I don’t read the New York Times seeking any valuable content, but I will look at it once in a while just to see what the paper is up to. How it is functioning in its totality as pure media.
The last article I actually read in its entirety is “Tamil Parties Make Strong Showing in Sri Lanka” by Lydia Polgreen. Under the guise of giving the readers context for the elections in Sri Lanka, amongst other things, the author writes ”Sri Lanka’s government has come under harsh scrutiny for its handling of the war against the Tamil Tigers, a ruthless insurgency that pioneered tactics like using children as soldiers and women as suicide bombers.”
Yes it actually says that the Tigers pioneered the use of child soldiers. My goal here is not to defend the Tigers or the use of children as soldiers, but anyone with an internet connection can see how ridiculously untrue this statement is. Children have been forced to fight as soldiers for thousands of years by virtually all armies from the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks, to the Romans to the Chinese to the Nazis. The American civil war had children fighting as did the Polish resistance in World War II.
The New York Times’ lie of the Tigers as the first to use children as soldiers has an ideological purpose here: non-western entities from far away places are capable of coming up with horrible things like child soldiers. Projecting everything evil onto societies different to the ones the readers belong to strengthens the force and enjoyability of the article. The article’s discussed event of elections in Sri Lanka is neither the subject nor the actual message – it is the medium by which the New York Times delivers us the actual message: be assured on the validity and relevance of this article and the authority of this newspaper.
The New York Times embeds its ideology deep enough for most of its readers not to really notice it as ideology. It easily glosses over historical realities in the defense and promotion of Western liberal values. Its possible to create an anatomy of any New York Times article and expose its underlying rhetorical devices deployed at the service of keeping the world as a matter of us versus them.
Also see: “How the US media marginalises dissent” by Ted Rall, Al Jazeera