Today in the premier newsroom in the world—the NYT—blacks and Latinos are both far below their percentages in the population while Jews who represent 3% of the US population are, according to some estimates, ten-fold too highly represented among the White Lady’s ranks. What’s up with that? The Times doesn’t track its Jewish percentage, or at least doesn’t publicize it, but historically the major editors, columnists and investigative types, to say nothing of the publisher—which is the Sulzberger family, actually—have been Jews. With a sprinkling of WASPs.
The peculiar position of the Sulzbergers is that the same diversity standard pushed in its reportage on industry/government has not applied among its own hires. This is actually not news but is instead something that we see every day among the higher ranks of American journalism. Reporters at the Washington Post, National Public Radio, ProPublica, the New Yorker el al want to complain about the decline of diversity due to the Trump administration—ICE attacks or what have you, erosion of affirmative action on college campuses and in the hallways of government—but the journalists doing the complaining are almost invariably white, often Jewish—the so-called “white saviors” who are so common among reporters in recent years.
On-air correspondents of the various networks are more representative, even at Fox News, because a lack of diversity is clear on a screen, while the most discriminatory practices in hiring are the purveyors of print media. Nowhere is that more true than the White Lady herself, aka the New York Times. And includes her reportage which operates under a well-defined double standard.
“Making our journalists know that we will stand up for them in the moments when they come under attack,” Executive Editor Joseph Kahn said last year in an interview with the news site Semafor, “that the institution is behind them, their safety but also their integrity, is a very important thing to do and also allows us to communicate with readers about the actual facts of a story.” Mr. Kahn’s comments were in the context of a question about Elon Musk’s criticism of the White Lady but are also pertinent in the newspaper’s sins against minorities which are related to condescension, theft of narrative and false narratives that unduly attribute black liberation to the efforts of Jews.
But before going there—yes we will go there, despite the risk of being labeled antisemitic—a few details. The Kahn interview was by Semafor’s editor in chief Ben Smith who was previously the White Lady’s main media critic who worked for Joe Kahn, actually, which is a pretty glaring conflict of interest for the interviewer but was merely the subject of a joking exchange between the two men before the first questions were asked. Smith like Kahn also identifies as Jewish, btw, and that is important.
The interview as it turned out was a complete blowjob which is the journalistic term for a story that is so positive that the person or entity that is the subject of the piece couldn’t have written anything more positive him or herself. There’s no one to call bullshit on the NYT in other words.
Joe Kahn says everything about how the newspaper of record deals with criticism except what happens when the criticism is accurate, because the White Lady admits few inaccuracies. Except her correction notes about misspellings and wrong dates in stories. But what if the whole piece is a crock of shit, like the newspaper’s false reporting that led to the War in Iraq and eventually to a White Lady white paper, a mea culpa, promising to do better in the future? Which was followed eventually by the Times getting rid of its ombudsman, and more recently by editorial columnists forgetting about Iraq and pushing a war against Iran, once again at the urging of the Israelis.
The White Lady's policy today is that a reader can complain by communicating with the writer or editor directly, in other words you can call/email the newspaper in order to call bullshit. But onto race in America, which is our subject here.
The Times’ credibility problem with black people just manifested itself twice in ugly and wholly discriminatory ways, first with coverage of the death of civil rights icon and former presidential candidate the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Chicago. To set the scene. Over the course of three days the Times published some 20 pieces on Jackson’s death, 17 of which were written by whites, overwhelmingly Jews, including the main story by Peter Applebome, former White Lady columnist and Atlanta bureau chief, a self-promoting Jewish expert on African Americans who wrote the main piece and who chose as the first person to quote in his story—about this black civil rights icon—a Jewish political organizer from Chicago named Rose. A more accurate and far shorter take on Jesse Jackson’s racial trajectory will be presented below but it’s useful to note first that the center of the Jewish universe is the New York Times, not Israel. The pages of this so-called White Lady constitute the cultural homeland of the Jewish peep, at least in writing.
The view of other peoples/ethnicities by the Times staff is not as sophisticated as you might think. Beliefs about black people are often based upon ignorance and upon a delusional view by American Jews that they are somehow owners of the black narrative in this country. Wrong, bro. Although this is a belief that is on permanent display at the Times. Just because you read it in the newspaper of record, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Suffice it to say that Jews don’t “know” us—black people—despite protestations to the contrary, any more than anyone from any race or culture knows any other race or culture. That’s ordinary humanism although cultural humility often clashes with a Jewish belief that black culture is part of the Jewish field of expertise, even to the exclusion from that field of black women and men ourselves. Jews are tourists in the hood, really, just as American black people are when, for example, we visit Tel Aviv. But you can’t tell the Times that, or the New Yorker for that matter where Editor-in-Chief David Remnick who is Jewish and has been accused by his own editorial staff of racism in hiring, nonetheless considers himself another expert on black people, having published four books—depending on your count—on the black peep, including a biography of Barack Obama.
And which leads to the second incident to be discussed, after the Jackson obit, another recent story by the poorly-informed White Lady, which spotlights an unethical practice common to the New Yorker as well. In which the newspaper of record is caught running a game, just like a bad boy in the hood, in order to downplay Jewish affronts to blacks and instead stress the White Lady/New Yorker’s complaints of antisemitism. To set the scene.
Interestingly, just a year or two ago Ta-Nehisi Coates said—while mentioning his desire to write about Palestine and the Palis’ struggle with the Israelis? He said he was warned off and told by Jewish writers/friends that he didn’t have the knowledge base to criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. That hasn’t stopped Jewish “experts” at the Times or New Yorker, bro, who are more than willing to opine on African Americans who they apparently know very little about. A recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography Jonathan Eig, a Jewish sportswriter from Dallas who is now the white press’s go-to foremost authority on Martin Luther King Jr.? Eig also has a series of children’s books written in the person of a little black girl.
This certainly has nothing to do with cultural appropriation or any wish on Eig’s part to exploit the black narrative for his own profit. God forbid. How do we know that?
Because the principal Times book reviewer Dwight Garner wrote in his very positive commentary on Eig’s MLK biography that the tome is now “the authoritative biography” of Martin Luther King Jr. Without actually explaining how the white guy Garner is in a position to make that judgment about the white guy Eig on the subject of the black leader MLK. What Eig's work does do—his children's books for example—is keep a black author from getting a contract from a publisher to write about black people. Just as the Times' plethora of white “experts" on blacks and race in America, like Peter Applebome, keep African Americans and Latinos from being hired in the White Lady’s newsroom. The Times has frequent coverage of blacks, btw, the coverage is just not often by blacks ourselves.
Doubly interesting is that Mr. Coates was at The Atlantic, where the editor-in-chief is former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg. Who is a very likely source of the opinion that blacks shouldn’t write about Palestiians/Jews. Coates now writes for Vanity Fair.
And speaking of conflict of interest in journalism, and the primacy of one cultural narrative, in a recent broadcast of PBS’s Washington Week in Review, convened to discuss the American-Israeli war on Iran—in a roundtable chaired by none other than Jeffrey Goldberg—three of four of the guests were Jewish journalists with ties to Israel, including the White Lady’s Peter Baker and the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Who are married, actually, not that there's anything wrong with that but maybe that should have been mentioned at the start. No need for a Muslim, for example, to join a roundtable to discuss a war on Muslims. Jews can do it all, just as is true in any discussion of Africa Americans, like Reverend Jackson, where Jewish journalists are also the experts. Enough said, except there has been about another source of the complaint that blacks should not write about Jewish affairs. It’s the White Lady herself.
The work that Coates eventually produced, called The Message, pointed to the similarities between what the Palestinians experience under Israeli rule and what blacks have experienced in America. An analogy that the White Lady has objected to, however. The Times reviewer of Coates’ book was Jennifer Szalai, who is the newspaper’s chief white-expert on black literature and has previously written that it is “banal” to think that black people are more knowledgeable on our own history than are whites. No shit.
In her review she subtly dissed Coates’ work for lack of a traditional factual basis: “He is using his position of prominence and moral authority to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians. Having lived the life of the famous Black writer in mostly white professional spaces, someone who has been both venerated and vilified, he finds in his new community ‘the warmth of solidarity.’” There’s nothing wrong with that, actually, solidarity that is, Ms. Szalai. It’s what freed black people from Jim Crow. It’s only wrong at the Times when the subject is non-Jewish or a people like the Palestinians who are in conflict with Jews.
Szalai also leans heavily into two racist tropes in her review, one being that blacks “feel” but don’t use facts, something often heard in white academic circles—black people emote, while whites reason. And that a successful black writer owes his success to the aforesaid white professional spaces. Gee, isn’t that kind of demeaning and/or patronizing? Apparently not in the White Lady’s pages where it's pretty standard fare.
Actually a discussion of facts, which Jennifer Szalai so prefers, would have to include the fact that American Jews love nothing better than to recall their efforts to help African Americans, during the civil rights era, including two Jewish Freedom Riders who got their tickets cancelled in Mississippi, alongside countless blacks. But Jewish historians and journalists somehow totally ignore those hundreds of black G.I.s who died in combat in Europe during World War Two while liberating concentration camps. The Tuskegee Airmen for example were not flying over Mississippi, although those missions might have been useful. Instead they were flying and dying over Germany, in order to free Jews.
It’s remarkable that a people like our Jewish brothers and sisters—who have promised never to forget the past—are so quick to forget what has been done for them but not to them. That is how the White Lady’s reportage works as well. And there’s actually a trick involved in her coverage—a sleight of journalistic hand—you might say, being employed.
So, like, on the third day of Times reporting on Reverend Jackson’s death, the subject finally became something that black people might have found more meaty. In a piece by the Jewish journalist Jonathan Mahler, who is another of the Times’ white experts on black people, the story was called “How a Stray Quote of Jesse Jackson’s Led to a Rupture Between Black and Jewish Voters,” did you read that?
During his 1984 run for the presidency Jackson infamously referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown,” which was clearly inappropriate (brought to light by a black Washington Post reporter, fyi) but was also indicative of African American dissatisfaction with the Jewish narrative of blacks in this country. Which includes the proposition that any disagreement with Jews is unacceptable. It wasn't actually a stray quote, in other words. It spoke to black frustration.
Our Jewish friends spend a lot of time in African Americans’ business—telling us what to do and what to think, to say nothing of what is “best” for us—without being invited. Part of the reason is financial. Once we accept contributions, whether of the political variety or to our educational institutions, the camel’s nose is under the tent. But whither, exactly, the hymie epithet? It’s history, bro. In the 1960s and 1970s Jews were forced out of some civil rights organizations—by angry black activists—for being patronizing and attempting to run black groups. As if we are inferiors and need direction in achieving our own liberation. Which the Times did not mention in its exploration of Jesse Jackson’s sins, even though Jackson was openly suspicious of the Jewish role in black civil rights. The Mahler piece continued, as background:
“A natural alliance between two largely liberal minority groups, each with a history of discrimination, had come under pressure from the country’s changing political dynamics. In New York City, a 1968 struggle over the control of public schools in largely Black neighborhoods prompted the firing of a group of predominantly Jewish teachers — spurring a citywide strike led by the Jewish head of the teachers union.” One point of contention is that African Americans are arguably not that liberal. We believe in fairness but also in many of the same traditional values as conservatives, including faith and family, and we are less and less attached to what is called, in the black podcast world, “the Democratic plantation.”
And forgive one for wondering why Jews were in charge of black instruction in the first place? Why the Jim Crow treatment in a northern city? And why was it so disconcerting that black teachers wanted the task of educating black children?
What’s also interesting about the Mahler piece is that any break in black-Jewish relations can be attributed to actions by blacks, never to anything that Jews have done. Jews are only victims in this perspective. Let’s see if that’s true. The Times has, almost singlehandedly, just ignominiously ended the mayoralty of an African American in New York City, who got too close to Muslim Turkey, and Jews contributed significantly to the recent reelection losses of two black Democratic members of Congress who had the temerity to criticize Israel. The Times has blacklisted at least one black journalist for supporting Palestinian liberation. But if blacks who are such a key demographic of the Democratic Party—as we are reminded endlessly by the White Lady—if we question Jews or criticize Jewish politics/action—we automatically become antisemites. Or we’re “ungrateful.” Oh please. Or we are confrontational.
Very often it’s just a scam, a way of trying to bring independent black thought to heel. Late last year the White Lady ran an “investigative” piece on the newest Supreme Court Justice, Katanji Brown Jackson, saying directly that she is “confrontational” and should not strike out on her own opinions but should find consensus with the Court’s liberals, particularly Jewish jurist Elena Kagan. Literally this was an investigate piece in the news section detailing liberal aims and how best, according to the reporter, to achieve those. The story was written by Jodi Kantor, perhaps the Times’ most famous journalist, half of the team that produced the influential #metoo coverage and is now on the Supreme Court beat. To set the scene.
Kantor who was previously in the White Lady's Washington bureau wrote that her conclusions were the result of interviews with clerks and court-observers but it certainly seemed that Justice Kagan, who was portrayed as a long-suffering Solon-in-a-skirt, may have had more than a passing hand at writing this copy. It was a crock of shit, in other words, a story portrayed as unbiased investigative journalism that seemed really intended to remind a black woman of her place. Kantor’s work was shameless and did not go over nearly as well as #metoo.
A few days later Jodi Kantor was quoted in a followup behind the scenes explainer of her piece on the black Supreme Court justice’s failings: “Justice Kagan, appointed in 2010 to be a diplomat and strategist, is capable of punching hard, but she shows her frustration only in flashes.” Laying it on a little thick, no, in order to repay a source? That certainly didn’t seem like objective journalism.
When Obama appointed Kagan he described her as a consensus-builder, but said nothing about her being a diplomat or a strategist who others on the Supreme Court must follow. Indeed it wouldn’t have mattered if he had because the eight associate justices of the court are on the bench in order to interpret and apply the Constitution, each having equal responsibility and power. When President Biden appointed Justice Jackson, for example, the heavy in the White Lady’s reportage, he described her “as someone with extraordinary character, who will bring to the Supreme Court an independent mind, uncompromising integrity, and with a strong moral compass and the courage to stand up for what she thinks is right.” Somehow none of that made it into the White Lady’s story.
Per Jodi Kantor: “Ever since Justice Jackson arrived in 2022, friction has been building: between her and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, who are more aligned strategically, and between her and the rest of the court, according to more than a dozen associates of the justices, including both liberals and conservatives. They spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to share sensitive details about closely held conversations.” Oh please. Dollars to donuts, Jodi Kantor got marching orders from Elena Kagan, as two Jewish women, Karan and Kantor, sat down to devise an approach, in the Times, to go after a minority in order to bring her in line. In fact Kantor used the female version of the “threatening black male” trope—the confrontational black woman—which Jodi Kantor is familiar with because she also went after Michelle Obama early during the Obama Administration, in a book that the President and First Lady did not much appreciate.
In fact in Kantor’s introduction to her Obama work she informs us, “This book is dedicated to Hana Kantor, who grew up poor in Poland, did not attend school beyond fifth grade, survived the Holocaust as a teenager, losing nearly everyone ad everything, built a life in the United States, and is still selecting the best tomatoes and playing kalooki in Florida and the Catskills. As her granddaughter, I’ve tried to help write the happiest ending to her story, to make good on the promise of America. I never once walked up the driveway of the White House without thinking of her.”
Ms. Kantor’s relationship to her grandmother is stirring but, actually, who gives a fuck? What does any of that have to do with the Negro First Family from Chicago? The Times as an institution continues to see black people through a Jewish historical lens. But we’re not an extension of Jews or part of the Jewish narrative, we have our own narrative. And that becomes clear when the newspaper of record needs to cut somebody loose. Just like Southern whites did, Times journalists come looking for us. If they criticize us it is because they're smarter or more upright morally/ethically. Really?
This standard also applies in Hollywood, btw. During the uproar over the Gaza War as American blacks began to stand up for the Palestinians—and correctly so—television star Julianna Margulies who is Jewish said we were “brainwashed.” It’s actually Jews who have been brainwashed, in part by the White Lady herself, to believe the decades of pro-Israeli b.s., which only now is coming to light as a wide swath of the domestic public questions our lock-step support of the Jewish State. Cue the war with Iran.
But enough of Gaza and the Hormuz Strait and onto Chicago, and later back to New York, the aforesaid “Hymietown.” Let a black person opine briefly on his own peeps for a change.
Chicago was the black melting pot and has formed so many ambitious black leaders including Oprah, Michael Jordan, Reverend Jackson, Elijah Muhammad and, most famously, Barack and Michelle Obama. In this context too the newspaper of record doesn’t know what it’s talking about. One might say, if one wished to be crude, the White Lady is a lying ho. Because her “errors” are intentional.
For instance: A more credible Jesse Jackson narrative is not that difficult to recount or understand if the source has cultural competence, which Times people mostly do not have on this particular story, race in America. But that doesn’t stop the newspaper of record from trying. The White Lady, btw, just ran an opinion piece by a black writer and two Jews that the term “African American” should be phased out, in favor of exclusive use of “black.” Now we know because the Times has told us our role/responsibilities yet again. At least a black person was involved in the story. But on to Illinois.
My mother and father were both born in Texas but grew up in Chicago after their families migrated, part of the mass movement of blacks from the South to the northern states and the Midwest during the early 20th century, in order to escape Jim Crow. To set the scene. For example Jesse Jackson himself went north from his birthplace in South Carolina. Chicago was where so many escaping black families ended up.
My father used to recount being a kid in Chicago in the 1920s and watching as an expensive car pulled up in the black hood and the back door opened and sitting there was Al Capone. With a large bank bag of coins in his lap, which he threw handfuls of at passing Negroes. Who scurried to pick up the money. Capone was insuring that if he came to trial and any blacks appeared on the jury, they knew to vote not guilty. Mr. Gold—the political operative who the Times chose to quote on black Chicago—isn’t going to tell you that.
My mother who was a gifted observer had a favorite saying about the Windy City where she spent her childhood. “Chicago has,” she liked to repeat, “the meanest niggers in the world.”
What she meant by “mean nigger” is what black people often still mean today, formidable. Like Michael Jordan, or Oprah. Ambitious. Smart. Capable. But white people don’t know what a mean nigger is unless they’re told by us. Chicago has created a lot of mean niggers in fact, thru the years, with and without the assistance of Jewish pols. What Times coverage also failed to note at Reverend Jackson’s passing is that Jesse Jackson was part of the generation of black people who first grew tired of Jewish efforts at control of our narrative and their condescension towards us, like Ms. Margulies, or Justice Kagan. Back to New York City. And back, actually, to the public education realm where the Times noted that Jews feel they have been dissed by blacks in the past. But where Jews have actually been doing the dissing.
So, like, a week after Reverend Jackson’s death the White Lady carried an astounding story. The piece centered on a videoconference regarding a public school that might be shuttered. Let the Times tell it from there, because she does a very good job, up to a point. It’s what she doesn’t say, in this case, that is highly racist and unjustifiably prosemitic.
“As one student, who attendees said was Black, spoke out to praise her teachers and lament the potential shutting of her school, another attendee — identified as Allyson Friedman, an associate professor at Hunter College who was attending as a public school parent — cut in. “They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” Dr. Friedman said, according to a recording of the meeting.
She was attending virtually and was unaware that her microphone was turned on, per the Times. ‘If you train a Black person well enough, they’ll know to use the back,” Dr. Friedman continued. “You don’t have to tell them anymore.”
According to the White Lady, “[Dr. Friedman] appeared to be referencing a comment made earlier in the meeting by the local school district’s interim acting superintendent, Reginald Higgins. He had mentioned Carter G. Woodson, the scholar known as the father of Black history, who said, ‘If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told.’” So far, so good. Or so bad, actually, but well reported nonetheless.
The Times followed up with a piece a day or two later that Professor Friedman had been suspended by Hunter College. What was not reported in either story, and is quite telling both about the professor and the newspaper, is that Dr. Friedman, like the White Lady herself, is Jewish. When Jews do great things, the NYT calls out culture/ethnicity, but otherwise, not so much. The Newspaper of Record’s attention to detail is very selective.
For instance as part of the coverage of Henry Kissinger’s death a few years ago, the White Lady was not much interested in the secret bombing campaign that Kissinger helped bring about, that killed tens of thousands of Cambodians, but was very interested that, at one point, Kissinger was boning actress Raquel Welch. Jesse Jackson’s “Hymie” rhetoric is important in Reverend Jackson’s obit, but not war crimes in Dr. Kissinger’s.
When it’s something as horrific as Professor Friedman’s comments, there’s no mention of Judaism or the fracturing of bonds between blacks and Jews. What Professor Friedman said was actually far worse than “Hymie” or “Hymietown.” But in the newspaper of record we read about the full extent of black racism but not Allyson Friedman’s. We read about black assaults on Jews but not Jewish assaults on African American civil rights. One of which took place in my hometown, Austin, Texas, actually. Literally. Again, the White Lady falsified the account by very selective use of what was not included in the story.
So, like, during the George Floyd protests that rocked the country and coincided with the pandemic, an Army sergeant at nearby Ft. Hood, who had a side gig driving Uber, came to Austin during an anti-police demonstration. Austin cops have killed a lot of minorities, many of them unarmed, through the years, and the protest was well-attended. To set the scene. The sergeant had a plan to kill a participant of the march, which he did.
The protestor was armed but not threatening and the sergeant’s idea, which he communicated in text messages before shooting the guy four times, was to kill an armed protestor and claim self defense. Long story short, the soldier was convicted of murder and sentenced from 5 years to life but was almost immediately pardoned on the instructions of Governor Greg Abbott.
The White Lady covered the case of the sergeant, Daniel Perry is his name, who is actually Jewish. Without ever mentioning in reportage that the attack on the Floyd protestor was committed by a Jew, although local reports had mentioned Perry’s culture/ethnicity and that information was obviously available to the Times as well.
The murder trial and the dispute over Sgt. Perry’s pardon both came at the height of the Gaza War when the newspaper of record was running news stories and opinion pieces at the time about the “special relationship” between blacks and Jews and the subliminal question of why African Americans were criticizing Israel. A story about a Jew who kills a pro-civil rights protestor doesn’t go along with the particular view of American race relations favored by the NYT. Sgt. Perry texted to someone, btw, evidence from the trial showed, “I am a racist” and he described Black Lives Matter activists as “monkeys.”
He is an anti-black Jewish terrorist, but you won’t read that in the Times. You will read, however, about antisemitism by blacks. T
he Times is a wonderful publication on many levels but its primary mission is prosemitism, that is, pushing a pro-Jewish narrative and ignoring anything that doesn’t jibe with that. Whether it’s Israel, Hollywood or the hood, the White Lady offers what the Times likes to call “a nuanced view” but others might call, simply, bullshit. One of the only on-the-mark comments in Times’ coverage of Reverend Jackson's death, for example, those 20-odd stories, was by the black writer Michael Eric Dyson who recounted that among Reverend Jackson’s economic campaigns was getting CBS to desegregate and hire blacks. One likes to think that if Jackson were still alive and in his prime he would have taken on the White Lady too.
Specifically, the Times has a race problem. Not solely evidenced by its nickname “White Lady” used among the black intelligentsia.
Today she finds herself in the peculiar and embarrassing position of pushing of a diversity narrative for others that has not been much applied in her own newsroom. Or in the pages of the newspaper, actually.
According to the Times’ own numbers, last updated in 2024, the news staff is approximately two-thirds white in a country where Caucasians are in the lower 50s and declining. Times leadership is 70% Caucasian. This is actually an improvement because in past decades the newspaper’s white staff has been closer to 90%. Go back beyond that and the Times didn’t really hire blacks or Latinos at all, except as window dressing—like, to point out the lone black person at a typewriter in the back of the newsroom when the mayor or another dignitary was taking a tour. As in “tokens,” you know?
Management was also busted just a few years ago by the newspaper guild for uniformly giving lower evaluation scores, for promotion, to minority news staff. The features of the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known in years past, have been adopted by a different peculiar industry, American mainstream journalism, in other words, the New York Times.
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