|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Sue the New York Times! Lowell Ponte During the Vietnam War era a father tried to talk sense into his radicalized loony-left son, who had just been arrested a second time for taking part in disruptive anti-war demonstrations.
"If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier," the father asked, "which would you like to see get shot?"
"I would want to see the American get shot," replied the adolescent. "It's the other guy's country. We shouldn't be there."
Story Continues Below That radical young man who approved the killing of American soldiers by Communists was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. In 1992 he replaced his retiring father as publisher of what remains the most influential newspaper in the United States, the New York Times.
"We are enormously powerful, and we are very scary," this hereditary ruler and now chairman of the Times corporate empire (which also owns the Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and other media outlets) boasted to an Associated Press interviewer in 2003.
In his megalomania, this un-elected enfant terrible, "Pinch" Sulzberger, has moved the New York Times so far to the ideological left that even its sports columnists were told never to contradict the Politically Correct line of Times editorials and – what amounts to the same thing – its heavily left-slanted news reporting.
"Why do they hate us?" asked U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone. The "they" he referred to are editors of the New York Times who "have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety."
Days ago these editors again published classified details of U.S. government efforts to monitor and thwart foreign terrorists like those who on 9/11 skyjacked airliners, destroyed the World Trade Center Towers, struck the Pentagon and killed 3,000 Americans.
To serve "the public interest," wrote Sulzberger's hand-picked Executive Editor Bill Keller, the Times days ago exposed secret U.S. monitoring of international financial transactions through the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT).
This monitoring had already made possible the apprehension of the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist behind the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 200 Westerners. (And, ironically, a September 24, 2001, Times editorial had called for precisely this kind of clandestine financial monitoring to help prevent future 9/11s.) This program's exposure by the Times virtually guarantees that it will catch no more terrorists.
Keller shares his boss's far-leftist ideology. Son of the former chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation, Keller was radicalized at Reed College and at the Times' Soviet and South African bureaus. This "objective" journalist once referred to three Republican U.S. senators as "the Taliban wing of the American right."
Religion is apparently one key to Keller's hatred for conservatives. He has described himself as a "collapsed Catholic" who is "well beyond lapsed." He has criticized President Bush's "public piety" and described Republican Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum as a "Catholic theocrat."
Keller wrote that Roman Catholic Pope John Paul II "shaped a hierarchy that is intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live." Keller wrote that the Catholic Church "exists first and foremost to preserve its power," and that "This is, after all, the church that gave us the Crusades and the Inquisition."
Like Sulzberger, Keller says that the New York Times has no liberal bias, just an "urban" perspective in its values and political views. "Traditionally, because our origins are urban," said Keller in a November 2004 USA Today interview, "urban cultural liberals tend to come across [in coverage] as more three-dimensional than conservatives or suburban Republicans."
This newspaper installed Fidel Castro as Communist dictator of Cuba with radical left reporting that sold him to Americans as an "agarian reformer." It won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from the Soviet Union that covered up Josef Stalin's genocide of as many as 17 million Ukrainians. Keller and Sulzberger refused to return this Pulitzer after the Times' dishonest reporting was documented because to do so, said Keller with Orwellian doublespeak, would be to "rewrite history."
And now, once again, the New York Times is giving aid and comfort to America's enemies.
How should Americans respond? Rep. Peter King, Republican from New York, has called for prosecution of Sulzberger and Keller under the espionage act, which would likely fail and turn them into martyrs.
National Review recommends pulling the Times' White House and congressional press credentials. This is opposed by the head of the journalist committee that rules on such credentials, Susan Milligan (a reporter for the Boston Globe, owned by the Times Company). The Times is now so partisan and so ideologically anti-American that it is more like the Communist Party Daily Worker than a legitimate newspaper trying to do honest reporting. But pulling its credentials would rally other threatened media to its side, set a troubling precedent, and create martyrs.
The Justice Department should demand that immunized Times reporters disclose who in the government – probably Clinton administration holdovers – so cavalierly put national security at risk by disclosing classified information. Reporters who refuse can spend 18 months in jail for contempt. Surely a Times willing to publish classified secrets in time of war cannot object to serving "the public interest" by exposing its criminal secret sources who for partisan purposes are endangering the public, can it?
(The Times evinced concern over hypothetical privacy violations by this anti-terrorist program, but neither it nor the ACLU seems concerned about government prying into our financial lives by the IRS or FinCEN [see http://www.fincen.gov/]).
If and when Islamist terrorists again strike the United States, the Times should be sued by every family of those the terrorists injure or kill.
After all, in a world of "joint and several liability," a jury could now reasonably hold the Times partly responsible for such terrorist attacks because of the help its reporting has knowingly given to the terrorists. The Times has become a de facto terrorist accomplice. If morality, ethics and criminal law cannot make this reckless newspaper behave responsibly, perhaps money – in the form of canceled subscriptions and civil lawsuit judgments – can.
Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |