioned the criminal misreporting of Walter Duranty, and then again with Humberto Fontava’s book, Exposing the Real Che Guevara, which mentioned the Time’s super generous reporting and coverage of the movements of the Dude. Generous does not begin to cover the scandalous misrepresentation of facts the Times is guilty of, the denial of such, and, most alarmingly, the WHY behind it.

Now, I am not sure I have ever read a Times article. Or if I have, it was an article that had been syndicated through a local paper. I think, to the best of my recollection, the closest I came was their staunch defense of their reporter over the Valerie Plame affair. And I remember thinking….yes, they should protect their sources. Turns out, I was wrong. Scooter Libby had given them written permission to reveal that he was the source. The Times refused as a result of other issues occurring at the same time. But we’ll get to that.

He starts with the Times reporters stationed in Berlin in the 1930’s and 40’s. And I knew this. Because I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But where William Shirer reported on what he saw, reporter Otto Tolischus reported the Nazi party line…and received a Pulitzer prize for his writing. When the entire rest of the foreign press corps was effectively imprisoned for the winter at the chateau of Bad Nauheim in 1941, the one journalist NOT imprisoned was Time’s Berlin Bureau chief Guido Enderis. He was left alone “because of his proved friendliness to Germany.” That quote, incidentally, is not just from the book. It’s a direct quote from Nazi Foreign Office Undersecretary Ernst Woermann, who issued the round up order on the other reporters in retaliation for actions taken against Nazi agents in the US. And he specifically let Guido out of the roundup. Because of his proved friendliness.

Even more horrifying than the Time’s friendliness to Germany, was it’s refusal to report on the Holocaust at all. While the rest of the world was reporting on the mass murder of the Jewish populations across Europe, the Times, on June 27, 1942, reported “More Executed in Yugoslavia, Czechslovakia & Poland—Jews Toll 700,000.” It was a 72 word blurb on page 5, below the fold. Turns out, the Times had a specific policy in place about not reporting on Jews…at all. When I did my report on the Red Famine, I made a joke about self-hating jews….turns out, I found em. The Times is owned by the Sulzburger-Ochs clan, who are all Jewish. Now, this is nothing against the Jewish faith or community, but I do believe this desire to downplay their own heritage, basically ascribing  Judaism as nothing more than a religion, while downplaying or even denying the deep cultural roots of their faith, contributed to their bizarre reporting policies. See, while shares are issued to the NYT, only family members get voting shares. And the Times in the 1940’s, trying to not report on Jewish matters, or be accused of being a Jewish paper, didn’t report on Jewish news. Even when Jews were the literal news. Except for when the family daughter married…her wedding received a big write up. While a mere 72 words were dedicated to the tragedy unfolding half a world away.

He covers Duranty’s reporting of the Holodomor…or lack of reporting. For which Duranty also received a Pulitzer prize. Duranty is the reporter who received the prized interview with Stalin. And he reported what Stalin wanted the world to hear. Nothing about Ukraine. Nothing about the Gulag’s. Nothing about the famines within Russia proper, or the secret police. Strict party line reporting. The entire rest of the world knew what was going on, thanks to Gareth Jones. This guy held a literal smoking gun. Like…I love the first amendment, and I am profoundly grateful that we have freedom of the press and that the government can’t interfere with the press. In Berlin, June 1931, Duranty was there to renew his passport at the US Embassy. While there, he advised State Department official A.W. Klieforth that “in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities, his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet Government and not his own.”

Now, Duranty was a confirmed and known hedonist. There is no question he lived a very good life reporting the official party line from communist Russia and was treated exceptionally well by the soviet’s. It does make me wonder how he actually felt about what was going on in Russia. I mean…that is such a random confession. And a disclaimer. He was distancing himself from the shitshow he was stuck living in. This does not excuse him. Because he could have refused the assignment. Hell, when he received his Pulitzer…why did he return to Russia? Was it received on his behalf in absentia? And if it was, when he returned to the States, why didn’t he return the prize and start reporting about what was really happening? In fact, the Pulitzer for Duranty’s reporting from Russia was never returned, despite political pressure from Ukrainian American’s in the early 2000’s to do just that.

In a weirdly ironic twist….which irony I will go in to later…the Times hired an independent consultant to determine if the Pulitzer SHOULD be returned. The consultant determined yes. But the times declined to return it, based on not wanting to erase history. Get that. They already erased 4 million plus Ukrainians by denying the famine was even happening. Hell, Duranty made a comment during a dinner one night that he knew for a fact the number was much higher. But the Times decided it was revisionist history if they returned the Pulitzer.

Also during WWII, the times science reporter William L. Laurence, was actively reporting on advances in atomic fission. And he was good at it, able to break down scientific jargon so even the most non-science reader could understand what was being said. So good at it, that he understood the advances being made well before the US Government ever caught on. Ultimately, he ended up being on the government’s payroll, helping to hide the effects of the nuclear fallout. In an interesting twist, William H. Lawrence, another Times reporter, WAS telling the truth of the devastation wrought by Little Boy over Nagasaki. But the Times, true to form, buried that news.

While Rindsberg does not touch on the favorable reviews of Che Guevara, he covers Fidel Castro extensively. And how the times favorable reporting of Fidel while trying to curry favor with the Kennedy’s led to them fumbling reporting on the Bay of Pigs, essentially burying the story on like page 9, while touting Castro as Cuba’s great liberator. And the Times NEVER reported on any of the gross humanitarian violations that occurred in Cuba.

And Rindsberg covers how the times reporting on Vietnam actually escalated that conflict. Kennedy and defense secretary McNamara were ready for a troop withdrawal as early as 1963. But in order to withdraw safely, they needed Vietnam to be relatively stable. And the Times reporting on Ngo Dinh Diem contributed to so much instability in the reason that Diem was ultimately assassinated, resulting in an escalation of conflict. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died needlessly, as a result of their reporting. So that’s fabulous.

And the reporting on the War on Terror… hell, first, the ultimate in fake news propaganda, the reporting on the death of Muhammed al-Dura. Who was ultimately found to not be killed by Israeli troops at all. Independent evaluation…and I mean FRANCE by this, not just Israel saying Nope, wasn’t us, FRANCE, evaluated all the information and determined there was no way that al-Dura could have been shot by Israeli troops. Yet no retraction was ever published. And for 20 years, Islamist terrorists have invoked the name of al-Dura to justify their own escalating violence.

The Times reporting on our troops in the war on Terror was so blatantly one sided and off that even other papers started calling the Times on their one-sided bullshit, running their own counter stories proving just how lopsided and inaccurate the Times reporting was. In like the early 2000’s was the Times ultimate heyday in stupid reporting…after the 1930s-40’s. Ok. The last 100 years they’ve pretty much sucked on the big stuff. But one of the worst actual scandals was when they hired intern, then staff reporter, Jayson Blair. Who effectively made up or plagiarized a bunch of stories, which were granted prominence in the paper. For over a year. And this despite a senior editor expressing grave concerns and advising the Times stop printing his stories. This, coupled with the Valerie Plame scandal, and the misreporting of the troops, all occurred at the same time the Times was being asked by the Ukrainian-American organizations to return Duranty’s Pulitzer, caused the Times to double down on their bizarre reporting techniques, culminating in The 1619 Project.

I feel like this is probably the most egregious misreporting the Times has done. Remember earlier in this review when I said the Times refused to return Duranty’s Pulitzer because that would be revisionist history if they returned the Pulitzer. The Times is A-OK revising history. If it tells the narrative, it wants told. And selling Marxist revisionist history is very much the narrative the Times wants told, as it continues to push and rewrite US History—badly. So badly that historians across the world reacted to this garbage. Letters were sent. And I mean…I am, clearly, an amateur historian. I did not read the 1619 Project because I knew it was brain cancer waiting to happen. The project itself is a house of lies and revisionist history. The historians who wrote letters are literal specialists in these fields, they’ve dedicated their lives to knowing and understanding these areas of the past, absolutely including the history of slavery. Hell, the historians the Times hired as consultants on the project said no, what you have is bad. This is not supported by facts.

And that is the nice thing about history. It just IS. You can look at all the information around the facts, but you can’t change the facts just because you want to. Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World, which I reviewed last year, is a perfect example of this. He never denied Genghis Kahn was a pretty brutal warlord. But he did approach the history from a different angle, more specifically, Genghis Kahn’s side of the story, and all the things made possible as a direct result of the Great Kahn’s leadership in Mongolia.

If the 1619 Project had done that, it would have been a valuable contribution to understanding American History. Approaching American’s history from the perspective of the Slave trade, covering the devastating effects of the slave trade on black families both in Africa, and here in the states is valuable information. But completely lying about history, about known facts, about causes of various conflicts that have literally nothing to do with what actually happened…makes it worth less than the paper it’s printed on.

This book was so good. The story flowed consistently, and while I have pretty much written off the The New York Times as trash, Ashley Rindsberg does not. He points out where the reporting was good and insists that even today the Times has some of the best reporters out there. But man…if I had ambitions beyond Reading ALL the Books, I could probably make a pretty solid living off of debunking the shit that comes out of the New York Times. Rindsberg has written at least one book on the topic. I’m sure there’s more out there.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on June 6, 2022, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.