Is it just me or does this @nytimes story on Chief Rabbi Mirvis' denunciation of Labour's antisemitism include zero British Jews supporting it, only Jews opposing it? nytimes.com/2019/11/26/wor…
@nytimes Two major problems with this:
1) The NYT is just printing bald antisemitic propaganda, of the sort you'd see on Iranian state tv in response to Mirvis. This is the obvious problem, but:
1) The NYT is just printing bald antisemitic propaganda, of the sort you'd see on Iranian state tv in response to Mirvis. This is the obvious problem, but:
@nytimes 2) it shows how misinformed you are if you read the NYT. The paper takes token dissenting voices in the Jewish community and presents them as representative of the larger community. You have to go out of your way to be this inaccurate.
@nytimes This shows how bias often manifests. Take a hot-button subject and portray an exact balance of opinion on it among a community that is *not* evenly divided. The only way NYT could present this as even is if they talked to *literally* no one on the majority side.
@nytimes That is, for the NYT to leave the desired impression with this article--that the Jewish community isn't happy with their chief rabbi defending the Jews from antisemitism--its reporter ("reporter") had to quite literally erase the UK Jewish community and go fishing on twitter.
@nytimes This is not about 'bias' as traditionally understood. This is about this writer's entire reporting method being completely incompatible with honest or ethical journalism. That's the process here: do the opposite of journalism to own the Jews. Is the paper beyond saving?
One reason this type of bias is so harmful is that it's harder to spot by the general reader and easier to 'defend': "Is anything in the piece a lie? No? Then what's your problem?"
It's very easy to get an outpouring of protest over, say, that NYT antisemitic cartoon.
It's very easy to get an outpouring of protest over, say, that NYT antisemitic cartoon.
Everyone instinctively *knows* there's something wrong with the 'toon--images always have an advantage over words in this particular regard, but also the history of antisemitic cartoons is infamous and well-understood.
Bias like this is much harder to make clear to the lay reader. You have to know something about the subject to spot it. But that's what makes it so pernicious: how many readers will simply absorb this story unthinkingly and move on, having a totally false picture of reality?
It's the banality of evil--even if 'evil' is too strong a word to describe this reporting. It's the concept. Rather than being actually 'evil' this kind of reporting is just completely ethically irredeemable and indefensible.
That's bad enough, but it's worse when you realize that what you're seeing is a *formula.* This is going to be repeated throughout the NYT's reporting on antisemitism. This is the process. Readers didn't get one dose of poison; they got merely the latest dose of poison.
And when all of that adds up, over years and decades, you have a fully contaminated drinking supply. Now you see how it happened. NYT may be the worst offender (in the US) on this, but it's not the only. And these outlets fully intend to keep it that way. /fin
PS--amazing: 
