An email to me from a reader of the blog who asked to remain anonymous. As it happens, about a month ago, I wrote to two of the Times’s correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman and Edward Wong, asking similar questions about their coverage of the West Bank. I have yet to hear back from either of them.
This report from a guest reporter to the NY Times is so different in so many ways from the dozens of other pieces, both news and opinion, that they publish. It reports from places where their own reporters never set foot, describes places and events in a specific and granular manner, directly quotes both Palestinians and settlers’ real words rather than quoting only official propaganda statements, and includes the relevant historical context of the places in the report.
The report describes so many things that you’ve described in your time traveling to the region down to precise details.
One would hope the Times, or its readership, would be inclined to somehow reconcile this account with all the other accounts it publishes. But I don’t think that’s any part of the reason why people read the Times, or why the Times is in the news business. I think the Times publishes “outlier” accounts like this to give token support to its “diversity of opinions” sloganeering. The account contains more factual reporting than the Times’s news dispatches on this war, yet it is placed on the Opinion column, just below Maureen Dowd’s pedestrian views on the Ivy League presidents and the paper’s 185th piece on the cultural impact of the Barbie movie.
And I think the vast majority of people who consume mainstream news media do it almost entirely out of the belief that they’ve met all their obligations as moral citizens by doing a little mindless doomscrolling and feeling a bit bad about the whole thing.
At the same time, the fact that this is ethnic cleansing and a genocide is inescapable, and a few people I know have mentioned it, but always on the condition it keep it in confidence. It’s really hard to overstate the amount of intimidation and fear of scorched-earth recrimination that’s been leveraged by the using of allegations antisemitism as a bludgeon.
I don’t feel sorry for the university presidents who were ambushed in that hearing. They engaged in the same bullshit artistry that is their stock in trade, and it went sideways. To paraphrase Flavor Flav, they built a maze they couldn’t get through. But I think there are a lot of ordinary people who would be more vocal about the genocide if not for the fear of nuclear recrimination in their neighborhoods, workplaces, and in cyberspace.
Policy of Truth 
Thanks for this comment.
I agree with just about everything you say. My one disagreement is with your lack of sympathy for the university presidents. They were asked about whether a certain scenario violated their written, codified codes of conduct. What’s remarkable is how little discussion there has been anywhere of what those codes actually say. People just feel free to make shit up or consult their own feelings, turn that into the “Code of Conduct” as written, and take it from there. The presidents had no choice but to be bound by a written code while dealing with people bound by nothing but a desire to grandstand. Not a fair fight.
I completely agree with your take on the Times. The Times’s coverage of Palestine has been shit. There’s no other way to put it. It doesn’t hold a candle to Al Jazeera’s, and is in many ways less worthwhile than the obviously partisan journalism one finds on Instagram (Shaun King, Abby Martin, Ana Kasparian, or in a more “serious” vein, The Intercept, Jewish Currents, Jacobin, Responsible Statecraft, +972, etc).
The Times and its readership (and this country) are obviously in denial about what is happening in Palestine. They can’t admit that their “light unto nations,” with its “most moral army in the world,” is committing genocide in Gaza, and is engaged in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. But that’s what’s happening. They are unwilling to tell their readers that Israel has spent the last several decades working up to what it’s doing; the Israelis didn’t just roll out a plan for genocide or ethnic cleansing this past October after the Hamas attacks. Those plans have been decades in the making. Our mainstream media particularly can’t admit that most Israeli war propaganda consists of lies, above all, the foundational lie that the Israelis never target civilians. They obviously do. And they can’t bring themselves to admit that Israel’s genocide in Gaza has a precedent: the precedent is Israel’s founding in 1948, and its conquest of both Gaza and the West Bank in 1967. That would induce people to grasp that there is a continuity to Israeli history. The continuity is supplied by the systematic commission of atrocities.
In short, what the Times expects its readers to do is to engage in the same act of pretense that drives its journalism on this subject: don’t pay sustained attention to the facts. Just give lip service to journalistic diligence. Then try to distract attention by focusing elsewhere. Their publishing Stack’s guest essay is part of the lip service.
The Times’s reporting on Gaza is of a piece with their reporting on Ukraine. Virtually all of it, from Day 1, was driven by delusions. First they got people to believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine came from out of the blue, without history or context. Then they got people to believe that Ukrainian victory was inevitable. Then they got people to believe that Russia was responsible for NordStream. Then they got people to believe that the spring (then summer, then fall) “counteroffensive” would work. Now they want us to believe that Ukraine will win if only the Republicans would fund the war. The Republicans are to blame for Biden’s war. Evidently, Grandpa Joe can never be held responsible for anything.
All of it was Orwellian nonsense from start to finish, complete bullshit that only the credulous could have believed. But they dished it out with wild abandon. Now the Ukrainians face annihilation, and the mainstream media is sitting around whistling Dixie. Fucking come on. It’s too late for that. The war is lost.
Mainstream journalists have gotten a free ride for far too long. The minute they faced competition from the younger generation of overtly partisan journalists, they started to sling mud and tell sympathetic stories about the need for government regulation. The truth is that these greying eminences have gotten their journalistic asses handed to them by kids half their age. It’s been gratifying to watch, and I look forward to more.
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