“Print subscriptions, meanwhile, are in “steady decline”; advertising is falling by close to (and sometimes more than) double digits each year.”
The writer says this like it has some financial needs in the situation. The Guardian model is there if ever subscriptions cannot float the expenses. (The Guardian loses money every issue, but more than makes it up by its money streams from other than advertising and subscriptions.)
Zuckerberg spent over $400,000,000, almost half a billion, on the democrat vote harvest machine. Soros is a hugely deep pocket for every kind of election for hard left campaigns. The owners are Billionaires. Money has nothing to do with it all – just the appearance of the NY Times not being a paid for propaganda, if the subscribers are seen to be funding it, and not just the Neo-Marxist Elites footing the bills.
Hi*l er funded Lord Haw-Haw, Tojo paid for Tokyo Rose, Stalin had Pravda, and the USA Left elites have The New York Times and CNN, they just pretend they are actually news, and not agenda, but we know that is not true.
First of all, subject to my inferior knowledge of the USA, I agree with everything you say.
If you take people with money (Soros, rock stars like Bono, footballers who kneel for political reasons, TV celebs) they seem to go through a barrier which makes them feel guilty about their wealth. Some take things very seriously, learn to read and read history. Of course, reading history means reading a certain kind of history, which shows that poor people are victims and rich people are evil and privileged. But this analysis does not include themselves.
If all of the rich people who actively support left-leaning ideas were to give away half of their riches before they started to preach, perhaps it would show that they meant it. Perhaps half would not be enough.
But this attitude is often found on UnHerd as well. Maybe those who see the problem as The Left or The Right are missing something. Perhaps the problem is inside themselves and is called ‘Human Nature’. Whatever the problem, constantly redefining it can’t be the issue. Solving it has to be more important and this comes back not to politics but the political system itself. Perhaps the USA needs an alternative to Congress, Senate, President. Perhaps the whole federation has to be broken up.
they seem to go through a barrier which makes them feel guilty about their wealth.
I’m not sure that is quite right. Some may do, but the ubiquity of a whole cohort of professional footballers genuflecting at the bell and reciting the credo, seems less about individual conscience and more about conformity to the prevailing media orthodoxy than anything else. All this, lest they have their head above the parapet and place that enormous wealth and career in jeopardy. Just going along to get along.
You are probably correct but somebody has to start it. A couple have tried to stop it, to no avail. It is difficult to imagine that most of them would even think about the meaning of the gesture anyway.
The whole thing is very like MaCartheyism in the States. Everybody denounces everybody else hoping that the finger won’t hover over them. Until a very powerful, confident personality suddenly appears saying, ‘Stop, this is silly.’ Then it stops.
Which echo chamber do you frequent? CNN is planning some severe cuts in its talking heads so you might not be as comfortable there.
Emre Emre
2 years ago
Recently a movie came out about Holodomor (this Terror-Famine in Ukraine) called “Mr. Jones” (2019). I found it a well-made introduction to the story: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6828390/
It’s worth mentioning this famine was intentionally done by the Soviets, and is today recognised as a genocide by many countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
You beat me to it. I was going to suggest the same movie. It got mixed reviews but I thought it was excellent. George Orwell makes an appearance, and it shows how truly depraved Duranty was.
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
I really can’t stand the use of the word “narrative” to define what, in fact, are lies.
Good point. Narrative conveys the idea of a more carefully constructed story to an end that may or may not be lies but a question of nuance and emphasis. Both truths and lies use it, and notably wnen addressing the less provable facts than scientific evidence. That’s the problem; It’s a “Gray” area.
What unites that criticism, from both sides of the political aisle, is something fundamental to any work of journalism: accuracy.
The media used to use accuracy to build trust, and sell papers. Now they use ‘star’ journalists to build followers and provide entertainment. And sell papers/pixels. Expecting accuracy is likely to result in disappointment.
Tony Taylor
2 years ago
The Times is doing what so many media outlets are doing – planting its flag in its favourite corner of the agora, and stuffing wax in its ears.
Douglas Proudfoot
2 years ago
It’s clear that almost all of the traditional outlets are competing for roughly half the viewers in the country, the ones on the left. To compete, they try to outflank each other on the left. As they move further left, they depart further from reality, and reduce the overall market for leftist propaganda. They end up playing musical chairs in a declining market.
Meanwhile, new web based outlets, like Unherd, are rapidly expanding to serve the market for accurate news and rational opinion.
The over concentration on the left doesn’t seem to make economic sense to me, this article not withstanding. The NYT may be able to win at it, but CNN is obviously losing badly. It would seem to be a triumph of ideology over economic interest.
As Abraham Lincoln once said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. There’s a limit to the number of billionaires willing to subsidize declining traditional outlets. With the Russia Hoax unravelling, and the Rittenhouse trial on TV exposing the previous coverage as a complete fabrication, trust in traditional outlets is in free fall. The Times, they are a changin’.
Linda Hutchinson
2 years ago
I don’t know what argument Ms Hanna-Jones used to prove that independemce and slavery are inextricably linked, but I do know of a theory put forward a long time ago which postulated that the Somerset Case was a catalyst for the independence movement. This case was in 1772 when a High Court judge in London ruled that slavery was “so odious” that it could not exist in common law; his ruling led to something like 15,000 slaves in England being freed.
Now, the theory goes that this decision reached American slaveowners and scared the hell out of those subject to British law, and to preserve slavery, the southern colonies joined the north in its rebellion against Britain. In fact, at the First Continental Congress in 1774,John Adams promised to support the Southern slave-holders’ right to keep slavery. I must confes that when I first read about the Somerset Case I did wonder if there might be some link, but I wasn’t sufficiently interested to look into it more deeply. True or not, though, it seems that these arguments are being used as a cudgel in this “culture war” rather than being confined to historical debate.
I shall see if I can find Leslie Harris’ refutation – assumiing of course that the Somerset Case is what this what Ms Hanna-Jones was using, otherwise I’ve just wasted my time posting this here.
Your post isn’t a waste of time, Ms H-J might be correct for the wrong reasons, and I’ve just learnt the name of the Somerset Case (which I had heard of, but hadn’t read the details of). This should be taught at school.
This is covered, and dealt with, in the piece by Harris (linked to in the piece above). The biggest problem is the reduction of a complex situation to a simple, ideology driven, narrative.
The 1619 Project is an Orwellian lie from the starting date, 1619. When the slaves landed in Virginia in 1619, there was no legal framework for slavery. Initially, at least some black slaves were treated as labor indentured for 14 years.
“It’s rather clear that Virginia did not have a set way of dealing with these folks, and it got worked out over time,” Scott says. “They had indentured people in Virginia, and some people may have seen Africans just like they saw other indentured people. We know some people became free, so it looks like they were treated like every other indentured person.”
Quoted from:
USA Today article: “1619: 400 years ago, a ship arrived in Virginia, bearing human cargo”
Lifetime slavery didn’t begin until 1641, in Massachusetts. Slavery wasn’t inherited by the children of slaves until 1662, in Virginia. Why wasn’t it the 1641 project, or the 1662 project?
The 1619 project says the American Revolution was strictly to protect slavery. To say this, the 1619 project ignores all the advocacy for the Revolution, none of which mentioned slavery, and also ignores that Great Britain didn’t abolish slavery until 1833.
The purpose of the 1619 project was not accurate history. The purpose of the 1619 project was to discredit the foundation of the US government, to make it easier for Marxists to rule by decree, contrary to law.
Usually, overlooked in American History is that 2/3 and maybe even more Europeans arrived in the New World as indentured servants, often taking 10 years or more to pay off their debt. Clearly, servitude is not slavery, but young people don’t realize that getting to the Americas and thriving thereafter was a struggle for just about everyone.
I think that in effect what Lord Mansfield, the judge, said was that the nature of slavery was such that it required specific English legislation authorising it in England. Overseas legislation wasn’t sufficient. As there was no legislation authorising it in England, James Somerset was free. I think Portugal and Spain had legislation. Did the then American colonies? I am assuming they didn’t if English law applied there.
In 1619 they did not. Lifetime slavery didn’t begin until 1641, in Massachusetts. Slavery wasn’t inherited by the children of slaves until 1662, in Virginia. Please see my comment above for more information.
I got this information from internet searches. A lot of my information about pre Revoloutionary Colonial America comes from my general reading of history, bolstered by family interests. Both sides of my family have revolutionary war veterans. One of my ancestors, Capt. Audley Paul, served with Col. Washington in the Virginia militia in the French and Indian War. Some of my ancestors came to America as early as 1640. Others came as late as 1890.
My personal theory of the revolution is based on the Scots Irish background of a lot of my family. Most of them came to America from Northern Ireland. When the British Crown started to play fast and loose with property rights in the colonies, many of them must have remembered the abuses of the period in Ireland.
The British Parliament imposed religious restrictions on the ownership of land, weapons and even horses on Ireland, without Irish consent. I think the fear that arbitrary restrictions on property ownership were possible, contributed directly to the revolution. The restrictive laws in Ireland were revoked, if I remember right, in 1778, probably as a reaction to the American Revolution.
John Locke’s reference to life, liberty and property may have been edited to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, but the underlying idea stayed the same. Since slaves were property, it had a little to do with them, but it mainly had to do with general property rights for everyone. That’s why the Revolution started in Boston, and not Virginia and Georgia, where there were many more slaves.
Crispus Attucks, a freed black man, is generally regarded as the first man Red Coats killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre. His race didn’t dampen the outrage in Boston at all.
this decision reached American slaveowners and scared the hell out of those subject to British law, and to preserve slavery, the southern colonies joined the north in its rebellion
Interesting. If that is in fact what the claim is based on (and I don’t know), though, I’d suggest it falls short of persuading. First, it apparently concedes that the rebellion was going to happen anyway. Second, evidence is needed that American slaveowners had the necessary clout to involve all the southern colonies in a rebellion in defence of their interests, and also that this was their motivation for doing so. And third, if this was their rationale for involvement, why didn’t they get it written into the DoI?
While a glimmer of truth in the Somerset case, the founders wrestled with the issue of slavery. A cornerstone of liberty is protection of personal property and slaves were a capital investment that couldn’t be waived away. In order to secure the slave states votes they agreed to the 3/5th compromise in counting people so as to reduce southern population. They also created a very odd clause in the constitution that effectively ended any further import of slaves after 1808.
The date 1619 represents the year blacks arrived. They were not slaves nor treated as such. Readings at the time tell the true story of the difficulties in admitting non-English migrants who were hampered by language and basic ‘modern’ living skills. Some blacks later became land owners with voting rights. The NYT story ignores that truth to build a false story of the time.
Christopher Barclay
2 years ago
In suggesting that 1619 was the birth of America, the 1619 Project dehumanises the inhabitants of North America prior to 1619.
Lillian Fry
2 years ago
The GrayLady Winked documents nearly 100 years of lying by the New York Times. Should be required reading.
James Joyce
2 years ago
Too bad the author didn’t mention Jason Blair. Jason Blair was not a typical hire–public uni, not yet a college graduate, but his melanin content was so high that The Times just had to have him. He was hired, put on the fast track, won the Pulitzer Prize…
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Surely he would have won the Pulitzer Prize if it weren’t for systemic racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the fact that he was a serial fabricator. He made up his stories, his sources, and because he was the Golden Boy (a term, not meant to be racist), this was overlooked for quite some time. Finally, it had to come out.
Jason wrote a book explaining how systemic racism and all the other things mentioned above conspired to bring him down. BURNING DOWN MY MASTER’S HOUSE. Don’t bother reading. Rubbish!
Jerry Jay Carroll
2 years ago
The NYT is angling its coverage for the badly-educated younger generations shaped by left-wing academics like potters do clay. In this it is like Corporate America cynically lending a hand to the methodical destruction of our cultural and historical values because there is money in it for them in the form of goodwill. Both remind me of the Marxist-Leninist apercu that capitalists will sell their customers the rope that will be used to hang them. You can’t keep moving left and remain sane. That the 1619 hoax finds ready buyers among the young and the left proves the point. Their ahistorical admiration for socialism will circle back, as they say in the White House these days, to bite them squarely where it hurts the most.
Sometimes it is ideology not marketing. The new editor of the Lancet – which you would hope is committed to objective truth – has had several embarrassments. The most disturbing was having to retract a paper about hydroxyquloroquine. The paper was used as a reason to halt trials of the drug – which was a potential (cheap) treatment for Covid. The paper was based on entirely fabricated evidence – which they might have noticed if they weren’t so keen to show up Donald Trump (who talked about the drug). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lancet-retracts-paper-that-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials
Their latest stunt is to refer to ‘bodies with vaginas’ instead of using the term ‘women’. How they think this helps their credibility is beyond me.
Last edited 2 years ago by Gunner Myrtle
Richard Powell
2 years ago
A small point, but I’ll make it as accuracy is central to this otherwise excellent article: Walter Duranty was educated at Cambridge (Emmanuel College) rather than Oxford. He took a Second in Classics in 1906. [Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Duranty]
So preceding the Cambridge 5 by just a few years. Although Duranty was knocking around Russia when Sir Anthony went there in the 1930s talent spotting. I wonder if by chance …… Still Duranty can’t have been all bad, he was a friend of Alistair Crowley, so obviously he had a sense of humour.
Arild Brock
2 years ago
SELLING A STORY – OR A CONTROVERSY?
Informative article.
Even worse than selling a non-accurate story in order to win the culture war, would be promoting the story in order to make the “war” last longer. The more doubtful the public, I guess, the more subscriptions you can sell.
Having said that, let’s not turn cynical. We should pursue truth before power and so remain human.
Matt B
2 years ago
Some history was wrongly written on purpose and needs correction, just as historians need jobs. And papers, long written on the back of adverts, need editors of sorts. Nothing new. The problem with substituting marketing for accuracy, if this story is right, is that the latest target audience, seemingly expecting better, will realize too over time that they have been duped. Since democracy has only blinking regard for truth, and feeds off money, perception and bias, papers play and catalyze the game. The NYT and others may adjust sails to navigate the ‘darkness’, before trying other tacks as the wind shifts again. The US as a beacon of light is, meantime, left to itself, flickering on a blasted shore with baying crowds crashing to either side and paper boats surfing the tide.
Talk about being duped?! We could give myriad of examples of this, starting with the lie that Hillary Clinton was a slam dunk to be POTUS back in 2016. Add the Russian collusion hoax, the burial of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Covid-19 lab leak conspiracy and the sanctification of George Floyd and you have a lovely chain of complete alterations of reality. Yet, the left continues to drink from the fountain.
Matt I suggest you read Luke Harding’s Shadow State on the Steele dossier which reveals who it was written for and the fact that for political reasons it was undermined by the American establishment.
It’s an interesting book but without clear evidence, while the US case against a Russian analyst involved in the Steele ‘dossier’ has only just begun. There is still a burden of proof requirement: the kind that would withstand legal scrutiny beyond crowd, media or kangaroo ‘justice’. Reserve judgement perhaps?
It’s the result of letting the Soviet elite who have used their usually ill-gotten gains to buy up posh London townhouses and sprinkle their money around various groups in the UK. It’s all about the excessive ‘funny’ money which fertilizes the corruption in British Society going back to the 1950’s at least.
Doesn’t help, for sure. It has a deeply corrupting influence.
Christopher Chantrill
2 years ago
Against the 1619 Project I present my 1584 Project. That was the year that the first shipload of “white trash” arrived off the coast of Virginia.
See, ever since the Autumn of the Middle Ages the feudal lords had a problem with the “beggars and vagabonds” that they kicked off their estates in the interest of “improvement” and the vital importance of an income to support a nice big house in London.
Where to send this “waste population” but to the Americas?
Cathy Carron
2 years ago
At this point, the best use of the NYTimes is at the bottom of a litter box. Bereft of facts & news and seething with ideological purity, it’s hard to imagine why anyone of sound mind would subscribe to it now.
Frederick Hastings
2 years ago
Truth crushed to earth shall rise again:
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,
And dies among his worshipers.
—William Cullen Bryant
Alan Hawkes
2 years ago
Some contributors below seem to be falling into the trap of ignoring the points to debate the personalities involved. It doesn’t matter how much of a celebrity someone is: if they say that 2+2=5, they are wrong. The important question is: are Nikole Hannah-Jones’ assertions correct, or not.
Martin Johnson
2 years ago
The claim that the American Revolution was about preserving slavery is just an outright lie and disproven by the fact that starting as early as 1776 every colony/state north of the Mason/Dixon line used its newly declared independence to start taking steps toward gradual emancipation.
While a hypothetical, there is a decent argument that had the slaveholding volonies still been in the Empire, the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s might have been delayed, perhaps by many years.
A better case can be made that the Texas revolt from Mexico in the 1830s was not wholly but in significant part about preserving slavery. Given the status of the Alamo in Texan and American iconography, that would be a weighty claim and one that has some real support.
William MacDougall
2 years ago
The role of slavery in America is not some modern notion. At the time Samuel Johnson wrote ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’ And the British authorities freed slaves who fought for the British union. Perhaps Nikole Hannah-Jones goes too far, but it’s ridiculous to say she’s as bad as Duranty.
She’s only ‘as bad as’ Duranty in that she’s a completely dishonest journalist, defending dangerous left-wing ideology. She’s not responsible for covering up mass murder, true.
Much worse was the NYT’s Judith Miller, who told lies which led to massacres in recent times.
Last edited 2 years ago by Rod McLaughlin
Lillian Fry
2 years ago
These two incidents are not the only lies perpetrated by the NYT. READ Rindsberg’s book: The Gray Lady Winked; how the NYT’s misreporting, distortions. & Fabrications radically alter history. There are few major events in the last hundred years in which the NYT has not played a questionable role. And in which their reporter has not been a major player and a subsequent celebrity.
Rod McLaughlin
2 years ago
“…according to scholars who participated in the debate, slavery played a relatively minor role compared to the Northern industrial and commercial economy…”
Not quite. Slavery was a very important part of the economy. The problem is that Hannah-Jones claims the USA is *based* on the racial oppression of African people. Although it is difficult to construct an alternative history of North America without genocide, capitalism would have done *better* without slavery. She’s got the wrong racism.
Diana Durham
2 years ago
What is strange about all this is also that an interpretation of 17th century history should become an article in a newspaper whose job is primarily the coverage and analysis of and comment on current affairs. Normally the journalist would write a book first, an in-depth account of their particular interpretation of history. Only then, if a case was to be made about its relevance to the present, might it provide a focus for an article in a newspaper. But also by then, given the need to be at least somewhat accurate in a book-length argument, the flaws and myopias would be on display enough to be critiqued. But in this case, it was the other way round. The paper went to bat for an article and its assumed relevance to modern day, before sufficient perspective and overview were available from perusal of the theory. Perhaps we are seeing here the rebirth of the importance of books!
Who’d thought that the NYTimes would to put out reinterpretations of history? Such a Marx-ian activity.
John Riordan
2 years ago
“The USSR was a massive market of 150 million people that for nearly two decades since the revolution had been restricted to US corporate interests.”
I was most interested in this assertion. Does anyone know the background to it?
More generally on this subject though, the notion that the American War of Independence was fought to prevent the abolition of slavery is extremely silly because it can be defeated purely on the dates alone. The War took place from 1775 to 1783. The Abolitionist movement, conversely, famously started in 2 George Yard in London in a modest print shop in 1787, did not achieve the Parliamentary vote until 20 years later in 1807, and the eradication of slavery as a legal institution in the Empire was not achieved until 1833. Slavery then of course was progressively eradicated in most of the rest of the world through a combination of diplomatic effort, economic sanctions, and the threat of military force, and since the USA was not part of the Empire and didn’t take orders from Britain any more, it took the Civil War of 1865 to settle the matter.
It is true, admittedly, that the inspiration for the British anti-slavery movement came from the American Quakers, and it is possible therefore that some sort of anti-slavery movement existed in the USA prior to the war of Independence. What cannot be claimed, though, is that Britain itself represented any sort of threat to the slave trade during the War of Independence. The dates simply don’t match and the proposition is complete bunk.
Last edited 2 years ago by John Riordan
Jacques Rossat
2 years ago
A couple of examples and the reasons why the 1619 Project has – according to the author – twisted the reality would have helped giving some weight to this rant.
I had never heard of the 1619 project until this article and there were definitely examples given of twisted reality. Wasn’t that the thrust of the article?
There is an immense amount of material out there, just Google ‘1619 project controversy’. It is fair of the writer and editor to not make this piece even longer by detailing what most readers are at least aware of and is easily found with a few keystrokes
“Print subscriptions, meanwhile, are in “steady decline”; advertising is falling by close to (and sometimes more than) double digits each year.”
The writer says this like it has some financial needs in the situation. The Guardian model is there if ever subscriptions cannot float the expenses. (The Guardian loses money every issue, but more than makes it up by its money streams from other than advertising and subscriptions.)
Zuckerberg spent over $400,000,000, almost half a billion, on the democrat vote harvest machine. Soros is a hugely deep pocket for every kind of election for hard left campaigns. The owners are Billionaires. Money has nothing to do with it all – just the appearance of the NY Times not being a paid for propaganda, if the subscribers are seen to be funding it, and not just the Neo-Marxist Elites footing the bills.
Hi*l er funded Lord Haw-Haw, Tojo paid for Tokyo Rose, Stalin had Pravda, and the USA Left elites have The New York Times and CNN, they just pretend they are actually news, and not agenda, but we know that is not true.
First of all, subject to my inferior knowledge of the USA, I agree with everything you say.
If you take people with money (Soros, rock stars like Bono, footballers who kneel for political reasons, TV celebs) they seem to go through a barrier which makes them feel guilty about their wealth. Some take things very seriously, learn to read and read history. Of course, reading history means reading a certain kind of history, which shows that poor people are victims and rich people are evil and privileged. But this analysis does not include themselves.
If all of the rich people who actively support left-leaning ideas were to give away half of their riches before they started to preach, perhaps it would show that they meant it. Perhaps half would not be enough.
But this attitude is often found on UnHerd as well. Maybe those who see the problem as The Left or The Right are missing something. Perhaps the problem is inside themselves and is called ‘Human Nature’. Whatever the problem, constantly redefining it can’t be the issue. Solving it has to be more important and this comes back not to politics but the political system itself. Perhaps the USA needs an alternative to Congress, Senate, President. Perhaps the whole federation has to be broken up.
OK thanks. Can’t look at the moment.
I’m not sure that is quite right. Some may do, but the ubiquity of a whole cohort of professional footballers genuflecting at the bell and reciting the credo, seems less about individual conscience and more about conformity to the prevailing media orthodoxy than anything else. All this, lest they have their head above the parapet and place that enormous wealth and career in jeopardy. Just going along to get along.
You are probably correct but somebody has to start it. A couple have tried to stop it, to no avail. It is difficult to imagine that most of them would even think about the meaning of the gesture anyway.
The whole thing is very like MaCartheyism in the States. Everybody denounces everybody else hoping that the finger won’t hover over them. Until a very powerful, confident personality suddenly appears saying, ‘Stop, this is silly.’ Then it stops.
I stopped reading it when it began to denigrate Tucker Carlson, about the only sane voice on the tube. The writer strikes me as something of a crank.
Which echo chamber do you frequent? CNN is planning some severe cuts in its talking heads so you might not be as comfortable there.
Recently a movie came out about Holodomor (this Terror-Famine in Ukraine) called “Mr. Jones” (2019). I found it a well-made introduction to the story:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6828390/
It’s worth mentioning this famine was intentionally done by the Soviets, and is today recognised as a genocide by many countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
You beat me to it. I was going to suggest the same movie. It got mixed reviews but I thought it was excellent. George Orwell makes an appearance, and it shows how truly depraved Duranty was.
I really can’t stand the use of the word “narrative” to define what, in fact, are lies.
Good point. Narrative conveys the idea of a more carefully constructed story to an end that may or may not be lies but a question of nuance and emphasis. Both truths and lies use it, and notably wnen addressing the less provable facts than scientific evidence. That’s the problem; It’s a “Gray” area.
They are lies in furtherance of The Narrative.
The media used to use accuracy to build trust, and sell papers. Now they use ‘star’ journalists to build followers and provide entertainment. And sell papers/pixels.
Expecting accuracy is likely to result in disappointment.
The Times is doing what so many media outlets are doing – planting its flag in its favourite corner of the agora, and stuffing wax in its ears.
It’s clear that almost all of the traditional outlets are competing for roughly half the viewers in the country, the ones on the left. To compete, they try to outflank each other on the left. As they move further left, they depart further from reality, and reduce the overall market for leftist propaganda. They end up playing musical chairs in a declining market.
Meanwhile, new web based outlets, like Unherd, are rapidly expanding to serve the market for accurate news and rational opinion.
The over concentration on the left doesn’t seem to make economic sense to me, this article not withstanding. The NYT may be able to win at it, but CNN is obviously losing badly. It would seem to be a triumph of ideology over economic interest.
As Abraham Lincoln once said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. There’s a limit to the number of billionaires willing to subsidize declining traditional outlets. With the Russia Hoax unravelling, and the Rittenhouse trial on TV exposing the previous coverage as a complete fabrication, trust in traditional outlets is in free fall. The Times, they are a changin’.
I don’t know what argument Ms Hanna-Jones used to prove that independemce and slavery are inextricably linked, but I do know of a theory put forward a long time ago which postulated that the Somerset Case was a catalyst for the independence movement. This case was in 1772 when a High Court judge in London ruled that slavery was “so odious” that it could not exist in common law; his ruling led to something like 15,000 slaves in England being freed.
Now, the theory goes that this decision reached American slaveowners and scared the hell out of those subject to British law, and to preserve slavery, the southern colonies joined the north in its rebellion against Britain. In fact, at the First Continental Congress in 1774,John Adams promised to support the Southern slave-holders’ right to keep slavery. I must confes that when I first read about the Somerset Case I did wonder if there might be some link, but I wasn’t sufficiently interested to look into it more deeply. True or not, though, it seems that these arguments are being used as a cudgel in this “culture war” rather than being confined to historical debate.
I shall see if I can find Leslie Harris’ refutation – assumiing of course that the Somerset Case is what this what Ms Hanna-Jones was using, otherwise I’ve just wasted my time posting this here.
Your post isn’t a waste of time, Ms H-J might be correct for the wrong reasons, and I’ve just learnt the name of the Somerset Case (which I had heard of, but hadn’t read the details of). This should be taught at school.
This is covered, and dealt with, in the piece by Harris (linked to in the piece above). The biggest problem is the reduction of a complex situation to a simple, ideology driven, narrative.
The 1619 Project is an Orwellian lie from the starting date, 1619. When the slaves landed in Virginia in 1619, there was no legal framework for slavery. Initially, at least some black slaves were treated as labor indentured for 14 years.
“It’s rather clear that Virginia did not have a set way of dealing with these folks, and it got worked out over time,” Scott says. “They had indentured people in Virginia, and some people may have seen Africans just like they saw other indentured people. We know some people became free, so it looks like they were treated like every other indentured person.”
Quoted from:
USA Today article: “1619: 400 years ago, a ship arrived in Virginia, bearing human cargo”
Lifetime slavery didn’t begin until 1641, in Massachusetts. Slavery wasn’t inherited by the children of slaves until 1662, in Virginia. Why wasn’t it the 1641 project, or the 1662 project?
The 1619 project says the American Revolution was strictly to protect slavery. To say this, the 1619 project ignores all the advocacy for the Revolution, none of which mentioned slavery, and also ignores that Great Britain didn’t abolish slavery until 1833.
The purpose of the 1619 project was not accurate history. The purpose of the 1619 project was to discredit the foundation of the US government, to make it easier for Marxists to rule by decree, contrary to law.
Usually, overlooked in American History is that 2/3 and maybe even more Europeans arrived in the New World as indentured servants, often taking 10 years or more to pay off their debt. Clearly, servitude is not slavery, but young people don’t realize that getting to the Americas and thriving thereafter was a struggle for just about everyone.
I think that in effect what Lord Mansfield, the judge, said was that the nature of slavery was such that it required specific English legislation authorising it in England. Overseas legislation wasn’t sufficient. As there was no legislation authorising it in England, James Somerset was free. I think Portugal and Spain had legislation. Did the then American colonies? I am assuming they didn’t if English law applied there.
In 1619 they did not. Lifetime slavery didn’t begin until 1641, in Massachusetts. Slavery wasn’t inherited by the children of slaves until 1662, in Virginia. Please see my comment above for more information.
Thank you. Are there any sources you would recommend?
I got this information from internet searches. A lot of my information about pre Revoloutionary Colonial America comes from my general reading of history, bolstered by family interests. Both sides of my family have revolutionary war veterans. One of my ancestors, Capt. Audley Paul, served with Col. Washington in the Virginia militia in the French and Indian War. Some of my ancestors came to America as early as 1640. Others came as late as 1890.
My personal theory of the revolution is based on the Scots Irish background of a lot of my family. Most of them came to America from Northern Ireland. When the British Crown started to play fast and loose with property rights in the colonies, many of them must have remembered the abuses of the period in Ireland.
The British Parliament imposed religious restrictions on the ownership of land, weapons and even horses on Ireland, without Irish consent. I think the fear that arbitrary restrictions on property ownership were possible, contributed directly to the revolution. The restrictive laws in Ireland were revoked, if I remember right, in 1778, probably as a reaction to the American Revolution.
John Locke’s reference to life, liberty and property may have been edited to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, but the underlying idea stayed the same. Since slaves were property, it had a little to do with them, but it mainly had to do with general property rights for everyone. That’s why the Revolution started in Boston, and not Virginia and Georgia, where there were many more slaves.
Crispus Attucks, a freed black man, is generally regarded as the first man Red Coats killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre. His race didn’t dampen the outrage in Boston at all.
Interesting. If that is in fact what the claim is based on (and I don’t know), though, I’d suggest it falls short of persuading.
First, it apparently concedes that the rebellion was going to happen anyway. Second, evidence is needed that American slaveowners had the necessary clout to involve all the southern colonies in a rebellion in defence of their interests, and also that this was their motivation for doing so. And third, if this was their rationale for involvement, why didn’t they get it written into the DoI?
While a glimmer of truth in the Somerset case, the founders wrestled with the issue of slavery. A cornerstone of liberty is protection of personal property and slaves were a capital investment that couldn’t be waived away. In order to secure the slave states votes they agreed to the 3/5th compromise in counting people so as to reduce southern population. They also created a very odd clause in the constitution that effectively ended any further import of slaves after 1808.
The date 1619 represents the year blacks arrived. They were not slaves nor treated as such. Readings at the time tell the true story of the difficulties in admitting non-English migrants who were hampered by language and basic ‘modern’ living skills. Some blacks later became land owners with voting rights. The NYT story ignores that truth to build a false story of the time.
In suggesting that 1619 was the birth of America, the 1619 Project dehumanises the inhabitants of North America prior to 1619.
The GrayLady Winked documents nearly 100 years of lying by the New York Times. Should be required reading.
Too bad the author didn’t mention Jason Blair. Jason Blair was not a typical hire–public uni, not yet a college graduate, but his melanin content was so high that The Times just had to have him. He was hired, put on the fast track, won the Pulitzer Prize…
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Surely he would have won the Pulitzer Prize if it weren’t for systemic racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the fact that he was a serial fabricator. He made up his stories, his sources, and because he was the Golden Boy (a term, not meant to be racist), this was overlooked for quite some time. Finally, it had to come out.
Jason wrote a book explaining how systemic racism and all the other things mentioned above conspired to bring him down. BURNING DOWN MY MASTER’S HOUSE. Don’t bother reading. Rubbish!
The NYT is angling its coverage for the badly-educated younger generations shaped by left-wing academics like potters do clay. In this it is like Corporate America cynically lending a hand to the methodical destruction of our cultural and historical values because there is money in it for them in the form of goodwill. Both remind me of the Marxist-Leninist apercu that capitalists will sell their customers the rope that will be used to hang them. You can’t keep moving left and remain sane. That the 1619 hoax finds ready buyers among the young and the left proves the point. Their ahistorical admiration for socialism will circle back, as they say in the White House these days, to bite them squarely where it hurts the most.
Sometimes it is ideology not marketing. The new editor of the Lancet – which you would hope is committed to objective truth – has had several embarrassments. The most disturbing was having to retract a paper about hydroxyquloroquine. The paper was used as a reason to halt trials of the drug – which was a potential (cheap) treatment for Covid. The paper was based on entirely fabricated evidence – which they might have noticed if they weren’t so keen to show up Donald Trump (who talked about the drug). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lancet-retracts-paper-that-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials
Their latest stunt is to refer to ‘bodies with vaginas’ instead of using the term ‘women’. How they think this helps their credibility is beyond me.
A small point, but I’ll make it as accuracy is central to this otherwise excellent article: Walter Duranty was educated at Cambridge (Emmanuel College) rather than Oxford. He took a Second in Classics in 1906. [Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Duranty]
So preceding the Cambridge 5 by just a few years. Although Duranty was knocking around Russia when Sir Anthony went there in the 1930s talent spotting. I wonder if by chance …… Still Duranty can’t have been all bad, he was a friend of Alistair Crowley, so obviously he had a sense of humour.
SELLING A STORY – OR A CONTROVERSY?
Informative article.
Even worse than selling a non-accurate story in order to win the culture war, would be promoting the story in order to make the “war” last longer. The more doubtful the public, I guess, the more subscriptions you can sell.
Having said that, let’s not turn cynical. We should pursue truth before power and so remain human.
Some history was wrongly written on purpose and needs correction, just as historians need jobs. And papers, long written on the back of adverts, need editors of sorts. Nothing new. The problem with substituting marketing for accuracy, if this story is right, is that the latest target audience, seemingly expecting better, will realize too over time that they have been duped. Since democracy has only blinking regard for truth, and feeds off money, perception and bias, papers play and catalyze the game. The NYT and others may adjust sails to navigate the ‘darkness’, before trying other tacks as the wind shifts again. The US as a beacon of light is, meantime, left to itself, flickering on a blasted shore with baying crowds crashing to either side and paper boats surfing the tide.
Talk about being duped?! We could give myriad of examples of this, starting with the lie that Hillary Clinton was a slam dunk to be POTUS back in 2016. Add the Russian collusion hoax, the burial of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Covid-19 lab leak conspiracy and the sanctification of George Floyd and you have a lovely chain of complete alterations of reality. Yet, the left continues to drink from the fountain.
What troubles me is how the UK has become a go-to place for dodgy evidence. Iraq, and now Steele?
Matt I suggest you read Luke Harding’s Shadow State on the Steele dossier which reveals who it was written for and the fact that for political reasons it was undermined by the American establishment.
It’s an interesting book but without clear evidence, while the US case against a Russian analyst involved in the Steele ‘dossier’ has only just begun. There is still a burden of proof requirement: the kind that would withstand legal scrutiny beyond crowd, media or kangaroo ‘justice’. Reserve judgement perhaps?
It’s the result of letting the Soviet elite who have used their usually ill-gotten gains to buy up posh London townhouses and sprinkle their money around various groups in the UK. It’s all about the excessive ‘funny’ money which fertilizes the corruption in British Society going back to the 1950’s at least.
Doesn’t help, for sure. It has a deeply corrupting influence.
Against the 1619 Project I present my 1584 Project. That was the year that the first shipload of “white trash” arrived off the coast of Virginia.
See, ever since the Autumn of the Middle Ages the feudal lords had a problem with the “beggars and vagabonds” that they kicked off their estates in the interest of “improvement” and the vital importance of an income to support a nice big house in London.
Where to send this “waste population” but to the Americas?
At this point, the best use of the NYTimes is at the bottom of a litter box. Bereft of facts & news and seething with ideological purity, it’s hard to imagine why anyone of sound mind would subscribe to it now.
Truth crushed to earth shall rise again:
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,
And dies among his worshipers.
—William Cullen Bryant
Some contributors below seem to be falling into the trap of ignoring the points to debate the personalities involved. It doesn’t matter how much of a celebrity someone is: if they say that 2+2=5, they are wrong. The important question is: are Nikole Hannah-Jones’ assertions correct, or not.
The claim that the American Revolution was about preserving slavery is just an outright lie and disproven by the fact that starting as early as 1776 every colony/state north of the Mason/Dixon line used its newly declared independence to start taking steps toward gradual emancipation.
While a hypothetical, there is a decent argument that had the slaveholding volonies still been in the Empire, the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s might have been delayed, perhaps by many years.
A better case can be made that the Texas revolt from Mexico in the 1830s was not wholly but in significant part about preserving slavery. Given the status of the Alamo in Texan and American iconography, that would be a weighty claim and one that has some real support.
The role of slavery in America is not some modern notion. At the time Samuel Johnson wrote ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’ And the British authorities freed slaves who fought for the British union. Perhaps Nikole Hannah-Jones goes too far, but it’s ridiculous to say she’s as bad as Duranty.
She’s only ‘as bad as’ Duranty in that she’s a completely dishonest journalist, defending dangerous left-wing ideology. She’s not responsible for covering up mass murder, true.
Much worse was the NYT’s Judith Miller, who told lies which led to massacres in recent times.
These two incidents are not the only lies perpetrated by the NYT. READ Rindsberg’s book: The Gray Lady Winked; how the NYT’s misreporting, distortions. & Fabrications radically alter history. There are few major events in the last hundred years in which the NYT has not played a questionable role. And in which their reporter has not been a major player and a subsequent celebrity.
“…according to scholars who participated in the debate, slavery played a relatively minor role compared to the Northern industrial and commercial economy…”
Not quite. Slavery was a very important part of the economy. The problem is that Hannah-Jones claims the USA is *based* on the racial oppression of African people. Although it is difficult to construct an alternative history of North America without genocide, capitalism would have done *better* without slavery. She’s got the wrong racism.
What is strange about all this is also that an interpretation of 17th century history should become an article in a newspaper whose job is primarily the coverage and analysis of and comment on current affairs. Normally the journalist would write a book first, an in-depth account of their particular interpretation of history. Only then, if a case was to be made about its relevance to the present, might it provide a focus for an article in a newspaper. But also by then, given the need to be at least somewhat accurate in a book-length argument, the flaws and myopias would be on display enough to be critiqued. But in this case, it was the other way round. The paper went to bat for an article and its assumed relevance to modern day, before sufficient perspective and overview were available from perusal of the theory. Perhaps we are seeing here the rebirth of the importance of books!
Who’d thought that the NYTimes would to put out reinterpretations of history? Such a Marx-ian activity.
“The USSR was a massive market of 150 million people that for nearly two decades since the revolution had been restricted to US corporate interests.”
I was most interested in this assertion. Does anyone know the background to it?
More generally on this subject though, the notion that the American War of Independence was fought to prevent the abolition of slavery is extremely silly because it can be defeated purely on the dates alone. The War took place from 1775 to 1783. The Abolitionist movement, conversely, famously started in 2 George Yard in London in a modest print shop in 1787, did not achieve the Parliamentary vote until 20 years later in 1807, and the eradication of slavery as a legal institution in the Empire was not achieved until 1833. Slavery then of course was progressively eradicated in most of the rest of the world through a combination of diplomatic effort, economic sanctions, and the threat of military force, and since the USA was not part of the Empire and didn’t take orders from Britain any more, it took the Civil War of 1865 to settle the matter.
It is true, admittedly, that the inspiration for the British anti-slavery movement came from the American Quakers, and it is possible therefore that some sort of anti-slavery movement existed in the USA prior to the war of Independence. What cannot be claimed, though, is that Britain itself represented any sort of threat to the slave trade during the War of Independence. The dates simply don’t match and the proposition is complete bunk.
A couple of examples and the reasons why the 1619 Project has – according to the author – twisted the reality would have helped giving some weight to this rant.
I had never heard of the 1619 project until this article and there were definitely examples given of twisted reality. Wasn’t that the thrust of the article?
There is an immense amount of material out there, just Google ‘1619 project controversy’. It is fair of the writer and editor to not make this piece even longer by detailing what most readers are at least aware of and is easily found with a few keystrokes
The examples were given in the article. You clearly didn’t read it properly.