by BEN NORTON
The New York Times published a ridiculous article smearing me with misleading claims, and even used an image of my face menacingly crossed out by a red line.
The newspaper dismissed my factual statement that the United States sponsored a violent coup d’etat to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, calling this objective truth a “conspiracy theory,” while deceptively erasing the overwhelming evidence that I presented.
Ironically the Times itself, back in 2014, reported some of these facts that it now disparages as a “conspiracy theory,” as I document below in this article.
The Times’ hatchet job violates basic journalistic practices. The newspaper did not even reach out to me with a request for comment, while it defamed me and published a photo of my face.
The smear piece is a case study in the U.S. newspaper of record’s propaganda techniques. And it is part of a transparent drive to advance the U.S. government’s new cold war on China and Russia.
The fact that the New York Times collaborates closely with the U.S. national security state is well established. The newspaper has publicly admitted to sending sensitive stories to the U.S. government for approval before publication, to ensure that “national security officials” have “no concerns.”
Prominent former New York Times reporter James Risen wrote in an exposé that the newspaper’s editors are “quite willing to cooperate with the government,” and that there has been an “informal arrangement” in which U.S. officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”
The Times also has a long, inglorious history of attacking anti-war voices in the United States, while spreading demonstrably false claims from anonymous government officials to justify Washington’s wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, Libya to Syria.
I don’t need to remind anyone of the Times’ leading role in amplifying lies about supposed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) in Iraq.
But there have also been many lesser-known fake news stories disseminated by the U.S. newspaper of record, like when it blamed Vietnamese communists for the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or falsely claimed that Iraqi soldiers took Kuwaiti babies out of incubators to die, or amplified the lie that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi gave Viagra to his soldiers and encouraged them to sexually assault women.
Then there are the more recent examples of the Times willingly spreading U.S. government disinformation, from the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory to the completely manufactured “Bountygate” scandal, to the equally ludicrous fake news farce known as “Havana Syndrome”–the notion that mass hysteria suffered by U.S. spies was secretly caused by futuristic Russian, Chinese, and/or Cuban “microwave weapons” or “radiofrequency energy” ray guns.
The newspaper’s April 11 report, titled “China’s Echoes of Russia’s Alternate Reality Intensify Around the World,” follows in this same propagandistic vein.
The article was written by Paul Mozur, Steven Lee Myers, and John Liu. The Times apparently needed three reporters to file this story, but not one of them could be bothered to reach out to me for comment.
If they were students in a college journalism 101 class, they would have failed their assignment.
The director of the CIA, William Burns, confirmed in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing this March that Washington is engaged in an “information war” against Russia.
Former top State Department official Eliot A. Cohen likewise stated clearly that, in Ukraine, the “United States and its NATO allies are engaged in a proxy war with Russia.”
This New York Times smear piece must be understood in this context: The newspaper of record is acting as a tool of U.S. government information warfare, a hatchet man for Washington, launching neo-McCarthyite attacks on independent journalists who dare to challenge the official NATO propaganda line.
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