“All the News That’s Fit to Print”*
Over 30 years ago, I met a professor in the faculty lounge of the college from which I graduated two decades earlier. I was an instructor there. I would lose my job a few years later. That job was a second one. I had written an article for The Humanist in which I recounted several incidents meeting people who were religious fundamentalists. The school where I taught was a religious-affiliated school and claimed I was not needed anymore since a full-time faculty member would now teach the course I had taught for several years.
I also studied for a graduate degree at this school at that time. One of my fellow students, during a casual conversation after class said, “Don’t worry, I’m not Jewish.” Readers get the picture here.
Getting back to the professor I met in the faculty lounge, he said that the generation of students of which I am a cohort was more informed than the students he now taught. I asked him what he based his claim on and he said that we were engaged with our world and we read newspapers. In other words, we were cognizant of what was going on around us. At that time, the US was knee deep in the Vietnam War. A person, especially males, needed to be informed because that was a life and death situation.
During those years of great change I read both the Providence Journal, Rhode Island’s only major newspaper, and the New York Times, in addition to magazines and articles in journals. Today when I read the Times, I need a healthy sense of distrust to work my way through a given day’s articles.
During the Vietnam War, newspapers across the US slowly moved from unquestioning support and acceptance of that war to condemnation. Condemnation was not hard by around 1968 because the carnage and mass murder of civilians there was highlighted on the evening television news. The massacre of around 347-504 (Wikipedia) unarmed civilians at My Lai was but the tip of the iceberg. The government and military here wanted body counts of the so-called enemy and they were given what they wanted. The photos coming out of My Lai and the iconic photo of a girl running down a road, burned by napalm, framed our knowledge of that war.
With all of this in mind, I opened up the digital version of the Times on my computer this morning with the healthy sense of skepticism with which I now approach the news. News outlets in the US and elsewhere now present the points of view of the ruling elite. The latter was not as obvious during the Vietnam era, although the rejection of that war was slow to come.
The first article I read (June 14, 2024) was about the Israeli assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. While the Times provided important information on that siege, the Times has been an unabashed cheerleader of Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza, while giving short shrift to the beating of protesters in New York City opposed to the Israel-Gaza war. Militarism in general seems to have infected many journalists at the Times and that constant drumbeat also fuels the Ukraine war, a war that could have been prevented through diplomacy, a bad word, decades before it began. In both wars the weapons manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank.
The second article was about Robert Kennedy, Jr. and where he stands on several issues (June 14, 2024). Tying Kennedy’s so-called isolationism to his blind support for Israel makes a mockery of anything resembling his purported position on foreign policy. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine insanity is enough to shake the bones of the astronomer Galileo and assert that the Earth is at the center of the universe once again.
The last article I read covered a compound used in jet manufacturing (June 14, 2024). The suspected substance came from China and even a casual observer realizes the push against everything that involves our new enemy China is suspect. It may be that an industry in China is producing a substandard material, but I want to examine the Federal Aviation Administration’s handling of the lethal flaw in Boeing’s 737 Max along with the FAA’s rightful consideration of this product from China.
The treatment of these important topics is also of concern to me because I once taught students how to detect prejudices in writing and how to identify propaganda. The problem here, however, is that if the reader, if indeed masses of people read anymore with the glancing blows of information from the Internet, has to constantly be on guard for propaganda without a solid base of what the literature in reading education calls schemata, or the knowledge underpinning a particular subject. Only then with sufficient background information can anything be known deeply, or can be assessed for its accuracy.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) addresses this issue. The main character in that novel is tasked with rewriting history and destroying the knowledge of the past. That’s exactly what’s going on today with the distortion of information.
* The statement about reporting news impartially (my emphasis) that appears on the masthead of the New York Times.
“All the News That’s Fit to Print”*