Winston Churchill once said that a tyrant is someone who believes his own desires and ambitions and pleasures are worth the suffering of millions. But what do you call those who champion his cause? The New York Times’ record of promoting world-class despots is the subject of a recent essay by journalist Bruce Bawer titled, “The Times, It Ain’t a-Changin,’”. Mr. Bawer alerts us to the tactics used by major news outlets as they pass off lies and half-truths that further their own agenda, one most Americans, keen on surviving as a free people, would be reluctant to endorse.

The Times’ current favorable portrayal of Islam is just a “fresh variation on a well established tradition” seen in its coverage of the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s, the Holocaust in the 1940s, the Communist triumph in Cuba in the late 50s and the killing fields of Cambodia in the 70s, Bawer writes. The Times defense of the 20th century’s most notorious tyrants has been like that of an over-protective parent, always trying to justify the indefensible.

Mr. Bawer, a former New Yorker living in Scandinavia asks: what sort of impression of Islam would someone have if his primary source of news were the New York Times? At the Times – and other major news outlets - that impression is shaped by apologists like Harvard professor Noah Feldman who offered a sympathetic view of sharia (Islamic) law in a recent New York Times Magazine article. According to Mr. Feldman, “the only real problem related [to] the rise of Islam in Europe today is – guess what? – European racism.”

Mr. Bawer is well aware of how selective that description of Islam is. It ignores the harsh reality of living with a burgeoning Muslim community. There is no mention of the steep rise in rape, in gay-bashing and other crimes by young Muslim males in the cities of Europe. Neither is their wide-spread abuse of the European welfare systems addressed. The professor imperiously tells us that “a hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including tradition, religious cultures – even intolerant ones.”

Since 9/11, sugarcoating Islam has become standard at the Times and the mainstream media follows its lead. The media “suppress, downplay or misrepresent developments that reflect badly on Islam,” according to Mr. Bawer. In addition, he points out that the Times uses “experts” like Mr. Feldman who share the newspaper’s dedication to denying the central role of jihad in the struggle between Islam and the West.

Mr. Bawer’s account of the Times tradition begins with the Ukraine famine of 1932-1933. Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, the most influential U.S. journalist in Russia at the time whose articles helped shape U.S. foreign policy, filed stories about “happy workers, plentiful harvests [and] congenial conditions” while 7 to 10 millions Ukrainians peasants were intentionally starved at Stalin’s command. The dictator ordered troops to seize harvested crops and livestock from rural villages and made it a crime to supply food to the hungry population. Historian Robert Conquest described Ukraine at that time as “one vast Bergen-Belsen.”

Mr. Duranty insisted that tales of widespread starvation were “sheer absurdity.” Not content with shilling for a mass murderer, he vilified anyone who spoke of devastation in the “workers’ paradise.” That’s how the game of gaining access and influence is played and why those most daring and unscrupulous are sometimes found at the top.

A State Department document declassified in 1987 revealed that in 1931 Mr. Duranty admitted to a U.S. embassy official that “in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,” his articles consistently reflected “the official opinion of the Soviet regime.” The Times’ was “intimately implicated in every last bit of it,” Mr. Bawer emphasizes.

During WWII readers were again denied the truth. The Times chose not to report on the destruction of the Jewish population of entire cities and countries, the Holocaust. The newspaper’s accounts of civilian deaths never stated that the victims were Jews nor that they were killed because they were Jews. They were simply identified by nationality or as “refugees.” When the State Department finally confirmed the annihilation of 2 million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Times buried the news on page ten.

Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger justified the decisions, saying that he couldn’t compromise the paper’s “unprejudiced and unbiased position.” Bawer believes it is likely that those who set the paper’s policy muted the facts of the Holocaust because they, like their counterparts today who whitewash Islam, didn’t want to endanger their elevated position in the cultural elite. Concern for the welfare of Jews may not sit well in that social circle. Maintaining a neutral attitude took priority over fully and honestly reporting an “historically unprecedented act of monstrous evil.”

A reflexive closed-mindedness is part of the reason the Times’ and other media today refuse “to report honestly on the dramatic changes in European society” resulting from the continent’s ongoing Islamization, Mr. Bawer writes. He points out a disturbing consistency in the Times “dread over appearing to take the side of European Jews – whether the Jews are being exterminated by Germans  (as they were then) or tormented by Muslims (as is the case today).”

In the late 1950s it was Fidel Castro who aroused the Time’s passion for utopians.  Here again we find a “special relationship” between the New York Times correspondent in Cuba, Herbert Matthews, and the budding dictator-for-life, Fidel Castro. A man with a soft spot for revolutionaries, Mr. Matthews wrote a front-page article, referring to him as a “man of ideals, of courage, and of remarkable qualities of leadership,” which established the Castro myth that endures to this day.

His high-profile adulation sparked a “new lease on life” for Castro’s ragtag band of no more than eighteen followers, according to Mr. Bawer.

In keeping with the Times tradition, Mr. Matthews insisted that Castro was not a Communist and savaged reporters who said otherwise. He was proud of his contribution to Castro’s victory - having downplayed, excused or misrepresented unpleasant details like the post-Revolution bloodbaths featuring the murder of countless Cubans by firing squads. He commented that “a revolution is not a tea party.” Mr. Bawer tells us that “..his rhapsodies about the Cuban, like Duranty’s hymns to the Georgian, were echoed throughout the Western media.”

Castro, recognizing the services rendered to his cause, visited the Times offices in New York in 1959 to “thank the Times for its role in the revolution.” Publisher Sulzberger was there to accept Castro’s profuse thanks. Matthews so successfully passed on his idolization of this tyrant - who executed his political rivals and put homosexuals in concentration camps  - that decades later we see Dan Rathers, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer continuing to honor Fidel Castro as a dear old friend.

Should intelligent readers be relying on news outlets that have a track record of providing false impressions? Our ability to make informed decisions as voters is being seriously jeopardized for lack of news organizations we can trust. And so is our future as a free people.
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