By Nicholas Stix
Originally published on October 7, 2005
Imagine if one demographic group in America were 33 times more prone to commit crimes than another group.
Imagine if one demographic group in America were 33 times more prone to commit crimes than another group. How would you feel about the relatively crime-prone group? The relatively crime-free group? Wouldn’t you want to know about such differences?
But we don’t have to imagine anything. The above contrast was not a hypothetical case, but rather the statistical relationship of black to Asian crime in America, as detailed in the new report, The Color of Crime, released by the New Century Foundation, the organization that sponsors American Renaissance magazine.
* “… between 2001 and 2003, blacks were 39 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than the reverse, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.”
* Between 2001 and 2003, blacks committed, on average, 15,400 black-on-white rapes per year, while whites averaged only 900 white-on-black rapes per year.
* “Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.”
But there are five-and-one-half as many whites as blacks. If anything, the numbers should be reversed. After all, as leftists always tell us, all groups are supposed to be equally represented in all categories, for good or ill. (Well, not really. Leftists never call on the NBA and NFL to institute racial parity for white players.)
* Nationally, youth gangs are 90 percent non-white. “Hispanics are 19 times more likely than whites to be members of youth gangs. Blacks are 15 times more likely, and Asians are nine times more likely.”
* The only crime category in which Asians are more heavily represented than whites is illegal gambling.
* “Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.”
But how can that be, when for years commentators of all political persuasions have insisted that the majority of the victims of black crime are themselves black? But it has been true for some time, because blacks increasingly target whites based on the color of the latter’s skin. The commentators have been guilty variously of lying or laziness.
* Far from being guilty of “racially profiling” innocent blacks, police have been exercising racial bias on behalf of blacks, arresting fewer blacks than their proportion of criminals: “… blacks who committed crimes that were reported to the police were 26 percent less likely to be arrested than people of other races who committed the same crimes.”
* “… police are determined to arrest non-black rather than black criminals.” (I have seen this practice in operation on the streets and subways of New York.)
* “[Blacks] are eight times more likely than people of other races to rob someone, for example, and 5.5 times more likely to steal a car.”
Well, as everyone knows, innocent blacks get rounded up by the police all the time, so we can safely ignore such statistics. After all, isn’t that what the NAACP, Village Voice, New York Times, and countless black “activists” and prominent academics have been saying for years? And although the folks insisting on the reality of racial profiling have no facts to back up their claims, they enjoy political prestige and moral authority. The Color of Crime, meanwhile, is based merely on lowly facts. As we shall see, prominent people are already saying that we should ignore The Color of Crime, because it wasn’t produced by the right sort of people. (And of course, the right sort of people never tells the truth about race and crime.)
* Charges of racial profiling, which maintain that police target innocent black motorists for traffic stops notwithstanding, a 2002 study by Maryland’s Public Service Research Institute, found that police were stopping too few black speeders (23%), compared to their proportion of actual speeders (25%). In fact, “blacks were twice as likely to speed as whites” in general, and there was an even higher frequency of black speeders in the 90-mph and higher range.
* “… the only evidence for police bias is disproportionate arrest rates for those groups police critics say are the targets of bias. High black arrest rates appear to reflect high crime rates, not police misconduct.”
* Blacks not only commit violent crimes at far higher rates than non-blacks, but their crimes are more violent than those of whites. Blacks are three times as likely as non-blacks to commit assault with guns, and twice as likely as non-blacks to commit assault with knives.
* Blacks not only commit violent crimes at far higher rates than whites, but blacks commit “white collar” offenses — fraud, bribery, racketeering and embezzlement, respectively — at two to five times the white rate.
* The single greatest indicator of an area’s crime rate is not poverty or education, but race and ethnicity. Even when one controls for income, the black crime rate is much higher than the white rate.
Things are actually much worse than the above notes suggest. As The Color of Crime notes, the feds inflate white crime statistics by counting Hispanic offenders as white; at the same time, “Hispanics are a [hate crime] victim category but not a perpetrator category.” If someone attacks a Mexican for racial reasons, he becomes a Hispanic victim of a hate crime. However, if the same Mexican commits a hate crime against a black, he is classified as a ‘white’ perpetrator. Even more absurdly, if a Mexican commits a hate crime against a white, both victim and perpetrator are reported as white.” Thus, the number of white perpetrators is exaggerated, while the number of white victims is constricted by the federal double-standard.
And as the study fails to note, with black-on-white male prison rape an institutionalized sport among black inmates, hundreds of thousands of white men have thus been victimized but never counted by the government. Meanwhile, white-on-black male prison rape is virtually non-existent.
Some of the study’s many sources were the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs); the feds’ National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS), in which 149,000 people across the country, in statistical proportion to all demographic groups, were called; the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS); and Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHRs); State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS); National Youth Gang Survey; the Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP); and National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP). The succinct report slays dragons in the course of mere footnotes, such as its nailing of tenured California State University criminology professor Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, who in her book Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls and Controversies, the reality of interracial violence be damned, depicted whites only as perpetrators, and not as the victims of hate crimes.
The Color of Crime – not to be confused with a 1998 piece of propaganda of the same name by tenured University of Maryland professor of criminology, Katheryn K. Russell – is the most scientifically rigorous research on crime and race available. It’s the state of the art.
The mainstream media will surely be anxious to publicize and discuss
The Color of Crime. After all, hasn’t the public been inundated since the late 1990s (and ultimately, since the 1960s) with dubious charges of racism (“racial profiling”) against law enforcement and the justice system? And don’t the MSM always tell us that they will report on anything newsworthy? Doesn’t the New York Times claim to be “the newspaper of record”?
In a future column, we shall see just how the MSM has responded to The Color of Crime.
In any event, the report gave in precise numbers what any sentient being over the age of twenty and living in the United States has long known. A 75-year-old Irish neighbor of mine is a retired nurse who was run out of a once-lovely Brooklyn neighborhood forty years ago by “integration” (read: brazen black crime in broad daylight). As she said to me last spring on the street, “The problem is … you know what the problem is.”
Friday, September 21, 2007
New York Times to White Prisoners: ‘Bend Over and Take It’
By Nicholas Stix
November 22, 2004
If you’re an Arab terrorist, the New York Times is willing to lie about the Geneva Conventions, in order to aid and abet you. But if you’re a white American prisoner, as far as Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. and his lackeys are concerned, no punishment is too grisly to be meted out to you.
The November 14 Times ran a house editorial, “Racial Segregation in Prison”, opposing a California prison policy being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court, that for many white prisoners, has been the difference between life and death.
California prison officials have in recent years been guilty of showing mercy to white prisoners, and the Times will not stand for that. The California Department of Corrections racially segregates new prisoners with members of their own race for 60 days after their arrival in an institution.
The reason for the practice is simple enough, but in matters of race, the Times can always be counted on to hide from, or lie about the facts. Targeting white inmates for rape based on the color of their skin has long been a sport among the black (and to a lesser degree, Hispanic) prisoners who dominate so many prisons in this country, and who consider such racial attacks their birthright. And since such rapes are often committed by violent offenders who know they are HIV+, and result in the death of the victim through AIDS, they are thus a package deal of assault, rape, and murder, not to mention the sexual slavery that the rape initiates.
Note that the slavery that is pervasive in the nation’s prisons is just one more thing the Times doesn’t want you to know about. And so, the same newspaper that opposes the death penalty for blacks and Hispanics is not at all concerned, if every prison sentence for a white man, no matter how brief and how petty the offense, may become in practice, a death sentence. I believe the Constitution calls that, “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. couldn’t care less about some white guys getting the shaft. Indeed, the racial socialism Sulzberger’s paper promotes both in its news and editorial sections, amounts to little more than the belief that white, heterosexual men should get the shaft, literally and figuratively, in every possible way. Or at least, white, heterosexual men who aren’t well-to-do leftists. Conversely, if it were known that white prisoners were violently raping, sexually enslaving, and murdering black prisoners through the deliberate transmission of HIV infection, the story would run in its proper place, on the top of page one.
The anonymous Times editorialist opined,
Justice Stevens was being cute; he didn’t for one moment think his question was stupid. Let’s see. If we break up the white minority of inmates in most maximum security California prisons, and pair them off with racist, ultraviolent, black and Hispanic gangbangers, will that discourage racial gangs or racial violence? In a word, Mr. Justice: No. But such a policy would give us the penal equivalent of busing, another program that rich leftists who are insulated from its consequences have always loved.
Last May, John Paul Stevens made much of his opposition to the death penalty. However, Stevens has no problem with the machinery of death when, in the hands of racist black and Hispanic prisoners, it takes the lives of white prisoners.
In an irony that is likely lost on Justice Stevens, the only white male prisoners who are reasonably safe are the ultraviolent, neo-Nazi sociopaths who are members of white supremacist gangs. The white gang members protect each other.
Back to the Times:
The far-left “Ninth Circus” showed some humanity! Well, we can’t have that, can we?
The Times editorialist exploited a peculiar institution of contemporary discourse. Socialists and communists like Pinch Sulzberger have for forty years demonized anyone who talks in explicitly racial terms, unless he is seeking to provide racial advantages to blacks. Speaking in explicitly racial terms about black racism or black social pathologies, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan learned almost 40 years ago, gets one shouted down as a “racist,” and booted out of polite society. And so, California officials didn’t dare mention to the justices the 800-pound gorilla of race in the courtroom, a reticence which the Times editorialist then exploited with, “California produced little evidence to support its segregation policy …”
The Times:
This is the usual Times hypocrisy, where race is concerned. When a policy racially advantages blacks and disadvantages whites, the Times supports blanket policies, and opposes all scrutiny and skepticism. And the California policy is of course in response to “serious threats or instances of racially motivated violence.” What the Times writer really means, is that where white victims are concerned, nothing counts as a “serious threat” or as “racially motivated violence.”
And we can safely ignore the Times’ reference to “the history of racial discrimination in American penology,” which is just the sort of blanket statement that the writer already condemned. (But it’s a blanket statement in favor of black racial privilege.) Whenever the Times proposes some sort of outrageous racial notion or practice, it repeats the mantra, “the history of racial discrimination.”
(Times op-ed columnist and racial newsroom enforcer, Bob Herbert, did just that on August 20, in “Voting While Black,” when he argued that for Florida state police detectives to interview elderly black witnesses in the latter’s homes while armed, as part of an election fraud investigation, constituted racial intimidation.
“The officers were armed and in plain clothes. For elderly African-American voters, who remember the terrible torment inflicted on blacks who tried to vote in the South in the 1950's and 60's, the sight of armed police officers coming into their homes to interrogate them about voting is chilling indeed.”
Note Herbert’s logical implication that police officers should not be permitted to be armed while working in black neighborhoods, lest they cause residents to “remember the terrible torment inflicted on blacks …”)
By the way, can someone explain to me how racially segregated chain gangs would be an instance of “racial discrimination in American penology”? The Times editorialist apparently assumes, a la the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education, that all-white chain gangs are inherently superior to their all-black counterparts.
Prison rape is such as serious problem that Human Rights Watch, of all organizations, devoted a study to it in 2001: No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons, which cited the racial rape of white prisoners as a serious problem.
The Human Rights Watch report helped bring about the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which the November 14 editorialist appears to have plum forgotten about. Normally, the Times loves federal laws, but as far as Sulzberger & Co. are concerned, in cases of racial violence or racial discrimination, whites must not benefit from federal legislation.
The November 14 editorial was not the first venture into the realm of prison violence by the Times editorial page. On September 7, editorial board member Brent Staples wrote a signed editorial, “Fighting the AIDS Epidemic by Issuing Condoms in the Prisons”, with condoms offering a surefire way to curb AIDS. Yep, that’ll do it. When a prisoner is about to be raped, all he’ll have to do is request that his attacker don a condom.
Staples left out that little matter of so much prison sex being a matter of rape. (He mentioned prison rape in passing, only to go back to his spiel, which implicitly denied its significance, and never mentioned its often racial character.)
Too bad Brent Staples refuses “to confront the sexual realities of prison life.”
The only thing worse than the Times neglecting a serious social problem, is when the paper devotes space to one.
November 22, 2004
If you’re an Arab terrorist, the New York Times is willing to lie about the Geneva Conventions, in order to aid and abet you. But if you’re a white American prisoner, as far as Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. and his lackeys are concerned, no punishment is too grisly to be meted out to you.
The November 14 Times ran a house editorial, “Racial Segregation in Prison”, opposing a California prison policy being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court, that for many white prisoners, has been the difference between life and death.
California prison officials have in recent years been guilty of showing mercy to white prisoners, and the Times will not stand for that. The California Department of Corrections racially segregates new prisoners with members of their own race for 60 days after their arrival in an institution.
The reason for the practice is simple enough, but in matters of race, the Times can always be counted on to hide from, or lie about the facts. Targeting white inmates for rape based on the color of their skin has long been a sport among the black (and to a lesser degree, Hispanic) prisoners who dominate so many prisons in this country, and who consider such racial attacks their birthright. And since such rapes are often committed by violent offenders who know they are HIV+, and result in the death of the victim through AIDS, they are thus a package deal of assault, rape, and murder, not to mention the sexual slavery that the rape initiates.
Note that the slavery that is pervasive in the nation’s prisons is just one more thing the Times doesn’t want you to know about. And so, the same newspaper that opposes the death penalty for blacks and Hispanics is not at all concerned, if every prison sentence for a white man, no matter how brief and how petty the offense, may become in practice, a death sentence. I believe the Constitution calls that, “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. couldn’t care less about some white guys getting the shaft. Indeed, the racial socialism Sulzberger’s paper promotes both in its news and editorial sections, amounts to little more than the belief that white, heterosexual men should get the shaft, literally and figuratively, in every possible way. Or at least, white, heterosexual men who aren’t well-to-do leftists. Conversely, if it were known that white prisoners were violently raping, sexually enslaving, and murdering black prisoners through the deliberate transmission of HIV infection, the story would run in its proper place, on the top of page one.
The anonymous Times editorialist opined,
The State of California says its policy, by which hundreds of thousands of prisoners were segregated last year, reduces violence in the cells. After 60 days, the state says it has enough information to decide whether particular inmates are dangerous. Of course, it is possible that the policy makes things worse. At oral argument, Justice John Paul Stevens asked what he called a “stupid question”: whether, if California wants to discourage racial gangs, it wouldn't make more sense to house prisoners with members of a different race.
Justice Stevens was being cute; he didn’t for one moment think his question was stupid. Let’s see. If we break up the white minority of inmates in most maximum security California prisons, and pair them off with racist, ultraviolent, black and Hispanic gangbangers, will that discourage racial gangs or racial violence? In a word, Mr. Justice: No. But such a policy would give us the penal equivalent of busing, another program that rich leftists who are insulated from its consequences have always loved.
Last May, John Paul Stevens made much of his opposition to the death penalty. However, Stevens has no problem with the machinery of death when, in the hands of racist black and Hispanic prisoners, it takes the lives of white prisoners.
In an irony that is likely lost on Justice Stevens, the only white male prisoners who are reasonably safe are the ultraviolent, neo-Nazi sociopaths who are members of white supremacist gangs. The white gang members protect each other.
Back to the Times:
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the policy. It invoked a Supreme Court precedent, Turner v. Safley, giving prisons broad authority in how they handle their inmates. California produced little evidence to support its segregation policy, but the court accepted as ‘common sense’ the notion that there is a connection between segregating prisoners and combating violence.
The far-left “Ninth Circus” showed some humanity! Well, we can’t have that, can we?
The Times editorialist exploited a peculiar institution of contemporary discourse. Socialists and communists like Pinch Sulzberger have for forty years demonized anyone who talks in explicitly racial terms, unless he is seeking to provide racial advantages to blacks. Speaking in explicitly racial terms about black racism or black social pathologies, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan learned almost 40 years ago, gets one shouted down as a “racist,” and booted out of polite society. And so, California officials didn’t dare mention to the justices the 800-pound gorilla of race in the courtroom, a reticence which the Times editorialist then exploited with, “California produced little evidence to support its segregation policy …”
The Times:
The Ninth Circuit should have been far more skeptical. The courts have long applied ‘strict scrutiny,’ an onerous legal standard, to racial classifications. The Ninth Circuit wants to carve out an exception for prisons. But given the history of racial discrimination in American penology, from segregated prisons and work farms to chain gangs, the courts should be highly demanding in reviewing racial policies behind bars.
This case might be harder if California prisons used racial segregation rarely, and only in response to serious threats or instances of racially motivated violence. But a blanket policy that separates all new prisoners on the basis of race is unconstitutional.
This is the usual Times hypocrisy, where race is concerned. When a policy racially advantages blacks and disadvantages whites, the Times supports blanket policies, and opposes all scrutiny and skepticism. And the California policy is of course in response to “serious threats or instances of racially motivated violence.” What the Times writer really means, is that where white victims are concerned, nothing counts as a “serious threat” or as “racially motivated violence.”
And we can safely ignore the Times’ reference to “the history of racial discrimination in American penology,” which is just the sort of blanket statement that the writer already condemned. (But it’s a blanket statement in favor of black racial privilege.) Whenever the Times proposes some sort of outrageous racial notion or practice, it repeats the mantra, “the history of racial discrimination.”
(Times op-ed columnist and racial newsroom enforcer, Bob Herbert, did just that on August 20, in “Voting While Black,” when he argued that for Florida state police detectives to interview elderly black witnesses in the latter’s homes while armed, as part of an election fraud investigation, constituted racial intimidation.
“The officers were armed and in plain clothes. For elderly African-American voters, who remember the terrible torment inflicted on blacks who tried to vote in the South in the 1950's and 60's, the sight of armed police officers coming into their homes to interrogate them about voting is chilling indeed.”
Note Herbert’s logical implication that police officers should not be permitted to be armed while working in black neighborhoods, lest they cause residents to “remember the terrible torment inflicted on blacks …”)
By the way, can someone explain to me how racially segregated chain gangs would be an instance of “racial discrimination in American penology”? The Times editorialist apparently assumes, a la the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education, that all-white chain gangs are inherently superior to their all-black counterparts.
Prison rape is such as serious problem that Human Rights Watch, of all organizations, devoted a study to it in 2001: No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons, which cited the racial rape of white prisoners as a serious problem.
Past studies have documented the prevalence of black on white sexual aggression in prison. These findings are further confirmed by Human Rights Watch's own research. Overall, our correspondence and interviews with white, black, and Hispanic inmates convince us that white inmates are disproportionately targeted for abuse. Although many whites reported being raped by white inmates, black on white abuse appears to be more common. To a much lesser extent, non-Hispanic whites also reported being victimized by Hispanic inmates.
The Human Rights Watch report helped bring about the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which the November 14 editorialist appears to have plum forgotten about. Normally, the Times loves federal laws, but as far as Sulzberger & Co. are concerned, in cases of racial violence or racial discrimination, whites must not benefit from federal legislation.
The November 14 editorial was not the first venture into the realm of prison violence by the Times editorial page. On September 7, editorial board member Brent Staples wrote a signed editorial, “Fighting the AIDS Epidemic by Issuing Condoms in the Prisons”, with condoms offering a surefire way to curb AIDS. Yep, that’ll do it. When a prisoner is about to be raped, all he’ll have to do is request that his attacker don a condom.
Staples left out that little matter of so much prison sex being a matter of rape. (He mentioned prison rape in passing, only to go back to his spiel, which implicitly denied its significance, and never mentioned its often racial character.)
The connection between the prison experience and the spread of AIDS outside prison is especially clear in poor communities, where a great many men spend time behind bars at some point in their lives. But with millions of people regularly exposed to H.I.V. in the prison system, the entire country has both a moral and a medical obligation to confront the sexual realities of prison life.
Until then, lives will be lost and prison-borne diseases will continue to spread from the corrections system into the community at large.
Too bad Brent Staples refuses “to confront the sexual realities of prison life.”
The only thing worse than the Times neglecting a serious social problem, is when the paper devotes space to one.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
The Great Black Hope: The Jayson Blair Case and the New York Times
By Nicholas Stix
June 3, 2003
Originally published in Toogood Reports
Jayson Blair was the Great Black Hope. The white publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Sulzberger’s white executive editor, Howell Raines, were intent on creating the Great African-American Reporter, and Blair was their guy. No matter, that Sulzberger and Raines were 80 years late. The Great Negro Reporter had already come and gone. George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), whose career was ended by the civil rights movement whose most trenchant critic he was, was a self-made man, who needed no white philanthropist/image-makers to invent him. But that’s a story for another day.
In William McGowan’s excellent book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, McGowan shows how Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s diversity campaign destroyed the Times as a newspaper, if not as a political force, leading to the non-reporting or misreporting of stories big and small. Having covered many of the same stories, and shown how the Times has intentionally misrepresented the facts in many others, I know that McGowan’s criticisms are valid. Indeed, regular newspaper features, and even entire web sites have been devoted to chronicling the Times’ penchant for fraud.
William McGowan reports that at the quasi-revivalist, December, 1992 “joint Diversity Summit Meeting of the of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr. “described a breakdown of communications on his multiracial diversity management committee that had its members ‘at each other’s throats.’ The ‘cultural change’ involved in diversity, he said, had proved to be ‘hard, brutal stuff.’ Sulzberger could have been previewing the complaints of the entire industry which followed his lead in the years to come, embracing diversity without really debating it much, and thus finding itself in a quagmire of diversity-related troubles.”
McGowan notes further that Sulzberger “has repeatedly stressed that diversity is ‘the single most important issue’ facing his paper. According to Sulzberger, ‘We can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight male vision of events and say that we, as journalists, are doing our job.”
It never occurred to Sulzberger, that in reducing reality to the conflicting “visions” of irreconcilable groups, he was denying the possibility of objective truth, and thus of journalism.
And the publisher did not brook criticism, whether internal or external. Thus it was, that when McGowan’s ultimately award-winning book was published in 2001, the Times refused to review it, and searches I performed in recent weeks of its database came up with no mention of Coloring the News in the pages of the Times. It was not until the Times ran a letter by McGowan regarding the Blair scandal, on May 16, that an editor’s postscript finally mentioned the title of his book.
During a massive, May 14 meeting held in a local movie theater by the Times for its news staff, Howell Raines stated the obvious, in confessing that he had carried Blair for much too long, simply because he was black.
So much for black Managing Editor Gerald Boyd’s song and dance, ‘What’s Race Got to Do with It?’
A Profile in Black Courage?
And yet, five days after Raines admitted that Blair owed his stay at the Times to race, unrepentant black Times columnist Bob Herbert not only denied the obvious, but went on the offensive, insinuating that any white who refused to kowtow to the party line that he and the mainstream media were promoting, was a sheet-wearing, white supremacist.
I wonder if Herbert has confronted Raines yet, regarding the latter’s “misrepresentation” of the Jayson Blair case?
Bob Herbert calls Jayson Blair “a first-class head case,” yet Herbert, the quintessential, upper-middle-class racial thug, would ram ever more incompetent, dishonest black journalists down the throats of whites, and then condemn the whites as racists, for choking on them. Who’s the real “first class head case” here?
Bob Herbert leads a charmed life. He can race-bait whites all he likes, because the Times protects him from criticism. As with other politically correct Times columnists, and especially those who are black or female, the paper rarely if ever publishes any letters to the editor criticizing Herbert. Thus, he has never had to take what he dishes out. Due to the Jayson Blair case, on May 21, Herbert’s editors made the barest of exceptions, publishing the briefest, most restrained letter imaginable contradicting Herbert.
Imagine trying to work in a newsroom in which a Bob Herbert is an influential figure, a man who stands ready to denounce - and get fired -any white man who doesn’t know his place on race matters. Now multiply Herbert by a thousand. For there are a few Bob Herberts patrolling every urban and suburban newsroom of any size in America. That is the real meaning of the notion of “critical mass” trumpeted by supporters of affirmative action - having enough incompetent racists on hand to bring an institution to heel.
Telling the Right Kinds of Lies - from the Bob Herbert File
My veteran colleague, Mary Mostert, was the first commentator to point out that Jayson Blair’s fault wasn’t in lying - Timesmen do that every day - but in telling the wrong kinds of lies. Stealing other newspapers’ work, and selling it as your own, is embarrassing, and could lead to the sort of lawsuit where extraordinarily broad interpretations of the First Amendment will not help the offending publisher. The right kind of lying includes lying in an op-ed column about a public figure your bosses hate, or quoting an obvious liar saying something that fits your bosses’ agenda. Herbert is an expert at both methods.
During Rudolph Giuliani’s New York mayoralty (1994-2001), Bob Herbert was a rabid purveyor of the racial profiling hoax, one of the most pernicious of all the many race hoaxes that we have seen since the 1980s. Herbert flat out accused Giuliani of ordering police to terrorize innocent black folks based merely on the color of their skin. Herbert threatened that blacks were no longer going to “tolerate” such persecution.
This was incendiary, deeply dishonest writing. Herbert was doing his darnedest to provoke race riots, without ever providing one iota of evidence to back up the charges he made against Giuliani. (Oddly, a couple of months ago, Herbert pulled a 180, and gave Giuliani credit for reducing crime in New York during his tenure. But the compliment was a rhetorical throwaway, to manufacture instant credibility for an attack on a new, white mayor.)
Note that while Herbert seeks to provoke race riots, he also believes that police must be handcuffed, in the face of rioters – or at least, non-white rioters.
In a story from the mid-1990s, during Rudy Giuliani’s first term as mayor, Herbert told of the fatal police shooting of a black murder suspect in his car, by white policemen in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Police on the scene - who supposedly did not know the driver was wanted for a murder – had a call that the car the man was driving had been reported stolen. When they told the driver to freeze, he made a move for something; they fired. It turned out that he had been reaching for the anti-theft tool, “the club.”
Never mind that a policeman’s paycheck does not oblige him to be a mind-reader, or to risk dying at the hands of a suspect who, ignoring his orders, makes sudden hand movements. For Herbert, it is acceptable behavior for a man told to freeze by police, to go about his usual parking routine. But then, Herbert never had to face down death, while keeping the streets safe.
But Herbert went way beyond that. He quoted a hairdresser from a nearby beauty parlor, as claiming that the police had yelled the “n”-word at the black driver, just before shooting him.
Rather than seek to dilute the fantastic nature of the hairdresser’s claim (fantastic, that is, to anyone who knows the streets of New York), Herbert laid it on even thicker. The hairdresser maintained that, while everyone else on the street dove for cover amid the fusillade, in the shooting zone she stood and watched, calmly smoking a cigarette.
Note that the neighborhood was black. Cops who shout the “n”-word in black neighborhoods don’t live very long.
In almost eighteen years in New York City, I don’t believe I have never heard a single white call a single black the “n”-word. (The qualification is due to a young white drug dealer in Far Rockaway, Queens, whom I had long assumed to be Puerto Rican. I may have once heard him use the term against a black rival.) During that time, I’ve only heard whites say the word in private three times. Of course, during those years, I’ve heard the “n”-word spoken in public over one million times. But roughly ninety five percent of those times, the speaker was black; the other times, the speaker was Puerto Rican. Trashy Puerto Ricans have honorary black status, which is why a couple of years ago, actress Jennifer Lopez, who is from The Bronx, felt she had the prerogative to publicly use the “n”-word. She was widely and unfairly attacked by blacks, who reneged on a longstanding, implicit agreement between blacks and trashy Puerto Ricans. (I suppose it served Lopez right, since her parents are not trashy people.)
The Good Old Days
As William McGowan reports, already in 1991, the Times’ then-editor-in-chief, Max Frankel, “admitted at a forum at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism that because of political considerations he would hesitate to fire a black female reporter if she was ‘less good’; minority staffers at the New York Times said that Frankel was being patronizing and that his admission threw their competence into doubt.” I always thought that it was never patronizing to tell the truth; rather, it’s patronizing when you lie to people, and tell them they are better than you think they are, in order not to hurt their feelings.
And yet, compared to now, in 1991, the Times was a meritocratic utopia. In 1992, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (whose nickname is “Pinch,” following his father’s moniker of “Punch”) took the reins from his father, as the Times’ publisher. As Stanley Kurtz notes in a National Review Online article on the Jayson Blair case, citing Harry Stein’s book, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace):
“Pinch was a political activist in the Sixties, and was twice arrested in anti-Vietnam protests. One day, the elder Sulzberger asked his son what Pinch calls, ‘the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life.’ If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, which would you like to see get shot? Young Arthur answered, ‘I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country.’ Some Sixties activists have since thought better of their early enthusiasms. Pinch hasn’t.
“Sulzberger once remarked that if older white males were alienated by the changes he was making to the Times, that would only prove ‘we’re doing something right.’ Clearly, by Pinch’s standards, the Times has lately been doing very well indeed.”
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is an emperor of the media world. That means that, surrounded by sycophants, family retainers, and bodyguards, instead of knowing more about reality than anyone else, he is as insulated from reality as a man can be, short of living in a cave.
Instead of challenging Sulzberger, and seeking to knock him off the top of the hill, most leading newspapers slavishly follow his lead, even to the point of basing their reporting around the Times. Thus it was that Jayson Blair’s fraudulent sniper story (about the supposed source of suspect John Muhammad’s “anger,” anger which Blair had also invented) was echoed around the country, and the world. Leading newspapers also slavishly follow Sulzberger’s lead, when promulgating their personnel and journalistic policies.
At the beginning of Coloring the News, William McGowan cites a 1996 poll, in which 40 percent of white journalists believed that “lower standards for promotion were applied to blacks. They also frequently complain that race, ethnicity and gender play an unfair role in assignment policies; that managers indulge behavior from minority colleagues (including racist behavior) for which they themselves would be fired or demoted …”
Granted, such complaints are, in themselves, subjective statements that may or may not be true. But McGowan spends the rest of his book proving that they are objectively true.
McGowan describes the mainstream media - particularly the biggest daily newspapers, but also TV news, as a business which, regarding the crucial issues of the day, simply cannot be trusted to get the story right. Large media organizations routinely hire unqualified, unprofessional black and Hispanic reporters and editors essentially as political cadres, and give them control over urban and ethnic reporting (doing the same thing with openly gay reporters for “gay” issues). Rather than honestly report on the beats they control, the diversity hires make a point of cheerleading for the groups they identify with, “killing” real investigative stories that bear on those groups, and harassing any white reporter with the temerity to try and do his job, until he either gives up or quits. Indeed, mirroring the consolidation of socialist power in America’s universities, which pushed out thousands of dedicated instructors and administrators, many veteran newsmen - themselves invariably old-time liberals – have left the most respected newspapers or the profession altogether, over the past ten years, unable to overcome politically corrupt editors and publishers, the anti-white-male diversity training sessions, or the black, Hispanic, gay and feminist newsroom enforcers.
(In Speaking Freely, the second volume of his autobiography, journalist Nat Hentoff talks about how many longtime colleagues at the Village Voice simply stopped talking to him, after he announced that he was opposed to abortion. Had Hentoff not been a journalistic institution, and one of the few original Voice staffers still around 35 years after the paper’s founding, he’d surely have been fired.)
And so it was, that many mainstream media reporters, rather than gleefully expose the corruption at 43rd St, have rushed to put out the fire, engaging in unpaid damage control for their supposed rival. That is how powerfully entrenched affirmative action/diversity is in the media, the truth be damned. (Some observers have argued that such self-censorship in reports on the Times is based on reporters’ hopes for a job at 43rd Street.)
The current red herring meant to take readers’ eyes off the prize, is the claim that Blair was a junkie (white, powder cocaine), a drunk, and a manic-depressive. However, since he has supposedly been clean and sober for over one year - i.e., during the time of his greatest fabrications and plagiaries – his alleged addictions are irrelevant to his downfall. Are reporters such as Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin trying to tell us that Blair’s problem was that he was clean and sober, or are they just trying to confuse us?
The most hysterical attempt at damage control was performed by New York Magazine’s Michael Wolff. In a snide, incoherent rant in the May 26 issue, Wolff seeks to distract the reader from raising any of the obvious questions with gutter language (“The kid was a f---up.”) and white-baiting (“[Blair] was there, in the angry-white-man interpretation, because the black No. 2 editor, Gerald Boyd, was his patron.”)
Wolff denigrates the claim that the Blair scandal was the worst in the paper’s 152-year history, but the two examples he gives as supposedly trumping it, serve only to undermine his case. He blames the Times for not revealing in advance, in 1961, its knowledge of the CIA’s plan for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, never considering that such a story would probably have landed the Times’ editors in prison - and rightly so – for treason. The other example he cites is the Wen Ho Lee case. The Times attacked the Los Alamos scientist who was suspected of passing nuclear secrets to the Red Chinese, and who was formally charged with dozens of crimes. Later, the paper published “an epic correction.” But this example is dishonest. Wen Ho Lee was never acquitted of any of the charges against him, and was convicted on one charge. That excepting the one charge, his prosecution was dropped, was due solely to media-aided race-baiting by Asian political hustlers.
Wolff does turn one nifty line (“The Times suggests that [the deceptions] were the result of the young man’s emotional problems - he is now commonly referred to as a sociopath, which probably means he was very charming ...”), but otherwise seems envious that he doesn’t work at the Times. Ultimately, Wolff comes off like a cloning experiment gone terribly wrong, in which a scientist tried to create a liberal version of the great wit, Mark Steyn.
Is Wolff married to his publisher’s daughter, or something?
In a May 26 essay in Insight magazine,however, New York comedienne and columnist, Julia Gorin, did manage to mine some humor from the Blair saga. Gorin, you see, actually worked at the Times as an advertising department temp, typing up ads that customers called in. Meanwhile, she tried to get a reporting job. Walking around with news clippings ready to spring on editors, like a Hollywood waiter with a screenplay tucked into his cumberbund, Gorin got only abuse for her trouble.
“Then I heard about the summer-internship program that Blair would get his start in, a conduit for an eventual staff position. I inquired but was told I was the wrong color; the internship was geared toward minorities. So I told them I was Jewish, an even smaller minority than black at 2 percent of the country’s population. But that seemed only to elicit giggles.
“It was just assumed that Jews are industrious and successful and never in need of a boost. Well, I’m tired of that vicious stereotype! This Jew has been struggling for eight years. I just may be the poorest Jew in the country. I’ve actually had to borrow money from black friends. What a country!”
Gorin quotes the 11 May Times report on Blair: “His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional.... Blair was further rewarded when he was given responsibility for leading the coverage of the [D.C.] sniper prosecution.”
“The only warnings I ever got were my walking papers. Blair’s foul-ups resulted in a promotion!
“Blair’s immediate supervisor, Jeanne Pinder, told the Times’ investigative team on this that she ‘offered to discuss Mr. Blair’s history and habits with anybody’ - mostly, she said, ‘because we wanted him to succeed.’
“No one ever cared if I succeeded! No one fought for me with the higher-ups! If a temporary assignment was up, and no one had bothered to do an evaluation, I wasn’t given a second thought. It was like: Oh, is she still here? We don’t need anyone!
“But back to Blair: By way of explaining his being hired from the initial internship program, recruiting editor Sheila Rule said that during his 10 weeks as an intern, ‘He did well. He did very well.
“This same lady told me to go work at a newspaper in another city for 50 years first, then come back and try the Times. Why was I so married to working for the Times anyway, she wanted to know.
“While he was at the Times, Blair even had the confidence to be contentious with editors who gave him a problem, and pull on them the rank of others.
“What chutzpah! I envy the protection Blair had.
“All the while, the Times describes many in the newsroom as having grown fond of ‘the affable’ Blair. ‘He had charisma, enormous charisma,’ Times media reporter David Carr said.
“Whereas my charisma usually is resented! Of course, if there’s one thing we know about the Times, it’s that charisma goes a long way. This wasn’t the first time a black man’s charisma charmed the objectivity right out of the newspaper and allowed him to get away with all but murder, lest we forget Bill Clinton.”
Inasmuch as in college (the jury is still out on his high school career), Jayson Blair was already known by colleagues to be a habitual liar and plagiarist, and then, as he received increasing encouragement from his superiors and other well-wishers, became ever more audacious in his frauds and plagiaries, he resembles one of the earliest beneficiaries of affirmative action, long before the term had even been coined. As my old Chronicles editor, Ted Pappas, shows in his book, Plagiarism and the Culture Wars, already as a child, Martin Luther King Jr. coveted other people’s words. And as King was helped along by supporters at mostly white institutions of higher education, and then became a preacher and civil rights leader, his plagiaries became ever more audacious.
Jayson Blair may not plan on becoming a civil rights leader, but he claims to be a victim of white racism, and already has retained an agent, in order to cash in on his new-found notoriety. And more than a few black folks have depicted him as a martyr to white racism. Maybe he can still be the Great Black Hoax, er, Hope.
June 3, 2003
Originally published in Toogood Reports
Jayson Blair was the Great Black Hope. The white publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Sulzberger’s white executive editor, Howell Raines, were intent on creating the Great African-American Reporter, and Blair was their guy. No matter, that Sulzberger and Raines were 80 years late. The Great Negro Reporter had already come and gone. George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), whose career was ended by the civil rights movement whose most trenchant critic he was, was a self-made man, who needed no white philanthropist/image-makers to invent him. But that’s a story for another day.
In William McGowan’s excellent book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, McGowan shows how Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s diversity campaign destroyed the Times as a newspaper, if not as a political force, leading to the non-reporting or misreporting of stories big and small. Having covered many of the same stories, and shown how the Times has intentionally misrepresented the facts in many others, I know that McGowan’s criticisms are valid. Indeed, regular newspaper features, and even entire web sites have been devoted to chronicling the Times’ penchant for fraud.
William McGowan reports that at the quasi-revivalist, December, 1992 “joint Diversity Summit Meeting of the of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr. “described a breakdown of communications on his multiracial diversity management committee that had its members ‘at each other’s throats.’ The ‘cultural change’ involved in diversity, he said, had proved to be ‘hard, brutal stuff.’ Sulzberger could have been previewing the complaints of the entire industry which followed his lead in the years to come, embracing diversity without really debating it much, and thus finding itself in a quagmire of diversity-related troubles.”
McGowan notes further that Sulzberger “has repeatedly stressed that diversity is ‘the single most important issue’ facing his paper. According to Sulzberger, ‘We can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight male vision of events and say that we, as journalists, are doing our job.”
It never occurred to Sulzberger, that in reducing reality to the conflicting “visions” of irreconcilable groups, he was denying the possibility of objective truth, and thus of journalism.
And the publisher did not brook criticism, whether internal or external. Thus it was, that when McGowan’s ultimately award-winning book was published in 2001, the Times refused to review it, and searches I performed in recent weeks of its database came up with no mention of Coloring the News in the pages of the Times. It was not until the Times ran a letter by McGowan regarding the Blair scandal, on May 16, that an editor’s postscript finally mentioned the title of his book.
During a massive, May 14 meeting held in a local movie theater by the Times for its news staff, Howell Raines stated the obvious, in confessing that he had carried Blair for much too long, simply because he was black.
So much for black Managing Editor Gerald Boyd’s song and dance, ‘What’s Race Got to Do with It?’
A Profile in Black Courage?
And yet, five days after Raines admitted that Blair owed his stay at the Times to race, unrepentant black Times columnist Bob Herbert not only denied the obvious, but went on the offensive, insinuating that any white who refused to kowtow to the party line that he and the mainstream media were promoting, was a sheet-wearing, white supremacist.
Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair’s reporting.
But the folks who delight in attacking anything black, or anything designed to help blacks, have pounced on the Blair story as evidence that there is something inherently wrong with The Times’s effort to diversify its newsroom, and beyond that, with the very idea of a commitment to diversity or affirmative action anywhere.
And while these agitators won’t admit it, the nasty subtext to their attack is that there is something inherently wrong with blacks.
There’s a real shortage of black reporters, editors and columnists at The Times. But the few who are here are doing fine and serious work day in and day out and don’t deserve to be stigmatized by people who can see them only through the prism of a stereotype.
The problem with American newsrooms is too little diversity, not too much. Blacks have always faced discrimination and maddening double standards in the newsroom, and they continue to do so. So do women, Latinos and many other groups that are not part of the traditional newsroom in-crowd.
So let’s be real. Discrimination in the newsroom - in hiring, in the quality of assignments and in promotions - is a much more pervasive problem than Jayson Blair’s aberrant behavior. A black reporter told me angrily last week, ‘After hundreds of years in America, we are still on probation.’
I agree. And the correct response is not to grow fainthearted, or to internalize the views of those who wish you ill. The correct response is to strike back - as hard and as often as it takes.
I wonder if Herbert has confronted Raines yet, regarding the latter’s “misrepresentation” of the Jayson Blair case?
Bob Herbert calls Jayson Blair “a first-class head case,” yet Herbert, the quintessential, upper-middle-class racial thug, would ram ever more incompetent, dishonest black journalists down the throats of whites, and then condemn the whites as racists, for choking on them. Who’s the real “first class head case” here?
Bob Herbert leads a charmed life. He can race-bait whites all he likes, because the Times protects him from criticism. As with other politically correct Times columnists, and especially those who are black or female, the paper rarely if ever publishes any letters to the editor criticizing Herbert. Thus, he has never had to take what he dishes out. Due to the Jayson Blair case, on May 21, Herbert’s editors made the barest of exceptions, publishing the briefest, most restrained letter imaginable contradicting Herbert.
To the Editor:
Bob Herbert (column, May 19) asserts that ‘the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair’s reporting.
This would seem to be at odds with the acknowledgment by The Times’s executive editor, Howell Raines, in a May 15 news article: ‘But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.
MEL KREITZER Cincinnati, May 19, 2003
Imagine trying to work in a newsroom in which a Bob Herbert is an influential figure, a man who stands ready to denounce - and get fired -any white man who doesn’t know his place on race matters. Now multiply Herbert by a thousand. For there are a few Bob Herberts patrolling every urban and suburban newsroom of any size in America. That is the real meaning of the notion of “critical mass” trumpeted by supporters of affirmative action - having enough incompetent racists on hand to bring an institution to heel.
Telling the Right Kinds of Lies - from the Bob Herbert File
My veteran colleague, Mary Mostert, was the first commentator to point out that Jayson Blair’s fault wasn’t in lying - Timesmen do that every day - but in telling the wrong kinds of lies. Stealing other newspapers’ work, and selling it as your own, is embarrassing, and could lead to the sort of lawsuit where extraordinarily broad interpretations of the First Amendment will not help the offending publisher. The right kind of lying includes lying in an op-ed column about a public figure your bosses hate, or quoting an obvious liar saying something that fits your bosses’ agenda. Herbert is an expert at both methods.
During Rudolph Giuliani’s New York mayoralty (1994-2001), Bob Herbert was a rabid purveyor of the racial profiling hoax, one of the most pernicious of all the many race hoaxes that we have seen since the 1980s. Herbert flat out accused Giuliani of ordering police to terrorize innocent black folks based merely on the color of their skin. Herbert threatened that blacks were no longer going to “tolerate” such persecution.
This was incendiary, deeply dishonest writing. Herbert was doing his darnedest to provoke race riots, without ever providing one iota of evidence to back up the charges he made against Giuliani. (Oddly, a couple of months ago, Herbert pulled a 180, and gave Giuliani credit for reducing crime in New York during his tenure. But the compliment was a rhetorical throwaway, to manufacture instant credibility for an attack on a new, white mayor.)
Note that while Herbert seeks to provoke race riots, he also believes that police must be handcuffed, in the face of rioters – or at least, non-white rioters.
In a story from the mid-1990s, during Rudy Giuliani’s first term as mayor, Herbert told of the fatal police shooting of a black murder suspect in his car, by white policemen in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Police on the scene - who supposedly did not know the driver was wanted for a murder – had a call that the car the man was driving had been reported stolen. When they told the driver to freeze, he made a move for something; they fired. It turned out that he had been reaching for the anti-theft tool, “the club.”
Never mind that a policeman’s paycheck does not oblige him to be a mind-reader, or to risk dying at the hands of a suspect who, ignoring his orders, makes sudden hand movements. For Herbert, it is acceptable behavior for a man told to freeze by police, to go about his usual parking routine. But then, Herbert never had to face down death, while keeping the streets safe.
But Herbert went way beyond that. He quoted a hairdresser from a nearby beauty parlor, as claiming that the police had yelled the “n”-word at the black driver, just before shooting him.
Rather than seek to dilute the fantastic nature of the hairdresser’s claim (fantastic, that is, to anyone who knows the streets of New York), Herbert laid it on even thicker. The hairdresser maintained that, while everyone else on the street dove for cover amid the fusillade, in the shooting zone she stood and watched, calmly smoking a cigarette.
Note that the neighborhood was black. Cops who shout the “n”-word in black neighborhoods don’t live very long.
In almost eighteen years in New York City, I don’t believe I have never heard a single white call a single black the “n”-word. (The qualification is due to a young white drug dealer in Far Rockaway, Queens, whom I had long assumed to be Puerto Rican. I may have once heard him use the term against a black rival.) During that time, I’ve only heard whites say the word in private three times. Of course, during those years, I’ve heard the “n”-word spoken in public over one million times. But roughly ninety five percent of those times, the speaker was black; the other times, the speaker was Puerto Rican. Trashy Puerto Ricans have honorary black status, which is why a couple of years ago, actress Jennifer Lopez, who is from The Bronx, felt she had the prerogative to publicly use the “n”-word. She was widely and unfairly attacked by blacks, who reneged on a longstanding, implicit agreement between blacks and trashy Puerto Ricans. (I suppose it served Lopez right, since her parents are not trashy people.)
The Good Old Days
As William McGowan reports, already in 1991, the Times’ then-editor-in-chief, Max Frankel, “admitted at a forum at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism that because of political considerations he would hesitate to fire a black female reporter if she was ‘less good’; minority staffers at the New York Times said that Frankel was being patronizing and that his admission threw their competence into doubt.” I always thought that it was never patronizing to tell the truth; rather, it’s patronizing when you lie to people, and tell them they are better than you think they are, in order not to hurt their feelings.
And yet, compared to now, in 1991, the Times was a meritocratic utopia. In 1992, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (whose nickname is “Pinch,” following his father’s moniker of “Punch”) took the reins from his father, as the Times’ publisher. As Stanley Kurtz notes in a National Review Online article on the Jayson Blair case, citing Harry Stein’s book, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace):
“Pinch was a political activist in the Sixties, and was twice arrested in anti-Vietnam protests. One day, the elder Sulzberger asked his son what Pinch calls, ‘the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life.’ If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, which would you like to see get shot? Young Arthur answered, ‘I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country.’ Some Sixties activists have since thought better of their early enthusiasms. Pinch hasn’t.
“Sulzberger once remarked that if older white males were alienated by the changes he was making to the Times, that would only prove ‘we’re doing something right.’ Clearly, by Pinch’s standards, the Times has lately been doing very well indeed.”
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is an emperor of the media world. That means that, surrounded by sycophants, family retainers, and bodyguards, instead of knowing more about reality than anyone else, he is as insulated from reality as a man can be, short of living in a cave.
Instead of challenging Sulzberger, and seeking to knock him off the top of the hill, most leading newspapers slavishly follow his lead, even to the point of basing their reporting around the Times. Thus it was that Jayson Blair’s fraudulent sniper story (about the supposed source of suspect John Muhammad’s “anger,” anger which Blair had also invented) was echoed around the country, and the world. Leading newspapers also slavishly follow Sulzberger’s lead, when promulgating their personnel and journalistic policies.
At the beginning of Coloring the News, William McGowan cites a 1996 poll, in which 40 percent of white journalists believed that “lower standards for promotion were applied to blacks. They also frequently complain that race, ethnicity and gender play an unfair role in assignment policies; that managers indulge behavior from minority colleagues (including racist behavior) for which they themselves would be fired or demoted …”
Granted, such complaints are, in themselves, subjective statements that may or may not be true. But McGowan spends the rest of his book proving that they are objectively true.
McGowan describes the mainstream media - particularly the biggest daily newspapers, but also TV news, as a business which, regarding the crucial issues of the day, simply cannot be trusted to get the story right. Large media organizations routinely hire unqualified, unprofessional black and Hispanic reporters and editors essentially as political cadres, and give them control over urban and ethnic reporting (doing the same thing with openly gay reporters for “gay” issues). Rather than honestly report on the beats they control, the diversity hires make a point of cheerleading for the groups they identify with, “killing” real investigative stories that bear on those groups, and harassing any white reporter with the temerity to try and do his job, until he either gives up or quits. Indeed, mirroring the consolidation of socialist power in America’s universities, which pushed out thousands of dedicated instructors and administrators, many veteran newsmen - themselves invariably old-time liberals – have left the most respected newspapers or the profession altogether, over the past ten years, unable to overcome politically corrupt editors and publishers, the anti-white-male diversity training sessions, or the black, Hispanic, gay and feminist newsroom enforcers.
(In Speaking Freely, the second volume of his autobiography, journalist Nat Hentoff talks about how many longtime colleagues at the Village Voice simply stopped talking to him, after he announced that he was opposed to abortion. Had Hentoff not been a journalistic institution, and one of the few original Voice staffers still around 35 years after the paper’s founding, he’d surely have been fired.)
And so it was, that many mainstream media reporters, rather than gleefully expose the corruption at 43rd St, have rushed to put out the fire, engaging in unpaid damage control for their supposed rival. That is how powerfully entrenched affirmative action/diversity is in the media, the truth be damned. (Some observers have argued that such self-censorship in reports on the Times is based on reporters’ hopes for a job at 43rd Street.)
The current red herring meant to take readers’ eyes off the prize, is the claim that Blair was a junkie (white, powder cocaine), a drunk, and a manic-depressive. However, since he has supposedly been clean and sober for over one year - i.e., during the time of his greatest fabrications and plagiaries – his alleged addictions are irrelevant to his downfall. Are reporters such as Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin trying to tell us that Blair’s problem was that he was clean and sober, or are they just trying to confuse us?
The most hysterical attempt at damage control was performed by New York Magazine’s Michael Wolff. In a snide, incoherent rant in the May 26 issue, Wolff seeks to distract the reader from raising any of the obvious questions with gutter language (“The kid was a f---up.”) and white-baiting (“[Blair] was there, in the angry-white-man interpretation, because the black No. 2 editor, Gerald Boyd, was his patron.”)
Wolff denigrates the claim that the Blair scandal was the worst in the paper’s 152-year history, but the two examples he gives as supposedly trumping it, serve only to undermine his case. He blames the Times for not revealing in advance, in 1961, its knowledge of the CIA’s plan for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, never considering that such a story would probably have landed the Times’ editors in prison - and rightly so – for treason. The other example he cites is the Wen Ho Lee case. The Times attacked the Los Alamos scientist who was suspected of passing nuclear secrets to the Red Chinese, and who was formally charged with dozens of crimes. Later, the paper published “an epic correction.” But this example is dishonest. Wen Ho Lee was never acquitted of any of the charges against him, and was convicted on one charge. That excepting the one charge, his prosecution was dropped, was due solely to media-aided race-baiting by Asian political hustlers.
Wolff does turn one nifty line (“The Times suggests that [the deceptions] were the result of the young man’s emotional problems - he is now commonly referred to as a sociopath, which probably means he was very charming ...”), but otherwise seems envious that he doesn’t work at the Times. Ultimately, Wolff comes off like a cloning experiment gone terribly wrong, in which a scientist tried to create a liberal version of the great wit, Mark Steyn.
Is Wolff married to his publisher’s daughter, or something?
In a May 26 essay in Insight magazine,however, New York comedienne and columnist, Julia Gorin, did manage to mine some humor from the Blair saga. Gorin, you see, actually worked at the Times as an advertising department temp, typing up ads that customers called in. Meanwhile, she tried to get a reporting job. Walking around with news clippings ready to spring on editors, like a Hollywood waiter with a screenplay tucked into his cumberbund, Gorin got only abuse for her trouble.
“Then I heard about the summer-internship program that Blair would get his start in, a conduit for an eventual staff position. I inquired but was told I was the wrong color; the internship was geared toward minorities. So I told them I was Jewish, an even smaller minority than black at 2 percent of the country’s population. But that seemed only to elicit giggles.
“It was just assumed that Jews are industrious and successful and never in need of a boost. Well, I’m tired of that vicious stereotype! This Jew has been struggling for eight years. I just may be the poorest Jew in the country. I’ve actually had to borrow money from black friends. What a country!”
Gorin quotes the 11 May Times report on Blair: “His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional.... Blair was further rewarded when he was given responsibility for leading the coverage of the [D.C.] sniper prosecution.”
“The only warnings I ever got were my walking papers. Blair’s foul-ups resulted in a promotion!
“Blair’s immediate supervisor, Jeanne Pinder, told the Times’ investigative team on this that she ‘offered to discuss Mr. Blair’s history and habits with anybody’ - mostly, she said, ‘because we wanted him to succeed.’
“No one ever cared if I succeeded! No one fought for me with the higher-ups! If a temporary assignment was up, and no one had bothered to do an evaluation, I wasn’t given a second thought. It was like: Oh, is she still here? We don’t need anyone!
“But back to Blair: By way of explaining his being hired from the initial internship program, recruiting editor Sheila Rule said that during his 10 weeks as an intern, ‘He did well. He did very well.
“This same lady told me to go work at a newspaper in another city for 50 years first, then come back and try the Times. Why was I so married to working for the Times anyway, she wanted to know.
“While he was at the Times, Blair even had the confidence to be contentious with editors who gave him a problem, and pull on them the rank of others.
“What chutzpah! I envy the protection Blair had.
“All the while, the Times describes many in the newsroom as having grown fond of ‘the affable’ Blair. ‘He had charisma, enormous charisma,’ Times media reporter David Carr said.
“Whereas my charisma usually is resented! Of course, if there’s one thing we know about the Times, it’s that charisma goes a long way. This wasn’t the first time a black man’s charisma charmed the objectivity right out of the newspaper and allowed him to get away with all but murder, lest we forget Bill Clinton.”
Inasmuch as in college (the jury is still out on his high school career), Jayson Blair was already known by colleagues to be a habitual liar and plagiarist, and then, as he received increasing encouragement from his superiors and other well-wishers, became ever more audacious in his frauds and plagiaries, he resembles one of the earliest beneficiaries of affirmative action, long before the term had even been coined. As my old Chronicles editor, Ted Pappas, shows in his book, Plagiarism and the Culture Wars, already as a child, Martin Luther King Jr. coveted other people’s words. And as King was helped along by supporters at mostly white institutions of higher education, and then became a preacher and civil rights leader, his plagiaries became ever more audacious.
Jayson Blair may not plan on becoming a civil rights leader, but he claims to be a victim of white racism, and already has retained an agent, in order to cash in on his new-found notoriety. And more than a few black folks have depicted him as a martyr to white racism. Maybe he can still be the Great Black Hoax, er, Hope.
The Jayson Blair Case: At the New York Times, the Spin Cycle Never Ends
By Nicholas Stix
May 23, 2003
Toogood Reports
“Let’s see if your lies match up with your partner’s lies.” That trademark line, uttered by NYPD Blue’s “Det. Andy Sipowicz” (Dennis Franz) to a suspect about to be interrogated, would be a fitting opening for the interrogation of any number of New York Times reporters and editors. But if I had my pick of TV detectives to grill the mopes at the Times, I’d call “Det. Frank Pembleton” (Andre Braugher) of the late series Homicide: Life on the Streets, up from Baltimore. Pembleton, a master interrogator and avenging angel (“We speak for the dead”), is particularly adept at getting the truth out of psychopaths, and on West 43rd Street, the psychopaths seem to be tripping over each other.
The Times worthies are busy trying to spin their way out of the biggest scandal in the history of the Newspaper of Record, as the Times is known in the media. After four years with the newspaper, reporter Jayson Blair was caught variously plagiarizing and fabricating dozens, and possibly hundreds of stories. Without ever leaving New York City, he e-mailed stories to the Times’ 43rd Street offices with datelines from Cleveland, Maryland, West Virginia, Texas and elsewhere. Rather than be fired, on May 1, Blair resigned.
The official story at the Times, is that Blair was a ‘lone gunman’ who acted on his own, based on a pathological desire to deceive. Affirmative action had nothing to do with it.
In a “hea culpa,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. insisted, “The person who did this is Jayson Blair. Let’s not begin to demonize our executives - either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.”
Even Times staffers don’t buy that line. A full year before matters exploded, Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landman had warned about Blair’s dishonesty, and sought to get him sacked, and other editors had expressed doubts about Blair. And it took external pressure, in the form of a plagiarism complaint from a Texas newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, before the Times brass would act at all.
But you have to remember who we’re dealing with here. And so, instead of hearing that Jayson Blair was a young man who had no business inside of the Times’ newsroom, we hear that Executive Editor Howell Raines was “autocratic” and had a “star system,” as if a rank incompetent and professional liar would somehow have “star” written all over him. And the mainstream media have helped the Times, by echoing its official story.
On ABC’s Nightline last Thursday, black Washington Post staffer Terry Neal sought to explain how a writer whose stories were fraudulent could be a “star.” Neal said it was a matter of a “tradeoff” between “accuracy” and getting “scoops.” But there is no evidence that Jayson Blair ever published a scoop in his life. Host Chris Bury did not ask Neal how lies based on non-existent, “unnamed sources” could count as “scoops.”
(Neal was trying to distill sound bites from a much more thoughtful column he’d written on Blair. The column argued that a dishonest reporter would be able to write more vivid, exciting prose than colleagues constrained by the truth. However, Neal’s claim that the Blair case had nothing to do with race does not stand up to scrutiny.)
In a shameless performance, Bury in effect resigned from the journalism profession. He opened the program by dishonestly contrasting how Blair was “pilloried” to the New Republic’s white serial plagiarist, Stephen Glass, who had just published an autobiographical novel, and who, Bury suggested, had gotten off easy. Bury counted on the audience having forgotten how Glass had been run out of the journalism business, when he was caught inventing stories back in 1998. When Stephen Glass was exposed as a fraud, no one showed him any sympathy, and rightly so. In contrast, many reporters have treated Jayson Blair as some sort of “tragedy,” writing of a “meltdown,” even as they show that Blair had been consistently dishonest since college, if not earlier.
Bury asked rhetorical questions of his guests that put race off limits as an issue. “But no one asks how Glass’s race may have helped him.” That’s because there was no evidence that race helped Glass, while there was abundant evidence that race helped Blair!
Rather than enlighten the public, Chris Bury aided in a cover-up. But then, he was just following the example of his longtime boss and mentor, Ted Koppel, in matters of race.
Bury’s precautions were unnecessary. His guests were Newsweek’s editor, Mark Whitaker, who is black; Condace Pressley, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists; and white Washington Post media critic, Howard Kurtz. Unless Bury squeezed in a critic of affirmative action while I blinked, his guests and the other journalists and professors interviewed, all denied that race was a factor in the Blair story. Chris Bury didn’t even pretend to be giving the story balanced coverage. And when Howard Kurtz said that a black journalist was “ready to take my head off” at the mere suggestion that race might have been a factor, neither Kurtz nor anyone else present questioned the integrity of the black journalist.
Just two days earlier, the NABJ web site had posted an editorial, condemning the consideration of race in the Blair story.
“‘But for those critics of diversity to assert that Blair did what he did or got where he got solely because of the color of his skin is just plain wrong, myopic and lazy journalism,’ said Condace Pressley, president of NABJ and assistant program director at WSB Radio in Atlanta. ‘And it ignores facts in other cases.’
“For instance, did race have anything to do with the awful case of Brian Walski, the LA Times photographer who fabricated the photograph out of Iraq earlier this year? Was it a factor with the two Salt Lake City reporters who sold a fabricated story to the National Enquirer for $20,000 in the Elizabeth Smart case? Was it a factor with Mike Barnicle, Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit, Eric Drudis or the dozens of other white journalists who smeared the honorable profession of journalism and lied to their readers?
“Why should it be a factor here?”
Because the facts say it is.
Like other race hustlers, Condace Pressley is playing a rigged game. She knows that with rare exceptions, it would be career suicide for any reporter at a major daily or TV station to challenge her.
At the bottom of the NABJ’s editorial, the organization lays out its mission:
“The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) founded in 1975, exists to promote newsroom diversity [to get unqualified blacks journalism internships and jobs], expand job and recruiting opportunities for African-American journalists and journalism students [a repetition of the previous phrase], and to advocate for fairness and balance in media coverage of the African-American community and of the African-American experience [to pressure media organizations out of doing serious reporting on blacks and urban issues, and instead turn them into racial cheerleaders].”
A courageous exception to the above rule was made by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who observed that,
“… a close reading of the Times’ own account of what went wrong suggests that the paper itself does not fully comprehend what happened. It was not, as some outside observers have said, that no newspaper can fully protect itself against a liar. It was rather that the paper should have known it had a liar on its hands and, despite obvious warnings, did little about it….
“The answer appears to be precisely what the Times denies: favoritism based on race.”
With all due respect to Richard Cohen, I have to note that he is that anachronism whom youngish conservatives are unaware ever existed, and that youngish lefties are outraged to discover still exists: The principled, liberal, male patriot with intact genitalia. Thus it is that Cohen, a military veteran, has also contradicted the feminist dogma that women can serve in the military, just like men. Granted, Cohen still defends an idealized form of affirmative action that exists nowhere, but even that is not enough to satisfy today’s diversity apparatchiks. But Cohen is in his sixties, and will be retiring sometime soon. The socialist establishment can wait him out.
Here are the bare facts, in the matter of the Truth vs. Jayson Blair:
1. In spite of a checkered track record as a student newspaper reporter, local daily and Boston Globe intern, and editor in high school and at the University of Maryland (where he did a poor job as editor, and resigned while under a cloud), he got his foot in the door at the Times through an affirmative action summer internship in 1998 -- in other words, through race;
2. He failed to ever finish college;
3. In spite of what Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz called “substandard” tours at the college paper and during the Times internship, and the lack of a college degree, the Times hired Blair as a reporter in 1999.
4. When repeated questions arose about Blair’s honesty as a reporter, instead of firing him, the Times brass repeatedly promoted him, from intermediate reporter to full-time reporter, to national reporter, and ultimately, to head up the D.C. Sniper team.
There is no tougher job to get in the world of journalism, than a writing gig at the New York Times. Tens of thousands of hot-shot reporters around the country dream of working at the Grey Lady, without ever getting so much as an interview.
In the early 1990s in New York, while publishing my own magazine, A Different Drummer, I also wrote the occasional freelance piece for the daily, New York Newsday.
At one point, I called up the New York Daily News, which was then the city’s biggest daily, to try and get a job there. The person I spoke to said - without laughing -- that I would have to send my resume to the personnel office.
I didn’t waste my time. Nobody, but nobody, ever got a writing job at a major metropolitan daily, by simply applying to the personnel office.
Around the same time, I sold some furniture (my day job) to a couple of New York Post staffers. I asked the husband what would happen, if I applied to his newspaper (then as now, the third biggest daily in town) for a writing job. Laughing, he said, “It would get tossed in the ‘circular file’“ (garbage can). His wife told of the first time she’d heard the term. Someone had sent in a resume, and her boss told her to “file it in the ‘circular file.’“
(Years later, I would freelance for both the Post and the Daily News, writing on higher education and culture, but did so through directly contacting the Post’s deputy op-ed editor, Mark Cunningham, and the Daily News’ op-ed editor, Bob Laird, respectively.)
To even be considered for employment at the Times, a reporter candidate often needs:
1. Orthodox socialist/politically correct views on … everything;
2. A bachelor’s degree from an Ivy League school or an OPU (overpriced, private university) equivalent, e.g., NYU;
3. A master’s degree in journalism, preferably from Columbia University; and
4. A storied career at a daily newspaper;
Apparently, for a black candidate, #1 alone suffices. No one at the Times even checked to see if Blair had graduated from Maryland, much less to find out whether he had finished his tenure as editor of The Diamondback, at the University of Maryland. (Mickey Kaus snickered about the Times’ failure to check out Blair’s college newspaper track record, “More evidence of due diligence, diversity-style.”) The in-house, May 11 “Blair Report” indirectly quoted a senior editor as saying of the former intern’s June, 1999 return to the newsroom as a reporter, “everyone assumed he had graduated.” And that was no accident. The history of affirmative action has involved not only the continual watering down of job requirements for black applicants (e.g., elimination of competency exams and previous professional experience), but also the attitude on the part of pro-affirmative action employers, of not wanting to know anything that might cast doubt on a black applicant’s qualifications.
(During the early 1990s, New York State NAACP chief Hazel Duke, whom socialist Gov. Mario Cuomo had given the patronage plum of running the state’s Off-Track Betting Corporation, summarily fired a bunch of white OTB managers. Duke then hired as her top manager, a black man who claimed to have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. When the white managers sued OTB, claiming they had been fired based solely on the color of their skin, and the state investigated the agency, it turned out that the black manager had no college degrees, though he said he felt he “deserved” them. Note that under the leadership of Hazel Duke, who was later caught embezzling funds from an elderly acquaintance, rather than earn billions of dollars for the state, as one would expect of a gambling authority, OTB made a net profit of zero dollars.)
Granted, the four points I cited above are not set in stone. Some current New York Times reporters lacked qualifications #3 & #4 at the time they were hired. One young, white female Times reporter I met circa 1987, told me she was hired as a copy girl straight out of the Ivy League’s Brown University. Sixteen undistinguished years later, the reporter is still with the Times. However, for heterosexual, white men, all four points are increasingly job requirements.
(As Reed Irvine reported on June 9, 2000, “Richard Berke, the national political correspondent for the New York Times, recently spoke at a reception celebrating the 10th anniversary of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He reminisced about the bad old days at the Times, when homosexual reporters were discriminated against. How things have changed. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there are times when you look at the front-page meeting and ... literally three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals.’“)
Initially, the Times adamantly, kind of, sort of denied that race had anything to do with the Blair case. Consider the newspaper’s 14,000-word, May 11 report on the case:
“Mr. Blair’s Times supervisors and Maryland professors emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom.”
Note the contradiction between the two sentences: He WASN’T a racial (affirmative action/diversity) hire and he WAS (“to help the paper diversify”) a racial hire. He got his foot in the door through a race-based internship program. One cannot, without raping the English language, deny that Jayson Blair was hired because of the color of his skin.
Several other questions that the Times report failed to answer were:
1. When prosecutors disparaged Blair’s story on sniper suspect John Muhammad, which Blair claimed was based on five anonymous law enforcement sources, why did his bosses not ask for the sources names? (In journalism, when a story’s veracity has been challenged, editors can and must get the names of anonymous informants.)
2. Why did the clerk responsible for expenses not check to see if the receipts Blair provided matched up with the places he claimed to have been reporting from?
3. Why did the Times, which typically issues company credit cards to reporters, either refuse to issue one to Blair, or revoke his card?
4. Why did Blair’s national editor, Jim Roberts, who in a highly unusual move, let Blair use his credit card for “travel,” fail to note the lack of any bills for hotel rooms or car rentals?
There were question marks already during Blair’s high-school career, during which time Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin reports, he interned at the Centreville Times newspaper, and was typically unreliable, disappeared at crucial times, and missed deadlines.
In one early report on Blair, another former University of Maryland student journalist refused to discuss Blair’s performance on the school paper, The Diamondback, instead making a mysteriously magnanimous comment about having himself been less than perfect. In Seth Mnookin’s new Newsweek story, “The Secret Life of Jayson Blair/Times Bomb,” Mnookin gets more specific information.
“‘When Jayson was initially hired, people were really upset,’ Danielle Newman told Newsweek. Newman was an editor under Blair, and succeeded him after he resigned. ‘We said we just didn’t think he was qualified,’ Newman said. There were concerns about a football game Blair covered-his story was filled with quotes from people another reporter at the game wasn’t sure existed. There was a story in which Blair tried to insert quotes from an Associated Press wire story. ‘We definitely had our suspicions about his reporting,’ Newman says. ‘But what could we do?’“
Unfortunately, Mnookin shies away from asking follow-up questions, like: Who was it that installed an unqualified, notoriously dishonest reporter as editor, and why?, and Why did you think there was nothing you could do about Blair?
Indeed, while Mnookin did at least admit that reporters across the country have been privately raising the issue, in newsrooms, of Blair’s possibly having benefited from racial discrimination, as soon as he raises the matter, he buries it in a thicket of addiction and psychological subplots: “Instead of answering questions about how Blair had been able to get away with so much for so long, the consensus in the newsroom was that the [May 11] Times story skirted around many of the major issues-the role of race in Blair’s hiring and promotions …”
At every step of Jayson Blair’s career, he engaged in unprofessional behavior, and often lacked the necessary qualifications for the job he was given, factors which would have disqualified him from being hired or gotten him fired, had he been white. And yet, people kept throwing editorships, internships, jobs and promotions his way, and working to help him succeed. He was repeatedly shuffled around the Times newsroom, given leaves of absence, warnings, reprimands, “counseling” … and promotions. Meanwhile, Times staffers and executives spoke about him less as a talented colleague, than the way a caseworker would speak of a client.
Let us return to the Times’ blackwash of things.
“In January 2001, Mr. Blair was promoted to full-time reporter with the consensus of a recruiting committee of roughly half a dozen people headed by Gerald M. Boyd, then a deputy managing editor, and the approval of Mr. [Joseph] Lelyveld.
[Joe Lelyveld was then the Times’ Executive Editor.]
“[Metropolitan Editor Jonathan] Landman said last week that he had been against the recommendation - that he ‘wasn’t asked so much as told’ about Mr. Blair’s promotion. But he also emphasized that he did not protest the move.”
[Of course he didn’t protest; that would have cost him his job.]
“The publisher and the executive editor, he said, had made clear the company’s commitment to diversity - ‘and properly so,’ he said….
“Mr. Boyd, who is now managing editor, the second-highest-ranking newsroom executive, said last week that the decision to advance Mr. Blair had not been based on race. Indeed, plenty of young white reporters have been swiftly promoted through the ranks.
[Is Boyd saying that the young white reporters were brought into the Times via a whites-only internship program, and that like Blair, they engaged from the beginning in sloppy, unprofessional work that required constant public corrections, that they were drug addicts, and became increasingly audacious in fabricating and plagiarizing stories? Of course, not. The only other logical possibility, is that he is saying that the fact that young, talented white reporters have been swiftly promoted, requires that a young black reporter also be promoted, no matter how incompetent and fraudulent he is. Methinks that, like Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd is used to making inane statements, without being challenged.]
“‘To say now that his promotion was about diversity in my view doesn’t begin to capture what was going on,’ said Mr. Boyd, who is himself African-American. ‘He was a young, promising reporter who had done a job that warranted promotion.’
[The record has made it abundantly clear that Jayson Blair was NOT a promising reporter, and had never earned a promotion.]
“But if anything, Mr. Blair’s performance after his promotion declined; he made more errors and clashed with more editors. Then came the catastrophes of Sept. 11, 2001, and things got worse.”
The report acknowledges that, “His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: ‘We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.’“
No one at the Times connected the dots, then or now. When you hire someone for reasons other than merit, and retain him, no matter how much he screws up, he is bound to have a sense of privilege and entitlement. Jayson Blair was responding to his superiors’ - specifically Raines and Boyd’s -- lead.
Note the divergence between Jonathan Landman’s admission that Blair’s promotion was due to race, and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd’s denial that race played a role. Liberal pundit Mickey Kaus called Boyd “the moose in The Times newsroom,” as in “the problem nobody will talk about.”
While demanding race-based hiring and promotions, professional blacks always deny that any particular black was hired or promoted, based on his race. The Times brass has sought to blame a lack of “communication,” for letting things go on for so long, in Blair’s case. But a white applicant with Jayson Blair’s pathetic track record would never have gotten an interview. His application material more likely would have been passed around, for office entertainment.
And yet, Jayson Blair is angry that people are calling him an “affirmative action hire.” He told the New York Observer that most of his editors at the Times were “idiots,” and that he was a victim of “racism.”
Let us recall New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.’s “hea culpa,” in refusing to admit that his policies were at all responsible for Blair’s misdeeds. “But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no newsroom search for scapegoats…. “The person who did this is Jayson Blair. Let’s not begin to demonize our executives - either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.”
Why not blame Sulzberger, who has apparently never heard the phrase, “The buck stops here”?
In December, 1992, a young Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., having that year taken the reigns from his father and namesake, announced that “diversity” would be his crusade. The history of the Times under Sulzberger Jr., has been the story of a daily that, already characterized by socialist bias, largely surrendered its hard news values and became a propaganda sheet, with reporters ever more frequently publishing veiled editorials disguised as news stories, when they weren’t engaging in myriad forms of dishonesty.
On May 14, the Times held an extraordinary meeting for its entire news staff - excepting its media reporter, Jacques Steinberg, who was barred entry -- in a local movie theater. Notwithstanding Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s rationalizations, and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd’s song and dance, ‘What’s Race Got to Do with It?,’ in a weak moment, Executive Editor Howell Raines had an attack of honesty. Switching from a “hea culpa” to a mea culpa, he stated the obvious.
“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter. I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities.”
“Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
May 23, 2003
Toogood Reports
“Let’s see if your lies match up with your partner’s lies.” That trademark line, uttered by NYPD Blue’s “Det. Andy Sipowicz” (Dennis Franz) to a suspect about to be interrogated, would be a fitting opening for the interrogation of any number of New York Times reporters and editors. But if I had my pick of TV detectives to grill the mopes at the Times, I’d call “Det. Frank Pembleton” (Andre Braugher) of the late series Homicide: Life on the Streets, up from Baltimore. Pembleton, a master interrogator and avenging angel (“We speak for the dead”), is particularly adept at getting the truth out of psychopaths, and on West 43rd Street, the psychopaths seem to be tripping over each other.
The Times worthies are busy trying to spin their way out of the biggest scandal in the history of the Newspaper of Record, as the Times is known in the media. After four years with the newspaper, reporter Jayson Blair was caught variously plagiarizing and fabricating dozens, and possibly hundreds of stories. Without ever leaving New York City, he e-mailed stories to the Times’ 43rd Street offices with datelines from Cleveland, Maryland, West Virginia, Texas and elsewhere. Rather than be fired, on May 1, Blair resigned.
The official story at the Times, is that Blair was a ‘lone gunman’ who acted on his own, based on a pathological desire to deceive. Affirmative action had nothing to do with it.
In a “hea culpa,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. insisted, “The person who did this is Jayson Blair. Let’s not begin to demonize our executives - either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.”
Even Times staffers don’t buy that line. A full year before matters exploded, Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landman had warned about Blair’s dishonesty, and sought to get him sacked, and other editors had expressed doubts about Blair. And it took external pressure, in the form of a plagiarism complaint from a Texas newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, before the Times brass would act at all.
But you have to remember who we’re dealing with here. And so, instead of hearing that Jayson Blair was a young man who had no business inside of the Times’ newsroom, we hear that Executive Editor Howell Raines was “autocratic” and had a “star system,” as if a rank incompetent and professional liar would somehow have “star” written all over him. And the mainstream media have helped the Times, by echoing its official story.
On ABC’s Nightline last Thursday, black Washington Post staffer Terry Neal sought to explain how a writer whose stories were fraudulent could be a “star.” Neal said it was a matter of a “tradeoff” between “accuracy” and getting “scoops.” But there is no evidence that Jayson Blair ever published a scoop in his life. Host Chris Bury did not ask Neal how lies based on non-existent, “unnamed sources” could count as “scoops.”
(Neal was trying to distill sound bites from a much more thoughtful column he’d written on Blair. The column argued that a dishonest reporter would be able to write more vivid, exciting prose than colleagues constrained by the truth. However, Neal’s claim that the Blair case had nothing to do with race does not stand up to scrutiny.)
In a shameless performance, Bury in effect resigned from the journalism profession. He opened the program by dishonestly contrasting how Blair was “pilloried” to the New Republic’s white serial plagiarist, Stephen Glass, who had just published an autobiographical novel, and who, Bury suggested, had gotten off easy. Bury counted on the audience having forgotten how Glass had been run out of the journalism business, when he was caught inventing stories back in 1998. When Stephen Glass was exposed as a fraud, no one showed him any sympathy, and rightly so. In contrast, many reporters have treated Jayson Blair as some sort of “tragedy,” writing of a “meltdown,” even as they show that Blair had been consistently dishonest since college, if not earlier.
Bury asked rhetorical questions of his guests that put race off limits as an issue. “But no one asks how Glass’s race may have helped him.” That’s because there was no evidence that race helped Glass, while there was abundant evidence that race helped Blair!
Rather than enlighten the public, Chris Bury aided in a cover-up. But then, he was just following the example of his longtime boss and mentor, Ted Koppel, in matters of race.
Bury’s precautions were unnecessary. His guests were Newsweek’s editor, Mark Whitaker, who is black; Condace Pressley, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists; and white Washington Post media critic, Howard Kurtz. Unless Bury squeezed in a critic of affirmative action while I blinked, his guests and the other journalists and professors interviewed, all denied that race was a factor in the Blair story. Chris Bury didn’t even pretend to be giving the story balanced coverage. And when Howard Kurtz said that a black journalist was “ready to take my head off” at the mere suggestion that race might have been a factor, neither Kurtz nor anyone else present questioned the integrity of the black journalist.
Just two days earlier, the NABJ web site had posted an editorial, condemning the consideration of race in the Blair story.
“‘But for those critics of diversity to assert that Blair did what he did or got where he got solely because of the color of his skin is just plain wrong, myopic and lazy journalism,’ said Condace Pressley, president of NABJ and assistant program director at WSB Radio in Atlanta. ‘And it ignores facts in other cases.’
“For instance, did race have anything to do with the awful case of Brian Walski, the LA Times photographer who fabricated the photograph out of Iraq earlier this year? Was it a factor with the two Salt Lake City reporters who sold a fabricated story to the National Enquirer for $20,000 in the Elizabeth Smart case? Was it a factor with Mike Barnicle, Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit, Eric Drudis or the dozens of other white journalists who smeared the honorable profession of journalism and lied to their readers?
“Why should it be a factor here?”
Because the facts say it is.
Like other race hustlers, Condace Pressley is playing a rigged game. She knows that with rare exceptions, it would be career suicide for any reporter at a major daily or TV station to challenge her.
At the bottom of the NABJ’s editorial, the organization lays out its mission:
“The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) founded in 1975, exists to promote newsroom diversity [to get unqualified blacks journalism internships and jobs], expand job and recruiting opportunities for African-American journalists and journalism students [a repetition of the previous phrase], and to advocate for fairness and balance in media coverage of the African-American community and of the African-American experience [to pressure media organizations out of doing serious reporting on blacks and urban issues, and instead turn them into racial cheerleaders].”
A courageous exception to the above rule was made by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who observed that,
“… a close reading of the Times’ own account of what went wrong suggests that the paper itself does not fully comprehend what happened. It was not, as some outside observers have said, that no newspaper can fully protect itself against a liar. It was rather that the paper should have known it had a liar on its hands and, despite obvious warnings, did little about it….
“The answer appears to be precisely what the Times denies: favoritism based on race.”
With all due respect to Richard Cohen, I have to note that he is that anachronism whom youngish conservatives are unaware ever existed, and that youngish lefties are outraged to discover still exists: The principled, liberal, male patriot with intact genitalia. Thus it is that Cohen, a military veteran, has also contradicted the feminist dogma that women can serve in the military, just like men. Granted, Cohen still defends an idealized form of affirmative action that exists nowhere, but even that is not enough to satisfy today’s diversity apparatchiks. But Cohen is in his sixties, and will be retiring sometime soon. The socialist establishment can wait him out.
Here are the bare facts, in the matter of the Truth vs. Jayson Blair:
1. In spite of a checkered track record as a student newspaper reporter, local daily and Boston Globe intern, and editor in high school and at the University of Maryland (where he did a poor job as editor, and resigned while under a cloud), he got his foot in the door at the Times through an affirmative action summer internship in 1998 -- in other words, through race;
2. He failed to ever finish college;
3. In spite of what Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz called “substandard” tours at the college paper and during the Times internship, and the lack of a college degree, the Times hired Blair as a reporter in 1999.
4. When repeated questions arose about Blair’s honesty as a reporter, instead of firing him, the Times brass repeatedly promoted him, from intermediate reporter to full-time reporter, to national reporter, and ultimately, to head up the D.C. Sniper team.
There is no tougher job to get in the world of journalism, than a writing gig at the New York Times. Tens of thousands of hot-shot reporters around the country dream of working at the Grey Lady, without ever getting so much as an interview.
In the early 1990s in New York, while publishing my own magazine, A Different Drummer, I also wrote the occasional freelance piece for the daily, New York Newsday.
At one point, I called up the New York Daily News, which was then the city’s biggest daily, to try and get a job there. The person I spoke to said - without laughing -- that I would have to send my resume to the personnel office.
I didn’t waste my time. Nobody, but nobody, ever got a writing job at a major metropolitan daily, by simply applying to the personnel office.
Around the same time, I sold some furniture (my day job) to a couple of New York Post staffers. I asked the husband what would happen, if I applied to his newspaper (then as now, the third biggest daily in town) for a writing job. Laughing, he said, “It would get tossed in the ‘circular file’“ (garbage can). His wife told of the first time she’d heard the term. Someone had sent in a resume, and her boss told her to “file it in the ‘circular file.’“
(Years later, I would freelance for both the Post and the Daily News, writing on higher education and culture, but did so through directly contacting the Post’s deputy op-ed editor, Mark Cunningham, and the Daily News’ op-ed editor, Bob Laird, respectively.)
To even be considered for employment at the Times, a reporter candidate often needs:
1. Orthodox socialist/politically correct views on … everything;
2. A bachelor’s degree from an Ivy League school or an OPU (overpriced, private university) equivalent, e.g., NYU;
3. A master’s degree in journalism, preferably from Columbia University; and
4. A storied career at a daily newspaper;
Apparently, for a black candidate, #1 alone suffices. No one at the Times even checked to see if Blair had graduated from Maryland, much less to find out whether he had finished his tenure as editor of The Diamondback, at the University of Maryland. (Mickey Kaus snickered about the Times’ failure to check out Blair’s college newspaper track record, “More evidence of due diligence, diversity-style.”) The in-house, May 11 “Blair Report” indirectly quoted a senior editor as saying of the former intern’s June, 1999 return to the newsroom as a reporter, “everyone assumed he had graduated.” And that was no accident. The history of affirmative action has involved not only the continual watering down of job requirements for black applicants (e.g., elimination of competency exams and previous professional experience), but also the attitude on the part of pro-affirmative action employers, of not wanting to know anything that might cast doubt on a black applicant’s qualifications.
(During the early 1990s, New York State NAACP chief Hazel Duke, whom socialist Gov. Mario Cuomo had given the patronage plum of running the state’s Off-Track Betting Corporation, summarily fired a bunch of white OTB managers. Duke then hired as her top manager, a black man who claimed to have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. When the white managers sued OTB, claiming they had been fired based solely on the color of their skin, and the state investigated the agency, it turned out that the black manager had no college degrees, though he said he felt he “deserved” them. Note that under the leadership of Hazel Duke, who was later caught embezzling funds from an elderly acquaintance, rather than earn billions of dollars for the state, as one would expect of a gambling authority, OTB made a net profit of zero dollars.)
Granted, the four points I cited above are not set in stone. Some current New York Times reporters lacked qualifications #3 & #4 at the time they were hired. One young, white female Times reporter I met circa 1987, told me she was hired as a copy girl straight out of the Ivy League’s Brown University. Sixteen undistinguished years later, the reporter is still with the Times. However, for heterosexual, white men, all four points are increasingly job requirements.
(As Reed Irvine reported on June 9, 2000, “Richard Berke, the national political correspondent for the New York Times, recently spoke at a reception celebrating the 10th anniversary of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He reminisced about the bad old days at the Times, when homosexual reporters were discriminated against. How things have changed. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there are times when you look at the front-page meeting and ... literally three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals.’“)
Initially, the Times adamantly, kind of, sort of denied that race had anything to do with the Blair case. Consider the newspaper’s 14,000-word, May 11 report on the case:
“Mr. Blair’s Times supervisors and Maryland professors emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom.”
Note the contradiction between the two sentences: He WASN’T a racial (affirmative action/diversity) hire and he WAS (“to help the paper diversify”) a racial hire. He got his foot in the door through a race-based internship program. One cannot, without raping the English language, deny that Jayson Blair was hired because of the color of his skin.
Several other questions that the Times report failed to answer were:
1. When prosecutors disparaged Blair’s story on sniper suspect John Muhammad, which Blair claimed was based on five anonymous law enforcement sources, why did his bosses not ask for the sources names? (In journalism, when a story’s veracity has been challenged, editors can and must get the names of anonymous informants.)
2. Why did the clerk responsible for expenses not check to see if the receipts Blair provided matched up with the places he claimed to have been reporting from?
3. Why did the Times, which typically issues company credit cards to reporters, either refuse to issue one to Blair, or revoke his card?
4. Why did Blair’s national editor, Jim Roberts, who in a highly unusual move, let Blair use his credit card for “travel,” fail to note the lack of any bills for hotel rooms or car rentals?
There were question marks already during Blair’s high-school career, during which time Newsweek’s Seth Mnookin reports, he interned at the Centreville Times newspaper, and was typically unreliable, disappeared at crucial times, and missed deadlines.
In one early report on Blair, another former University of Maryland student journalist refused to discuss Blair’s performance on the school paper, The Diamondback, instead making a mysteriously magnanimous comment about having himself been less than perfect. In Seth Mnookin’s new Newsweek story, “The Secret Life of Jayson Blair/Times Bomb,” Mnookin gets more specific information.
“‘When Jayson was initially hired, people were really upset,’ Danielle Newman told Newsweek. Newman was an editor under Blair, and succeeded him after he resigned. ‘We said we just didn’t think he was qualified,’ Newman said. There were concerns about a football game Blair covered-his story was filled with quotes from people another reporter at the game wasn’t sure existed. There was a story in which Blair tried to insert quotes from an Associated Press wire story. ‘We definitely had our suspicions about his reporting,’ Newman says. ‘But what could we do?’“
Unfortunately, Mnookin shies away from asking follow-up questions, like: Who was it that installed an unqualified, notoriously dishonest reporter as editor, and why?, and Why did you think there was nothing you could do about Blair?
Indeed, while Mnookin did at least admit that reporters across the country have been privately raising the issue, in newsrooms, of Blair’s possibly having benefited from racial discrimination, as soon as he raises the matter, he buries it in a thicket of addiction and psychological subplots: “Instead of answering questions about how Blair had been able to get away with so much for so long, the consensus in the newsroom was that the [May 11] Times story skirted around many of the major issues-the role of race in Blair’s hiring and promotions …”
At every step of Jayson Blair’s career, he engaged in unprofessional behavior, and often lacked the necessary qualifications for the job he was given, factors which would have disqualified him from being hired or gotten him fired, had he been white. And yet, people kept throwing editorships, internships, jobs and promotions his way, and working to help him succeed. He was repeatedly shuffled around the Times newsroom, given leaves of absence, warnings, reprimands, “counseling” … and promotions. Meanwhile, Times staffers and executives spoke about him less as a talented colleague, than the way a caseworker would speak of a client.
Let us return to the Times’ blackwash of things.
“In January 2001, Mr. Blair was promoted to full-time reporter with the consensus of a recruiting committee of roughly half a dozen people headed by Gerald M. Boyd, then a deputy managing editor, and the approval of Mr. [Joseph] Lelyveld.
[Joe Lelyveld was then the Times’ Executive Editor.]
“[Metropolitan Editor Jonathan] Landman said last week that he had been against the recommendation - that he ‘wasn’t asked so much as told’ about Mr. Blair’s promotion. But he also emphasized that he did not protest the move.”
[Of course he didn’t protest; that would have cost him his job.]
“The publisher and the executive editor, he said, had made clear the company’s commitment to diversity - ‘and properly so,’ he said….
“Mr. Boyd, who is now managing editor, the second-highest-ranking newsroom executive, said last week that the decision to advance Mr. Blair had not been based on race. Indeed, plenty of young white reporters have been swiftly promoted through the ranks.
[Is Boyd saying that the young white reporters were brought into the Times via a whites-only internship program, and that like Blair, they engaged from the beginning in sloppy, unprofessional work that required constant public corrections, that they were drug addicts, and became increasingly audacious in fabricating and plagiarizing stories? Of course, not. The only other logical possibility, is that he is saying that the fact that young, talented white reporters have been swiftly promoted, requires that a young black reporter also be promoted, no matter how incompetent and fraudulent he is. Methinks that, like Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd is used to making inane statements, without being challenged.]
“‘To say now that his promotion was about diversity in my view doesn’t begin to capture what was going on,’ said Mr. Boyd, who is himself African-American. ‘He was a young, promising reporter who had done a job that warranted promotion.’
[The record has made it abundantly clear that Jayson Blair was NOT a promising reporter, and had never earned a promotion.]
“But if anything, Mr. Blair’s performance after his promotion declined; he made more errors and clashed with more editors. Then came the catastrophes of Sept. 11, 2001, and things got worse.”
The report acknowledges that, “His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: ‘We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.’“
No one at the Times connected the dots, then or now. When you hire someone for reasons other than merit, and retain him, no matter how much he screws up, he is bound to have a sense of privilege and entitlement. Jayson Blair was responding to his superiors’ - specifically Raines and Boyd’s -- lead.
Note the divergence between Jonathan Landman’s admission that Blair’s promotion was due to race, and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd’s denial that race played a role. Liberal pundit Mickey Kaus called Boyd “the moose in The Times newsroom,” as in “the problem nobody will talk about.”
While demanding race-based hiring and promotions, professional blacks always deny that any particular black was hired or promoted, based on his race. The Times brass has sought to blame a lack of “communication,” for letting things go on for so long, in Blair’s case. But a white applicant with Jayson Blair’s pathetic track record would never have gotten an interview. His application material more likely would have been passed around, for office entertainment.
And yet, Jayson Blair is angry that people are calling him an “affirmative action hire.” He told the New York Observer that most of his editors at the Times were “idiots,” and that he was a victim of “racism.”
Let us recall New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.’s “hea culpa,” in refusing to admit that his policies were at all responsible for Blair’s misdeeds. “But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no newsroom search for scapegoats…. “The person who did this is Jayson Blair. Let’s not begin to demonize our executives - either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.”
Why not blame Sulzberger, who has apparently never heard the phrase, “The buck stops here”?
In December, 1992, a young Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., having that year taken the reigns from his father and namesake, announced that “diversity” would be his crusade. The history of the Times under Sulzberger Jr., has been the story of a daily that, already characterized by socialist bias, largely surrendered its hard news values and became a propaganda sheet, with reporters ever more frequently publishing veiled editorials disguised as news stories, when they weren’t engaging in myriad forms of dishonesty.
On May 14, the Times held an extraordinary meeting for its entire news staff - excepting its media reporter, Jacques Steinberg, who was barred entry -- in a local movie theater. Notwithstanding Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s rationalizations, and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd’s song and dance, ‘What’s Race Got to Do with It?,’ in a weak moment, Executive Editor Howell Raines had an attack of honesty. Switching from a “hea culpa” to a mea culpa, he stated the obvious.
“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter. I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities.”
“Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Six Little Girls
By Nicholas Stix
July, 2005
Middle American News
All across the diverse, new America, whites are being daily victimized in racial attacks that a complicit corporate media encourages by: 1. refusing to report on them, thereby hamstringing local communities and the nation alike from organizing to publicly condemn the attacks, punish the offenders, and deter future attacks; and 2. promoting a constant stream of hate crime hoaxes engineered by minority group members against whites.
One must use Internet search engines, in order to piece together the truth. One learns of Harris County, Texas police officer Nathaniel Rogers Jr., who has been charged with having pistol-whipped a white man, while shouting racial epithets; black former Atlanta policeman Terrance Alexander, who was fired for assaulting a white woman; black Pennsylvanian Stanford Augusto Douglas Jr., who confessed to having hunted down and murdered a white former superior, claiming he was avenging a racist joke from seven years earlier; and as in the case of Denver detective Donnie Young, of illegal aliens who are murdering white American police officers. And in national stories that cannot be suppressed, such as Atlanta’s Brian Nichols case, even when a black murder suspect confesses to being a race warrior, reporters deny the meaning of the man’s own words.
Racial attacks are increasingly carried out by minority youth, who are encouraged to do so by community leaders, educators, the media, and even textbooks. For instance, Sandra Stotsky’s book, Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason, cites an elementary school textbook which presents a Hispanic boy calling a white boy the coded racial epithet, “Monolingual lout!”
In one recent incident, on March 30 in Marine Park, Brooklyn, six white Catholic school girls from St. Edmond’s high school were attacked for 20 minutes by approximately 30 black boys and girls who beat the girls to a pulp, while shouting racial epithets (“black power!” "honky b-----s!" “white crackers!” “Martin Luther King!”). (Five of the victims were 15 years old; one was older.) The NYPD censored the racial epithets from police reports, and the New York media likewise refused to report on the attack. However, when a little community newspaper broke through the wall of silence, and Internet sites publicized the story nationwide, the mainstream media were forced to report on the attack. And yet, a number of mainstream reporters displayed more anger at the gutsy little newspaper and reporter that scooped them, and the Web sites, than at the attackers.
As the white girls were playing basketball, a group of six black girls from nearby Marine Park Junior High School ordered them to surrender the court. The white girls refused, and according to Brooklyn Skyline reporter Marianna Hernandez, some adults intervened, telling the black girls to wait their turn.
Though they were in a largely white neighborhood, the black girls were as contemptuous of the white adults as of the girls, and returned several times, each time with more black allies. Finally, when the mob reached about thirty 13 and 14-year-old black boys and girls, they swooped down on the white girls, punching, kicking, and stomping them. The victims’ wounds included chunks of hair ripped out of one girl’s head, a broken nose, a torn arm muscle, head trauma. One white victim ran into traffic to escape, and could easily have been killed. Indeed, had the attackers been older, they might have beaten to death some or all of the white girls. Two victims required hospitalization.
In 1986, when a much smaller white gang attacked some black men walking through Howard Beach, Queens, Michael Griffith was killed when he ran into traffic to try and save himself. The case became a national cause celebre, was used to condemn New York whites, and vaulted black supremacists
Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, and C. Vernon Mason, who in 1987-88 would produce the Tawana Brawley Hoax, to national prominence.
The five female suspects, plus three boys that were arrested five weeks later, are now charged with two misdemeanors (attempted assault and menacing) and three felonies, including attempted gang assault in the first degree and two counts of hate crimes. Because they are all under 16, the most the attackers can serve is 18 months in a juvenile facility.
On June 13, the eight defendants’ criminal trial began. After opening statements and testimony, the trial was adjourned until June 27.
Daily News columnist Denis Hamill quoted one of the victims’ attorneys, Stephen Murphy, as saying, “No matter who's doing the hating, it's ugly. In this case, it's clear these five white girls were singled out because of the color of their skin, and the police brass at the 63rd Precinct ignored all the evidence.”
Murphy successfully defended one of the white defendants in the Howard Beach trial. Murphy’s co-counsel, Daniel Russo, a former Brooklyn prosecutor, told Middle American News that he and Murphy are still investigating the conduct of Marine Park JHS and the NYPD, to see whether they will sue the city education and/or police departments. “Suit hasn’t been filed yet.” Russo noted, however, “There was no police presence in the park.”
The idea that New York blacks have a right to riot whenever they please -- what historian Fred Siegel in The Future Once Happened Here called “riot ideology” -- was born under Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966-1973). During an economic boom with only five percent local unemployment, Lindsay’s Marxist welfare commissioner, Mitchell “Come-and-Get-It” Ginsberg, more than doubled the welfare rolls from 538,000 to 1,165,000.
The riot ideology and the welfare revolution it spawned were not limited to New York. Marxist Columbia University professors Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward developed the “politics of turmoil,” in order to bring about a communist revolution. The idea was to bankrupt America’s cities, through getting all black unwed mothers to quit their jobs and go on the welfare rolls; to cause all social institutions to collapse, through making impossible demands on them; and to use young black males as revolutionary storm troopers. Piven and Cloward anticipated the explosion in illegitimacy, educational failure, crime and drug addiction as revolutionary opportunities.
The welfare revolution did not bring about a Marxist overthrow of America’s government, but it did bring about the collapse of black -- and later Hispanic -- urban morality, and the institutionalization of black and Hispanic racism. Today, these pathologies are celebrated as “multiculturalism.”
Originally published in Middle American News.
July, 2005
Middle American News
All across the diverse, new America, whites are being daily victimized in racial attacks that a complicit corporate media encourages by: 1. refusing to report on them, thereby hamstringing local communities and the nation alike from organizing to publicly condemn the attacks, punish the offenders, and deter future attacks; and 2. promoting a constant stream of hate crime hoaxes engineered by minority group members against whites.
One must use Internet search engines, in order to piece together the truth. One learns of Harris County, Texas police officer Nathaniel Rogers Jr., who has been charged with having pistol-whipped a white man, while shouting racial epithets; black former Atlanta policeman Terrance Alexander, who was fired for assaulting a white woman; black Pennsylvanian Stanford Augusto Douglas Jr., who confessed to having hunted down and murdered a white former superior, claiming he was avenging a racist joke from seven years earlier; and as in the case of Denver detective Donnie Young, of illegal aliens who are murdering white American police officers. And in national stories that cannot be suppressed, such as Atlanta’s Brian Nichols case, even when a black murder suspect confesses to being a race warrior, reporters deny the meaning of the man’s own words.
Racial attacks are increasingly carried out by minority youth, who are encouraged to do so by community leaders, educators, the media, and even textbooks. For instance, Sandra Stotsky’s book, Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason, cites an elementary school textbook which presents a Hispanic boy calling a white boy the coded racial epithet, “Monolingual lout!”
In one recent incident, on March 30 in Marine Park, Brooklyn, six white Catholic school girls from St. Edmond’s high school were attacked for 20 minutes by approximately 30 black boys and girls who beat the girls to a pulp, while shouting racial epithets (“black power!” "honky b-----s!" “white crackers!” “Martin Luther King!”). (Five of the victims were 15 years old; one was older.) The NYPD censored the racial epithets from police reports, and the New York media likewise refused to report on the attack. However, when a little community newspaper broke through the wall of silence, and Internet sites publicized the story nationwide, the mainstream media were forced to report on the attack. And yet, a number of mainstream reporters displayed more anger at the gutsy little newspaper and reporter that scooped them, and the Web sites, than at the attackers.
As the white girls were playing basketball, a group of six black girls from nearby Marine Park Junior High School ordered them to surrender the court. The white girls refused, and according to Brooklyn Skyline reporter Marianna Hernandez, some adults intervened, telling the black girls to wait their turn.
Though they were in a largely white neighborhood, the black girls were as contemptuous of the white adults as of the girls, and returned several times, each time with more black allies. Finally, when the mob reached about thirty 13 and 14-year-old black boys and girls, they swooped down on the white girls, punching, kicking, and stomping them. The victims’ wounds included chunks of hair ripped out of one girl’s head, a broken nose, a torn arm muscle, head trauma. One white victim ran into traffic to escape, and could easily have been killed. Indeed, had the attackers been older, they might have beaten to death some or all of the white girls. Two victims required hospitalization.
In 1986, when a much smaller white gang attacked some black men walking through Howard Beach, Queens, Michael Griffith was killed when he ran into traffic to try and save himself. The case became a national cause celebre, was used to condemn New York whites, and vaulted black supremacists
Al Sharpton, Alton Maddox, and C. Vernon Mason, who in 1987-88 would produce the Tawana Brawley Hoax, to national prominence.
Five of the alleged March 30 attackers were so blasé, that they hung around in the vicinity afterward, where they were identified by witnesses and arrested for mere misdemeanor assault. Because of their age, their names are being kept confidential by Brooklyn Family Court: Sadira M., Akeylah P., Jessica P., Kedne L. and Vanna W.
Days later at a community meeting, the local precinct commander, Deputy Inspector Kevin McGinn, announced, “This is not being looked at as a bias crime.”
In the April 11 Brooklyn Skyline community newspaper, Marianna Hernandez’ story -- with the sarcastic title, “Non-Bias Attack” -- told of the mob violence, of Dep. Insp. McGinn’s denial that the crime was a racial attack, and quoted parents of the victims. Hernandez quoted local parent Cathy Miller as saying, “It’s getting progressively worse in the community - these types of gangs are not only taking away our parks, they’re ruining our neighborhoods.”
Over the next two weeks, the Skyline article was read by hundreds of thousands of Americans via the Internet. It was only after people had read about the attack everywhere but in New York (excepting for Skyline readers), that the New York media felt forced to report on it. And then, many reporters were more interested in condemning Marianna Hernandez and the Skyline for reporting on the attack, than condemning the attackers.
On April 25, reporters Angelina Cappiello, Patrick Gallahue, and Erika Martinez, of the allegedly conservative New York Post, emphasized in the lead to their article, that the case “became a rallying point on white-supremacy Web sites,” and mocked the victims’ parents for hiring a lawyer. “One parent said she and the other parents are planning to obtain a lawyer and take legal action — though she couldn't specify exactly what action would be taken.”
The reporters had to know that in New York, white victims of racial attacks must pay for expensive, aggressive legal representation, just as if they were defendants, if they wish to obtain justice. Otherwise, police and prosecutors alike will treat them with contempt.
The Post report mentioned in passing that the charges had been upgraded to felonies, after the city corporation counsel had overruled police in determining that the crime was a felony bias attack. City lawyers virtually never up the ante for black racial attackers. The Post reporters had to know that the change was likely due to the victims’ parents having hired high-profile lawyer Stephen Murphy, and from the publicity that ensued from the Skyline report.
The Post report did, however, quote state Sen. Carl Kruger as saying, "If you look at our community in Brooklyn, [hate crimes] are not down. This is another reminder." That was an unusually courageous statement for a politician.
In a column in the same edition, Post reporter Leonard Greene was even more hostile. In “Vile outbursts are fanning flames of hatred,” Greene argued that in reporting on the attack, the Brooklyn Skyline had committed a crime equal to that of the racist mob.
“THERE were two bias crimes in Brooklyn.
“The first happened when a group of black girls allegedly attacked a group of white girls …
“The second happened when a local newspaper resorted to hate speech and race-baiting to stir up local outrage over the incident.”
The five female suspects, plus three boys that were arrested five weeks later, are now charged with two misdemeanors (attempted assault and menacing) and three felonies, including attempted gang assault in the first degree and two counts of hate crimes. Because they are all under 16, the most the attackers can serve is 18 months in a juvenile facility.
On June 13, the eight defendants’ criminal trial began. After opening statements and testimony, the trial was adjourned until June 27.
Daily News columnist Denis Hamill quoted one of the victims’ attorneys, Stephen Murphy, as saying, “No matter who's doing the hating, it's ugly. In this case, it's clear these five white girls were singled out because of the color of their skin, and the police brass at the 63rd Precinct ignored all the evidence.”
Murphy successfully defended one of the white defendants in the Howard Beach trial. Murphy’s co-counsel, Daniel Russo, a former Brooklyn prosecutor, told Middle American News that he and Murphy are still investigating the conduct of Marine Park JHS and the NYPD, to see whether they will sue the city education and/or police departments. “Suit hasn’t been filed yet.” Russo noted, however, “There was no police presence in the park.”
The idea that New York blacks have a right to riot whenever they please -- what historian Fred Siegel in The Future Once Happened Here called “riot ideology” -- was born under Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966-1973). During an economic boom with only five percent local unemployment, Lindsay’s Marxist welfare commissioner, Mitchell “Come-and-Get-It” Ginsberg, more than doubled the welfare rolls from 538,000 to 1,165,000.
The riot ideology and the welfare revolution it spawned were not limited to New York. Marxist Columbia University professors Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward developed the “politics of turmoil,” in order to bring about a communist revolution. The idea was to bankrupt America’s cities, through getting all black unwed mothers to quit their jobs and go on the welfare rolls; to cause all social institutions to collapse, through making impossible demands on them; and to use young black males as revolutionary storm troopers. Piven and Cloward anticipated the explosion in illegitimacy, educational failure, crime and drug addiction as revolutionary opportunities.
The welfare revolution did not bring about a Marxist overthrow of America’s government, but it did bring about the collapse of black -- and later Hispanic -- urban morality, and the institutionalization of black and Hispanic racism. Today, these pathologies are celebrated as “multiculturalism.”
Sunday, September 09, 2007
The Crucifixion of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill
By Nicholas Stix
Posted July 22, 2002 for August 12 issue
Insight on the News
Just point and click. Those two steps, and a long e-mail “cc” list, apparently are all that it takes to spread a hoax around the world today. It works like a computer virus, and with consequences no less dangerous.
Just ask Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.
Readers of Insight and her sister daily, the Washington Times, know Hatfill through his attempts over the years to warn the public of America's lack of readiness against biowarfare attacks. However, the mainstream liberal press ignored Hatfill — until late June, that is.
Since then Hatfill has gained international notoriety with a slew of stories in Time magazine, the American Prospect, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Washington Post, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel and on Websites as far away as South Africa. The stories played up FBI searches of Hatfill's home and a refrigerated storage locker he rents — implying that he is the anthrax terrorist who killed five people last fall with contaminated mail. On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as “Mr. Z” and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist.
Why would the FBI need to “exculpate” someone on whom it has nothing? The only cloud of “suspicion” hanging over Hatfill's head is the one manufactured by the media, who have let Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg lead them around by the nose. Rosenberg blames the U.S. government for last fall's anthrax attacks. She long has called on the United States to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would permit international inspectors to visit our biodefense installations. In a sympathetic portrait in the March 18 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that,
Rosenberg has provided no evidence to support her charges. Meanwhile, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton has argued, her prescription would allow rogue nations such as Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria to learn through protocol inspections about U.S. defensive programs and develop their own offensive programs. Journalists usually refer to Rosenberg as a “microbiologist” and “State University of New York professor.” Officially, she is a professor of environmental science at a performing-arts college, but she neither has conducted scientific research nor taught in years. And she has little biowarfare expertise. Working with the far-left Federation of American Scientists, Rosenberg is a taxpayer-supported, full-time activist. Immediately after last fall's anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began claiming that the terrorist was an American scientist from within the biodefense establishment. However, her stories diverged wildly depending on her audience. In the European version, the terrorist was a CIA agent/contract scientist who acted on agency orders as part of a deadly germ-warfare experiment. Unbeknownst to European reporters, they were getting a plotline from the brilliant but little-watched TV show, Millennium (1996-99). In the American version, the terrorist was a “bioevangelist” (the Sun's Scott Shane) who sought not to harm anyone, but to warn the public of the dangers of biowarfare.
In setting up an American scientist to take the fall for the killings, Rosenberg may have seen an opportunity to discredit the U.S. biowarfare-defense program, get the Bush administration to sign on to international biowarfare protocols that would give our enemies access to our biodefense secrets and exact political revenge on Hatfill. In seeking to convince readers of Hatfill's guilt in last fall's attacks, Kristof and the other journalists claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these “attacks.”
No one ever has provided any evidence showing that the Rhodesian army carried out anthrax attacks, much less that Hatfill participated in them. Kristof and company merely are regurgitating a tainted 1992 article by longtime Rosenberg associate Meryl Nass. The Nass report purported to explain the 1978-80 anthrax outbreak that affected 10,000 black farmers, predominantly with cutaneous anthrax, killing 182. In her “explanation,” Nass leaped from one politically loaded speculation to another without any evidence.
The flamboyant, brilliant Hatfill earned his medical degree in Rhodesia in the late 1970s and early 1980s while serving in U.S. and Rhodesian special forces. In Rhodesia, he fought against communist guerrillas. One must recall that in Rhodesia — now named Zimbabwe, and ruled since 1980 by genocidal communist Robert Mugabe — the choice was never between apartheid and freedom, but rather between white or black apartheid.
Hatfill's attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me, “My client doesn't want to do anything, right now. … He's really upset that his name continues to be mentioned, and he's decided that the best approach is to ignore everything and to try and stay as much removed from it as he can. He might change his mind at some point in the future and participate in something but, right now, he doesn't [wish to].”
If Hatfill doesn't engage the campaign against him in a hurry, he soon may find himself sharing a cell with the likes of José Padilla.
My other articles on the anthrax case:
(If you're pressed for time, the best of the bunch are: “Dr. Strangelove Disarms America,” “Media Manufacture Cloud of Suspicion over Hatfill,” and “A High-Tech Lynching: ABC News, the FBI, and the ‘Greendale School’ Myth.”)
“Calling Agent Frank Black: Anthrax, the Left’s Dr. Strangelove, and TV’s Millennium”
“Hunting America’s Leading Anthrax Hoaxer: Dr. Strangelove Strikes Again – in Scotland!”
“Media Manufacture Cloud of Suspicion over Hatfill”
“Dr. Strangelove Disarms America”
“A High-Tech Lynching: ABC News, the FBI, and the ‘Greendale School’ Myth”
“FBI Anthrax ‘Person of Interest’ Positively ID’d In Princeton, NJ”
“FBI Terrorizes Hatfill”
“DOJ Ordered Hatfill Dismissed: Should AG John Ashcroft be Next?”
“Scientist with Rhodesian Past Still Center of Media Crosshairs”
“The Anthrax Case: Hatfill Tormentor Back in Business”
“Anthrax: No Progress in Battle on Bioterror – Why?”
Posted July 22, 2002 for August 12 issue
Insight on the News
Just point and click. Those two steps, and a long e-mail “cc” list, apparently are all that it takes to spread a hoax around the world today. It works like a computer virus, and with consequences no less dangerous.
Just ask Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.
Readers of Insight and her sister daily, the Washington Times, know Hatfill through his attempts over the years to warn the public of America's lack of readiness against biowarfare attacks. However, the mainstream liberal press ignored Hatfill — until late June, that is.
Since then Hatfill has gained international notoriety with a slew of stories in Time magazine, the American Prospect, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Washington Post, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel and on Websites as far away as South Africa. The stories played up FBI searches of Hatfill's home and a refrigerated storage locker he rents — implying that he is the anthrax terrorist who killed five people last fall with contaminated mail. On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as “Mr. Z” and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist.
If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. … It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion.”
Why would the FBI need to “exculpate” someone on whom it has nothing? The only cloud of “suspicion” hanging over Hatfill's head is the one manufactured by the media, who have let Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg lead them around by the nose. Rosenberg blames the U.S. government for last fall's anthrax attacks. She long has called on the United States to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would permit international inspectors to visit our biodefense installations. In a sympathetic portrait in the March 18 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann wrote that,
Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the [1972 Biological Weapons] convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored.
Rosenberg has provided no evidence to support her charges. Meanwhile, as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton has argued, her prescription would allow rogue nations such as Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria to learn through protocol inspections about U.S. defensive programs and develop their own offensive programs. Journalists usually refer to Rosenberg as a “microbiologist” and “State University of New York professor.” Officially, she is a professor of environmental science at a performing-arts college, but she neither has conducted scientific research nor taught in years. And she has little biowarfare expertise. Working with the far-left Federation of American Scientists, Rosenberg is a taxpayer-supported, full-time activist. Immediately after last fall's anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began claiming that the terrorist was an American scientist from within the biodefense establishment. However, her stories diverged wildly depending on her audience. In the European version, the terrorist was a CIA agent/contract scientist who acted on agency orders as part of a deadly germ-warfare experiment. Unbeknownst to European reporters, they were getting a plotline from the brilliant but little-watched TV show, Millennium (1996-99). In the American version, the terrorist was a “bioevangelist” (the Sun's Scott Shane) who sought not to harm anyone, but to warn the public of the dangers of biowarfare.
In setting up an American scientist to take the fall for the killings, Rosenberg may have seen an opportunity to discredit the U.S. biowarfare-defense program, get the Bush administration to sign on to international biowarfare protocols that would give our enemies access to our biodefense secrets and exact political revenge on Hatfill. In seeking to convince readers of Hatfill's guilt in last fall's attacks, Kristof and the other journalists claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these “attacks.”
No one ever has provided any evidence showing that the Rhodesian army carried out anthrax attacks, much less that Hatfill participated in them. Kristof and company merely are regurgitating a tainted 1992 article by longtime Rosenberg associate Meryl Nass. The Nass report purported to explain the 1978-80 anthrax outbreak that affected 10,000 black farmers, predominantly with cutaneous anthrax, killing 182. In her “explanation,” Nass leaped from one politically loaded speculation to another without any evidence.
The flamboyant, brilliant Hatfill earned his medical degree in Rhodesia in the late 1970s and early 1980s while serving in U.S. and Rhodesian special forces. In Rhodesia, he fought against communist guerrillas. One must recall that in Rhodesia — now named Zimbabwe, and ruled since 1980 by genocidal communist Robert Mugabe — the choice was never between apartheid and freedom, but rather between white or black apartheid.
Hatfill's attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me, “My client doesn't want to do anything, right now. … He's really upset that his name continues to be mentioned, and he's decided that the best approach is to ignore everything and to try and stay as much removed from it as he can. He might change his mind at some point in the future and participate in something but, right now, he doesn't [wish to].”
If Hatfill doesn't engage the campaign against him in a hurry, he soon may find himself sharing a cell with the likes of José Padilla.
My other articles on the anthrax case:
(If you're pressed for time, the best of the bunch are: “Dr. Strangelove Disarms America,” “Media Manufacture Cloud of Suspicion over Hatfill,” and “A High-Tech Lynching: ABC News, the FBI, and the ‘Greendale School’ Myth.”)
“Calling Agent Frank Black: Anthrax, the Left’s Dr. Strangelove, and TV’s Millennium”
“Hunting America’s Leading Anthrax Hoaxer: Dr. Strangelove Strikes Again – in Scotland!”
“Media Manufacture Cloud of Suspicion over Hatfill”
“Dr. Strangelove Disarms America”
“A High-Tech Lynching: ABC News, the FBI, and the ‘Greendale School’ Myth”
“FBI Anthrax ‘Person of Interest’ Positively ID’d In Princeton, NJ”
“FBI Terrorizes Hatfill”
“DOJ Ordered Hatfill Dismissed: Should AG John Ashcroft be Next?”
“Scientist with Rhodesian Past Still Center of Media Crosshairs”
“The Anthrax Case: Hatfill Tormentor Back in Business”
“Anthrax: No Progress in Battle on Bioterror – Why?”
Dr. Strangelove Disarms America
By Nicholas Stix
August, 2002
Middle American News
Where some see a crisis, others see an opportunity. Last fall, five victims were murdered by anthrax-laced letters, but according to recent reports in such diverse sources as the socialist New York Times and neo-conservative weekly standard, the feds now have dozens, even hundreds of potential suspects. But not according to Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, whom I have dubbed the Dr. Strangelove of the American Left, far and away the most quoted “scientist” in anthrax stories. Rosenberg, who neither teaches nor conducts research, is a tenured, activist professor of environmental science at New York State’s performing arts college at Purchase, and the chairwoman of the Marxist Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Working Group on Biological Weapons. Since last fall, Rosenberg has insisted that the FBI knows exactly who the anthrax terrorist is, and that he is a “home-grown” (read: right-wing, Christian, white male) terrorist, not an Al Qaeda operative. Immediately following the anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began using them to try and force the federal government to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would undermine American sovereignty, and make America more vulnerable than ever to terrorist attacks.
In spite of (or because of) her extremist politics and lack of biowarfare expertise, Rosenberg has been quoted and cited by CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, New Yorker, Village Voice, Hartford Courant, Baltimore Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and American Prospect. Abroad, she has enjoyed fawning treatment by the BBC, Britain’s The Guardian and Scotsman newspapers, the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor, and on web sites as far away as the South African-based Dispatch.
In the December 14, 2001 New York Times, reporter William J. Broad misrepresented Rosenberg as an “expert,” and led with her in his anthrax story:
In the February 27-March 5, New York-based Village Voice, columnist James Ridgeway reported that Rosenberg “says the FBI has likely known the identity of the anthrax perp since October....,” and quoted her as saying, “Clearly they don’t want to name anyone until they have sufficient evidence to make a conviction. On the other hand, considering the small number of people they have to interview and that they’ve had five months to do it in – this is purely conjecture – they may be reluctant to pursue this guy because he may know too much.”
In the course of speaking with countless journalists, Rosenberg has frequently changed her story. To one audience she insists the “fact” that the anthrax terrorist was just seeking to spread fear, rather than kill anyone (what about the five people he murdered?!), “proves” that he is an American; to another audience, the “fact” that he tried to kill as many people as possible, “proves” that he is ... an American! Rosenberg has only been consistent, in ignoring evidence pointing to foreign terrorists, such as the skin inflammations that 911 terrorist leader Mohammed Atta suffered on his hands -- possibly from handling anthrax spores -- and for which he had sought treatment, and several secret meetings Atta had in Europe with Iraqi intelligence officers.
On January 6, the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane quoted Rosenberg as saying that the terrorist may have initiated an attack, in order to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist theory.” Rosenberg “says such a notion was occasionally aired jokingly in the small circle of those who worried about biological terror prior to Sept. 11. ‘There have been a number of occasions when we’ve said in frustration, “What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up.”’”
So, Rosenberg and her comrades were hoping for an anthrax attack, in order to alert the public to the danger of otherwise non-existent attacks, for which they would then blame the American government.
One moment Rosenberg claims that she has put together a “profile” of the killer entirely on her own, and the next, she insists that she has worked closely with the FBI, and knows that the anthrax killer was a specific scientist working on a germ warfare program, and acting with federal authorization.
As David Tell wrote on April 29 for the New York Post and the weekly standard, “Rosenberg claims the FBI has known the anthrax killer’s precise identity for months already ... [A]ccording to an account ... [she] offered on BBC Two’s flagship Newsnight telecast March 14, the suspect is a former federal bioweapons scientist now doing contract work for the CIA. Last fall, you see, the man’s Langley masters supposedly decided they’d like to field-test what would happen if billions of lethal anthrax spores were sent through the regular mail, and ‘it was left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out.’ The loosely supervised madman then used his assignment to launch an attack on the media and Senate ‘for his own motives.’ And, this truth being obviously too hot to handle, the FBI is now trying very hard not to discover it.”
David Tell noted that Rosenberg’s academic title notwithstanding, she doesn’t understand anthrax, genetic research, biological warfare or the evidence at hand, and “[her] sensational pronouncements betray ... a surprisingly unscientific, even Oliver Stone-scale, incaution about the ‘facts’ at her disposal.”
And yet, the media here and abroad treat Rosenberg’s pronouncements as authoritative. In January, she was interviewed on the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor (my translation):
The Monitor’s producers embellished on Rosenberg’s embellishments. Immediately after discussing her charges, The Monitor “reported” that,
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is the only person to make that claim before or since the Monitor interview. The Monitor producers’ claim of independent corroboration was designed to enhance both their credibility and Rosenberg’s.
Indeed, far from getting her “mad CIA scientist” story from FBI sources, Rosenberg stole the idea from Chris Carter’s brilliant but little-watched TV show, Millennium (1996-1999).
Rosenberg assumes the terrorist got his hands on the Ames strain at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. But since 1997, when a new federal law mandated that all such transactions be recorded with the Centers for Disease Control, Fort Detrick, following scientific protocol, has shared Ames strain anthrax spores with researchers at seven institutions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Canadian and British scientists have since shared the Ames strain with colleagues at other, unreported locations, and it’s anyone’s guess how many institutions received Ames spores from USAMRIID prior to 1997. And the Iraqis have long had weaponized anthrax.
The best analysis I have seen of the method behind Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s particular brand of madness, came from Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival, on March 20:
And that’s exactly what Rosenberg wants.
In the June 26 Hartford Courant, Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan reported that “[Dr. Steven J.] Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg ... staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle ...” and FBI agents.
“For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.”
Immediately following the June 18 meeting, a slew of articles appeared in the American and even African media strongly suggesting that Dr. Steven J. Hatfill was the anthrax terrorist.
Steven J. Hatfill, a brilliant, flamboyant, American scientist who has for years warned of the dangers of bioterrorism, is a protegé of William C. Patrick III, the scientist who ran the U.S. offensive biowarfare program that President Richard Nixon shut down over 30 years ago. Hatfill has consented to four FBI searches of his home and property, and most recently invited the Bureau -- amid FBI press leaks to the media -- to search his premises on June 25. None of the searches turned up anything. Using journalistic and political proxies, Rosenberg has cost Hatfill his security clearance, and hunted him from job to job, seeking to make it impossible for him to work.
Rosenberg, who has no evidence to support her accusations, has persecuted Hatfill, and sought his arrest because he is a patriotic defender of America’s biowarfare defense program, which she seeks to destroy; to distract the public and authorities’ attention from hunting down the real, presumably foreign terrorists; and last, but not least, as political revenge. Hatfill earned his medical degree in then-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Having also trained and served in Rhodesian and American special forces, Hatfill fought against the guerillas who eventually toppled Rhodesia’s white, apartheid regime. Communist dictator Robert Mugabe, in power since 1980, has destroyed the nation, and is now deliberately starving up to half of its 12 million citizens. Rosenberg supports Mugabe.
In 1992, Dr. Meryl Nass, a longtime Rosenberg associate, published an article on the anthrax outbreak on black-owned farms in late 1970s’ Rhodesia. The outbreak initially affected livestock, and eventually over 10,000 blacks, predominantly with skin anthrax; 182 people died. Despite lacking any evidence to support her charge of a military anthrax attack, Nass claimed that the outbreak was a case of germ warfare carried out by the white, Rhodesian Army’s elite Selous Scouts unit. (Reportedly, Hatfill served in the Selous Scouts.) The article was not published in a scientific journal. More recently, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has gotten New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to suggest, in his July 2 and July 12 columns, that Hatfill (whom Kristof refers to as “Mr. Z”) worked on the “anthrax outbreak” in Rhodesia, and to call on the F.B.I. to arrest Hatfill:
On July 3, Hatfill’s attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me that his client, who is in a state of shock, does not want to talk to the press:
If Steven J. Hatfill does not recover from the shock of the ambush he is enduring, he may soon find himself unable to speak even with his attorney.
August, 2002
Middle American News
Where some see a crisis, others see an opportunity. Last fall, five victims were murdered by anthrax-laced letters, but according to recent reports in such diverse sources as the socialist New York Times and neo-conservative weekly standard, the feds now have dozens, even hundreds of potential suspects. But not according to Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, whom I have dubbed the Dr. Strangelove of the American Left, far and away the most quoted “scientist” in anthrax stories. Rosenberg, who neither teaches nor conducts research, is a tenured, activist professor of environmental science at New York State’s performing arts college at Purchase, and the chairwoman of the Marxist Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Working Group on Biological Weapons. Since last fall, Rosenberg has insisted that the FBI knows exactly who the anthrax terrorist is, and that he is a “home-grown” (read: right-wing, Christian, white male) terrorist, not an Al Qaeda operative. Immediately following the anthrax attacks, Rosenberg began using them to try and force the federal government to sign on to biowarfare protocols that would undermine American sovereignty, and make America more vulnerable than ever to terrorist attacks.
In spite of (or because of) her extremist politics and lack of biowarfare expertise, Rosenberg has been quoted and cited by CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, New Yorker, Village Voice, Hartford Courant, Baltimore Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and American Prospect. Abroad, she has enjoyed fawning treatment by the BBC, Britain’s The Guardian and Scotsman newspapers, the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor, and on web sites as far away as the South African-based Dispatch.
In the December 14, 2001 New York Times, reporter William J. Broad misrepresented Rosenberg as an “expert,” and led with her in his anthrax story:
F.B.I. agents yesterday questioned a leading proponent of the theory that the anthrax attacks were the work of someone linked to a federal laboratory or contractor, asking her about possible clues to the culprit’s identity.
“They wanted to know whether I had ideas about who did it,” said the expert, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York at Purchase and chairwoman of a biological weapons panel at the Federation of American Scientists.
In the February 27-March 5, New York-based Village Voice, columnist James Ridgeway reported that Rosenberg “says the FBI has likely known the identity of the anthrax perp since October....,” and quoted her as saying, “Clearly they don’t want to name anyone until they have sufficient evidence to make a conviction. On the other hand, considering the small number of people they have to interview and that they’ve had five months to do it in – this is purely conjecture – they may be reluctant to pursue this guy because he may know too much.”
In the course of speaking with countless journalists, Rosenberg has frequently changed her story. To one audience she insists the “fact” that the anthrax terrorist was just seeking to spread fear, rather than kill anyone (what about the five people he murdered?!), “proves” that he is an American; to another audience, the “fact” that he tried to kill as many people as possible, “proves” that he is ... an American! Rosenberg has only been consistent, in ignoring evidence pointing to foreign terrorists, such as the skin inflammations that 911 terrorist leader Mohammed Atta suffered on his hands -- possibly from handling anthrax spores -- and for which he had sought treatment, and several secret meetings Atta had in Europe with Iraqi intelligence officers.
On January 6, the Baltimore Sun’s Scott Shane quoted Rosenberg as saying that the terrorist may have initiated an attack, in order to warn the public of the dangers of bioterrorism. Shane dubbed this the “bioevangelist theory.” Rosenberg “says such a notion was occasionally aired jokingly in the small circle of those who worried about biological terror prior to Sept. 11. ‘There have been a number of occasions when we’ve said in frustration, “What we need is a biological weapons attack to wake the country up.”’”
So, Rosenberg and her comrades were hoping for an anthrax attack, in order to alert the public to the danger of otherwise non-existent attacks, for which they would then blame the American government.
One moment Rosenberg claims that she has put together a “profile” of the killer entirely on her own, and the next, she insists that she has worked closely with the FBI, and knows that the anthrax killer was a specific scientist working on a germ warfare program, and acting with federal authorization.
As David Tell wrote on April 29 for the New York Post and the weekly standard, “Rosenberg claims the FBI has known the anthrax killer’s precise identity for months already ... [A]ccording to an account ... [she] offered on BBC Two’s flagship Newsnight telecast March 14, the suspect is a former federal bioweapons scientist now doing contract work for the CIA. Last fall, you see, the man’s Langley masters supposedly decided they’d like to field-test what would happen if billions of lethal anthrax spores were sent through the regular mail, and ‘it was left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out.’ The loosely supervised madman then used his assignment to launch an attack on the media and Senate ‘for his own motives.’ And, this truth being obviously too hot to handle, the FBI is now trying very hard not to discover it.”
David Tell noted that Rosenberg’s academic title notwithstanding, she doesn’t understand anthrax, genetic research, biological warfare or the evidence at hand, and “[her] sensational pronouncements betray ... a surprisingly unscientific, even Oliver Stone-scale, incaution about the ‘facts’ at her disposal.”
And yet, the media here and abroad treat Rosenberg’s pronouncements as authoritative. In January, she was interviewed on the German TV newsmagazine, The Monitor (my translation):
Microbiologist [sic] Barbara Hatch Rosenberg knows the results of investigations by U.S. officials. Their analyses have meanwhile unambiguously confirmed their initial suspicion: The anthrax attacker came not from bin Laden’s bioterror laboratory, but rather from an American government lab.
The Monitor’s producers embellished on Rosenberg’s embellishments. Immediately after discussing her charges, The Monitor “reported” that,
The FBI now has a new, hot clue. And according to information in The Monitor’s possession, it leads straight to the American secret police, the CIA. The FBI is working on the assumption that the criminal is employed by a corporation that experimented with biological weapons for the CIA.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is the only person to make that claim before or since the Monitor interview. The Monitor producers’ claim of independent corroboration was designed to enhance both their credibility and Rosenberg’s.
Indeed, far from getting her “mad CIA scientist” story from FBI sources, Rosenberg stole the idea from Chris Carter’s brilliant but little-watched TV show, Millennium (1996-1999).
Rosenberg assumes the terrorist got his hands on the Ames strain at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. But since 1997, when a new federal law mandated that all such transactions be recorded with the Centers for Disease Control, Fort Detrick, following scientific protocol, has shared Ames strain anthrax spores with researchers at seven institutions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Canadian and British scientists have since shared the Ames strain with colleagues at other, unreported locations, and it’s anyone’s guess how many institutions received Ames spores from USAMRIID prior to 1997. And the Iraqis have long had weaponized anthrax.
The best analysis I have seen of the method behind Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s particular brand of madness, came from Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival, on March 20:
The [February 25] Washington Times story by Jerry Seper about the FBI supposedly having a prime suspect in the anthrax attacks generated attention nationally. He claimed his sources were "law enforcement authorities" and "leading biochemical experts." But you had to read deep into the article to discover his main source for this charge - Barbara Hatch Rosenberg ...
Interestingly, the Federation of American Scientists now promotes Rosenberg’s report on its own Web site by saying, "This report by Dr. Barbara Rosenberg prompted media reports that the FBI has a prime suspect in the anthrax attacks."...
The Times neglected to mention that [the Federation of American Scientists] is a group with a left-wing orientation that believes in the sanctity of international arms control agreements....
Near the end of Rosenberg’s own report, she tips her hand, saying, "The recent anthrax attack was a minor one but nonetheless we now see that it was made possible by a sophisticated government program…"
That’s her way of attacking the Bush Administration for resisting a protocol to an international agreement supposedly banning biological weapons. She believes that if it is proven that a former U.S. government scientist is behind the anthrax attacks, then that makes the case for having an international treaty mandating inspections of government facilities. The U.S. fears that rogue nations would circumvent the treaty and our secrets would be exposed to the world.
And that’s exactly what Rosenberg wants.
In the June 26 Hartford Courant, Dave Altimari and Jack Dolan reported that “[Dr. Steven J.] Hatfill’s name came up during a [June 18] meeting between Barbara Hatch Rosenberg ... staff members of Sens. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Thomas A. Daschle ...” and FBI agents.
“For months, Rosenberg has been publicly prodding the FBI to take a closer look at Hatfill.”
Immediately following the June 18 meeting, a slew of articles appeared in the American and even African media strongly suggesting that Dr. Steven J. Hatfill was the anthrax terrorist.
Steven J. Hatfill, a brilliant, flamboyant, American scientist who has for years warned of the dangers of bioterrorism, is a protegé of William C. Patrick III, the scientist who ran the U.S. offensive biowarfare program that President Richard Nixon shut down over 30 years ago. Hatfill has consented to four FBI searches of his home and property, and most recently invited the Bureau -- amid FBI press leaks to the media -- to search his premises on June 25. None of the searches turned up anything. Using journalistic and political proxies, Rosenberg has cost Hatfill his security clearance, and hunted him from job to job, seeking to make it impossible for him to work.
Rosenberg, who has no evidence to support her accusations, has persecuted Hatfill, and sought his arrest because he is a patriotic defender of America’s biowarfare defense program, which she seeks to destroy; to distract the public and authorities’ attention from hunting down the real, presumably foreign terrorists; and last, but not least, as political revenge. Hatfill earned his medical degree in then-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Having also trained and served in Rhodesian and American special forces, Hatfill fought against the guerillas who eventually toppled Rhodesia’s white, apartheid regime. Communist dictator Robert Mugabe, in power since 1980, has destroyed the nation, and is now deliberately starving up to half of its 12 million citizens. Rosenberg supports Mugabe.
In 1992, Dr. Meryl Nass, a longtime Rosenberg associate, published an article on the anthrax outbreak on black-owned farms in late 1970s’ Rhodesia. The outbreak initially affected livestock, and eventually over 10,000 blacks, predominantly with skin anthrax; 182 people died. Despite lacking any evidence to support her charge of a military anthrax attack, Nass claimed that the outbreak was a case of germ warfare carried out by the white, Rhodesian Army’s elite Selous Scouts unit. (Reportedly, Hatfill served in the Selous Scouts.) The article was not published in a scientific journal. More recently, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has gotten New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to suggest, in his July 2 and July 12 columns, that Hatfill (whom Kristof refers to as “Mr. Z”) worked on the “anthrax outbreak” in Rhodesia, and to call on the F.B.I. to arrest Hatfill:
Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts.
On July 3, Hatfill’s attorney, Thomas C. Carter, told me that his client, who is in a state of shock, does not want to talk to the press:
My client doesn’t want to do anything, right now.... He’s really upset that his name continues to be mentioned, and he’s decided that the best approach is to ignore everything, and to try and stay as much removed from it as he can. He might change his mind at some point in the future and participate in something, but right now, he doesn’t [want to].
If Steven J. Hatfill does not recover from the shock of the ambush he is enduring, he may soon find himself unable to speak even with his attorney.
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