NYT Reporter Confirms Paper Is Purposeful Mouthpiece for Military-Industrial Complex

The Daily Bell

EXPOSED: NY Times Peddles War Propaganda ... Former New York Times journalist, Daniel Simpson, spills the beans on how NYT operates. – RT

Dominant Social Theme: The New York Times is a great beacon of truth and freedom.

Free-Market Analysis: In this RT video, former New York Times reporter Daniel Simpson reveals much of what we've been presenting to you, dear reader, for the past three years.

He confirms that the New York Times is basically a vast warehouse of manufactured, elite dominant social themes and adds that the CIA's favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, is as well.

Little of it is real. The New York Times at this point in its illustrious history is nothing more than a megaphone for the military-industrial complex and the even more powerful coterie of power elite families that have organized this superstructure.

This is not a hypothetical issue for newspapers anymore. The revelation of news manipulation, thanks to what we call the Internet Reformation, is hitting newspapers quite hard as regards the bottom line.

We can see it in this news story that appeared recently at TechDirt, entitled, "Newspaper Ad Revenue Fell Off Quite A Cliff: Now On Par With 1950 Revenue."

This is just incredible! The industry has lost a half-century of revenue. This news is brought to us by economics professor Mark Perry who labels such a loss "one of those huge Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction."

The peak of newspaper advertising corresponded to the initial availability of blogging software. After that, the decline took hold.

The article makes the point that 'Net facilities such as Craigslist probably played an even more important role in the erosion of newspaper ad revenue.

We also learn that giving away newspapers online for free has not helped support ad revenue as it should have. Instead, it is newspapers' failure to innovate. An excerpt:

We've pointed out for many years that the "real" business of newspapers was never "news," but collecting together a community and then selling their attention.

The problem that newspapers came up against wasn't that they were suddenly giving out content online for free, but that there were very, very quickly millions of other "communities" that people could join online, such that the community of folks reading the newspaper started to go down, and with it, the attention went away ...

In other words, the newspapers suddenly faced a lot more competition for ad dollars, and they did nothing to convince the market to stick with them. So, the market went elsewhere.

We would argue the market went elsewhere not just because of different "communities" but because at a fundamental level people stopped believing in the editorial product once they could compare it to bloggers' 'Net output.

Simpson's book is bound to make matters worse because sooner or later the intelligentsia itself will start to suffer.

He himself brings this up in the video by mentioning with some scorn that the top people at the Times see their jobs as befriending the powerful and providing a specific, military-industrial narrative.

As such scorn permeates the ranks of writers and editors themselves, the communications industry will likely realize a final crisis. It is one that will be driven by the actors based on the idea that their worldview is no longer sufficiently persuasive.

We are all "naked apes" and the narratives we tell ourselves help to organize our worlds. This is a time when the power elite can no longer effectively organize and promote such narratives. As nature abhors a vacuum, truth-telling will effectively fill the gap.

We are not suggesting this state of affairs will last forever but enough damage has already been done to enough elite narratives to make many of them fairly unstable and even unsustainable.

We see evidence of this in Simpson's book. It is yet another marker on a voyage to Somewhere Else. The world tomorrow will be a very different place than it is today.

Here's a bio on Simpson. He's a courageous young man:

Daniel Simpson is a journalist gone native. He threw away a career as a foreign correspondent, aghast at his paper's pro-war propaganda. Instead, he tried to start a Summer of Love. Renamed Raoul Djukanovic, he had visions of changing the Balkans with a music festival. A Rough Guide to the Dark Side relates how that dream went spectacularly wrong, leaving him fried on drugs in a hunt for the meaning of life.

You can see the video here:

(Video from RT's YouTube user channel)

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

September 26, 2012

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