The New York Times’ Ongoing Vendetta Against Keith Olbermann

Beneath the grey, prissy, precious façade of low-key “objectivity” of the New York Times lurks seething rage and resentments mere mortals can only guess at.

For example, the New York Times has these weird vendettas against certain people. Invariably there’s a political-ideological motive. For months now they’ve been after the head of Keith Olbermann. It’s just one hatchet-job after another, whenever there’s a career move by Olbermann, or a contract dispute, or a rumor to “report on.” The articles always really say just one thing:

Keith Olbermann has a rotten personality, and doesn’t get along with people.

Ok, I was wrong. That’s two things.

Don’t know why that’s newsworthy. Don’t know why it bears repetition. Don’t know why it’s worthy of full article treatments, over and over, when so much critical news is relegated to those tiny “Briefs” items, or total blackout. But there it is.

Only real reason I can discern is that Olbermann has been pushing back against the reactionary media consensus in this country, a consensus which despite misleading appearances and feints, the NY Times is very much a part of. 

Latest installment in the Get Keith series ran in the Business Section January 5, 2012 on the front page. [“Olbermann In a Clash AtNew Job.”] (All these attacks on Olbermann have run on the first page of the Business Section, a sign of their importance to the editors.) The “news” here is that Olbermann was annoyed at “technical difficulties” that the Times claims have “plagued” his show on Current TV, so he didn’t want to host “special election coverage” of the Iowa caucuses. [I.e. obsessive media overattention to the insignificant preferences of 120,000 old, white, reactionary Iowan ideological fanatics choosing among a field of seven extremist GOP presidential candidates- this isn’t even a selection of convention delegates, by the way.] So they made arrangements without him. But Keith held a staff meeting anyway! And then the channel’s president wrote a memo to Olbermann’s staff about it! And then his show went back on the air as before! And Keith griped in Twitter posts and to The Hollywood Reporter! And And And!

In other words, the usual trivial office politics, now fodder for malicious NYT gossip. (Nothing like that ever happens at the august NY Times, I’m sure. Personality conflicts? Where, here?)

Strange indeed that this workplace trivia merits a front page Business Section article. But who am I to second-guess Times editors? They’re professional journalists [sic]. I’m just some scummy little blogger [in their contemptuous view]. 

But wait, there’s more! Did you know that the Olbermann-free Current TV Iowa caucus coverage “was derided by online commentators”? (Like, say bloggers?) Who, praytell?

The Times only cites one actual person:

Jonah Goldberg of National Review.

Oh really. How odd that an extreme reactionary writing for a notorious neofascist rag would deride a “liberal” TV channel! Guess that proves your point, Times!

Tellingly, the [utterly predictable and meaningless] Goldberg dismissal that the Times cites as evidence of Current TV’s shabbiness has nothing to do with actual content, but appearance, to wit: “the production values were only slightly better than local public access” says Goldberg. And most scathingly, Goldberg pronounced it “hilarious,” quotes the Times.

[Wonder how James O’Keefe’s “production values” rate?]

Well, a negative review by Jonah Goldberg! That’s definitive for sure! He’s an authority, after all. At least, the “liberal” NY Times seems to think so. [See footnote 1 below.]

 I guess Current TV needs a multimillion dollar set, eye-candy computer graphics, and constant “WHOOSH” sound effects a la Murdoch’s Fox “News” to have “credibility.”

Before I digress into the nature of National Review and the NY Times kinship with it, here’s a couple of other examples of NYT vendetta targets: [See footnote 2 for more on the kinship.]

Director Oliver Stone was another victim of an NYT vendetta. His crime: making the movie “JFK,” which questioned the Official (totally preposterous and disproven over and over) Version of the assassination. The movie itself was inept and misleading in my view, but that’s besides the point. Anyone who threatens the Official Line on the JFK assassination poses an implied threat to the legitimacy of the U.S. system by exposing a domestic coup in which the major media are accomplices to this day, since they perpetuate the lies and cover up. You’d be reading a food column for example and the hack would take a gratuitous swipe at Oliver Stone, like “the foie gras was full of off notes, like something prepared by chef Oliver Stone,” and you’d be like “where did that come from?” Apparently every scrivener at the Times was trying to curry favor with their superiors in this way, a real junior high schoolish pile-on. This vendetta continued for years. (I haven’t checked recently but it wouldn’t surprise me if they still take snarky swipes at Stone. Ideological watchdogs tend to reflexively bark at their targets forevermore.)

Or Julian Assange, the besieged founder of the now-destroyed WikiLeaks website/repository for dirty state secrets. You’d think the Times would be grateful for the numerous articles they got courtesy of WikiLeaks documents. But nooo. The Times has to have its cake and eat it too. While using WikiLeaks-provided documents for their own “scoops” and referencing them in numerous other articles, the Times is in high dudgeon over WikiLeaks “irresponsibility” and putative lack of ethics. (The Times has very high moral standards, don’t you know.) Assange comes in for constant attacks in the Times, an obviously-organized campaign. The former Big Boss Editor, Bill Keller, seemed to particularly loathe Assange, commandeering the cover of the rag’s Sunday Magazine section last year for a completely juvenile, insulting hatchet-job on Assange written by Keller himself. [see my previous essay on this at “Bill Keller's Character Assassination Hatchet-Job on Julian Assange” ]

Inexplicably, Keller fancies himself a Deep Thinker. Actually it’s not inexplicable. He’s an egomaniac whose success in climbing the career ladder as an apparatchik of the bourgeois propaganda system has convinced him of his own brilliance. This is a common phenomenon among meritless elites drunk on their own power and “success.” Now that he’s been succeeded as Chief Honcho Editor by Jill Abramson, Keller is Senior Gasbag at the Times. In this capacity he had the hypocritical and probably completely unconscious gall to reference WikiLeaks in a long, boring expectoration about something or other- frankly I don’t even remember the putative topic! Must’ve been important, though, ‘cause it was long, it was in the Times and on its website, and it was by Bill Keller. Whatever. Point is, he knifed the WikiLeaks founder, who is in a desperate struggle to avoid imprisonment in a U.S. dungeon for political prisoners, over and over, and yet he still uses WikiLeaks without apology or gratitude. Nice. Remind me to NEVER EVER help the New York Times with anything. WikiLeaks helped inform Keller about the world, and Keller’s repayment is to join in the campaign to destroy WikiLeaks and persecute Julian Assange. Too bad there’s no Hell, because Keller deserves a special place in it.

1] Ordinarily I ignore the bylines on NYT “news” articles, because those people are institutional drones who are really interchangeable, and no one cares about what they’re writing because they wrote it, but only because the New York Times is “saying” it. In other words, in general their names are insignificant and will never be remembered after they die, or maybe not even after they leave the NYT, and I’m not in the business of helping promote their personal “brands,” to whatever insignificant degree a mention by me might do so. [Obviously it’s different with propagandists of some import, like Keller, or in the case of op-ed type pieces which presumably are a more personal expression of the writer’s mentality and put forth as speaking for themselves, not for the institution.] But in this case I’ll make an exception to help you see patterns in future “work” by this particular hatchetman. His name is Brian Stelter.

2] Jonah Goldberg, for those who’ve forgotten, which is probably most everyone outside the propaganda nomenklatura, is the spawn of Lucianne Goldberg, a pathological reactionary. [How pathological? In a long, friendly interview with a rightwing freebie New York City rag grandiloquently named NY Press some years back she made explicit, vulgar remarks about Chelsea Clinton’s vagina. This was when Chelsea was about 12 years old or so. Not that if Chelsea had been an adult that would have excused it. NY Press changed owners since then and has evaporated into an empty shell for advertising.] Goldberg, a “literary agent,” was in effect the handler for GOP mole in the Clinton regime Linda Tripp, who entrapped hapless naïf White House intern Monica Lewinsky, taping her confidences about her affair with Clinton and setting Lewinsky up for the full police state squeeze treatment by rightwing hitman “special prosecutor” Kenneth Starr with his Grand Jury and FBI thug “investigators.” Which is not to excuse Clinton’s loutist, caddish, and criminal behavior. [THE PRESIDENT'S ACQUITTAL: THE AGENT; Tripp Friend Says She's Proud of Her Role]

National Review is a fascist rag that relentlessly promotes any and all fascist killer regimes on the planet, although there are fewer these days with the changes in Latin America. The New York Times also promoted those same regimes, for example, both it and NR celebrated the 1973 Chilean military coup instigated by the CIA and Pentagon under Nixon’s direct orders. The NYT even employed a reactionary propagandist by the name of Shirley Christian to crank out pro-Pinochet propaganda pieces (and anti-Sandinista ones).

For decades, the NYT refused to report the murder of 30,000 human beings by the Argentine terrorist military tyranny. When they finally started reporting, they claimed only a few hundred were butchered. The “coverage” was dry as dust, no humanity given  to the victims, which the NYT does so well went they want sympathy for the victims- mainly when the perpetrators are U.S. official enemies, or not “friends.” Gradually over several years they eventually got up to the true number, before cutting it back down again. Now it’s usually just a vague “thousands” or “many.” (They’d never treat the Holocaust 6 million like that.)

During the exterminationist “civil war” in El Salvador in the 1980s, which of course NR was a cheerleader for (in the spurious name of “anti-Communism”) the NY Times under the vicious gay-hater A.M.Rosenthal put in his boot after a story, on the El Mozote massacre of a thousand defenseless villagers by an “elite” U.S.-trained battalion (the worst of the worst are always U.S.-trained, and more importantly, U.S.-indoctrinated, that is, infected with fascist ideology), displeased the Reagan regime, Rosenthal rode herd on his reporters to make sure all the “news” on El Salvador in future was pro the state terrorist regime there, and systematically covered up or downplayed the numerous, horrific atrocities sponsored by the U.S.

In the ginning up of war hysteria to enable the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the NYT was on board and complicit in the disinformation. (To be fair, they did print an op-ed by Joseph Wilson, who exposed the fictiveness of the Niger uranium “connection.” That led to the Bush regime burning his wife, undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.) Later, when the war and the lies were discredited, to wipe the egg off its face the NYT made their long-time agit-propagandist Judith Miller the fall gal for that, for being a conduit for Ahmed Chalabi disinfo and etc. As if the paper had no control over what they published under her name. These days Miller is letting her rightwing freak flag wave higher than ever in overtly reactionary venues.

Oh, and guess who edits the NYT “Book Review”? Sam Tanenhaus, rightwing hagiographer of NR boss William F. Buckley, Jr. (Tanenhaus and the other glorifiers of Buckley, who in life, as after death, was treated with universal approbation by the bourgeois media, elide the fact that Buckley’s lifelong mission amounted to rehabilitating the reputation of fascism after the damage Hitler did to it. One method was to harp on Bolshevik crimes and oppression, real, exaggerated, and occasionally imagined, as Buckley himself did in his “novels.”) Of course, the “Book Review” does review books, so technically that title is correct, but it’s really a vehicle for subtle ideological suasion. Read it carefully and see what I mean.

To be sure, there are differences between the NYT and NR, of course. National Review, and its erstwhile, finally dead proprietor, the fascist scion of inherited wealth William F. Buckley, Jr., sided with the white supremacist terrorist racists of the South against blacks who wanted to to eat in a restaurant, ride on a bus, or register to vote without being murdered. The NYT did not. The NYT was even sued for “libel” [i.e. truth] by some white racist officials in a case that the Times had to take to the U.S. Supreme Court to win. [They’d probably lose today. Especially with the black-hating black Clarence Thomas newly influential on the Court.] Later on, NR went to bat for racist supremacists in Rhodesia and South Africa (as did other publications, such as U.S. News [sic] and World Report). And of course the Times doesn’t hate all Government social spending, which you can view as compassionate, pragmatic, or both. Probably some of both, at least if we take their editorial words at face value. Hence the “liberal” sobriquet.

In a neofascist country, the non-deranged is “leftwing.”