Thursday, August 10, 2017

A tale of two NY Times stories

Sar Shalom

The New York Times has two stories today that can be summarized in the following manner: [A] says the [B] is engaged in violating fundamental democratic rights of [C] because of [C]'s exercise of free speech.

One of those articles appears on the home page of the Times' website and you can fill it in with [A] = the alt-right, [B] = Google, [C] = James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired for writing a memo attributing low levels of women in leadership positions to lower capabilities of women. The other story appears in the Opinion section and can be filled in with [A] = Sherif Mansour, the author of the op-ed piece, [B] = Israel, [C] = reporters who write negative things about Israel.

I hardly need to explain to this audience about the malfeasance committed by most of the press corp in Israel and the abuse of freedoms granted that led Israel to draw a line which will lead to consequences if crossed. It is all well and good to point out that case, and eagerly wait to read responses to Mansour along those lines. However, a parallel point is that the malfeasance committed by the media in Israel is to critical coverage of Israel as Damore's memo is to raising legitimate questions about affirmative action policies. In turn, Mansour in covering Israel's response to the most egregious demonization of itself as though it were censorship of criticism of any kind, and the Times in giving a platform to every Tom, Dick, and Harry leveling such charges against Israel, are acting like the alt-right in its defense of the likes of James Damore.

12 comments:

  1. The New York Times seems to be dying along with the rest of the "legacy" media.

    Good.

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  2. The media is corrupt; probably has always been and most people intuit that at some level or another. This latest fake news thing is a sign of that as is the rise of blogs/alternative media. For those of us who are Pro-Israel, we have seen it for a long long time. No national coverage of the Reem's thing; no national coverage of the California hate preacher are just two recent examples for those of us who know how different it would be if some Jewish restaurant put up a mural of Baruch Goldstein or if a Rabbi preached about destroying all the Muslims. A pox on the media.

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  3. I'm not sure I agree with the comparison.

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    Replies
    1. Could you describe your disagreement with the comparison? Do you disagree in that there are differences between the two or that there are no similarities?

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    2. I haven't read the memo. Are you saying it outright misogyny. Ben Shapiro is defending it. He is conservative for sure. But alt-right?

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  4. What does questioning affirmative action policies have to do with slandering a small country?
    Maybe I'm being thick. Feel free to further explain it to me.

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    Replies
    1. Sorry for the split infinitive.

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    2. The article about the alt-right attacking the firing of Damore is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/business/alt-right-silicon-valley-google-memo.html

      I didn't want to dignify the Mansour column with a link.

      You're reading the analogy wrongly. A more precise version would be questioning affirmative action : Damore's memo :: criticizing Israel : the activy's of "journalism" outfits getting banned by Israel. The similarity between the alt-right and the Israel-haters is that both oppose actions taken against the second item from one of those pairs, but rather than arguing the second items should be protected, conflate them with the first items in their respective pairs and disparage taking action against one of the first items.

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    3. Sorry, but after reading Damore's memo, and the NYT article you provided, I just can't get passed how badly the NYT sucks.

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    4. Seriously, that article stinks from the Headline to the end. It's an awful article full of bias, inaccuracies, and hypocrisy. And in this way reminds one so much of the Times' Israel coverage.



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    5. You don't have to accept the premise of Damore's firing, just follow the logic of what that premise implies for Israel. Based on that logic isn't worth pointing out the hypocrisy of supporting the reaction to Damore's memo/denouncing those supporting Damore while denouncing Israel's reaction to the journalist-activists?

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  5. How to Convict the New York Times
    of Unfair Bias Against Israel:


    https://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2016/11/guest-post-how-to-convict-new-york-times.html
    ______________________________

    New York Times Erases Israel from Map:

    https://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2016/11/guest-post-nyt-erases-israel-from-map.html

    http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2016/03/guest-postnyt-vs-israel.html
    ______________________________

    ReplyDelete