by Joseph Kahn, Executive Editor, The New York Times
New York, August 7 - My friends, we at The Times take our journalistic responsibilities seriously, and always have. Whether it involves uncritical publication of Walter Duranty's coverup of the Holodomor in Ukraine, relegating the Holocaust to page 14 even as it was happening, or spreading the Russia Collusion hoax, this paper strives for integrity and honesty. The very soul of this enterprise. To continue that endeavor, we must give outsize attention and credibility to the progressive fringe among Jews, as if those voices represent anything but their tiny slice of reality.
Lest you think I'm infringing here on the Opinion editors, I assure you, they do not need my help in this respect. No, I refer here to our news coverage, our language, our choice of stories. Our headline composition. Our choice of photographs - such as that one with the Palestinian child with a birth defect whom we portrayed as starving because of Israeli actions. And the one we replaced it with that was the same thing, as if in correction. But that's not what I'm talking about either. I'm talking about platforming, interviewing, and writing articles about the farthest left among Jews, to imply that their opinions reflect something authentically Jewish, something that holds true for Jews in general.
You know whom I mean: Peter Beinart. Norman Finkelstein. Every random as-a-Jew at pro-Hamas rallies and encampments. You can even platform people whom the majority of Jews don't even accept as Jewish in the first place. That's better, in fact. It allows us to force an ideology onto demographics who wouldn't otherwise espouse it.
Think of it as the converse of what we do in the Middle East. There, we begin with the assumption that the Palestinian position is for a peaceful two-state solution and conciliation with Israel, and frame everything through that lens. Palestinian terrorism we treat as an aberration or a just reaction to Israeli evil. We impute to Palestinian leaders peaceful intentions even when they explicitly call for the violent extermination of Jews from the river to the sea. We cannot allow our readers to gain the impression that the mainstream Palestinian position sees violence against Jews as inherently legitimate, and that the exterminationist rhetoric even in non-Hamas Palestinian media and school curricula means anything.
That would be wrongthink. There will be no wrongthink in the news section of The New York Times.
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