Its not often that I hate anything. ‘Hate’ is a strong word with very little room for understanding and good critique, but we do reserve it for some things in life and I have for a long time reserved it for the New York Times. Without getting into the lower end of criticism of main stream media – along the lines of conspiracy theorists – or the higher end – along the lines of Chomsky’s propaganda model – one can dismiss the New York Times for its arrogance. A newspaper arrogant enough that it no longer needs to convey what actually matters in the long term, but what it deems matters in the short term. This is arrogance. More than anything, the publication is not about what it publishes but what it doesn’t publish. This is how it retains its stronghold. Anything else is pure castration.
Julian Assange recently revealed that the New York Times had over a thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers, well before Daniel Ellsberg handed over his copy to them. The New York Times never intended to publish the papers, until the realization that they were going to be published by Ellsberg anyway. More recently, we also know that the paper sought clearance from the State Department before publishing any stories of consequence based on the Wikileaks cables. It can only publish what will not make a difference to the way things already are – essentially everything worthless.
In January 2010, I for the first time read the travel section of the the New York Times, because it was related to a country I’ve been following for a long time: Sri Lanka. Out of 31 places to visit in 2010, Sri Lanka was at the top of the list at #1. What matters to the New York Times here is that Sri Lanka’s civil war ended seven months ago in May 2009 and what doesn’t matter is that a humanatrian disaster with tens of thousands of war ravaged people living in the north-east of the island were under an existential threat of physical and cultural annihilation.
The New York Times of course knew this and also of the war crimes allegations against the government of Sri Lanka. So how is it that it can suggest we must absolutely visit the beaches of a nation with people in pure agony and a brutal government? Because putting together a list of beautiful countries that we in the West can visit to fill the travel section, is actually is more important than not encouraging a politically failed state such as Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan example is obscure, since it is only after thirty years of conflict the world is slowly becoming aware of the politics of what has happened on the island and continuing to happen. But imagine for a moment that Israel declared war-on-terror, completely took over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank killing tens of thousands of civilians with international silence, ended all voilence and months later the New York Times declares Israel and the Palestinian territories to be the number one tourist destination for that year; because it is “rich in natural beauty and cultural splendors.” And then imagine this number one designation being proudly presented on the Israel Defense Forces website. This is exactly what happened in Sri Lanka.
At the most thoughtful level, The New York Times and papers modeled after it are really entertainment, with little regard for conveying the reality as confronted by most people in the the world.
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