New york times

The fatwa artists

On June 3, the New York Times published a very bad op-ed. By itself, this is not breaking news. The Times opinion page has long been a kind of stagnant water cooler for conventional center-left opinion, a hospice care ward for America’s remaining pleats-panted, open-collar Blairites. Sure, they’ll occasionally publish something interesting — an essay by the deputy leader of the Taliban, for example, or an admission by David Brooks that he once tried the ganja. But generally the Gray Lady’s opiners tend to be tucked in bed by nine, dreaming of the things globalization might accomplish the next day.This piece was not that. It was, first of all, written by a Republican, Sen.

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The Brexitland soap opera of the New York Times

From our UK edition

The New York Times doesn’t much like the United Kingdom. By that, I mean the dystopian fantasy United Kingdom the Grey Lady has confected to explain Brexit and Boris Johnson’s electoral triumph in December. Objectively observed, Britain today is further to the left on public spending, equalities legislation and social attitudes than just a decade ago. Not if you scan the pages of the Times, however, where the Britain that glowers back at you is a grey and unpleasant land, a grim shudder of cruelty, racism and imperial nostalgia buffering about in its late dotage after renouncing civilised Europe. A dull, foreigner-free retirement community with nothing but Spam, Union Jack tea towels and global obsolescence to look forward to.

As old media squabbles, new media thrives

The traditional newsroom is finally coming to terms with its slow metamorphosis into a college campus, taken hostage by younger progressive activist staffers.When Sen. Tom Cotton was granted op-ed space in the New York Times last week, many of the millennial staff were triggered into issuing social media claims that lives were being put in danger, namely those of their African American colleagues.The fallout has been swift and will have a chilling effect on speech and commentary in major newspapers for years to come. James Bennet, the Times’s editorial director, resigned from his position after defending the paper’s decision to run the column.

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The snowflakes turn to ice

About a year ago, I went to see my friend John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, in his office in New York. When I reached him, he was in a state. One of his authors had used the word ‘tartly’ — the adverb, meaning sharply or sourly — and one of his junior editors had ruled that the word was problematic. The junior editor thought it might be connected to the word ‘tart’ — the noun, meaning prostitute — and therefore misogynistic. ‘See what I have to put up with?’ he asked. Rick was laughing but it wasn’t altogether a joke.

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Why isn’t Andrew Sullivan allowed to write his column?

What has happened to New York media? Just as the New York Times was experiencing its own Inner Mongolia Moment over the now notorious Sen. Tom Cotton ‘Send in the Troops’ op-ed, the Maoists at New York magazine were going after their best columnist, Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan revealed on Twitter yesterday that his column wouldn't be appearing. The reason? His editors are not allowing him to write about the riots. https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1268564124423933953 Presumably Sullivan’s editors are frightened that he might make the radically bourgeois point that looting and violence are wrong.

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Sources: New York Times not telling the truth about Tom Cotton op-ed

The revolution is eating itself at the New York Times. After the Times ran Sen. Tom Cotton’s call for using the National Guard to quell riots, a riot broke out in the Times’s News department. Although a poll earlier this week found that 63 percent of Democrats ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ supported Cotton’s suggestion, the woke warriors at the Times were truly triggered. On Thursday, some 800 staffers broke the terms of their contracts and publicly denounced their employer. Most demonstrated their fearless individuality by retweeting the same sentence: ‘This article endangers Black @nytimes staff.’There’s no mob without a lynching.

New York Times makes The Spectator part of the story

Cockburn was thrilled to see the New York Times take an interest in The Spectator last weekend, after the paper published an article about our London office’s ‘incestuous ties’ with the governing elite. Amazing that during a global pandemic and nationwide rioting, the NYT saw fit to dedicate few inches on page A8 to a political adviser on a northern European island. ‘Rogue Trip by Boris Johnson Aide Makes U.K.’s Spectator Part of the Story’, declared the headline. At least that was the revised headline — the first suggested, erroneously, that The Spectator was in ‘turmoil.’ The Spectator may be in many things, but turmoil isn’t one of them. The Gray Lady isn’t known for its fair-mindedness these days. But its coverage of the Speccie was surprisingly reasonable.

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In praise of Kayleigh McEnany

Is Kayleigh McEnany the best Press Secretary in history? I think she may be. True, it’s early days. She was elevated to the position only in April and presided over her first briefing just a few weeks ago on May 1. But so far her tenure has been glorious. Despite having attended both Georgetown and Harvard, where she took a law degree, she remains quick-witted, forthright and occupies a cant-free zone that suffuses the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with a spirit of patriotic candor that is as welcome as it is rare in the self-involved purlieus of the so-called mainstream media. She is also, I think it important to observe, distinctly dishy, another advantage.

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Doctor rebuts NYT hit piece about Kushner’s coronavirus efforts

The doctor at the center of a New York Times story alleging Jared Kushner bungled the administration's attempts to procure medical supplies is pushing back on the negative tone of the piece, indicating that the Times’s reporting 'did not fully reflect my experience.' Dr Jeffrey Hendricks is quoted in a Times article from May 5 expressing frustration with Kushner's assembled team of coronavirus volunteers, whose job it was to identify potential sources of medical equipment. 'When I offered them viable leads at viable prices from an approved vendor, they kept passing me down the line and made terrible deals instead,' Hendricks said of dealing with the volunteer team, adding that getting responses at all was difficult.

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Will the coronavirus succeed where Russiagate and Ukrainegate failed?

Back on March 12, I noted in this space that one of the most potent effects of our latest Chinese import would be as a weapon of political propaganda — a new club, that is to say, which the Dems would wield to beat President Trump. It has taken a while for the Hephaestus of the Left to fashion the appropriate weapon. Back at the end of January, there was a brief moment where a stiletto was thought to be the weapon of choice. Trump suspended air travel from China of January 31: stab him with the charge of xenophobia, slice him with slur of racism, carve him up with the charge of overreacting. Towards the end of February, however, there was a sudden shift in sentiment. There were hardly any cases, even fewer fatalities, but the public-health tea kettles were screaming panic.

coronavirus Donald Trump at a press briefing, Credit: Getty

Why is the New York Times shilling for the World Health Organization?

Donald Trump announced this week he intends to halt funding for the World Health Organization over the group's suspicious relationship with China. Doubtless you'll be shocked to hear that the establishment media quickly fell in line to defend one of its favorite globalist institutions, regardless of its actual effectiveness. The New York Times, fresh off picking apart the woman who has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, scraped together an article defending the WHO's response to the coronavirus outbreak in a stunning display of  revisionist history. 'The World Health Organization, always cautious, acted more forcefully and faster than many national governments', declared the Times's standfirst, which prompted Cockburn to spit out his double-roast espresso.

new york times WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Why the mainstream media won’t take Tara Reade seriously

'The gym bag, I don’t know where it went. I handed it to him. It was gone and then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And then he went down my skirt, but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers.' That's how former Senate aide Tara Reade described a 1993 encounter with her former boss Joe Biden on a podcast last month. A Biden spokesperson says the account is 'false’, but Reade's claim is supported by a friend and her younger brother, who both say she told them about the alleged assault shortly after it happened. But most establishment media outlets, such as the Washington Post, didn’t give her allegation more than a passing mention. Biden managed to give seven interviews to the press without being asked about Reade's claims once.

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Sovereignty rules

Washington, DC At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed. It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent.

The coronavirus class divide

Tone-deaf media elites and celebrities demand we all just stay home just as they do, self-isolating in their multi-million-dollar LA mansions or NYC brownstones. Journalists who don’t care to educate themselves about rural America — even after wildly misunderstanding the rise of Trump in 2016 — now lecture us country bumpkins, because we’re too stupid to understand how to quarantine ourselves. The architect of this condescending union of the fatuous and the famous was the New York Times.

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Apocalypse soon

An age demands a name when it’s an age of upheaval. The name should describe the ills of society and even suggest their cure. Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society aims to do exactly that — and succeeds in ways that he might not have intended. Douthat rejects the common view of decadence as Caligula-inspired orgies or Marquis de Sade-style perversion, or even excessive consumption of chocolate cake by women. For him, decadence is ‘neither empty of any judgment nor excessively deterministic’. He finds this sweet spot in the work of Jacques Barzun, who defined decadent times by their ‘deep concerns’ and ‘peculiarly restless’ mood.

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A short list of Biden backers who declared Trump mentally unfit for office

If there ever were a theme to emerge from the Trump era it is this: hypocrisy. We're all guilty, we all change our minds and contradict ourselves on occasion. So it is that we come full circle during the ascendancy of Joe Biden and observe that the very same commentators and pundits who once suggested that Donald Trump was mentally unfit for office find themselves enthusiastically endorsing one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. for president. There's something especially egregious about declaring Trump intellectually incapable of governing while supporting the candidacy of a man who often forgets where he is and the office for which he's running. In the spirit of the time we find ourselves living in, let's name and shame the worst offenders.

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Trump campaign hits the media where it hurts — in court

The Trump campaign named the Washington Post in a libel suit on Tuesday over two articles the paper published last year claiming that the campaign tried to conspire with Russia. The first article, published June 13, asserted that the campaign ‘tried to conspire with’ a ‘sweeping and systematic’ Russian attack on the American electoral system, while a second article published on June 20 questioned ‘who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?

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The biggest problem with today’s writers? Mediocrity

There is nothing writers love to write about more than writers. We are an extraordinarily self-important breed. Find a group of plumbers, office workers or electricians and they will talk about anything except their line of work. When writers come together, though, the subject of conversation is invariably their peers and themselves. But I can hardly talk. Here I am, coming to you today not just to write about writers and writing but to write about a writer writing about writers and writing. (Did you make it through that sentence OK? I'm sorry for inflicting it on you. Have a drink or something. You deserve one.) What have we done to deserve this kind of self-absorption? Writing, at its best, adds a little truth and a little beauty to the world.

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California bound

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I think it was from the late Roger Scruton, back when he was writing about wine for another magazine, that I learned the importance of being a terroiriste — not, nota bene, a terrorist. That, as Qasem Soleimani learned to his sorrow, is something else entirely. No, what Sir Roger had in mind was the importance of environment to the production of delicious wine. Terroir means the composition of the soil, yes, but it also means so much more. One dictionary sums it up as the ‘complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including...the soil, topography, and climate’.

Award winning bottles of wine

The rise of cancel chic

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Last summer, at a secretive dinner in Manhattan, I heard a New York Times staffer regale our table with some tales. He told us about how a dozen or so people had, like him, faced the most perilous horror imaginable for a blue checkmark Twitter person. They’d been canceled. For some, it was a tweet. For others, posing in a photograph with a Republican, or clicking ‘like’ on a Facebook post written by a known transphobe, or perhaps expressing an unhealthy familiarity with the work of Milton Friedman. For the Times staffer, he deigned to question gender theory in the office and sent half his team hyperventilating into paper bags and the other privately giving him the thumbs up.

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