Truth of The Times

Book review: The Gray Lady Winked, by Ashley Rindsberg, Midnight Oil Publishers (May 3, 2021),‎ 284 pages, ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1736703304

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In the midst of the greatest mass deception that the world has ever known, led by Western liberal media with the New York Times at the head of the mob, comes a book that chronicles ten historic circumstances in which the Times could not be trusted, some because of editorial negligence, but most because the Times chose to elevate one ideology or another above their core journalistic mission of reporting truth. Nowhere is the COVID story mentioned, or the role of the Times in promoting the Pharma/CDC narrative without question, but the book provides essential background which helps us to be skeptical in a time when the imperative for skepticism is paramount.

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I experienced my personal disenchantment with the New York Times in 2004. In the days following the Bush-Kerry election, I contributed to an email exchange group noting anomalies that pointed to a stolen election. I was teaching graduate statistics at the time, and other members of our group included lawyers, engineers, and college professors. We took our statistical case to the New York Times, laid out in clear and quantitative terms the evidence for our hypothesis that votes had been shifted, across the country but especially in Ohio. 

You may remember that Ohio had been the last, outcome-determining state to report late that Tuesday night. At midnight, Kerry was ahead by 100,000 votes; then the Ohio feed went black because of a “computer glitch” in the central processor in the state capital. When the computer came back on line two hours later, Bush was ahead by 100,000 votes, and he maintained his lead in Ohio, and thus in the Electoral College vote.

When we submitted our evidence to the New York Times, we were not overly optimistic. None of us had the kind of contacts that could command a return phone call from the Times newsroom. We expected to be ignored. 

But we were not ignored. A week after the election, the Times wrote about our group but not our concerns, never responding to our statistical evidence. They never interviewed me, nor any of the members of our group with Ivy League degrees and professional credentials. But they profiled a woman from Colorado, a Junior High School math teacher who was in over her head. They made her look foolish, without ever examining the content of her message or ours. 

This was a hit piece, fashioned under circumstances in which we knew the Times had access to better information. How could I regard this as anything other than deliberate deception by the Newspaper of Record? And the effect of this deception by the Liberal standard-bearer of the Fourth Estate was to legitimize the tainted election of a belligerent, Neo-con president.

Paul Krugman, the Times’s long-running economic columnist, had published a series of op-eds through the 2004 election season in which he catalogued vulnerabilities of the electronic voting systems that had been newly adopted pursuant to the Help America Vote Act, and warned of a real possibility that the election could be stolen. Krugman’s last column was published just before the election. He was “on leave” until January, and when his column returned, he never again mentioned the spectre of electronic vote-rigging.

Politically-motivated news management in the 21st Century

As I write this, the New York Times has just unceremoniously reversed its position on the Hunter Biden laptop emails. These came out before the 2020 election, and they appeared to show that the the son of then vice president Joe Biden had shaken down Ukraine’s national oil company for personal gain with threats of withholding US economic aid. This revelation could have materially affected the Biden-Trump election, and the Times, at the time, assured its readers that there was no truth in the charges, that the emails were not real, that the story had been fabricated by Russian disinformation agents. The Times actively denied a true story which might have undermined Biden’s electoral prospects. 

This was reminiscent of their actions in 2004, spiking a story that G. W. Bush had been silently, electronically prompted during his debates with Kerry, and delaying until after the election another story about widespread, illegal domestic surveillance of every phone call we made and email we sent. 

Also current is the war in Ukraine, which the Times is reporting in simplistic terms, Putin in the role of villain, with no reference to the context of NATO’s expansion into the former Soviet republics, or the American (VP Biden) installation of a puppet regime in Kiev, or the complex historic relationship between Ukraine and Russia over the centuries. 

The Book

I knew all this before reading the book, but I also knew the Times of the Vietnam era, bravely publishing the Watergate story and the Pentagon Papers, the Wikileaks scandal of its day. I did not know most of what was in Ashley Rindsberg’s book. 

The Times was supportive of Hitler through the 1930s, and consistently downplayed the possibility he might have imperial designs on Europe and the world, at a time when many other Western journalists saw clearly who Hitler was and what were his ambitions. Even after the War began, the Times’s coverage of the Nazis was spearheaded by Guido Enderis, who often quoted from Nazi press releases as fact. 

Not despite but because of the fact that the Times is owned and managed by Jews, the Times deliberately downplayed evidence of death camps and genocide in the Third Reich. They made a strategic decision to bend over backward not to appear to advocate Jewish causes in any way, and thus they failed to report in real time on one of the greatest mass murder operations of the Twentieth Century.

The Times also was complicit in hiding the atrocities of Joseph Stalin. Their bureau chief in Moscow, Walter Durante, was either on Stalin’s payroll, or a starry-eyed believer in the Communist doctrine that utopian ends justify brutal means. 

When America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Times reporter was revealed to have been given special access to the research, and was actually on board one of the bombers. In return for access, he had become a mouthpiece for government propaganda about atomic weaponry. The most damaging lie to come out of William L. Laurence’s reportage was that there were no long-lasting effects of nuclear radiation that might affect human health.

The best-known Times deception of our era was Judith Miller’s articles promoting the fiction of “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”, leading up to the 2003 American bombing and invasion. Miller’s case was based on an unnamed highly-placed Administration source, who turned out to be VP Cheney’s right-hand man, Scooter Libby. Miller published the claims uncritically as fact, without investigating them. As it turned out, there was no truth behind them, and the disaster of America’s war in Iraq was built on this lie.

The scandal of Jayson Blair is laid out in much detail, not because it is politically significant, but because it represents egregious lack of oversight. Blair made his name reporting on PTSD of American servicemen in the aftermath of the Iraq wars, and the story he told was tainted by plagiarism and fabrication, but though it was one-sided, it was not thematically inaccurate. 

What the book leaves out 

The Gray Lady Winked remains safely in the realm of examples where historical perspective has belied the Times’s coverage. The book avoids areas which are still controversial, where some large fraction of the public knows the truths that the Times has been hiding, but these truths have not been acknowledged in polite society, or in the Mainstream press.

There is no mention in the Gray Lady of the JFK assassination, or the other history-changing assassinations of the 1960s, including Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X. For those who read books, these assassinations have all been linked to our own CIA and FBI. (For those who still have questions about these events, I recommend, in particular, JFK and the Unspeakable and The Plot to Kill King.) The JFK assassination derailed a progressive movement in American politics, especially JFK’s determination to support third world nations to remain non-aligned, and his decision to disengage from Vietnam. 

There is no mention of 9/11, or the abundant physical and eyewitness evidence that the Twin Towers (along with a third tower, Building 7) were brought down by controlled demolition, independent of airplanes and localized fires. The implication that “9/11 was an inside job” has explosive potential to disgrace and indict current officials of the US government, as well as recent presidents and vice presidents. It begs the question why Obama, coming to office in 2009, told the nation to “look forward, not backward”, when he might have launched an inquiry that brought down the whole neoCon horror show. And 9/11 inquiry remains our best chance to delegitimize the “war on terror” and all the autocratic overreach that comes with it. The Times did at one point entertain questions and alternative narratives about 9/11, but (my personal observation) they were long ago scrubbed from the NYTimes web site, and I have been unable to locate articles that I remember even in Archive.org. 

The Gray Lady was written before the pandemic, and it took a long time for Rindsberg to get it out into the world. But certainly the lessons of the book are most enlightening when applied to the COVID narrative. I don’t know what you believe about the pandemic’s origins and the lockdowns, masking, and vaccines used in response, but I have been open with my beliefs since the beginning and in my current writing.

• The COVID virus carries signs of its artificial origins. SARS-CoV-2 was engineered as a bioweapon and deliberately released. 
• The spike protein is the toxic payload, designed into the virus. To design vaccines around the spike protein was to assure that the worst of the virus gets delivered to every vaccine recipient.
• The most effective early treatments for COVID, including hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, zinc and vitamin D were criminally suppressed by government regulators with complicity of the medical establishment.
• The vaccines have created an enormous burden of death and chronic disease on a scale 100 times worse than the most dangerous vaccines of the past.

It is not contested that the US has one of the worst death rates from COVID in the world, higher than Italy or Iran which had such a hard time up front, more than twice as high as India, 23 times higher than Japan and 200 times higher than Nigeria. Can anyone say with a straight face that we had the right ideas about how to protect the public from the virus? Also uncontested is that, according to the only public database of vaccine reactions in America, the mRNA vaccines have been associated with 90 times more deaths than the second most deadly vaccine (Shingrix).

You can read none of this in the NYTimes, and much of it is actively denied. Robert Kennedy Jr wrote a scathing expose, thoroughly documented, putting deception and profiteering around COVID in the context of Big Pharma’s historical corruption of the medical establishment and the regulatory agencies. The book reached #1 bestseller status according to some lists, but not the Times’s. Of course, the Times never reviewed the book; but most shamefully, they published a character assassination of Kennedy that cited none of the explosive material in his book, and made no substantive counter-arguments. In my view, the COVID deception has been the greatest fraud in human history, and it could never have been done if the New York Times had maintained any vestige of its commitment to honest reporting. 

 

Conclusion

Editors of The Times realize that they have the power to affect public perception, change electoral outcomes, and redirect the course of history. They are using this power consciously for various agendas, sometimes at the expense of truth. With the quality of their prose and the assiduous attention of their copy editors, they have maintained their reputation as the Newspaper of Record, the pinnacle of Western Journalism, All the News that’s Fit to Print. But those who want to know the truth about current affairs are learning to read broadly from an abundance of blogs, podcasts, and independent journalists to supplement the news we get from a mainstream chorus that is increasingly singing in unison.