Requiem for the Gray Lady (Part 1)

Once the paper of record in the USA, under Dean Baquet the New York Times has become a left-wing tabloid with an antique type font

“Friends, Romans, Countrymen

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones”

Act III, Scene II, “Julius Caesar”, William Shakespeare

Once upon a time, long long ago, there were a few daily publications in the USA that at least tried to separate editorial opinion from reporting.  There was a “social contract” of sorts between the American electorate and what were believed to be leading members of the Fourth Estate (stemming from the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights), in which – in exchange for some semblance of objectivity and  independent “watchdog” service to the public, the press would enjoy broad legal protections.  This was codified in the common practice of segregating editorial opinion (which was clearly advocacy) from the “hard news” reporting.  And when I was younger (or just more naïve), this seemed fairly clear.  But over time, the NY Times has gradually eroded the separation between news analysis and opinion, to the point where the paper now routinely injects government propaganda, mis- and disinformation, and far left wing opinion into the daily reporting sections.

As previously noted by Tony Lyons, (President, Skyhorse Publishing) the mendacious New York Times, a bastion of censorship and corruption, has warned the world that “America Has a Free Speech Problem.”

The Washington, DC-based Capital Research Center (CRC) has published a detailed historical summary of the gradual and then recently accelerating drift of the NY Times towards the far left via the CRC research arm Influence Watch.  For those not familiar with the CRC, according to Wikipedia (which has its own far left wing propaganda bias), the CRC

“is an American conservative non-profit organization located in Washington, D.C. Its stated purpose is "to study non-profit organizations, with a special focus on reviving the American traditions of charity, philanthropy, and voluntarism.””

Quoting from the excellent analysis of the CRC (which I strongly recommend reading for additional details);

“In 1972, conservative activist and author William F. Buckley’s National Review undertook an audit of the paper’s journalism under Rosenthal and found no evidence of ideological bias, concluding, “The Times news administration was so evenhanded it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” The National Review suggested other media should follow the NYT’s example, writing “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated, the nation would be far better informed and more broadly served.””

Many point to the executive editorship of Howard Raines as the beginning of the NYT’s slide into obvious bias, as he pushed a “calcified” Times to become “smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience.” Raines had been the editor of the NYT’s left-leaning opinion section, which some critics believe influenced the paper’s combination of advocacy and journalism under his tenure from 2001 to 2003. Political consultant Dick Morris, who had managed Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, in 2003 charged that Raines had turned the NYT into a “political consulting firm for the Democratic Party.”

“Under Raines, it is squandering the unparalleled credibility it has amassed over the past century in order to articulate and advance its own political and ideological agenda,” Morris argued. “For decades, the Times was the one newspaper so respected for its integrity and so widely read that it had influence well beyond its circulation. Now it has stooped to the role of partisan cheerleader, sending messages of dissent, and fanning the flames of disagreement on the left.”

Raines lost his job after reporter Jayson Blair was discovered to have engaged in widespread plagiarism and fraud, which a front-page NYT correction article proclaimed “a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.”

The NYT’s next two executive editors — Bill Keller and Jill Abramson – slowed the pace of change from Raines but still continued to mix more news with opinion, implementing changes such as “News Analysis” articles that for the first time encouraged news reporters to provide an explicit point of view on the news they were covering. Keller questioned the basic concept of media impartiality, saying, “Whether true objectivity is ever possible – I don’t think that is what we’re here for.” However, Keller later attacked Fox News for a lack of objectivity, saying “they probably are convinced that what they have created is the conservative counterweight to a media elite long marinated in liberal bias.”

Critics charge that Abramson’s successor, Dean Baquet, has again accelerated the intrusion of left-leaning bias into the Times’s news coverage. Abramson herself wrote that “Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump.” Abramson warned that journalistic standards were falling throughout the NYT newsroom after the 2016 election, saying “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards.”

What the heck has happened to journalism? Here are two versions of the story, one representing how the press likes to see itself (The Elements of Journalism, Revised and Updated 4th Edition: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect), and the other a more critical analysis (The Journalist and the Murderer)

Here are two key quotes from the latter, written by acclaimed New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm. These get right to the heart of my own experiences with “advocacy journalism”. In the first of a two part series published in the New Yorker in March of 1989, Ms. Malcolm writes;

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.”

This is based on her evocative analysis of the professional choices that shape a work of non-fiction, as well as a rumination on the morality that underpins the journalistic enterprise. The journalist in question is Joe McGinniss; the murderer is the former Special Forces captain Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who became the subject of McGinniss's 1983 book Fatal Vision. So, has anything changed in the last thirty years?

As many readers of this substack are aware, Jill and I have recently had our own unpleasant experiences with the New York Times, which have lead to our attorney filing a formal complaint concerning defamation with both the paper and the (former) NYT reporter Davey Alba.

Subsequently, various reporters and podcasters have asked me how Ms. Alba and the NYT were able to gain my trust and consent for the interview. Was I “like the credulous widow” suffering from “vanity, ignorance, or loneliness”? Or did I go into this with eyes wide open but was somehow hoodwinked by Ms. Alba in some way?

Sticking to the facts, and in the interest of helping to “vaccinate” readers with the sad truth of how journalism is practiced at the New York Times, I offer the following email exchange for your own review and judgement. A bit of context first though - The last two years have not been my first experience with going to the press in the role of a “Whistleblower”. Upon advice of my medical ethics mentor at the time, I had gone to the press concerning what I knew about the death of young Jesse Gelsinger at the hands of University of Pennsylvania gene therapy guru James Wilson. One of the reporters that I worked with fairly intensively was the NYT’s Sheryl Gaye Stolberg, who wrote a summary of the incident titled “The Biotech Death of Jesse Gelsinger”. Over time I had come to trust Ms. Stolberg and to respect her reporting. With that introduction and context, below I provide the email thread which lead to my decision (which Jill disagreed with) to agree to allow Ms. Alba to conduct an extended interview at our farm.

As you read the correspondence, I suggest that you keep in mind the quoted analysis of Janet Malcom. Learn from my mistake. Do not agree to interviews with these journalists who seek to advance a particular agenda, such as what the NYT heralded as “Davey Alba is joining The New York Times as a technology reporter covering disinformation and all of its tentacles.” Nothing good will come of it. Prior to agreeing to this interview, Mattias Desmet had spoken to me of the moral imperative and importance of trying to speak to all sides in order to help minimize the risk of the overall society falling even deeper into the mass formation process which he describes in his seminal tome The Psychology of Totalitarianism. My repeated personal experience in this case suggests that speaking to legacy media journalists out of a sense of helping to correct mis- and disinformation (ergo, “Fake News”) is a fools errand. I hope that the thread below helps you to understand this for yourself without the need to personally experience what I have repeatedly been through.

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Wed, Jan 26, 10:40 AM

From Davey Alba to Robert Malone

Hi Robert,

My name is Davey Alba, I’m a reporter with The New York Times. We are interested in profiling you and I wanted to reach out and see if this is something that you’d be up for.

My beat is traditionally misinformation, but I wanted to understand and potentially correct the record on some other mainstream publications’ quick write-ups of what your views about Covid-19 have been in the past year. I’ve listened to your podcast with Joe Rogan, the five video interviews with The Epoch Times, and your podcast with Bret Weinstein. I’ve heard you say you aren’t anti-vaxx — you have some concerns about how quickly the treatment has been developed and pushed out to millions of people around the world, but that it has helped, especially in the case of older adults. And it seems like as a pioneer of mRNA, you had some concerns about the stability of the technology and had pushed for other treatments like pills and drugs, before going the route of a vaccine. I also understand that it’s not like you haven’t lived through this before, since you were involved in a company trying to develop drug treatments during the Zika virus epidemic of 2015-2016.

I wanted to make sure that this understanding of your views is correct, and to give you a chance to respond to your detractors. If you’re free this week, would you be up for a chat? Please do let me know.

All the best,

Davey

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January 26th, 2022

From Robert Malone to Davey Alba

Hello Mr Alba

I have learned to be wary of journalists from legacy media writing to me.  Please forward a link to your other work, or partner with Sheryl Gaye Stolberg on this

Your summary seems a bit off in many aspects

Best

Robert

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January 27th, 2022

From Robert Malone to Davey Alba and Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Looking forward to your reply, Mr. Alba

Sheryl has known me for many, many years.

Please contact her.

You can find detailed information about me on my website at www.rwmalonemd.com

My CV and Biosketch are attached.

You may also appreciate the following recent scientific works

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2021.633680/full

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-526394/v1

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3646583

These clinical trials are currently enrolling.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04488081

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January 27th, 2022

From Davey Alba to Robert Malone

Thank you, Robert — I'll have a conversation with Sheryl (I've already reached out), and I'll read these closely. Hope you can give me a few hours to go through them.

In the meantime, my apologies if I've characterized any of your views inaccurately or left something out — I think that's why it would be so important to have a conversation with you, to get your side of things and portray them fairly.

Understood that you wanted to vet some of my work. I've also covered things like the surveillance creep of facial recognition in schools, the racial tensions at an Amazon warehouse where several nooses had been found, anti-Muslim hate in India, facial recognition tech used by police in Orlando, and sexual harassment by a data startup CEO. Lastly, here is a piece I wrote in 2018 that won a couple of awards, on the role of misinformation during the 2016 Philippine elections, and how President Duterte, an autocrat, used Facebook to justify extrajudicial killings in the country's war on drugs.

I would love to speak with you this week or early next. Do you need any more information from me? Just let me know.

Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you,

Davey

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January 27th, 2022

From Robert Malone to Davey Alba

I am in SF airport en route to Maui. Hopefully you will have connected with Sheryl by time I land and get settled

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January 27th, 2022

From Davey Alba to Robert Malone

Yes — she’s also in an airport at the moment and I spoke briefly with her before her plane took off, and will speak to her again at 2pm ET. She told me you two had been in touch early in the pandemic and you had done an interview with her a few years ago as well.

Sounds great re: getting settled first — safe travels, and feel free to ping me again when you land and get your bearings!

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January 28th, 2022

From Davey Alba to Robert Malone

Hi Robert, would love to continue this conversation over the phone if you have some time next week — and, my editor says, it would also be great if we could send a photographer over to where you are to take your portrait.

What's your availability looking like over the next few days? I know you must be busy, but let me know when you have time.

Best,

Davey

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TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2