"NEW YORK: I am sitting in the auditorium at The New York Times. It is the first time I have been back in nearly two decades. It will be the last. The newspaper is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderless leadership and myopic cheerleading of the military debacles in the Middle East, Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, where one of the Times contributions to the mass slaughter of Palestinians was an editorial refusing to back an unconditional ceasefire. Many seated in the auditorium are culpable. …"
(Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.)
Only the ignorant were lied to. Those of us who have kept up to date with the Palestinian struggle knew this would come. Now we have to stand up and speak out and challenge those who choose to be complicit in this. We need to inform people of the threat from the Zionist movement.
Last month Israel's IDF bombed and destroyed the Iranian embassy in Damascus that killed, among others, two senior Iranian generals. Then, Israel brazenly warned Iran against retaliating, which U.S./Canadian/British headlines frequently referenced as though Iran's retaliation would be considered the first strike [WTF?!].
This to me reveals a great yet misplaced sense of entitlement by the Israeli state [not to mention that of the U.S. via its own morally corrupt foreign policy].
It’s as though it feels it can claim it was being proactive in its militarily unprovoked killings in another country of Iranians [or other foreign nationals] it deems a threat, and its suspicions should suffice as justification. It doesn’t.
Putin’s Russia is similarly hypocritical towards the Ukraine when the latter's forces dare to strike back against Russia’s deliberate targeting and killing of civilians and destruction of infrastructure with barrages of missiles or drones.
From his own words, Putin seems genuinely astonished and angry, as though the Ukraine really has no right to self-defence! [WTF?!]
And Russia will absurdly justify its first-strike attacks against Ukrainian civilians as a necessity of ‘de-nazifying’ their democratically elected government. I say, first ‘de-nazify' Russia's Kremlin and especially its presidency!
It all reminds me of the high-school bully with a grand sense of entitlement and whose concept of his fair share was always three-quarters of the pie.
Deborah, I am impressed by your lengthy and detailed replies but in going over the events of the past you seem to have lost sight of what is happening in the present. It matters little what Chris Hedges says, or you say, about past events. The evidence of genocide by Israel is clear and compelling. Just look at photos of Gaza; it is decimated.
Let me repeat what Chris Hedges said. although I'm sure it's much worse now:
"Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.."
May I point out that Gaza has no fighter jets, no bombers, no tanks, no warships, no precision guided munitions, and no long-range artillery. Just a glance at recent photos of Gaza show it is almost completely destroyed. It is a massacre.
Israel will never survive as a nation state if it did not respond to the October 7 atrocities by wiping out Hamas. What October 7 showed is that if Hamas has the capabilities to commit an actual genocide then they would do so. Israel has all the ability to wipe out Gaza and all Gazans but has not done so.
It is odd reading this… almost as if Israel is being blamed for Hamas committing a genocide by not being sufficiently vigilant to prevent Hamas from committing the horror to begin with.
"Former IDF soldier Benzi Sanders was deployed into Gaza in 2014. He tells CNN's Christiane Amanpour it's a 'catastrophic mistake' to believe military power against Hamas will bring safety to Israel." November 6, 2023 | Video | Amanpour & Company - PBS
“Ex-IDF soldier criticizes Israeli government over ‘catastrophic mistake’.” Amanpour, PBS, November 6, 2023.
He also stated on the record that Israel “facilitated” transfer of weapons, etcetera, to Hamas.
And it was strange how the broadcasted recorded interview with Benzi Sanders was cut off midstream. Right in the middle of his sentence, the screen went blank for a moment, then off to some unrelated material — quite conspicuously with a complete absence of the usual brief apology/explanation from the host when such an interruption occurs.
More so, the posted interview itself seems to have been deleted at the PBS source. When you click the link, you see a “Sorry, this video is not currently available.”
Let's assume he is right... then when is the appropriate response since the peace process in the 1990s did not result in Hamas stopping the suicide bombings nor did the disengagement in 2005 result in Palestinians and Hamas taking the peaceful, state-building, approach. Maybe there is no solution to this conflict?
On this topic, the mainstream news-media have lost much of their humanity and independence. Today’s legacy news-media know quite well what readership butters most, if not all, of their bread and accordingly go in that self-compromised editorial direction.
The most journalistically compromised news-media I've read is Canada’s National Post newspaper. It epitomizes an extreme example of an echo chamber promoting unconditional support for the state of Israel, including its very-long-practiced cruelty towards the Palestinian people. And I mean unconditional support. It's eerily mind-blowing how far downhill it's gone with the whole echo-chamber concept.
More progressive outlets like Canada's other national newspaper, The Globe and Mail — progressive in regards to essentially following “woke” ideology — can be more deceitful and/or apologist in their pro-Israel coverage and especially op/ed writing since the 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel.
I feel that genuine journalists with integrity would tender their resignations and publicly proclaim they can no longer help propagate their employer’s corrupt media product, be it from the Right or Left.
Indeed. ... As a good Canadian example of remarkably ethically-challenged corporate news-media, Postmedia [which among many other Canadian publications also owns both of our national daily newspapers] is on record allying itself with not only the planet’s second most polluting forms of carbon-based 'energy' but also THE MOST polluting/dirtiest crude oil, bitumen.
Also, a few years ago, Postmedia had acquired a lobbying firm with close ties to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in order to participate in his government’s $30 million PR “war room” in promoting the industry's interests.
And in May of 2021, the newspaper giant refused to run paid ads by Leadnow, a social and environmental justice organization, that exposed the Royal Bank of Canada as the largest financer of the nation's fossil fuel extraction.
Now I understand why the Knesset so quickly passed a law allowing the ban on foreign media, so that Al Jazeera is no longer allowed to be broadcast there.
I've been a follower since they broadcast Collateral Murder and the follow-up interview with the US soldier who was on the ground very shortly after the Hero US helicopter fliers took out a Reuters journalist and his photographer, then shot up the poor bastard who tried to evacuate the wounded to a hospital. I wonder, is the US Army's "Investigation" of that incident progressing?
If Israel had been willing, in good faith, to have a two state solution we wouldn't be in this situation. Unfortunately, Israel was not willing to give up a single inch of the land they have stolen. They want it all and are willing to commit genocide to get it. I might add that neither the British, or any other colonial power, had the right to give away Palestinian land.
What makes you think that the Palestinians would ever accept a two state solution? Where is the evidence that the Palestinian leadership has seriously negotiated? Or the people themselves want it?
Thank you Jonathan for a courageous piece of journalism, as you well know you will never please Zionist and their special interests groups, but as you have so bodily done with this piece that ought not stop true journalism, again Thank you Jonathan.
British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) wrote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. …”
Cannot corporate power also be applicable to Big Media and its conduct?
The New York Times helped create the Iraq War — a ‘war’ that was much more like a turkey shoot, considering the massive military might attacking the relatively weak country — through then-VP Dick Cheney’s anonymous and knowingly-false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
After the severe damage was done, the Times claimed honest-ignorance innocence on the grounds that it was its blogger’s overzealousness that was really at fault. The same Times that otherwise insists upon securing the non-publishable yet accurate identity of its writers’ anonymous information sources.
Quite memorable was popular Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s show (May 29, 2003), where he ranted about the war’s justification and supposed success: “… We needed to go to that part of the world; and what they needed to see [was that] American boys and girls going house to house, from Basrah to Baghdad, [and] simply saying, ‘suck on this’.”
It’s as though they all decided: ‘Just to be on the safe side, let’s error in favor of militarily assaulting, invading and devastating Iraq’. What astonishes me is how such news-media staff can afterwards sleep at night or look their little children/grandchildren in the face everyday. I know I couldn’t.
But from another perspective, The Times may have jumped on the atrocity-prone Iraq-invasion bandwagon due to their close proximity to the massive 9/11 blow the city took only a few years prior. There was plenty of that particularly bitter bandwagon going around in Western circles back then. ...
Some people feel that a self-compromised or corrupt news media is better than no news media at all. I definitely do not.
Chris Hedges: Requiem for The New York Times
By EDITOR April 12, 2024
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
"NEW YORK: I am sitting in the auditorium at The New York Times. It is the first time I have been back in nearly two decades. It will be the last. The newspaper is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderless leadership and myopic cheerleading of the military debacles in the Middle East, Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, where one of the Times contributions to the mass slaughter of Palestinians was an editorial refusing to back an unconditional ceasefire. Many seated in the auditorium are culpable. …"
(Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.)
https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/12/chris-hedges-requiem-for-the-new-york-times/
Only the ignorant were lied to. Those of us who have kept up to date with the Palestinian struggle knew this would come. Now we have to stand up and speak out and challenge those who choose to be complicit in this. We need to inform people of the threat from the Zionist movement.
I Blame Biden & Harris equally for this mess with Iran as well. https://shorturl.at/ceiG4
Last month Israel's IDF bombed and destroyed the Iranian embassy in Damascus that killed, among others, two senior Iranian generals. Then, Israel brazenly warned Iran against retaliating, which U.S./Canadian/British headlines frequently referenced as though Iran's retaliation would be considered the first strike [WTF?!].
This to me reveals a great yet misplaced sense of entitlement by the Israeli state [not to mention that of the U.S. via its own morally corrupt foreign policy].
It’s as though it feels it can claim it was being proactive in its militarily unprovoked killings in another country of Iranians [or other foreign nationals] it deems a threat, and its suspicions should suffice as justification. It doesn’t.
Putin’s Russia is similarly hypocritical towards the Ukraine when the latter's forces dare to strike back against Russia’s deliberate targeting and killing of civilians and destruction of infrastructure with barrages of missiles or drones.
From his own words, Putin seems genuinely astonished and angry, as though the Ukraine really has no right to self-defence! [WTF?!]
And Russia will absurdly justify its first-strike attacks against Ukrainian civilians as a necessity of ‘de-nazifying’ their democratically elected government. I say, first ‘de-nazify' Russia's Kremlin and especially its presidency!
It all reminds me of the high-school bully with a grand sense of entitlement and whose concept of his fair share was always three-quarters of the pie.
I take your point, My apologies, I prefer to understand the views of others than to just argue,
Deborah, I am impressed by your lengthy and detailed replies but in going over the events of the past you seem to have lost sight of what is happening in the present. It matters little what Chris Hedges says, or you say, about past events. The evidence of genocide by Israel is clear and compelling. Just look at photos of Gaza; it is decimated.
Let me repeat what Chris Hedges said. although I'm sure it's much worse now:
"Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.."
May I point out that Gaza has no fighter jets, no bombers, no tanks, no warships, no precision guided munitions, and no long-range artillery. Just a glance at recent photos of Gaza show it is almost completely destroyed. It is a massacre.
thank you for this, very accurate insight
Why have American Presidents and Senators been talking about it for the last 50 years?
Israel will never survive as a nation state if it did not respond to the October 7 atrocities by wiping out Hamas. What October 7 showed is that if Hamas has the capabilities to commit an actual genocide then they would do so. Israel has all the ability to wipe out Gaza and all Gazans but has not done so.
It is odd reading this… almost as if Israel is being blamed for Hamas committing a genocide by not being sufficiently vigilant to prevent Hamas from committing the horror to begin with.
"Former IDF soldier Benzi Sanders was deployed into Gaza in 2014. He tells CNN's Christiane Amanpour it's a 'catastrophic mistake' to believe military power against Hamas will bring safety to Israel." November 6, 2023 | Video | Amanpour & Company - PBS
“Ex-IDF soldier criticizes Israeli government over ‘catastrophic mistake’.” Amanpour, PBS, November 6, 2023.
He also stated on the record that Israel “facilitated” transfer of weapons, etcetera, to Hamas.
And it was strange how the broadcasted recorded interview with Benzi Sanders was cut off midstream. Right in the middle of his sentence, the screen went blank for a moment, then off to some unrelated material — quite conspicuously with a complete absence of the usual brief apology/explanation from the host when such an interruption occurs.
More so, the posted interview itself seems to have been deleted at the PBS source. When you click the link, you see a “Sorry, this video is not currently available.”
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/november-6-2023-kbnqke/
____
Other source websites with the interview:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/11/06/idf-soldier-benzi-sanders-amanpour-israel-vpx.cnn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xliqJ6pxx08
https://www.msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/-hamas-just-got-stronger-former-idf-soldier-on-why-gaza-incursion-may-not-bring-peace-196887109943
Let's assume he is right... then when is the appropriate response since the peace process in the 1990s did not result in Hamas stopping the suicide bombings nor did the disengagement in 2005 result in Palestinians and Hamas taking the peaceful, state-building, approach. Maybe there is no solution to this conflict?
Jazeera is a lying news outlet
On this topic, the mainstream news-media have lost much of their humanity and independence. Today’s legacy news-media know quite well what readership butters most, if not all, of their bread and accordingly go in that self-compromised editorial direction.
The most journalistically compromised news-media I've read is Canada’s National Post newspaper. It epitomizes an extreme example of an echo chamber promoting unconditional support for the state of Israel, including its very-long-practiced cruelty towards the Palestinian people. And I mean unconditional support. It's eerily mind-blowing how far downhill it's gone with the whole echo-chamber concept.
More progressive outlets like Canada's other national newspaper, The Globe and Mail — progressive in regards to essentially following “woke” ideology — can be more deceitful and/or apologist in their pro-Israel coverage and especially op/ed writing since the 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel.
I feel that genuine journalists with integrity would tender their resignations and publicly proclaim they can no longer help propagate their employer’s corrupt media product, be it from the Right or Left.
The western media is full of lies anyway
Indeed. ... As a good Canadian example of remarkably ethically-challenged corporate news-media, Postmedia [which among many other Canadian publications also owns both of our national daily newspapers] is on record allying itself with not only the planet’s second most polluting forms of carbon-based 'energy' but also THE MOST polluting/dirtiest crude oil, bitumen.
Also, a few years ago, Postmedia had acquired a lobbying firm with close ties to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in order to participate in his government’s $30 million PR “war room” in promoting the industry's interests.
And in May of 2021, the newspaper giant refused to run paid ads by Leadnow, a social and environmental justice organization, that exposed the Royal Bank of Canada as the largest financer of the nation's fossil fuel extraction.
Now I understand why the Knesset so quickly passed a law allowing the ban on foreign media, so that Al Jazeera is no longer allowed to be broadcast there.
I've been a follower since they broadcast Collateral Murder and the follow-up interview with the US soldier who was on the ground very shortly after the Hero US helicopter fliers took out a Reuters journalist and his photographer, then shot up the poor bastard who tried to evacuate the wounded to a hospital. I wonder, is the US Army's "Investigation" of that incident progressing?
Israel has a long history of playing the victim to cover up its own crimes as documented here: https://open.substack.com/pub/generalgrievance/p/how-zionist-bullies-victim-wash-their?r=z5j1k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
If Israel had been willing, in good faith, to have a two state solution we wouldn't be in this situation. Unfortunately, Israel was not willing to give up a single inch of the land they have stolen. They want it all and are willing to commit genocide to get it. I might add that neither the British, or any other colonial power, had the right to give away Palestinian land.
What makes you think that the Palestinians would ever accept a two state solution? Where is the evidence that the Palestinian leadership has seriously negotiated? Or the people themselves want it?
ONE THING we know about Jews is THEY LIE.
Oh and they love Genocide so long as it isnt them.
Thank you Jonathan for a courageous piece of journalism, as you well know you will never please Zionist and their special interests groups, but as you have so bodily done with this piece that ought not stop true journalism, again Thank you Jonathan.
Thank you Jonathan for your honest joyrnalism.
We were also lied to about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. History repeats itself.
British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) wrote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. …”
Cannot corporate power also be applicable to Big Media and its conduct?
The New York Times helped create the Iraq War — a ‘war’ that was much more like a turkey shoot, considering the massive military might attacking the relatively weak country — through then-VP Dick Cheney’s anonymous and knowingly-false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
After the severe damage was done, the Times claimed honest-ignorance innocence on the grounds that it was its blogger’s overzealousness that was really at fault. The same Times that otherwise insists upon securing the non-publishable yet accurate identity of its writers’ anonymous information sources.
Quite memorable was popular Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s show (May 29, 2003), where he ranted about the war’s justification and supposed success: “… We needed to go to that part of the world; and what they needed to see [was that] American boys and girls going house to house, from Basrah to Baghdad, [and] simply saying, ‘suck on this’.”
It’s as though they all decided: ‘Just to be on the safe side, let’s error in favor of militarily assaulting, invading and devastating Iraq’. What astonishes me is how such news-media staff can afterwards sleep at night or look their little children/grandchildren in the face everyday. I know I couldn’t.
But from another perspective, The Times may have jumped on the atrocity-prone Iraq-invasion bandwagon due to their close proximity to the massive 9/11 blow the city took only a few years prior. There was plenty of that particularly bitter bandwagon going around in Western circles back then. ...
Some people feel that a self-compromised or corrupt news media is better than no news media at all. I definitely do not.