History is of little use to the New York Times because reporting with a historical perspective would mean having to discuss the history of Israel’s decades-long goal of exterminating the Palestinian people as a nation or the history of U.S. interventions around the world that leave little doubt that America is a global empire based on the conquest of other people’s lands for political, economic and military gains.
So it was with great amusement to find that on the day of the inauguration of America’s first black president, the Time is incapable of correctly describing one of the most dramatic and well-known events of the tumultuous ’60s.
In describing the local reaction to Obama’s inauguration, Times reporter David Stout visited a barbershop in the neighborhood of Anacostia. In the barbershop, Stout noted there was a “poster that read ‘Obama, hope and change’ was pinned to the wall alongside a picture of athletes making the Black Panther salute at the 1968 Olympics.”
What the hell is the “Black Panther salute”? What the Times means, of course, is the “Black Power salute.” There is a world of difference between a political party, the Panthers, and a symbolic expression, the raised, clenched fist. But such is the sorry of state of reporting at the paper of record that it can't get the term right for one of the most iconic images of the 1960s.
Sooner or later some editor will probably correct it, but it would be amusing to see how long it takes for them to catch on. (The report went up at 2:37pm according to the Times, so the error has already been there for nearly an hour.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/us/politics/20logisticscnd.html?hp
Comments
What can you say about the old grey lady. In every edition you can pull out examples of the New York Times' bias. Its not liberal. Its not conservative. Its corporate. Stanley Fish wrote a article/opinion piece where he argues for the university as a glorified tech or training school. He argues against a liberal education.
(see: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/?em)
Indicative in the Stanley Fish of the journalism world is a sense that the liberal arts are something to be discarded or not relevant. Who needs history when you have business? Who needs philosophy or political science when you have paid pundits and corporate media to educate?
And this is just a piece of the paper's corporate agenda. This agenda is not liberal per se, though it bends towards the Democratic Party (though it was instrumental in hyping the Iraq War and supporting Bush). So it won't get things such as peoples' movements. It will flub them badly or show outright contempt or bias.
That is the New York Times. It is a corporate newspaper. It focuses on profits first. The second, profits. And then third, how can it make money.
No illusions please.
Worrying with the NYT is a waste of attention and energy, it seems to me. They ARE corporate, oligarchic, and stuck in their delusions of service-to-power. Propaganda is Propaganda is Propaganda.
What is less well known to most progressives and 'radicals' is that their 'own' media, progressive alternative media has been infiltrated (penetrated, controlled) by Ford Foundation money which is directly linked to the CIA. All that 'black,' unregulated, non-reported money has to go to things like making sure the lefties 'alternative' reportings don't go into certain matters like peak oil and Wall St. swindles and scams that were supposed to serve our national security agendas, etc.
Let's make a list of alternative news sources that in part survive on Ford Foundation funds.
The New York Times is $400 million in debt. $400 million! They couldn't focus on profits first if their lives depended on it. Really, If you're going to twist an individual journalist's oversight into a conspiracy theory, at least base that theory in enough reality to make it mildly convincing.
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