NYTimes Columnist Friedman Calls for Blacklist
July 30th, 2005Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has issued an Action Alert against New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for his July 22 column: “Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide.”
Friedman says the federal government, in the form of the State Department, should “produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report,” to “focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.” He also wants the government to include “excuse makers,” which, according to FAIR, includes “a majority of Americans, according to recent polls.”
I must say I used to love reading The New York Times and admit that I have reported and written for that once great newspaper. Perhaps this entire episode can be chalked up to post-9/11/Jayson Blair stress syndrome, but I stopped reading Mr. Friedman’s columns a couple of years ago when he flip-flopped on the war in Iraq. You see he was for it and against it, sort of like Sen. John Kerry on the funding for the war, about the time I was trying to tell the national desk that something was fishy in Bush’s D.C.
The Times plans to start charging for editorial columns in September, so Mr. Friedman’s audience will no doubt shrink considerably at that time. Somehow I doubt the FAIR action alert will do any good anyway, since all the activist’s e-mails will just go unread by the management at the paper. And besides, the State Department will ignore Friedman. Why shouldn’t we?
I’m sure there were newspaper columnists all over the land who stood with McCarthy and his blacklist during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Luckily, they are long forgotten.
Tags: Charging for the New York Times, Death of Newspapers, Domestic Terrorism, Free Press Under Assault, Iraq War
July 30th, 2005 at 11:18 am
I gave up on the NYT when their editorial during the momentary overthrow of the Venezuelan gov’t read something like this: The Venezuelan army, by overthrowing the President, abolishing the legislature, abolishing the constitution and installing the head of the Chamber of Commerce as President, saved democracy for Venezuela!
This was either just before or just after Howell Raines of Alabama was moved from editorial page editor to Senior Editor.
Since the Venezuelan momentary overthrow was planned and orchestrated by the CIA, it indicates to me that they decided after the Pentagon Papers revelation by the Times and Washington Post, to put a mole on the editorial staff.
Also, when Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News broke the story about the CIA’s bringing of crack cocaine into South LA, the Times and Post never reported the story. They did, however, claim that it was imposssible for the CIA to have done this and condemned the Mercury for carrying it.
And the only major columnist opposing Joe McCarthy was IF Stone for the NY Post, and he was fired for it. Ed R. Murrow on TV stood strong. All the rest bowed and crawled. I remember it well.
July 30th, 2005 at 12:34 pm
Wow, Jack, you go back before my time and remember a lot. We should talk.
Just for the blog record here and so other readers will get the benefit of this and learn my own bona fides, I had my own experience with CIA infiltration of the press in the early 1990s. I tell part of the story in this column posted under a pen name back when I first started blogging and writing a Sunday column for The Southerner Daily News at southerner.net/blog/.
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