Take it from a Newspaperman
I just wanted to share with my readers the benefit of my years of experience in the newspaper business.
The press lies. They lie their hindquarters off, and lie, and lie and lie. Sometimes the lie when it costs them money and readership. The lie even when they lose advertisement. They lie like Baghdad Bob saying the American army was defeated while tanks were visible in the background shot closing in. They lie like Walter Duranty.
Walter Duranty. Remember him?
“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.”
–New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1
“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
–New York Times, August 23, 1933“Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin’s program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding.”
–New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
–New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18
“There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”–New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13
There is a more telling Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. (“An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934,” University of California Press )
Arnold Beichman, writing for the Weekly Standard says this:
The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP’s Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:
“Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated”.
And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.
Lying out of fear or covetousness I understand. I don’t do it, and am rather proud of my ability to resist this one temptation with manly fortitude, but I grasp it. I get the concept. They lie even when the lie increases their danger or creates the loss of their goal. They lie even when no one is fooled or could be fooled.
Why? Why do they lie, and love lies, and lie even when it damns them, and it does no damned good?
It is like asking why the Grinch hates Christmas. No one quite knows the reason.
So whenever I hear the report that Gamergate is dead, and that the Social Justice Warriors won a signal victory in this arena, I assume, even if I hear it from a source I ordinarily would trust, that it is a lie. The writer might easily be deceived, because, alas, some people do believe the press, and do not believe the lies are coordinated.
Likewise if I hear how much the fans loved and the rating soared for the last two minutes of the last season of LEGEND OF KORRA, where the writing team declared retroactively that Korra and Asami holding hands displays not that they are friends, but that they are teen sexual deviants.
The press reports all the fans swooned. Who, after all, does not love with giddy transports of love the idea of unmarried underage clamlickers pleasuring each other and calling it true love? And teaching children likewise. There is nothing remotely offensive in that. We don’t need no stinking families: the State is Father, the State is Mother.
And whoever thinks that sex is sex and that sex is not non-sex is a bigot. To the Left, the law of non-contradiction is a hate crime. War is peace, after all, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.
There is no friendship in the world of the Left, and no sex, only sexual deviance. There is no one who disagrees or has reservations on any Leftist issues, only haters and heretics not with the program: all victories are total and absolute, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Likewise if I hear about how anthropogenic Global Warming, or Global Cooling, or Global Something is now absolutely settled science, as settled as Newton, as settled as the Geocentric Theory, as settled as Lamarck! Science never investigates evidence nor welcomes questions once a matter is settled. Skepticism is outlawed in scientific discussions among the Left. Science, for them, is a matter of wide eyed total belief, belief without question, with one’s mouth hanging open.
In the spirit of the New Year, as we say farewell to 2014, destined to become known in history as the Year of Lies, I suggest we all watch this, my single favorite video from Andrew Klavan.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
