The Grey Lady Deserves To Wear A Scarlet "L" for Liar

That most full of itself locus on North America, New York City, has a number of institutions and entities which are ridiculously lauded and held up as some kind of pantomime of greatness when they are just businesses.  One of the most ridiculously lauded of those is the New York Times.   The "great grey lady" is hardly what it's sold as being.  It never was what its PR sold it as being.  It operates as much as a propaganda organ for those who own and run it as much as it is a reliable source for information, its record is an unpredictable mix of good reporting and the worst of corporate oligarchic stenography.  Lest anyone forget, there is the decisive role the New York Times played in promoting the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq through the reporting of the publisher's good friend, Judith Miller.  And that's only one of the many instances that balance such things as publishing the Pentagon Papers.  And that's not to mention the license it gives its favored opinion scribblers to lie, distort and defame - a license to lie it has bragged of obtaining from the Supreme Court in the Sullivan decision, something which I will never stop pointing out.   That any major newspaper would present its role in expanding the power of the "news" media to publish and push lies should be something which is an occasion of serious shock and self-examination.   Facts and the truth are alleged to be the purpose of the news media, they never stop telling us that and that they are important because of that, which is obviously a lie when a major organ of the media brags about its role in endowing the media with a privilege to lie with impunity.

Yet they wonder why people don't trust the press or, in large numbers, even bother with it.

The New York Times has sponsored one of the most malignant voices in journalism for decades, Marueeen Dowd, and there is no one who has been the focus of her malignity more so than Hillary Clinton.   As Media Matters says,

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd continued her nearly 23-year long crusade against Hillary Clinton with a column accusing her of “compromis[ing] the president” and “willfully put[ting] herself above the rules.” 

Dowd wrote a July 9 column, titled “The Clinton Contamination,” admonishing Clinton after FBI Director James Comey called her private email server “extremely careless” but recommended no charges for criminal conduct -- the Justice Department accepted those recommendations. In her column, Dowd called Clinton’s actions “arrogant” and “selfish” and said she “contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington -- Barack Obama, James Comey, and Loretta Lynch,” continuing that “Hillary’s goo got on Obama.” Dowd concluded that “the Clintons work hard but don’t play by the rules.” Dowd lamented that “the email scandal” had supposedly “clouded the futures” of some of the most trusted Clinton aides, and derisively referred to former President Bill Clinton as “the Arkansas devil.”

A Media Matters analysis of Dowd’s columns found that 72 percent of her work between November 1993 and June 2014 included negative tropes against the Clintons, including regularly portraying Hillary Clinton as an unlikeable, power-hungry phony. In the year following, all 17 of Dowd’s columns with significant mentions of Clinton were negative. Dowd regularly relies on sexist tropes to describe Clinton, including that she is a “granny” who “can’t figure out how to campaign as a woman” and suggesting she “should have run as a man” during the 2016 election. Hypocritically, Dowd has also accused her of “cry[ing] sexism too often.” 

That record of her personal campaign against Hillary Clinton has been being laid down in "the paper of record" for almost a quarter of a century.  If Hillary Clinton becomes president it will likely extend to more than three decades, if they both live long enough.  And Maureen Dowd has taken full advantage of the permission the publisher and editors at The New York Times grant her to carry out her personal campaign of defamation against Hillary Clinton.   That she does it from the editorial pages of the rag allow her even greater scope for defamation than the alleged news reporters who have been laying down a record of false reporting on Hillary Clinton.

It is clear that the publishers and the rest of the establishment at The New York Times have and have had a goal of damaging Hillary Clinton.  I've read and heard gossip about why that might be but, unlike the New York Times, I'm not in the business of passing on gossip as if it were confirmed fact.  The New York Times, its owners, its publishers, its editorial staff, really its entire staff, deserve to be held accountable for the record of Maureen Dowd and the decades long campaign of lies, half truths and smears she's written against someone far more accomplished than she will ever be.  I don't know the extent to which envy might play in Dowd's obsession with Hillary Clinton,  I always suspected it had everything to do with the campaign of lies and smears that the equally putrid Christopher Hitchens conducted against Bill Clinton.  I've read people who knew them who said it extended to the period when they were both at Oxford and Bill Clinton was more successful with women than the silver-tongued Trot.   I doubt that Dowd's motivations are any less petty and base, nor those of the women and men who have given her permission to use the New York Times to conduct it.   I wonder if some member of the Sulzberger family didn't get seated in the right place at a table or something back in the 1990s.   Oh, I'm sure they'll endorse her late in October or November, the alternative being the insane choice of the Republican-fascist party.  That changes nothing about their conduct.

Update:  Get back to me when Sanford or Biddeford or Alfred, Maine is as full of itself as New York City.  And, for the record, I really wish people really, really didn't want to move here.  I'd talk it down incessantly if I thought it would make them want to move to The City instead of ruining the countryside here.   That still doesn't change the fact that New York City has a Paris or London sized over-estimate of its superiority over everywhere else in this or any other possible world.