On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 9:15 PM PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > I’ve actually had two brief Twitter arguments with Maggie Haberman. She > is not as bad as many of her critics maintain, but she is the prototype of > a certain kind of New York Times reporter, who sacrifices truth and > accuracy for access to powerful government sources. In a way she is the > Judith Miller of the Trump era (that is an exaggeration, she is nowhere > near as bad as Miller was). > > Still, any reporter, even Maggie or Chucky Todd, is a hero of the Republic > in the era of Trump’s constant war against the press. >
The story I heard about the Times when I was a young adult was about Walter Duranty. In the 1930s Stalin was industrializing the USSR and he needed export commodities to exchange for industrial parts. The grain farms in the Ukraine were collectivized and the government gave the local workers a starvation allowance of food and took the rest of the grain for food. Tens of thousands of people starved to death and any farmer who kept any grain to feed his family was arrested and executed. From time to time word got out to the west about the mass starvation and the Times asked Duranty, their reporter in Moscow, to investigate. He never left Moscow (and may not have been able to) and he talked to his Soviet government sources who denied that there was a mass starvation. And that was the story he filed each time. When the cult of Stalin ended in 1956 a lot of suppressed stories came out and there was a lot of anger in the US toward the NY Times for abetting a mass atrocity. Duranty was supposed to be a lesson to journalism about choosing access over investigation. One thing I haven't seen discussed yet is that the new Congress will certainly be having hearings about what has happened during the last 4 years and why. When the Democratic led House had hearings in 2019 and 2020 they got blocked by the refusal of the White House to allow their people to testify and the refusal of the DOJ to enforce subpoenas. Civil service employees couldn't be protected from retaliation. All of that changes on the 20th as the political appointees will no longer be in the White House and have presidential protection and the civil service employees will be encouraged to testify. I expect a lot of shocking wrongdoing will be uncovered and reporters like Haberman will be called to account for not reporting things going on all around her and choosing to print lies told to her by her sources instead. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiFSFNpkc2Wwzpx8dzSvvrFq8Hr4xzDfj5%2BUKNY1cg6kRw%40mail.gmail.com.
