Who Tells the New York Times What is Fit to Print?
Who Tells the New York Times What is Fit to Print?
I have been reading The New York Times regularly for almost sixty years, since the first time I lived in New York from 1963 to 1966, on paper whenever possible as well as online once that was also available. I was never under the illusion that their prominent motto ( "All the News that's Fit to Print") was anything more than an idle boast. But I always found some excellent reporting as well as much that wasn't. In my opinion, in recent years, both the Times and the Washington Post have improved significantly by running more frequent investigative reporting challenging conventional wisdom on many issues.
The most striking recent exception to this pattern, however, has been coverage of the war in Ukraine, where the Times as well as other Western media have served as faithful echoes of the Washington party line.
Few examples have been as transparent, however, as an article that appeared on March 7 after Seymour Hersh's detailed exposé on Substack on February 8 of U.S. responsibility for sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline.
The headline in that article proclaimed:
"Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say
New intelligence reporting amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe."
Hersch, of course, needs no help to defend himself as he did in an article about the cover up involving stories planted in both the Times and the German publication Die Zeit.
The New York Times, however, dropped the story entirely after that misleading article.
In this short note, my goal is not to advance my own views on the war in Ukraine, but simply to ask all those who are commenting on the war to make a greater effort to take into account a much wider range of sources than mainstream Western media.
That implies, in my opinion, heavily discounting any "news" or "analysis" coming directly or indirectly from official sources in any of the three countries who are the major combatants, including the United States as well as Russia and Ukraine.
As the war continues, with no end in sight, even the details of the military balance on the battlefields from day to day are much disputed. In terms of the global media battle, however, it is clear that heavy-handed Russian propaganda has been met by far more successful disinformation by the media-savvy Ukrainian and U.S. foreign policy establishments.
Over the past year, therefore, I have tried to educate myself by reading widely, including books for background as well as news and analysis available online.
A short list of books that I have read or have on my to-read list is here.
For readers in the United States, these are all available to purchase at Bookshop.org.
A wide variety of other sources, including videos as well as articles, is available in this Google drive document.
War in Ukraine: Key Background Sources
Among these sources I recommend for particularly useful background are two recently published books and one set of articles.
The first book, published this year, is Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022, by Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. Both authors are familiar with sources in both Ukrainian and Russian, and have done research in Ukraine. Arel is the chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa and Driscoll an associate professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego. The book is a close analysis of the period from 2013 to 2022.
The second, published in 2022, is From the Fires of War: Ukraine's Azov Movement and the Global Far Right, by Michael Colborne. Colborne is a Canadian journalist and researcher who focuses on the far right in Eastern Europe. His first-hand research shows how Azov has grown from a militia of fringe far-right figures and football hooligans fending off Russian-backed forces into a multipronged social movement with wide influence far beyond those who share its far-right ideology and glorification of violence.
The articles to note are far more limited in scope, analyzing the background to the period leading up to the Russian invasion and contradicting the more common Western narrative. Jacques Baud is a former Swiss intelligence official whose career includes several years in the previous decade on the NATO staff with the mandate of providing military support for Ukraine. See two of his articles available in English, published on April 1 and April 11, 2022, respectively. He often cites confidential Western intelligence sources without attribution, so I make no claim to be able to verify how accurate they are. However, his analysis is both detailed and cogent. He is no admirer of Russia but strongly critical of Western policies. I note them not because I regard them as the last word, but simply to indicate that it is far more complicated than the conventional narrative in Washington.
Additional updates from AfricaFocus Notes
From today: Articles on the death of Randall Robinson
And from March 24, updates on several other current issues
Bill (William) Minter, Editor, AfricaFocus Notes
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