RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events The New York Times declares war on America

by Byron York
August 17, 2019


Perhaps when you think of the founding of the United States, you think of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers. Now, the New York Times wants to "reframe" your understanding of the nation's founding.

In the Times' view (which it hopes to make the view of millions of Americans), the country was actually founded in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to North America, to Virginia, to be sold as slaves.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of that event, and the Times has created something called the 1619 Project. This is what the paper hopes the project will accomplish: "It aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

Another, more concise statement from the Times: "The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history."

The basic thrust of the 1619 Project is that everything in American history is explained by slavery and race. The message is woven throughout the first publication of the project, an entire edition of the Times magazine. It begins with an overview of race in America — "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true." — written by Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who on Twitter uses the identity Ida Bae Wells, from the crusading late 19th-early 20th century African American journalist Ida B. Wells.

The essays go on to cover the economy ("If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation."), the food we eat ("The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery."), the nation's physical health ("Why doesn't the United States have universal healthcare? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War."), politics ("America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others."), daily life ("What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot."), and much more.

The Times promises more 1619 Project stories in the future, not just in the paper's news sections, but in the business, sports, travel, and other sections. The Times' popular podcast, The Daily, will also devote time to it.

But a project with the aim of reframing U.S. history has to be more than a bunch of articles and podcasts. A major goal of the 1619 Project is to take the reframing message to schools. The Times has joined an organization called the Pulitzer Center (which, it should be noted, is not the organization that hands out the Pulitzer Prize) to create a 1619 Project curriculum. "Here you will find reading guides, activities, and other resources to bring The 1619 Project into your classroom," the center says in a message to teachers.

The paper also wants to reach into schools itself. "We will be sending some of our writers on multi-city tours to talk to students," Hannah-Jones said recently, "and we will be sending copies of the magazine to high schools and colleges. Because to us, this project really takes wing when young people are able to read this and understand the way that slavery has shaped their country's history."

The project rollout just happened to come at the same time as the leak of a transcript of a Times employee town hall in which the paper's executive editor, Dean Baquet, discussed his "vision" of making race the central theme of Times coverage for the remaining two years of President Trump's term in office.

Baquet spoke frankly about the paper's approach to Trump. For two years, he explained, the Times made a very, very big deal of the Trump-Russia affair. "We built our newsroom to cover one story," Baquet said. But then came the Mueller report, which failed to establish the core allegation against the president: that he and his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to fix the 2016 election.

"Now we have to regroup," Baquet told the staff, "and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story."

That different story is race — and Trump. "We've got to change," Baquet said. "I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks? How do we cover the world's reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that's become so divided by Donald Trump?"

Some on the staff appeared both anguished by the president ("it's a very scary time") and more than ready to make race a key feature of Times coverage.

"I'm wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting?" one staffer asked Baquet. "Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn't racist, I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting."

The staffer's point brought Baquet back to the paper's new initiative. "One reason we all signed off on The 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that," Baquet said. "Race in the next year ... is going to be a huge part of the American story. And I mean, race in terms of not only African Americans and their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos and immigration."

So the Times has two big plans. One would be big enough: to focus on the universe of racism accusations that increasingly surround the president at a time when he just happens to be running for reelection. But the other is even bigger: to "reframe" American history in accordance with the values of Times editors. It's an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking for people in what used to be known more simply as the news business.

Some conservatives and journalists condemned The New York Times following its “1619 Project” that “aims to reframe the country’s history.”

The “1619 Project” is made up of numerous stories and poems about slavery and racism and suggests America’s “true founding” was when the first slaves arrived.
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the project “a lie” on Fox News Monday.

The project includes an essay by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones on Aug. 14 suggesting “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.”

“The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery,” the project reads. “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

Gingrich tweeted Sunday that “The NY Times 1619 Project should make its slogan ‘All the Propaganda we want to brainwash you with’.it is a repudiation of the original NY Times motto.”

by Scott McKay


The revelations from an internal town hall between New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and key members of the paper’s staff, which leaked to Slate and were reported Thursday with an extensive transcript, prove everything we already knew — namely, that the paper was dedicating its coverage and its very credibility to the Trump-Russia narrative.

“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” Baquet told the assemblage. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”

Think about that statement for a minute. Baquet says he “built our newsroom” to cover a story which turns out to have been based on a hoax spread by Democrat Party operatives and used by a corrupt Obama administration to spy on innocent American citizens while attempting to prejudice a presidential election.

Had the Times actually covered the back half of the Trump-Russia story, in which the abuses by the Obama and Clinton camps turn out to have been the meat of the thing, it might have been justified to “build our newsroom” around it. But of course that’s not what Baquet did.

Not shockingly, as Baquet admitted, things went badly.

“Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump,” he said, “not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”

Then came Honest Bob Mueller, who it turns out was a big disappointment to Baquet and his gang.

“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy s–t, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”

The Trump-Russia story hasn’t looked “a certain way” for two years at all. Not to anyone who was objective about the story. In fact, after about six months at maximum anybody interested in the truth could have screamed from rooftops that the Steele dossier was the crux of the Trump-Russia story and that the whole thing was a put-up job designed to serve as a slow-motion wrecking ball to the Trump administration. The fact that Baquet and the Times were fully invested in swinging that wrecking ball is now unmistakable by his own admission.

Well, he swung it. And he’s missed his target and hit his own institution full-on.



It’s worse. Baquet now says he’s rebuilding his newsroom for something else.

“I think that we’ve got to change,” he told the town hall. Baquet says the Times’ new focus is to “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.”

While you’re letting that sink in, here’s more.

“I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks?” he said. “How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump?”

And just a bit more.

“How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.”

So after burning his paper’s credibility with respect to Trump by flailing away at the Russia hoax for two years and now admitting that the entire thing was a colossal whiff, Pulitzer Prizes notwithstanding (those ring about as hollow as the Nobel Peace Prizes given to Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, in retrospect), Baquet now wants to spend the next two years forcing the ashes of that credibility down the collective throat of the American people by spreading non-stop the further hoax of the president’s racism.

This being a president who was routinely feted and complimented by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton before he ran and who’s such a racist that under his management black unemployment is at record lows. Would Black Entertainment Television chief executive officer Robert Johnson be so effusive about Trump’s economic performance if he really thought the president was a racist or white supremacist, or any of the other slurs the Times appears dedicated to tag Trump with?

In a way, Baquet has done the country a favor. Now that his performance at the Times’ internal meeting has leaked out, there can be no denying the intentions behind the nonstop accusations of Trump’s racism — and that of every one of his voters by extension — to come in the next year and change before the November 2020 elections.

If the ownership of the Times had any integrity or business sense, they would drop Dean Baquet like a radioactive turd this very day. I can’t think of anything more poisonous than a newspaper’s executive editor essentially publicly admitting his plan to stoke racial animosity in an effort to influence a presidential election when his charge is to present that publication as an objective deliverer of news. Fulfilling that mission is now impossible.

Baquet has to go, as does the newsroom he built in pursuit of a hoax perpetrated on the American people — and he has to go now, before he does any more damage to domestic stability.

So until he does, it isn’t a bad idea for those people unsatisfied with the quotes above to not just refuse to spend a single dime on the Times’ content but also to similarly refuse patronage of its advertisers.

The reason this kind of abuse of the First Amendment happens is those behind it don’t see consequences to their actions. That can’t continue. It’s time to make the Gray Lady suffer.