THE NEW YORK TIMES PROTEST
Protest the New York Times Revealing of U.S. Secrets, Monday, July 10, 5 p.m.
The exact place is still to be decided, but it will almost certainly be in the Times Square area. The groups on board so far are Free Republic, Caucus for America, and the Congress for Racial Equality. High-visibility media people are interested in speaking at the protest. More information will be coming on this as we gather groups and speakers.
So hold the date!
If you have been as sick about the Times's unconscionable act of treason - the release of our classified information now is your chance to do something to make your outrage heard.
New York Times Scandals
The day after the Israel Day Parade in 2002, the Times featured a picture of the event on the front page. The photo, however, focused on the comparatively minuscule number of Palestinian protestors at the parade and made the event appear to be confrontational.
In 2003, the Times admitted to journalism fraud committed over a span of several years by one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, and the general professionalism of the paper was questioned, though Blair immediately resigned following the incident. Questions of affirmative action in journalism were also raised, since Blair was African American.
The paper's top two editors – Howell Raines, the executive editor, and Gerald Boyd, managing editor – resigned their posts following the incident.
In April, 2004 the Times reversed its policy of not using the term Armenian Genocide. Despite publishing dozens of articles about the Armenian Genocide as it progressed, the Times for a period shied away from using the term in its articles as part of its editorial policy. The Turkish Government still actively denies genocide occurred. Incidentally, Times columnist and former reporter Nicholas D. Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has mentioned being of Armenian descent and has criticized the ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government, in his Times column.
On May 26, 2004, the Times published another significant admission of journalistic failings, admitting that its flawed reporting during the buildup to the Iraq campaign of the War on Terror helped promote the misleading belief that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. [14] While this "From the Editors" piece didn't mention names, a large part of the incriminated articles had been written by Times reporter Judith Miller, who already stated in Feb 26, 1998 to claim that "all of Iraq is one large storage facility" for weapons of mass destruction. One of Miller's prime sources was Ahmed Chalabi, who is currently the interim oil minister of US-occupied Iraq.
A second self-criticism by Okrent went further. "The failure was not individual, but institutional," he wrote. "War requires an extra standard of care, not a lesser one. But in the Times's WMD coverage, readers encountered some rather breathless stories built on unsubstantiated 'revelations' that, in many instances, were the anonymity-cloaked assertions of people with vested interests.
Times reporters broke many stories before and after the war - but when the stories themselves later broke apart, in many instances Times readers never found out. ... Other stories pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors. ... The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the WMD stories, but how the Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign." [15]
In August 2005, the Times was accused of attempting to unseal the adoption records of United States Supreme Court nominee Justice John Roberts's children, an unprecedented investigation by a newspaper. Journalist Brit Hume, of Fox News reported that the Times has been asking lawyers that specialize in adoption cases for advice on how to get into the sealed court records. The report went on, "Sources familiar with the matter tell Fox News that at least one lawyer turned the Times down flat, saying that any effort to pry into adoption case records, which are always sealed, would be reprehensible."
The Times replied: "Our reporters made initial inquiries about the adoptions, as they did about many other aspects of his background. They did so with great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue. We did not order up an investigation of the adoptions. We have not pursued the issue after the initial inquiries, which detected nothing irregular about the adoptions. More specifically, our reporter called a number of lawyers who handle adoptions to learn about adoption issues in general and to inquire whether adoption papers are publicly available. He was told that the rule varies from case to case and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. At some point, he was informed that the Roberts adoption papers were sealed. He did not try to get them unsealed, nor did he try to obtain copies in any other way. He did not hire anyone to help him. Our editors have made it clear that they will not stand for any gratuitous reporting about the Roberts children. Many of our staff are adoptive parents-including our executive editor-and we are particularly sensitive to the subject.
" The Times was condemned by the National Council for Adoption, “NCFA denounces, in the strongest possible terms, the shocking decision of The New York Times to investigate the adoption records of Justice John Roberts’ two young children. The adoption community is outraged that, for obviously political reasons, the Times has targeted the very private circumstances, motivations, and processes by which the Roberts became parents." [16]
Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Times has referred to those displaced by the hurricane as "refugees", while most news media refer to them as "evacuees". The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees defines "refugees" as those who have crossed a national border to escape unbearable conditions at home, while those who have been driven from home within their own nation are referred to as "internally displaced persons" (or "IDP's"). The American Heritage Dictionary, however, defines refugee as "one who flees in search of refuge." The Katrina coverage continues to be highlighted by the New York Times.
In October 2005, Times reporter Judith Miller was released from prison after an 85-day stay, when she agreed to testify to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury. She said she finally relented only after receiving a personal waiver, both on the phone and in writing, of her earlier confidential source agreement with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, although Libby's lawyer claimed the offer of a waiver had been standing for a year. After her second appearance before the grand jury, Miller was released from her contempt of court finding, after which the New York Times became free to write their own account of the affair. This account [17] was published on October 16, along with a personal account by Miller [18]. However, these accounts were widely criticized as revealing even more flaws and failings of both Miller and the Times than they answered, including uncooperativeness and dissembling by Miller to the Times and a lack of reasonable oversight of Miller’s work by the Times, as summarized for example in the Washington Post [19]. This included several predictions and calls for Miller to be fired, including some by self-styled media watchdogs Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University (and a former New York Times reporter); Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University; and Editor and Publisher columnist Greg Mitchell. Mitchell said Miller was guilty of “crimes against journalism” and “did far more damage to her newspaper than did Jayson Blair, and that’s not even counting her WMD reporting, which hurt and embarrassed the paper in other ways.” [20] Miller resigned from the paper on 9 November 2005.
On December 16, 2005, a New York Times article revealed that the Bush administration had ordered the NSA to intercept certain telephone conversations between suspected al-Qaeda-connected persons in the U.S. and those in other countries without first obtaining court warrants for each instance of surveillance. The article noted that reporters and editors at the Times had known about this intelligence-gathering program for approximately a year, but after meeting with White House officials, who requested that the article not be published, the newspaper chose to delay publication to conduct additional reporting. The Justice Department has launched an investigation to determine the sources of the classified information regarding the program that the Times published. The men who reported the stories, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2006.
The March 20, 2006 issue of the New York Times came with an 8-page sponsored section on Sudan paid for with $929,000 U.S dollars by the Sudanese government urging for investment in Sudan. The sponsored section has since caused demands from Sudan human rights activists for an apology by the New York Times. [21] [22] [23]
In an article in June 2006, the Times revealed, that the Bush administration has surveyed thousands of bank accounts all around the world. The administration used the SWIFT system in Belgium. MSNBC In wake of this incident, Republican Congressman Peter T. King has called for an investigation into whether or not the NYT violated the Espionage Act. On June 28, 2006, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on a measure condemning the New York Times for first publishing this information.
