Accuracy in Media
Saturday, June 9, 2001

A year ago we had raised the issue of Jesse Dirkhising, the 13-year-old boy who was tortured to death by two homosexuals in Arkansas in September 1999. The media's general failure to cover the murder stands in sharp contrast to the massive coverage of the death of Mathew Shepard, the gay college student in Wyoming. The Times hadn't published a word on the Dirkhising case.

A year later, nothing had changed. In fact, when Cliff Kincaid mentioned Dirkhising's name again, Sulzberger admitted that it didn't ring a bell. The Times' failure to cover the case was mentioned by John Leo of U.S. News & World Report in a recent column in which he said, "Since the murder, not one story about the Jesse Dirkhising case has appeared in the New York Times." Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic, who is himself gay, told John Leo that the New York Times would rather go out of business than report the Dirkhising story.

This reflects a hard pro-gay bias. Kincaid noted that Richard Berke, the Times national political correspondent, has said openly that homosexuals have a dominant role at the New York Times. Specifically, here's his quote: "There are times when you look at the front page meeting and literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals."

Cliff asked Sulzberger to comment on the paper's pro-homosexual bias, and whether this is responsible for suppressing the Jesse Dirkhising story. Sulzberger said: "Well, I know Rick Berke very well, and I'm surprised he made a comment like that because it's not true. But even if it were true, that would not bother me. You'd have to know the people sitting in those page one meetings, and I know that this is just false. But that is not the point." He went on to claim that the Times is not embarrassed by its coverage on this or any other issue.

Sulzberger then added that he wanted to point out that a Fortune magazine survey of the world's most admired companies concluded that the Times Co. offered its customers the best service and product. "And I believe they are correct," he said.

Cliff protested at that point, "What does that have to do with suppressing this story?" His reply was: "I don't think we're suppressing this story. We've got to move on now." When Cliff reiterated that not one word had appeared in the Times on it, he said, "That's what you say. I'll take your word for it." But still no explanation of this obvious pro-gay bias.

Sulzberger didn't say how many gays he thought were represented at the front-page meetings of the New York Times. Whatever the number, Sulzberger said it didn't matter one way or another.

But it DOES matter, and the Dirkhising case proves it. Last December, a Gallup poll found that confidence in the news media had hit a new low. Two-thirds of those polled didn't trust the reporting, and there was no mention of the poll making an exception for the New York Times.

Sulzberger was not only put on the defensive regarding the paper's coverage of gays, but of China. A.M. Rosenthal, forced by the Times into retirement, has written some excellent columns lately about human rights violations in China. However, they appear in the Times' competitor, the New York Daily News. By contrast, the Times now runs columns by Tom Friedman, who, on the day of the New York Times' annual meeting, had a column about progress in China.

Friedman described China as an authoritarian state. He didn't use the term dictatorship. He went on to talk about the rise in personal freedoms in China, including the use of the Internet. Cliff asked Arthur Sulzberger and Martin Nisenholtz, the CEO of New York Times Digital, who is responsible for the New York Times on the Web, about reports that ordinary Chinese citizens do not have access to the Internet and foreign sources such as the New York Times. He asked if this was true.

Nisenholtz acknowledged that it was, saying that the Times on the Web was not available in China unless you were able to hack into it. He said this was because the regime was blocking it. So the authoritarian government described by Friedman that is supposedly allowing people more personal and Internet freedom actually blocks access to the columns of Tom Friedman!

But readers of Friedman's column had no way of knowing that. Nizenholtz said the Times had "discussed this with the Chinese and made the point that we would very much appreciate the New York Times being distributed in China but obviously we can't do any more than that." Another Times official said they had run editorials and stories on this subject, but Friedman seemed to be unaware of them.

Times Mimics China TV

Cliff then asked Sulzberger about his paper's preference for the term "spy plane" in describing the American EP-3 plane seized by the Chinese regime. The Pentagon referred to it as a surveillance or reconnaissance aircraft. It's a lumbering plane that was on automatic pilot over international waters. The use of the term spy plane implied something suspicious and illegal. The Times preferred the Chinese term and, in an editorial, even defended the Chinese going aboard this plane and checking out the equipment, most of which was destroyed by the crew.

Cliff asked Sulzberger whether his paper was pandering to the regime or if it was just a coincidence that the Times used the same terminology employed by the official Chinese television agency. He replied, "I'm delighted to tell you that unequivocally the New York Times is not pandering to the Chinese regime." He also denied that the Times had any business interests or investments in China, saying, "Not that I'm aware of. Not on purpose."

Attacking Bush's Anti-Missile Plan

The strange news judgment of the New York Times was on display once again when it ran a lead front-page story on April 30th about how the Bush administration was preparing to break out of the ABM Treaty in order to deploy a national missile defense system. The first paragraph of the story said the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty "has been the cornerstone of arms control for nearly 30 years." The administration's decision was depicted as alarming and dangerous.

But that claim about the treaty is false. The ABM Treaty, which was signed with the Soviet Union, died when the Soviet Union broke apart. But the Times had a clever way of distorting that critical fact. In a box on page one next to the story itself, the Times explained that the ABM treaty was "later extended to Russia and other ex-Soviet nuclear states..."

Extended? By whom? Treaties are supposed to be ratified by the U.S. Senate with a two-thirds vote. The "extension" of the ABM treaty was not even submitted to the Senate. It was "extended" at the whim of then-President Bill Clinton. This aspect of the controversy was not explained at all by the New York Times. What's more, the Times completely ignored the evidence that the Soviets, and now the Russians, violated the ABM treaty.

The Clinton administration renegotiated the ABM Treaty, signing agreements with the states of the former Soviet Union, but it refused to submit them to the Senate for ratification. This was a subject of bitter controversy. Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had asked for them to be submitted, knowing that they would be rejected

This background makes laughable the Times' claim that the ABM Treaty has been the "cornerstone" of arms control. But it's even more ridiculous when you consider the evidence that the Soviets massively violated it.

Former CIA/DIA official William T. Lee's book, "The ABM Treaty Charade: A Study in Elite Illusion and Delusion," proves that the Russians have violated the treaty by integrating thousands of dual-purpose anti-aircraft weapons with large radars that provide warnings of a missile attack. Lee says the Russians are set to obtain a big strategic advantage if they continue to improve their nuclear arsenal while we adhere to the ABM Treaty.

Reprinted with permission of Accuracy in Media (www.aim.org) from its AIM Report #9.

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