Analysis by Joe Schaeffer, LibertyNation.com
Now that the Trump-Russia collusion hoax has died a natural death, dominant establishment media titan The New York Times has decided to pivot to a new obsession. Executive Editor Dean Baquet has told staffers that the paper will shift its newsroom focus from finding President Trump’s Russian agent ID badge to exposing every facet of life in America today as a symptom or result of systemic racism.
“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” Baquet told Times employees in a transcript of a meeting published by the online website Slate, referring to the paper’s nonstop coverage of the Trump-Russia narrative. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that.”
Baquet was not the least bit subtle about the new course he is charting for the paper. “In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world,” he told employees. “We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.”
Apparently The Times will be navigating this new angle right over the Niagara Falls of modern-day political correctness. The focus on race is to involve all facets of the paper’s content, according to the meeting transcript. A staffer asked Baquet:
“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. 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.”
Amazingly, the executive editor greeted this assertion that the newspaper he manages must flavor the totality of its reporting with a preconceived bias with complete acceptance and approval. “I do think that race and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story,” Baquet stated. “Race in the next year — and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away from this discussion with — race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story.”
Baquet referenced the paper’s newly announced 1619 Project, which recontextualizes the entire history of America as the byproduct of racial animus. The project “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,” The Times explained in rolling out the new feature. In 1619, the first slave ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia.
In case there is any confusion as to the intentions here, the paper openly declares, “[t]he goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history.”
For a preview of what to expect from the once-celebrated Gray Lady that once was able to bill itself the “newspaper of record” (ask Ukrainians who had to endure The Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty’s maliciously false reporting about Stalin’s deadly famine in the 1930s how accurate a description that was), head to editorial board member Mara Gay’s Twitter account. Gay highlights several recent Times’ articles that show the new “journalism” in action:
- “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation”
- “The Barbaric History of Sugar in America – How sugar became the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery”
- “How America’s Vast Racial Wealth Gap Grew: By Plunder”
- “How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam”
- “Why Doesn’t America Have Universal Health Care? One Word: Race”
Beyond the fact that another leftist media organ gleefully burns away any credibility it may have once had, the new direction The Times is taking will mark another notch up in the incredibly dangerous vilification of Trump supporters. As The Times tailors the news to fit its race “mission,” emotions will be whipped up without regard to facts, logic, or even common sense, and the same true believers who clutched so desperately to the Trump-Russia myth will become equally irrationally committed to the universal American racism construct.
Racism is the most powerful personal mortal sin in the progressive canon. What’s more, it is the one that can never be forgiven. Trump’s fictitious “treason” with Russia did not stain his supporters individually as much as the scarlet R certainly will. With this new direction, The New York Times will provide an invaluable contribution to furthering the climate of acceptable violence we see percolating on the left more and more each day.
Free Press International
