86 Years Ago

The most effective ‘mouthpiece’ of those who would take away our 2nd Amendment protected rights is the New York Times (NYT).  The leadership on the left swear by it.  (The rest of us swear at it!)  The NYT repeats anti-2A propaganda and many readers unquestioningly believe whatever the NYT prints.

A favorite tactic of the left is to try and destroy the credibility of those that oppose them by highlighting even the smallest issue.  It’s time 2A defenders went on the offense and highlighted something that was no small issue; the NYT got it wrong and it contributed to 20 million people being killed.         

Below is a cautionary tale about unquestioned belief in the NYT that is reprinted from Legal Insurrection.

‘In 1939, Hitler and Stalin concluded secret negotiations, which resulted in the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23 of that year, to bring about their desired division of Eastern Europe, beginning with Poland. This pact allowed Hitler to invade Poland with the Soviets’ blessing, which, as is well known, set into motion the Second World War.’

‘What is much less well known is that the New York Times reported on the start of the War by repeating and reinforcing the Nazi propaganda. The renowned author and journalist Ashley Rindsberg elaborates on this fact in his recent bestseller The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History (p. 27): The New York Times bought the Nazi dupe without flinching. Underneath its famous banner, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” the paper reported that, according to “Chancellor Hitler,” Germany had been attacked. Already in the second paragraph of the Times’s front-page article, the reporter … reprint[ed] verbatim Hitler’s infamous war speech to the Reichstag, which the Führer used to justify to the world, as much as to the German people, his invasion of Poland….’

‘Rindsberg describes this New York Times article as “what likely constitutes the single biggest, yet least recognized, journalistic failure on record.” (p. 26)  Eighty-six years later, American socialists and progressives, and even numerous liberals, still swear by the content and narrative promoted by the Times. They consider reading and trusting the paper a matter of intellectual refinement, social awareness, and moral superiority.’ (Emphasis added)

What Legal Insurrection did not talk about was that the NYT had a history of misrepresenting what was happening in the USSR.  Walter Duranty was a New York Times reporter, living in relative comfort in Moscow with his mistress, while Duranty covered up Stalin’s crimes, including the Ukrainian famine / genocide. 

He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. 

Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist of note, later described Duranty as “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.”

But no editor at the NYT thought to question Duranty’s reporting.  Could it be that the NYT’s ideological sympathy was in line with socialism just as it is in line, today, with the anti-2A movement?

Gun grabbers use every opportunity to tell the general public of the awfulness of civilian gun ownership.  As defenders of 2A, we are well informed of the counter arguments, but those who exclusively read the NYT probably never read those counter arguments.  And those same readers put the NYT on a pedestal that it does not deserve.